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Taking the pulse of the people: Newest awards by popular vote

What is America's favorite example of good design? The Smithsonian's Cooper- Hewitt National Design Museum in New York has been asking that question this autumn by urging people to vote for their favorites in the first People's Design Awards.

What does the response tell us about America's perceptions of design?

For starters, it suggests that design is one of those subjects on which most people have opinions, often strong ones. Public votes and prizes are precarious projects for museums, accustomed to exploring subjects with scholarly subtlety in exhibitions, rather than delivering absolute judgments by naming winners and losers. As the Turner Prize for contemporary art proves year after year at the Tate Britain, awards are remarkably effective at generating media coverage and public debate, and at provoking controversy and accusations of sensationalism.

» peoplesdesignaward.org

» Search Branding-Specific Tags: Design Awards - Turner Prize - Contemporary Art
» International Herald Tribune

Podcast: Marketing Metrics and Financial Performance

[mp3] Listen or Download / Wharton

Consumers Increasingly Focus On Price

Are consumers becoming more price-sensitive? Yes. Our data shows that consumers increasingly favor price over brand and they are less likely to spend more for products that save them time and hassles or that have an image that they like. But not all consumers are the same. Our research also shows that males of all ages are less price-sensitive than females — and that young males are a good target for marketing non-price attributes.

» Search Branding-Specific Tags: price-sensitive - price over brand
» Forrester Research

Web 3.0 - Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense.

Their goal is to add a layer of meaning on top of the existing Web that would make it less of a catalog and more of a guide — and even provide the foundation for systems that can reason in a human fashion. That level of artificial intelligence, with machines doing the thinking instead of simply following commands, has eluded researchers for more than half a century.

These ideas, which some people are calling Web 3.0, as the story notes, could well be the foundation for one of the Next Big Things in technology. Smart entrepreneurs are working now on making them real.

In the news category, the value of this approach is obvious: sifting through the huge amount of noise and finding the signal, then putting it all together in a coherent (or at least more coherent) whole than we can dream of today. Again, people are working on this, and some may be getting fairly close to a first approximation. But it will be an extremely difficult problem, the kind that tech folks call “nontrivial.”
Then again, the nontrivial problems are worth the most — when they’re solved.

» Search Branding-Specific Tags: Common Sense - Artificial Intelligence
» NY Times

HD DVD Movies: Studios eye the high capacity medium's potential for new ad revenue.

"The extra space gives the studios room not only for high-definition video and enhanced audio, but also for a bevy of interactive features, including games, picture-in-picture commentaries and Web links.

Some car chases in movies are so over the top that you might find yourself mentally trying to add up the cost of all the wreckage. Now Progressive Direct will do the math for you. It teamed up with Universal Studios Home Entertainment to insert a running tally of the destruction into the recent release of "The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift" on high-definition DVD. As cars smack into one another in Tokyo, a display in a small window keeps track: Roof repair: $209; taillights: $451; fender: $618."

» Search Branding-Specific Tags: HD DVD - Universal Studios - Advergames
» NY Times

J&J Selects INVEGA as Brand Name for the treatment of schizophrenia drug.

Janssen, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, announced that it has selected INVEGA™ as the brand name for paliperidone extended release tablets, the company's investigational oral atypical antipsychotic. The company is seeking approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to market INVEGA™ for the treatment of schizophrenia.

» Search Branding-Specific Tags: Schizophrenia - Drug Name - Drug Naming
» Johnson & Johnson

Google's Marissa Mayer: Speed Matters

Marissa Mayer, Google’s (GOOG) vice president for search products and user experience, has a secret. Or she did, until her brief presentation this afternoon at the Web 2.0 Summit today in San Francisco.

Her secret: on the Web, speed matters.

Mayer described an interesting experiment Google performed a few years ago. The idea was to figure out the ideal number of results to display in response to a search query. When Google asked users if they wanted 10, 20 or 30 results on the first page, the winner was 30. More is better, was the apparent thinking. But consumer behavior told a different story: the more responses Google displayed, the fewer searches each user performed. It was, she said, an indication of “extreme unhappiness.” But it was the opposite of what people said they wanted.

The question was why that was happening? In essense, Google figured out that the answer was speed: it simplying took a lot longer - too long - to display the screen with more results.

Mayer said she looked for an uncontrolled variable - and it turned out to be speed. Load times increased from 0.4 seconds for 10 results, to 0.9 seconds for 30 results. Google’s approach, she said, “is to make it up in volume.” There is less time per transaction, but you can “generate more area under the curve over time” with “lots of small and fast interactions.”

Mayer says the need for speed will lead to some “key changes coming,” including richer support for Javascript in particular and client side applications in general. She also noted that mobile access speeds are “fundamentally too slow,” and predicted that there will be “real advances in mobile hardware.”

» Search Branding-Specific Tags: Web 2 - User Experience - Google
» SeekingAlpha

The Executive Guide to the BlogoSphere (pdf)

Christopher Graves, Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide
Download PDF: BlogoSphere

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