No one.  At least none of the usual suspects like Google, Amazon or Apple.  Which is a real shame because I’ve been using Evernote on my iPhone to keep a list of holiday gift ideas this year.

You see, the best gift ideas come when you are in conversation with someone and they mention something they would love to have.  Or you notice them admiring something in a store.  Or you make a connection between something you see and a passion of theirs.  It’s at these inopportune times that we need to create opportunity.  Not when we sit down to deliberately craft a gift list.

That’s where Evernote has come into play this year.  Since I almost always have my iPhone with me, I almost always have a way to capture those gift ideas.  I can take a picture of a wine bottle label, record a voice memo while I’m driving or, more often than not, type the entry into my file “gift list.”  Now that the holidays are approaching, I’m ready to make some purchases from this list.  And here’s where I’ve discovered this missed opportunity in the gift-buying process.

My gift list is basically a string of searchable keywords.  Wouldn’t it be amazing if I could click through my entries to buy [insert search parameters here like nearest, best quality, highest rated, least expensive] gift at my point of intention?

I’m sure there are apps out there that do similar things, but I have yet to find one with the computational power and breach of a Google.  C’mon guys…this idea is long overdue and would be very useful.  After all, I’ve already spent 40 minutes trying to track down a decent jar of Amarena Cherries on Google and Bing.

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I’m going to go buy a pair of Levi’s because I love what they are doing with their new tag.  No, it doesn’t make any sense.  Yes, it works on me as a consumer anyways.  Nice work, BBDO.

Goodwill has been doing some very clever things of late, including a fashion show in D.C. featuring clothes from its store.  It’s nice to see them making it into the eco-consciousness chain.  As for this new clothing tag, here’s the scoop:

From Creativity:

BBDO West turns the Levi’s clothing care tag into a communications medium for Goodwill.

Starting next year, the Levi’s care tag will become the vehicle for delivering an environmentally conscious message for Goodwill. BBDO West came up with a clever idea to include on Levi’s instruction labels a recommendation to donate the clothing to charity once its owner tires of it.

The effort seeks to address the approximately 23.8 billion pounds of clothing and textiles that end up in U.S. landfills every year. The care tags will be seen starting January 2010 in Levi’s retail and wholesale products and by Fall 2010 they’ll appear on regional and global items

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With the recent launches of Barnes & Noble’s Nook e-reader, Amazon’s second iteration of the Kindle, and the rumors swirling around an Apple iPad device, the publishing world is in a frenzy about the supposed demise of their business models. Really?  They haven’t learned anything from the evolution of the music industry (and those that try to stop it)?

The newspaper and magazine industries are inefficient because their products are inefficient.  Much like an album with only 2 good songs on it, a lot of print publication content is irrelevant to its readers.  And when you add a national advertising buy into the mix, the volume of irrelevant content grows.  Readers have a lot of online options and customize their media intake accordingly.  It’s why I have an iGoogle landing page, the NewsAddict iPhone app and why I only read certain parts of my Wall Street Journal.  I know what I want and I am not going to bother with the rest.  And that’s the key to the publishing industry reinventing itself (and rediscovering profits).

Although these new reading devices shift control of distribution, they free publishers up to focus solely on content.  And if they’re smart, they’ll start focusing on the customization of that content.  Here are a few innovations I’d like to see from newspaper and magazine publishers in the near future:

1) Create alliances.  We don’t need more than a handful of national newspapers.  But what those national newspapers need is local outreach via the smaller, struggling, regional brands.  Better yet, make alliances with the tiny papers.  Hire them as the foot soldiers to create localized relevance for your customers.

2) Offer a la carte options.  If I could order the Friday Calendar section of the L.A. Times, op-ed and art reviews from The New York Times, the front page and Marketplace sections of the Wall Street Journal, and the weekend section of my local (and otherwise dreadful) San Diego Union-Tribune, I would.  Oh, and Calvin & Hobbes reprints.  This would be a hybrid paper that reflects my tastes and interests.

3) Deliver relevant adveritsing.  So, I’ve just defined my reading preferences for you, you probably know where I am sitting as I read your content, and I have a screen in front of me that (should) let me click through an advertisement.  That sounds like the holy grail of newspaper and magazine advertising.  You’re able to hypertarget audiences, create measurable impressions and clicks, and reiterate the process with greater and greater relevancy.  Doesn’t that make your ad space even more valuable?

Seriously, it’s not like someone isn’t thinking about these things.  But who is executing on them?  If it’s Amazon and Apple, then that’s the failure of the publishers who should be defining how the content is bundled.

Though I focused on newspapers in my examples, the same holds true for magazines.  I’m waiting for my FastCompany / Wired / The Week / Entertainment Weekly / Conde Nast Traveler mash-up.  Is anyone going to deliver?

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If you haven’t already heard about it, check out the site for Paranormal Activity, a low-budget horror movie.  What’s remarkable about this little movie (aside from it having been made for $30,000 in the filmmaker’s house and grabbing distribution from Paramount) is the way in which they are employing social media, the web and email to sell tickets.  Maketers should pay attention to the variety of ways Paramount is hyping this film and how each piece of their strategy works together.

1. Start with a good movie (product).  Apparently this is a horror movie that actually scares people, which will appeal tremendously to its core audience.  How do we know it scares people?  Because the trailer eschews showing too much footage of the actual film, instead showing us the reactions of a terrified audience as captured by infrared cameras.  Brilliant.  They understand that the audience is going to the film for the experience – to be scared.
2. Paramount is rolling this out slowly in select markets, usually large college towns.  What’s great about this is that on their website they have a Demand It feature which lets you a) fill out a petition requesting they show it in your area and b) see which towns and cities are frontrunners to get screenings and how many votes they are getting.  They are billing this as the “first-ever major film release decided by you!”
3. By “demanding it,” potential audience members provide Paramount with their email address.  This, in turn, allows Paramount to directly market to a high-quality lead, movie tickets for a genre picture they want to see.  My friend Jason signed up for the film and this is what he received one day later: You can buy tickets right from the email.  Short of just sending you the tickets, Paramount has almost completely removed friction from the sales process.
4. Paramount is leveraging Twitter with a promotion called “Tweet your screams.” They are actually building the Twitter conversation from scratch. And collecting Twitter logins while they’re at it.
5. And, of course, you can become a fan on Facebook and share it via all of the other more traditional web-based methods.

This is a very clever use of a lot of different (free or inexpensive) tools.  I will be watching the box office returns on Paranormal Activity to see how this translates into revenue.  And how Paramount uses the database of horror fans it’s building for its next scary movie release.

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Last week, I attended a 2 day seminar on Entrepreneurial Thought and Action taught by the President of Babson College, Len Schlesinger, and the President of Innovation Associates Inc., Charlie Kiefer.  The seminar presented a practical, creative model of entrepreneurism vs. the traditionally-taught predictive model.  In this context, “creative” implies how we build something new.

The concepts presented in this seminar were simple and profound, highlighting a gap in current business school curricula:  that who you are, what you know and who you know are as important (if not moreso) to the success of a start-up as your ability to write a good business plan. The course content is grounded in recently published research which challenges traditional notions of what makes for a successful entrepreneurial venture.  The seminar was largely experientially-based with a free flow of conversation.  My classmates ranged from a 15-year-old entrepreneurial prodigy to a bestselling author.  Ideas and insights flowed freely.  Among them:

Charlie on entrepreneurism: “To the extent that I can create the future, I don’t need to predict it.”

Len on value: “You create value through your ability to create behavioral opportunities [on which you can act]….”

Charlie on risk: “Each step I take I want to be stepping on something that can bare my weight.”

Len on problem-solving: “Most intractable problems are defects in thinking [about the problem].”

In one of our exercises we explored the concept of how “tension seeks resolution.”  Screenplay structure, through the employment of ever-escalating reversals in the storyline, illustrates this concept beautifully.  Through our ability to heighten tension, we can force resolution (action).  This became an interesting window through which to view our own entrepreneurial actions (or lack of action).

For those of you out there with a big idea on which you have yet to take the plunge, you might want to consider attending this seminar (they iterate it every month or so).  2 days and $275 is a good deal for getting the second half of your business education.

Take another step

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