No more cables? "WiTricity"...

I'm not going to try and explain how it's done but it seems that wireless power, or "WiTricity" could be common place in the future, according to this Guardian article, eradicating the need for power cables and batteries. As someone who carries their laptop around nearly everywhere and works on the move, I'd see huge benefits from never having to take the power lead around with me, and relying on electronic hotspots instead.

However, there's no timescales given in the article for how long it might take for "WiTricity" to become mainstream, so I'm a little sceptical about this becoming reality any time soon.

Nokia Unloader

For those that haven't seen this campaign by Nokia - the unloader - it's worth a look. Nokia are looking to promote their phones - the E66 and E71 which allow the user to view, edit and print documents - and part of that promotion is to allow office workers the satisfaction of destroying boring documents. Take a look at this short Unloader video to explain more.

Whether you think of it as a brilliant piece of innovative marketing or as a rehash of a combination of the Honda Cogs ad and the the Mentos intern idea - I'll leave that up to you.

Second Life stats

I must confess that I haven't entered Second Life yet. Prevailing opinion amongst marketers seems to be that lots of people try Second Life, giving decent registration numbers, but few use it regularly. That didn't stop me from wanting to hear more from Philip Rosedale, the founder of Second Life, when I came across this presentation on Ted.com.

A few stats that came out from the Q&A session (from May 2008) at the end:

• The average age of a Second Life user is 32
• 55% of Second Life users are male, but women tend to use Second Life 30% more
• 35% of Second Life users are from the US
• 55% of Second Life users come from the Europe
• 55,000 people are making money on Second Life

Indiglo grid

Indiglo have come up with an interesting idea of using an ever-editable grid using Indiglo logos. As a user you can add new logos, delete logos, rotate logos, etc. And in doing so you can create a shape, a word, or any object.

But of course while you're adding, resizing and deleting your Indiglo logos as you want to, others are also using the grid to create whatever they want to create at the time. That means that you can attempt to collaborate with others, or deliberately stop others from creating what they are wanting to create. And of course, these people are from all over the world, creating a feeling of a being part of a big project - I found myself interacting with "Yukki" from Republic of Korea.

To use the grid users need only give their name or nickname so there's almost no barrier to getting involved, but of course that also means that it's near impossible to measure the impact of the grid as a piece of marketing in itself. Could it be that Uniglo are less interested in the impact of this one piece of marketing by itself, (safe in the knowledge that the grid is emphasising things that they would like the consumer to attribute to the brand - constantly adapting, fast-moving, innovative) and are more interested in looking at a measure like Net Promoter Score to give an overall view of how consumers view the brand?

How do you do yours?

Online shopping that is. It seems that the number of searches for online discount vouchers has gone up pretty dramatically. I would consider myself to be relatively progressive, compared to the average person in the UK, with my online shopping. I'm not hung up about giving out my personal details, although I do have a PayPal account (which means that I don't have to give out my contact details each time I shop) should I want to pay via that, and where it feels most appropriate I buy online.

But I've recently found out that I'm missing out on something that sounds so basic to experienced online shoppers. I simply look at a few competing sites, find the best product and go through to the online checkout - sounds like the only way to do it, right? Well experienced online shoppers are amazed at my naivity - once you've had a look for the product you want, you should search for an online voucher to get money off that product. Sometimes the slightly more expensive product turns out to be cheaper with the voucher. And I'm reliably informed that the majority of the time you will find a voucher.

Whether or not things will always be like this is debatable, but until online retailers start to concern themselves with giving discounts to people who would have bought anyway, then why not take advantage? Next time, before you go to online checkout, just run a little search for money off vouchers for that product or retailer - after all, you have nothing to lose.

And here's some old news....

It's always good to have more supporting evidence that online advertising performs better when supported by search. But it's hardly news is it? I've been telling clients that for several years as I'm sure anyone that works in digital media has....

India's struggle to break through

India is a country of contradictions. As this article at Spectator Business argues, it might be expecting GDP growth of 8% in 2008, but it's equally got some incredibly deep problems to resolve which have been summed up by this author after he runs through a few issues blocking sustainable Indian growth:

"And that's before we tackle India's two greatest Achilles heels: a bloated bureaucracy with an insidiously corrupt political core; and some of the worst infrastructure the modern world has ever seen."

As an Englishman who has spent more than 3 months in India and travelled through both the North and the South, transport and bureaucracy are both tricky, with even buying a train ticket becoming an activity taking over an hour, and requiring the strength to muscle your way to the front of the "queue" (which involves full body contact or otherwise it is considered that there is a gap that someone could slip into!). If you have the money, you don't even buy the ticket yourself - you pay someone else to go through the ordeal on your behalf.

But more concerning from what I experienced as a consumer, and heard about in a business context, was the corruption. A CEO that I met in India, running a company who had relocated from the UK given that India was where their core audience was, made reference to the various issues he had in getting his head office up and running. The process of ensuring electricity involved various bribes and use of middle-men to negotiate on behalf of the company, also taking a cut. Corruption on that scale makes it impossible for anyone to work out their business case, and that was only to sort out the leccy, one of hundreds of issues to resolve.

So since experiencing India in 2007 and again this year I've always wondered exactly how this country was going to become a global superpower - as I'm told it is by every article I read - until this one.