About three or four years ago I was giving a presentation about technology at a large prestigious University to a group of Masters students soon to graduate. The presentation was going well and the crowd seemed to be engaged and enjoying what I had to say. I had made it through approximately half of my slides and had mentioned something about an email I had received when from the middle of this auditorium style room a kid shouted out, "Email is for old people."
This comment caught me off guard and I stopped the presentation. I asked, "Who just said that?" The setting was very formal and no-one volunteered themselves right away. The crowd was large enough that I couldn't pick the It seemed that whoever had made the disruption realized that maybe he shouldn't have blurted out the comment or else he thought that I might be upset about his actions. After some cajoling, a hand was raised and the once brazen student admitted to the outburst.
I asked him, "What do you mean, email is for old people?" He explained, to the agreement of the crowd, "No one uses email anymore! The only time we use email is when our professors make us check our grades." I was very interested in what he had to say and so instead of continuing on my topic I put away my clicker, abandoned my slides and just had a conversation with the group.
"So Who uses email on regular basis?"
Less than a fourth of the hands went up.
"How do you get a hold of one another?"
"We text, twitter, or Facebook."
"Email is so slow. We want to get ahold of our friends instantly."
"Yeah, it takes forever to get someone to answer an email."
"We can text during class and in meetings. You can't really do that with a phone call."
"How many of you will text first instead of calling on the phone?"
Almost all hands were raised.
"How do you communicate anything substantial, with only 160 characters?"
"U only need 160 chars 2 say what U need 2 say. FYI."
"Facebook is for bigger stuff - and pictures."
"If you really need to write something big you just post it to your blog. I have an RSS feed of all my friends blogs."
The conversation continued like this for the duration of my visit. The votes were in and email failed the test of GenY and the Millennials. The next generation weighed-in and without an instant response they are not interested.
A friend of mine, James Keddington, heard a similar story when he saw Gen. Colin Powell speak who shared an experience about his Grandson saying the same thing, "Email is for old people Grandpa!"
So, what does this mean for the world of Marketing? It means that those Masters students have been in the work force for several years now. It means that we can not ignore the power of new media, social networks, and social media. It means that 1f we adapt our products and marketing efforts to this group where they live, how they live and on the platforms they live on then we will span the generational gap and be a thriving company in the next five years.
Thanks,
Curtis J. Morley
P.S. Let's regain our youth and instigate a worldwide "Email Free Friday."
Do you need a lot of info fast? Do you need to be a maven in your industry? Do you want every piece of info that your favorite newspaper or blog has - BUT you don't want irrelevant information that just gets in the way? Here is your solution. An RSS Filter tool. Everyone loves a good RSS feed but nobody wants the information overload that goes with it. Here are some of the tools that I suggest to get RSS feeds filtered just the way you like it.
Are you having a heart attack because you didn't order flowers a week ago? Well calm your beating heart and give your Loved one a heart attack instead. Just fill in your name and your loved ones name below and from your printer will come many Valentines Hearts that you can cut out and put on your love's car walls, mirrors, house, etc... I suggest putting red, pink or bright pink paper into your printer but white will do. Each Valentines heart comes out with a unique saying.
Flash application that prints multiple Valentines hearts, each with a personalized Valentines saying. Create your own valentines. Give your love a heart attack(the good way).
FranklinCovey, the worldwide leader in training and consulting services in the areas of strategy execution, leadership and personal effectiveness, built LiveClicks™ webinar workshops—a global online-learning business leveraging the technology of Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro software.
During this session, you will hear how FranklinCovey was able to:
Double online-learning seminar attendance and income
Create a customized system for tracking and monetizing training content worldwide
Provide an exceptionally high-quality customer experience
Overcome technical and operational obstacles while launching LiveClicks webinar workshops as a global platform
Posted in Adobe, Flash at 11:48 am by Curtis J. Morley
Flash on the iPhone
Finally it is true. You will soon be able to use Flash Pro CS5 to develop iPhone apps. It only takes an export. There are currently a handful of apps up on the iTunes Store. Go sign up for the beta
Posted in Adobe, Flash at 11:39 am by Curtis J. Morley
Flash Player 10.1 is now available which gives mobile phones users the ability to run the full version of Flash on a mobile device. This release has a tremendous amount of features and developments. As you can see in this graphic from Kevin Lynch's presentation Flash Player 10.1 is now:
Smartphone enabled
Multitouch capable
Accelerometer capable
Hardware accelerated
HTTP video streaming capable
Contains content protection
Has Peer assisted networking (social network integration)
Flash Player 10.1
Flash Player 10.1 also has significant performance enhancements as you can see in the graph below.
Here is the quiz of the day.
Which Browsers Come Preinstalled with Flash Player?
Icons for IE8, Chrome2, Firefox 3, Safari 4, Opera 9
Which Browsers come preinstalled with the Flash Player plugin pre-installed?
Internet Explorer 8 (8.0.7100.0)
Google Chrome 2 (2.0.172.37)
Firefox 3 (3.51)
Opera 9.7 (9.64)
Safari 4 (4.0.2)
Find out the answer after the break.
Break
If you guessed Internet Explorer 8 you would be right. The way I found this out is because our computer failed and I took it in to get it fixed at EBC computers who did a great job (a little pricey) and replaced the harddrive and installed Windows 7 as the OS. The first thing I did (after plugging it into our 25" monitor at home) was to download the various browsers. I then saw the page on Opera Mobile and wanted to check it out. Surprisingly none of the browsers (including Opera which was the site I was on requiring Flash Player) had the Flash Player preinstalled except for Internet Explorer 8.
And here are the screenshots to prove it.
Google Chrome Flash Plugin Screenshot
Google Chrome isn't preinstalled with Flash Player
Safari Flash Plugin Screenshot
Safari Browser is not presintalled with Flash Player but had a detiled pop-up
Firefox Flash Plugin Screenshot
Firefox Browser is not presintalled with Flash Player. This was pretty lame.
Opera Flash Plugin Screenshot
Opera Browser is not presintalled with Flash Player. The lamest of all.
So what should you do if you run into this scenario? Go to Adobe of course and Get the Flash Plugin.
So it seems that Android has jumped ahead of iPhone again and the launch of Flash Player 10 will be released in October during the Adobe Max confernce. Flash for Android is a big step for the mobile industry. Besides running the SkyFire browser on Windows Mobile and Symbian phones this is the first major release to allow Flash 10 content on mobile. Leave it to Google to be the first to run Flash Player 10 on mobile devices. Google seems to really have embraced Flash.
