Tag: Youtube

Where have all the salesmen gone?

Algorithm rules. Pop-up ads and SEO.

Sales automation. Who needs a firm handshake, the smell of splash perfume and sincere eye contact!

Users know everything about the product and the industry anyway.

There is no need for more information. Only the recommendation part, which they rely on friends and families.

Strangers knocking on doors and pushing product don’t seem to work as it once did during the industrial era (Death of the salesman).

Willy Loman takes off his hat, and resigns to his fate. Ours is an age of logistic and automation. May the best route win.  User-generated content, user-interphase, user-comment. We call this empowerment. Democratizing the web.  Everyone logs in, surfs and is glued to the set.

And we barely scratch the surface. Since mobile penetration is faster than desktop’s, designers beef up mobile IP and liberate users from their “desks”.

First the “brick” phone, then the I-phone. We should hold memorials for boombox, Walkman, brick phone and mainframe computers. Products are smaller, cheaper, easier to ship. No manual needed. No demo. No need for salesmen. Click here, enter there, and UPS or FedEx will ship to your door (it started with Amazon, Ebay and Priceline until it grows on you). Or more conveniently, swipe your credit card, punch in the vending selection, and transact with a machine.

Every start-up now enjoys lower barriers of entry (open source software, cheaper hardware, increased bandwidth and labor surplus). San Francisco is witnessing a Renaissance: game companies, Twitter etc… Let’s play. Let the game begin.

Excuse me, I just got interrupted by an automated sales call by a machine. At least, it is accent-reduced. So the choice now is speech recognition or live, but from far off-shored call centers. Which one do you prefer? Can’t afford to send a rep. He would fumble despite having rehearsed his elevator speech. He already forgot how to tie a knot. It’s a lost art from a lost species. Where have all the salesmen gone? Long time passing.

 

Here’s my card

You have heard that line in movies, at the bar, or convention hall.

The Post had an article about the survival of the card in our digital age.

Maybe because it’s so small, so humble, and so obvious.

Google was thinking big i.e. “organize the world’s information”, thus, overlooked the tiny card in our wallet.

I received a business card which says “name, looking for employment in such and such field”.

I thought that was quite a sign of our time.

I got tired of printing my position (will work for food). So I printed my social network URL instead.

Our identity has slowly evolved, from off-line to online,  national passport to digital passport.

Virtual identity. We update photos and other data on our social graph.

We used to have coaches in sports, music, career. And now, there are  new breed of  online business coach.

Larger play place. More global. Higher benchmark.

It used to be “on the web, nobody knows you are a dog”.

Now, you need to approach multiple platforms from Twitter to YouTube, from Facebook to LinkedIn.

New rules of engagement.

New rules of PR.

Yet the business card stays the same.

Hi touch, low tech.

Easily exchanged at mixer.

Strong hand grip. Name tag on your right chest. Card on your left hand.

Impressive impression.

Twitter speech replaces elevator speech.

Let’s go.

Your name? Mine is .

Here’s my card.

 

Deer facing headlights

WSJ most read article is “Why people can’t make decision” (see my other blog, “buy-in behaviors”).

I also found another article that reinforces this period of indecision: companies are saving the money they borrowed at bank’s low rates, thus fail to spur the economy.

Why would people borrow money at low rates, then sit on them? Companies need leadership (i.e. doing the right thing as opposed to “doing the thing right”). They forgot a biblical story about stewardship.

The post- WW generation are now in leadership position. Ambivalence is the norm (don’t blame them, after Vietnam and Watergate).

Right now, both parties are blaming each other for the ailing and failing economy.

And we in turn blame ourselves.

Self-recrimination paralyzes us, resulting in indecision. In short, deer facing approaching headlights.

Charlie Rose series on how the brain works, shows the frontal part of the brain, when damaged, causes moral lapses.

Our economic system got injured and is now in recovery (not as desired, but to be expected).

Any movement helps.

As long as the deer starts moving, and wakes up from its trance.

The stats indicated that it was a 18-month long recession. But it feels like decades.

The last recession, coincided with the dot.com burst, gave rise to Web 2.0 (whose contributors had a lot of time in their hand for Wikipedia and YouTube).

This time,  it shouldn’t be an exception. Something good will come out.

If you saw the recent front page story of the San Francisco Chronicle, you would have read about a female humpback whale who had become entangled in a spider web of crab traps and lines.

With help from emergency crew (near SF), she was cut loose, and immediately swam in circle to show gratitude and joy. Very moving story of giving and receiving.

We can learn a lesson from the animal kingdom to enhance our humanity. We should wake up sooner than a deer facing oncoming traffic! Go against our natural reflex to survive and thrive. Keep moving. Let not gravity and inertia win the day.

 

all flesh!

It must be hard to keep reinventing one’s self, especially when it comes to topping your own high marks.

Gaga does it again on Vogue cover (all- meat bikini ).

http://www.nydailynews.com/gossip/2010/09/07/2010-09-07_lady_gaga_dons_raw_meat_on_cover_of_vogue_hommes_japan.html

Use all your resources. Follow the money and your instincts.

This is to show that when it comes to imagination, we have no bound.

We are the ones who limit ourselves.

Try YouTube.

Have a laugh at some videos, then turn around, and laugh at yourselves.

Why can’t you do it better? Why don’t you do it at all!

The last time I saw Lady Gaga, it was on the cover of the Rolling Stone (gun and bullets).

Why all the complaints, now that she did away with guns and try meat and butter?

It’s designed as a publicity stunt. And in my book, it works.

It triggers the imagination. It opens up something in my brain. It moves me and motivates me.

Shouldn’t it motivate you? One human being do something unheard of before, leads to many more mutations.

Vietnamese math award winner was said to “have thrown the bridge across the river” for others to see and solve the many “lemma”.

Whatever multi-sided equation he was working on, I am sure humanity can someday benefit from much (the way we have profited from the size and speed of the silicon chips).

On the creative side, Lady Gaga now stands on top of earlier giants such as JLo and Madonna, to reign supreme. I had a good feeling about this, seeing Elton John and her in a duet.  I knew then, that Elton was pairing with her, and endorsing her as heiress apparent. It’s our garden of Eden, with Eve not wearing any clothes.

All flesh!

 

Name Change

It costs about $800 to change one’s name here in the US e.g. on social security , driver’s license and passport.

One might prefer something that has global sounding: Villa, Gaga, Shakira.

Between YouTube, Facebook and World Cup, we enjoy an unprecedented confluence of technology and globalization.

And the common denominators are football scores and music scores.

For a brief moment our world is united.

(this morning, at the gym, a stranger I was talking to couldn’t recall Argentina, who played opposite Brazil. Thanks to World Cup, we could strike small talks).

We kid ourselves into thinking that we will be forever young, and glorious .

These sport idols represent our aspiration i.e. fame and fortune. I know parents want what’s best for their children.

What they don’t know is the specifics on how their expectations fan out e.g. doctors, dentists etc.. (no one wants to dream their children grow up to be a secretary. It just happens that it is increasingly a less desirable occupation due to automation).

And as Friedman keeps reminding his children at night :”if you don’t get up early, and study hard, kids from China and India will take your jobs”.

They are already here, excelling in many aspects that involved a tool or an instrument (Yo-Yo, Lang Lang).

The elementary school I attended in Saigon was L’ecole Aurore. It’s been renamed twice, just to end up with its original translation “Rang Dong.”

Many of the French colonial street names aren’t that lucky

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jul/05/world/la-fg-vietnam-names-20100705

And life goes on in Shanghai, Saigon or Singapore. One street vendor FOB replaces another on that same spot.

Even banks change their names. Keep the sign shops busy. Call it unbranding or what not. Same script, different actors.

Isn’t it the same in Las Vegas, Sunset Boulevard and 42nd St! Like Friedman, I told my girls to study hard or else kids from BRIC nations will take their jobs.

They may even change their names to land an interviews. I named mine Aimy and Maily. That way, they can go back and forth between the Vietnamese world and the Anglo one. Hope they don’t spend $800 someday to switch to Gaga or Shakira. I prefer Paris if it comes to that . Might as well be bold!

Introspect, retrospect and reflect

Books started to come out, dissecting the effects of the Net. A new one, entitled “The Shallows, What the Internet is doing to our brains” by Nicholas Carr.

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6523DV20100603?feedType=nl&feedName=ustechnology

In retrospect, it brings to mind Neil Postman‘s “Amusing ourselves to death“, a classic critique about effects of television.

(He argues that the sheer quantity of content piped into our living room – our 20th century camp fire – distracts us and anesthetizes our senses).

Now, another author took a serious look at the effects of the Internet.

And how it will, by sheer size, divert us from utilizing our cognitive skills such as introspection and reflection.

In other words, both Neil and Nick ( and Marshall McLuhan) recognize the weight of ” the Medium is the Message“.

Data-rich, yet context-poor.

We will turn to be a civilization of multi-taskers, with up-to-the-minute news flashes and mash-ups, short bursts of data (140 characters plus headers). As of this edit, the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) have just taken down the Times and Twitter sites, our electronic “Twin-Towers”.

Vietnamese government begins its ban on sharing on social media starting this weekend. We might have to revert to raising pigeons and save empty bottles (message in the bottle).

The President himself used to carry a Blackberry besides the Pentagon football codes.

N Korea, for instance, says “war could burst out any minute”. BP says the pipe was cut, but not as planned.

So on and so forth.

We know a lot of disparage facts.

But very few of us knew the background, context and historical twist and turn (Korean has experienced a few close-calls since 1950 partition,

or that before the Gulf spill, there had been another off shore explosion in Mexico).

In other words, we are a wiki society with massive of free information, yet no version is the final draft.

Yet the author (Nicholas) goes on saying that we are a nation of Librarians (like Bill Gates’ mother).

I would argue that librarians wouldn’t exactly have access to the millions of YouTube downloads until now.

And that internet adopters seem to be on the young side, the jury is still out on them, to see if the Millenium Generation will fully develop their cognitive faculties.

I do know that they are more environmentally conscious, use more SMS (cheaper that way) and show the same youthful tendencies (rebellion for one) . I hope they pick up on earlier generations’ aspiration of “sharing the land” and preserving Mother Earth.  (If you hear the song I sing, you’ll understand – Youngbloods).

And maybe they will get closer to the truth as opposed to facts on Twitter ( fact-checking professor’s lecture, for instance).

Nothing wrong with the cult of amateurism. In broadcasting, shaky camera shots used to be edited out. Now, in the age of Twitter, YouTube and CNN, any cell phone user could be our eyes and ears. Through them, we learned about NIDA of Iran, the Israel commandos at Gaza seas and the chemical abuse in Syria .

Then it’s up to us to dig deeper, on Wikipedia,. In my opinion, the internet triggers our curiosity which leads to further discovering, learning,  thinking, categorizing ( pattern recognition), and finally, reflection (about the nature of man, for instance, as Augustine and Rousseau once did, contrarily.) The worst case scenario is to be inundated by it to the point of stop thinking.

Facebook and YouTube take that one step further, by showing us faces and music. So there we have it: the visual, auditory and of course, tactile (click away). Amuse yourself to death. There are too many of us anyway. “All my sorrows, feel I am dying…”

Internet intersects culture

In China,, teacher Ma was on trial for using the internet to recruit partner-swapping.

In Pakistan, they banned Facebook and then YouTube.

And in Iran, right after the election, they did not like Twitter.

Fast-pace technology collides slow-changing tradition.

As of this edit, Kenneth Cole (shoes-man) tweeted about “boots on the ground” as referring to to Syria’s dilemma.

No joking matter! But he did it on purpose to profit from planned controversy.

The gods must be crazy!

People feel invaded, and threatened (that life as they know it will forever be altered.)

Travelers kept saying that every time they are back to Beijing or Shanghai, they couldn’t find the same noodle shop.

It’s gone, and in its place, huge towers had been erected,in those spots.

If you looked at Miami in the old days, and Miami today, you couldn’t help but feeling the same.

Nobody seems to take full credit for the rise and roar of the internet .

Among the tech camp itself, mothers are eating their young.

Wiki displaced Britannica, Firefox took shares from IE.

Nokia got absorbed into the Office suites.

What we wear, eat and play might never be the same. They might not even be real (Samsung Swatch and Google Glass).

Back to teacher Ma. It’s not the internet. It’s his predisposition to activities that are shunned by most, with or without the internet.

Erecting urban towers, and putting some locks on the door doesn’t shut him

off from the larger Village of 1.5 billion or for that matter, 7 billion. Or let’s just for argument ‘s sakes, let Teacher Ma be the new Timothy Leary, then China will definitely need a lot of computing power for all those swapping and scheduling e.g. concubine.com recommends this xxx-pound lady, to schedule a meet at a local KFC, click here.

It’s exhaustive for them just to find one another in the big city (which noodle shop to meet at) to begin with. It’s open source on the internet, but still very much a closed society on the ground. Remember, Moore’s law only applies to chip processing speed, not to collective culture like in China, Pakistan, and Iran.

People there are still very much defined by a web of relationships i.e. son of so and so, daughter-in-law of Mr X etc… Change should start slow, let’s say to introduce Square Dancing, which allows for some partner swapping and swinging, then move on to Halloween Costume Ball . Then maybe, Farewell my concubines or Raise the Red Lantern, part II. Finally, comes consumer spending then Credit swapping, and Partner swapping (Ponzi).  The best case for Teacher Ma is to share a bunk bed with other inmates whose only wish is to someday have internet access.

 

Media shock

When I was working weekends at the School of Journalism at Penn State, journalist-wannabes would check out Advertising Age,

Christian Science Monitor, and of course, the New York Times.

And everyone read the campus paper.

They even showed Deep Throat on campus (organized by the Student Association).

Such was the time.

We all lined up with our punch cards in hand to get to the (mainframe) computer lab (2 computers per 30,000 students).

And I was quite privy to take my singing group into the Agricultural TV studio over the weekend to film my “YouTube” version.

According to the latest issue of the Economist, television is still having a steady market shares in sports and major events.

Print media of course doesn’t fare well.

Everybody is trying to monetize the online version which so far contributes to the demise of its print division.

Newspaper boys and press men are joining last century’s coach men and horseshoe makers.

A lot of Vietnamese men were working at the Post in the early 80’s.  Hope they can transfer to AZ to work within Amazon.

The news will still be there.

Or email alert.

Or mobile alert.

This is not new. At MCI we were issued Skypage with news and weather alerts.

It’s prescient that my retirement will be without Reader’s Digest large print, and Christian Science Monitor (online only).

If I were going back to Media school today, perhaps I will take online courses only. That’s where the action seems to be, monetized or not.

It’s one thing to be alone and reflective with the printed pages. It’s quite another to log on, and view the same pages perhaps million are also accessing.

World Shared Web. On the go and in the cloud. I don’t think they still check out Ad Age which are kept behind the counter.

But the passion for news at Penn State is still unsurpassed as shown during the Joe Pa earthshaking event.

What, when, where, how and most importantly who (knew about the locker incident). We still need media men, however we get our news.

 

Traditions: collide and compromise

East meets West. New Year and Valentine’s. Families vs lovers.

In Vietnam, with a strong Confucian foundation, filial quality stands above all else.

So on that first day of this year of the Tiger, sons and daughters are expected to show up first thing at the parents’ door steps.

Then, in the evening, this year only, they can sneak out to rendezvous with their sweethearts on Valentines Day.

http://english.vietnamnet.vn/lifestyle/201002/Tet-trumps-Valentine%E2%80%99s-Day-in-Vietnam-894718/

If you took the fireworks in major cities into the mix, we are talking about Western traditions wrapping around Eastern culture.

Today, it’s President Day in the US. And President Obama will face tough choices: to meet with the Dalai Lama, risking to alienate a huge bond holder.

We expect Presidents to take a stand at the crossroad: Kennedy facing up to the Cuban invasion, Johnson choosing between the Great Society or inheriting French Vietnam, and now Obama electing to have government intervention and involvement in financial institutions.

Values often collide and force a compromise.

You can measure a man’s maturity by seeing how many of those compromises he has made. (And his integrity by how few).

By design, we are made of “opposites attract” from a set of parents. No wonder we walk that tight rope our whole life (at least I have) with the creative tension of push and pull.

The only way to keep the balance is to move forward, inadvertently, creating a Third force, a synthesis. Einstein once said life was like riding a bicycle, you needed to keep paddling forward to stay in balance.

Those in sales can recognize this dynamic: corporate expectation versus market reality. Customers expectations ride on top of lab engineers’ vision.

(Google video store had been a flop before the YouTube acquisition).

So, red lucky envelope or heart-shape chocolate? Just one day, but an important one, we saw a rare eclipse. In Vietnam, young lovers have never celebrated  New Year this eagerly. They have their own agenda. And sneaking out will only make forbidden fruit taste all the more sweeter. And years from now, it will be their turn to scold their young ones for not showing up first thing (with a mischievous smile of course). This generation wants it both ways, without compromise. Text and talk.

Uplink-Upload

Remember Nightline when it first debut?

Satellite uplink made possible real-time, split-screen dialogue, with multi-continental guests and in-studio moderator.

Safer than appearing on Jerry Springer (which need at least two or three bouncers).

Now we have video upload from crowd source.  We have moved beyond “lonely girl” in front of a fixed web cam, to

high-resolution digital videophones that can run with the Iranian students in street protest.

These incidents somehow share a thread: technology and social history converge (uplink-upload, Iranian revolution and counter-revolution).

ATT was asking the public to refrain from using too much wireless bandwidth. The same people who were joking about Russian bread line are now asking others to ration their data consumption (brought back to mind “rolling black out” in CA ten years ago).

Spy kids have outgrown their allotted bandwidth (early days of Google at Standford U saw this happen as well).

It has been tough on network planners: back in the voice-only network, ATT used to plan for Mother’s Day calling traffic. Once you can handle that peak day, you are set for the rest of the year.

Now, even with all the Global Crossing, Qwest and Level 3 excess capacity, we don’t seem to have enough (turn on those dark fibers, Let there be Light!). Off-shoring makes sense because worker bees can operate in a 24/7 Information Conveyor belt, and VPN can “follow-the-sun” to load balance their network capacity.

Social networking, M-commerce and groundswell for companies to crowd-source will feed the network effect, as Web pages become more multi-media in appeal, attracting more viewers (not readers), whose attention load will only increase (same strategy which Portals like Yahoo tried to do in their inception). Today, we have roughly 3 Billion+ email users.

Socially, however, we have less face time, and become more attention-starved, esp the extroverted  among us. (I notice advertiser’s move away from the Organization Man – IBM clone, to tech-centric spoke persons for companies e.g.  UPS, Cable and Verizon.

It’s as if the stage hands are now MC’s of the show, retiring the PR-Marketing folks to the background to do SEO tedious work).

So much to read, so many people to chat with and scenes to upload.

Is it a great time to be alive or what!

Too bad even John Lennon couldn’t have “imagined” a multi-media world we have today, and it’s evolving still.

After all, 29 years is a long time to be gone from the scene.

People are hurrying to compile “2009 the Year in Review”, “the top Ten of the Decade” etc…

Stop. We barely get through the warm-up part. Easy on the appetizers. Things are still cooking and this time it’s not pie in the sky. Modern Family now features a gay couple adopting a Vietnamese baby girl. Society is accepting of social change. And technology facilitates speed of adoption. (Good) hacker’s mindset brings about Wikipedia. It’s like reading college papers but never the final draft. Rashomon multiple POV. Keep uploading, the more the merrier.  The architecture is such that one server down, the myriad will rise up (redundancy).

Back then, you either watched Johnny Carson in pajamas, or Nightline (with guest from PTL, Tammy’s tears over her make-up, a deja-vu today if you watch Barbara Walters top ten list which honors SC Governor’s wife ).

Now, day or night, with DirecTV, Slingbox etc…you wish you had multiple lives for the 5-hour average TV viewing. And that’s just downlink viewing. We still have Hulu and YouTube for you to download. You don’t want to miss the talk of the town. It’s our new Water Cooler chat-up of the 21st century, where you don’t need a tie to stand in the hallway.

Just a connection to upload your share of social lubricant. Just remember not to take up too much of ATT bandwidth.

It’s our 21st century version of “Russian bread line”.