I always bust out this photo for the 4th of July. It’s one of my all time favorite shots that I captured. This was done “old school” on slide Film (Fuji Velvia 50) and a non-digital SLR (Nikon F5). Sometimes there’s nothing wrong with recycling the past…especially when the colors are this vibrant! Hope your 4th is as good as mine is going to be.
Technically, John doesn’t turn 1 for 2 more days. His official birthday is June 15. But, we decided to get some family and friends to celebrate his 1st birthday today. John had a blast and to say that he was showered with gifts would be an understatement. It’s clear that John is loved, not only by his parents, but by so many others.
Also, from the looks of it, I think he enjoyed that birthday cake! Nothing like your first taste of sugar and chocolate.
When you have kids, you get to experience a lot of firsts. There’s the steps, words, dates and so much more. Today, I got to experience another first. Cora had her first haircut today…just a little trim.
I used some high grain (ISO 800) for this and no Flash. I just love the how gritty the picture processed and how serious Cora looked.
Today, Cora turned 3. Her birthday somehow coincided with wear your bathing suit to school day. We celebrated her birthday with friends and Family on Sunday. It’s amazing to see how quickly they grow up. It’s almost as if it were yesterday when she was just learning how to crawl. Now she’s running and jumping around. Time flies.
Every once in a while I like to stop talking about marketing, advertising, the web, social, etc. and talk about my two awesome kids, Cora and John. People always claim to have the cutest kids in the world. But, I think it’s safe to say, we all know mine are the cutest.
I know it’s not a competition, but it’s still nice to know mine are the cutest 
Happy Easter!
Today, we played hard for charity. The Junior League in Minneapolis organized great event today, Bowling For Books. It’s simple, really. You bring in your books. You trade them in so that kids who are less fortunate can have books. You eat pizza. You drink beer (well the kids didn’t). And, you bowl.
This was Cora and John’s first time bowling. I have to say, they were quite brave. There was no ramp and no bumper guards. Nope. We don’t use enablers or crutches at my house
I love bowling. It’s a simple activity that anyone can play regardless of age. As I was meeting all these new people and watching all these people engage with one another it reminded me of something very important. Real connections, real relationships and real conversations are way better than virtual ones on twitter, Facebook and the like. I mean think about it. You can’t share a beer virtually and have the same REAL effect. That alone makes it a more meaningful activity.
Get out from behind the computer, put the Nexus One down and start engaging in real life. You just might like it.
As you can see from the photos and video below, we had a great time.
I’ve always been a fan of the grand gesture. The grand gesture is something so big that it’s completely memorable years later. As I thought about what to get Cora this year for Christmas, I really wanted to ger her something that she would look back on years later and say, “I remember that Christmas when I was 2 and you got me…” Picking a present that memorable is pretty damn hard.
After considering many options, I finally decided on building her a ball pit. I mean seriously, what kid wouldn’t want their own ball pit? This ended up being much more difficult than I thought. The “pit” portion was insanely easy thanks to Amazon. But, trying to find the balls proved to be problematic. Based on the calculator on this site, I knew I needed somewhere between 2,500 and 3,000 balls. So of course I turned to Amazon. The cost of the balls was cheap, but the shipping was insane. By insane, I mean we are talking $800.00 for shipping. Nuts. That meant I had to go old school. I went to Target. They sell balls in 150 pack quantities and the per ball cost was actually cheaper than Amazon. Awesome, right? Well, not so fast.
Not every Target carries the balls and the ones that do rarely have more than 4 packages on shelf. Hmm…well over the course of 4 weeks I hit up a variety of Target stores and finally had enough balls.
So we’ve got the balls and the pit. But, we need something to blow up on the pit. I thought I had a blower that would work. It didn’t. So, on December 23rd, it was off to Target again to get a blower that would work. I had tried Wal-Mart earlier in the day, but that didn’t work out. Can you believe it, they didn’t carry one. Oh well, there loss is Target’s gain.
It took roughly 30 minutes to pump up the pit and fill it with the balls. All told we used 2,250 balls. I’ve got an extra 5 bags of balls just in case we need it at some point. If you have kids I highly recommend this. The cost is fairly manageable and the experience will last a long time. When you see the joy on your kid’s face, you know you’ve nailed it.
Part I can be found here.
The format at this summit was a little different. Day 1 had a neat wrinkle. The summit attendees got to hear from and comments on 5 startup companies focused on real time information and data. It was kinda like a mini TechCrunch50. This was definitely a cool experience and something I hope they keep in the summit format. We heard from:
Bazaar Labs: They currently offer a product called flixup that’s basically twitter + Rotten Tomatoes. In near real time you can get the pulse of your friends/connections and the community at large regarding movies. It’s an interesting idea that’s ripe for contextual ads. They also offer a feature where you can predict the success of future movies based on the performance of previous movies. I have to imagine studios have something similar that goes like this: Michael Bay + Explosions + Save The World = X Million As cool as the product is, I think they’re missing the middle part of the business model. Predicting the future is neat, but how about being able to see other movies in theater and available for purchase (e.g. DVD)…then within the app being able to buy them. I’ll be watching this app and company closely.
Networked Insights: They offer a product called SocialSense that’s focused on making sense of all the crazy social media chatter that’s out there. They believe that social channels provide the best and largest real time group for research. In today’s business environment speed wins and frankly the old ways of doing research are very slow. He gave an example of two recent redesigns for recipe sites that were done by General Mills and Kraft. One of the sites (he wouldn’t say which) launched first and while not as pretty of well designed offered amazing utility. The other site was a high usability testing scorer. But, they were late to market because they focused on flawless and perfect execution. Guess what? Speed win. Site 1 has over a million users. Site two has less than 50,000. Ouch. Follow and connect with @dneely40 for more information about their company.
AdHatchery: AdHatchery.com hasn’t launched yet, but will be soon. The presenter was great and really highlighted the problems we have in the industry between publishers (sellers) and agencies (buyers). The sales process sucks. It’s riddled with phone calls, emails, and follow ups. It’s a waste of time frankly. AdHatchery is trying to make the process between buyers and sellers simpler, easier, faster, and more transparent. So imagine a concept like LinkedIn where you can post your client’s needs. Then publishers, any publishers, can bid and offer proposals specific to that RFP or business problem. The advertiser can easily evaluate the options, provide feedback, and then close a deal quickly. More importantly, there’s a community based feedback feature where you can rate/review the sales contact who provided the RFP. This is very cool. If implemented well, this could be the type of tool that can shine a light on crappy sales contacts and hopefully shun them into being better. We can only hope…
HitPost: They believe everyone is either an armchair spots announcer/pundit or can be one. Their platform (which works across all mediums and devices) Hitpost.com enables this to happen. The tool works similar to flixup, but it’s clearly designed around sports fans. People are already doing this. If you watch a live twitter feed of a sports game you’ll see exactly what I mean. HitPost ties it all together across all networks. I see a lot of promise in this one.
Track Simple: I honestly have no idea what these guys do, but I want to buy it. The presentation given was simply one of the best presentations I’ve ever seen. It was classic Obama. The presenter spoke so well you had no choice, but to say, “ummmm yeah I’ll take one.” I’m actually hoping to follow up with these guys tonight. If I learn more I’ll update this post.
In short, there’s no shortage of ideas and everyone is focusing on the real time web.
As I’ve talked about it previous posts the iMedia summits are the best collection of forward looking interactive marketers and innovators. I look forward to attending their summits every year. From Saturday December 5 through Wednesday December 9 at the Camelback Inn I got to share ideas, meet some great people, and of course learn a hell of a lot.
The first part of Day 1 was focused on agencies discussing and aggregating the problems we’re seeing in the industry. The group was broken into 4 topical areas. I lead a discussion on “things agencies should be focusing on, but aren’t.” The feedback and input from the group was amazing, somewhat eye opening, and reassuring. I say reassuring, because everyone across the country is having the same problems. It’s not an east coast thing, or a small agency thing, or a digital agency thing. It doesn’t matter where your based on the type of company you work at, we’re all in the same boat. Here’s a high level recap of the situation:
I’ll be adding posts as the summit continues.
We enjoyed the trick or treating…hope you did too.
Interactive marketer, innovator, boat rocker, continuous learner, movie lover, risk taker, dad and all around good guy. I'm always up for a spirited conversation. These are my thoughts and ramblings, not those of my employer.
