The Strategy Review

This move by an NYC actor made my day ... superb, subversive and ballsy

 

More on those Chinese Apple stores ...

Y'know, I can't get this story out of my mind. And I'm mystified that we haven't seen a MASS of fuss around it.

If I'm right, at the last count there were 22 fully-functioning, fully-branded bootleg Apple stores that had been discovered in China.

Now, I'm an old music business hand, who recalls when it wasn't consumers (with the hysterical exception of the "Home Taping Is Killing Music" campaign that ran in the 80's when I was still working in retail ...) who were held accountable for piracy, it was Middle- and Far-Eastern factories.

Those appalling quality bootleg cassettes of Police albums that overseas travellers brought back with them still live in my ears.

A very funny twist to the story is that of course, of all the companies that feature more recently in the music industry's "we are victims of the most appalling crime" complaint, one of the most reviled is ... Apple. While Steve Jobs was welcome with joyful weeping when iTunes launched, now almost everybody on the business side hates him. Nothing like a little "you stole my toy" resentment.

So now, we've come full circle in a way that you really couldn't write ... the same relentless commercial amorality that produced those unlistenable copies of Outlandos D'Amour - selling product that of course comes out of the back - or front even - of the factories that make the very same beautiful laptop on which I'm writing this - has produced a fully-working facsimile of the entire Apple brand experience.

Some of the kids who work in these bootleg stores truly believe - or at least want to, or maybe just don't care ... - that they're working for the man. The Jobs man, I mean.

But the thing that tickles me most of all is that, of all the many things that music business hacks lament, right up there is the demise of the old-style, mom-and-pop record store. And guess where all that buzz has migrated to? Well, think back to your last Apple Store visit.

Hmmmmm ....

MySpace sold finally

MySpace sold for more or less nowt ... News Corp to retain a small stake: as you would ...

Oh come on!

Nuff said ...

This looks like a great piece of real branded entertainment!

Finally ... maybe someone's got it right? We'll see ... the show launches today.

It's remarkable to see Hiscox, a totally B2B brand, take the leap in to BE. What's also interesting is how they've done exactly what they should strategically, by finding the elemants of their brand that need sustained dramatisation via narrative and translating them into a fun, shareable sitcom (yes, sitcom ...) that will appeal directly to their target audience.

We'll be able to see the growth of the show on YouTube. I've subscribed to Leap Year - something I almost never do - to see how this courageous move plays out over the summer. I recommend you do the same.

 

Social media, football and The Family ...

The Mafia - that most connected of organisations - has apparently been using test messaging via a popular football TV show to keep those behind bars in the loop.

My name is Michael ... and I'm an Apple addict

Well, I've taken the first step and put down the drugs.

I mean of course, that I almost bought - to the point of actually putting in the order and paying for it - an iPad for delivery in early June. 

I got over-excited after a rather good day at the office. I decided I needed a reward - deserved it indeed. I'd had THAT email - announcing the availability of iPads in the UK from May 28th.

I've gotten into the habit of glancing at THOSE emails briefly and binning them ... you know why. This one I kept, sensing that I might need to come back to it. And yesterday, after my moment of excitement, I surged through the process, put down £600 on my card, and logged off.

I couldn't sleep. For the first time, I felt that I'd been mugged by my own relationship with the Apple brand. Not that the iPad isn't a glorious piece of kit. But it's not - right now at least - for me. 

What put the lid on it for me was when I got the order confirmation back this morning. The May 28th availability had turned into a 2nd week of June delivery.

Reader, I've had enough. I love my MacBook Pro, I love my iPhone, I'm really excited about OS 4.0.

But I went back, cancelled the whole order, and I don't - really don't - think I'm in the market for an iPad.

As of now - one day at a time - I'm Apple sober.

New Pepsi ad cuts through ... but at what cost!?

Fan-made Pre ad hits harder than ...

Facebook Sets Deal to Provide Ad Data to Nielsen - WSJ.com

When will we hear the last of this? When I read that Nielsen was partnering with Facebook I thought "interesting: they're finally engaging with engagement". 

Far from it: this is just a polling proposition to ask users about display ads in FB and then, of course, produce the usual reports. What a big, expensive, 2-steps-back Yawn.

Don't feed the banks - they bite

David Stoughton of ValueKinetics writes:

Once again much hot air and argumentation between parliamentary committees and city grandees about the right regime for banking governance - or is that regulation, or perhaps structure, or ownership. Who knows, clearly this lot do not? All this talk is put sharply in focus by the return, in some quarters, of mega-bonuses for risk takers.  

Here's yet another viewpoint (but I buy this one).

Talking with a business analyst in the city the other day, I encountered a perspective that hadn't previously occurred to me, but that makes perfect sense now I get it. It is, of course, all about those complex products derivatives, and it takes a mathematician to spot it.

Put simply the whole theory behind derivatives and the way risk is priced rests on one fundamental assumption, that of perfect information. A not unreasonable assumption under ordinary conditions of electronic trading. Provided that assumption holds true, risk can be estimated and properly reflected in prices.

The problem arises because the financial instruments that are made possible in this environment hide information, some of them deliberately. For instance the, now notorious, CDOs (Collateralised Debt Obligations) were devised precisely for the purpose of hiding the risk in sub-prime mortgages.

Once the information is hidden the pricing of risk ceases to reflect the reality and the market is potentially destabilised. Under those conditions no-one, and I mean no-one, can or could price the risk or predict the point at which it all starts to unwind (this is not a matter of more rocket science - the system moves from complexity into chaos). On top of that all derivatives multiply any risks many times, so once it starts to unwind the whole house of cards comes down.

Danger, keep out

If this analysis is correct, and it does seem to make sense, then no amount of tinkering with governance, regulation or ownership is going to make the slightest difference. Only banning derivatives might work or, more specifically, outlawing financial instruments that hide risk. But, as my friend pointed out, there are lots of ways in which information can be hidden or its flow impeded, most of them unintentional. So, either the mathematical foundation of modern banking are challenged, or we resign ourselves to periodic bouts of banking instability of unpredictable proportions.

I don't see any politicians who will want to make this case - it would effectively spell the end of banking as we know it, with a reversion to the practices of as long ago as the fifties. A leap too far then for any of the players who have a say in what happens next. It won't be happening any time soon.

So, as I've said before - though perhaps with less clear justification - keep your money under the mattress, or put it in one of the retail banks offered by high street retailers. It's safer there, I promise.

Police assaulting protesters

Not sure about the whole underlying story, but this is incredibly ugly ... draw your own conclusions from this extended and startling footage.

Time to abandon the financial services Titanic

David Stoughton of ValueKinetics writes:

There is a spat going on between the chancellor, Alistair Darling, and the governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, about banks and their regulation. King says that a bank that is 'too big to fail' is too big, full stop. Alistair Darling merely wants tighter regulation.

Meanwhile Lib Dem treasury spokesman, Vince Cable, has properly identified a much bigger problem, the systemic risk to retail customers  - and given government guarantees, the general public - of mixing retail and investment banking in the same organisation.

There is yet another big issue not yet specifically identified by any of the parties to the current ding-dong, that of convergent business models. Banking in the West has become altogether too samey. There is a lack of diversity in the financial services sector that is in itself a huge risk, given the strong likelihood of disruptive change on top of recession. In short, as I have observed elsewhere, there is no longer sufficient variation in strategy and configuration for new business models adapted to changed circumstances to emerge - they, and we, all sink or swim together.

Alistair Darling is going to win on this round - government machismo is at stake almost as never before - but we should not be exposed to such systemic risk any more, and certainly not because a beleaguered government finds it impossible to back down.

Over to you

So here's the thing, vote with your money (or your overdraft). Move any accounts you have to institutions with alternative  models. The only big UK bank that, perforce, has a different model is HSBC (given their extensive holdings in areas of the world that do business differently) but one alternative is not enough. Santander, which once looked as if it might offer another has now conformed to the norm. There are options though, retailers with banking facilities - the supermarkets and a growing range of others - offer a real alternative. They have high asset ratios based, often, on extensive property portfolios, and they have a mixed risk profile that is less likely to experience systemic failure.

There are real signs that the bankers are ready, and rarin', to get back on the roller-coaster; time for us to get canny and step off it. Think before you bank!

"Minority Report" gets real at the Met

Alarmed, on a blog that's after all primarily about business strategy, to be writing for the second day running about abuses of citizen privacy.

The Telegraph - now apparently transforming into an investigative powerhouse for the people - reports the pride that the Met are taking in a new strategy of "preventative DNA capture".

Youth as young as 10 are being arrested, specifically in order that their DNA can be taken and stored as long as is legally permitted. Whatever that means ... little to me I must say. Any trust in such softeners is long gone.

This is a cynical "guilty unless you somehow manage to stay innocent" strategy, made all the more startling by the statement in the article by an officer who bluntly outlines the core argument: if you know we've got your DNA, you're that much less likely to commit a crime.

Of course the usual punch-pulling devices will be hard on the heels of this lunacy - only in certain circumstances etc etc - but given that the make or break decisions will one assumes migrate back through the system - via layers of similarly data-obsessed amoral nutters - to the very cabinet that's falling apart due to its own comical failure to observe the most basic code of behaviour ... Is this a case of "Trust Me ... I know where you live"?

Thanks for sharing!

Briefly, more worrying developments on the trust front. In certain UK locations, applicants for new passports are being asked questions regarding their credit record. There's apparently a partnership in place between the IPS and a credit agency: Equifax has been mentioned.

Extraordinarily galling is that some white sock grey shoe nutter on the IPS side claims - in the above linked article in Computer Weekly - that this is an example of how people are happy for data to be exchanged between public and private sector when they can get something in return: a passport!

The Open Rights Group - where I picked this one up - will no doubt be tracking this development. Am I the only person who's wondering how much longer we can put up with this - sadly no longer funny - inept creeping surveillance state we clearly now live in.

Be thankful ... and then worry a whole lot more

David Stoughton of ValueKinetics writes:

Reasons to be cheerful in the middle of a recession seem just the sort of 'bright-side of life' comments that can irritate the hell out of companions and hasten your untimely end. Still, in the light of the vision in War Inc. of how power is projected in the 21st century and, more importantly, by whom it is wielded, I dare to suggest we have been permitted a breather.

I'm not advising everyone to rush out and rent this film if they haven't seen it. It likes itself a lot, and the satire is rather blunted by the ego trips. Never mind that though. Although I chose it almost at random as a piece of escapism after a long day of training, it came as a timely reminder of where we might have been headed in the Bush era. Essentially a vision of perpetual war waged by corporations to control the agenda and feather their nests, it was of course not really about the future, but an exaggeration of the very real state of affairs in Iraq at that time.

No reason to think a change of president alone reduces the ambitions of greedy corporations who are 'too big to fail' (or to control) but, coupled with a sharp kicking on the bottom line and the promise of closer scrutiny, it does slow things down. As the world order fragments and the size and power of corporations as compared the state grows, the risk of some larger ones running amuck should still not be discounted.

So, whilst we obsess about our insalubrious political representatives, let's make sure that we don't lose sight of the greed and delusions of grandeur that brought down many of our banks and are certainly detectable in other supranational businesses.  We may yet see corporations 'creating realities on the ground' by intervening violently in the affairs of inconvenient countries. And it is not impossible that some of them will come to regard the state as a vehicle to command, in furtherance of their ambitions, rather than one that has any control over their actions.

When the realities of peak oil hit in the next boom - whenever that comes - there is going to be scope for some pretty unpleasant stuff that makes profiteering by acquiring property at public expense look tame. We all need to get our heads out of this entertaining side-show and look at the bigger picture while we can. Though I too welcome a a good laugh at the expense of those who have the arrogance to pretend they have the right to wield power over us, I'm a bit nervous about who is really holding the reins. It's that old trust thing again.

Mea culpa advertising - a "Sorry!" state of affairs ...

Interesting to see two quite iconic consumer brands - Marks and Spencer with its boob job, and the Evening Standard's Sorry campaign - happily stepping up and - shock horror - spending very serious media money apologising to consumers.

Traditionally this is the turf of the corporate communications folks ... spin territory rather than core branding. It speaks to me of a number of lurking communications issues going large:

1. Do it ... or have it done to you. Brands see now - very much the case with M&S's big boob - that failing to respond when consumers - with either warmth or hostility - open the dialogue is potentially hugely destructive.
2. Quality will out. If what you've been doing for your consumers doesn't come up to scratch and is hurting the business, admit it and build on the resulting goodwill to recreate the brand from ground up. Doesn't hurt, we note, in the case of the Standard, to have a Russian trillionaire writing the cheques, of course, but even so ...
3. The micromedia tail wags the macromedia dog. Social media - very much the case in the M&S boob scenario - is beginning to call the tune for big media.

And of course, what will be most interesting is to see how The New Transparency plays out elsewhere.

Now, about those MP's expenses? (But let's make sure the public purse isn't co-opted by the COI to fund the - perhaps inevitable - mea culpa's to come from Parliament!)

Data and conservatism

David Stoughton of ValueKinetics writes:

What, I am tempted to ask, does the UK government not understand about an admonition to stop hoarding DNA data? Or, for that matter, about the huge waste of public money that is the ID card scheme. But such questions are fruitless. We are faced with a regime that perceives the gathering and storage of data, any data, as a universal panacea. "Can't think of anything to do about it? No problem! Just collect the data, then we can tell people it's all under control"

That data will solve any problem is almost a religious creed, and not just amongst tired, fractious, cabinet ministers bereft of other ideas, it's becoming an imperative of action-man politics. As with all political shibboleths, we are shortly going to witness the very real downside. No! Not I'm not referring to more of our personal details left on trains, or emailed directly to the fraudsters without passing Go, I'm talking about a serious loss of competitiveness and the stifling of innovation.

Data is, in reality, being used to centralise power. Not just in the executive, though that's the epicentre but in the, otherwise challenged, institutions of the state like the NHS, the police and local government.  And we, the public, are being sold the story that this is a good thing. Treatments (well, OK, waiting times) will improve, crimes will be solved, terrorists apprehended before they can act. Without the data it's all going to get worse, much worse, believe me and so on, and on ....

Evidence for all this is very scant - indeed most of the improvements that ministers point to prove illusory or gained at the expense of other, equally important, benefits - but polls indicate that the public has been persuaded that data hoarding is essential to their health and security. Meanwhile the very real problems that the belief in centralised, institutionally-administered, data are storing up are off the radar.

Here's the issue. Centralised data, in the hands of the few, is being used to embed and conserve existing practice. It is, whether intentionally or not, a way of resisting change. All the evidence shows that real, IT-enabled, change happens bottom up. There are obvious examples out there, social media and mobile culture among them. There are also many, less evident but more telling, examples in the worlds of medicine and finance amongst others.

As a special report, 'Medicine goes digital', in last week's Economist pointed out, there are medical facilities in India and Thailand where digital patient records are far in advance of anything we have here - at a fraction of the cost - precisely because these initiatives are not centralised ... and, also because they are not centrally directed, such schemes are evolving fast. Commentators in the report agree that the impending medical revolution will happen only when patients, who know far more about what's happening to them now than the doctors can, become central to the process. That is, anywhere but here, where the old adage,"doctor knows best", is reinforced by control of the data.

Similar developments in finance, like Zopa, are not going to be initiated by banks, especially when governments regulate them to death. It is likely that stricter regulatory regimes will mean that real developments in personal finance - the ones that will replace our current, broken, systems - will also take place anywhere but here. Indeed I hear that Thailand is, once again, the unlikely venue for some interesting new thinking. I wonder also about the work of Dr Capra on mobilising distributed data, previously referred to (Security is so yesterday); will that be killed by an insistence on centralisation and regulation?

I could go on, but the point is this. Centralised, data-driven, heavily-regulated systems are the tools of the new conservatism. They are being used to entrench institutions in which the public is enjoined to place unquestioning trust, working against a tide of distrust in institutions that seemed almost unstoppable a few years ago. These schemes militate against innovation, and they jeopardise more than our personal data and our freedoms, they threaten our prosperity too.

The "distributed me" and the personal impact of surveillance

Prompted by the quite astounding - you couldn't make this stuff up - report from the BBC today regarding The Home Office's apparent "collusion" with Phorm, to think and post some more about this issue of privacy and trust, into which a number of hitherto unrelated threads are converging.

Our recent postings on these diverse concerns are here, here and here.

The Home Secretary was yesterday reported as demanding new laws to match new communications realities.

"Communications data is an essential tool for law enforcement agencies to track murderers, paedophiles, save lives and tackle crime," Ms Smith said. "Advances in communications mean that there are ever more sophisticated ways to communicate and we need to ensure that we keep up with the technology being used by those who seek to do us harm."

Well, hmmm. OK.

But I want to make a different - I believe both more subtle and more powerful point here.

Accepted - with some reservations - that law seeks to meet criminals with comparably sophisticated resources. Sounds alarmingly similar to the "big gun > bigger gun > biggest gun" escalation we've seen in the past, an argument that we'll lose if we can't outgun the bad guys. However ...

A cultural and social change that connectness brings, that is given little coverage, is the fact that, just as networks and rich-featured mobile extend my reach and range in terms of communication, they also carry my very Identity out into this world that The Home Office sees as so hostile.

Pre-Web Smiley-styley spy games - and the various forms of surveillance they entailed - largely stopped short of invading citizens' personal space. Today when say BT stores details of my usage of Facebook, LinkedIn and my various email accounts and web surfing (I have to say I just don't trust that this much-protested "contact not content" stance is entirely honest), my new "distributed self", as opposed to the one that pre-connectedness was more or less confined to my own physical body, my usage of the Royal Mail and the odd (Bakelite) phone call, is very tangibly recorded.

Just as the medium is the message, surely the contact to a significant extent, IS the content.

My experience of being human is transformed, highly distributed, across both space and time through connectedness. With or without the obfuscation and dissembling we're so weary of, just because these kind folks are not (yet) kicking our doors in doesn't mean they're not, in a very real sense, inside our heads.

"The data. The data." (After Conrad. And Copolla, I guess)

Feel compelled to comment, albeit briefly and without enormous insight, on the sheer amount of security / trust / other sneaky stuff, that's in the headlines all of a sudden:

• The Labour blogging scandal, good old dirty tricks with a 2.0 spin on it: ugly and stupid ... and got caught - the hat trick;
• Amazon's clumsy handling of the gay authors issue ...
• ... alongside their - I tend to think commendable - Phorm-blocking move;
• The UK Goverment, in January and effective from March, sliding the ISP citizen-consumer spying law into place, with the usual guff about "only in certain circumstances will this be used" ... see David Stoughton's excellent post on this blog for the full smart dirty on that one;
• And just today, Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys urges the dropping of hundreds of thousands of DNA records of entirely innocent people that the government and its cronies are saving up ... "just in case" ... Just in case, er, what? We suddenly run out of real villains and have to go after reg'lar folks?

Time - as I've done having discussed the ISP-bollox with m'learned friend Brian Millar - to give the Open Rights Group a bit of support.

PS something else that's been niggling me for many months now ... the stupidity of so-called smart advertising tools. Contextual, behavioural or whatever ...

Why on earth - when I'm reading about Nokia's 90% quarterly decline in profits (in itself an extremely important piece of business news) would I want to see an O2 ad offering me deals on Nokia phones? It makes, for example, blind cold-calling at home seem positively sparkling! This takes me back to my querulous post of a few days ago on how the future is no longer digital.

Living in the goldfish bowl

David Stoughton of ValueKinetics writes:

When I was eleven and twelve I experienced a crisis with religion. Although not from an especially religious family, I went to schools where religion featured prominently - in the syllabus, not just at morning prayers. Indeed, I recall winning a scripture prize around that time.

The crisis, when it came, was one of claustrophobia tinged with paranoia. I had been fed on a diet of stories about the omnipotent, all-seeing, god who watched over us. One who knows not just what you’re up to … but what you’re thinking as well. No chance of a respite, nowhere you could call your own. Oh, and there was a rider, ‘anything you think can, and will, be used against you in a higher court’.

The reminder that, “details of user e-mails and net phone calls will be stored by internet service providers (ISPs) from Monday under an EU directive,” recalls that time strongly for me. We live in an age where surveillance is the leitmotif of our culture.

We are all familiar with the facts. Data on us is gathered, tracked, and stored by a score of, more or less authorised, agencies; and we are under continuous observation, “ (with) more than 4 million surveillance cameras, the UK is the most watched nation in the world, in relation to the size of our population”. Shortly, ID cards and biometrics will extend both the scope of the data kept about us, and the range of those who have access to it.

I know that, occasionally, the data this surveillance tracks helps to keep us secure. Only yesterday more suspected terrorists, who had clearly been under surveillance for many weeks, were picked up – rather hastily, after an entirely typical security blunder. More often though it is used, and abused, for altogether less defensible purposes. “Councils in England and Wales have used controversial spying laws 10,000 times in the past five years, figures obtained by the Liberal Democrats show… officials have been using it to spy on suspected dog fouling, littering and other minor offences.”

More alarmingly if, like me, the goldfish bowl scares you, “a survey of more than 180 local authorities found:

• 1,615 council staff have the power to authorise the use of Ripa (Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act).
• 21% (or 340) of these staff are below senior management grade”

But, of course, it’s not just government that wants our data; business gets in on the act too, and they are just as indifferent to principle. “Nearly half of UK companies could be breaching the Data Protection Act (DPA) through the misuse of customer data,” said a report in 2006. And then there are the hackers. They want to know all about you too – well, obviously!

So I’m beginning to feel like I’m back in that goldfish bowl – but this time being watched from all sides. Shortly I expect to wake up to hear one of these agencies whispering, “we know what you’re thinking”, and then I’ll be thrown back completely into that late-childhood paranoia.

Can inducing paranoia in the populace really be excused on the grounds of its occasional benefits? Even if it can, where is the respect? Sometimes I find myself thinking the hackers have more respect than government. At least they have the decency to attribute some value to our data. They buy and sell the stuff. Unlike government, which shares your data with almost anyone who can offer a half convincing excuse - sorry, I mean reason. Or just leaves it on the train.

Orange in London - why no 3G

Have just started a Facebook group for victims of Orange UK's inability to fix their 3G service in Central London. It's been about 2 months now, and when I ring the service folks they talk rubbish about when the service should be back up, engineers on the case etc ... what the hell is going on here?

How about that World Service!

Worth commenting that the BBC is capturing 58% of all online audiences for the World Cup ... a big enough number to get me blogging again after an embarrassingly long gap!

Important post from Umair on edge competencies

Quoted in full.

Watch reconstruction happen in real-time: Digg Spy.

A viscerally powerful demonstration of value shifting to the edge: in this case, outside the boundaries of the firm itself.

A viscerally powerful demonstration of the most important concepts behind 2.0 strategy, and why they fundamentally upend the orthodoxies of 1.0 strategy: without understanding why openness, sharing, transparency, and zero intelligence, are deep sources of economic value creation - not just fuzzy, feelgood notions - Digg Spy, or reconstructors like it, couldn't even be conceptualized.

Finally, a viscerally powerful demonstration of strategy decay and competence traps - why the media industry is unable to leverage these new economics to build edge competencies: because the assumptions that must be overturned are deeply embedded in their core businesses, strategies - and ways of making of the world.

This is an important post; if you're a regular reader, I hope you'll click over, check the link for a while, watch it evolve, then come back here and re-read the post.

White House hails new energy sources ... supports failing ad industry

New Scientist on those Superbowl ads ...

Brain scans of Super bowl viewers suggest that certain commercials more effectively excite the brain’s empathy and reward centres, making them "light up".

Now, if we can just make the ads more interesting than watching paint dry, we're home!

RFID injections ...

... both cool and scary.

Two employees have been injected with RFID chips this week as part of a new requirement to access their company's datacenter.

Idol kicks butt on Grandmas ... I'm sorry - Grammy's

From the beeb ...

American Idol got nearly twice as many viewers as the televised Grammys ceremony when they clashed on US TV, audience figures have shown.

Talent show Idol, the most watched US TV programme, was seen by 28m viewers when it went head to head with the annual awards event.

A delicate little note from AdRants re new PVR-avoidant ads from NBC and Goodyear ...

This is ... well put:

We turn the page, you add an insert. We ban billboards from our state, you fly banners over our beaches. We hang up on your telemarketing, you call back with answer machine message leaving auto-bots. We install an email spam filter, you send spam to weblog comments and trackbacks. We stop reading comment-spammed blogs, you launch spam blogs whose sole purpose is to peddle your crap. We block your pop ups, you fuck with technology to serve them anyway. We stop watching TV to spend more time with online gaming, you plaster our games with advertising. We skip our ads with our DVR, you plaster commercial graphics all over the screen during programming. We become immune to advertising, you launch a hoard of buzz marketers on our ass.

Proliferating this madness or simply launching the inevitable next sorte against the ad-skipping public, Goodyear, in a DVR-proof advertising deal with NBC, will morph its actual blimp into animated versions of the blimp, floating it across the screen during Olympic programming to deliver commercial messaging promoting the company's TripleTred and SilentArmor tire technology. Surely, now, the time is undoubtedly ripe now for an enterprising company to develop a DVR-embedded technology which will swipe anything but actual programming from the screen just as several online ad blocking technologies now do on the web.

While this new advertising endeavor may be met with skepticism and repulsion, advertising, after all, does make the free world go 'round. We may hate it but without it, we'd be looking at a pay per view world with monthly cable TV bills upwards of $500. Oh, excuse me, we have to go. The people from Hooters are here to paint a gigantic pair of Hooters-branded breasts on our driveway so as to reap the benefits of Google Maps.

Rubbish Superbowl ads ...

... say no more.

Bebop finds gig listings from your iTunes list

Great little idea this - check it out.