To the right of these posts, you can see our Voki avatar speaking in Karl’s voice.
A few months back, we had the privilege of partnering with Oddcast to name one of their new products. The product, a talking, customizable avatar, like all of Oddcast’s products, is on the leading edge of personalized, marketing technologies and can be added to any blog, MySpace page or mobile phone.
We thought it was a fun product and really enjoyed naming it. Now it’s live and starting to show up on different online sites.
The avatar is very easy to use – you can create one in ten to fifteen minutes – and fairly easy to post – if you know how to post to a blog or how to upload an image, you shouldn’t have any problem.
We hope to see these everywhere. Try it out at www.voki.com.
Tags: useful sites
It’s been a while since we’ve posted. It’s true, we’ve been exceptionally busy. But we know we should post and we know we should do it more often as a way of connecting with you our visitors.
Since we haven’t posted in a while, we’d like to ask you: What would you like us to write about. In the past, we have focused our writing on branding and naming issues, but a lot of the questions we’ve been getting lately are around marketing.
Is there a particular area of marketing you would like to know more about? Are there naming issues that you or your company have faced that you would like to share?
Drop us a line and let us know.
Tags: useful sites
I got to Timothy Ferris through a post that was on Reddit.com called “
From Geek to Freak: How I Gained 34 Lbs. of Muscle in 4 Weeks.” While at his
blog, I saw that he had written a book called “The Four Hour Work Week.”Intrigued, I downloaded the
Audible.com file, listened to it and bought the book. I thought it was smart, has a lot of thought-provoking ideas and have told my friends the chapters on eliminating emails, phone calls and meetings are worth the price of admission.
Timothy has been on a whirlwind media tour. (In the book, he writes his goal is to be a best selling author selling 20,000 copies a week. I’ve watched the book climb the Amazon charts to best seller in business. I’m impressed.)
I had heard he was going to appear at Rich Scheferin’s information summit in July. On a conference call, Rich mentioned Tim had done 28 radio interviews in one week. Then, Annemarie Segaric pointed me to Marlene Green’s blog where she has links to two audio interviews with Tim, one at Joe Polish’s blog and another at Ken McCarthy’s.
Tim talks about mini-retirements (which is something I know intimately, having spent a year away from NYC with my family in Panama). He also talks about creating a “Muse,” an (online) business that generates revenue with minimal involvement from the owner. These are ideas are very smart and very do-able. (OK, I don’t have a muse yet, but I’m working on it.)
But perhaps what is most interesting is the timing.
I believe Timothy has fired the opening salvo in a war against “24/7 Always Available, Always On” culture. He’s not the only one, but he may be one of the first to reach the NYTimes Best Seller List with these ideas.
Tags: useful sites
I recently got back into using LinkedIn. I’d been using the site professionally for about 2 years, but it wasn’t until a friend suggested I start taking my network seriously that I really started using it.
To more effectively use LinkedIn, he suggested I check out Christian Mayaud’s brilliant Sacred Cow Dung. Specifically, Christian’s post called “Cheater’s Guide to LinkedIn.” It’s even versioned, v0.1. The Cheater’s Guide tells you HOW to optimize your profile, accept all requests to connect and, perhaps most importantly, get a life.
Each of the 16 Cheats includes a Cheater Principle, which summarizes the principle. Most of these are fun, see: “Superconnectors are “All Sluts” and “Everyone is valuable – until proven otherwise.”
At this point, The Cheater’s Guide is nearly two years old. So far, I have found it to be very useful and will be pointing new LinkedIn users there.
Tags: LinkedIn · useful sites
This was news a few months ago. Well, now apparently, The International Astronomers Union is porposing a new definition for planet. I would say, probably to clear up the controversy they created when they said Pluto wasn’t. According to The Useless Tree, this follows a very Confucian (sp?) idea that names are important.
According to Confucius: “Naming enables the noble minded to speak, and speech enables the noble-minded to act.”
Tags: Naming · useful sites
