Great read from Mark Penn. I particularly liked this thought:

Make it a Choice, not a referendum on you. Campaigns and consumer choices share one important thing in common: they are about alternatives, not ideals. Too often incumbent politicians and brands face a referendum on their policies even though the alternative remains untested. In these situations you have to make it a choice. 

Very excited that CommBank Kaching is now here. You can download from the iTunes store – for this version you will need to have CBA/NetBank account and also be in Australia. Lots more innovation coming from us in this space.

I’ve been using Kaching for the past month and is makes shopping a breeze. Simply tap and go with an iPhone and iCarte. Let us know how you find the experience.

Neal Stephenson says it so well..

“I’ll tell you what I’d like to see happen,” he said, and began discussing what the future was supposed to have looked like, back in his 1960s childhood. He ticked off the tropes of what he called “techno-optimistic science fiction,” including flying cars and jetpacks. And then computers went from being things that filled a room to things that could fit on a desk, and the economy and industries changed. “The kinds of super-bright, hardworking geeky people who, 50 years ago, would have been building moon rockets or hydrogen bombs or what have you have ended up working in the computer industry, doing jobs that in many cases seem kind of ignominious by comparison.”

Again, a beat. A consideration, perhaps, that he is talking about the core readership for his best sellers. No matter. He’s rolling. He presses on.

“What I’m kind of hoping is that this is just kind of a pause, while we assimilate this gigantic new thing, ubiquitous computing and the Internet. And that at some point we’ll turn around and say, ‘Well, that was interesting — we have a whole set of new tools and capabilities that we didn’t have before the whole computer/Internet thing came along.’ ”

He said people should say, “Now let’s get back to work doing interesting and useful things.”

Thanks to John for the pointer. Here is the longer piece on Innovation Starvation.

For me the big question is how and when will we pause?

Amex Open Forum continues to do a great job on content. This piece caught my eye. Social plays a massive role in brand building today.

Loved these stats from Anthill Magazine.

• Facebook clocked 10,659,580 Australian users in November (and 13 million unique Australian views). In other words, more than half of Australia’s population now use Facebook.
• The oldest members of turned 31 (bringing their ‘digital native’ customs into the mainstream), while Baby-Boomers finally earned the nickname ‘silver surfers’.
• Five billion apps were downloaded.video views exceeded two billion… per day. An average 600 tweets were posted… per second!