Jobs’ ‘Star Trek’ videocall gaffe

‘iPhone brings Star Trek to the modern world’ claims the Times story headline:

Apple has placed video calling at the centre of its new iPhone, [a feature that] that got the 5,000 crowd at the Worldwide Developers Conference most excited. Steve Jobs, founder and chief executive of Apple, introduced the new service to whoops of delight when he called to Jony Ive, the company’s British-born designer. “I grew up with The Jetsons and Star Trek, just dreaming about video calling. Now it’s real,” Mr Jobs said.

However, as any Trekkie know, the handheld devices features in the cult sci-fic series were not actually videocall-capable, as better-informed people at Trekmovie.com make clear, but it did show a kind of desktop videocalling system. And the same applies to The Jetsons:

Most Irritating Media Clichés – Part 1

E&T’s Buzzword Editor Mark Eting has just published his latest index of 36 Most Irritating Media Clichés. The Top 12 comprises:
1. The Elephant in the room
2. Poster boy / poster girl
3. In spades
4. Step change
5. Zero sum gain
6. Outcomes
7. Codify
8. Traction
9. Conflate
10. Devil is in the detail / details
11. Imprimatur
12. Motherhood and apple pie

Love ’em? Hate ’em? Commentaries, s’il vous plait… A dozen more skirmishes in the war against clichés coming up next week.

AshBalls #2: ‘Stuck abroad? Get luggage home more easily’

More Eyjafjallajokull AshBalls from hi-tech luggage vendor LiveLuggage (you can just imagine Monty Python’s Graham Chapman speaking this over tinkly background musak…)

As thousands of stranded passengers have found out during the travel chaos, being stuck abroad is bad enough, without having walk miles with luggage. Power-assisted and anti-gravity cases from Live Luggage help take some of the strain out of this situation. A new breed of case chassis with a patented ‘Anti-Gravity’ handle system. Easily manoeuvrable case which feels almost weightless when fully loaded.  Live Luggage features power-assisted wheels with in-built pan-cake motors for power-assistance for going up gradients. Intelligently driven with torque sensors and tilt switches, the wheels power up automatically when a step or gradient is sensed, driving the wheels forward, saving strain on the user’s body.  The weight of the packed case feels like virtually nothing.  Safe, rechargeable batteries last for around 1.5 miles on a single charge.

‘It’s easy to pull a Live Luggage case comfortably while holding a child’ is the claim, but as the supplied PR image shows, evidently an easier tac is to get the child to do the actual lugging:

SON: Dad – where’s Mum?
DAD: Shhh – she’s in your suitcase.

‘Acidhead Dr Who’ secret unearthed

Another attempt to spin even more interest in the new series of Dr Who by raking over old internal BBC memos, has been revealed by a confidential BBC News Web story.

Among secrets from the programme’s past – disinterred from BBC archives by the BBC publicity department – is the revelation that the Doc’s first regeneration was designed to be modelled on a bad acid trip.

In an internal memo dated 1966, producers outlined how the first Doctor, played by William Hartnell, would morph into Dr Who 2.0 (Patrick Troughton): “It is as if he has had the LSD drug, and instead of experiencing the kicks, he has the hell and dank horror which can be its effect”.

Other secrets thought to be lurking in the Dr Who archive include the revelation that the show was originally named after the rock band The Who, in an attempt by BBC programme makers to attract a hipper viewing audience.

Strange daze for Jim Morrison spotters?

It’s a hardly-known fact that in the same way that Fab Four fans could buy Beatle wigs and suits, a limited amount of merchandising around their Stateside contemporaries The Doors was also released. Costing $4.95 in 1969, the ‘realistic-looking’ Jim Morrison wig/beard combo transformed any wannabe Lizard King into an approximation of the iconic frontman. A pair of squeaky snakeskin slacks, and jug of cheap Californian wine to swig from, completed the ensemble. Although taken off the market when the great man died in 1971, Jim Morrison beard/wigs sets do occasionally come up on eBay.
Little wonder then that the authenticity that some newly-discovered footage of Morrison – to be included in When You’re Strange, a new cinema documentary about the insobrietous would-be shaman – has been questioned. Is it the genuinely hirsute Jimbo seen in the frame? Or a Morrison look-alike sporting prefabricated face fur?   Judge for yourself at
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8608139.stm
.

Tweeting: ‘blogging for morons’?

So, farewell then Social Media World Forum Europe The World The Universe 2010, and roll-on next year’s event. Conference programme presentations in 2011 that we’d like to see include:

• Keynote address 1: “Will someone please capitalise me £500k?”
  Is investing thousands in a ‘vaguely interesting idea for a website that has the potential to be quite successful’ throwing good money after bad? Not at all, argues serial entrepreneur Con O’Course.
• Keynote address 2: Tweeting: is it really just blogging for morons?
  Controversial über analyst Gunther Lünch of market-watcher DataGeist Group shares his view of the ‘bifurcation of the Socmed generation’ into so-called ‘Tweet twats and blog-telectuals’.
• Social Media Trends: the rise of ‘identity sharing’
  Many socmed adherents are finding that an entire personality is surplus to their requirements. University lecturer Professor Grant Guzzler suggests that there is no moral or ethical reason why two (or more) individuals should not share the same single personality in virtual cyber-domains.
• Monetization: the ‘Holy Grail’ of Social Media business models
  Leading commercial consultant Daniel Day-Rate revisits a subject heading that rarely fails to pack ‘em in. His conclusion: we still have some way to go toward achieving this.
• Case study: 10 steps to deriving value from the obvious
  Shirley Knott, managing director of the UK’s largest small-to-medium sized enterprise Mega Industries International, explains how her company did some fairly obvious things to making Internet technology perform some basic business processes, such as setting-up a website, and accepting online payments.