Tuesday, March 21, 2006

BMW's Audio Books: Beyond Product Placement

I like to listen to moody, noirish mysery novels while driving around in the Southern California sunshine. It’s a sweet-and-sour thing. Never gets stale for me.

Which is why I was intrigued recently when I stumbled upon BMW Audio Books. The company has commissioned original fiction by some unexpected authors, and to judge by a first listen, they’ve done it right.

This weekend I downloaded and listened to James Flint’s Outer Limits-ish Master of the Storm this weekend while winding up the Pacific Coast Highway. The production was impeccable, far better quality than most of the books I’ve purchased on Audible.com, the story performed (rather than merely read) by Forbes Masson, a Shakespeare-trained Scotsman with an intoxicating, single-malt voice. Flint’s work has a distinctive style, and like the other authors BMW has engaged, he has enough edge-dwelling credibility that there’s precious little chance anyone will mistake him for a shill… even though the story does take place in a car--a BMW.

The presence of the car in the Storm has a nudge-nudge, wink-wink quality to it, and little to do with the story itself. But any expectation that the story would be advertorial in nature is quickly dispelled as the protagonist gets behind the wheel after one champagne too many and plows into an innocent bystander. Not a particularly safe plot point for a car company, but a turn that had the effect of instantly earning my trust and attention.

When you’re a successful luxury brand, your job is to keep your profile up and not lose your cool--all the while acting like you have nothing to prove to anyone.

That’s not an easy prescription to follow. Just ask Jaguar, which, under Ford, ran a series of banal suburbanite ads that left one wondering whether the product were a car or a washer-dryer set. Sales of the Tauruses--er, Jags--predictably suck.

Publishing slightly off-color, risk-taking fiction is a brilliantly safe way of owning the edge, I think. Unless you start slandering mullahs, literary fiction isn’t likely to upset anyone, even pretty out-there fiction. And it’s an art form in serious need of patronage.

Friday, March 17, 2006

Why blogs are relevant

Oliver Kamm doesn’t quite know what he’s talking about in this piece on blogging (which also appears in today’s Times), but he’s quite confident about what he says. (He’s spot-on with regard to Arianna Huffington, though; she did show up to my party in LA last year, but I didn’t invite her, Mickey Kaus did.)

You can read my lengthy response, or just insert the word ‘people’ everywhere that Kamm uses the word ‘blogs,’ and it’ll quickly be apparent where he’s gone wrong.

"Why blogs are relevant" continued...

Thursday, March 16, 2006

The iPod is dying and will die in 2006

Half a year ago I posted a very controversial blog entitled “2006 the Year the iPod died”. We had a lot of comments, trackbacks and found the topic generated a lot of discussion at other blogsites as well. I promised to return to that forecast.

First - let me re-iterate. We, Alan Moore and I, are both big fans of Apple, and we loved the iPod and i-Tunes concepts so much that we made it one of the case studies in our book. A positive case study in every way. We do love this innovation. But unfortunately for the many Apple and iPod fans who shared thoughts with us, this Apple innovation is totally bound to become a niche proposition, exactly like other fantastic Apple innovations like Macintosh computers.

"The iPod is dying and will die in 2006" continued...

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

It's all about the holes in the cheese

Darwin said, for wont of repeating myself, that

It is not the strongest or most intelligent that survive, but the ones most adaptive to change.

The other important point Darwin made was the ability of the opposite sex to attract; to find the best mate, another survival instinct.

Just think of the peacock; it’s gotta have something going for it, right?

"It's all about the holes in the cheese" continued...

Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Techdirt Greenhouse

I’m just back from a flying visit to San Jose, California, where I attended Techdirt Greenhouse, an event put on by corporate intelligence firm Techdirt. It was a stimulating day populated with intensely clever, driven, and affable individuals talking about all things innovative in the technology business. Attendees included execs from Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, and Apple’s iTunes division. VC Jeff Clavier - who I’d first met at Innovate Europe in Spain last June - and Engagement Alliance advisory board member Hillary Johnson have more on Greenhouse.

The guys at Techdirt - Mike, Mike, Mike, Mike, and Dennis - are also prolific and extremely sharp bloggers. Check out what they have to say today about the increasingly crowded classified search market.

Tags: techdirtgreenhouse, techdirt greenhouse