Just got done with updating the case study on mobile advertising for the Newspaper Association of America — I guess I shouldn’t be so surprised that market conditions had changed so very much since mid-2008. You always hear that “Internet years are like dog years,” but man, did that ever hold true.
Just a few examples:
- One of the big segments I wrote lumped Alternate Reality and Apps into the same category. This was obviously before Apple’s App store completely blew up.
- QR codes were this crazy technology that strange Japanese advertisers were using. Seemed like Sea-urchin sushi. Something that would never really catch on here.
- 3.And the biggest one of all – mobile is now an actual line-item in marketing and advertising budgets, not just a throw-in with “digital media.”
So here’s something that I just couldn’t figure out what to do with – the touchscreen guys just pinged me last week and showed me some stuff about multitouch displays that allow you to use all ten fingers to manipulate & add things.
Now, I’m not sure – yet – if this really represents some kind of massive leap forward in getting the damn central processors to recognize input from the user … or if it’s like the ridiculous razor-blade wars, where Schick & Gillette seem locked in a strange battle to cram more blades onto a razor than you see in The Bride’s big samurai-sword fight scene in Kill Bill Vol. 1.
Anyway – 3M has a 22-inch monitor that can recognize all ten of your grubby digits, and a whole gallery of videos showing how the Microsoft Surface-type tech is making its way into your pocket. Wish I could show them to you here directly, but 3M has not provided any sort of embedding functionality.
