“marketing”

SeeqPod (YubNub’s “seeq“) crawls the web for mp3’s and streams (and queues) them for you right along search results. “Playable search” they call it, hinting they’ll use the word in expansive, unexpected ways. It’s kind of how you can now play YouTube videos within Google results. The instant gratification level of it all is sky-high. It’s long due and as clever a copyright hack as I’ve seen (like how music websites link to YouTube videos to play music but so much better). A big, dark underweb of mp3s has always been there, it’s just never been this discoverable, this sampleable.

I learned about it, btw, through one of the classiest, most elegant, best targeted spams ever. The SeeqPod team sent me a (probably automatic) email recommending me to try searching for Rufus Wrainwright through their search engine. Since their spam was so unusually well-written and targeted (I had written about Rufus Wainwright before), I tried it. Maybe in these days were spam filters are so effective spammers will have to resource to being useful and wanted. We can dream.

Update 11/Dec/07

Project Playlist (YubNub’s “projp“) is a very similar website, though SeeqPod’s interface is much better. One interesting feature of Project Playlist is that you can search other people’s playlists too, which is a great way to find similar music. SeeqPod, on the other hand, has the interesting “discover” feature, which recommends similar music. (Via Chepe.)

Hoy, en la fila para ordenar de Il Tavolo, que siempre es exquisito, habia un grupo de amigas que siendo su primera vez pidieron una enumeracion de lo que ofrecia el bistro. Ya para terminar la retahila menciona el cajero que tenian “tes de raspberry y naranja”. “Naranja y que?”, pregunta confundida una de las amigas (la mas bella, de cejas oscuras y cabellos claros, a la Kate Winslet). “Naranja y raspberry”, responde inmutable el cajero y sigue impasible durante la larga pausa en que la amiga evidencia seguir en ayunas. “Uno de naranja,” acaba respondiendo atolondrada.

Siguieron el resto de las amigas y ya para cuando toco mi turno habia encontrado en mi Blackberry (!) la traduccion de raspberry, que me evadio en ese momento. “Frambuesa!” Es lo primero que le digo al cajero. “Es raspberry en epanhol”. “Es lo mismo”, me responde enfadado. Pero no, no lo es. Porque con frambuesa te hubieras comunicado, con raspberry confundiste.

Lejos, muy lejos, estoy de ser un purista del espanhol o un paranoico anticolonialista (si acaso soy el colonialista…). Como cualquier amigo puede atestiguar y al igual que muchos de ellos, mi lengua materna es el spanglish y hoy en dia escribo (blogs, correos, messenger) casi siempre en ingles siempre que mi interlocutor lo hable aunque sea como segunda lengua. Pero trato siempre que hablo con alguien que solo habla espanhol de anotar mi spanglish natural con sinonimos o parafraseos en espanhol. No hacerlo, no intentarlo siquiera, es lo que me espanto de este cajero. Si no te preocupa que te entiendan, para que hablar?

Ahora que siguiendo esta logica del entendimiento la verdad es que no hay mas que reconocer que sino fuera por flojera, condicionamiento, y, si, pedanteria tendria todo el sentido del mundo sustituir blog por bitacora, messenger por mensajeria instantanea, marketing por mercadeo (la otra vez vi marquetin!), link por enlace y asi (en vez de etcetera, que es nomas latin para “y el resto…”). Hasta ahi todo va bien para los academicos pero porque parar ahi? Por que no es medico de ninhos el pediatra, medico de la piel el dermatologo, musculo del corazon el miocardio, aprendiz por si mismo el autodidacta, inflamacion del estomago la gastritis y asi?

Y bueno, ya siguiendo esta logica de entendimiento hasta sus ultimas consecuencias, por que no aprender Esperanto, “el buen lenguaje”?

Why doesn’t it have its Pepsi and its RC Cola? Its Burger King and its Carl’s Jr? Its Adidas and its Rebook? Everyone likes to dismiss it as overpriced McCoffee but if so, why haven’t competitors of remotely comparable size and ambition sprung up in its obviously profitable and still rather vacant niche—the third place^WP? Why is it instead that it has mushroomed globally to the point of cannibalization and watering down? The closest thing I know of a competitor is—and I’m surely biased by being in Mexico—Mexican Punta del Cielo. Though it at least gets the basic idea right and is at least as designed as Starbucks (a crucial point), it is still puny (20 stores) and not particularly innovative. So, again, why does Starbucks stand alone?

Herbal Essences has always been one of the prettiest shampoos out there but their new color me happy line is something else. Not only is the industrial (blobjecty^WP) and graphic (modern art noveau) design stunning, their personified, casual copy is like nothing I’ve seen before. Fascinating.

Felicitous!

A ”Jew” car plate (they’re assigned sequentially here in Guadalajara so there’ve been a lot of Jews lately):

A rather machista ad for pickups:

And, well, the bizarre machito^WP:

All three of them long (9,000 words average), all three of them remarkable. Favorite to least-favorite-but-still-remarkable,

Unhappy Meals By Michael Pollan January 28, 2007

What should we eat?

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

..A little meat won’t kill you, though it’s better approached as a side dish than as a main. And you’re much better off eating whole fresh foods than processed food products. That’s what I mean by the recommendation to eat “food.” Once, food was all you could eat, but today there are lots of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages festooned with health claims, which brings me to a related rule of thumb: if you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.

Darwin’s God By Robin Marantz Henig March 4, 2007

How can we explain belief in God?

Stephen Jay Gould, the famed evolutionary biologist at Harvard who died in 2002, and his colleague Richard Lewontin proposed “spandrel” to describe a trait that has no adaptive value of its own. They borrowed the term from architecture, where it originally referred to the V-shaped structure formed between two rounded arches. The structure is not there for any purpose; it is there because that is what happens when arches align.

In architecture, a spandrel can be neutral or it can be made functional. Building a staircase, for instance, creates a space underneath that is innocuous, just a blank sort of triangle. But if you put a closet there, the under-stairs space takes on a function, unrelated to the staircase’s but useful nonetheless. Either way, functional or nonfunctional, the space under the stairs is a spandrel, an unintended byproduct.

“Natural selection made the human brain big,” Gould wrote, “but most of our mental properties and potentials may be spandrels—that is, nonadaptive side consequences of building a device with such structural complexity.”

The possibility that God could be a spandrel offered Atran a new way of understanding the evolution of religion. But a spandrel of what, exactly?

Hardships of early human life favored the evolution of certain cognitive tools, among them the ability to infer the presence of organisms that might do harm, to come up with causal narratives for natural events and to recognize that other people have minds of their own with their own beliefs, desires and intentions. Psychologists call these tools, respectively, agent detection, causal reasoning and theory of mind.

From 0 to 60 to World Domination By Jon Gertner February 18, 2007

A look at Toyota.

By any measure, Toyota’s performance last year, in a tepid market for car sales, was so striking, so outsize, that there seem to be few analogs, at least in the manufacturing world. A baseball team that wins 150 out of 162 games? Maybe. By late December, Toyota’s global projections for 2007 — the production of 9.34 million cars and trucks — indicated that it would soon pass G.M. as the world’s largest car company. For auto analysts, one of the more useful measures of consumer appeal is the “retail turn rate” — that is, the number of days a car sits on a dealer’s lot before it is turned over to a customer. As of November 2006, according to the Power Information Network, a division of J.D. Power & Associates that tracks such sales data, Toyota’s cars in the U.S. (including its Lexus and Scion brands) had an average turn rate of 27 days. BMW was second at 31; Honda was third at 32. Ford was at 82 and G.M. at 83. And Daimler-Chrysler was at 107. The financial markets reflected these contrasts. By year’s end, Toyota would record an annual net profit of $11.6 billion, and its market capitalization (the value of all its shares) would reach nearly $240 billion — greater than that of G.M., Ford, Daimler-Chrysler, Honda and Nissan combined.

I had never seen this before but it’s a neat idea. Have you seen other examples?

A vast, motley mishmash humanity is.

Speaking of prodigies, Michael Dell is back at the helm (well, he never really left) of his (rather relatively) ailing company^E. That’s exciting news, I remember reading Dell’s semi-autobiographical book, Direct From Dell^AM, particularly the first and some of the second chapter, and thinking of, well, Mozart^WP—here was a marketing prodigy, a gifted boy who could play the market like Mozart could play the piano.

Making posters has been a hobby of mine since I can remember. At high school I tried to start a series of posters on moral values but only finished one on gayness and another on licentiousness. At college, I made one on Esperanto and several for the cinema club I ran with some friends.

This one, my latest, is about the Jicama fruit^WP and it plays on a joke by Friends’s Chandler: “Cheese. It’s milk that you chew.” The funny thing is that for Jicamas it’s almost true, from the fruit’s pedia: