There’s been a lot of talk in the news lately about putting cosmetics on farm animals. Naturally, this made me think of lead generation.

No connection, you say? Consider this: Most lead generation campaigns are just internal strategy or positioning statements with some stock imagery added.

These internal documents, meant to define a product or brand, were never intended to be used outside the company. But because lead generation is often considered the poor stepsister of brand or image advertising, the people in charge of it too often think of it as a throwaway or no-brainer.

The result is a press release, strategy statement, or internal briefing document that’s been poured into a direct mail or email template—and it reads like it. All the benefits that have been deemed important are there, but they’re in a laundry list with no focused message. There’s no respect for the limited time of the audience—the fact that busy businesspeople need a simple, clear takeaway that can be digested with a short skim.

In other words, the internal strategy statement is the pig. The pretty stock images, colors, and fonts are the lipstick.

Take this email from XO Communications (editor's note: contact information has been removed.) The headline says “Convergence is Here,” without any clear benefit. Presumably, the creators had discussed the benefit so much, it was obvious to them, only it’s not obvious to us, since we weren’t privy to their conference table discussions. Then, the bulleted list throws a lot of marketingspeak buzzwords around, but doesn’t make the benefits any more real, instead throwing out vague claims like “increased productivity.” Oh, and “business continuity features”—someday I’d sure like to know what they are! All internally approved benefit points, no doubt.

Then there’s the stock photo. Not only is it a cliché, but it contradicts the headline. Is convergence ahead, or is it here? Plus, again, this visual conveys no benefit (or, really, any other information.)

Don’t cheat yourself of the response you’re after. Instead of putting lipstick on the pig, make sure your message is focused, simplified, and geared from the ground up for your audience. Only then will you have an engaging piece of direct response advertising. And that’s a totally different animal.

For more tips on how to avoid other common e-mail mistakes, download a free copy of our white paper: “Top 10 High-Tech E-Mail Marketing Mistakes.”

Noticed these awesome Dentyne (chewing gum) advertisements on the NYC subways recently, which challenge technology's ability to create a "real" connection between people. Check out this NYTimes article to read more about the campaign or the makefacetime.com website, but beware, it shuts down in 3 minutes.

By

VIKRAM KARVE

When I was a small boy in the nineteen sixties Pune was a “Tea Town”. Everyone drank tea and all over the town there were chiefly two types of tea for the laidback discerning gourmet Punekar to relish – AMRUT TULYA CHAHA at the ubiquitous Amrut-tulya Tea Shops in every nook and corner of Pune, and the peerless IRANI CHAI served by the numerous Irani Restaurants all over Pune City and Camp like Café Naaz, Lucky, Good Luck, Volga etc.

Amrut means Nectar, and Tulya means Comparable, so “Amrut Tulya” means “Comparable to Nectar” and indeed, true to its name, Amrut-Tulya Tea is comparable to nectar –  sweet, ambrosial, like the elixir of life! Amrut Tulya Chaha is not brewed in the traditional Tea service style – the tea is “cooked” in front of you.

Come, my dear Tea Lover, let me tell you how to make Amrut Tulya Chaha - The Art of Tea – Pune Style.

Assemble the following Ingredients for Two cups of Amrut Tulya Tea “Special Chaha”

Assam CTC Tea or, if you live in Pune, get the famous CTC+OP “Family Mixture” Tea Powder from your favourite “Tea Depot” in the heart of Pune City.

[By the way, the acronyms are: CTC – Crush, Tear, Curl; OP – Orange Pekoe; BOP – Broken Orange Pekoe].

Full Cream Buffalo Milk [I like Chitale’s]

Fresh Water

Sugar

Fresh Ginger Crushed [Better still you can crush the juicy fresh ginger with the chimta directly in the water-milk concoction to let the ginger juices flow out and blend in smoothly]

Cardamom – peel, crush and powder the pods

[NB – Amrut Tulya Tea is not your traditional Masala Chai so please don’t add any Tea Masalas or spices like clove, cinnamon, black peppercorns or herbs like gavati chaha (lemon grass?), tulsi leaves etc. and neither is it the “khada chamach” or “cutting” Chai so please don’t boil away to glory – remember, you must achieve Amrut Tulya Chaha of just the right consistency!]

In a brass vessel [or stainless steel, if you can’t get a brass vessel] mix one cup of water and one cup of milk. Add four teaspoons of sugar. Put on the stove. Medium heat.

Squeeze in a bit of crushed ginger and add a pinch of cardamom powder and the peel.

Lightly stir, let it warm, and bring to a boil.

Smartly add two teaspoons of tea powder and keep stirring gently to ensure the boiling concoction does not spill over. Keep boiling till the tea attains beautiful bright golden-orange colour – the moment you see a reddish tinge, give the heavenly brew a loving last stir, twirl the vessel, and sieve the Amrut Tulya Tea Special Chaha directly into the cups.

Sip the delicious tea slowly and mindfully, roll it on your tongue, let it emulsify in your palate, close your eyes, absorb, discern the flavour, the rich taste, relish every sip lovingly.

Tell me, isn’t Amrut Tulya Chaha lip-smacking tasty and soul-refreshing? Blissful ambrosia, an experience of nectar, isn’t it?

Now you know why they call it Amrut Tulya – comparable to Nectar!

VIKRAM KARVE

Copyright © Vikram Karve 2008

Vikram Karve has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

vikramkarve@sify.com

http://vikramkarve.sulekha.com

http://www.linkedin.com/in/karve

The wording provides speakers supplied with the speakers software Creative Xtreme Fidelity (X-Fi) and the design of satellite speakers with dual full-zakresowymi transducers with high efficiency. Creative N400 is a compact set of 2.0 with a single USB cable, which also supplies the speakers and moves the sound in digital form. The two satellite speakers are equipped with dwucalowe, Full active transducers designed to provide a large volume at the same time, smooth, detailed read with clear bass. All controls are available on the upper right speaker housing. The set is also protective case, which will check during the journey.

Creative N400 are delivered with the software Creative X-Fi, which allows you to enjoy effects such as the Creative X-Fi Crystalizer przywracający detailed and vivid read compressed music and film sound paths. All low-and high intelligently are strengthened. Creative X-Fi CMSS-3D stereo signal processing MP3 files and digital movies to surround sound, carried out by two speakers. The votes are centrally positioned to you, and the background sounds around.

The set is accompanied by a Creative ALchemy software also supports Creative EAX 4.0 Advanced HD and OpenAL. Creative ALchemy restores surround sound Creative EAX Advanced HD 4.0 for Windows Vista, providing the same impression in the games as the Windows XP platform. Already more than 400 games benefit from Creative EAX Advanced HD 4.0.

It's quite detailed -- a novel this challenging needs to be, I feel -- so it should give you a fair idea of just what I want to achieve with it.

Take a look when you have time to spare and let me know what you think.

Outline Sample for The Dummy.

© 2008 Gary William Murning

Here is a list of parts that i salvaged from my old Dell Dimension E520.

CPU- Intel Duo Core 2.13 Ghz

Philips DVD Burner

Nvidia 7300LE Video Card

Parts I Bought New from Newegg.com:

Asus P5K PRO Motherboard

Xion II w/450w PS

Thermaltake Blue Orb II CPU Heat Sink

320GB Seagate Barracuda HD

4 GB Crucial Ballistix Tracer Ram

2- 120mm intake and exhaust fan, 1- 80mm intake fan

Creative Soundblaster X-Fi Sound Card

Parts I got from a friend to Finish it off:

2 Blue cold cathode tube neons

Now that its done I really want to build another one. I'm in the process of looking at parts and doing some research. I plan to build a smaller system for just normal everyday use. E-mail and internet pretty much.  And a Larger system for a dedicated Gaming rig. Just looking at parts right now, hopefully soon i will have time to do another.

大家應該都有宿醉的經驗, 想吐, 頭痛腫脹, 渾身不舒服, 就我個人而言最怕的就是頭痛, 波蘭的一個類似解酒液產品的公司做了一個網站去說明他們的產品, 網站中沒有hard sell說他們的產品多屌多屌, 反而是用頭部按摩的方式用視覺傳達他們產品的功效. 一般去剪頭髮的時候設計師都會先幫忙洗頭, 然後順便按摩頭部, 我就看過躺在我隔壁的大叔頭部按摩太舒服而開始打呼...

網站有一個很好玩得點是你可以自己上傳照片, 然後動畫中備按摩的那個人就會變成妳上傳的照片的人臉, 當然也可以不用是人類得臉, 還可以看看目前最受歡迎的上傳照片有哪些, 目前有阿諾, 布希, Michael Jacson等等...

網站中按摩完頭部之後就說"我們的產品就是這種感覺"...像頭部按摩一樣舒服, 解決你的宿醉. 網站中唯一的遺憾, navigation很不清楚, 動畫中的navigatino是左下方的一個紅色按鈕, 也許他們想把主要的navigation作成像產品(藥丸)的樣子. enjoy the massage.

The hell with dell don't neeed them anymore spent a little more and got a way more stable system doing it myself.

I always aimed for an arcade experience with this game which meant typically a game time around 5 minutes in length with a learning curve that meant if you mastered the flow of the game you could spend an infinite amount of time playing. I've never been a fan of those games where they slowly restrict your movement and ultimately force your ship/character in to submission. With Invaders I pretty much tried to provide a balanced game that was simple to pick up, tough to beat but rewarding none the less.
To that end much of my time is now spent balancing certain aspects of the action. I haven't drawn new graphics or cut any serious new code for a couple of weeks. This final stage is pretty much bug fixing and playing with numbers.

One of the biggest decisions I took almost immediately during play testing was to cut down the "Bonus Stage". Whilst I was proud of it as an interlude to the blast the aliens approach to the rest of the game I wasn't happy that it was something to appear several times each wave. It was just a bit too samey I guess. Confusingly in the code I still refer to it as the Boss Stage which probably didn't help. I don't have any plans for a boss stage as such.

One final thing I have never been too happy about is what I call the "stragglers". Those aliens that are left doing their little moves at the end of a level. They appear far too easy to blast away when really (a la Space Invaders, Galaga etc) they ought to get progressively tougher to hit. So I implemented what I call a finalFew mode. This is typically triggered by the number of alien kills per level being greater than AliensToKill < 5.
In finalFew mode the aliens break out of formation and start to speed up. They also take on the ability to fire lasers bolts, something previously reserved for the Drone ships.

I'm in no doubt that the real fun in this game is blasting the aliens whilst dodging the raining bombs and lasers. I figured the more the player spends his time doing this the happier he will be.

ConversantLife.com is a really cool concept. It's kind of a myspace/facebook of the blog world with focused writers on various subject matter and it's a lot of it is written through a faith lens. Very cool stuff and I highly recommend that you go get a username over there and check out what they have going on.

I'll be blogging for them once a week and I'm really looking forward to it. I just submitted my first blog entry, 'introductions', last night. ConversantLife is a publishing company. They publish some guys you might have heard of and some guys I deeply respect and that I've actually had the chance to work alongside. Guys like Mike Erre, Teaching Pastor at Rock Harbor in Newport Beach, Ca, and Richard Dahlstrom, a prolific leader, author and pastor from the Seattle area.

Anyways, this a bit of the new journey that i find myself on and it is really fun! Be sure to go give ConversantLife.com a look (you can use your facebook login if you have one) and leave me a comment over there just for giggles! Happy clicking!

I am thus proposing that we learn communication through our life experiences. Although our life experiences are diverse and varied, we often come to the same conclusion of certain situations. Just think about how we deal with a break-up, divorce and securing a job through an interview. Although our culture and life circumstances are different, the emotional journeys that we go through are the same. And it can be inferred that we share similar thoughts and communication process to get through it. The findings of researches often confirm this when they provides a graph showing the commonality of the emotional journey that we went through, akin to the process of culture shock that we experience when we are in another country. Regardless of which culture or country that we come from and regardless of our destinations, the process of culture shock is always the same. 

Therefore, to understand communication, we need to understand human nature, which is of a more important concern when it comes to understanding the intrinsic details of the communication process than research (which is useful for identifying trends but not as useful at exploring details, which when it comes to communication studies, involves the study of each and every individual). In fact, understanding human nature should be the way to understand communication over research. Human nature forges the path to our understanding of communications, while research subsequently serves to confirm it. Yes, at least when it comes to the understanding of our communication process, research is subservient to the understanding of human nature. I believe that the same can be said of psychology where we often learn more from direct observation than from research.

We can also see the advantages of learning through an in-depth understanding of human nature over scientific research in other areas of our lives. Consider sales and marketing. Recent research has discovered that different customers feel differently about different products and while they may sound positive in the surveys that they have participated, their actual sentiments are actually negative in actuality. This example clearly exemplifies the fallacies of using scientific research, in this case surveys.  However, if we understand human nature, we will have an awareness that every individuals are different and their responses to surveys are usually determined more by personality (i.e. a person who is more cautious and afraid of offending others will probably give a more positive response) than by choice. Hence, understanding each customers' personalities and characters is the key to successful sales, which is a fact commonly understood more by frontline customer service staff (in their daily interactions with customers) than senior management. And it's only through the understanding of human nature can a complete or near-complete understanding of all the customers come to fruition. Research methods will fail miserably here since all if not most research methods assume a certain degree of uniformity in their subjects, which is often not the case

Unfortunately, research has often been the preferred method in most forms of study even till today. Understanding people, communication and issues through human nature has not always been accepted in the academic circles, and I believe that much can be attributed to the fact that the topic of human nature relates closer to psychology and philosophy, which are the humanities. And for reasons that are still unknown, science has always been the tool that has been used by most societies to understand life rather than its counterpart: the arts. One primary reason may be due to the fact that science has always been an objective form of study (a factor that seldom goes unnoticed in the academic circles and which is highly valued) while arts has always been subjective. We can probably infer from this conclusion that as human beings, we almost always want to search and settle for uniformity rather than differences (except when it comes to looking for a romantic/lifetime partner, that is. Despite this, some similarities are still required for the relationship to blossom, yes?). This probably also explains why change is difficult for us (despite the fact that change may be the only constant in life) and that individualistic  individuals such as the creatives (who often do not have a tendency to conform) are sometimes seen in a somewhat negative light by some collectivistic societies. It is ironic then that when society demands for more creativity, it is the arts that people turn to (since being creative is through the use of the right brain hemisphere), and not the sciences.

Thus, the next time we step into the bookstore to look for some books of interest, it's best to ask ourselves if what we need to know can be answered by our life experiences. If so, it's best we engage in some related activities rather than picking up a book to read (For instance, if we wish to learn about swimming, wouldn't it better for us to enroll in a swimming course rather than reading book?). Reading is a good habit to inculcate since books educate, entertain and inform.  However, let's not read our way through life.

Let's live through life.

Pizza #2

Halloween Vegan Spiderweb Pizza

Ingredients:

• Whole Wheat Pizza Dough, I had left over dough from last week that I had put in the freezer.  However, if you you don't mind non-vegan, you can use just any pizza crust.
• 1/2 cup Pizza Sauce, this recipe I made up this morning. Yummy!!!

• a few sheets of Vegan "cheese". I used Veggie Slices, Smoked Provolone Flavor.

• 4 pitted black olives

Directions:

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Place rolled out pizza dough on a baking stone or sheet, pre-sprinkled with corn meal to prevent sticking.

Top with Pizza Sauce.

Cut "cheese" into stripes and place around pizza like a web.

Bake pizza for 10 minutes until cheese has melted.

***Note: You may want to pre-bake your pizza dough for 5-7 minutes before putting the pizza sauce on.

Cut one whole olive in half for the body and abdomen. And slice an olive and then, slice again one slice in half for legs. Cut two smaller pieces for the pedipalp ( the two front end thingys). Assemble spider on the pizza.

Happy Halloween!!!

Baby Friendly Beads

it's such a long drive for her! what a treat that she enjoys coming! 

we got lots done this time! we have the wedding invites almost finished. i'll be stamping the back monogram and then we'll be done with them completely. we also started the reception invites (mini me's of the invites! super cute!) i'm planning to have those all done by the 17th when we meet her!

sorry - not gonna post pictures until after we mail them out! :) you'll just have to wait!

supper's cookin, hubby's home (and he fixed my toilet today WOOHOO! a flushing toilet is a treat ya know! LOL) off to eat some grub!

I'm glad the end is in sight, but have enjoyed the creative thinking process along the way. I almost drag my heels to take the photo, but really enjoy myself once I'm uploading it, editing, playing with colours and observing different options for the end result. It's nice to do something creative for creativity's sake!