FLYsmart is the result of a partnership between outdoor advertising giant ClearChannel Outdoor, and Geodelic (a client of Waldo Finn, a company which employees this author), a mobile, location-specific media platform powered by a network of informative and relevant guides to local attractions, businesses and services.

FLYsmart customers will also be able to linger in a bar or bookstore longer - and with less stress - because they can check arrival and departure times right from their smartphones, instead of running out to the concourse to check the displays.

"By combining Clear Channel's enormous airport footprint with the simplicity of Geodelic's mobile experience, we can provide consumers with a new level of convenience that comes from having personalized and relevant location-specific information at your fingertips," said Rahul Sonnad, founder and CEO of Geodelic. Sonnad says the app will be available for Blackberry in the near future, as well.

Location-based marketing is a growing category for businesses looking to maintain traffic into physical locations, like retail stores, restaurants, and tourist attractions. Companies like Gowalla and Foursquare have popularized "check ins", while social networking behemoth Facebook has just launched Places, a feature for connecting  with friends based on their location.

 The FLYsmart application takes a different approach, providing location-specific services and information to improve a transient customer's experience through an airport terminal.

“Airports are always looking to improve the traveler experience and find new ways to garner the attention of transient passengers in promoting food, retail and advertising sales,” commented Toby Sturek, President of Clear Channel Airports. “FLYsmart will do all that in the most relevant, convenient and contemporary way.”

The FLYsmart app will initially be launched in ten of North America’s largest airports including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago O’Hare, Dallas Fort Worth, Denver, Detroit, Philadelphia, Phoenix San Francisco and Seattle. New airports will be added each week.

I used the app the first day it launched, on my travels from Seattle to Los Angeles. The app was very helpful in keeping me informed about flight departure times for my home airport. Although the Los Angeles Airport guide hadn't yet launched, I could still see relevant local information for my stay in Los Angeles through the Geodelic national directory, that comes with every FLYSmart app.

"A candid collection of crazy correspondence containing comments, complaints, criticisms, critiques and confessions that categorically captures and conveys the confusion, complications, curiosities, compliments and consequences consumers and customers constructively confront, creatively contemplate and/or continuously consider. Comprende?"

I asked the author of this creative, anonymous blog to come out from behind the curtain, and share a little insight about what type of consumer he is. In a nod to my Vanity Fair subscription, what follows is my personal hybrid version of the Proust and George Wayne interview with Write The Company.

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?

Uncertainty. Like when my mom said she’d like to have me DNA tested.

What is your favorite place to shop?

  The Red Light District in Amsterdam, but my wife only lets me window shop.

What is your idea of earthly happiness?

Co-ed mud wrestling.

What consistent faults do you see in companies to whom you feel compelled to write?

Companies need to stop referring to consumers and customers as their “Target Market.” Targets are things you fire at, attack, hit and try to destroy. That alone makes me want to take aim at them.

Who are your favorite heroes of fiction?

Hester Prynne definitely tops the list. I’ve written hundreds of letters and she was able to take one single Scarlet Letter and turn it into a book and movie deal.

Who are your favorite characters in history?

Groucho, Chico, Harpo and sometimes Karl.

What phrase do you most hate to hear from a customer service representative?

“That’s our policy.” To me, that translates to: Nah-nah nah-nah-nah!

The quality you most admire in the person who replies for the company?

That he or she passed a background check and drug testing. You always want your inquiries handled by people with no rap sheet or traces of drugs in their urine.

What do you value most from the companies that respond?

The fact that they did respond. Too many don’t. Maybe they’re afraid some lunatic is going to post what they say online. 

What is your favorite kind of product to complain about?

Any product that comes with a technical support number. I consider it a pre-warning. As soon as I see it I assign a speed dial number.

If you weren’t using all your free time writing to companies, what would you be doing in your spare time?

Free time isn’t productive so I don’t believe in it. Even with the time I spend writing letters I invoice myself and then question the charges. Too much of my time is already devoted to banging uncooperative electronic equipment repeatedly with a Ball Pein Hammer. Any spare time beyond that is spent doing stuff like flossing and catching up on which celebrities and athletes are heading to rehab or jail.

Via Coolhunting.com

My friends at Geodelic are launching the private beta of their GeoGuide product and you can help out by creating your very own personal city guide. And by participating in this beta, you can also enter to win a new iPad. I have already created mine, Gearheadgal's Diners & Dives, my homage to Guy's Triple D on the Food Network. No doubt you'll have your own ideas! Got favorite places to take your dogs for a hike? Know the finest flea markets? Have fun finding your inspiration, but hurry, the contest ends in a few weeks.  Click here now and submit your idea so you can build a guide that might win you your very own new iPad!

Mistura watches are made with materials that derive from the South American tropics. But they also send a message of meaning about sustainability and craftsmanship.  Created from Bamboo, Macana, Coconut skin, Carreto, Guayacan and Nazarene woods, these watches first require each designer to use a specific technique of preservation and a way of cutting the material that reminds the wearer how valuable time is. Mistura Designs

One of the founders, Daniel Schemel, whom I met at an arts festival, described how woods like Bamboo and Macana must be cut after 5:00 pm and before 5:00 am on moon’s last quarter night making sure that the circulating liquids in the main tree limbs are resting down in the roots. Using this particular night to cut the wood, he claims, helps to void cracks during the drying process that takes exactly 6 months. It's only then, his story goes, that designers start their creations.

The watches are made with a soft leather band, punched with large holes, which make it easy to use the oversized wooden clasp to secure them comfortably. The combinations of wood - teak and purple heart, for example - set against turquoise and white crackled straps are eye-catching. And the Japanese watch movement the artists use helps keeps them affordable. Ironically, the natural materials make them even more susceptible to the elements, especially heat and humidity that can change the shape and color of the wood and leather. Every piece merges art and nature as part of its lifecycle.

I have often said that every product has a story, and the man from Mistura surely had an interesting one to tell. You can buy these watches directly from their website http://www.misturadesigns.com/ or you can follow them on Facebook to find the next summer arts festival where they are appearing.

But what happens when employees understand that service IS the product because management gives them tools and decision rights to actually solve customer problems and, in fact, prevent them? Employees of two service brands, The Morgan Hotels Group and Virgin America, represent the new paradigm of customer experience owners, employees who feel more like "hosts" not "agents."

The Free Online Dictionary defines a host as "one who receives or entertains guests in a social or official capacity." In personal social activities, we have no problem seeing hosts as people who treat visitors graciously and are aware of their guests' needs, making sure that they are comfortable and feel welcomed, not just when it comes time to say "please come again."

Flight attendants on Virgin America are called "teammates" and flyers are "guests." That mental model informs each employee how to treat a visitor who enters via the jetway and spends time in their day traveling via the airline. For Morgan Hotels, guests who take the time to complete a marketing survey after the visit are rewarded by a personal note from a Customer Experience Manager who addresses the guest's specific feedback, if the guest opts to invite the hotel to contact them. That person is prepared to continue the dialogue with the guest to ensure the guest feels appreciated for providing the insight on their own time about their interactions and stay with the hotel.

Social graces seemed to have disappeared with the appearance of the socially acceptable practice of anonymously posting nasty comments about online content or marketing material. It's always been easy to criticize the host who doesn't get it right - who makes us feel unwanted and underappreciated. But those are also usually the people who don't treat us as if they are entertaining or engaging us either personally and professionally as a host.

Sure, it's an easy argument to make that the last guy was incompetent, but the history of continued failure to solve problems is something no single employee wants to own. In fact, the last senior executive of our region who told us he wasn't responsible for the past and "only the future" no longer works at the company.  Consequently, our past conversations and credit promises have also evaporated with him. This provided a helpful cue for the musical refrain sung by Jeff, the repairman who showed up today. "I can't tell you what he promised because he doesn't work here any more, I can only look forward at fixing your problems." Company amnesia about our ongoing record of miserable service appears rampant.

Lack of customer memory also has dramatically degraded the company's troubleshooting ability, and that contributes to our long record of service calls. Rather than tracking past work, and using that to narrow the problem set, the care, repair service and network engineering employees each start from ground zero, which further compounds the problem because no one seems to be keeping a big picture view. Over time, we have been told during different service visits that the repair will require the person to remove switches in our wired network closet, remove several of our DVRs from the network, remove and replace the cable card from the TiVo, replace the underground cable to our house, tune the signal at the junction box at our house, and a few more things I can't even remember.

It seems I am in good company, though, because it appears they can't remember much either. Today's supervisor was unable to even find our TiVo cable cards registered with the service system, despite the fact that the repairmen have been to our house more than a handful of times to address our lack of HD service. "I'm surprised you get any service at all," she commented. What then does she think they have been coming to our house to address all those blocks of time we had to be home when they booked an "appointment?"

Real problem solving only emerges from sourcing the collective tribal knowledge a company has about a customer and their service history. When a company has only short term memory, employees can't do their job. But when multiple employees espouse short term memory as their service "opportunity", beware - you are probably not going to really feel well serviced in the long run.

Hilarious @CraigyFerg "a magazine is like a paper-y blog." They came before there was AOL.

Most days, the average Internet user curates a flood of content from multiple destinations into a patchwork of information, updates and insights that help them stay connected. It’s a lot of work to hunt, gather, personalize and sample all the content available, and even more if you are part of the growing percentage of consumers interested in watching video. Tubemogul reports Web media brands posted 326 million video streams in the first quarter of this year, which is an increase of more than 300 percent compared to Q1 of 2009, and does not include all the user generated content uploaded to photo and video sharing sites.

“Some times you just want to push play, and see what’s on,” said Blair Harrison, CEO of Frequency, a real time video site that lets you lean back and watch samples of video playing continuously from all over the Internet. “But with so much video coming online each hour, there really is no way for a consumer to get a sample of what’s playing on the web” Harrison contends that consuming video on the web has become a laborious and disjointed experience, forcing people who want to enjoy rich media online to jump from link to link, collecting clips or navigating between embedded players and web pages just to sample video content.

Launched earlier this month by Harrison, the former CEO of IFILM, which sold to Viacom for $49 Million in 2005, Frequency aims to make it easy for anyone to quickly scan and tune into what’s playing online at any time. He brought together a crew of experienced digital media engineers from that company, and built a platform that offers content publishers a promotional engine for long form video clips. Frequency’s tools create a continuous stream of previews, auto-generated in different bitrates, from feeds aggregated by the company’s platform. Users navigate the clips which play like previews of coming attractions, touting the longer version on the publisher’s website.

When consumers enter the Frequency site, there is always something playing. Like a stream of 140 character headlines on Twitter, the Frequency player cycles through fifteen-second clips from across the web, categorized by topic and source. If you want to learn more on a topic, simply pick a tag, and the player pivots to play previews that share that term in common. If you like to follow a particular publisher or collector of videos, you can create a personalized channel that just tunes into their “frequency”, or channel of auto-play clips.

“There are over 200,000 video clips being posted to the web every hour,” said Harrison. “We want to make it simple for anyone to quickly discover and watch what is appealing to them at any particular moment they’re looking to tune in. “

Frequency is a privately funded, early stage video network, and is also client of Waldo Finn, LLC, a business and strategy consulting firm, which employs the author of this post.