Dumbo the Elephant and the Battle for Standards. Poll!

*** KGGGRBANG! GUF ***

Just arrived at this new destination: vermeiretim.wordpress.com.

“Hey, this has the same extension as my twitter account! And it feels the same as my previous blog.
I feel very at ease. Yes, think I should settle here. “

But you’re here already, so I better cut the crap and inform you that I was formerly whispering at tmbot.wordpress.com.

Moving content from a wordpress.com blog to another wordpress.com blog sort of works like this (or at least, that’s how I think you’re supposed to handle it):

make new domain, export xml old, import xml into new, wait 20 sec, site is there! But afterwards, you need to do organize your blog. Settings and things like widgets and themes are apparently not in the XML.

Annoying? Absolutely not.

Just modifying a name shouldn’t take that much time. I guess any non-technician will agree. But while going through this entire export/import/tweak-process, I noticed that the WordPress back-office has a “Polls” option. Hooray! Always wanted to poll. The question is below and if you’re into stories, elephants or brain concussions I think you should VOTE!*

What a stupid question! Haven’t you heard about Mobile HTML5 yet?

I have to say, I’m a bit tangled by the entire mobile market thing / marketing (phones, tablets).

If you want to “go mobile” for whatever business reason – don’t just do it because you can – what platform do you develop it for? As it seems a mobile app is OS-dependent and thus requires some different coding.

From what I’ve understood (mobile) HTML5 would overcome this issue. So as long is this language isn’t completely there yet, mobile marketing could be a big effort and a lot of money.

Guess best thing today’s marketers can do is to find out which mobile devices have the biggest market share within their customer base.

How to obtain that kind of knowledge? Well, I would say use your senses when you meet a customer. He’ll probably do something with his mobile device at some point. Or just look when one uploads an image to Facebook or something similar. Yfrog for instance shows the device that shot the picture. Another approach is to organize a poll. As I did with my poll on the battle for standards.

My poll is about the battle for standards

Don’t underestimate the battle for standards within high-tech industries. It can be an important factor for the adoption of innovation. It can also make or break a company.

I learned this pretty early. At an age of about six to seven, I was quite into Dumbo the Flying Elephant. And back in the eighties one had to record video on a physical tape with a video recorder. And those tapes showed me that the same product can be different and one had to “win”. Here’s what happened. Remember I had age six.

Dumbo is on but Samson is on too.

Easter holidays, rainy day. You’re not allowed to play outside. So is your friend living across the street. Good thing: big afternoon on the tele. Dumbo was aired. But Samson, which I was equally into, was on too. And at the same time. Bummer!

Me and my friend (read: their dads) decided to each tape a show, not realizing they couldn’t exchange the tapes because one of the dads had a betamax and the other had a VHS. Battle for standards, there you go!

Let’s play Dumbo. Hell yeah, I believe I can fly!

As a result me and my friend watched the Dumbo movie together and we didn’t watch Samson anymore. Rain stopped by the way. It was logic that we went out to play. We always did that. We often played football. Not that day.

We played dumbo that day, only that day that is. We took a bucket and a feather. Climbed on top of our red brick postboxes. I jumped believing I was about to fly, exactly in the same way as Dumbo does in the below video. Crashed on my head but scored the bucket though! Guess I didn’t fly because I miss the elephant ears.

Few hours later I woke up. Diagnosed with a brain concussion. Maybe that’s why I remember this entire story anyway?

Oh yes, VHS won and I love Samson more than Dumbo since then.

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*It would be truly awesome if the site only showed the video after poll participation.