“…According to industry tracker IDC, the bestselling smartphone in the U.S. so far this year by units is not the iPhone but the BlackBerry Curve.”

While many see the iPhone/BlackBerry competition as zero sum between consumer and business users, it turns out that Apple’s marketing job convincing consumers they’d enjoy having the power of a desktop in a handheld device has been a boon to RIM.

Jessica Hempel, author of the Fortune article, states, “Since the iPhone’s introduction in June 2007, BlackBerry quarterly sales have more than tripled, from $1.1 billion to $3.4 billion.”

Most interesting to me is the article’s note that RIM first started targeting mass audiences in 2008:

“Once considered mostly a business tool, of late the BlackBerry has made huge gains as a consumer product. RIM launched its first television ad campaign targeting a mass audience in 2008, and last quarter 80% of its new subscribers came from the nonbusiness crowd.”

During the research I conducted into RIM’s market positioning in 2006-2007, I found the campaign for the mass audience consumer to already be well under way as RIM was promoting the BlackBerry Pearl to consumers.

Below is a short excerpt from Chapter 3 of Constant Connectivity in a Wireless Age: The Discursive Promotional Strategies of the BlackBerry

The BlackBerry Pearl Website

Many of the themes found on the Prosumer and Corporate focused BlackBerry website are reiterated on the Consumer-focused Pearl website, albeit with a flashier designed website. The focus is on family and leisure, as well as the style component, as the profiles include several creative professionals who highlight the design features of the device. It is clear from the high-production value of the website that RIM is leveraging its best-in-class reputation (RIM, 2006 Annual Report, p.11) as a business tool to promote the Pearl as an aspirational, luxury brand smartphone. The Pearl is presented as an extension of the user’s personality, enabling one to mediate their successful personal and work lives with the technological assistance of a stylish device.

It seems RIM’s first foray into a consumer phones with the Pearl has been followed up by what looks to be the wildly successful BlackBerry Curve.

I wish them luck on the on-going battle for market dominance. The lack of exclusive service provider deal baggage should provide some real leverage as complaints about AT&T service continue to intensify.

I’m late to the Tumblr party, but you can’t help but notice the Tumblr aesthetic taking over the web with the proliferation of awesome single-themed picture blogs (though they’re not all necessarily Tumblr blogs).

As with an web service or site, as soon as it hits a critical mass, the critics get snarky – a la Fuck Yeah Sharks:

Copy longer than 10 words is so Q2 2008.

My favorite Single Themed Picture Blogs…

Awkward Family Photos

Look At This Fucking Hipster

Texts From Last Night

Maybe You Shoudn’t Buy That

This Is Why You’re Fat

Moron Ail - picture blog, though not single topic

Fuck Yeah Sharks

Fuck You, Penguin

Shipment of Fail

Fail Blog

What am I missing?

What are you favorites?

Check it out at http://www.feedthehead.net/

Colbert kicked off the week during a convo with Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig.

Eclectic Method – The Colbert Report – Remix feat Lawrence Lessig

Other gems include a remix of excerpts from Obama’s audiobook autobiography and a hilarious video of Christian Bale’s audio rant remixed with the drooling and doped up kid in the back seat after the dentist.

Barack Obama is tired of you s**t (Techno Zuendli Mix)

Christian Bale takes David to the Dentist (Mash-Up)

The GPS scam struck me as a particularly civilized form of robbery, a Thomas Crowne type of an affair involving airports and luxury cars, as compared to the rude reminder of B.C.’s less glamorous car theft problem I received when I was recently visiting Vancouver. As I got on the SkyTrain to head downtown, a huge sign tacked to the wall of the mall overlooking a grey parking lot warned “Bait Cars Are Everywhere.”

The car bait program has been in place since 2002 and has seen a dramatic decrease in car thefts in the Lower Mainland, according to ICBC. The program has a sexy website (in comparison to ICBC or the VPD anyway), which is where I found this gem about how my hometown is managing to buck the province-wide trend of declining car thefts: Bait Cars Tackle Williams Lake Auto Theft Epidemic.

I’ll have to write something nice about my hometown next time. Until then, underscore_mouse and abbenquesnel have some pretty Flickr pictures of the area…

This past weekend on my walk home after a Friday night tutorial at Zeitgeist on how to graffiti like the pros (it involves a paper bag), I noticed the same stencil spray painted on the corner of 24th & Guerrero.

I walk past the Google shuttle stop every morning and I don’t know that I’d go as far as to call them “trendy professionals”, but I think the graffiti guys and the googlites have a lot in common, per Richard Flordia’s thesis in “The Rise of the Creative Class.” Florida posits that creative professionals are simply seeking communities with a sense of ‘authenticity’… that would be panaderias over Banana Republic.

Shootings > Starbucks?

It’s too bad the salaries of Googlites can’t take care of drive-by shootings on the same corner. From SF Gate on June 23:

…

San Francisco police also were investigating a shooting Sunday night of a man in his mid-30s who was attacked near the corner of 24th and Guerrero streets by a person who jumped out of a car and started shooting. The shooter then jumped back into the car and fled with a driver, according to police.

In related news, if “young professionals” don’t do it, the government will take care of public blight for you:

Sad chapter in Western Addition history ending

The Fillmore, where 60 percent of the residents were African American, was declared blight in 1948. The first demolition project began in 1956. The second phase, the brainchild of the redevelopment agency’s then-head Justin Herman, began in 1964 and expanded the area to 60 square blocks. Eminent domain was used to purchase Victorian homes and buy out local businesses. The thriving black business community was destroyed as owners of nightclubs, barbershops, banks and retail stores were forced to close up shop.

…

The city plans to turn over 1,300 acres – more than half of the Bayview-Hunters Point area – to the Redevelopment Agency to help clean up blight, build affordable housing and stimulate business. The project creates the largest redevelopment district in San Francisco history.

** Update, Aug. 18: The graffiti lesson was delivered on Day 14, check out Notes from the Zeitgeist

The summation seemed to be that Microsoft will continue throwing a lot of money around for the foreseeable future.

As the talk wrapped up and Dan gave the final pitch for the book, he asked Mary how much the book cost and she responded with, “Free, like beer.”

The book in fact was not free.

Web 2.0 mistake… assuming the drinks are always free?

Lunch however was on CNET, which was enjoyed out on their sunny patio.

Pluggd: text tagging for videos

WHY? This was the most compelling demo at SF New Tech’s most recent event (other than the cuddly Pleo). You’re watching a 45 min clip from CNN but you just want the news about Iraq. Pluggd inserts text tags in the video at the points where Iraq is mentioned, as well terms they deem relevant like “Iran”, “war”, “terrorism”.

Diigo: social book marking site, also allows users to annotate websites and share with others

WHY? My laptop was taken from me before its time last month, and besides missing having a laptop period, the things I miss most from my clunky old Dell are, in order, (1) the graduate school dictionary I compiled of all the esoteric terms I was reading, (2) my bookmarks, (3) travel photos.

Diigo is my second try at using a bookmarking site. I used Del.icio.us for a while a couple of years back and abandoned it after a few months of use. The unforeseen laptop tragedy has given me a new appreciation as to why it’s useful to have your bookmarks stored online.

TweetClouds: Tag cloud of all terms you use on Twitter

WHY? You don’t already spend enough time thinking about yourself. Visual summary of what you’ve been writing about.

I’ve been using Twitter for just over a month now, see my TweetCloud here: http://www.tweetclouds.com/user_pages/ldpodcast.html

Someecards: Writers from The Onion write egreeting cards.

WHY? You need a laugh and/or another distraction at work.

Seeqpod: Find exactly the music you want, stream it to your computer, build playlists

WHY? You want what you want when you want it without having to download songs and viruses to your computer.

San Francisco Web 2.0 Crawl Calendar: Calendar of all Web 2.0 Expo events happening next week

WHY? Some events aren’t listed on Facebook. Thank you Search Marketing Salon for putting this together.

1. Olympic Torch Run
2. Flickr’s launch of video

Scott Beale from Laughing Squid posted some amazing coverage of the run/protests on Flickr, photos and video. Check it out at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/laughingsquid/2401435793

For one year — March 17, 2006 to March 17, 2007 — he filmed one video entry a day, M-F. His video journal was one of the first widely popular blogs that involved audience participation; he also created an alternative advertising model that involved yellow duckies.

I have not heard of Ze since his last post in March 2007, until this week. One of my Twitter friends wrote something about thanking Ze Frank for orange, and today someone emailed a link to one of the funniest videos:

the show with zefrank: 11-27-06

* Is there a stuffwhitepeoplelike post on Scrabble yet?

Why, I wondered, was Ze suddenly showing back up in my life after a one year hiatus?

Two Google-seconds later I had my answer.

Ze has created the ColorWars 2008 on Twitter. Team Orange, Blue, VERY Green, and on. Players join a color team by choosing a color follow, and voila! you’re a team player! There’s something about Bingo challenges, but with my diminished attention span I can’t be bothered to follow through to figure it out. Point is, user-created challenges, games, and merriment are on Twitter.

GaryVee launched GDP08 (Good People Day) on Twitter today, April 3, a little experiment that saw hundreds (thousands?) of nice messages tweeted about others deemed to be good people.

I hear blogging about blogging is in poor taste. I’ll end here.

Learned a valuable lesson about Javascript and WordPress today — they don’t mix — and Ze don’t do Java.

Regardless, glad to have some Ze back in my life. Go Yellow!