Amazon, Foursquare, etc.

One day, someone will take a picture of me and they won't need to ask my name because they will in one minute receive an email identifying my name, affiliation, and probably address. If this person is interested in me, they won't have to go to Craiglist's Missed Connections, they will cold call me. If this person is a stalker, I will experience one of those Bruce Willis futuristic psycho-thriller situations. That day, effectively, is now.

Amazon has introduced a video recognition feature where you can take a picture of any object, send it to Amazon, and within minutes receive that product, as listed on Amazon, and a one-click step to ordering that product. Crazy.

And in other news they are putting Kindle on the Blackberry. One more step in the right no-more-new-devices direction.

My clustermates are obsessed with foursquare.com. From what I understand, it allows you to live the SimCity reality by letting you figure out where your friends are and use your social habits for the imaginary benefit of earning rank and points for the territories you cover.

We had a guest speaker for marketing who is developing www.webook.com, specifically, a program called Page to Fame. his idea is that publishing needs to evolve in the direction of being allow consumers to purchase editorial in bite size chunks, like a poem, an essay, etc., instead of a 300 page situation. As part of that logic, he's started a site where authors pay to have the first page of their literature read by the people who obsessively peruse blogs, editorials, and the like, for the opportunity to advance in a competition where agents will end up reviewing a few chapters and ultimately offer a book deal.

I think the idea is cool, though I have my questions. But it inspires my interest in expand on-demand programming. I think that there is a lot of money to be made on a lot more movies by bundling and distributing quality arranged video content. (See the recent piece on willingness to buy: http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1964604,00.html) And a lot of his ideas on viewer participation means that more people would want to pay for self designed catalogs of digital video content.

And related to last week's class. If Buzz signals what it looks like for Google to become Facebook, I wonder what the internet would look like if Facebook were to become Google. Perhaps content will be organized by most poked.