27 June 2014

Good To See The Young’uns Catching Up

Marissa Mayer, 2011 InterviewYahoo Wants You to Linger (on the Ads, Too)
By Vindu Goel, New York Times
… Marissa Mayer, the chief executive, has decided that one way to reverse that decline (in advertising) is to turn the company into a media empire with a constellation of what it calls digital magazines…

Ms. Mayer says that she wants to make Yahoo a “daily habit” for its 800 million users. But she doesn’t want people to come to Yahoo just to read email, post photographs on Flickr or get the latest sports scores. She also wants Yahoo to be a place where they curl up and spend some time …. And curling up right beside them would be the advertisers.

wrongSounds familiar.  Should you read all my posts on this subject?  Nah. You’d be here for hours.  One or two’ll be enough.  Click and pick:

Social Media - WOMM - Web Advertising Posts

Actually, Ms. Mayer is talking about Tablets as magazines. A few more musty posts:

15 April 2007
Positioning Magazines for Baby Boomers
There are active and passive parts of our day. Without getting into too much psychobabble, as you get older the passive side needs more nourishment. It’s not really passive. It’s focused absorption. At some point you have to climb out of your frenetic digital nest and concentrate on one thing. It might be reading a book, watching a TV show or movie, listening to music, looking out the window.

Or immersing yourself in a magazine.

28 August 2013
Tablets & The Magic of Muggles
…Tablets could become a major vehicle for advertising.  They’ll get bigger, lighter, much thinner, flexible or semi-flexible if that’s what you’d prefer, easy to handle while sitting, lying down. Finger scrolls won’t be much different than turning pages…

04 November 2013
Smartphones & Tablets, Apples & Oranges
… If I tuck a magazine under my arm and take it with me, is that mobile advertising?  If I’m home on my couch flipping through Flipboard on my tablet that I don’t take anywhere anymore because the thrill of brandishing it is gone, I just use it at home - would those big, almost full screen ads be traditional advertising?

It’s good to see the young’uns catching up.  They may need a bit of help, however:



Human Resources/Brain Power


Related:

 

huffington_post_logo1

Ageism Raises Its Techie Head

03 June 2014

A Few New Tech Products

imageOn The Huffington Post (where I also blog), writer Pamela Poole has a savvy take on a handful of new tech products featured and/or inspired by the annual Boomers Business Summit

I’ve been to a few of those…

24 March 2006
At My Table at The Summit
"So can you tell if someone is having sex?"
"…We think so."
"... Good sex?"

Ms. Poole’s HuffPost Piece:

Leave It To Boomers: Transforming Aging With Tech
image… We all know that the physical and cognitive abilities of older people can deteriorate, leaving them unable to manage ordinary tasks and vulnerable to exploitation. It sucks.

Fortunately, thanks to today's tech, we've come a very long way from the "I've fallen and I can't get up" necklace!

The products range from very interesting to old hat to slightly convoluted.  You can sort them out yourself.

The thin, portable reading glasses make sense to me – and/or similarly constructed magnifying glasses. 

imageThe super-duper walker has me wincing. My first thought was of a bag lady pushing a shopping cart - not a good image.

Some hybrid of this and a product I blogged about a few years ago might work:

14 October 2011
Entrepreneurs & Baby Boomers II
SC… Awhile back I received a phone call from a gentleman who’d designed a clever piece of exercise/sporting equipment for rollicking and rolling on trails. It was an adaptation of another clever, successful product, making a certain popular activity much safer – and more fun.

I’m just not convinced that people would want to mosey around with a shopping cart.

More about technology, baby boomers, entrepreneurs, advertising:

10 April 2013
Entrepreneurs, VCs & Health Tech
… I’ve always been a big fan and supporter of tech and health tech.  Fabulous stuff is on the way.

But there will be backlash.