Are you in ATM mode?

I read an interesting blog on Edelman Digital about living in ATM mode.  Appartently this is a concept coined by Ernie the Attorney, a blawger. The story goes that Ernie lost a great deal of his belongings when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans and since that disaster has moved a lot of his stuff from physical assets to bits.

Now Ernie is taking this a step further by keeping a lot of his data online “in the cloud” so that he can get access to it from any connected device, similar to the way that you can get your money from any ATM without going to the bank. This has freed him up to travel with just his smartphone.

Cloud computing is currently getting a big push with the recent launch of the 3G iPhone but before you get carried away take note of the story covered on the BBC today about how Apple has set up an apologetic blog devoted to solving the problems of its recently launched MobileMe service. 

Two weeks ago Apple launched the new service to coincide with its 3G iPhone and pitched it to users as its answer to cloud computing.  All well and good so far, but many users found that they were not able to receive or send emails while others were unable to synch their devices at all.  Not so good.

With the criticism mounting in the blogosphere Apple has decided to launch its own MobileMe blog to help users with any teething problems.  Regardless of the problems its customers are facing, I quite like the fact that a large brand is using the medium of blogging to combat problems in the blogosphere.  Are we about to see more of this?

Back to the mothership

According to a story on El Reg today, Bebo users have the chance to team up with a controversial scientist to compile multimedia packages to be transmitted into deep space on behalf of the human race.  The planet Gliese which has only recently been detected is thought to be capable of supporting life.  The AMFE group (A Message From Earth) and interested Bebo users are hotly debating the burning questions of space diplomacy – namely, just what pictures should be sent to the aliens. Categories include “humans”, “animals” and “celebrities”.  The article explains that the Bebo compilation will be thrown open to all comers on August 4, and close on September 30 and the “best” 500 submissions will be beamed out to Gliese 581 on October 9, and should get there in a couple of decades.

 

It was the couple of decades part that caught my imagination.  This blog would have only been the figment of someone’s imagination a couple of decades ago and a number of the worlds largest brands didbn’t even exist a couple of years let alone a couple of decades.

 

Having worked with a number of clients recently who have been working on a brand re-fresh it made me think about how vital it is to get this right.  Most brands keep the same logo and brand image for many years – think about how often the largest brands in the world change their logo – not very often.  How do you represent something and expect it to still be relevant in a couple of decades time?

How cool do bloggers think cuil is?

Following my blog about Cuil yesterday I thought I would have a look around the blogosphere to see what other people made of the new search engine, especially after so much noise for such a new company.  The following three caught my attention first and all made some good points.

First up was the excellent Stephen Waddington’s blog which did make me chuckle when I saw what you could find yourself looking at if you misspelt the site name.  He also made a good point about Cuil being case sensitive which is a little disappointing.

Rather interestingly Alice Marshall has decided to use Cuil as her default search engine due to its privacy element.  According to Cuil when you search they do not collect any personally identifiable information, and do not have any idea who sends queries: not by name, not by IP address, and not by cookies. 

My colleague Jo Jamieson at Berkeley PR also had a play with Cuil this morning and found some interesting results if you search for it on Google.

I would be interested to hear what anyone else out there thinks.