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Well, ‘in the cur­rent eco­nomic cli­mate’ would be one. It’s becom­ing almost impos­si­ble to pick up a news­pa­per or read any mar­ket­ing copy with­out encoun­ter­ing word­ing to this effect – ‘in the cur­rent down­turn’, ‘in these chal­leng­ing times’ etc.

Of course, the rea­son for using them is empa­thy – we get it, we under­stand, we feel your pain. The prob­lem is that cus­tomers don’t really care that much whether you feel their pain or not. They’re far more inter­ested in actu­ally deal­ing with that pain.

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Sprint has put up a page full of wid­gets to sup­port its This is now posi­tion­ing. It’s a fan­tas­ti­cally eclec­tic mix show­ing every­thing from from the cur­rent world pop­u­la­tion through to the num­ber of cof­fee cups being pro­duced. You can even down­load a pre-determined selec­tion for your own use (shame they didn’t let you sim­ply pick from the whole lot).

There are so many mar­ket­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties with wid­gets right now. Beyond sim­ply using them to reflect a posi­tion­ing, as Sprint has, the oppor­tu­nity to cre­ate stuff that’s really use­ful for cus­tomers is just immense.

The ever-excellent Slideshare is run­ning its annual World’s Best Pre­sen­ta­tion con­test. Brows­ing through, there are some really nice decks with inter­est­ing con­tent. You can eas­ily see the influ­ence Pre­sen­ta­tion Zen and Duarte Design have had (all for the bet­ter) in the war against death by Pow­er­Point. I par­tic­u­larly like the following:

But…

The thing that strikes me look­ing through most of the entries is that the pre­sen­ter is almost entirely super­flu­ous. Surely pre­sen­ta­tions, at their best, are about pre­sen­ters mak­ing a con­nec­tion with an audi­ence – not sim­ply a set of slides that can be read through (how­ever pretty they are).

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This is nice. Musi­cov­ery is a Pandora-esque music dis­cov­ery site that allows you to select playlists by click­ing your mood. Choose from dark to pos­i­tive and from calm to ener­getic and then watch it graph­i­cally spin out tracks in a very pretty Visual The­saurus stylee.

Source: NOTCOT.ORG

At the risk of con­firm­ing the wide­spread sus­pi­cions that (a) any­one into tech­nol­ogy is a Star Wars obsessed geek and (b) peo­ple in adver­tis­ing have too much time on their hands, if you’ve got a Apple lap­top you have to check out Mac­Saber.

Like many new lap­tops, Macs have a bunch of motion sen­sors in them. It’s these that recog­nise when you’ve man­aged to elbow your machine off your desk and which brace its innards for impact. But of course where there’s a sen­sor, there’s input. And this can be used to trig­ger other events. This is pre­cisely what the geniuses behind Mac­Saber have used to turn their Macs into some­thing far, far more inter­est­ing.

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