Brian Zhang Larsen’s Blog

I almost forgot how much noise there actually is when shopping in Japan. This video, made by one of my favorite tech blogs, akihabara news, made me reminisce. Notice the noise just after the introduction by the slightly geeky French guy.

The video is from Akihabara which is the tech district in Tokyo. And yes it is true, it IS possible to spend many many hours there looking at the new tech stuff and comic books and plastic figures. hooray for the otaku. Most larger stores (+1 employee) has its own set of speakers, telling about the good prices. Some also have a small theme song. Our favorite was Biccameras catch phrase which was “irrashaimase, Irrashaimase….” and then something. This simply means welcome or come in, and we could never withstand the offer. So we always went inside whenever we went by a “Biccamera”. Aside to the speakers the streets are filled with people who hands out different kinds of advertisement.

Soon the data mining cup, 2006 wil start. Remember to register so I can wip your ass…

I am actually not sure that I can see the time to analyze all that data again this year, but last year it was pretty fun. Anyway, it is free, so try it out. You can use the open source java data mining software weka to help you with the analyzing and mining.

I fell over this a while ago. I don’t want to mention you know what, but I think there is some other interesting predictions and estimates on this hype cycle.

I initially found this version of Gartner’s hype cycle in an entry from Dion Hinchcliffe, and I asked him who made it. Apparently he repurposed this from a Marketing chart, and he encouraged me to blog about it… So here I am.
I especially like the placements of “RSS” and “word of mouth”. I am convinced that “word of mouth” has disappointed a lot now as a marketing stunt, and did not live up to the hype it had received. Though I think that currently the term viral marketing will be hyped up, and then we just start over again with another word for roughly the same thing. Word of mouth can indeed be a very powerful tool and have helped a lot of emerging technologies and websites to gain momentum and reach a critical mass. But as a sole marketing strategy I believe it can turn to be very unreliable. But maybe it will all go better for viral marketing!!!
I also agree on the placement of RSS. Even though it has existed a long time now, it is still being hyped as “The truth” by many. There is so many ideas for its usage and, and I thinks one of its powers is that it is relatively (to what?!) simple to make and use. It has soon to disprove some of the hyped usages, and reach a more realistically position. Personally I have a hard time seeing what the major problems and disappointments should be, but then again I only use it at a moderate level, and don’t expect it to do much more for me that it does now. My guess is that RSS will reach the plateau of productivity by the time Microsoft Launches Vista. While they are the incumbent and thereby naturally have a large amount of inertia, we still await them to implement and use RSS.