John Tierney writing in the Science section of the 3/25/08 NY Times made some interesting observations about recent efforts to convince people to use less electricity. This is of interest to me because it is an area that my Fall 08 marketing class will be working in along with the Indianapolis-based LLC, Service Concepts. I intend to incorporate concepts from the relatively new field of social marketing and conservative psychology into the course. Here’s what John stated:

A study in California showed that when the monthly electric bill listed the average consumption in the neighborhood, the people in above-average households significantly decreased their consumption.

Meanwhile, the people with the below-average bills reacted by significantly increasing their consumption — not exactly the goal of the project.

That reaction was avoided when the bill featured a little drawing along with the numbers: a smiling face on a below-average bill or a frowning face on an above-average bill. After that simple nudge, the heavy users made even bigger cuts in consumption, while the light users remained frugal. Very simple feedback, and very easy to incorporate.

 A glowing ball called the Ambient Orb, [see right] programmed to change colors as the price of electricity increases at peak periods, has been given to some utility customers in California, who promptly reduced their usage by 40 percent when the ball glowed red in peak periods. 

Another gadget, the Wattson, which changes colors depending upon how much electricity a house is using, collects data that can be displayed on a Web site. Clive Thompson, a columnist for Wired, has suggested that people start displaying the Wattson data on their Facebook pages. For Purdue types, the Wattson integrates via wireless with the household computer system, and it shouldn’t be rocket science to pass the data on.

But there’s more.[Gotta love the late-night TV hawkers!]  The Wattson, produced by DIY Kyoto, resulted in the three behind the idea [pic from their web site @ bottom] being voted one of the top startups in recent UK competition. All are industrial designers, NOT engineers. Furthermore, the Wattson is presently only being sold for EU use. Seems like the door is wide open for US apps. I’ll be chewing on this. Hank

My grad assistant Jeff recently had the hard drive on his notebook crash. Like MOST of us he did not have important files backed up, including an important proposal. Sound familiar? If he had been running the freeium program syncplicity, he could have had his files automatically being backed up on the fly - no hassle, no brainier. If you found your way this far, you can figure out how to use syncplicity from their web site. And yes, it works fine running Parallels on a Mac . But, as the TV guys say, there’s more!

IF you are running an iPhone AND you are running syncplicity, THEN you can go to https://m.syncplicity.com, log in with your appropriate UN/PW, and access your backed up files. Else, ??? See here for details. Uber! Hank

I use Wordpress to power this blog. Update 2.6 came out yesterday, and today we’re running it. You the user won’t see instant changes, except I can now “easily” label pictures. Below is a 3:26 or so video of the changes for those who are into Wordpress. Hank

As suggested yesterday, this morning (4 AM) I brought our iPhone up plugged into a generic Toshiba P35 running XP-Home. It saw the iPhone, installed driver(s), and after Windoz had done its thing, I could “see” the iPhone in MyComputer and access it. Photos were visible using several photo viewing programs such as Infraview. I unplugged the iPhone, and plugged it into our iMac running Parallels; it did not “see” the iPhone. QED. Something is amiss between Parallels and iPhone 2.0. Be interesting to see if others “discover” this. Meanwhile, I purchased ($19.95) software from www.tangee.com that goes around the problem and supports manipulation of photos from our iPhone while running Parallels. A screen capture of tangee in use is at the bottom. Works for me. On to other challenges.

Yesterday afternoon I was out @ Purdue Research Park attending a board meeting, and checked out our iPhone 2.0 running only on the Edge network. A little “E” comes up by the signal bar icon to let you know which network you are on - ours will always be “E” . ALL of the apps worked as advertised, with one exception. When I brought up Car Care it crashed the iPhone - this is the second time this has happened. After a reboot, Car Care has not had any problems. I would have to say Pandora, running with just two bars, is awesome. Mobile Flickr took awhile to upload a 85K picture, but it worked.

This morning when I synch’d, four more apps were installed that I selected yesterday - Facebook, If Found, Twitterific, and WeightTrack. My impression so far is the iPhone 2.0 update has a uber cool factor, indeed lots of useful “free” apps are available, but it has warts - Parallels has big warts, and crashing never happened before. One thing I’m certain of, Macheads will be all over both the new iPhone, and the original with the 2.0 update extolling its many virtues. My initial reaction to many of the apps is “I can use that.” On to other challenges. Hank

  As reported in Adrants in a study recently completed by MultiMedia Intelligence, the growth in teen purchases of cell phones is on the wane.

Key findings:

• Subscriber growth is seasonal, with Q3 and Q4 the stronger quarters.
• More than half of teens are cellular subscribers by age 13.
• On average, girls mature cellularly earlier than boys. Even in older age groups, teen female subscribers outnumber male subscribers. However, the gap among those in the 17-year-old age group has narrowed greatly.
• The Hispanic teen market has become significant, projected to approach 3 million subscribers by 2012.
• The teen market is a primary source of new subscribers for carriers. By age 17, the majority of teens have wireless services, with the penetration skewing higher for females.

Parents, marketers, and entrepreneurs might be able to make sense out of this?

Hank

Q  U  O  T  E  D
“The court is not unsympathetic to Tiffany and other rights owners who have invested enormous resources in developing their brand, only to see them illicitly and efficiently exploited by others on the Internet. Nevertheless, the law is clear: It is the trademark owner’s burden to police its mark, and companies like eBay cannot be held liable for trademark infringement based solely on their generalized knowledge that trademark infringement might be occurring on their websites.”
– U.S. District Judge Richard Sullivan, ruling in eBay’s favor, sees the liability issue differently than his French counterparts From SiliconValley.com

So the bottom line, YOU have to police copyright, trademark, patent etc. infringement. Uncle has not, and will not, do it for you. Hank

Ok, so going to iPhoto on the Mac side supported getting photos from our iPhone. On the PC side, the iPhone did not/would not show up as a device in MyComputer when docked and synch’d. Unsat. Don’t know if this is a function of running Parallels, not holding my mouth correctly, or what. I’ll check it out on another PC and see if the same thing happens.

Meanwhile, you can see the 13 apps I’ve added (Not contacts and techcrunch) in the top left hand corner. Some of the apps seem to work when they are of a mind to, and other times NOT. More on this tomorrow. Back to Car Care, a nice app.

Car Care supports keeping track of both the fuel that a given auto sucks up, and also maintenance.  So instead of getting out the notebook and calculator when you fill up, whip out your iPhone and enter the appropriate data. Works for me. A couple of screen shots are below. Hank

Yesterday I blogged that I had successfully update my first generation iPhone to the just released [officially last Friday] 2.0 software version. I joined millions of others, and downloaded a bunch of apps from the app store, including Super Mondey Ball - it’s a blast, and Car Care.

Apple’s latest press release would have us believe over 10 million apps have been downloaded since the app store opened last Thursday. It’s the later that I’ll briefly discuss today. But first: The iPhone 2.0 software has a built-in screen capture shortcut. Hold the “home” button, then hit the “power/sleep” button, and presto, a capture of your screen is in your photos. But get this, so far, on the PC side, I haven’t been able to get to the captured picture. It’s on the iPhone, but….

Lots of others things don’t appear to be “right” either. Several of the apps that worked yesterday, don’t today. When I came up on the Mac side of our iMac (remember, we’re running Parallels and Windows XP on our iMac, so we have both an OS X “side,” and a Windoz side), it informed me that iTunes didn’t have several of the apps and proceeded to screw with the iPhone. When it finished, Car Care was no longer on the iPhone.

I’d say all is not well so far. I’ve got lots of “stuff” to figure out concerning this iPhone gadget - more later. Hank