Catherine Meyer, Les Veres and Dan Macaluso went to meet our International Resellers during a channel meeting which took place in Amsterdam on October 16, 2007.

Catherine says:

We met with Resellers from Italy, Germany, Holland, England, Finland, France and the Benalux areas. Next Solutions, our Dutch partner, hosted the event at their facilities just outside Amsterdam. Before the meeting began, all the attendees enjoyed speaking with each other and sharing their experiences.

The meeting started with a presentation which focused on the trends in digital asset management and enterprise content management global markets, while encouraging our resellers to “surf the WAVE” and take advantage of our new channel partnership program “Partnerlink”. Les answered questions and provided additional information throughout the presentation. Dan delivered the remainder of the presentation, which consisted of products update, development schedule and direction.

Dan continued the presentation by offering the latest updates on the Mediabank and B.media products. His presentation generated numerous questions and overall everyone was impressed with the new development on products. Read the rest of this entry »

“Be all you can be”

“What’s in your wallet?”

“Good to the last drop”

“Got Milk?”

I will bet you, that you could tell me every identity that those slogans belong to. Why?

What makes a good slogan/copy shot? Why do some copy shots become embedded in our brains, while others like “A Good Place to Sit and Eat.” (Denny’s), fall by the wayside?

Nick Padmore at A List Apart has crunched the numbers. He started with the 115 best slogans, straplines, taglines, and headlines (nominated by 18 creative experts), and examined every aspect of the slogans; mood, grammar, inclusion of the brand name, standards, metaphors and other devices.

Nick even went as far as to do separate calculations for post-1985 copy shots.

His conclusion was simple.

Judging against that criteria, he claims “If it’s on, it’s in” (Radio Times) is the Best Copy Shot Ever Written.

While I don’t agree with that AT ALL, his article is very informative (if a bit lengthy). It even has pie charts!

Seeing the numbers, it becomes very clear that most successful slogans have many elements in common. This is a very good thing to keep in mind when you are coming up with your next advertising campaign.

And just in case you didn’t know, the entities from the aboves slogans are (in order): ARMY, Capital One, Maxwell House, and National Milk Processor Board.

After writing last weeks article about the growth of online marketing, another online advertising study was released.

The study, released by Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers, only futher enforces the growing trend of online marketing:

Internet advertising revenues exceeded $5.2 billion for the third quarter of 2007, representing yet another historic high for a quarter and a $1.1 billion increase, or 25.3 percent, over Q3 2006.

And TechCrunch put some perspective on the numbers:

Whilst the $5.2 billion figure is a record month, the growth rate quarter on quarter are not that spectacular; the third quarter was up only three percent on Q2. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; three percent may not sound a lot, but if it were 33% the cries of bubble would be heard loud and wide. 3% is a sustainable, healthy number that will bring joy to many online who rely on advertising without the related fear that the growth may not be sustainable.

With the announcement of Facebook’s new user-tracking highly-targeted targeted ad platform, it seems that everybody is talking about online marketing. And for a good reason too, a recent eMarketer’s report says that by 2011, U.S. advertisers will spend about 42 billion dollars on online advertising. That is just less than double the 21.4 billion we are spending in 2007.

But is it to much? As Gigaom wonders

“Of course, it also means that advertising (or marketing messages) are going to be in-your-face, every time you turn around. What is the theoretical limit to our ability to absorb these messages? I just wonder, when, as people-being-marketed-to will we say: Enough! Stop! Or will we?”

Ever since the first Dot-Com-Era, cynical speculators have been forecasting the bleak future of traditional print media.

Back then I scoffed at that idea, the internet was still a novelty, and the diversity of online new sources was lacking (to say the least).

But over the past few years, I find myself increasingly getting my news online, whether it be from the citizen journalism of blogs or the online entity of the local newspaper. And, I know I am not the only one.

This is an excerpt from a New York Times article about the shift from traditional to online news:

The circulation declines of American newspapers continued over the spring and summer, as sales across the industry fell almost 3 percent compared with the year before, according to figures released yesterday.

The drop, reported by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, reflects the growing shift of readers to the Internet, where newspaper readership has climbed, and also a strategy by many major papers to shed unprofitable or marginally profitable print circulation.

Over at TechCrunch they are examining the decline in relation to global region and marketing:

The decline of print media isn’t an international story, it’s one that’s very much focused on the United States, and to a lesser extent the English speaking world. The problem today with print media in the United States is that it has yet to have undergone a massive market restructuring that has occurred in other countries.

And What They Think looks at the shift from traditional to digital media and compares it to the evolution of print services.

It seems to me that the future of print is indeed uncertain, and we should all be prepared to adapt and evolve… or maybe I am just another cynical speculator.

Employee Name: Kayla Martin

Bio: Kayla is the Web Designer, Graphic Designer, and all-around Creative at WAVE. Kayla joined WAVE in February 2007, after graduating Full Sail with a bachelor’s degree in Digital Arts and Design. Although Kayla is relatively new at WAVE, she joined us in February 2007, she has already made some big improvements including a complete re-build of wavecorp.com and is currently in the process of re-branding WAVE.

Hobbies: Cooking, Fishing, Boating (or just being on/near the water), and Shopping

Favorite Quote: Curiosity about life in all of its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people. –Leo Burnett

Random Fact: I like to eat turkey sandwiches for breakfast.

At WAVE, we know that you, the customer, are the most important aspect of our business. That is why we will soon be adding a “Customer Spotlight” feature to our News Blog. This Customer Spotlight will highlight the wonderful people we have as customers.

Also, we will be adding a Meet the Team feature, so you all can get to know the people behind WAVE Corporation.

 Update: The first Meet the Team segment can be read here

To all those celebrating Halloween tonight, make it a happy one.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN FROM WAVE!

With the heightened awareness of piracy and copyright infringement on the web, it is becoming increasingly important for companies to track use and distribution of their licensed content through Digital Rights Management (DRM).

When online .mp3s and .movs started to replace CDs and DVDs, the public’s awareness of DRM increased. That awareness, combined with a few high-profile follies, like Sony’s “rootkit-DRM” a few years ago, caused consumers to rally against the DRM movement. Now, with high-profile announcements like “DRM-Free mp3s on iTunes,” DRM seems to be struggling once again in the digital music industry.

But what is the current state and future of DRM in the publishing industry? Surely, our content and the content of our customers’ is vital to our business and in some instances a critical revenue stream. It prevents assets from being used inappropriately or without permission. Is DRM within the publishing industry fundamentally different than within the music industry? What impact does DRM have on the usability of assets? What do you think of DRM in general, do you use it in your organization?

Looks like within the next couple of years, the industry will have access to 4 terabyte hard drives. The article below suggests that this could be possible by 2011.

Hitachi Ltd. says its researchers have successfully shrunken a key component in hard drives to a nanoscale that will pave the way for quadrupling today’s storage limits to 4 terabytes for desktop computers and 1 terabyte on laptops in 2011….
The feat, which Hitachi plans to present Monday at the Perpendicular Magnetic Recording Conference in Tokyo, revisits a technology known as giant magnetoresistance, or GMR, that was the basis of the work of two European scientists who won the Nobel Prize in physics last week….
“We changed the direction of the current and adjusted the materials to get good properties,” said John Best, chief technologist for Hitachi’s data-storage unit.
By doing so, Hitachi said it has created the world’s smallest disk drive heads in the 30-nanometer to 50-nanometer range, or about 2,000 times smaller than the width of an average human hair.
Other hard drive companies are working on similar technology as well, Rydning said. He predicted the entire disk drive industry will begin migrating to this new type of GMR-based technology in 2009.

Read the rest of the article over at MSNBC.com

Within the foreseeable future, users workstation will be able to house terabytes of data. How will company’s adapt? Will there users even need all this space considering most corporate data resides on remote storage servers? Organizing, searching, finding, rights management, availability, how will workflows be affected with all this data sitting out there? The next few years should be interesting with the storage needs and disk space availability increasing at such a rapid pace. Filtering through all this data will become increasingly dependant on how its organized and managed.