education

Knowledge Bombs Away!

As education is one of thunder::tech’s four core principals, we value the information we can learn and share with our colleagues and clients. Walking around to my co-workers' desks, I’ll see a variety of publications and I always have the opportunity to stop at the thunder::tech library.


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Apple attempts to change education, one “i” at a time

On Thursday, Jan. 19, techies, fan boys and the like gathered at the Guggenheim Museum in New York for an education event hosted by Apple. There, Phillip Schiller, Apple’s vice president of worldwide marketing, unveiled some great new innovations for the education community. A new version of their e-reader app, updates to their university Web portal and an e-book creation tool.

Let’s start with that last one… iBooks Author. It is a new desktop app available only on Mac OSX Lion. It allows anyone to create an e-book. Anyone. For free. Users can then publish their book to the iBookstore or iTunes U (more on those in a minute). But the really great thing here isn’t that anyone can create and publish a book. The exciting part about this is that Apple is pioneering a relatively new format. It isn’t just a book. It’s more than words on a page. Apple gives users access to a wealth of multi-touch widgets. Interactivity. Additionally, users can add videos, keynote presentations and interactive 3-D objects.
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The Agency as the Educator

We’ve noticed a trend in the past few years that has been interesting to watch from the agency perspective. An Ad Age article summed up the education challenges for marketers with results from a recent Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) report conducted by IBM that surveyed more than 1,700 CMOs. The biggest takeaway was that 78 percent expect more complexity in the next five years, but only 48 percent are prepared to deal with it.

Also of note was how personally underprepared CMOs are, based on the survey numbers. For instance, while 82 percent said they plan to increase their company's use of social media, only 25 percent said they needed social media expertise. We don’t believe our clients have to be social media experts to understand the channels, but if they’re not actively participating with it, then we’re a long way from getting them started.
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