“Every advertising should be measurable. You should be able to adjust it, right? Then you should be able to tune it, track it, track the right users, and target to the right people.” – Susan Wojcicki, Google Ad Chief (from In the Plex by Steven Levy)
Mel Karmazin calls this “fucking with the magic.” And sixty years ago, it was magic.
In May, 2010, I imagined an iPhone app I called the Blab-o-Meter. It only took a year for someone to pick up on the idea. They call it the Talk-o-Meter
“Some people don’t realize when they dominate others in a discussion. Make sure each of two participants get the same talk time with this App! After a brief calibration of both voices, the App recognizes who’s speaking and keeps track of the speaker’s talk time. The result is displayed as colored percent bars. The screen update can be set to one, two or five minute intervals.”
If you can find an earlier reference to this idea, let me know. I suspect The Coffee Zone is too noisy for the app but I’ll give it a try.
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When I heard that James Arness had died my first thought was, “How could he still be alive?!” It’s just that Gunsmoke was so long ago.
So I dug out this photo taken when Craig Watson and I “interviewed” the popular TV actor when he appeared at the Sikeston Bootheel Rodeo. KBOA news guys John Reeder did the recording and Craig (on the right) and I asked some questions. Marshall Dillon signed my Fanner 50 holster.
A couple of nights ago I was browsing through some old Day-Timers (calendars) and came across a few memories from 1994:
April 26 – A meeting with some folks at MOREnet and the University of Missouri J-School. My first look at a web browser (Mosaic). I was blown away. The Internet was a very different creature before the browser.
June 20 – Sent check to someone named Bill Bahr a check for $1,700 for a used Toshiba notebook computer. Base price was $1,400 plus $300 for a fax/modem PCMCIA card.
I think it was this one. It was a heavy mother but I was giddy at the idea of being able to take a computer with me on the road.