David Lidsky's Blog, page 4802

Global First Look: Brandkarma.com Insures that Brands Reap What They Sow

Superstar Aussie ad man Craig Davis has spent his life promoting brands. Now, with his new Web site, Brandkarma.com, he wants the world to weigh in on who's been naughty or nice.

What goes around comes around, they say in the pen, and it's as true for brands as it is for people. Just ask Toyota. Or Wal-Mart. Or WaMu. Or the brand called Tiger. In an effort to accelerate that karma wheel, today Craig Davis, chief creative officer at Publicis Mojo, will launch Brandkarma.com, a site designed...

Newell Rubbermaid's Digital Leader on Innovating a 100 Year Old Brand

In this Brand Innovator Spotlight, Bert DuMars talks about how breaking down the silos and collaborating with consumers is keeping a century old company successful in the digital age.

[image error]Bert DuMars is VP E-Business & Interactive Marketing for Newell Rubbermaid, a global marketer of consumer and commercial products including Sharpie, Graco and Irwin Industrial Tools.  Since 2007, Mr. DuMars has been responsible for directing and coordinating eMarketing, eCommerce and Social Media Marketing...

Crib Sheet: Google Vs. China (Vs. Australia?)

Google killed its Chinese search engine on Monday and diverted Chinese users to its existing Hong Kong servers, offering uncensored global Web searches. Is it the terminal move of the saga? No. More developments continue.

Google, commenting on the situation yesterday, noted that the bait-and-switch-esque solution is actually legal within existing Chinese regulations, and it hoped that the Chinese authorities would leave the situation at rest--with the rider that the Chinese government could...

Virgin Galactic Embarks on Maiden Voyage Above Mojave Desert

 

Space geeks, fasten your seatbelt and zip up your flying suits (protein pills and helmets are, of course, optional). Virgin Galactic's passenger spaceship, the Enterprise, took to the skies for the first time yesterday, attached to her proud Mom, the Eve. Lasting around three hours, the flight took both components, SpaceShipTwo, and WhiteKnightTwo, the commercial spaceship's mothership, up to around 45,000 feet over the Californian desert.

At around 7am PST, the craft trundled down the...

Nintendo Announces 3-D Handheld - But Can it Steal Back Apple's Gaming Market Share?

Nintendo has revealed that it will be showing the next iteration of the DS handheld games console at the upcoming E3 games show in June, and it'll be sporting an amazing new feature: Glasses-free 3D display technology. It's all an attempt to beat Apple's increasing dominance in the handheld video gaming space.

The DS 3D will have backwards compatibility with the previous generation's games, but there will be new titles that make use of its 3D powers. The amazing thing about the...

Bill Gates Goes Nuclear with Toshiba's 4S Reactor

Bill Gates is going atomic. The Microsoft founder's startup TerraPower is partnering with Toshiba to build a traveling-wave reactor. These reactors run on depleted uranium, rather than the enriched sort found in light-water reactors, only have to be refueled every 60 to 100 years, and are small enough to fit in a hot tub. it is all part of Gates' quest for zero carbon emissions in the next 40 years.

Toshiba has been working on its own mini nuclear reactors with a 30-year shelf life, making...

SFMOMA's Expansion Plans are Shockingly Safe

After his dream for a museum in the Presidio went nowhere, Gap founder Don Fisher turned his 1,100-piece contemporary art collection over to SFMOMA. It'll make SFMOMA into an art-world force on the level of MOMA or the Tate Modern, and as such, it'll need its own flashy new box. As if trying to prove it can play with the big boys, SFMOMA picked an utterly predictable shortlist of potential designers for the 225,000-square-foot expansion. The was leaked to Curbed and as yet is unconfirmed by...

Why You Should Start a Company in... Portland, Oregon

It used to be, if you were serious about starting a tech company, you went to Silicon Valley. But emerging entrepreneurial hubs around the country are giving startup aspirants options. In this series, we talk to leading figures in those communities about what makes them tick. Here, part ten in our series.

It rains an average of 155 days of the year in Portland, Oregon, which sits near the coast between Silicon Valley and Seattle. That may be what drives some startups and engineers indoors to...

Google AdWords Gets Legal Green Light From EU for Trademark Keywords

The European Union has, for once, passed a legal ruling in Google's favor. The case centers around Google's use of trademarks as keywords in its adwords system, which is now legally sanctioned. But the lawyers for Louis Vuitton and other brands are still circling.

Google's blog explains what happens--since its from Google's viewpoint it stresses the positives in the situation, but digging through the text it's pretty clear that Google sees this legal case as pivotal for the future of free and...

Better Place, By the Numbers

Can Better Place, Shai Agassi's ambitious electric vehicle startup, actually create a viable alternative transportation infrastructure? Greentech Media attempted to answer the question with a dollars and cents breakdown of both Better Place and electric vehicles. Here, we try to simplify the issue even further.

Better Place has developed a battery-swap
station that lets drivers to exchange their car's depleted battery pack
for a full one in less than a minute. The
more battery-swap stations ...