Regardless of my essential antipathy to most project management systems, I have recently turned to a very sophisticated, multiuser, web deployed project management system called dotProject.  The system is very flexible and lends itself to the creation of projects that can be fluid and managed by individual contributors via a dashboard that presents them with to do lists automatically generated form the projects entered into the system.

Though there is a relatively steep learning curve for those that have to manage projects, it is very easy to train individual contributors.  It has all the functionality you would expect and includes Gantt charts, calendars and all the tools you would expect short of sophisticated resource levelling tools.  Just make sure to run it on an open source OS, I recommend Ubuntu server.  Check it out here 

The 8830 is the first RIM device I have used in quite a while and it is much slimmer and stylish than my current Treo, the carrier coverage easily beats Sprint (Though an equivalent voice and data plan from Verizon is more expensive) and it is easier to use than my Treo for day to day activities.  For example, start typing on the main screen and the device figures out if the keystrokes map to a number or the name of one of your contacts and displays the choices.  Contextual menus are never far away and there are no delays in moving from application to application.  I thought I would miss the touchscreen, but the trackball proves to be a much better navigation experience than having to move your fingers up to the touchscreen.

The device runs on Verizon’s CDMA network in the US and roams to GSM networks in Europe.  Now if only they offered the Pearl in a similar configuration, I think that I would be 100% sold…Check out a full video review I found on youtube:

Jeff Han has set up a company to commercialize the technology.

Check out a new video here

Many of the thoughts expressed below were thematic to this year’s show. Naming all speakers, panelists and moderators that contributed to my interpretations would be excessive. I credit the show organizers and presenters for a very informed few days and offer apologies in advance for using a few direct quotes without citing source.

To state the obvious: The common thread to the ad:tech 2006 NYC conference sessions was web 2.0 and social networking–no surprise. (It would be fair to mention that the viral case study of the year is the Diet Coke and Mentos “science guys”. And the media darling is certainly YouTube’s purchase by Google.) The question around the topic of social networking is: “is it real or a fad”? Is this the tipping point or Bubble Part Deux?

The best definition of “viral” I’ve heard in a while has to be “bored at work network”. This is the new demographic target when attempting to create the next thing that will catch web-fire. But as an advertiser that has been around a bubble or two, the other tenet of the day rings familiar: It’s not the medium it’s the message–the idea comes first then the execution.

Things aren’t really that different than web 1.0 after all. We’ve gone from “We need a web site”, to: “We need a social network, community-based, viral video idea to sell our widgets”. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. We need to consider the audience and we need to respect how savvy they are to what’s legit or staged with the specific intent to go viral. We need to connect with the online consumer, measure the experience and use web sites as surrogates for sales.

Successful viral is still mostly about funny. A baseball bat to the groin will always be funny. But as soon as you try to sell the bat it becomes a funny ad. It’s instantly contextualized. Will the public care as much about the Mentos/Coke guys now that they are being paid by Coke? We’ll see. This is, perhaps, beside the point as long as it’s being seen. But what is the measure? If 40,000 people download an ad is that a success? 100,000? 1,000,000? What qualifies as a success online compared to how we measure an ad on television? Maybe the answer is the audience itself. On television you target a specific demographic, but a wide spectrum of people end up seeing the ad. Maybe the bored at work network is the new bullseye on the prime time audience target.

Where are the media dollars being spent? Clearly, more is going into online. Budgets once reserved for television are finding their way to the online space. Case in point: Pontiac launched the G5 as an online campaign only. This is a trend worth watching as the new measures for success gets defined over time.

Some predictions at ad:tech about the “Anywhere Consumer” put the focus once again on the message first, then onto the challenge of delivering it. The important thing is that the message needs to take into account the new convenience culture. It’s not as simple as moving media spend from television to online when there are MP3 players, PDAs, myriad mobile devices and in environment media to consider. I’m not suggesting we create commercials for iPods–or maybe I am–many iPods play video so the vehicle is in place. But certainly there is an opportunity for messaging at the point of download or reinforced messaging within the content itself. The point is that today’s consumer is a highly mobile target–they’re not just sitting in front of the TV waiting for commercials to happen.

Big Cable and Telcos want us to subscribe to their infrastructure with all its “structured” limitations–think digital on-demand cable–on the surface it feels dynamic, but everything is managed end-to-end by the cable provider. There’s choice, but no dialogue other than tracking customer’s habits. Consumer-based technologies are the ones to watch for–technologies developed with the mobile consumer’s behaviors and preference for flexibility in mind. VOIP feels better to the consumer, despite having to pay for the service, because it still benefits from a “free” vibe due to its use over the internet. It is a great example of a tomorrow technology today.

The talk about the future of advertising was primarily centered on TV. The prediction is that in the future ads will be fewer and better and people will be more willing to watch–imagine, advertising Nirvana! Today nobody wants to watch the 8 minutes of commercials during a half-hour sitcom. Ad space in the future may be purchased the same for all mediums. Same price for TV, web, etc.? Hard to imagine, but the theory is that it will be in more places, more accurately targeted, thus more relevance in shorter bursts across “everywhere”.

A last note on social networking. The ad:tech pundits say to watch not for the next massive networks of millions of people, but instead watch as the trend comes back around to lots of smaller conversations. Hopefully some of these conversations will be about brands. Who really owns them anyway? The consumer. As advertisers we need to be willing to let go of some aspects of the brand more than we’re generally comfortable. If brand residue and blog bling are what advertisers are after, that can’t come from a 30 second TV spot alone. It comes from also letting the brand exist where it fits naturally, in unfiltered ways, in the hands of the consumer. Scary thought perhaps, but it’s out there anyway. Tapping into this and embracing, dare I say creating, the gestalt might be the dominant future of branding.

When I was growing up in the late sixties/early seventies, the term generation gap was always front and center as the country was roiled by what seemed at times to be an incipient civil war across generational lines. The fact that we no longer hear the term bandied about on the press does not mean however that generational schisms have disappeared. Peer just for a minute into the world of a teenager, and you will see them floating in a technology bubble that would have been inconceivable to those of us old enough to have lived through Watergate. Between the cell phones, texting, pervasive access to the Internet and an ever expanding market for video games, you will also find a category of entertainment with the unwieldy moniker of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games, MMORPG’s for short. They represent the most socially disruptive technology to have gained a solid foothold in the new millennium, they are already creating a vast generational gap, and they are going to impact your business directly.

Many of the most popular video games, even console based games, have an online component where player may hook up together over an Internet connection and play together, often in teams or clans. These games are one dimensional though, they are immersive, but they are essentially sophisticated shoot em up’s, a prime example is Halo (http://www.gamespot.com/xbox/action/halo2/review.html?q=halo) These games hook kids as tweeners and leads them on to more all encompassing immersive games, where you lead a parallel life through an online representation of your persona called an avatar. The most popular MMORPG’s currently are World of Warcraft (http://www.worldofwarcraft.com) with seven million users and Second Life (http://www.secondlife.com) with one million members and growing at 10 to 15% monthly. Users essentially live parallel lives in these universes where the work, make, buy and sell virtual goods and even real estate, sometimes in real world currency over E-Bay. It is estimated that the total economic activity inside these games is expected to surpass the billion dollar mark (that is real hard currency transactions folks) by 2008. The cyberspace first described by Neal Stephenson in the seminal cyberpunk novel Snow Crash is becoming a reality.

Over the past couple of weeks, Second Life has been burning up the news wires with the likes of Cisco and Sun joining American Apparel and Wells Fargo in having varying presences in that virtual world. This week the jump of commercial enterprise to cyberspace has been legitimized as Reuters has opened a presence on what is rapidly becoming its own small country. Commercial presences range from traditional billboard advertising, interestingly enough mostly end-user generated, to stores like American Apparel (no shopping there yet though) to provision of branded game elements like Reuters free heads up news display and branded community news space.

As science fiction rapidly becomes reality, you need to take steps to make sure that you are prepared for it:

• Connect with Second Life and other MMORPGs and explore their current partnership deals.
• Include virtual world advertising in you interactive budgets.
• Consider establishing a virtual presence in Second Life if only for the power of press coverage. There are huge opportunities right now to do something really innovative.
• Designate someone to stay on top of this market, imagine how well you would have done if you had been forewarned in 1993 of the power of the web.

CNET points out the positive and negatives of community generated advertising videos on YouTube. Agencies fear consumers taking over the brands image on the Internet as evidenced by the Volkswagen ‘terrorist’ video last year, on the other hand imitation is a sincere form of flattery and a cheap way to extend the brands’ reach.