Just when the market was trumpeting Google’s loss of innovative aptitude, Google Mobile has begun to unveil what could be the future for mobile optimization.And (with any luck) has sounded the bell for the end of app mania. Let’s face it, there are too many apps. From Fortune 100 corporations to garage-based ambitions, everyone has an app. But when you get right down to it, most of the apps that get released offer slightly more than mobile optimized data recall with functionality that could have been accomplished on a mobile browser.
Now I’m not suggesting that apps don’t have a place in our smart phone world, but Google’s recent unveiling of its own mobile optimized site, and Google Docs for mobile, are welcome reminders of what can be done within the framework of a mobile browser.Remember, before the internet, computers ran on apps. Then the Internet came about and the tech world opened up, connected, revolted and became a better place. Through app mania though we’ve taken our innovative focus away from our desire to push the limits of the open online platform and returned to building functionality for a closed-platform personal processing device. So thank you Google, for reawakening us to the browser’s offer of an open platform whereupon technology innovators can showcase their unbridled ambitions.
Insperity, formerly Administaff, now has “Business Performance Advisors” (BPAs) instead of “Sales Representatives.” So why change the title of the front-line sales force?
Their 25 years of experience tells them that words matter. They’ve also re-named the industry a few times — in the 1990’s from Employee Leasing to “Professional Employer Organization” (PEO). Then within the last year from PEO to “Workforce Optimization.” No one else in the industry can quite seem to catch up with this kind of thought leadership. The competition seems to just follow suit and adopt the terms that Insperity defines with its evolving solutions.
Of course, for long-term success, there must be truthful substance behind a clever title. “Business Performance Advisor” demonstrates Insperity’s sharp focus on “being there” for their clients, more like a partner. It also serves as an effective conversation starter/reminder that the BPAs can use to tell their story and articulate the benefits they bring to the table.
Thought leadership yields other benefits for Insperity as well. Because they are living the concept of ”trusted advisor” with their own clients, they also understand how to partner with their vendors in the same way. Insperity valued Tocquigny’s advice to invest a significant amount of time, energy and budget as we lead them through best-practice strategic planning of their forthcoming social media communities.
Allowing us in as a partner — instead of seeing us only as a vendor or marketing firm — led to more effective planning that will be instrumental in developing high-impact online communities and tools. This ultimately plays back into their main mission and helps the BPAs “be there” for their clients.
One of our core responsibilities at Tocquigny (and more specifically within Tocquigny Labs) is to immerse ourselves in emerging technologies, with the key objective of identifying their respective applicabilities within our space. When something is launched, for instance Google+, it is my team’s task to become the resident experts, with the capability of answering a wide gamut of business and technical questions from both internal stakeholders and clients. Like scientists, we must see beyond the buzz-ridden Mashable articles and “Trending Topics”, and actually submerge ourselves in the technology. This all leads up to the key function of Labs: adding relevance & context. Every day we get to don our creative caps and architect innovative applications of the technology specific to our diversified client-base and their short- and long-term needs.
We have a roadmap of technologies in queue, but this week’s was one we had been waiting to test out for quite some time: the Kinect motion-sensing input device (created by Microsoft). Released in conjunction with the XBox 360, it didn’t take long for technologists to see the Kinect’s applicability beyond gaming. The infrared device brings John Underkoffler’s visionary gesture-control interface from Minority Report to life.
This $150 consumer-facing infrared camera has introduced natural user interfaces (through gesture- and voice-control) to the masses. Offered many different names by the tech-crowd (computer vision, NUI, gesture-control, feature-recognition, spatial navigation, et al), the Kinect represents what many feel is the future of physical computing.
This week, we took the Kinect for a lengthy test-drive. Most notably, we used the device to capture full-body movements and converted them into commands that were fed into a piece of music composition software. Illustrated by the above photo, a person can control a digital symphony simply by moving any joint in their body. Sounds like a toy, right? A pretty practical toy… After all, this experiment was the catalyst for dozens of ideas pertinent to our future-facing clientele.
The government’s newest attempt to deter smokers is literally sickening.
Via FDA.gov: “These warnings mark the first change in cigarette warnings in more than 25 years and are a significant advancement in communicating the dangers of smoking. The introduction of these warnings is expected to have a significant public health impact by decreasing the number of smokers, resulting in lives saved, increased life expectancy, and lower medical costs.”
”Placement of new warnings on cigarette packages and advertisements — starting in September 2012, the new cigarette health warnings will appear:
• on the top 50 percent of both the front and rear panels of each cigarette package.
• in the upper portion of each cigarette advertisement, occupying at least 20 percent of the area of the advertisement.”
The images are most certainly unsettling and will now be leering at you from behind the counter at your nearest corner store. There goes my weekly candy bar run at 7-11. Tell me you can choke down a Milky Way after this: Do we really think this will work? Apparently so: Lawrence R. Deyton, director of the F.D.A. Center for Tobacco Products, said the government estimates — based on other countries’ experience — that the new warning labels will prompt an additional 213,000 Americans to quit smoking next year…
So from 46 million to 45,787,000?
This is a whole new realm of advertising we’ve never seen before for a minimal result. We’ve come a long way from 8 out of 9 dentists prefer Colgate, baby. How will this tactic perform against a substance whose addictiveness is compared to that of heroin? And what’s next? Images of shirtless obese people plastering your local fast food drive-thru? Only time will tell.
