McCheeky

Blogarhythm: Top Jimmy - Mean Street (covering Van Halen)

iPhone, smiPhone

Looks like DBS have decided that iPhone is now the official generic name for any kind of smart phone!

Click on their Win an iPhone ad and read the not-so-fine print (it's an HTC HD mini ;-)



iPod has arguably already attained genericized trademark status for any kind of MP3 device (taking the mantle from it's predecessor, the Walkman).

And it seems Main Street has long since given Apple another category winner with iPhone joining the likes of Escalator, Zipper, Butterscotch, and even Heroin(!)

Which can really piss off pedantic technologists and the people who have to sell the phones - as brilliantly captured in the iPhone vs HTC animations by the guy that Best Buy wants to fire.

Dear Boss..

Customer Satisfaction Poll

Strangely enough, 100% of respondents to this poll reported 0% satifaction..

Fail Whale

too good to pass without note.. (more about showing the whale here)

Lessons in Re-branding: My Aquarium and SpeedDate's Agressive Acquisition Strategy

The My Aquarium Facebook application will soon become .. a dating app??? WTF!


At first I thought it must be a joke, or someone hacked the developer's facebook account.

But amazingly, it seems for real. SpeedDate have apparently been acquiring quite a number of Facebook applications, and My Aquarium is just one of the latest.

I don't know what on earth they are thinking though. Do they seriously expect to just buy users like this? Isn't there a fundamental demographic and motivational mismatch between users of a cute aquarium app and the dating crowd (except by pure coincidence)?

Rather than endearing people to SpeedDate, I'd expect the reaction is more like this:

Get the hell of my Facebook page. First you buy up and kill off one of my apps, then you expect me to use your totally unrelated app? Get real!

Kind of like if Microsoft came along and bought up Adobe then sent an email to all Photoshop users saying they must all upgrade to Excel. Can you imagine the consumer revolt that would cause?

I don't know anything about SpeedDate, but this behaviour just makes me want to see them fail big time. Not a good PR position to be in...

Premature Exultation

No better lesson on counting chickens...

Show the Whale!

Adam Keys and Geoffrey Grosenbach introduced the term for 2008 on the rails podcast: show the whale.
I think it's perfect, and in my lexicon already!
==> No, this is not the official fail whale logo! The real one was done by Yiying Lu, a young designer from China/Sydney, who now is world famous thanks to twitter's stability problems.

The Final Solution

The Physics of Large Objects

Blog Stats

I want a t-shirt just like this for my birthday, except I'd change it to "..than MY blog" and add my url;-).

The (original) Office

.. but Slough is still my favourite office.

Forgotten benefits of moving to the cloud..

Out of sight, out of mind.. no more gadget-purchase grief;-)

Hash brown or shoestring fries, sir? Service!

Another xkcd classic..

Mas Escape - In Lego!

Sorry - we've upgraded!

Upgrades: just what customers look forward to, for the new features, stability and performance?

Or as this supermarket admits: source of pain, frustration and disappointment!

Frieze!

Organised by Improv EveryWhere

Spy Game / That's The Way I Like It

Just started watching Spy Game and got a surprise to see Adrian Pang playing a minor role. He's a pretty big celeb in Singapore, mainly as a funny guy but also done his share of drama. Probably best know for co-hosting Yummy King (好吃王) with Michelle Chia. But by far the best thing I've seen him do is a little-know movie called That's The Way I Like It. It's an hilarious transposition of Saturday Night Fever into a Singaporean context. Get it if you can (found at Library@Esplanade if you live in Singapore). Here's a teaser: Disco hits Singapore. Hock, an ordinary underachiever, discovers disco when his favorite kung fu movie is replaced by a low-budget "Saturday night fever."

Optimism

Winston Churchill had quite a bit to say about optimism.

A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

For myself I am an optimist. It does not seem to be much use being anything else.

But Havelock Ellis would rather lock him up..

The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.

Mickey the Assistant Manager

..from Hobtopia/lol cats