Archive for the ‘enemy’ tag
When Did We Get So Nasty?
That’s the only word I can think of that effectively summarizes what I’ve seen online lately.
In case you’re not familiar with the term, it’s derived from the word vitriol, which is another term for sulphuric acid. “Vitriolic” means caustic or severely harsh, and it’s quite clear that those who have physically used the chemical compound to attack others have clearly meant harm. There’s even evidence of that in an old Sherlock Holmes story, “The Illustrious Client.”
And lately, if you’ve had even a passing glance at any number of topics on the web – Chick-fil-A and their CEO’s unfortunate statements, the Olympics (particularly the two athletes who now find themselves banned because of hateful tweets directed against their competitors), or of course anything related to politics that involves two or more political parties – you’ll get the sense that rational and emotionally detached debate has completely gone out the window.
Earlier this political season, I remarked on Facebook that instead of levying a constant barrage of attacks, negative commentary and invective at the other candidate, people should try posting something positive about their own candidate:
That didn’t last long. That was five months ago. And look where we are now.
Just what is it today that makes people think they can get away with being so downright abusive to fellow humans online? It used to be that people hid behind the anonymity that the Internet allowed. And when the likes of Facebook came along, mostly everyone who had an account needed to own up to who they were.
Oh sure, there are still trolls who hide behind fake identities on a variety of sites, from forums to blogs and even Facebook and Google+ now. But the this behavior has become so insidious – so acceptable – that suddenly, some people don’t care who they offend or how antisocial it makes them look; they just seem to want to make themselves feel better by putting others down.
Did you ever hear the phrase nani gigantum humeris insidentes? Of course you didn’t. It’s Latin; no one speaks it any more. But you may recognize its translation: “Dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants.” It was famously uttered by Sir Isaac Newton and signifies that we owe much to those who have gone before. Essentially, it’s about respect.
But the troglodytes spewing negativity online today would have us believe that they know better – that they are the giants. Standing on what, the shoulders of dwarves?
And the natural response to someone who comes out of the gate swinging is typically either more support for their view, or an equal and opposite reaction (that’s my nod to Newton and my physics professors) to blunt it. Either way, there’s a party that’s meant to be taken down a notch or offended.
There is an old Cherokee legend that deals with this issue of how to handle such. an offense.
Grandfather Tells (The Wolves Within)
An old Grandfather said to his grandson, who came to him with anger at a friend who had done him an injustice, ”Let me tell you a story.
“I too, at times, have felt a great hate for those that have taken so much, with no sorrow for what they do. But hate wears you down, and does not hurt your enemy. It is like taking poison and wishing your enemy would die. I have struggled with these feelings many times.”
He continued, “It is as if there are two wolves inside me. One is good and does no harm. He lives in harmony with all around him, and does not take offense when no offense was intended. He will only fight when it is right to do so, and in the right way.
“But the other wolf, ah! He is full of anger. The littlest thing will set him into a fit of temper. He fights everyone, all the time, for no reason. He cannot think because his anger and hate are so great. It is helpless anger,for his anger will change nothing. Sometimes, it is hard to live with these two wolves inside me, for both of them try to dominate my spirit.”
The boy looked intently into his Grandfather’s eyes and asked, “Which one wins, Grandfather?”
The Grandfather smiled and quietly said, “The one I feed.”
So don’t you think it’s time we stopped feeding the negativity? What if we all banded together to demonstrate that there’s much more to be gained by positive thinking and positive words? At Ford, we make it a point not to refer to our competition in any way – and certainly not in a disparaging way. It’s a good practice that more businesses (and dare I say politicians?) should take to heart. Words can come back to haunt us, thus harming business and personal relationships alike.
I had started this post last night but didn’t have a chance to finish it before I turned in. And then to my surprise, my colleague Frank Eliason had crafted a very similar post on his own blog (“A Day to Be #PositivelySocial“).
In fact, Frank has gone to far as to suggest that we set aside a day – just one day, August 14 – when we can be positive online. He has suggested using the #PositivelySocial hashtag and encouraging others to do so, to show that we can tone down the vitriol and attacks and instead focus on being more helpful, encouraging and genuinely positive.
Maybe we should harken back to our childhood influences and take this to heart:
Are you in?
Image source: bcostin (Flickr)
Humans Are Their Own Worst Enemy in New Liberty Mutual Campaign
Humans. We sure suck, always doing stupid, destructive stuff. Like walking into glass doors, squirting ketchup all over our dinner companions and dropping air conditioners from tall buildings through the roofs of vehicles parked below. That's just a small sample of the miscues that ruin cars, homes and property in Hill Holliday's latest effort for Liberty Mutual Insurance. TV spots broke this weekend during coverage of the London Olympic Games, along with digital ads and a Facebook app. Using the umbrella theme "Humans," the campaign is designed to emphasize "our empathy towards policyholders in times when they need us," according to Liberty Mutual Personal Insurance CMO Jim MacPhee. The well-choreographed mishaps are memorably amusing but never cartoonish and always within the realm of possibility. That should help folks relate to the broader message. Actor Paul Giamatti's voiceover is a highlight. He never oversells, but adopts an effortlessly relaxed and reassuring tone that almost—almost—made me forget for an instant that insurance companies are greedy corporate monsters. But hey, they're only human. Check out the 60-second anthem spot below and a 30-second execution after the jump.
Know Your Enemy: Lex Machina Raises $2 Million For IP Litigation Analytics
It is a common perception that IP litigation is exploding, in part because the patent system is allegedly broken. Enter Lex Machina, a Palo Alto based company providing IP litigation data and analytics to help companies ”anticipate, manage, and win patent and other IP law suits,” which just closed another $2 million in a funding round led by X/Seed Capital.
Investors in this latest round include Costanoa Venture Capital (founded by Greg Sands), Naval Ravikant (Angel List), Jeff Hammerbacher (Cloudera), and David Chao (DCM). Prior investors include Dan Cooperman (former General Counsel for Apple and Oracle) and Jerry Yang (Yahoo!).
“This funding will enable us to improve our existing SaaS product and develop more IP analytics products that will employ our proprietary data to predict litigation outcomes, inform transaction and investment decisions and value and monetize critical IP assets,” said Josh Becker, CEO of Lex Machina, in a statement.
Sounds good, here’s how:
Lex Machina’s crawler extracts documents and data from PACER, the individual websites of all 94 Federal District Courts, the International Trade Commission’s Electronic Document Information System, and the USPTO website. Deploying both natural language processing and legal text classification technology developed at Stanford University, the crawler classifies cases, dockets, entities, patents, and case outcomes, which are then reviewed by attorneys and indexed for search.
Companies and attorneys may use this information to determine whether litigation or settlement makes sense in an individual case, for example, by evaluating how successful a particular plaintiff has been in prior IP lawsuits, how an individual judge has decided similar cases during her career on the bench, and the overall win/loss record of a specific law firm. (This data is also great for discovering trends, as you can read about in this post that TechCrunch did last year on patent lawsuit trends.)
Although attorneys have traditionally relied on Westlaw and Lexis for online legal research, Lex Machina seems poised to provide a more intuitive legal research experience that will appeal to a broader user base. The research tools also include relatively robust infographics, which are otherwise scarce or non-existent in current legal research products.
Still, an individual license is not cheap, coming in at a reported $10,000 per year. If smaller start-ups could gain access to the Lex Machina research tools at a discounted rate, or a reasonable per-use fee, I could see this service having broader appeal. The company is reportedly considering some free services for smaller companies, but nothing is yet available. The company also claims to provide free access to its data for federal courts, public agencies, academics, students, and select non-profits.
Lex Machina was founded in 2006 by Stanford Law School Professor Mark Lemley, who graduated from Stanford in 1988 and then, surely against his Cardinal instincts, attended law school at UC Berkeley. The company grew out of a Stanford University Law School and Computer Science Department project named the IP Litigation Clearinghouse (IPLC), which at the time mapped every electronically available patent litigation event and outcome.
Certainly one of the greatest research indignities is collecting, organizing, synthesizing, and analyzing data from widely divergent sources. Lex Machina’s IP litigation research tools look promising in this regard and the strategic value of such information is undeniable.”So it is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles without a single loss.” Immortal wisdom from Sun Tzu.
Daniel McKenzie is a California attorney. He graduated from Stanford in 2004 and advises various entertainment startups in addition to an active private practice in the northern San Francisco bay area.
The gov’t thinks you should focus on the adversary, but who is the adversary?
After 9/11, the FBI needed to change the way it operated. It switched its focus and looked toward identifying the enemy — a change former FBI assistant executive director Shawn Henry says needs to translate to the information security world.
Henry spoke at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas today and explained that one of the main problems with the security industry is the lack of focus on the enemy, with most of the focus on the networks themselves. Corporations, according to Henry, only pay attention to the bullets flying by their heads, not the people shooting the bullets.
“In the FBI since 9/11, we made significant changes in our organization,” said Henry. “You’ve got to assume that the adversary is on the network. I assume there are terrorists in this country… I know there are spies in this country… they’re here, what do you do?”
Henry suggests companies start dedicating resources toward intelligence gathering. Not just looking at their own networks, detecting vulnerabilities, and attempting to protect the perimeter, but rather going “down range.” Not only finding out who the attacker is, but also taking them out.
This is the first step toward the private sector helping the government. Henry calls on private entities to form partnerships and hand over network logs that effectively act like video camera footage.
But who the adversary really is is up for debate.
“People who are suffering a loss are often not talking about the loss,” said Adam Shostack, a founder of the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposure dictionary, at Black Hat. “They’re covering up those problems.”
Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties at Stanford University, asked the crowd to raise their hands for, “Who is more afraid of Google? The government?” The crowd overwhelming raised their hands for Google.
“I lose my cool when I hear people from the goverment saying people from the private sector need to step up. … Providing for the common defense is what the government is supposed to do,” said Marcus Ranum, Tenable Security’s chief of security. But, “the government still really sucks at handling classified material.”
Image via Meghan Kelly/VentureBeat
Filed under: security, VentureBeat 
How Banks Can Abdicate The Bad Guy Throne
[Note: I can't decide if I'm serious about some of the recommendations included here or not. I'll decide after I get some feedback]
I’ve been an industry analyst for 13 of the past 15 years. During that time, I’ve sat through more vendor briefings than I could possibly count. Many of those sessions were with start-up firms, and many of those start-ups no longer exist.
A common question to vendors in those briefings was “Who do you compete with?”
I’m going to out on a limb here and assert that there is no better predictor of technology start-up failure than a “we don’t have any competition” answer from the start-up.
If you don’t have competition, then there is no market. If there is no market, you have no future.
Every firm needs competition, and knowing exactly who — or what — you’re competing against can be an incredibly focusing thing for firms.
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Rolling the clock forward to 2012, and focusing the lens on the financial services industry:
Banks and credit unions don’t know who their primary competitor is.
It’s not the same for both type of financial institution.
Creditunionistas seem to believe that big banks are their primary competition. At a micro-market, tactical level, sure, that might be true. But associating with the Occupy Wall Street, MoveYourMoney, and Bank Transfer Day efforts will do little to produce sustainable, long-term gains in market awareness and new member growth.
Credit unions’ biggest enemy, or primary competitor, is: Apathy.
People just don’t care enough about their choice of financial providers to choose a credit union over a bank, and this apathy is often driven by the fact that — although money is really really important to us — managing money is a chore that many of us choose to spend as little time as possible on.
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And as long as creditunionistas mis-focus their competitive energies bashing big banks, big banks have little to worry about (in the scheme of things) in terms of a competitive threat from credit unions.
So what is the big banks’ biggest competitor? In a word (OK, two): Public opinion.
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Just as every firm has — and needs — competition (or an “enemy”), so do we as a society. We like to have a bad guy to blame stuff on.
The media, in particular, needs these “bad guys” because it helps to sell papers and attract viewers (or, at least, it used to).
Do you remember Gary Condit? He was accused of doing something evil to an intern of his. The story was in the news every day. Well, every day, until something else came along (which might have been 9/11, if my memory serves me correctly).
A couple of summers ago, BP was in the news every day because of the oil spill in the gulf. As far as people in the US were concerned, BP was the most evil corporation on the planet.
But, thank God (from the perspective of BP, that is), the financial crisis hit, and with it, a new enemy. A new”bad guy” to blame all of our woes and troubles on. The “TBTF” big banks.
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It’s been a couple of years into this already, and I wouldn’t be surprised if bank execs think to themselves “Damn! Isn’t there someone or something else that can come along and be the Bad Guy for a while?”
Well, if something isn’t going to come along by itself, the banking industry needs to make it happen.
This might sound underhanded or sneaky, but the banking industry needs to launch a well-crafted PR campaign to create a new Enemy of the State, and pass the Bad Guy throne on to somebody else.
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If I were crafting this campaign, I know exactly who I’d go after to put on the Bad Guy throne: Telcos.
It boggles my mind that people would complain that their bank eliminated a free checking account and wants to charge them $5 a month to provide all the services they get from that account….and not say Boo! about the bills they get from their wireless providers, which cost something closer to 20 times more than the $5 a month that banks want to charge.
And you think banks have “hidden fees”? They pale in comparison to the fees on my cell phone bill.
Sure, it might cost be $35 if I overdraw on my checking account. But do you know what it costs me if I go over my monthly minutes or data limits? Yeah, a LOT.
And while the process of switching banks might not be as smooth and easy as some people would like it to be, at least I don’t have a two-year contract (that somehow gets extended every time I do something) with my bank that would be cost me hundreds of dollars to get out of.
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Look, I don’t have anything against the telcos. I’m just trying to give the banking industry some ideas on how to get out of the mess it’s in.
Yes, there are a lot of things from an internal policies, procedures, and pricing perspective that big banks could — and should — do to restore consumer trust.
I’m just saying that a well-crafted, well-executed PR campaign might speed things up a bit.
Filed under: Credit Unions, Financial Services, Marketing Tagged: Bank Transfer Day, Credit Unions, Financial Services, MoveYourMoney, Occupy Wall Street 
Judge overseeing Kim Dotcom’s extradition steps down
Kim Dotcom, whose file-hosting service Megaupload was shut down by the New Zealand and U.S. governments for copyright infringement at the beginning of the year, has had plenty to say about the case until now. But as he awaits news about extradition to the U.S. from New Zealand, he’s become unusually quiet.
I’m wondering if his silence is due to the fact that the judge who was overseeing his extradition case to the U.S. has stepped down — presumably making Dotcom’s future a bit more tremulous.
The New Zealand Herald is reporting that Judge David Harvey, who was overseeing the extradition case, has removed himself after voicing his opinions on the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade agreement that could be expanded to make circumventing a DVD’s region code illegal. And for those of you who don’t know what region codes are, they are codes that allow certain DVDs to work only within certain countries to limit piracy.
Harvey, who previously looked favorably on Dotcom, referred to the U.S. as the enemy for its part in upholding silly matters of copyright law internationally. In this instance, it had to do with DVD region codes, but obviously those comments could paint him as biased in the case, which is why he decided to step down.
“Under TPP and the American Digital Millennium copyright provisions you will not be able to do that, that will be prohibited… if you do you will be a criminal – that’s what will happen,” Harvey said, adding, “We have met the enemy and he is [the] U.S.”
Harvey was previously responsible for reinstating Dotcom’s Internet access based on good behavior. He also allowed him to visit a recording studio to finish his politically charged hip-hop album, as VentureBeat previously reported back in April.
Photo illustration: Jolie O’Dell/VentureBeat
Filed under: media 
A Healthy Obsession
I believe there’s one obsession all companies should breed in every employee: an obsession with the customer experience. This isn’t window dressing. This isn’t “nice to have.” To me, it should be fundamental. Why? Because everything flows from that experience. How many opportunities are being missed simply by not looking bravely and honestly at how your customer flows through your process?
A Healthy Obsession
I recently stayed at the San Diego Marriott Marquis and Marina in San Diego. Upon entering the lobby, there was a human being standing there like a greeter. He guided me over to the desk, where my check-in process was handled flawlessly, and I was pointed in the direction of the elevators.
The very last part of this is where some hotels do it differently.
Both the Trump International in Las Vegas and the amazing Magnolia Hotel in Victoria British Columbia take the extra step of walking me over to the elevators and pushing the UP button.
This seems like an unnecessary gesture. This seems like a time-waster and a problem with process, especially if there are a lot of people waiting to check in. And yet, the difference is that I felt even more personally cared for at both of those other hotels, based on the starting experience of that simple gesture.
Let me be clear: the Marriott Marquis & Marina is an amazing hotel, and I had a wonderful stay, a great view, and flawless service. I’m pointing this difference out simply to illustrate the point of differentiation in my experiences.
And that’s just one kind of experience opportunity. To me, the bigger issue is friction.
Friction is the Enemy
I was seeking a word to sum up the problem with customer experiences, and the team at 44Doors gave me friction, based on this post. Friction is the enemy.
Where are all the various parts of the customer experience that might cause frustration, an issue, a delay? Sticking with hotels, the one that the Marriott Marquis & Marina solved brilliantly was the business traveler’s lament: plugs. Their desk was loaded with ports and plugs and places to stick my devices.
If you simply set your company’s every last employee on a hunt to reduce friction, you’d find much more customer satisfaction, I’d predict.
Follow the Flow
What is the customer experience for your business? Follow all of it? How do people find out about you? How do they take a next step? What happens when they get started? What about after you’ve “sold” to them? How much of the journey do you still hand-hold? And what happens when a customer leaves your care?
I wrote about this once before in a post about guest experience design. I believe in this. I believe there’s a lot to understanding the potential customer flow.
It’s also really easy to NOT remember to do all this, and really easy to believe that the system is working exactly as planned, after you do it once. But that’s not how life works, is it?
Following the Customer Experience Is Predictive of Future Opportunities
In speaking with credit unions the other day, I challenged them that banks weren’t their competition; access and trust were their competition. Meaning, it’s not banks that are stealing members from their credit union, but it’s problems with access to services and their money that causes them frustration (and trust, but that’s for another post). If every part of a credit union walked through the variations of a member’s experience, it would become clear fairly quickly that members have switched to being more reliant on their mobile phones for information, and that their websites need a mobile-friendly refresh.
The same is true with your company, by the way. Heck, it’s true with mine.
First Steps
How would you get your company on board to grow this healthy obsession? It’s a process. It requires building out some assumptions of what the map looks like now, testing those assumptions, and bringing together teams, probably as a whole and then one at a time, to talk about how your work influences the work of others around you. From this, perhaps there’s a “spot friction” contest, where you earn points for finding parts of the customer experience that are messy. Maybe you award the employee with the most points the role of “World Class Concierge” and you set him or her to the task of building an empowered workforce of friction-hunters.
And keep this a daily process rolled into a quarterly review. This isn’t a speech to be had at annual events. This is a lifestyle choice, or a workstyle choice, I suppose.
Where’s the Friction in YOUR Customer Process?
Even if you’re a solo consultant, what’s the hardest parts of doing business with you? I know I’m working on mine over the next few months, and then daily. What about you?
Pirate’s dream come true: Boxopus pushes torrents to your Dropbox account
In popular culture, the giant octopus has always been a notorious enemy to pirates. But when it comes to new service Boxopus, Internet pirates might have a new best friend that will help them store illegally obtained media in their Dropbox accounts.
Boxopus, which was first spotlighted by TorrentFreak, smartly uses Dropbox’s API to anonymously add torrent files to a Dropbox account. And get this: You don’t even need a BitTorrent client to make it work.
“Our Boxopus is one of the kind,” the site writes on its About page. “He lives in the bottomless abyss of the Internet. He can stretch his tentacles and reach any content on the number of torrent-sites. Just feed him with a torrent! Whenever you do it, he’ll grab the file you need and put it in your Dropbox in a little time.”
The Boxopus service is smart to tie itself to Dropbox because it is one of the most widely used cloud storage services today, and it has many passionate fans because of its simplicity and usefulness. Dropbox recently added an easy way to share links to files, and it added automated photo uploads to its popular iOS app as well. Boxopus says that because it uses Dropbox’s API, it has no access to other files stored in your Dropbox account.
To make using Boxopus even easier, sites that host torrent files can create a one-click Boxopus download option for users. TorrentReactor, Fulldls.com, Vertor.com, and Torrentzap.com have already added this option, according to TorrentFreak.
Boxopus plans to keep the service free and unlimited during its beta period. After the beta period ends, the service will add limitations for free users.
We’ve contacted the Dropbox team to see if they have any issues with how Boxopus uses its API. We will update this post if we hear back.
Octopus photo: Jason Mintzer/Shutterstock
Filed under: cloud 
Cyberbullies, meet your new worst enemy: Facebook
Cyberbullies won’t find any safe haven in Facebook.
The company is on the verge of complying with a U.K. High Court order to reveal the names, emails addresses, and IP addresses of four alleged cyberbullies, The Guardian reports.
Their accuser is Nicola Brookes, a U.K. woman who became a target for attack when she posted a comment on Facebook about former X Factor contestant Frankie Cocozza.
It’s unknown what exactly about Frankie Cocozza that set off the alleged bullies (maybe the hair?) but the result was, in a word, undeserved. Brookes says she was called a drug dealer and a pedophile by her assailants, who even went as far as to create a fake Facebook profile to further their cause.
With the subpoenaed details, lawyers hope to identify who the bullies are and where they live.
In what very might be a legal precedent, Facebook is expected to concede to the court the information, though it doesn’t take much inspection to realize that there will be some problems with the plaintiff’s case.
For one, the bullies created a fake profile, which clearly prevents anyone from knowing exactly who exactly said what. IP addresses, too, are notoriously held on shaky ground, legally. And email addresses — well, they don’t prove much of anything. In all, lawyers are going to have to piece together more than a few details before they have a firm case.
Facebook, for its part, hasn’t ignored the cyberbully issue, which it responded to last year by releasing a new social reporting tool. Later that year, the company launched Stop Bullying: Speak Up, a campaign meant to raise awareness of the issue.
That support, Facebook says, extends to the Brookes case as well.
“There is no place for harassment on Facebook, but unfortunately a small minority of malicious individuals exist online, just as they do offline. We respect our legal obligations and work with law enforcement to ensure that such people are brought to justice,” Facebook said in a statement to VentureBeat.
Photo: Shutterstock
Filed under: social, VentureBeat 
Remember these crazy memes from past E3s?
It’s the weekend before the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles. In less than 48 hours, the first press conference will kick off a week overloaded with new games and big surprises, but that’s only half the fun. Sure, we love seeing fresh software at the industry’s largest trade show, but the presentations are often memorable for an entirely different reason: the memes.
Each year, a world-wide audience of gamers collaborate to create Photoshop jokes and animated gifs based on the most awkward and odd moments of the show. In preparation for E3 2012, we’ve looked back to remember some of our favorites from years gone by.
“Riiiiidge Racer”
Sony CEO Kazuo Hirai
E3 2006 – Sony press conference
Ridge Racer – PSP
By 2006, when Kaz Hirai went to exhibit Ridge Racer for the PlayStation Portable, the series was over a decade old. Sure, the arcade-driving game had its fans, but Hirai seemed under the delusion that it was the killer app the company’s handheld device needed to rile up the hardcore gamers. The audience didn’t have much of a reaction even when he mimicked the “RIIIIDGE RACER” chant from the opening of the original game. Or maybe, especially when he mimicked the original game.
Giant Enemy Crab
Producer Bill Ritch
E3 2006 – Sony press conference
Genji: Days of the Blade – PlayStation 3
During the 2006 Sony stage show, developer Game Republic showed off its Genji: Days of the Blade for PS3. The producer on the title, Bill Ritch, pitched the game as featuring “famous battles that actually took place in ancient Japan.” The very next moment, a giant enemy crab the size of a house jumped onto the screen. Which means either those Akira Kurosawa films are terribly inaccurate or Bill Ritch doesn’t know what the word “actually” means. In the course of fighting the GEC, Ritch inflicted “massive damage” upon the sea creature which became a meme of its own.
The reference filtered into other games. Scribblenauts for the DS has a “giant enemy crab” available for summoning. The Simpsons game for Xbox 360 has a Giant Ancient Crab exhibit that is shuttered due to “massive damage.” Motorstorm for the PS3 has a class of tracks titled “Giant Enemy Crab.”
Uninterested translator
Producer Kazunori Yamauchi and his translator
E3 2009 – Sony Press Conference
Gran Turismo – PSP Go
Translating on the fly is probably a difficult job. Apparently, some professional interpreters use pen and paper to take notes so they don’t miss huge chunks of what their subject is saying. Unfortunately, that led to Gran Turismo producer Kaz Yamauchi’s translator looking bored and uninterested throughout his entire talk.
Motion control demonstrations
Everyone
E3 2006 – 2011
Everyone looks stupid when they play Wii and Kinect games. That even goes for the people who make them. Since Nintendo introduced its waggle-based console, we’ve been able to rely on executives and hired actors forced to make fools of themselves. The best examples:
Ubisoft’s Mr. Caffeine
Public speaker Aaron Priceman
E3 2011 – Ubisoft press conference
This industry has very few executives who can get up on stage and speak convincingly to the press. The list consists of Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime, EA Chief Operating Officer Peter Moore, and maybe one or two others. Guys like Don Mattrick and Jack Tretton are probably very good at their jobs, but they don’t have that same confidence when pitching their products to professional writers. Last year, Ubisoft decided to outsource that public-presenter role to Aaron Priceman, or Mr. Caffeine as he is known. It didn’t go well.
Gamers knew they were in for a wild ride the moment Mr. Caffeine walked on stage with his wireless headset microphone. It looked like he may have rolled straight over from the set of an infomercial (entirely possible). He then proceeded to drop flat joke after flat joke. Between his mispronunciation of Tom Clancy as “Kuh-lancy” and his timely approximation of the Wayne’s World flash-back noise (doodla doodly doo!), Mr. Caffeine was a meme factory.
“My body is ready!”
Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime
E3 2007 – Nintendo press conference
Wii Fit – Wii
In 2007, our bodies became the controller, and Nintendo hype-man Reggie Fils-Aime showed us how. To help Nintendo designer Shigeru Miyamoto demonstrate the Wii Fit Balance Board, Reggie walked on stage and gave us the unofficial motto of E3 and life: “My body is ready.” The phrase caught on quickly and has become a regular part of gamer parlance.
Did we forget your favorite meme? Be sure to hit up the comments with your favorite E3 moments. And check back throughout the week as we bring you the latest Photoshops and animated gifs from E3 2012.
Filed under: VentureBeat 
