You can still buy a ticket online at a 25% discount for the Venture Summit Mid-Atlantic 2010: Where Big Ideas Meet Big Money happening November 3rd-5th, 2010 at the George Mason Inn at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia

Aspen, CO — “in between oil spills, we do air and water pollution” joked EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson as she was interviewed by Aspen Institute Director, Walter Issacson at the Fortune Magazine Brainstorm Tech Conference.

Jackson also declared the Clean Air Act a tremendous success but warned that the nation’s air remains dangerous and toxic on many places across the country.

My admonition to the radio industry to get off its butt @ Radio Ink Convergence Summit last night: http://ht.ly/1UbYT

As ConferenceHound.com growls its way out of its winter of discontent and hibernation, we are taking a few surveys about what motivates you to attend a conference or trade show.  This survey is exactly one question long and we'd sure appreciate it, if you could find a few seconds to give us your opinion .  We think it's three clicks and about 15 seconds to complete. 

There's no sense in not taking a few more cheap punches while the Adobe Flash platform is reeling on the mat.

Not for Steve Jobs. Not for me.

 

Back in the depths of the dot com crash, I remember the sages of my rump agency expounding, like the plastics salesman to Dustin Hoffman's Ben in The Graduate,  "One Word: Flash". A generation of expensive flash developers was born. Design shops, Ad Agencies, Fashion Brands could not stumble over each other fast enough to build Flashy, Splashy Web intros on their sites. 

Micro-sites in flash, rich media banners in flash, video in flash, Flash in Flash.  Macromedia wins. Adobe buys out the platform.  Party is on. 

Along comes buzz kill Apple which does not support Flash in it its nascent iPhone.  Worse, this Ipad, this arriviste, this nifty hug-it-in-your-lap in your Ralph Lauren earth tone beddings, Kindle-killing, gargantuan iPod Touch comes along. Suddenly, every hipster company and brand is left with a website home page that looks like a highway construction zone for a collapsed bridge. Media publishers, heavily invested in Flash video can't strut their stuff on the newest, coolest delivery system out there. Magazine publishers are all over the iPad as the savior of journalism. 

To your left, you will see a beautiful screen capture of the appearance of the home page of the evidently misnamed "Design Agency" as it appears this morning on my iPad. 

Would you like to hire them? Would you know how to contact them? Do you know what they do?

Can you hear the collective whine from Flash developers and award winner wannabes?

Guess what? Steve doesn't care about you and your piddling Flash problems: Steve Jobs: Thoughts on Flash .

Actually neither do I. Flash hegemony can't end soon enough.  Why?

• Site developers and publishers who entice their clients or bosses into Flashy, Splashy Home pages are instantaneously guarantying their clients sub-standard SEO discoverability on major search engines. Unless you really know what you are doing, the text within a Flash unit is not indexable  
• Have you ever tried to cut and paste a company's contact information from an Adobe Flash site into your contacts?  Fuhggedaboudit. Next company please.
• Flash developers, in my experience, are really nice, frequently talented, always expensive, hard-to-find and for the most part usually gone surfing (the waves, sunshine, not the web)..  Good people, many of them, but after paying them endlessly to fix their own bugs, it gets old.
• Which brings me to the platform itself.  I'm not a developer, but I don't need a computer science degree from Stanford or a design degree from RISD to know that this platform is extremely buggy, requiring lots of QA, lots of long conversations with clients about bugginess, and not at all easy to edit by "the rest of us".

So while there has no doubt been some tremendous commercial art completed in flash, not to speak of insane budgets (even I, speak as someoneonce succesfully enlisted to sell a client  a $95,000 flash banner requiring a helicoper shoot), the end can't come soon enough.

The iPad may or may not be the next killer platform, but every content publisher is going to think twice about continuing to develop content that will be unusable on the newest coolest device — not to speak of its older, possibly cooler cousin, the iPhone.

HTML 5 Baby. Bring it on.

Oh, and if you just checked your site on your iPad and discovered the horror of it all, our Barbary Coast Subsidiary might be able to help you solve the problem quickly.

The king of that 140 character, billion dollar valuation micro-blogging platform, Twitter has hit upon an absolutely brilliant concept. 

I don't know why nobody ever thought of this before.

Biz Stone says he will announce plans to monetize Twitter with…..are you ready?…… Advertising.    Happy Friday!

Advertising is going mobile, right along with everything else that takes place on a screen. As more and more people carry smart phones (don't you?), advertisers have to adapt.

We have written before about "app-vertising." Now we are studying this new report from Research And Markets, to begin to imagine our future. This a future in which every marketing plan includes mobile. Seriously.

At a recent Mobile Ad Summit panel, a trio of advertising CEOs agreed that smart phones are the game-changer. The platform has suddenly become desirable, and brands are just beginning to explore the possibilities.

The global spend on mobile could reach nearly $29 billion just this year, and up to $50 billion five years from now.

You in? Grab your phone, let's hit the road.

Just about a month ago, we wondered here if the end of traditional media had finally arrived. Today, we see that Gap is putting another nail in the coffin. This autumn's "Born to Fit" campaign has just about everything in it — everything, that is, except the mix of traditional media we are used to seeing. Instead of the big television campaign, we see an engaging Facebook page, as well as an iPhone app called StyleMixer, an online fashion show, and hundreds of in-store concerts.

Mobile? Check.
Social? Check.
In-store? Check.
TV? Not so much.

Is this the model for the future?

Ad Age tells us that mobile advertising may finally be coming into its own. People can't seem to get enough applications for their smart phones, and even welcome branded apps. Assuming the apps don't suck, that is.

Sounds easy! Of course, when you realize that the average user installs 20-40 apps on his phone, and there are tens of thousands of applications out there, you realize that the real challenge is getting those eyeballs in the first place.

OK, so it's not quite so simple. Nonetheless, the opportunities are there — and only getting better. Branded apps are brilliant when executed well. They take some serious development savvy and a good push to get them found by users. There is also a second option: in-application advertising. Piggy-back on someone else's awesome app and show off your product inside.

Want inspiration? Check out the Ad Age article for some examples.
Don't believe this is the next great thing? Analysts do. Maybe time for a little more research.