Web Analytics and Tracking Your Online Marketing Campaigns, Why Starting With a Basic Analytics Foundation is a Smart Way to Go

Source: http://www.hmtweb.com/blog/2008/11/web-analytics-and-tracking-your-online.html

You woke up earlier than usual this morning, eager to start the day. This is not your typical week... You've got a new product launching and you are having some final meetings to make sure everything is covered with your online marketing campaigns. In one of your last meetings before the launch, your CMO walks in and says, "Great work on developing the campaign and I'm excited to see the results. When can I expect to see some reporting detailing how each channel is performing?" Crickets chirp… {Since this is my blog post, I have the power to freeze time for 10 minutes so I can explain more about web analytics and help you craft your answer to your CMO. Please continue reading.} There's no reason that tracking online marketing campaigns should be an issue, although unfortunately, many times it is. There is a lot of talk about bleeding edge web analytics, and believe me, I'm excited about those advancements. But I would be careful with how you implement your web analytics package, or more importantly, how fast you move to an advanced tracking setup.

read on about a solid web analytics foundation ...

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Scarab is Small, Scarab is Fast, Scarab is Hot

Source: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/yankodesign/~3/458135754/

Think hand-held pocket bikes! Mini Cooper small edition! Smart Car ant size! All of these are just basically giants compared to the hot insect-style transport. It is called the Scarab. It’s got multiple driving modes: fast to slow, perfect park mode, sensors, Lidar, radar, transponders, GPS, guns, knives, sharp sticks!

WHOA before we go any further: I got carried away there. No guns or knives allowed. But If you ask nicely, you can probably bring your sharp sticks.

A designer by the name of David Miguel Moreira Gonçalves presents the Scarab:

The aim of this project was to develop guidelines and a holistic solution for a new system of urban transport, composed of vehicle and infrastructure, in a sustainable way and adaptable to various urban environments.

And the specs for the potential vehicle:

-The vehicle is composed of interchangeable modules that can be customized.
-Powerpack module composed of a permanent battery plus 3 options for the main energy pack (battery, biofuel ICE or a fuel cell).
-4 wheel drive through electric brushless in-wheel motors with directdrive.
-Wheels with regenerative braking through EW Brakes.
-Drive by wire and tactile HUD embedded in the Lexan canopy.
-Structural elements in Carbon-Aramid composite.
-Embedded sensors, Lidar, radar, transponders, GPS. These serve to exchange information with the system, with other drivers and to have precise location data.
-Renting of the vehicle or modules that allows for a private/public/mixed utilization and transport access for people with less financial resources.
-Doesn't need new infrastructures.
-Is backward compatible with current transport systems and uses current day technologies.

Of course this calls to mind the film “Minority Report,” as most conceptual vehicles and weapons do. But beyond that, this doesn’t seem too far away from reality. In many ways superior to the motorcycle: size for stability, cover from the elements, storage space, and since it would be a “brand new amazing thing,” a million billion of them would be produced, so they’d be pretty much free, right?

right?

Designer: David Miguel Moreira Gonçalves

David Gonçalves

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South Koreans Discover 'True Blue' Material for Better OLED Screens [Feeling Blue]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/ZDzRge4lLf4/south-koreans-discover-true-blue-material-for-better-oled-screens

OLED screens are pretty awesome all around, but they have more than a few Achilles Heels to overcome before they're accepted into the mainstream. That said, one of the hurdles has allegedly fallen this weekend, thanks to new research out of South Korea. According to the AP, South Korean scientists have developed an efficient "true blue" material that, while sounding like a 1991 Madonna album, is actually a pretty important step forward for OLEDs.

You see, OLEDs, for all their potential greatness, have a heck of a time producing the blue light necessary to produce great images (red, green, blue light makes TVs happy!). Red and green light works fine, but blue remained elusive. That's where the South Koreans come in.

The discovery was the work of Pusan National University chemistry professor Jin Sung-Ho, who said the discovery was an important one for advancing the energy efficiency of OLEDs. For gadget lovers, it's yet another piece of the puzzle that, when completed, will mean powerful, beautiful OLED TVs are a mainstay in homes across the world. [AFP]

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Dealzmodo Review: The $300 Sonos Rig [Review]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/gXIKhmJF2as/dealzmodo-review-the-300-sonos-rig

I love Sonos, the super synced-up wireless music home system, but have always been a little freaked out by the price, about $750 to start, including the increasingly old-school-looking $400 scroll-wheel Controller. When I saw the Sonos iPhone Wi-Fi app—free if you've got an iPhone or iPod touch—I realized that the Controller was finally a thing of the past. Couple the app with a clearance-priced ZP80 ZonePlayer, and you can start your own Sonos rig for $300. After playing around with the latest hardware and software, I can safely say that's a hell of a deal.

I say "you can start" your rig because one of the Sonos' main selling points is its ability to wirelessly coordinate ZonePlayers all throughout the house for flawlessly synced music playback. The idea is that you spend $300 on the ZP80 (or $350 on a ZP90 if you miss out on the clearance inventory) and then later on, when times aren't so tough, you can add more ZonePlayers as you go. What's great about the one ZonePlayer is that you immediately get the AirPort Express-like ability to grab music from your Mac or PC, plus the iTunes Remote app's ability to control it from a little handheld, but that's just the beginning. The ZonePlay! er comes with the ability to serve up web radio, Rhapsody, Napster, Pandora, Last.fm and Best Buy Music, all without a computer.

In my house, it all plays out rather well:

When my laptop is awake and on the network, the ZonePlayer I have connected directly to my router (via Ethernet) and a stereo system can access all of my non-DRM tracks. I can sort through all those tracks via the Sonos Desktop Controller, which works on both Macs and PCs and whose setup was ridiculously easy. But I can walk away from the laptop (leaving it on) and instead pick up an iTouch lying on the coffee table, which lets me view the same exact tracks, and just as fast.

Say I close or power down my laptop, or my wife wants to get on the Sonos while I am away, laptop in tow. There are so many sources of music available via the Sonos Controller app, she may not actually even notice that my vast library is gone. (I could, obviously, load the Sonos control on her laptop so that it would serve her music, too, but based on what I'm telling you, that has so far proven irrelevant.)

My wife loves Fresh Air with Terry Gross. By searching for the show in the Radio section, she can not only find out when it's on next, but can listen to recent shows in full, at a much better sound quality than those damn Audible downloads, for zero money. She can also search for different radio stations and add them to favorites—we have both our favorite NYC and Seattle radio side by side. You can't yet bookmark actual radio shows, a la Fresh Air, in Favorites, but I'm hoping that's something that will be worked out soon.You probably now that Sonos offers free 30-! day no-c redit-card-required trials of Rhapsody, Napster and Sirius—the key, I think, is to try all three in a row, giving you basically 60 days of free on-demand music sampling, and a month of decent satellite radio, before you choose one, if any.

Controlling the system over Wi-Fi is easy, too. You kinda have to get used to the queue concept that goes back to desktop music jukeboxes of olde—once you add songs to the queue, they're there until you clear them, even after they've played. But you can add many songs and radio shows of differing sources to the same queue, making for a highly programmable audio experience: I can listen to the new-ish Coldplay, followed by Terry Gross's interview with Seth Meyers, followed by a classic mix playlist I devised in iTunes (automatically recognized by Sonos), all queued up in just a few minutes. The volume control is funny—on the iTouch, you have to tap to the left or right of the slider to make it go up or down, but once I figured that out, it was smooth sailing.After the super-syncability and the multiple sources of music, the third best thing about Sonos is the fact that it is constantly being upgraded. So even though there are some technical advantages to the newer hardware (wireless-N is the big one), the basic functionality is the same, meaning buying at clearance shouldn't be a problem.

What don't I like? I feel like this new setup has answered my biggest historical gripes with the system; though it would be nice for it to play iTunes DRM tracks, and it would be convenient for the first ZonePlayer to connect wirelessly and not via hard Ethernet (it does this so that it can create its own super-stable Wi-Fi network), the thing is getting better and cheaper at the same time—$300 for clearance ZP80s, potentially even less on eBay. If that isn't go! od news in these troubled times, I don't know what is. [Sonos]

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Make's LED History Movie Is Pretty Cool, Includes DIY Instructions [LEDs]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/chma4mVeQOw/makes-led-history-movie-is-pretty-cool-includes-diy-instructions

We all take LEDs pretty much for granted, but the guys over at MAKE have done a good job with this movie that shows the history behind the little glowing things. Turns out the Light Emitting Diode was one of those devices that was more or less discovered by accident, during an experiment at Marconi labs into a Cat's-Whisker Schottky barrier diode made from a chunk of silicon carbide: so MAKE, of course, shows you how to recreate that for yourself. Check it out: it's fascinating stuff. [Makezine]

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