Teenagers eschew newspapers

A report on how teenagers use technology, written by a 15 year old intern at Morgan Stanley, created huge waves of interest in the city when it was published in full on their website. If you want to know what technology is hot and what is not for the teenage community, check out his full report. This may be a slightly irrelevant thought, but why is a fifteen year old working as an intern at Morgan Stanley in the first place and not out enjoying football with his mates?  In fact they are probably ahead of the game.  Alex Linde wrapped it up neatly in his blog -What if you want to know what’s going on in the world? A newspaper is now nearly the worst way of finding out.

* Newspaper – what the editor thinks was important yesterday.
* TV – what the director thinks is important today.
* Blog – pretty much everything that happened today.
* Twitter – what’s happening right now.

Female Blackbird singing

If you are running an ecommerce store, then Sitemaker’s twitter stream offer some excellent daily tweets with their ‘e-commerce thought for the day’. Here is an example: When using technology on the website, don’t forget the commercial reality, basically it’s still just people shopping. How easy it is to forget that very simple truth! One of the most successful footwear e-commerce stores Zappos looks a bit clunky on the screen, but that is because it is totally customer focussed. Customer feedback, You Tube videos, Twitter stream, Live customer support – it has the lot.  But they haven’t done too badly – they have just been brought by Amazon for $928 million

Not another bulletpoint..........

I recently endured a series of ‘Death by PowerPoint’ presentations by a major global brand.  We’ve all been there. Traped in uncomfortable chairs as bullet point after bullet point trundles up the screen, with the speaker simply parroting the the text from a laptop screen that the audience can quite easily read for themselves.  Occasionally there was a snappy transition to ease the monotony.  It was not a complex message.  After the fifth consecutive presentation I felt I had to speak to someone before losing the will to live. I met one of the brand’s UK team and said ‘You could say all this in about three minutes using simple 2D animation.  You don’t need to take 30 minutes. Lee and Sachi Lafever do a brilliant job with their Common Craft videos. ‘Ah, nice idea’ they said ‘but we don’t have the budget for animation at the moment’. ‘Look’ I said ‘This isn’t Disney – no dwarfs, deer or pixellated toys are involved – just some simple paper cut outs and a clever script’.  Alas – they weren’t interested.  There needs to be an EU Directive shrink-wrapped round every issue of PowerPoint.  Use very sparingly or not at all. PowerPoint can clog the imagination, seriously harm your creativity and shorten the lives of your audience.