Explore Posterous

Notice anything different here? Yup, standing up almost like competitive C1+ canoe.

This technique could come in handy some day.

Recently, someone took the idea of video email a step further and created an email marketing campaign that used video in a way that I hadn’t thought feasible – and it displayed properly in nearly all major email programs!

Here’s how she did it…

“Silent Video Email” Uses Animated GIF

Take a look at this email created for the movie “Twilight” (link opens in new window).

That video trailer playing on the left-hand side? It not only works on the web page, but it works in all major email clients except Outlook 2007 (which only displays the first frame of the trailer).

In other words, it works in:

• AOL
• Yahoo
• Hotmail
• Gmail
• Mozilla Thunderbird
• And More

Pretty cool, no?

Every system built by a single institution has points of failure that can bring the entire system down.  Even in organizations that have tried hard for internal redundancy – for example, Google and Amazon have extremely distributed infrastructures – there will always be system-wide shared components, architectures, or assumptions that are flawed.  The only way to guarantee there aren’t is to set up completely separate, competing organizations – in other words, new institutions.

This insight has practical implications when building internet services.  One thing I learned from my Hunch co-founder Tom Pinckney is, if you really care about having a reliable website, always host your servers at two data centers, owned by different companies, on networks owned by different companies, on separate power grids, and so forth.  Our last company, SiteAdvisor, handled billions of requests per hour but never went down when the institutions we depended on went down – which was surprisingly often.  (We did have downtime, but it was due to our own flawed components, assumptions etc.).

The importance of institutional redundancy is profoundly more important when applied to the internet at large. The US government originally designed the internet to be fully decentralized so as to withstand large-scale nuclear attack.  The core services built on top of the internet – the web (HTTP), email (SMTP), subscription messaging (RSS) – were made similarly open and therefore distributible across institutions.  This explains their remarkable system-wide reliability.  It also explains why we should be worried about reliability when core internet services are owned by a single company.

The principle of not depending on single institutions applies beyond technology.  Every institution is opaque to outsiders, with single points of failure, human and otherwise.  For example, one of the primary lessons of the recent financial crisis is that the most important form of diversification is across institutions, not, as the experts have told us for decades, across asset classes.  The Madoff fraud was one extreme, but there were plenty of cases of lesser fraud and countless cases of poor financial management, most of which would have been almost impossible to anticipate by outsiders.

Roberto Bigano shares some techniques used in photographing cars on location. The soft light created needs to be large and very close to the object as you can see in the studio setup.

You'll notice that he changed the light positions in the set. It's difficult to tell from the shadow where the light is from but you can tell from how the light shapes the object.

You can also see how fast the light falls off, its an indication that the light is large, soft and really close.

Roberto Bigano's web site and article here

 

Have you noticed that more and more companies are marketing "simplicity" as a reason to buy their products or services? For example, Philips Electronics advertises "Sense and simplicity" while Bank of America promotes "Clear, easy-to-understand products." Simplicity also is the subtle message that Schwab conveys when it says "Talk to Chuck" and that Fidelity suggests when it says just "Stay on the line."

The reality is that simplicity is highly appealing in a world that is getting more and more complex — where consumers have too many choices, where technology is constantly evolving, and where the political and economic environment is unpredictable. In the midst of all this instability and change, people want to get back to basics. They want uncomplicated products, straightforward guidance, and things that work quickly and simply the first time, without lots of extra effort.

What is interesting about this phenomenon is that it is in sharp contrast with the thinking of the past few years — which was that consumers wanted unlimited choice so that they could customize their products and services to fit their own unique needs and lifestyles. As such, technology companies pushed for more and more bells and whistles, while other firms drove towards mass customization. The result was a huge array of choices that became almost overwhelming and costly.

For example, office furniture manufacturer Herman Miller discovered that it was giving consumers so many choices for customizing its popular Aeron chair that it had to be prepared to produce over four million variations on the basic model — even though only a few thousand configurations were actually being ordered. Similarly, Cisco Systems learned from its top corporate customers that all the new features in its networking products were actually causing instability in the corporate networks because they couldn't be integrated easily with existing hardware and software.

It's easy to create slogans and marketing materials about simplicity. The challenge is to truly make things easier for the customer so that simplicity becomes a competitive advantage.

To do that, companies need to listen to their customers and truly engage them in dialogue about their needs — and their perceptions of products and services offered. For example, Cisco works with a number of customer advisory groups that meet regularly with senior executives and product developers; Fidelity executives either answer their 800-number consumer phone lines or listen to tapes of the calls; ConAgra Foods product managers make field visits to consumers' homes and to grocery stores.

In addition to listening to customers, companies also need to design their products and services from the customer perspective. When Intuit developed its small business accounting software package, the product developers realized that most small business owners were not familiar with accounting jargon, and in fact were intimidated by it. So instead of using the term "accounts receivable", they called it "money in." Similarly, "accounts payable" became "money out." As a result of developing a product from the customer perspective, Intuit sold 100,000 copies of the software the first year.

Not every company needs to create its own version of the iPod, an icon of simplicity. But there is no reason why every company can't listen to their own customers and design products and services in ways that better satisfy their customers' desires for greater simplicity and ease of use. If you don't, your competitors probably will.

Ron Ashkenas is a managing partner of Robert H. Schaffer & Associates, a Stamford, Connecticut consulting firm and the author of the forthcoming book Simply Effective: How to Cut Through Complexity in Your Organization and Get Things Done

.