Weekend Reading - August 29
Friday, August 29th, 2008
Dell releases low-cost laptops for “emerging economies.” Dell has unveiled a new line of computers designed to meet the needs of small businesses, governments and educational institutions operating on limited budgets in the world’s emerging economies. The new Vostro products include two pre-configured laptops and two desktops. Additional Vostro products designed for emerging economies will be introduced in coming months.
According to IDC, there are more than 72 million small businesses worldwide, with 23.4 million – nearly one-third of the global total – located in Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan). Latin America and EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) follow with 12.5 million and 11.9 million.
The new Vostro products were designed to address affordability, reliability and easy maintenance, says Dell.
Photoshop goes online, finally! Adobe Systems Incorporated last week announced the availability of an online version of Adobe Photoshop Express. The public beta will let users store, sort and show off digital photos with eye-catching effects. According to Adobe, Photoshop Express allows users to store up to 2 gigabytes of images online for free, make edits to their photos, and share them online in creative ways, including downloading and uploading photos from popular social networking sites like Facebook. Photoshop Express offers a variety of creative sharing options, including uploading and showing off photos and slideshows in your own online “Gallery” hosted by Adobe, or conveniently embedding or linking photos to social networking sites and personal blogs without having to leave the application.
Did you get Obama’s veep text? So did 2.9 million. Nielsen Mobile, a service of The Nielsen Company, estimates that 2.9 million US mobile subscribers received a text message from the Obama campaign over the course of Friday, Saturday and Sunday last week. How does Nielsen know this? Nielsen Mobile monitors shortcode marketing (the use of text-message shortcodes such as the 62262 “O-B-A-M-A”) through the world’s largest telecommunications bill-panel, an opt-in panel that reports on the billing activity for more than 40,000 subscriber lines in the US.
The VP message was sent in the late hours of Friday night and is, by many accounts, the single largest mobile marketing event in the US., to date. From a mobile perspective, it makes sense that the campaign chose to use text-messages. Today, 116 million US mobile subscribers (52 percent of subscribers) actively use text messaging, making it a new mass medium for marketing efforts.
Nic Covey, director of insights at Nielsen Mobile also believes that “the success of this text-campaign has Madison Avenue thinking even more about how they too can interact with a universe of 116 million text-message users in the US.”
We agree. From a marketing standpoint, good move. It got people talking throughout the week, not only about his announcement, but also his commitment to technology throughout the week – hitting a fever pitch Friday night.
On the other hand…
We knew who the veep was before we went to bed. We got the text message the next morning – because it was sent during the night. And where did we get the information? The old guard: TV news. Not the web, not Twitter, not a text message.
Information Week’s Mitch Wagner has a fantastic analysis on the old guard scooping the new media.
Was the announcement itself a success? Wagner doesn’t think so. It was successful though in getting people to opt-in [cough cough] with their email addresses. So far, we’ve received emails from Michelle Omaba, Barack’s campaign manager, and Joe Biden.
Then again, text messaging may be obsolete by 2017. In his thought-provoking post, Ed Hardy, editor at Brighthand.com says:
Five years from now, I predict that anyone in the U.S. getting a text will be surprised. U.S. carriers will turn the service off in less than 10 years.
The technology for full email access is available now, so SMS has really outlived its usefulness.
At least injuries from walking into light poles while texting will go down, right?
