webguerillas recently launched a new service called “world trend monitor“. the wtm is supposed to filter relevant trends for you – a radar for current trends all over the world if you don’t find the time to dig through numerous resources by yourself.

“the world trend monitor (wtm) is a information service that bundles the worldwide most important trends in the categories marketing, fashion and shopping in a monthly trend monitor. trend scouts are spread all over the world to feed the wtm by screening thousands of exclusive sources – offline and online. the trends are found where they first appear at the very front of the news chain. a subscription model of the world trend monitor varies in the categories fashion, marketing and shopping and is available as print versions, pdf documents or as online trend-archive.”

an english version of the site isn’t available yet, but will be available soon. i tried the free marketing trend monitor (see pdf download in the abo section) and i like this news source for new trends, visit www.worldtrendmonitor.com for more information.

more trend sources: trnd, springwise, trendhunter and trendwatching.

(via brainwash)

[tags: worldtrendmonitor, world trend monitor, wtm, trend, trends, webguerillas]

a couple of weeks ago i posted the clip about the viral learning center on how to create viral videos. here is an entertaining and simple way how to explain viral and word of mouth marketing – or better “how to sell soap”.

great work amos, love it!

(via vm-people)

[tags: viral marketing, vm-people, thomas zorbach, wom, word-of-mouth]

bloggers like to play games and the blogosphere is a perfect playground including a worldwide audience. there are blog memes and alternate reality games for instance. a couple of minutes ago i stumbled over “praschls geheimblog” at treehuggin’ pussy and don’t even know what this is and if it’s just a single joke or something bigger taking off … the openebiz blog is the only other hit at google’s blogsearch.

a google search for “praschls geheimblog” is also not that successful – we will see where it goes, i’ll keep an eye on it within the next couple of days …

(via malte at treehuggin’ pussy)

update: felix schwenzel von wirres.net kicks in (thanks robert)

[tags: praschl, geheimblog, praschls geheimblog, alternate reality game]

bbdo keeps on releasing nice campaigns for blush dessous berlin.

“the latest thing from bbdo berlin for blush: matches with a striking strip right on the panty. it just feels great to light your fire.”

see also the getting undressed and blechschaden ads for blush.

(via adverbox)

[tags: blush, dessous, berlin, advertising, bbdo, streichholz, matches]

the first apple iphone commercial aired on the oscars last week.

a sweet ad showing 28 scenes from cult movie actors saying “hello” on the phone followed by the image of the device, finishing with the text “coming in june”. they don’t even have to name the product because everybody just knows, apple-like, simple, ingenious.

watch the first apple iphone commercial “hello” on youtube or the apple website.

(via the r.c. shortcast)

[tags: apple, iphone, phone, commercial, ipod, itunes, mac, telephony]

today i found this google adsense ad on my own blog (see on the right) … isn’t it ironic, don’t you think.

pretty much one and a half years ago i decided to add some google adsense ads to my blog to test if this is generating any money. result: it doesn’t – see my january earnings below.

i took part in robert basic’s survey and it seems that some bloggers are actually making money with their blog, but most of them, especially when the ads aren’t placed all around every blogpost, they do not. i don’t really care, i was just testing it, but the above ad in my own blog was just – ironic.

[tags: google, adsense, adwords, google adsense, advertising, targeted, ads]

at vm-people we were discussing if you can do viral marketing for nearly every product, even for more “boring” products or services which don’t come with a sticky viral message or adjective by itself – being extremely innovative, exciting, enormous, beautiful or extraordinary like the apple iphone for instance.

the bottom line – yes you can, given the fact that it is still a “good” product or service, bringing a benefit/making a meaning to the world and not something completely wasting your time. it’s surely harder though compared to an exciting product by itself but truly possible.

vm-people did a great job setting up the fischer fixing blog providing background information and insights working with professional bonded anchors like the fhb II and connecting opinion leaders in this area of expertise.

another great example of creating buzz about a rather white-bread product like a self-cleaning toilet is the new cws commercial “say no to dirt“.

complete washroom solutions launched a nice viral spot starring milla jovovich, giving cws a fresher and younger image and definitely rising awareness.

(via werbeblogger, song: benny benassi “satisfaction”)

[tags: cws, complete washroom solutions, say no to dirt, viral marketing]

i’m sorry and this may offend some fans but i never heard of this guy before my fiancée told me about him some days ago. i’m talking about eddie izzard a british cross-dressing stand-up comedian and actor who describes himself as an “executive transvestite” (see wikipedia entry).

i love his kind of humor, he is just f… hilarious, gotta watch him!

you’ll find some of his skits on youtube and google video.

more info: wikipedia entry, official website, a fan site

[tags: eddie izzard, eddie, izzard, british, cross-dressing, stand-up, comedian]

after gmail has lost tons of user emails german service provider 1&1 seems to have serious problems now.

i was quite a fan of 1&1, having 23 domains and tons of emails hosted there, but since noon (january 17. 2007, pst) my imap account started to make problems and went completely down afterwards – my main imap inbox (more than 8000 emails) is gone now and their webmail is down as well.

while searching for help i found out that they shut down the email support completely and when calling their helpline (fortunately 24 hour support) a women’s voice said that they are aware of a problem regarding emails and they are working on it.

hope it will be fixed soon, i’m/they are screwed when all these mails are lost. seems that we all have to go back to pop3 to keep several local backups.

update – january 17. 2007, 19:07: email is back up again and i’m very happy about it!
and obviously i missed to read the werbeblogger within the last two days …

update – january 18. 2007, 14:03: i can access my mails via imap again but the server times out all the time, so it’s still pretty crappy and isn’t fun to work with. they gotta improve that or i have to switch to a new provider.

[tags: 1&1, 1und1, 1and1, bug, email, webmail, downtime, server down]

you might have noticed that many blogs, including mine, got these nice mouse-over previews when hovering your mouse over any link – it’s a service called snap.

“snap preview anywhere enables anyone visiting your site or blog to get a glimpse of what other sites you’re linking to, without having to leave your site. by rolling over any link, the user gets a visual preview of the site without having to go there, thus eliminating wasted “trips” to linked sites.”

the california based snap started about two months ago launching snap preview anywhere. in just 8 weeks, over 30,000 sites worldwide have already integrated snap into their sites and over 70,000,000 previews have been generated. they also just nailed a deal with wordpress literally putting their preview tool to 600,000 blogs and surely more to follow.

the integration is a no-brainer, generate a tiny code snippet, put it on your blog or website and enjoy the little website previews, it is very helpful in deciding if you want to click through or not. it takes no longer than three minutes to set up and you can even customize it later on if you want to – turning on previews on internal links, turning off previews on specific links or setting the hover delay time for showing the preview.

> get the snippet and link previews for your site here

also check out: visual snap web search and the snap image search

[tags: snap, snap preview, snap preview anywhere, spa, preview, wordpress]

some time ago i wrote about the video sharing portal revver. revver tracks and monetizes videos as they spread across the web. it connects video makers and sharers with sponsors in a free and open marketplace. at the end of each video there is an ad displayed, revver splits the ad revenue with you 50/50.

“if you like to create or share video, revver was made for you. every time someone watches a video that you’ve uploaded or shared, you could earn money.”

in the meanwhile they changed the logo, made great improvements on the user interface, look&feel and added more functionalities.

but the best thing is, the concept pays off for the user/artist/uploader, directly transferred to your paypal account.

so, start uploading your videos on revver and make some money out of it.

[tags: revver, revverizing, video, sharing, video sharing, portal, viral, youtube]

first i have to say that i’m a fan of google and their services. due to my google account profile i’m currently using 21 different google services. one of them is of course google’s popular webmail service gmail – fortunately not as my primary mail service.

om malik reported today that due to a bug some gmail users lost all their emails and found a blank gmail account when logging in.

furthermore sahim pointed out in one of the comments that google’s social networking platform orkut is completely down today as well, saying “orkut is under construction, please check back soon”.

at google groups there is a discussion about this topic including an answer from the gmail support team:

“our engineering team has been working to resolve the issue with your account that we detected in our system. we appreciate your patience with us. everyone at google realizes how important email communications can be so it is with a heavy heart and tremendous disappointment that we must let you know that an isolated problem caused the loss of all the data in your account before december 18th. our engineers worked long nights to try to locate any recoverable information, but after doing everything they could think of, asking the help of other engineers at google and spending nights pounding their keyboards, they have finally had to accept that for your account we could not recover the data.”

in times where we handle so much conversation via email this is a disaster for every affected gmail user. but no system is perfect and we have to deal with tons of beta’s in web 2.0 times.

common tipp: still backup your email locally via pop3 and an email client like mozilla thunderbird or outlook.

(via gigaom and techcrunch)

update – december 28. 2006 at 19:07: a google spokeswoman sent om malik an email explaining the situation – doing the pr limitation of damage: