Cameron Gibbs

read this: http://www.sickjokes.net/index.php/cat18/college_degree_to_pilot_high_school_dipl

via thedailywh.at

Dear friends and family,

Happy New Year! 2009 was a great year for our little family and we’d like to share some of the year’s highlights with you.

The greatest thing that happened to us in 2009 was the birth of our youngest son, Edward Benjamin. He definitely has the coolest birthday in the family — 9/9/09! Noah (3) and Dallin (5) love their new little brother and enjoy holding him and playing with him. We are very proud of our three little boys.

In April, Heidi took the boys with her to visit her family in Peru for a month. Cameron joined them for the last week. Dallin and Noah picked up some Spanish and Dallin enjoyed working with Grandpa Bedoya making cars in Grandpa’s workshop. The highlight of our trip was visiting Caral, the oldest city of the Americas, which is just an hour and half drive from Heidi’s home. It was really neat.

In June, Cameron’s mom along with Paul, Heidi, and Maryanne (Cameron’s younger siblings) moved to Utah and found a home just 15 minutes from ours. We’re happy to have family so close — our boys love going to Grandma’s.

In August, Heidi’s mom came up to help Heidi during the last part of the pregnancy. We surprised her by having Heidi’s dad fly up for the last few weeks she was here. They were able to attend the General Conference of our church and later participate in the blessing of Edward.

This year Heidi and Cameron enjoyed starting up a small business with Matt and Jamee (Cameron’s brother and sister-in-law). The company is called memorybears.com. It’s been a gratifying side business and we look forward to growing it in 2010.

In November, we made a road trip to California to spend a week visiting Zion’s National Park, Las Vegas, Calico, Disneyland and family. It was a lot for one trip but we enjoyed every minute of it.

Heidi continues to do her best raising our three boys and loves being the only girl. Cameron continues working at ZAGG and can’t imagine enjoying any other job as much as the one he has now.

Reflecting upon the blessings of this past year, we can’t help but acknowledge the hand of God in our lives. We are so grateful to Him for His love and for sending His Son to save us. Without Christ’s sacrifice, we would not have the opportunity of being an eternal family and all of our experiences this past year would be just a memory and nothing more. Our hearts are full.

We wish you a prosperous and happy 2010.

Love,

Cameron and Heidi Gibbs

Over the last week, I’ve noticed my ad spend in yahoo going up. I just recalled Yahoo sending me an email about their “improved” content match so I logged into the account to take a closer look and sure enough, the increased ad spend was coming from this “improved” content match. Problem is, the return on the ad spend was no where near what it had been before the “improvement” was made. Try to solve your problems by sticking it to your advertisers Yahoo? Yeah, that’s going to go real far. I can’t wait to hear the outcry. Somebody really needs to go in there and turnaround that fast-sinking ship.

Today’s keynote speaker was George Kliavkoff, Chief Digital Officer at NBC. His presentation was actually an interview done by a senior writer at Fortune Magazine, Adam Lashinsky. The best part was probably Adam’s questioning — he really grilled the NBC exec on everything from hulu.com to his relationship with Steve Jobs. I didn’t realize that hulu had finally launched the full version of the site until I visited it today; it’s been up now for a couple of months supposedly. It actually looks really nice — quite applesque. I’m interested to see how well it does compared to distribution on itunes and how big it will be compared to Youtube (though they aren’t really competing for content; instead they will be competing for eyeballs).

The best part of the today’s sessions was definitely the “You don’t know jack!” session. ad tech invited about 6 or 7 teens (dubbed millenials or the millenial generation) from the bay area and asked them what devices or services that can’t live without, what they they thought of sms advertisements, freerice.com, virality, etc. The kids were pretty sharp so they were likely a bit ahead of the curve when compared to their contemporaries but it definitely gives you an idea of what direction they are heading.

One thing that I’ve really appreciated at ad tech is not only the quality of the speakers but the quality of the moderators and interviewers. They’ve seemed to have hired a bunch of senior journalists from big newspapers and the quality of their questions and statements is noticed. Even if the content in tomorrow’s session is weak, the conference has already paid for itself several times over. I would definitely recommend it to anyone in the marketing industry.

So the sun has set on the first day of ad tech and I promised a report on the day so here goes…

Jeff Hayslett, CMO of Kodak, was the keynote and did a great job though it was the first time I’ve heard someone drop the f-bomb in a presentation! One of the more interesting points of his presentation that I wasn’t aware of was that Kodak actually invented the digital camera but decided not to release because they were making so much money selling film. Obviously a big mistake. I actually caught up with him after spoke and he seemed like he’d be a cool guy to work with.

One of the sessions covered the future of marketing… it was interesting. The speakers covered everything from digital coupons text to you cell phone, to digital ads on GPS systems to LCD displays interactively showing off the features of products on display. The presentation that got the most ooo’s was Total Immersion’s 3D digital imaging. It worked by holding up the packaging of the product to a camera and then viewing a 3D image of the product on an LCD screen. Though it looked very cool, it doesn’t seem very useful or even that effective in presenting the product.

In an afternoon session, the topic of the future of search was covered. Representatives from Google, Microsoft, a couple of big advertisers and an online marketing agency made up the panel. The Google rep was the Directory of Advertising for the Western Region of the US and that was about as interesting as her presentation got. Surprisingly, the rep from MSN was actually pretty interesting and talked about some interesting stuff they will short be coming out with, including real time, real data on keyword searches. It sounded like something similar to the overture keyword tool which I dearly miss (since its no longer been updated, I’ve been relying on SEO Book’s keyword tool which is ok but I don’t always trust).

Unfortunately, the afternoon sessions were pretty boring so I spent most of my time catching up on my google reader feeds were pretty lean on material. I also had to leave early a couple of sessions to do a couple of conference calls so I didn’t catch everything.

Tomorrow and Thursday will be covering a lot more material (more tracks) so I anticipate coming back to the hotel with a lot more education, information and ideas.

Just arrived in SF to attend the ad tech conference. I’m planning on writing a daily post for the 3-day event so stay tuned. This will be my first time attending ad tech so I’m anxious to see how good it is.

I just read iLounge’s overview of an interview that Steve Jobs’ did with Fortune and I really liked this snippet:

After an extended period of living with the originally designed enclosure for the iPhone, Jobs concluded that he didn’t “love” the shell, an emotion that he would need to feel for what he believed was the company’s most important release ever. “[W]e pushed the reset button. We went through all of the zillions of models we’d made and ideas we’d had.” And, with too little time remaining before the device’s announcement, he challenged the designers to do better, quickly. “It was hell because we had to go to the team and say, ‘All this work you’ve [done] for the last year, we’re going to have to throw it away and start over, and we’re going to have to work twice as hard now because we don’t have enough time.’ “

Now that take guts (what Jobs did)… and hard work (what his team had to do).

I have been following the GOP primaries like never before. I have watched every debate (there’s been 6 or 7 I think) and have been reading about them every day. The main reason I’m following so closely this time around is because I’m a big supporter of Mitt Romney.

I have been really impressed with how well Romney has done considering his lack of name-recognition. He’s pretty far back in the national polls, but the party nominees aren’t decided by a national vote, but are done state by state over time (up until Super Tuesday, when more than 20 states will pick a nominee for each party).

Romney is a smart person and has showed his intelligence and capabilities by focusing on the first two states to vote, Iowa and New Hampshire. Yesterday, CNN reported the most recent poll in Iowa put Romney 23 points ahead of the next contender, Giuliani. That is simply remarkable. The same story also mentions Judd Gregg, a 3-term NH Senator and former NH Governer, endorsing Romney. In NH, Romney’s lead isn’t as large, close to 10 points, but it’s large enough that it won’t be easy for another candidate to take the lead. After New Hampshire, its Michigan, where Romney will likely win, and then South Carolina where he’s in second place.

Opponents say that Romney’s leading in those early states because he has poured so much money in advertising in them. Well, imagine the return that investment is going to give him when he gets all that free press after winning the early states before Super Tuesday… probably millions upon millions of dollars worth (my SEO readers understand this concept — how investing in paid advertising can result in a lot of free or “organic” advertising). Also, to dispute his opponents, you can’t lead the polls just because you’ve advertised, you also have to have to have a good “product”, have a good “offer”, and you have to target the right people (think 40/40/20 rule).

Yesterday, Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard, published an article on how the Republican race is most-likely a two-man race between Romney (who leads in the early states) and Giuliani (who leads in the national polls). The article paints the two most likely scenarios, though also recognizing that anything could happen between now and Jan 3rd. Either Romney or Giuliani.

One thing that the article doesn’t mention is Romney’s inevitable “Mormon speech.” Many evangelicals that back Romney want him to give a speech similar to JFK’s where he said that he wouldn’t take orders from the Pope. Romney hasn’t ever said that he’s going to do it but it he probably will. Yesterday when he was interviewed by Sean Hannity, he said that “the time may come” for him to address his faith. I think he’ll do it, he just wants to time it right, either just before the Iowa caucus or just before the first southern state votes (South Carolina). That will give him even more free publicity just before Super Tuesday.

If you haven’t heard of OLPC (one laptop per child) before, I think you’ll be impressed with what this company is doing to bring education to poor countries. They have manufactured a laptop that costs only $188 (which they hope will eventually only cost $100) that does just about everything a normal computer can do, and even a little more.

Dave Pogue, a tech editor for the NY Times, reviews the laptop here. I recommend checking out his video review there.

The laptop will be available for purchase for $400 for two weeks in November. It’s $400 because it’s a buy-one, give-one plan (you get one and one goes to someone else less fortunate). What a great idea. Thanks OLPC.

[via engadget]