bloomfield knoble project a 2012 Apex Award Finalist
Digital Signage Expo (DSE), the world’s largest and longest running International Conference and Tradeshow dedicated exclusively to digital signage, interactive technology and digital out-of-home networks (DOOH), today announced the finalists for its Apex Awards for 2012. The annual DSE Apex Awards honor innovation in the development and deployment of technology in the global DOOH industry. Nominees are the end-use site of the installation.
Chosen by an independent panel of five industry journalists, this year’s Apex Award finalists were named from a field of 88 entrants representing 18 countries and vying in 11 major digital signage categories. Gold, Silver and Bronze Apex Awards will be presented in each category at a special awards banquet slated for the opening night of DSE 2012 on Wednesday, March 7th from 7-9 p.m. at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.
Stephan Pastis is a Genius!
Full disclosure here – I am huge fan of Pearls Before Swine and of its creator, Stephan Pastis. In fact, it has been my great pleasure to not only meet Mr. Pastis, but to hang out with him as well. He is an amazing combination of funny and charming with tremendous charisma and yes, I do have a bit of a man crush. I must have made quite an impression on him as well as he actually corresponds with me from time to time. Quick side note – Mr. Pastis is Greek and he occasionally corresponds in Greek. In fact, I got a note from him just the other day. Did you know that the Greek word for “friend” is “stalker” and that “see you soon” is “restraining order?”
Man crush aside, I want to skip the normal praise I would heap upon him for his writing, drawing, artful commentary, being so handsome, etc. and praise him from a marketing perspective. This weekend I realized that Stephan Pastis is a genius!
“Last time there was this much excitement about a tablet, it had some commandments written on it.” Wall Street Journal.
Google+’s Much Needed Shot in the Arm
bloomfield knoble has been watching Google+ with a skeptical eye since its launch last summer. As we stated at the time, where do people have room in their lives for another social network? We still stand behind that statement. It’s not like Facebook is doing anything wrong. They’re not driving away the masses, making them clamor for another outlet on which to post their Farmville needs. In fact, Facebook just launched their most popular overhaul yet, the Timeline. So gaining a foothold has been hard for Google+.
Upstaging CES
Isn’t really that hard to do anymore, mostly because of the need to get product announcements out quickly. Anyway, if you’re heading to CES this week, one of the most common products you’ll see will be ultra books – super thin computers and yet even smaller digital devices. As cool as many of these products will be, they’re nothing like whats coming.
Tim Wogan writes in PhysicsWorld that a new technique for embedding atomic-scale wires within crystals of silicon has revealed that Ohm’s law can hold true for wires just four atoms thick and one atom tall. The result comes as a surprise because conventional wisdom suggests that quantum effects should cause large deviations from Ohm’s law for such tiny wires. Paradoxically, the researchers hope the finding will aid the development of quantum computers.
The wisdom of crowds
I’ve written about crowd dynamics before, but I saw an article that I thought really brought it together. So, courtesy of The Economist, “The strange but extremely valuable science of how pedestrians behave.”
IMAGINE that you are French. You are walking along a busy pavement in Paris and another pedestrian is approaching from the opposite direction. A collision will occur unless you each move out of the other’s way. Which way do you step? The answer is almost certainly to the right. Replay the same scene in many parts of Asia, however, and you would probably move to the left. It is not obvious why. There is no instruction to head in a specific direction (South Korea, where there is a campaign to get people to walk on the right, is an exception). There is no simple correlation with the side of the road on which people drive: Londoners funnel to the right on pavements, for example.
Hacking – Morse Code Style
I was listening to a news report this morning about a recent hack of a security firm in Texas. Then, by coincidence, I read this article in New Scientist. The article struck me as funny – not just because of the article, but because the news story I had heard earlier was making a big deal about hacking, so I thought I would share it courtesy of Paul Marks, senior technology correspondent for New Scientist.
A century ago, one of the world’s first hackers used Morse code insults to disrupt a public demo of Marconi’s wireless telegraph.
LATE one June afternoon in 1903 a hush fell across an expectant audience in the Royal Institution’s celebrated lecture theatre in London. Before the crowd, the physicist John Ambrose Fleming was adjusting arcane apparatus as he prepared to demonstrate an emerging technological wonder: a long-range wireless communication system developed by his boss, the Italian radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi. The aim was to showcase publicly for the first time that Morse code messages could be sent wirelessly over long distances. Around 300 miles away, Marconi was preparing to send a signal to London from a clifftop station in Poldhu, Cornwall, UK.
Top 10 breakthroughs for 2011 (Physics World style)
It seems that everybody is doing end-of-the-year lists, so I thought I would do one too (courtesy of Physics World). I am always the first to admit that much of the science-related stuff I blog about doesn’t have a direct correlation to marketing (although I try to make it seem so), but sometimes science just needs to be promoted for science sake. So courtesy of Hamish Johnston, editor of physicsworld.com, here are their top 10 breakthroughs of 2011.
MIT Expands Free Online Courses
I wish I would have gone to MIT. I love everything about MIT, except maybe their lack of D1 sports. Unfortunately, my complete disregard for high school academics apparently outweighed my disdain for social interaction (which I thought would enable me to fit in perfectly with fellow Asperger sufferers). Anyway, over the last 10 years or so, I have been able to “attend” MIT thanks to their EXCELLENT OpenCourseware program. At this point in my life, I want the knowledge – not the certificate. I will admit, however, to owning several MIT t-shirts that I like to wear and let people infer what they will.
Anyway, one of my dreams may come true! MIT today announced the launch of an online learning initiative internally called “MITx.” MITx will offer a portfolio of MIT courses through an online interactive learning platform that will:
- organize and present course material to enable students to learn at their own pace
- feature interactivity, online laboratories and student-to-student communication
- allow for the individual assessment of any student’s work and allow students who demonstrate their mastery of subjects to earn a certificate of completion awarded by MITx
- operate on an open-source, scalable software infrastructure in order to make it continuously improving and readily available to other educational institutions.
MIT expects that this learning platform will enhance the educational experience of its on-campus students, offering them online tools that supplement and enrich their classroom and laboratory experiences. MIT also expects that MITx will eventually host a virtual community of millions of learners around the world.
Search and you will find.
Search engines have improved without you noticing. How did they do it? Jim Giles, Ferris Jabr and New Scientist try to find out.
Anyone can publish on the web, but it would be better if some people didn’t; the world does not need another site that provides advice on how to unlock an iPhone or find cheap car insurance. Now new evidence shows that search engines have upped their game to make sure their results are not dominated by such low-quality sites.
