Leverage. Tech-savvy. Curating. Phenomenon. These are a few randomly-picked words that will make someone’s brain stop mid-sentence. In fact, just read a pitch and imagine you’re talking to a 12-year-old who might care a little about what you’re doing but owes you nothing. That’s about the attention span you can expect from a blogger or reporter who is getting 300-500 emails a day.
Several years ago I got an absolutely wretched pitch from a PR person, and rather than just deleting it and moving on, I critiqued it and sent it back to him. Apparently he fired it up the chain of command to the company CEO, who cc:’d me (accidentally, it turned out) and complained that “this is why we never pitch to the Mac press, those people are too picky.”
So it’s worth pointing out that a lousy pitch isn’t always the PR person’s fault. There’s often pressure on them from above, from some pointy-haired manager’s office (include the CEO’s) to bury their lead in the weeds of buzzwords and industry jargon.
Still, good food for thought for PR people looking to more effectively hone their craft. (And, worth noting, put on my radar from one of my favorite commies in the business.)
Having the right color scheme is so important. I’ve visited Web sites that were designed well, but the colors were just horrible. It ruins the experience.
At an event at the University of Arizona’s Department of Marketing, former Apple advertising lead Ken Segall has shared some additional details into the naming behind Apple’s massively popular smartphone. While Apple ended up calling its industry-changing smartphone the “iPhone,” Apple considered a few other names.
The people you follow will be shown in your buddy list. Double clicking one will open a new chat window and start a new private messaging session like you would see on Omega. Sending and receiving messages happen very fast, usually within a second. You can drag files into the chat window, and they will upload to your account’s App.net file storage and be sent as part of a message.
I haven’t tried it yet, but it sounds interesting.
Okay, so the big news today on the Wall Street Journal is that Samsung is ramping up advertising ahead of a new product launch. That’s it, that’s the story.
You can go read that or you can watch pigs swimming, which I found more informative and entertaining than anything on WSJ lately.
A year-long study conducted by the Pew Research Center has confirmed what we’ve known all along: Twitter is a rotten cesspool of smug, cynical douchebags consistently trying to out-mean and one-up each other. Oh, had you not noticed?
Except readers of The Loop. You are all awesome.
Hey, Pew Research: If you want to pay me to spend a year figuring out where the rest of the assholes are on the Internet, drop me a line.
“I think magazines are becoming passé. They’ll always be around for people who enjoy that coffee table copy of their favorite magazines, but for the most part I think print media is on its way out, including us for that matter.”
Responding to a petition on WhiteHouse.gov, the executive branch stated “The White House agrees with the 114,000+ of you who believe that consumers should be able to unlock their cell phones without risking criminal or other penalties.”
The FCC is already looking in to this, and the FCC chairman has said that making cellphone unlocking illegal, which happened January 26, “doesn’t pass the common sense test.”
What I cannot defend, however, is asshattery in the name of grammar.
Lexicographer Kory Stamper makes the plea for grammarians to be less douchey this National Grammar Day. I appreciate the sentiment, but feel like it’s asking people to say “Yarr” less on Talk Like A Pirate Day. This isn’t lost on Kory, who warns against “vigilante peeving” and encourages grammarians to use the day in positive ways.
“There’s so much malware on Android, you’d think it would be a huge deal,” Cobb says. And the growth of is “huge,” he added, “both in the number of malware exploits and their increasing sophistication. The rate of growth in Android malware is impressive, and scary.”
I joined Rene Ritchie last night to to talk about stupid Apple headlines going mainstream, journalistic responsibility, responsive design, what’s really challenging Apple, and vacationing down south in Montreal.
The story that The Simpsons’ creator Matt Groening once illustrated a brochure for Apple back in 1989 has been making the rounds of the internet for awhile now. However, in addition to that brochure, Groening did other artwork for Apple around that same time period.
A neat look back at the material Matt Groening worked on for Apple, back before Groening hit big with The Simpsons. At the time, he had indie cred as the creator (and publisher) of the Life In Hell comics, popular with the hip young kids listening to The Pixies and Robyn Hitchcock on their Walkmans. Apple drafted Groening to create a student brochure distributed on college campuses to encourage them to buy Macs, and he also worked with Apple on posters. Check it out.
While Tim Cook has dropped hints that Apple Inc. (AAPL) is hard at work on a television to drive the next era of growth, the company’s wristwatch-style device, still in development, may prove more profitable.
I wonder whether AAPL price will go up or down on the news that one unannounced product will be more profitable than another unannounced product.
Houston called out iCloud’s “bizarre limitations,” saying that no iPhone or iPad user can easily share iCloud documents with an Android device.
I see iCloud and Dropbox as different types of services — maybe they shouldn’t be, but I think they are. There are plenty of things I could say that iCloud does better than Dropbox, but it wouldn’t make sense to do so. Just like this doesn’t make sense in a some ways.
I’d like to thank G8R Software for sponsoring The Loop this week with CaptureNotes 2 and CaptureAudio.
CaptureNotes 2 for iPad is the full featured notetaking and audio recording application that provides users with the ability to write, type, Flag audio with markers and annotate PDFs during classes or meetings. Launching soon, CaptureAudio delivers more than a simple voice recording app, bringing the unique Flag marking feature of CaptureNotes to the iPhone. Notebooks are easily shared among team members. Likewise, recorded audio sessions can conveniently be shared between the two Apps, supporting both iPhone and iPad users!
CaptureNotes 2 & CaptureAudio are brought to you by G8R Software.
we’re all familiar with the rampant theft of towels and linen from hotel rooms – in fact, the problem is so widespread that some hotels have resorted to inserting tracking devices in their linens to stop the thievery.
However, it seems some hotel guests will steal just about anything that’s not nailed down (and some things that are). A poll of Britons uncovered a surprising array of goods pilfered regularly from hotel rooms.
I get the occasional towel and certainly the toiletries but the curtains? And who the hell steals the Bible!? Which part of the Commandment “Thou shalt not steal” is unclear to these people?
Popular note-taking service Evernote has reset all user passwords after information including usernames, email addresses, and encrypted passwords was stolen in a security breach.
Ruh-roh!
Before you freak out, though, know that the passwords were hashed and salted, so you probably don’t face any immediate danger. Still, make sure to reset your Evernote password as soon as you can.
Nobody was ever driven into bankruptcy by unreliable Wi-Fi, but that’s the Ron Johnson Era in a nutshell. Instead of building on what the people who like JCPenney liked about JCPenney, he undertook a series of essentially arbitrary changes that alienated some without drawing anyone new in.
I like JCPenney. It’s one of the only major department stores that sells good-looking and well-made clothes in sizes I can wear. But it was that way before Ron Johnson came in, and he hasn’t done anything to improve the one department I care about since he’s been there.
One of Johnson’s big changes, and the one he’s being raked over the coals for, is the “no discounting” policy that has removed coupons from the equation. As a long-time JCPenney customer, I counted on those coupons to take percentages off purchases I made. Now I just wait for clearance sales and seasonal markdowns instead. That translates into fewer trips to JCPenney that we used to do. The balance sheets speak for themselves: many other customers like me simply aren’t spending money at JCPenney like they were before, and new customers who like the other changes that Johnson has made aren’t replacing them fast enough.
I think Ron Johnson should just admit this isn’t working and move on to something better. Remember, he is heavily invested in seeing JCPenney succeed.
Judge Lucy Koh, the federal judge presiding over two Apple v. Samsung cases in the Northern District of California, has just entered an order striking (or, more precisely, vacating) $450,514,650 ($450 million) from a $1,049,343,540 ($1.05 billion) damages award determined by a jury in August 2012.
Pangea Software on Friday announced the release of Air Wings Intergalactic, a new arena multiplayer flying game for iOS. It’s free to download (in-app purchases unlock new ships and levels).
The full game features seven different spaceships, different arenas and weapons to use (the free download sports four levels and one ship). It’s the successor to Pangea’s earlier iOS hit release, Air Wings. The game also features Game Center support and support for AirPlay, so you can stream audio and video of the game to a TV connected using Apple TV.
