Are You A Real Ketchup Fan?

If you're a real ketchup fanatic -- here's an opportunity for you to put your marketing skills and your video camera to work a la Nick Dimondi and his $12 "Crash The SuperBowl" Doritos commercial. The catch? You've got to be a diehard Heinz ketchup fan (or possibly a great lawyer).

This time around, the "Top This" challenge is worth $57,000 (get it?) to the winning thirty-second video entry, which can be submitted on YouTube's www.topthistv.com web site. What a great opportunity for you creative marketers to get some breakthrough exposure. I'm predicting more of these yet to come.

The Amazing World of Jeff Han

Some of you may have seen Jefferson Han's video from last year's TED conference with his amazing work in transforming the way we use computers -- specifically using an intuitive touch interface. It's reminiscent of the comment in one of the early Star Trek movies, "Ah, a keyboard -- how quaint."

If you think differently about the way you organize your photos with Google's Picasa, and you thought you saw a glimpse of the future of computing in "Minority Report," take a look at this new video of Jeff's "multi-touch" manipulation of ideas around a screen at this year's conference. The i-phone touchscreen was interesting, but collaboration by throwing things back and forth on a giant computer wallboard changes things to a new order of magnitude.

How to make your product popular? Make it free (or dirt cheap).

Microsoft has just announced a plan to bump its user base up to about a third of the earth's population in the next eight years by offering its suite of office, academic and e-mail software at $3.00 a copy in developing countries, where the current versions are most often pirated.

The plan goes into effect later this year. Possible catch: will these third-world users have to apply for a MS credit card to purchase online?

How Does Offshoring Affect You?

Here's a striking discussion by Princeton economist Alan Blinder on the nature of offshoring and what it means for the flat world. Blinder is the author of "The Quiet Revolution." He compares programming and other currently "offshorable" jobs to farming in the late 18th century --

"Let me give you a large-scale analogy: suppose you were privileged in the year 1802 to walk into President Jefferson's office and say, "You know what, President Jefferson? Right now, 83 percent of Americans earn their living on farms. In 150 years, that'll be about 3 percent." You know, Jefferson might have asked you, "Well, what will the other 80 percent do?" And of course, you wouldn't have known, and nobody would have known. But they found better things to do than working on farms. And so in the end, I think we're gonna have huge gains from this process. What I'm worried about is getting from here to there..."

Next month's i.c. stars CIO event "Capitalize on Illinois" in Chicago focuses on offshoring and I'll include a summary of that discussion here.

Hi-Tech Easter

In our hyperindividualized culture, technology continues to push us further down the path - personal videos, customized controls, hundreds of channels, niches of people with your specific interests, good or bad. On the other end of the spectrum from the ubiquitous white earplugs dangling from a head bowed under a hooded sweatshirt was this spectre of 12,000 people standing simaltaneously to acknowledge the opening strains of the Hallelujah Chorus yesterday morning at the Sears Centre. All the more stunning to think of higher truth in its universality and ability to meet all our needs at once. What a great way to start the week.

Cursor Security

I haven't had this happen recently but evidently if you're on a web site that changes your cursor to an hourglass or other animated figure, you should be thinking security. The good people at Microsoft weren't, until about December. Now they've thought about it enough to put out an emergency patch, including one for the newly released Vista, to keep hackers from being able to install malware through the breach. If your computer downloads updates automatically, you got the patch this week. If not, you're still vulnerable to this risk and should do a manual download from the Microsoft site.