WiFi on the School Bus
February 15, 2010
What did they expect would happen?
School officials mounted a mobile Internet router to bus No. 92’s sheet-metal frame, enabling students to surf the Web. The students call it the Internet Bus, and what began as a high-tech experiment has had an old-fashioned — and unexpected — result. Wi-Fi access has transformed what was often a boisterous bus ride into a rolling study hall, and behavioral problems have virtually disappeared.
“It’s made a big difference,” said J. J. Johnson, the bus’s driver. “Boys aren’t hitting each other, girls are busy, and there’s not so much jumping around.” The New York Times is reporting
No kidding it was less noisy on the bus? You mean the steady stream of kids updating their facebook account, posting on the latest gaming sites, and quickly cutting and pasting everyone elses homework into their word doc kept them pacified for the trip?
Genius….
Since when does the FDIC respond to Youtube Videos?
February 13, 2010
Edit : It appears that the Video was taken down now, only adding fuel to the fire.
The problem before the FDIC responded the view count on the video was 683 total, after the FDIC responded the view count on the video shot up to 14,000 and climbing. In other words the FDIC’s unknowing march into social media boosted the view count of the video and widened it’s reach.
This was a very poor decision on part of the FDIC’s PR department. Honestly I wouldn’t have even noticed the video and posted it on Google News if I didn’t see the FDIC’s press release.
They need some sort of social media savvy ad agency… because what they got now is a PR firm for the people saying bad things about them.
Here is the press release:
—————————-
Press Releases
FDIC Provides Additional Information on its Loss Share Agreement With OneWest Bank
February 12, 2010
FDIC Director of Public Affairs Andrew Gray said, “It is unfortunate but necessary to respond to blatantly false claims in a web video that is being circulated about the loss-sharing agreement between the FDIC and OneWest Bank. Here are the facts: OneWest has not been paid one penny by the FDIC in loss-share claims. The loss-share agreement is limited to 7% of the total assets that OneWest services, and OneWest must first take more than $2.5 billion in losses before it can make a loss-share claim on owned assets. In order to be paid through loss share, OneWest must have adhered to the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP).
The producers of this video perpetuate other falsehoods. The FDIC has not requested to borrow money from the Treasury Department. Indeed, we continue to be funded by the banking industry through assessments, not by taxpayers as claimed in the video.
This video has no credibility. Regardless of the personal or professional motivations behind its production, there is always a responsibility to be factually correct and transparent. The FDIC made available a fact sheet on the day that the sale of IndyMac was announced that details the terms of the contract. It’s too bad that the creators of this video opted to premise it on falsehoods.”
http://www.fdic.gov/news/news/press/2010/onewest_lossshare.html
Must of struck a nerve. This is awkward in many regards, but the FDIC isn’t know to responding to social media discussions, Youtube videos or even bloggers. So what prompted them to respond to this?
This is the video in question
Edit: The guy updated his video here:
http://www.thinkbigworksmall.com/mypage/player/tbws/23088/1013723
Today, Team Detroiters watched in horror
February 12, 2010
The below e-mail came in anonymously. I do not know the name of the individual that sent it, but it’s an interesting read to state the least. The below is a full cut and paste of the e-mail, nothing was modified or changed.
——
Today, Team Detroiters watched in horror as two of their own announced, in not
so many words, that they were committing portfolio suicide. While one ACD
threatened to follow suit, using a tactic about as sharp as a KFC spork.
The incendiary? Doug “The Flat Top” Claggett, the devious Creative Director
Meredith hired to spearhead their crumb of Chrysler CRM business.
Known for ideas as flat as his hair, Claggett resigned from his position in the
Ford CRM group last week. Nary a tear was shed. After all, anybody who would
leave Team Detroit the day Ford announced billion-dollar profits to spearhead
CRM for the nail in BBDO’s coffin (RIP) was obviously a ginormous boob.
For months, Claggett had been hiding in his office, working on his book, which
consisted of pirated ideas he killed for personal gain. So naturally, when it
came time to invite misery to keep him company, Claggett did what he did best:
pirate.
He convinced two junior Team Detroit creatives that burning their WPP bridge
would be good for their career — and more automotive junk, er, I mean direct
mail would diversify their books. And gave one delusional ACD the brilliant idea
to use the job offer from Claggett as leverage to score Claggett’s old job at
Team Detroit. Really, we can’t begin to speculate WTF he was thinking. Nor do
we care. We just hope he leaves us the good stapler.
To Claggett’s credit, he did get Meredith to agree to a year’s worth of
severance if the whole Chrysler thing didn’t pan out — which is pretty
flattering for someone too ignorant to realize it was an act of desperation.
Because even though Detroit creatives are in dire straits, they’d rather sling
crack on 8 Mile than CRM for Chrysler.
Stay tuned, Tribble, for a mailbox full of Chrysler collateral that looks oddly
similar to something you received from Ford four years ago.
—————-
Meet Nicholas Francisco AKA Alex Martin former Publicis West Ad Agency Executive
February 11, 2010
This is bad, really bad. Former Ad Agency Executive Nicholas Francisco has been found living under the name Alex Martin. Thanks to some good reporting from KIRO 7 TV they found Nicholas Francisco AKA Alex Martin
But almost two years after his disappearance, Ming Laven realized KIRO 7 had to look for someone entirely different: A man whose driver’s license says “Alex Martin.”
And they found him in Los Angeles.
He was living with a roommate, doing freelance design work out of this duplex.
His cover blown, he reluctantly sat down with us for a few minutes.
Ming Laven: What were you trying to get away from?
Francisco: Everything.
Ming Laven: Such as?
Francisco: Literally everything. I needed to leave and that’s what I wanted to do.
Ming Laven: Was it hard to leave your kids?
Francisco: Yeah. Everyone else, not so much.
His ex-wife Christine had been waiting for two years to hear what happened.
“To hear it and hear it from his mouth, that’s hard. It’s reality,” said Christine.
In the meantime, she gave birth to their third child — alone.
And she’s tried to explain to 4-year-old Noah and 6-year-old Zea why dad isn’t around anymore.
“He chose just as much as I did that he wanted to have those three beautiful kids, and he does have a responsibility to them,” said Christine.
“You know, it’s sad that I can’t be a part of that, but I don’t want to be around for the rest of that. There’s a whole (expletive) ecosystem around that I don’t even care for,” said Francisco.
Francisco has been ordered to pay $906 a month in child support.
In Oct, 31, 2009, DSHS was able to grab some money from a bank account Francisco opened in California. But then he closed it, and became Alex Martin.
Meanwhile, Christine lost their home to foreclosure. She’s also on the hook for his student loans.
We have been reporting for years on the whereabouts of Nicholas Francisco Well now he’s found… and honestly I am not happy about the outcome.
This is pretty much an outrage… abandonment, leaving kids at home.. just bad overall…. the icing on the cake is that he works for an ad agency. Agency spy pointed me to his article here and to that I am thankful.
This is pretty much the worst possible outcome, husband abandons wife.. runs away to another state.. changes names… leaves wife with bills and offers no child support..
great husband.
@drudgerep - New Drudge Report Twitter Feed
February 11, 2010
I know others have created a twitter feed for the Drudge Report, but most of them were filled with bugs and I figured I would make a clean cut easy way for a reliable Drudge Report Twitter Feed located at http://twitter.com/drudgerep . Since the election season is around the corner, generally speaking that site tends to get more traffic and is useful, what’s not useful is being forced to visit the site every 10 minutes to find out what is breaking. So a Twitter feed is easy enough right?
Well it wasn’t that easy… See Matt Drudge is still posting to that site the same way he did in 1996, a single html file that it appears he manually FTP’s up. This isn’t wordpress or a CMS by any modern definition. Though he may have been the first Political Blogger, he’s clearly not caring about any modern conveniences that blogging now has.
That means that there is NO RSS feed, no Atom feed, no modern social media tools.
So I decided to start to code a scraper, a script that will literally just go though the HTML every x minutes and find the new links, then post them into an RSS feed.
Then I found a site that did this already.
http://www.drudgereportfeed.com/ The feed appears to then use a a Google owned product called FeedBurner.com .. fair enough. But now I have working RSS feed, but now I must take that RSS feed to put it into Twitter.
So I started reading into the Twitter API information to build a script that would allow for this.
I then found a site called twitterfeed.com and plugged in the credentials to the new twitter feed that I created, and working with Twitter’s API it worked. But I had to specify a URL shortner as most of the URLs that Matt posts are 1.5 million characters long.
I figured I would use bit.ly since it’s owned by the same investment company twitter is.
So after that was complete, I then realised.. I had to do zero coding and now I have a reliable twitter feed that updates almost in real time.
I love the Internet.
Good Job Grey NY
February 10, 2010
Wow Digg is sending out some badly targeted ads today.
Recently I posted my personal opinion on why Microsoft / Interpublic advertising deal is bad, really bad. In fact I even titled it “Any Interpublic clients want off Microsoft’s ad system”
Well a picture is worth a 1000 words right? So here is the screen shot on how P&G PANTENE media spend is literally wasting their money. In this case however it’s not Microsoft and it’s not Interpublic, it’s WPP group plc’s Grey NY. They appear to be buying ads though Nexage for Mobile, but do you consider this targeted advertising? Like beautiful hair means so much to Steve Jobs…. Of course click to enlarge the screenshot.
It’s why these big advertising agencies really shouldn’t be learning digital media spends using client money for their classes. These are amateur mistakes with client money.
Shameful.
Google to offer 1Gbps residential ISP service
February 10, 2010
It plans to build a fibre-optic network offering speeds of up to 1Gbps (gigabit per second) to up to 500,000 homes. This is in comparison to Comcast on or about 5Mpbs (if your lucky on a good day) …
1 Gbps is enough bandwidth to rid yourself of any need for installed software or a comprehensive OS. With bandwidth like that open to you, you wouldn’t even have to install a video game… you could run it live full screen though your browser with virtually no lag.
You would even be able to run photoshop and large graphic and video work without having to install the video editing software on your computer. 1 Gb video file would take 1-2 seconds to load up … roughly the same speed to the average individual as your hard drive.
Google’s reason for this is quite simple.. they are simply stating “you don’t need Microsoft Word, Google docs is just as fast (if not faster)”
If bandwidth like that was open to the general public, the need for anything Microsoft would be virtually nill.
They are really pushing for improvement, because in their eyes improvement is completely removing Microsoft from the picture.
Reward - idea to stop snow plow from dumping snow on driveway
February 10, 2010
Seriously, I need some sort of idea to get that stupid snow truck from dumping everything on the street on the driveway about 12 seconds after I finish shovelling it.
That’s what I am dealing with.. after 2 hours of shovelling, I am then forced to deal with a 6 foot high wall that the snow shovel truck dumped it on my driveway.
This is just madness, 10 seconds after one is done shoving the 2000 tons of snow on the driveway, the next truck comes by and dumps it all back on what you just finished.
So here is is, a reward for anyone that can solve that problem…..
Iran to announce nuclear bomb Thursday
February 9, 2010
Recently there has been a nuclear sized uproar regarding this statement that came from Iran:
“Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Monday that Iran is set to deliver a “punch” that will stun world powers during this week’s 31st anniversary of the Islamic revolution.
“The Iranian nation, with its unity and God’s grace, will punch the arrogance (Western powers) on the 22nd of Bahman (February 11) in a way that will leave them stunned,” Khamenei, who is also Iran’s commander-in-chief, told a gathering of air force personnel. “
So of course Political Forums went crazy with speculation that Iran will announce that they have successfully created a nuclear bomb on Thursday.
There’s all sorts of problems with this however. The first being the fact that announcing that they have a nuclear bomb will not win them any international support. Iran has more resources at it’s disposal than most pariah nations. It has a large population, a huge reserve of oil and natural gas. It recently launched living creatures into space. The country for all it’s weirdness isn’t a backwater nation.
It does live in this era of global trade, unlike North Korea. The problem at hand is if Iran announces that they have a nuclear bomb. Even staunch allies like Russia will most likely stop supporting it.
China might back them due to the recent pissing match we have with them over the 6 billion dollar arms sales to Taiwan and of course that support would come in the payment of better gas pricing. But overall they are going to lose much with an announcement like that. They can’t lose much from us anymore, we already have them sanctioned to the hilt so we virtually have no leverage, and what are we going to do, pull our troops from both Iraq and Afghanistan to fight in Iran? In essence losing both wars to fight the Iranians that are armed with nuclear weapons?
But the real reason Iran won’t make an announcement that they have nuclear weapons? It’s because it’s a green light for every country within 2000 miles of it to start building their own nuclear bombs. Saudi Arabia within minutes will most likely start planning for their own nuclear deterrent.
We really don’t know what Iran is going to announce on Thursday, but the chances are very remote it will be that they have a nuclear bomb.
Any Interpublic clients want off Microsoft’s ad system?
February 9, 2010
I want to start this off with a disclaimer, I am writing this as an opinion .. nothing more.. nothing less.. just my opinion on the Interpublic deal with Microsoft. As the CEO of a search and social media advertising agency I just have to call BS when I see it. This in my opinion is complete BS.
Forbes is reporting that Advertising Agency Interpublic is going to send their client money to single digit market share Bing rather than Google.
The move is widely seen as the “anything but Google option”, this is what the problem is. It’s not grounded on ROI for their clients, it’s not grounded in anything that benefits their clients. This is designed to waste their client money with a search engine that most likely will return very little ROI for their client… honestly the traffic is just not there.
“Any agency or client can chose other vendors to handle their accounts, but if they don’t specify, Microsoft will be the default.”
WTF? Measuring our log files of about the 400 sites (many of them that we manage for fortune 500 firms), we see that being on page 1 in Bing is roughly equal to page 3 in Google for the same keyword.. and honestly the use of the Google invented and perfected Microsoft Ad system is almost laughable.
Microsoft started copying the rough product of Google Adwords only a few years ago, and still really hasn’t perfected it. The ads on Digg are horrific to state the least in terms of relevancy.
Seriously Interpublic… what are you doing? Think about your clients next time.. and not yourself. If this doesn’t raise red flags across all your clients.. nothing will… seriously any interpublic clients want off that horrific ad system contact us…
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