Santa Gives the Winter Olympics a Pass

Santa was quoted in Miami earlier today, "Ho Ho Ho.. I wasn't sure if I was allowed to go because I am not an official corporate Olympic sponsor, so my lawyers told me to give it a miss... but I will be back next year!"


The official "West Coast Canada Santa Visit" went to Lolloowet area this year. The Mayor of Vancouver was disappointed that Vancouver was not honored with Santa's presence but he says, "The Value of the Olympics far outweighed the downside...."

NORAD and Santa Team Up

Can I Open One Now?

If you're like me waiting for Santa to make his way down your chimney and deliver all those cool new toys you need there is a great new tracking tool from Google Maps.

Santa Snacks
Santa takes breaks during his Christmas Eve trip around the world – especially for snacks left by children. Do you put a snack out for Santa? Kids all over the world do. Some even leave carrots for Santa's reindeer. (Carrots are their favorite food.)

Leaving cookies for Santa is a tradition for many families. Imagine eating that many cookies in one night (burp)!

What the Heck is Google Wave

But can it wash the dishes, answer the phone and get rid of all my spam...
Edited version from Bob Moss blog post.

If you have not checked out Wave (invitation only, since September this year) you are missing out on one of the coolest and probably most innovative collaboration tool available on the market today..

Oh yea... it FREE too!

Wave is a revolutionary new way to keep in contact with people and collaborate on documents and could completely replace email. The theory is that email is beginning to look a little antiquated, especially when we could be using the features of Web 2.0 with 'waves'.


What exactly is 'waves'?
A wave is best compared to a conversation in an instant messenger, but in the case of a wave, you can chat to yourself or to a whole group of people. Each wave contains a subwave called a 'wavelet', which focuses on a particular aspect of the main wave, and can be manipulated in much the same way. This means one wave can branch out into a number of other waves, but keep all the original associations. Each wavelet contains entries, known as 'blips', posted by the various collaborators, extension apps, or even automated robots you converse with. These can contain anything, including text and video, and mean that your wave becomes diverse and dynamic, with content that's constantly updated, either from an external source or your fellow collaborators. A document, in wave terms, contains the content of each blip. You slowly build up and manipulate the various blips to produce in-depth conversations or collaborative papers. You can then embed your wave document into a webpage, so it can act like an interactive and automatically updating wiki. It's also possible to export everything into a final file for printing or sending to your fellow collaborators.


Spell checking that think for you.
You are less likely to suffer from spelling mistakes or grammatical errors than you would with a wiki, thanks to Google's innovative natural language tools. These adapt depending on the context of your writing, and pick the most likely suggestion when it compares against the text that came before. This means you could type "I have bean eating beens" and have this automatically corrected to the sentence you expected as you type, without the need for any further intervention.

Waves have full support for you to drag and drop files, text snippets or any web content. This will automatically be added to your document as a blip. This makes things much more interactive. As expected, you can also embed other Google services such as calendars, YouTube video, Picasa images and so on into your waves. As a document creator, only the people you explicitly specify as collaborators can alter your work. You can remove collaborators at any time and cycle back through the changes they might have made.


Expect lots of great new plug-ins and applets
Google has open-sourced the open-transport layer as well as large swathes of the main code, so developers can build their own extensions using the Wave API. One such extension enables you to embed Twitter feeds into a document, thereby creating a 'twave' and enabling real-time communication over another protocol while still integrating seamlessly into the interface. This can then be extended by programming robots. Developers can program robots that create blips and respond in particular ways to content in other waves and external websites. They can even respond to you sending them messages, which means you can ask your robot for the latest sports scores and be told instantly. To include your robot in any wave, just add it as a collaborator, and off you go.

OK so how do you get a Wave Invitation. Find someone who has a Gmail account and ask them. If they are using their Gmail account properly they already have a Wave account setup and it not then they will thank you when they get all set up in Google Wave.

More great info:
Complete guide Blog on Google wave

Take 2 Asprins and Get Marketing Now

I have a headake just thinking about these numbers.

One of the few industries that have actually increased their marketing budget (2.457 Billion) over the last several years is "Big Pharma". Even though they are making billions in profit they are aware that in the cut-through industry of pharmaceutical wonder drugs R&D does not guarantee success. One company has increased its advertising budget by 160 percent and most are ramping up their budgets as we exit the recession.

If they see that the only way to get a great product (or idea) to market is to spend more of marketing and cut budgets in other places should send a strong signal to all businesses. If your not aggressively marketing your business than you are fighting a loosing battle against the companies that are.

Now is not the time to go crazy and overspend on ineffective marketing ideas. If you have limited funds in marketing then you should be rearranging your cash flow to get more marketing and advertising campaigns moving sooner are rather than later. If nothing we have learnt that the business that comes out of a recession with a strong well executed marketing plan is often the leader in their segment for years and sometimes decades.

Wow... Check the Next Generation Trailer - Avatar

Now this look like a good waist of cash...

Just downloaded a new Adobe program to run this trailer for Avatar. You can click on the images to see larger versions.

Lots of very cool "game like" interface design.
A taste of what the internet information programs will be like in the future.
If you have a high-end computer with lots of bandwidth then I recommend you check it out.

The trailer runs then stops at designated people or creatures and you have a choice of watching an in-depth info video on that subject or continuing with the trailer. Very nice interface idea and I can see this being a great new format for interactive news that will once again blow away the TV experience.

Enjoy