What do you think would have happened if founders listened to pre-release comments about selling used printers online (eBay), creating the tenth search engine (Google), building personal computers for hobbyists (Apple), enabling people to tell their friends that their cat rolled over (Twitter), or rating whether people are good looking (HotorNot)?

And…

If you believe in something, go for it. This is the only way to really find out. Mathematically, the naysayers are right 95% of the time, but believing you’re in the 5% is what makes entrepreneurs are entrepreneurs.

Trust your instincts. You will fall on your face quite a few times, but that’s learning too. Without falling over lots of times, you’ll never learn to run.

Vi vet ikke hva som skjer.
Vi vet ikke om gutta kommer levende fra det.
Vi vet ikke hvem som kutter tauet.
Vi vet heller ikke om hun i vinduet hopper.
Vi vet ikke hva som skjer.
For dette er ingen film.
Dette er en reklamefilm.
For DnB NOR.
Og vi vet ikke hva som skjer.
Akkurat som i livet.

(Nowegian text at the end of the movie)

Very clever. I’m curious to see if they are brave enough to NOT show it on tv. Just use the site and the viral world to spread it.

Why? Because TV advertising is STINKING expensive. And why hassle people with ads on tv if they come to see it on your site because they WANT to see it?

Kjære krimvenn!
Jeg sitter i disse dager fordypet i skrivingen av neste års kriminalroman om lensmann Ole Vik. Handlingen tar til på Korsneset syd for Bergen, men vil forflytte seg til andre deler av Norge etter hvert som krimdramaet skrider frem, og selvfølgelig til mitt fiktive paradis, Fjellberghavn. En del av handlingen vil også finne sted i utlandet. Boken vil omhandle mennesker med ulik sosial bakgrunn, alder og yrke, noe som gir meg en herlig frihet i valg av skjebner. Dermed åpner det seg en unik mulighet for deg som leser: Kunne du tenke deg å bli drept i denne boken?

Med en snedig begrunnelse, en spennende historie eller en artig fortelling om deg selv, kan du bli skrevet inn i evigheten, bli berømt og få en flott nekrolog lenge før du selv dør. Det er ikke mange forunt!

De fleste boklesere ønsker å lese om spennende mennesker og deres skjebner. Din skjebne i boken er å bli drept. Kanskje skjer dette nettopp på grunn av en av dine helt spesielle sider? Skisser gjerne hva som er spesielt ved deg i svarskjemaet nedenfor.

My English translation (and do feel free to correct me, and make a better translation!)

Dear friend and crime lover!
These days I’m writing next year’s crime novel about police officer Ole Vik. The novel takes place at Korsneset south of Bergen [Norway's second biggest city], but I want to move parts of the plot to other parts of Norway as the drama thickens, and of course to my fictitious paradise, Fjellberghavn. Parts of the book will also take part abroad. The book will have people with different social backgrounds, ages and professions, something that give a wonderful freedom when picking destinies. Which opens an unique opportunity for you as a reader: Would you like to get killed in this book?

With a good reason, an exiting or fun story about yourself, you can be written into history, get famous and get a great necrology a long time before you die. Not something that happens to lots of people!

Most readers wish to read about exiting people and their faith. Your destiny in the book is to get killed. Maybe you’re killed because of one of your special behaviours? Tell me what’s special about yourself in the form below.

How about that? The winner will be killed in the book, and some runnerups will get book prices. He as already gotten over 200 entries, so be sure to enter before 1. May.

I’m not sure if you have to be Norwegian? I would guess so, even though the rules doesn’t say anything about it.

I just thought this was a wonderful way to get interesting content for a book. And what a great way to market your future book. Brilliant.

Great new ad from Coca-Cola. Truly a brilliant idea. Turn something completely around. When will we see the next ad doing this? Doom monsters sharing Mentos? Hitman dancing in the park with his iPod nano?

The promos will be judged on “…originality (30% of score), creativity (30% of score), and ability to generate interest in watching “The Office.” (40% of score)”. The winners will appear at the end of selected episodes of “The Office” and on NBC.com.

Not to bad. Who is it that almost every marketer in the world wants to get?

Clever idea for marketing and viral too. Pretty soon all your favorite blogs will post these…

Here’s a promise: I will not shop at XXL more. Period.

XXL is a chain of huge shops with sports equipment. They sell shoes, sportswear, bikes, skis, tents, helmets, rackets, balls etc. They have a quite good website at XXL.no where you can buy sports equipment online. Almost every week all households around their shops get a 10-20 pages thick “newspaper” with the latest offers.

XXL claim they’re the cheapest on the market in Norway, and also have the biggest selection (which explains the name).

So far, so good.

Empty

So I get their latest ad, and head off to buy shoes for the kids. Empty. “We’re sold out”, “It was extremely popular”, “It’s saturday” (what??), “We sold many because of the ads” (no really?), “We have lots of them at Sandvika” (30 kms to drive), “We didn’t get enough from the importer”, “It hasn’t arrived yet. You’re too early” (I’m too early????)

I’m so fed up on their lame excuses. The best one was the one I got today: “It’s saturday”. Ok, that explains everything. On friday nights, shoes go into their little shoecaves, deep below the mall, and don’t come out again until monday morning.

Shopping wisdom for free

So to help the managers at XXL and others selling sports equipment, here’s some wisdom from yours truly. It’s for free. And you can copy and paste it and publish it as much as you want.

1. When you advertise a product, people will come to buy it (especially if you put your ad in the mailboxes of 1,5 million people
2. People shop on saturdays. Yes, the day the shops are open, and most people don’t go to work.
3. Some shopping malls have 25% of their weekly sales saturdays between 14 and 18.
4. if your shelves go empty on saturdays, you will lose lots of customers.
5. If your normal trained staff have saturdays off, and all the people working in your shop on saturdays are 14 year old kids, you will also lose lots of customers.
6. Saturdays are chrunchtime. This is where the best show where they are made of, and the loosers loose (XXL has lost every saturday I’ve been there).
7. If you are selling footballshoes (that’s soccer if you’re in the US), you will always sell more of the sizes used by the “first-time players”. Here in Norway most football schools start at 7 or 8, so naturally you will sell more shoes of that size.
8. If you work in a shop that fails to deliver on saturdays, pleeeeease give customers a decent answer. Not “we sold many because of the ads”. Try “sorry, but our shop manager doesn’t know how to plan ahead. I’ll promise to tell him how stupid this is.”

[Rant_mode off]

Here are the slogans that ends the first of two 60-second “masterpieces” (you can see both of them on the page as both QT and WMV).

Carbon dioxide. They call it pollution. We call it life.

I can’t find words for how UTTERLY stupid this is. It’s like someone at Comedy Central or Saturday Night Live made a parody, but couldn’t make it funny enough. And just forgot about the whole thing. But these people mean it. Seriously.

(still from the most stupid ad ever made)

You should think that people in an educated country as USA should be smart enough to not produce plain stupid things like this. But no. Amazing.

Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about carbon dioxide

Carbon dioxide is an end product in organisms that obtain energy from breaking down sugars or fats with oxygen as part of their metabolism, in a process known as cellular respiration. This includes all plants, animals, many fungi and some bacteria. In higher animals, the carbon dioxide travels in the blood from the body’s tissues to the lungs where it’s exhaled.

Carbon dioxide content in fresh air is approximately 0.04%, and in exhaled air approximately 4.5%. When inhaled in high concentrations (about 5% by volume), it is toxic to humans and other animals. This is sometimes known as choke damp, an old mining industry term, and was the cause of death at Lake Nyos in Cameroon, where an upwelling of CO2-laden lake water in 1986 covered a wide area in a blanket of the gas, killing nearly 2000.

There’s also a Flickr user called Stunning Nikon on Flickr, that has all the ads as images (one of them – featuring Kate Moss – above).

If you want to check out likely candidates for the Nikon Stunning Gallery the next days, use Flickr’s own “Interesting” feature. See the pictures people have tagged for Nikon rated by how interesting they are. There are over 3 000 photos tagged as of today, and some of them of very high quality, even if some users seem to have tagged every photo they ever have taken…

Marketing

This is clever marketing by Nikon. The fact that I’m writing about it proof in itself. But the smartest thing about it is this: Right now hundreds, maybe thousands of photographers all over the world are looking through their photos thinking “Which one would be good enought for the Nikon Stunning Gallery site?” Or “Which photo in my stream is good enough?”

And when people see that excellent photographers like Mark Burdett, Nils K. Windisch and Roger (NJ Dodge) have “nikonstunninggallery” in their tags, they will click and find out what it is. “Hmmm… These guys are all using Nikons…”

There’s also a companion site called Stunningnikon.com, with some ads, (way) too much Flash and Kate showing some more skin with a beat to it.

BTW, here are the ones I have “dared” tagging for the gallery…

If you read brilliantdays.com from a news reader, you may have to click through to this article, to see the video. Or use this URL:

“The Paradox of choice”.

The speech is by Barry Schwartz, and is about what Schwartz says is a significant problem in people’s life in general: Too much choice.

You have more choice than ever – which is a good thing. Or is it? Schwartz looks at some of our assumptions about choice, and it’s a real eye-opener. Highly recommended!

He talks about phone services, health care, physical appearance, romance and how to choose your salad dressing, education, workplace and lifepartner. How everything now is your choice, and if you’re unattractive it’s your fault. How you’re always on.

And how too much choice sometimes paralyse you: You can’t choose.

What to learn?

If you give customers too much choice, they don’t choose. One of the examples Schwartz uses is retirement funds. As I understand it, American employers have to save money themselves to finance their pensions (unlike other Western countries like Norway, where I live). So employers give their employees a choice of funds to put money in. But the more funds employees can choose from, the fewer will actually choose anything. For every ten more funds to choose from, 2% fewer will pick a fund.

So if you want to have your employees start saving for their pension, give them few choices.

I would guess the same applies to webpages: If the average surfer are given too much choice when coming to your site, they will simply leave. Not making any choice.

Simplify! Take away choices. Or hide them where powerusers still find them. Which make the average surfer happy – and being able to choose. And the powerusers will find what they want.

Why choice make people miserable

Four reasons, accoring to Schwartz:

1. Regret and anticipated regret
No choice is perfect. If you choose between two products, there’s a high chance you picked the right one. If there are 200, it’s very likely you picked the wrong one. Anticipated regret is that you are so sure to regret, that you don’t pick.

2. Opportunity costs
You make a choice, and find out that other choices was better in terms of costs: The other car had better mileage, the other computer had more storage etc.

3. Escalation of expectations
When you choose between loooots of products, your expactations are so much higher. If your jeans store has 80 pairs of jeans, you expect the one you chose to be perfect. But even high class products fail your expectations if your expectations are “perfect”. So you end up feeling miserable with what normally would be a good choice.

4. Self blame
When you pick the wrong product when there is only two choices, it’s the world’s fault. But when you choose between 200 products, it’s your fault. That’s what people feel, according to Schwartz. This self blame makes people feel sad.

Best or good enough?

So you try to find the perfect restaurant, perfect car, perfect phone, perfect pc, perfect girlfriend or boyfriend. In a world of unlimited choice, how do you know if you got the best? You have to examine all the possibilities. But that’s not possible. There’s unlimited choice. So you pick a selection and pick the best of those. Then it turns out that you didn’t find the perfect. But if you only had searched a little bit longer or better, you might have found it…

On the other hand: If you’re looking for something that’s good enough, you look at the choice in front of you, and think: “Is this good enough for me?”. If it is, you choose it, and you don’t look back.

This might be some of the most important things I’ve heard for a long time.. Picking what’s perfect and what’s good enough. I notice that “good enough” has a bad sound in my brain. What about you? Why? Good enough means something that holds up to your standards, so why should picking what’s good enough have a bad smell to it?

Getting your things done

Why do you feel that you don’t have enough time? Because of all the things you have to do? Why do people feel time pressure? Most people believe that it is the pressure of all the things we have to do, the mile-long todo-list.

Two groups of people were told to make lists: Group one made a list of all the things they HAD to do, all the chores etc. The other group: A list of the things they would LIKE to do. A much smaller list.

Guess which group felt the most time pressure?

The one with the LIKE to do list. All the things I would like to do, and have to make difficult choices about.

Cartoons – and the book

BTW, he refers to cartoons he shows, but these are not in the video, probably because of copyright.

Barry Schwartz has written a book about this too, The Paradox of Choice : Why More Is Less.

What was the hardest part of doing this?

Nicky: Everything. People don’t realize how much work went into this. We had to recreate the uniforms to put on our body doubles. We had to bring in a new Jordan, a new ehlo, a new Dwight Clark, a new Everson Walls, a new referee, a new ump and we had to make sure the crowd was in appropriate period clothes. Then we had to match the lighting. An overcast day for the football game, the interior of the basketball arena and lighting that would match the baseball game. The detail is endless.

Read the rest here.

So what is a “plog”? Amazon defines it as…

Your Amazon.com Plog is a personalized web log that appears on your customer home page. Every person’s Plog is different (hence the name) and just like a blog, your Plog is sorted in reverse chronological order. Each post also gives you the opportunity to provide feedback to the sender as to whether you liked the post or not. This feedback loop means your Plog becomes even more relevant and interesting over time. Your Plog will appear if you are logged into our web site and is visible only to you.

Authors with at least one book for sale on Amazon.com are eligible to participate in Amazon Connect.

In other words: Authors of books can make a special blog inside Amazon.com. Their posts will show up on your plog if you ever bought on of their books.

So here’s John Lithgow showing up on mine:

Now I can comments on John’s post, and rate it which will give him feedback if his post was worth it for his readers too.

I like this. It’s a good idea, and will…

1. Make Amazon sell more books
2. Make people want to log onto Amazon more often
3. Help authors connect with their readers in an easy way
4. And the opposite: Make readers connect with the authors

I hope more authors do this, and also start their own blogs outside of Amazon.

(The book I bought by John Lithgow was this)

“I like Flickr. I like blogs. I like search. I like the fact that my daughter is going to knit her own ipod sock. Maybe next year she can exhibit at MacWorld and give me a free pass. .

In that light, I hear that MacWorld might have been better called MacWorld Accessories. Is there a fashion show next year?

Maybe we could call it MacFash. .”

This is something for Anina: Arrange the first gadget, computers and fashion show: With all the cool iPod accessories, mobile phones by fashion designers, software for creation of digital art and fashion, and clothing for the digital lifestyle.

Some examples:

The Burton Audex
The Levis RedWire DLX jeans
The Giro Tuneups II system (lame Flash interface, click snow, then helmets, then accessories)
Elite Model Look mobile phones

And of course a million different designers doing iPod cases with everything from polyester, via knitted socks to $30,000 with diamonds.

How about it, Anina? In Paris? The first MacFash? Or maybe TechFash?

In the newsletter Pamela Robinson continues her series on successful interviewing, and also answers questions from readers of the newsletters. Like this answers from a woman thinking about how having a baby could influence her career.

If you are in the creative arena, there is more of a tolerance and acceptance of kids… in fact many of the creative execs, writers, & directors bring their children to work at times, and have the flexibility to take time off when needed – for a doctor’s appointment or a soccer game. However, the more corporate positions (on the business side) tend to be less tolerant of catering to the children’s needs, and of course this varies from company to company.

I think she is right. In the creative arena, where I work, there IS a bigger tolerance of kids. And their parents! And exactly that is why many of us are so creative. Yes. It’s as simple as this: People who spend a significant amount of time with kids get a new way to look at things. And also learn that there is no need to take themselves so seriously all the time. Not to mention perspective: After washing poo or nursing a fever sick child, you do think differently the next time you sit down with your Wacom tablet. Taking your small kids to work also helps you see things that you didn’t think about at all before: Why did you put that thing over there? Why do you have to do it like that?

I even let the kids make promos with me. They loved it, the result was excellent, and my boss was happy. And the show got lots of viewers.

How to make amazing circles

You make your own amazing circles, the full instructions are here. And do post them on the Amazing circles group at Flickr.

Promax members – upload your pictures!

Promax BDA has conferences all over the world, in cities like Vienna, Dubai, Jakarta, Mumbai and New York this year. If you’re attending on of these conferences, take pictures and upload them to the Promax group at Flickr. So far there are only pictures from Promax Athens 2005, so find those pictures and upload them! See my post about sharing your Promax BDA pictures.

The picture is from a presentation by Carlos Ferreyros, Creative Director of ca square, USA. The slide reads “Vision without action is daydreaming. Action without vision is a nightmare.” I think it is a Japanese proverb. Do you know?

Update: The picture used in the article is also at Flickr, here.

What is most interesting with this is: How long does it take before other big sites pick up the trend? Why shouldn’t people be able to tag articles at CNN.com? Or movies at Imdb.com? Amazon has always been visionary when it comes to new ways to let people use (and buy from) Amazon.com. So I’m certain that lots of sites will offer tagging for articles and items in shops pretty soon.

This is what is going on with downloadable television at the moment. Although PVR ownership is growing there is still far too much money on the table for television executives to offer us anything compelling. Why innovate when there is still tons of dough to make in commercials and DVD sales? To offer us a truly compelling service would mean disrupting their current rich, but declining, revenue streams and they are still too lucrative at this point for them to do this. Unfortunately.

So what do they do instead? They offer us a bunch of very limited crap alternatives that people won’t end up using to pay lip service to the idea of video on demand. And whether it’s the crappy “start over” service from Time Warner (hey, it’s great, people can’t skip the ads) or a download service from Apple (but with expensive sucky low res versions of shows) or these two latest offerings from NBC (NBC’s service will only work with DirecTV DVRs, uh hello McFly) and CBS (their service will contain commercials), these are all stupid offerings that have no or limited appeal at best.

Photo by Niall Kennedy.

It’s so bad that I wonder if there are any designers at Microsoft at all? Can’t be. It’s so bad that good sites write long interesting articles on it.

Old way: Hire a PR firm

New way: Buy Typepad accounts for ever employee in your company. And maybe some users too.

Hello bosses everywhere. Read that again. Open up your companies. And win.

As big and as important as Microsoft is, the coverage of the company is quite mediocre. This is particularly true in the mainstream press. The reason for this is that today’s newspaper and magazine tech writers know little about computers and are all Mac users. It’s a fact. This is why when Microsoft actually does have a good idea, people look to trash it out of hand. With 90 percent of the mainstream writers being Mac users, what would you expect?

The logic of this is amazing. Windows has a 90+ marketshare, Macs about 4%. And then it turns out that all media is controlled by Mac-loving fanatics? Wow.

Scoble does of course agree:

At blogging conferences you’ll see something like 60% Macs. So, will they be able to write authoritatively about anything that comes down on the Windows side of the house?

More great logic. Because 60% at conferences use Powerbooks, Apple will get better PR than Microsoft? Hmmm.

I have read lots of rave reviews of Xbox 360 and Windows Vista. And people have slaughtered the iPod. Of course people can write that something they use themselves is crap. Or needs to be improved.

I think the there are two reasons why Apple sometimes are more hyped than Microsoft.

1) Steve Jobs is better communicator than Bill Gates. He knows how to put up a show. Bill Gates is an amazingly clever person but hasn’t the charisma of Steve Jobs.

2) Apple delivers. When Apple show a new product, it is available in the Apple Store the next hour most of the time. The biggest example of this NOT being true is faster G5 processors. So they change to Intel next year.

This commenter on Scoble hits it right on the head:

Look at the difference in the announcements from Apple and Microsoft. Apple is very secretive about future products. When they do make an announcement, you can order their product from their web site. Microsoft hypes their products for years telling everyone how great their software will be in a few years. When they do have a sincere announcement about a new product, it gets lost in all their old hype announcements and Apple’s real announcements.

BTW, I love the mac, and use Windows XP over 20 hours a week. I love the Xbox, and will can’t wait to get the 360.

I even asked Scoble for countdown bagdes to put on my site, but never got some. So there you go. Apple are better marketers. Dvorak should watch some movies. Smell some flowers. Have some wine. So tired.

Dave Winer didn’t like it. I haven’t seen it yet, but saw the first nine minutes on Vividas today. More movies should be promoted this way: Put up high quality clips on the web. The first 10 minutes is an honest thing to do. It gives quite a different impression than the promo.

Minus points to Seth for not telling which bank this was.

http://apple.com/dangermouse

Originally uploaded to Flickr a superhero by night.

Flickr user “a superhero by night” thinks Apple marketing got it a bit wrong this time (for once I must add). So he improves the new Mighty Mouse web page.

Those Pesky Ninja’s!

Originally uploaded to Flickr Michael Heilemann.

LOL. Seth Godin would love this.

Update Seth does love it. See Seth’s blog

Next is an ad for T-mobile. If only everbody talking and walking were this clever. I see people walking around talking in their mobiles every day, completely isolated from the world, and paying no attention to things happening around them. People listening to their iPods are in general much more aware of their surroundings than people on their mobiles.

It seems like men do net help much around the house in Great Britain? See the cool ad from McCoys Specials.

The Smirnoff Ice is hilarious. LOL. Worlds biggest refrigerator!

I think some people may find the Skoda ad a bit offensive. I think it’s a great idea. But I would still buy a Prius…

The last one is Miller beer.

If you see any brilliant ads, use the comments under!

But it never made it to the official arrangements at the festival, due to criticism in the Gay and Lesbian community. On the net it’s a different story: A huge success, with over 80 000 downloads and over 500 GB in downloads during this weekend.

Idea

The idea comes from advertising agency Kitchen in Oslo, which also have clients like McDonalds in Norway.

Technical details

The movie itself is made by Toxic design studio in Oslo. It is animated by talented 3D manager Rune Spaans, who made an animatic in 3ds Max first. 20-25 pics were put together with “temp” music, and discussed with Kitchen to see if the story and cut was right.

Version 1 of the animatic is here, and version 2 here.

Rune then had to download way too many pictures of sperm and Colonoscopy for research. At work! LOL.

He then made an advanced test in 3ds Max, which didn’t work out the way he wanted it too. Switching to Maya didn’t work out either. Back to 3ds Max again, this time with a simpler setup, which worked.

The passes were done with RPManager in 3ds Max, 16 bit greyscale.It was rendered in Brazil and composited in Digital Fusion. An almost finished version of the animation is here.

With several thousand sperms in some pictures, some of the frames took over five hours to render. The sperms have a glasslike surface that mimics jellyfish. The whole thing took over a week to render on Toxic’s render farm.

Music

The music is made by Verdens sterkeste mann (The World’s strongest man). Brilliant name for a company.

Rune has even made a director’s cut of the movie. I won’t tell you what the yellow thing is…

There’s also a technical explanation about the production here – in Norwegian.

Controversy

The movie got lots of criticism in the Gay and Lesbian community in Oslo. Many people thinks it encourages people to have sex without a condom. And thereby undermining the work with HIV and AIDS information. Other critics don’t like the fact the the Lesbians are forgotten in the ad. Which in turn made Europride turn down the movie, and not include it in the festival.

Read more about the controversy in Gay and Lesbian paper Blikk

The pics from the party in Athens, is here and here. The awards ceremony is here.

This is an example, Oslo-Nice, two adults, roundtrip, leaving in June, returning in June. Click the box which has a price and a date that suits you, and off you go!

This is very honest, it gives you lots of information with just a glance on the page, and it makes booking easier. I hope more companies use this kind of form.

The sheep walking in front often wears a bell around their necks. That way, the farmer can hear where they are, since most sheep will be around the sheep with the bell.

Seth Godin wears a bell. A big one. And tells how to spot other sheep – in front of their herds.

Some signs: Uses Firefox, not IE. Uses RSS and has a blog. Reads Boingboing, doesn’t watch the tonight show.

Seth’s name for them is the Digerati.

“As a result, your most-connected, most influential customers are part of the digerati. They can make or break your product, your service or even your religion’s new policies. Because the Net is now a broadcast (and a narrowcast) medium, the digerati can spread ideas.”