BRANDING UNBOUND

Lego Men Open iPhone Package

Cute slide show from Flicrk, by way of Adverlab. See the set, here. It'd make a really fun video.

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New York Times: U R 2 Old To Text

Entertaining article in Saturday's New York Times about the "text generation gap" between the age group that's all about text appeal, and the age group that just doesn't get it.

A typical anecdote in the piece: Father driving his tweener and her friend around makes comment about their conversation. Girls start texting. Father says maybe you shouldn't text in the car with your friend here, it's rude. Daughter: "Dad, we're texting to each other" - obviously to keep Dad's prying ears out of the conversation.

Such is the text gap, explains MIT social psychologist Sherry Turkle in the piece.

“For kids it has become an identity-shaping and psyche-changing object,” Ms. Turkle said. “No one creates a new technology really understanding how it will be used or how it can change a society.”

But as with any cultural shift involving parents and children — the birth of rock ’n’ roll or the sexual revolution of the 1960s, for example — various gulfs emerge. Baby boomers who warned decades ago that their out-of-touch parents couldn’t be trusted now sometimes find themselves raising children who — thanks to the Internet and the cellphone — consider Mom and Dad to be clueless, too.

Read the Times piece, here. And as a side note, read my long-ago interview with Turkle about emerging changes in our sense of self due to digital media (in this case, virtual worlds like Second Life), here.

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Jst 4 U: Text Messaging Inspires Unusual New Baby Names

The text messaging craze - along with its truncated nomenclature - is inspiring unusually spelled names in parts of the Asia Pacific region.

Thaindian News (by way of texually) reports that many text-crazy parents are "eschewing traditional spellings for versions such as Alex-Zander, Cam’ron, Emma-Lee, Ozkah, Thaillah and Ameleiyah."

According to the pub, social analyst Mark McCrindle looked at Australian births in 2007 and discovered that the name Jayden was registered spelled in 12 ways, Aidan in nine ways, and Amelia and Tahlia in eight ways.

The name Lachlan had five other versions - Lochlyn, Lochlin, Lochlen, Lochlain and Lauchlan.

“The use of a ‘y’ instead of an ‘i’ has hit epidemic proportions, as has the use of ‘k’ over ‘c’ like in the names Jaykob and Lynkon, double letters like Siimon and Chriss and hyphens like Emma-Lee,” the pub cites News.com.au as quoting McCrindle as saying.

2cool4me.

Read all about it, here.

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Tiffany Unveils $94,000 400-Diamond Mobile Phone

The little blue box ringing - but I'm not sure anyone will answer the call.

Word's out that Tiffany has joined Ferrari, Porsche, Prada and others who have rolled out branded luxury mobile phones.

But this may be over the top, even by Tiffany's standards.

Gadget site Switched is reporting that in February, Tiffany is introducing a $94,000 3G mobile phone that features 400 20-carat diamonds for Japan's Softbank Mobile network.

The first call should be to Tiffany headquarters to tell them stop damaging their once venerable brand with expensive junk.

Actually, I'd say the same for most of these luxury mobile phones. It seems so kitchy to trick out a commodity product with your upscale brand.

Alas, even with the rich and famous, sometimes there's no accounting for taste.

Read more about it, here.

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Intel's Otellini Predicts 'Personal Net' Within 5 Years

Intel's CEO Paul Otellini is predicting mobile devices will soon have more power than desktop PCs, and will "augment reality" by pulling data from the Net in real time.

"It's an internet that is proactive, predictive and context-aware" - accessible through devices anywhere, he said during the CES conference.

In BRANDING UNBOUND the book, I talk about a conversation I once had with the late Michael Dertouzos, former director of MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science about just this scenario. He called them "BodyNets," that enable us to access our social networks, email, news, bank accounts, want ads, and even place transactions, wherever we go, through mobile devices that work must faster than anything we've known in the wireline Internet.

In his mind, it would be via smart glasses in a real-world version of a convention used in the 3D virtual world known as There.

It seems Otellini is predicting this reality within five years.

If only Dertouzos had lived to see the day.

Read more about Otellini's view, here.

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Nielsen: Top U.S. Cities For Text Messaging, 2007

Who knew Houston was so hip? Hard to believe, but the San Francisco Bay Area - home of Silicon Valley -  isn't even in the list:

                                              % of adults who use the text
                                               messaging feature on their
     Rank    Markets                                   cell phone
       1     Houston DMA                                  38
       2     Austin DMA                                     38
       3     Washington, D.C. DMA                     38
       4     Miami/Ft. Lauderdale DMA               37
       5     Atlanta DMA                                    37
       6     Salt Lake City DMA                           36
       7     Seattle/Tacoma DMA                        36
       8     San Diego DMA                                 36
       9     El Paso DMA                                     36
      10    New York DMA                                 35

             National Average                              31

    Source: Scarborough Research, Scarborough USA+ Release 1 2007
            (Current 6 months only)

     * Text messaging: Those consumers who used the text messaging feature
       on their cell phone

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Elves To Santa: 'Go Mobile'

The "Pepper...and Salt" cartoon in today's Wall Street Journal: An elf with Santa at the mailbox: "Only one letter. I told you we should switch to email and texting."

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Video Ad Spoof: The ZunePhone

So true... Quick Links:

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'Mobile Web' Slingers: Spiderman Phone Patent Shoots - But Will It Score

Peter Parker be damned. Your Friendly Neighborhood Gizmodo is reporting that a new patent that essentially connects a flip-style cell phone to any dork's wrist, where it can be whipped out to receive or place calls - or to allow Web heads to surf the Net wherever they turf. Sad but true. Click here for more.

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Exclamation Point Costs Texter $1,000 Prize(!)

A texting contest at the North Dakota State Fair came down to a single digit.

The AP is reporting that Kevin Taylor, 30, of Minneapolis lost out on a $1,000 first prize because he forgot the punctuation mark at the end of a phrase that he and his sudden-death competitor had to enter.

Beth Brevik, 32, ended up with the big prize.

I'm wondering if teenagers weren't allowed, or whether the text-tapping thirtysomethings were part of some seniors category.

As the AP points out, a similar contest in New York saw a 13-year-old girl win $50,000.

For more, click here.

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