Consumers are increasingly using web applications across the Internet. Google is the leader of this trend, with email, word processing, spreadsheet, and calendar functionality. Data is not stored locally, on each computer, but in large "server farms" operated by Google. What are the implications of this transition? Nicholas Carr makes an analogy to the development of the electrical grid 100 years ago.

Cheap, plentiful electricity changed society and culture, spurring the rise of mass media, mass consumerism and modern advertising. We can expect that cheap, plentiful computing will have similarly far-reaching consequences, once again overturning many of our assumptions about how we work and live.

What Cloud Means to Marketing Forecast, by Nicholas Carr

In 2008 marketers should avoid over-hyped opportunities and focus instead on measuring their campaigns' success, one satisfied customer at a time, according to Drew Neisser, CEO for US-based experiential marketing agency Renegade.
Neisser has published a "top ten" of marketing industry trends that will be worth considering during the coming year...

Drew Neisser on 2008 Trends

The rise of Web 2.0 and user-generated content is having a profound effect on traditional marketing tactics. This article proposes that the 4 Ps - product, price, place and promotion - be replaced by the much more consumer-oriented 5 Ps: people, passion, processes, platform and partners.

When wholly, enthusiastically deployed, the new five Ps all work together - a passion for pleasing the person with whom you're doing business gives rise to new processes, the adoption of smarter platforms and value-adding partnerships that can make the promise of one-to-one marketing real.

The new FIVE Ps of Marketing

The massive attacks against hundreds of thousands of Web pages that started earlier this month has spread to some of the Internet's most prominent sites, including those for USA Today, ABC News, Target and Wal-Mart, researchers said today.

Dancho Danchev, the Bulgarian security researcher who first reported the attacks two weeks ago, said that the attacks had spread to a long list of high-profile sites, which have had their search results poisoned with malicious IFrame code. "The attack's been ongoing for almost a month now," Danchev said in an e-mail.

The Hanover Theatre in Worcester, Massachusetts, has just celebrated their grand opening!

Signal designed their web site, which includes a custom Content Management System (CMS). All data for shows is input only once through a simple web interface. The data is then displayed in various places throughout the site as needed, and photos are automatically scaled to the appropriate sizes. Additional CMS components were designed to manage news content, and materials for media inquiries.

This was a fun project to work on. We wish them much continued success!

Visit Hanover Theatre's Website: