Understand me correctly, I will be one of those walking around with one, and I will tell everyone they they’re stupid not to get one.
However, I was, a bit disappointed. That’s it? No USB port, no running parallel programs etc. Come on, if I’m working on a presentation in Keynote, I might want to have some pdfs that I can flip trough, as well as having some webpage up and running. For now, the iPad IS an over-sized iPod Touch – even if it hurts for me to say it.

But, then again. Apple always listen – or a least that is what they make us think – to their customers.

Look at the first iPhone. Headphone connector was made so that only Apple signature ones would work. No 3G, and you couldn’t even send SMS to multiple partners. But, a year later Steve Jobs was in front of an audience telling us how much their customers had screamed about this and – presto – here was everything they wanted.

People were standing up, applauding, cheering, for something Nokia, Sony Ericsson, and LG had implemented during the beginning of this millennium.

Apple knew this. They are not stupid – on the contrary – they KNOW what they are up against.

They know that MANY of their user will buy a new iPhone just because of the 3G, or just to say that thy are one of the “chosen few” (oooh) to have the LATEST and the GREATEST of whatever Apple throws at them.

It wasn’t until this Keynote that it struck me how Steve and his comrades do to make the audience, including myself, cheer and scream of joy – for something so simple as sending text messages to more than one friend, or something as and iPad.

Listen to how they talk.

- It’s magical, wonderful, most technological invention yet, beautiful, special…etc. They do not mention what the technological things are, or mean, nor do they show how it measures compared to other – who cares?

When Microsoft presents a new OS, they come out, full guns blazing and then *boom* there you have it.

Not Apple, they show it, talk about, Steve Jobs takes a seat in a nice, comfortable chair, and show you – how you open an application that looks like a book case. He even takes the time to show you how to read a book – Ted Kennedy’s biography to add.

You sit there, on needles, almost wishing you could buy one now – because you want to read a book as well – just like Steve. Who cares that you have ten books that you can pick up and read right now – they are as good as firestarters when thinking about reading on an iPad.

So Apple will probably sell more of these, and in a year they’ll introduce the iPad X, with USB, maybe a lite version of Snow Leopard, double the hard drive, and a signature USB memory stick – only $69.99 at Apple Store.

And you will read about it here.

The text will be written on an old iPad, and I will once again praise Apple for everything.

Apple 19 – Johan’s common sense 1!

Though it might not teach you THAT much on the subtitle topic – What makes them click? However, there are a lot of facts that one can use, apply, or just throw around to sound smart and cool. And I must say that I learned a thing or two concerning how a web store works, but the info I will bring with me is far more than that. It is how I function in purchase, as well as social situations.

To describe the problem, Mr. Hastings says that:

The trick is finding problems in your business that you can package cleanly, where you can provide a sample data set and a very clear evaluation metric.

What the cash prize of $1,000,000 gave the company was a discrete math problem that will predict future movie ratings using past movie ratings. A must add to the prize itself, is that it was given to a group of people, who many of them, had never meet. Someone started out with a solution, posted it on the Internet, got help from someone else. So it continued until they had solved it, and they all got their share of the dough.

Reed also gives a short glimpse at the future and says that they are now working on is to determine the movies that will appeal to a customer who don’t rate movies online, at all.

Imagine that this was your company. What would you use this form of information to?

Could you use it to test whether or not a certain product would be a fail or not, or maybe which demographic it would be best fit for.

How about the way the solution was thought up, using several different people, who might not even live in the same country, know each other, or might not even meet, to help you with your development.

Interesting thoughts came up while listening to the Podcast Brand Fast-trackers with Peter Hirshberg, Co-Founder and Chairman of The Conversation Group.

Or, maybe not as much thoughts as a “my creator, he might be on to something here” experience.

They conversation concerned that companies must work hard to keep their brand updated to the ever changing market. Though this is a not new finding, what struck a chord with me was when Peter Hirshberg said that too many companies are now updating to Web 2.0 and will soon understand that they need to use Marketing 2.0 (applying social media in their marketing) as well. However, what a company must do while doing all this, is to update their company to COMPANY 2.0.

I never heard anyone talk about it, and that might be the reason for why I became so excited. It is easy to say that one should update to web 2.0 and marketing 2.0, because that only means to exchange one part of the company structure or plan, for another. The old marketing plan can be changed of the course of a month or maybe a long weekend at some hip resort.

But, can your company take all this? Does your customer get all this, or will they be lost because too much of what they once knew about your company are now lost due to all of this.

Think of your company as a computer that you bought in the year 2000. Think about the design, the size of the hard drive, the processor, the CD-ROM and all other features.

Now think of the same computer today. To make it work, you have probably updated the hard drive to get more size since files are bigger, and you need more data. You have bought more RAM to operate the huge programs you are running everyday. This means that you have probably update the programs, and the operating system.
The only thing that is still what it was is the shell that surrounds all this.

You might work or started your own company a few years ago, and up until now you have done these changes that one have to do. When the market grew, so did you – more people being hired, and you had to get educated on how things that you ones knew by heart, work in today are setting. The company has a website, if you are a hip company you might have a Facebook group or a blog that is used to communicate to your customers. And right about now, it is time to operate the marketing plan as well.

The problem is, that no one of your customers sees this, or the market. They just see the same company that ha been there for many years. Same CEO, same theme, same logo. The attributes that forms the structure of the company are still the same, and people might find that as negative.

IBM found themselves in a situation were their company was not needed anymore. They had changed everything INSIDE the company, but to really make that leap that they needed, they had to change the outside, the shell as well.

It is easy for a author, researcher or mr/mrs Know-it-All to use expressions as “2.0″. But what about the ones who are supposed to do all this, the companies? It is time that some one stopped talking about “all the cool” things, and focused on what this means for the market.

For more on this subject, read these posts from other blogs, Carl Rosenberg & Passionate.

Here’s my question that I asked for the class, with some-what of an answer. I will come back to this later, since this will be part of my master thesis.

By introducing two forms of sponsorships, one time or ongoing, could companies receive maximum out of sponsoring?

Question will be answered by using all four articles, plus an additional doctorial thesis by Fredrik Törn, How established brands can enhance their strength, interestingness, and vitality”. In his report, he conclude that incongruence in sponsoring might work better than if there is a connection between the brands, however, this only works once since the person who views the commercial a second time then has had the time to make a connection, thus won’t react the same once again. This is a slight opposite finding than the Cornwell et. al. article.

This lead me to think that an event could have two different kind of contracts, depending on how the actual sponsors that are plausibly related to the sponsored property, are more likely to be correctly identified an recognized. Fredrik Törn uses the example of Red Bull, the energy drink, sponsoring a Shakespeare play. Though there is no connection between the formats, nor would an avid Shakespearian viewer bring a Red Bull to the play, this would work as an eye-opener for a viewer, thus earn Red Bull more brand recognition, than if they were to sponsor another sport event.

Thus, at a sport event, sign a contract with a company that will give them mayor exposure at one particular time, but make it clear enough that people will recognize it. At a Baseball game, put a sign for ballet classes, at the ballet, why not for a WWE match on pay-per-view? Then, as mentioned in the Johar et. al. the more a person watches the commercial/ad the more likely is it that the person will recognize the company as a true sponsor. Therefore, one should have another contract that companies can sign if they wish to get a lot of exposure but for a longer time, in case of sports an entire season, etc. Ad this to the Olson et. al. 2009 about different spots to have the company logo and the connection to the event.

During a most wonderful lunch at Aquavit in Tokyo, me and my friend Tommy took it on our self to introduce a Swedish drinking song for the Japanese business men who enjoyed their food. So, the song was done to suite their culture.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give to you, the Helan Går!

Now, what do I want to say with all this. Well, the week in Tokyo has been wonderful, I have meet wonderful people, I have seen places that I couldn’t have imagined a few days ago, and I have learned a lot of life lessons.

But also, when communicating with another culture it is important to understand how you come out. A western country makes one type of noise, the Japanese another. So we have to understand the other cultures noise, adopt it to our way of thinking, and send it right back, without changing the core values.

People dream. People have ideas. People wish for things to happen. And then there are those who just go for it. They never let these “barriers” (that seems to exist around others) hold them back, but instead they sit down/stand up and create/do/make something.

Ted Valetin is one of these people. I came across him out of pure coincident after searching for blogs with smart, interesting, inspiring content – and there he was. With more then 20 websites on the Internet (18 of these within his map project), and several added soon, this man is becoming an Internet phenomenon underdog.

Maybe underdog is an understatement, but I believe that too many people are underestimating this man’s full potential.

I decided to write about this man two days after he released his site Blogopedia.com. The idea is so simple, yet so f-ing brilliant that there is no need for me explain it. But for those who wants to know, the idea is simple:

Blogipedia collects facts and opinions from blogs.
If a blogger writes that something IS something, for instant “Cheese is good”, then that text will be shown on Blogopedia within a couple of days.
After that can our members tag the text as fact, positive, negative, or neutral.

To see if it works, I have decided to test with a couple of strings.

1. Ted Valentin är en sann entreprenör.
2. Ted Valentin är en inspirationskälla.
3. Johan Olsson är ägaren av State the Obvious, en blogg om kommunikation.
4. Johan Olsson är född 1982, han gillar att bygga med LEGO, åka berg-och-dalbanor, och spela gitarr.

For more information on Ted Valentin, visit him on www.tedvalentin.com.

I just received some very interesting information from one of the professors here at BI, C. A. Solberg. This was also mentioned by professor, Eric Olson.

In a recent study done, concerning customer orientations, it might not be a good thing to actually have a two-way communication with your customer.

“It can even be dangerous” to quote on of them.

The reason might be that your customer does not have a single clue of what your are asking them to tell you, because they do not understand the products potential .

They mentioned a technological product, and an IT service.

If you are a producer of a technological product, you should try to have a two-way communication with your potential customers. They can give you important advise on how to develop the product.

However, if you are developing IT software, services etc., studies show that it actually sets you back more, or that by surveying your customer about future development, will set you more back financially than what you would generate from the study. This is because the common people tend not to have knowledge, or an understanding of what can be done. They might say – “Change the banner into red, instead of blue.” Not because that would make it better but because it is the only thing they can think of.

I am looking forward to read this report once I get my hands on it.

If you ask a customer what it wants and the customer does not have an answer, that probably mean that:

• The customer did not understand the question.
• It has not idea what it can get.

These are two VERY interesting step stones for you as a company.

1. It gives you a heads up what you are missing in your communication with your customer/clients.
2. You can start showing what you are capable of.

Start communicating!