Ilya Vedrashko

Not science fiction anymore, this: "Once chairs and other things become content, the prospect of rampant chair piracy turns from unimaginable into very real." The Pirate Bay is opening a new category for the new kind of piratable stuff: "We believe that the next step in copying will be made from digital form into physical form. It will be physical objects. Or as we decided to call them: Physibles.

I took my first Kodak Photo Spot (wiki) pictures at my spring break trip to the Disney World in the mid-1990s, and through all these years I've never stopped admiring their genius. It's a marketing idea whose elegance has rarely been emulated. I love how organically spreadable the signs were, how they subtly nudged you to spend another scarce frame of  film, and how they made people's lives a little bit better by giving their memories just the right composition.

Clotaire Rapaille, the author of The Culture Code who was featured in the PBS documentary The Persuaders, is the inventor behind the patent for "Advertisement for Leather Clothing" granted in 2005.

As part of Hill's Beacon initiative, I traveled to the Y Combinator's Ad Innovation Conference earlier this week to watch some 20 YC-funded start-ups present their technologies to a roomful of ad people. AdExchanger already has a nice write-up that explains what each company does, so that's not what I am going to do here. Instead, I will go through my notes trying to answer the question Paul Graham, the YC co-founder (pictured above with the glass), asked after the event: "So, what stuck?"

"Groupon is Hastening the Demise of the Newspaper Industry," wrote a daily deals trade pub in April.

It could be the other way around.

A Microsoft guy explains how Kinect and Nuads will add gestural and voice goodness to TV ads served through Xbox.

Would one have to be standing up for this? Are people's living spaces spacious enough to accomodate Kinect? And would anyone care?

On May 12, 1994, the CEO of Procter & Gamble Edwin Artzt delivered a speech at the annual 4As conference on the future of advertising. It has since become a classic, often referenced but rarely read in full. The speech, written months before the first banner ad received its first impression, was prescient in many regards and inspiring throughout:

A collection of assorted tools that make my work easier:

1. Instructions for adding bookmarklets to Safari on iPad

2. Vi.sualize.us - bookmark pictures you find online via a browser plug-in; no sign-ups required