HP Slate, we hardly knew you.  In fact, we didn’t know you at all.  I mean, not really.  Apart from your fakey YouTube videos and premature twitter raves, it really was just a glimmer of hope in the minds of many that you could pull this off.  And what was it that ultimately yanked it?  Performance?  Really?  You put a netbook-class CPU in a device running Windows 7 Ultimate and were shocked, shocked that it performed like a septuagenarian belly dancer.  While I applaud them for having the guts to cancel the product before embarrassing both themselves  and Microsoft by releasing it, you have to question the product development and marketing that allowed the first screw to be put into the back of it’s oh so svelte case.  Perhaps they underestimated the Apple iPad.  Or thought their target market would be too dumb to notice.  Whatever the reason, I’m offering HP a hand in rising Phoenix-like from this.  Let’s hope they take this to heart this time: (more…)

HP has their marketing engine over-revving today, with a bunch of me-too tweets and a new video demonstrating with their HP Slate will do and how cool the music from the video is.  Whatever.  HP, in case you happen to ready my blog, this is for you:

HP, you have been in this market since 2002, with the release of the TC1000.  The design was unexpectedly fantastic, and demonstrated the potential these devices had in changing how consumers and businesses used computers.  But not only did you cripple it with a sub-par CPU, you borked practicality by having the only Tablet PC on the market with a non-digitized screen so a regular digitizer pen wasn’t usable – if you lost the pen you were out of luck until you bought a replacement from HP.  Since then, every other device you’ve released in this category has been with with a collective yawn.  So my question is this: what are you doing differently and when will we see it? (more…)

The most impressive viral marketing campaign produced.  Heineken Italy collaborated with girlfriends, journalists and professors to convince over 1,100 soccer fans to forgo the Champions League Match to go to a concert.  15 minutes into it, they let them in on the joke, just in time for the start of the game, which was broadcast to the surprised but remarkably chipper audience.

The results? 1.5 million caught the "concert" on live TV, and over 5 million hits to the site Heineken created for the event.  And of course, the viral news coverage, blogs and YouTube visitors.