Just clicked through this on SlideShare and I found it to be a great resource for presenting the idea of Web 2.0 to folks.  Normally, online slide cannot hold my attention but the visuals and information worked great.  Kudos to the creator and contributors.  Great Work.

It’s no secret that the iphone is one of the best tech toys out there, but to me it’s a life changer.  Its a revolution in function and where it goes from here could change everything.

The word phone is actually a misnomer.  It would be more accurate to label it a handheld computer that can make phone calls.  Never has there been so much function in such a compact, easy to use format.

Although it is easy to make hardware comparisons and compose bullet lists versus other smart phones, the ace in the hole for Apple is the App Store.  In the same way that video game consoles live and die by the success of software (games), so will smart phones.  Except that the iPhone already has a long line of developers clamoring at making applications and the hardware itself is so hot that it often sells for double or triple depending on what part of the world you live in.

The iPhone, like a computer with only an operating system, is a blank canvas.  Yet it holds many advantages over even the best laptop.  Microphone, Speakers, Camera, GPS, Accelerometer (tilt sensing) Wifi, and 3G (Fast data) all in the palm of your hand and all with Apple’s trademark easy to use interface.

There is so much to talk about that new websites spring up everyday concerning this device.  A podcast called iPhone Alley is dedicated to iphone news only and then there is the legions of hackers “jail breaking” (allowing them to use unlicensed software) their phones because they can’t wait for official applications but I could be here forever if we travel down that rabbit hole.

Lets get to my favorite applications so far:

Productivity

Evernote is an online repository for notes. You can take them in any fashion: photos, recordings, writing.  They are stored and archived for you in a an online repository for future use. It even has the ability to take handwritten notes and recognize the text. The iphone application lest you do all this from your phone with ease.

Weatherbug: If your business is outside, then knowing what is going on with the weather is very important.  There are many ways to get this information but with the built GPS and a real-time radar, it doesn’t get much easier to tell of that rain is coming your way.

Microsoft Exchange email support works flawlessly and was easy as pie to setup. Typing on the screen became second nature to me after a couple of days.  The trick is just to trust the phone, it will auto-correct spelling in most every case.  I can now type pretty fast on it and do not miss my berry one bit.

Kyte.com lets you broadcast live photos and video via a website and the iphone application only supports photos at the moment but is expected to support live video.

The Fun Stuff

Facebook: This one is both fun and productive as many organizations use a facebook account to keep in touch with customers/students/alumni.  You can post images directly, post new messages and chat.

Twinkle: This is a twitter application which amazingly takes your current location and shows you what other people are talking about. You can post a photo direct, respond to messages and make your own posts.

More Cowbell: There are so many novelty applications on the App Store,  I thought I would include just one of my favorites.  Some of you may remember the Christopher Walken skit from SNL. Essentially this turns your iphone into a Cowbell.  Best part is it works with music.  So if you are using your ipod to play music, you can run this app and add cowbell to any song. LOL

The Future

I only scratched the surface here, the killer app is the App Store itself, it represents the life changing possibilities I alluded to.  The list of problems that can be solved is endless: pull up medical literature on a drug, read a CT scan, measure how many calories you burned (based on movement of phone), buy anything, read a book, control your computer, access a server, get directions, find out who is around you, get all your news, watch anything, talk to anyone in the world via wifi, turn photos of text into text, etc etc etc.

All these things were already here or on the way on multiple portable devices. However, no device (other than the iPhone) so far brings them all together and makes them easier to accomplish at the same time.

Oh alright, there must be some cons right?  Battery life is rough, although I heard it was the same or better than most 3G devices.  Video is not there yet but I think this will be a software upgrade.  Maybe this was a battery life decision.  I know its capable, here is a clip of it being used.  As far as cut and paste and MMS messages, I do not really care.

Needless to say, I highly recommend it to everyone. You will wonder how you functioned without it.  Sliced bread’s got nothing on the Apple iPhone 3G.

I have been away form the blog for a while and away from marketing as well.  I have been charged with the task of organizing a search committee and a plan for our new central web team.

My assistant found this great site and I wanted to share it.  If you need to write a job description for a field that you are not completely familiar with, this is great place to start.  Of course it’s also a nice job search engine for job seekers as well.

Essentially, it searches live job posts and profiles the information much like google, including salary averages per city.  Although the information is only as good as the posts, you can always click right through the results and read the actual description that was posted.  Its great resource that I will definitely go back to.

If you are like me, you found it much easier to grow a facebook group than a facebook page since you cannot send out “join” requests for a page and until recently we were not able to even see a page without logging on.  Groups however were easier to grow and a bit more viral in the features available. (Credit to my assistant, Karina, who discovered this recently for me.)

A request to Facebook and 24 hours is all that is needed to turn your group fans into page fans and maybe grow your page from:

this

to this

in 24 hours!!!

Here is all that is required:

1. Visit the Facebook Help Form Page.
2. Subject line should read: Convert Group to Page
3. Make sure you include the url for both the group and the page in the body of the request.
4. Watch your page fans grow!!

We doubled are fans with this new feature.

Come July 11th I think I will be taking the iphone plunge. I have turned into quite the mac addict recently. I guess I was just waiting for the price to be right. $199 for 8gb and $299 for a 16gb. Delicious.

• 3g speed
• Microsoft Exchange - important for me, it means I can use work email on it
• GPS - no need to by a Garmin now
• 24 hours of audio playback - do i need my regular ipod anymore?

Official Apple Store Marketing

Beware: 3G sucks battery life, they claim 5 hours of talk time/browsing but the silver lining it you could just turn it off when you don’t need it.

OK , where do I preorder!!!

Apple store down. Will we be able to buy a new iphone today?

Tick, Tock, Tick Tock.

Many times I am asked for recommended video and photo gear. There is a plethora of options out there but you would be hard pressed to find an easier solution for recording HD video than the Sanyo Xacti HD 1000. First of all, lets get something straight, if you want the best quality you should be looking at Canon’s line, they make incredible camcorders.

However, if you want ease of use, nearly pocket size, full hd recording, at a bargain price, look no further. Sanyo, yes Sanyo has done a great job with its xacti line by filling a niche of folks looking for portable digital recording (saving to a memory card) at an affordable price.

I hate tapes. I hate long editing jobs. I have grown to love taking short clips with my digital cameras and putting them together with simple editing tools like movie maker or imovie. This is why the next logical step up for me is a more capable memory card based camcorder.

Here are a few clips (which we took just to test it out). We have since purchased the wide angle adapter and are going to get some better campus shots filled with students for b-roll on our video projects and to feed our virtual tour pages.

In order to see it in HD you will need to visit vimeo’s site. Vimeo is a great video sharing site for hosting quality video. It does have high traffic (compared to youtube) but its embedded videos look fantastic. Actually, the one seen here is not even as nice as they can appear on your site, since wordpress is restricting the size of the video window on this site.

Pros

• nice quality HD video
• pocket size - take anywhere
• easy - flip open = turn on mechanism
• fast edit potential - easy upload
• external mic plug
• wide angle adapter available

Cons

• photo quality - sub standard
• low light performance - slow focus - focus hunting

But what about post production?

All these HD camcorders had many problems with editing when they first came out, mostly software related. Many are fixed now, including the HD1000. You can edit clip files with IMovie and Windows Movie Maker (for movie maker you only need to open in quicktime and save as “mov”, this alows movie maker to read the files). Its also important to note you can actually edit right in the camera’s built-in menu and you will be able to upload the “mp4″ file right to any video host.

The caveat: you need to record in the 720p mode. I use the 720p 60 frames per second mode. I have tried the higher resolution (1920 x 1080) and I just cannot find a program that will edit it. I am sure that video production folks have the skill to make it happen but for the amateur or enthusiast like myself, it was not working. It’s a software thing and eventually the consumer software will catch up but for now 1280 x 720 is a nice jump from standard videos and looks great online (for those with broadband and a good computer who can view it).

But even if the end product will be used in standard definition, you will get a very crisp looking picture that will rival and in some cases beat professional standard video equipment (assuming you have good lighting of course).

Lets recap, the name of my game is fast quality, portable, HD.

For this task I feel the HD1000 is a great choice. It been out for 8 months now and Canon has released memory card camcorders that I am sure are better choices for image quality but at $200-300 premium and a different, less portable form factor. As with all technology, I am sure in a few months I will have a different “weapon of choice” for quick HD video recording but for now you cannot go wrong if you want quality fast HD in your pocket.

Here are some more samples of what others have created with this little hd wonder.

I’m going to confess, I am very green on the subject of social media, to the point that I only started reading the Cluetrain Manifesto this year. By internet standards I’m a total newb. However, most of my circle of friends and colleagues are by far even more naive to the end of business as usual.

Image Credit: Scobleizer

My first real experience with the concepts of this life changing phenomenon occurred at a Higher Education E- Marketing conference hosted by Stamats last year in Chicago. I have to credit Thomas Frey of the DaVicni Institute with his presentation on ” the future of education”. He ingrained in my mind a sense wonder and a thirst for knowledge. Other presentations at the event went on to discuss how universities were using social networks and I returned to my own institution, energized and full of ideas.

But the concepts transcended my work in marketing. They pointed to what is so eloquently written in books like Cluetrain or Groundswell. Everyone knows that the only constant is change but the majority of people still do not realize just what an incredible revolution the web has made possible and how it will continue to change our culture, our habits, our lives.

So should you care as a marketer? Damn straight you should care. How much? That is dictated by your customers and the product or service you are selling. In higher ed, its a no-brainer.

Here are a few links I found very informative:

How To: Effectively Talk to Execs and Clients about Social Media - This one is of great importance to me since many times, talking to folks that do not use social media is a real challenge.

Is Social Media Marketing Right For You? - A good recent post on the subject.

The Press Release is Dead: How Web 2.0 Could Save PR and Marketing - and of course there is the social media press release developed by shift communications.

We developed a facebook page a couple of months ago and were frustrated when trying to tell people about it since you had to be logged in to view it.

Something has recently changed and it may have happened with the release of this note on April 21.

How to Promote your Page off Facebook

1:09pm Monday, Apr 21

While Social Ads are effective at driving word-of-mouth marketing for your Facebook Page on the site, we also recommend promoting your Page on your own website externally to help spread the word to new customers and fans. When promoting your Page off Facebook, encourage your customers to show their support by visiting your Page and clicking the “Become a Fan” link in the upper right-hand corner.You can download a “Find us on Facebook” badge to promote your Facebook Page from the link below.

If you’re running promotions for your fans on Facebook, don’t forget to mention the promos on your receipts, tickets, menu, and website.

Challenge: Get our print magazine online fast without sacrificing the quality of the design and making sure that the articles are searchable and available to blogs and other social media as soon as the print version hits subscribers.

Solution: Using wordpress and issuu.com, we have developed a work flow that allows us to get our print publication online as fast as possible with the least amount of manual input and errors, requiring a much shorter approval process.

We had gone through many different iterations of the magazine online, very evident when you look at the archives. The problem was always that each one was created as a mini-site and the text was taken from the PDF file, requiring massive amount of re-editing and formatting to get into html. This in turn created a lengthy approval process with the editor and designer, making the entire production last well over 3-4 weeks, start to finish. By then the articles were stale and no one cared, in fact a few magazines never made it online.

We are now creating 2 versions of the magazine online in a matter of 2-3 days. Issuu.com hosts the flash version (simply upload a PDF) and the wordpress driven site is used to post the articles. The posted articles allow search engines to hit our stories and the flash version allows users the option to view them as they were originally designed. Bonus: Issuu.com is also becoming a a popular destination and by virtue of our magazine being there it is also getting increased exposure at no cost. The articles are also searchable on issuu.com’s search function.

Here is a bit more detail on the workflow:

Using Issuu.com to host a flash version

1. Designer exports to PDF (version 1.5)
2. Upload PDF to issuu.com account and check for errors
3. Make note of pages with errors and pull the PDF down again, to avoid it being bookmarked or viewed with errors (you may also create a separate account for this). Note: you will not be able to see the errors in the PDF, it is in the conversion to flash that they show up.
4. Open pages with problems in photoshop and make a PDF of the page with problem alone, essentially making the page an image. (there may be a better way to fix the errors but we have not found it)
5. Insert these pages back into your original PDF, replacing the pages which contained the errors. (there may be a better way to fix the errors but we have not found it)

Using WordPress software to post articles

1. Designer exports publication document (we are suing In Design), creating “rtf” files. (Note: if the design file is tagged correctly there will be less files and less confusion when opening these.)
2. These files can then be easily copied into the wordpress system (using the “paste from word” options with little to no formatting needed. It is best to have someone work on this with hard copy as a guide.
3. For feature articles, we include a direct link to the flash version of the page with the feature. (but users can view the whole magazine in that format as well).

Alternates:

We were not the first to use issuu in this manner. Red Country magazine embeds the issuu reader right into their page. I like this presentation and we may incorporate this in the next update. Just FYI, I do not read Red Country, it was sent to me as an example by issuu.

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