If you watched the Academy Awards on Sunday, you’ll know that the Hurt Locker was the big winner of the bunch.  However, as a marketer I found one nomination and subsequent victory to be very interesting – the winner of the animated short film category:  Logorama.  This is a film entirely dedicated to brands.  They do a marvelous job of incorporating hundreds of logos in a compelling and entertaining short…don’t take my word for it – the entire spot is embedded below.  I’m still trying to find our Intel logo in the mix… if you find it – leave a comment with the timestamp of where in the video it is…

It’s award season…and I am not just talking about the Oscars.  You’ll have to wait for Sunday night’s telecast to see our spot in broadcast.

Following FastCompany’s list of most innovative companies (Intel was ranked #14), Fortune Magazine released it’s list of the world’s most admired companies for 2010.  Intel comes in at #31 – up two spots from last year.  I think the first comment in our section says it best:

“Of course Intel should be admired .. one of the best companies based in Silicon Valley working with the greatest minds in the world .. life as we know it would never have been the same with out Intel’s innovations…”

Thank you Ismail – we agree…

Jess3 (Jesse Thomas) strikes again, and creates a fantastic video that shows us the ‘latest’ state of the internet… Kudos on a really interesting look at the trends and factoids in the social graph.

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from Jesse Thomas on Vimeo.

I consume a lot of content – a lot.  I don’t go to a single source for that content – rather choosing to bounce around my favorite sites to digest specific data tidbits.  Be it sports content (the usual suspects of ESPN, Yahoo Sports, Sports Blog Nation, and Bleacher Report) or current events, ie news (New York Times, Washington Post, CNN), or gossip (I won’t list all of those – I have a little addiction there).  However – what I have noticed over the last couple of years is that Social Media has been the single largest ‘engine’ for me when consuming, contributing and relaying content.  I am pretty selective whom I follow on Twitter and have found some very reliable outlets to funnel most of the news (all the above categories) that I am interested in.  In addition – I’ve also found that I spend a lot of time on aggregation sites - with Popurls being at the top of that list.

The net result of all of this is that I actually spend most of cycles on Twitter and Popurls for the bulk of my news – which is a trend not uncommon to the general population and shows the transition from traditional media to new media outlets.  Pew Internet released a report today that shows how Americans are receiving, consuming, and relaying news of interest to them. There are a few very interesting points that Pew makes in it’s report.  The first being that we no longer rely on just the newspaper or the nightly news to feed our media habit.  In fact, we leverage all the platforms available to us to keep current on a daily basis.

“46% of Americans say they get news from four to six media platforms on a typical day. Just 7% get their news from a single media platform on a typical day”

The second relevant point they make, in my opinion, shows how we are tailoring our media habits to fit our individual news – creating a personalized, portable, and participatory relationship with the information that we find important:

• Portable : 33% of cell phone owners now access news on their cell phones.
• Personalized : 28% of internet users have customized their home page to include news from sources and on topics that particularly interest them.
• Participatory : 37% of internet users have contributed to the creation of news, commented about it, or disseminated it via postings on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter.

Being in the profession that I am – this profile doesn’t surprise me in the least.  What it does show me, however, is that the advent of multi-platform, new media outlets has streamlined and customized people’s content consumption experience.  We have more control over what we consume, how and where we consume it, and whom we share interesting tidbits with. Personally, I can’t imagine going back to a world of passively pushed content – I want my content and I want it now…on any device I see fit to view it on.

My top 10 reads for the week.   This is a SMALL sampling of what I come across in my weekly media consumption addiction.  If you’d like to be on my email list, please email me and I will add you.

Twitter Ad Platform ‘Imminent’- MediaPost

The Truth about Mobile Application Stores - ReadWriteWeb

Mobile Phones Organize Lives - Research Brief

Choosing a Marketing Plan: Traditional or Social Media - NYTimes

Mobile Web: A Better Platform for Socializing? – ReadWriteWeb

Five Reasons Not To Get Swept Up In App Madness - ITinnovation

A 4 Stage Model for Member Engagement – Social Media Today

The Case for Handcrafted Social Media – FastCompany

For Chip Makers, the Next Battle Is in Smartphones - NYTimes

The 10 Social Media Metrics Your Company Should Monitor – Social Times

It’s Thursday afternoon, and I need a 15min break from the world of work… as such, I trolled the interwebs for something interesting to give my brain a break.  Gizmodo had a very interesting post showing a visualization of the transient nature of Manhattan between day and night.  The graphic (click for larger) on the left shows the population by day, that on the right shows the rapid decline come nightfall.  Truly a commuter city.

According to the official Twitter Blog, there has been a MASSIVE spike in tweeting over the last 12 months.  Clearly stating the obvious here as we’ve seen how pervasive micro-blogging has become in all aspects of our daily lives.  The interesting thing that I took away from their post was the microscopic level they take their analysis – down to the second (they are processing an average of more than 600 tweets per second).  Tech Crunch takes this a step further, and puts the question to their readers regarding who is responsible for the bulk of the tweeting. Is it the top 10% of users that are responsible for this number?  Good question – I know looking at my twitter stream of people that I follow, I can pinpoint 5-10 people I follow that compose the bulk of the information that comes across to me.  Here are some additional interesting observations from the Royal Pingdom:

• December 2009 was the first month Twitter processed more than one billion tweets (with 1.036 billion tweets).
• January 2010 had 16 times as many tweets as January 2009.
• The activity on Twitter has doubled since August 2009.
• January 2010 saw more tweets per day (39.5 million) than the whole of September 2008.

My top 10 reads for the week.   This is a SMALL sampling of what I come across in my weekly media consumption addiction.  If you’d like to be on my email list, please email me and I will add you.

Windows Phone 7 Series: Everything Is Different Now – Gizmodo

Local TV for Devices on the Move - NYTimes article

Facebook directs more online users than Google – SFChronicle

Google CEO Eric Schmidt at MWC Puts Mobile First – eWeek

Professional sports are ahead of the game in social media – SmartBlog

Marketers, Researchers, Lend Me Your Ears – BrandWeek

Will You Pay for Hulu on the iPad? It May Be Your Only Choice - All Things Digital

Fast Company’s Worlds Most Innovative Companies 2010: Intel #14 – FastCompany

Google Launches Powerful Mobile Shopping App for Android - Mashable

Yahoo! and Total Immersion Bring Augmented Reality to the Olympics - ReadWriteWeb

Slipping a little from last year, but still making the top 20 – Intel ranks well in Fast Company’s World’s Most Innovative Companies for 2010.  Fast Company focuses in on Single Chip Cloud Computing but that only scratches the surface of the innovation going on in this company.  Consider our design wins in Health Care, our new 2010 Core Processor Family and on an entertainment level – our Sponsors of Tomorrow advertising campaign.  All great stuff coming out of the halls of Intel.

We’ve all seen the writing on the wall for some time now – MTV is not really a TV station dedicated to music anymore – and it hasn’t been for quite some time.  Last week – they made it official, with a very deliberate change in their iconic logo and tagline.  For the first time in 30 years, you won’t see the tagline ‘Music Television’ as part of their logo – on air, online, or in print.  It’s not surprising really – we’ve seen the media leader change from the attitude of ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ to ‘Reality Bites’.  Gone are the video mega-hits like Thriller or Vogue.  In their place?  Jersey Shore & 16 and Pregnant.  As a product of the 80’s and 90’s and countless hours spent singing along to my favorite artists as they told a musical story through the magic of video I must admit, I’m disappointed.  MTV – I’d hoped for better from you…what I get is a dose of reality…TV, that is.