President Obama unveiled his administration’s blueprint for a new national network of high-speed passenger rail lines Thursday, saying such an investment is necessary to reduce traffic congestion, cut dependence on foreign oil and improve the environment.

Amtrack’s version of a bullet train can travel 150 mph but the tracks are so bad the highest speed it can travel is only 80 mph.

The president’s plan identifies 10 potential high-speed intercity corridors for federal funding, including California, the Pacific Northwest, the Midwest, the Southeast, the Gulf Coast, Pennsylvania, Florida, New York and New England.

It also highlights potential improvements in the heavily traveled Northeast Corridor running from Washington to Boston, Massachusetts.

Each of the corridors identified by the president’s report are between 100 and 600 miles long. The blueprint envisions some trains traveling at top speeds of over 150 mph.

Federal grants would also be directed toward separate individual rail projects that are deemed “ready to go,” with preliminary engineering and environmental work already completed.

“My high-speed rail proposal will lead to innovations that change the way we travel in America. We must start developing clean, energy-efficient transportation that will define our regions for centuries to come,” Obama proclaimed.

The president cited the success of high-speed rail in European countries such as France and Spain as a positive example for the United States.

The plan would be funded in part through the recently passed $787 billion stimulus plan, which includes a total of $8 billion for improvements in rail service. Obama has also proposed a separate five-year, $5 billion investment in high-speed rail as part of the administration’s suggested fiscal year 2010 budget.

“We’re going to make travel in this country leaner and a whole lot cleaner,” said Vice President Joe Biden, speaking before Obama.

The city of Chicago, Illinois, would be the hub of the proposed Midwest Regional Rail System, which would stretch to Madison, Wisconsin, in the Northwest; St. Louis, Missouri, in the South; and Detroit, Michigan, in the East.

I will be lucky if I am still around when it hits the tracks! My business days in Tokyo were certainly made easier with the “Bullet Train.” I miss having that option.

The economy is ripe for integration. Brick-and-click integration, that is.

Experts did not really predict it to happen quite this soon, and consumers did not seem willing to cooperate immediately, but all indications are that the various shopping channels are finally beginning to integrate.

Catalog users are leaning more heavily toward online shopping. Web retailers are beginning to understand the necessity of having a “real world” presence. And the public is increasingly flexible about where it is willing to shop.

A new report from Goldman Sachs, Harris Interactive and Nielsen//NetRatings offers the encouraging news that consumer online spending has increased 34 percent since the beginning of last November.

According to other analysts, consumers will spend US$10.25 billion online in this quarter, up 12 percent from one year ago.

In contrast, the word from brick-and-mortar retailers is that retail business is down when compared to this time last year.

All of the data adds up to the fact that American consumers are starting to make the online shopping channel part of their lives.

Mainstream retail operations are reporting surprisingly strong online sales. Williams Sonoma for example, reports its online sales are three times higher than a year ago.

Why? According to Bob Pittman, who recently was tapped to become the sole chief operating officer of AOL Time Warner, it is because Internet access has reached a “critical mass,” with two-thirds of American homes now online.

Speaking at a recent industry conference, Pittman said that “the Internet revolution is in full force,” and that despite a sluggish economy, online shopping is steady. Still, e-tail sales continue to make up just 1% of total retail sales, based on figures from the U.S. Department of Commerce.

The key to pumping up that figure could be more aggressive attempts at integrating all channels, a process that is moving at a snail’s pace.

For example, a survey conducted by The E-Tailing Group, a Chicago-based Internet strategies consulting firm, revealed only 12 percent of e-tail sites allow consumers to pick up their purchases at brick-and-mortar locations.

On the plus side, 65 percent of the sites surveyed do offer Internet buyers the opportunity to return merchandise at stores, instead of through the mail or shipping companies.

In addition to making things easier for the consumer, merchants could benefit from more aggressive integration by using their already high-traffic offline operations to drive consumers online.

So far, although retailers are willing to publish the address of their Web site in ads and on shopping bags, they rarely feature Web promotions that would aggressively drive consumers to the site.

Additionally, those brick-and-click retailers that do manage to encourage shoppers to sign on could make the consumers feel more comfortable if the Web site looked more like the store. Familiarity helps.

The E-Tailing Group suggests retailers should promote features that the Web site offers that other channels, such as mail-order catalogs, cannot offer. For example, why not play up the advantages of online real-time inventory and instant checking of order status? Most Web sites now have these capabilities.

It appears a number of retailers are still hesitant to over-promote their Web sites, fearing they might kill the cash cow that fuels the rest of the machine. That probably stems from a traditional self-contained profit-center mindset.

Perhaps if their channels were more effectively integrated, retailers might capture a greater market share and generate increases in all profit centers.

Companies that have taken this type of approach are already seeing results. Land’s End for example, a company that has done an above-average job in integrating its channels, reports that nearly 20 percent of its sales now come from the Internet.

Lands’ End may emerge as one of the poster children for successful online selling, and its achievements will likely be the result of the power of integration.

What do you think? Let’s talk about it.

The benefit to the brand and consumers is clear.

With 75 percent of all households engaged in a loyalty program, an extension to mobile is obvious. What’s critical is that you need to use the phone in the right way and create a 1-to-1 relationship with the consumer.

Mobile provides the best opportunity to establish a trusted, timely relationship with your customers. Once you have that relationship, extend through the use of mobile rewards and loyalty programs that keep your consumer with you and your brand.

Mobile is providing brands a reach to their consumers like never before: always on, always available and everywhere.

Relationship marketing is a form of marketing that evolved from direct response marketing in which emphasis is placed on building longer term relationships with customers rather than on individual transactions.

Relationship marketing involves understanding the customers’ needs as they go through their life cycles while emphasizing a broad range of services to existing customers as they need them.

Loyalty marketing programs, on the other hand, are designed to increase customer satisfaction and retention through communications-based loyalty and rewards programs.

So what do relationship and loyalty marketing mean to the mobile world?

Bottom line, it’s about extending your relationship with your consumer and ensuring they receive increasing value from your brand. Loyalty programs are just one opportunity.

“When The Economy Goes Down, Sex Goes Up” | datingish

For small children, there are few life changes bigger than learning how to use the toilet. It’s a time when both tots and their parents can be in need of a little positive reinforcement and a morale boost.

Kimberly-Clark’s Pull-Up brand is trying to help, and engender loyalty at the same time, with an ambitious 3-week-old program that uses the mobile phone and points to where mobile marketing may be headed.
The company rolled out the first part of the campaign with on-pack stickers instructing moms to text “potty” or “bigkid” to a shortcode to receive their potty-training kit.

The message directs them to a website designed for their phone, with resources to help with the potty-training process. There, moms can sign up to receive a potty-training kit and get information on the second part of the campaign, which launches this week and involves arranging for Disney characters to call parents’ phones at a designated time.

When the call comes in, parents are asked to hand the phone to their child so that character can congratulate them on their potty training. The last phase of the program will allow moms to access more Disney voices and messages by entering a proof of purchase.

“What makes mobile work is the recognition that the consumer is in charge,” said Bryon Morrison, president of Omnicom’s mobile agency, Ipsh, which handled the Pull-Ups effort. “This program allows moms to engage with multiple mobile channels and online … and then builds the relationship by continuously optimizing the program and adding more value for each interaction.”

Advertisers from Domino’s Pizza to Victoria’s Secret have begun building out mobile-marketing infrastructures that deliver value and convenience for customers in an effort to keep them engaged and loyal to the brand. And for categories such as diapers, where parents can end up spending a few thousand dollars over several years, such relationship building is especially key.

Beyond price

But driving loyalty is more about delivering value beyond price, and most mobile customer-relationship-management programs still focus too much on coupons and SMS alerts about new products. Done correctly, CRM programs spur purchases without compromising price points, and can often reinforce pricing, because the brand is selling benefits and personalization.

“Coupons are almost exactly the opposite of CRM — [coupons are] not used to drive repeat purchase over time, they’re designed to spur trial among non-users and to promote usually new-product introductions based on price,” said Eric Bader, managing partner of mobile-marketing firm Brand in Hand, Procter & Gamble’s mobile agency of record.

Mr. Bader said his agency’s CRM billings have shot up this year from virtually zero last year, with one of its recent bookings a $150,000 project with a major university that involves using mobile to manage the entire student life cycle, from recruitment to application, acceptance, enrollment and attendance. Meanwhile, Group M’s mobile agency, Joule, has seen revenue double from a year ago for mobile-CRM initiatives, according to CEO Michael Collins.

One of the more proven mobile CRM initiatives is BMW’s 2-year-old German program that lets customers purchase snow tires, which the government mandates. The carmaker sends customers in its database pictures of their car model, in the correct color, plus winter-tire recommendations and prices. Customers see how the tires would appear on their car, and can set up an appointment with the dealer right from the message. In the two years BMW has run the program, about a third of the customers who receive the messages have bought winter tires through BMW, according to Marc Mielau, the carmaker’s head of digital media.

Said Mr. Mielau,”CRM is really about engaging the customers and taking their data, their behavior and other learnings in order to design better products and services.”

What makes mobile work is the recognition that the consumer is in charge.

A new iPhone app that launched today will further enable your addiction to checking your Gmail account by notifying you of new e-mail similar to the way you receive text messages.

That app is called GPush. Specifically designed for Gmail users, the app displays the “From” and “Subject” fields of a new e-mail on the standby screen as soon as the e-mail is received. The app takes advantage of support for push-notification in Apple’s new iPhone 3.0.

The target audience? Clearly me and all the other workaholics, who obsessively check their e-mail every few minutes. Wired Magazine put the app to the test and found it delivered on its promise rather well: Each test e-mail sent to takes about three seconds to push to a standby screen in that familiar bubbly box. Not bad.

Brian Chen of Wired who tested the GPush just had two complaints: 1.) No support for multiple accounts, meaning you can only obsessively watch one of your Gmail inboxes; and 2.) Only one sound, the Tri-tone, is working with the notifications (he personally found the sound really annoying).

This video puts social media in context with some amazing facts.

Clear Channel’s IHeartRadio app has scored 2.5 million unique downloads on the iPhone and Blackberry.

2009 has been an especially rough year for the radio industry, with revenue down a whopping 24% during the first quarter. But online radio is a small but fast-growing sector that continues to pick up steam, including a 13% spike in first-quarter 2009, thanks in large part to aggressive efforts by companies such as Clear Channel, which made a big bet on streaming audio five years ago as a source of organic growth in audience and eventually revenue.

Those plans accelerated last summer with the launch of Clear Channel’s first mobile app, IHeartRadio, which has gone on to amass 2.5 million unique downloads on the iPhone and BlackBerry. The mobile momentum has also translated to Clear Channel’s overall online audience, with 22 million unique listeners frequenting the company’s digital properties each month and over 9 million unique visits to the company’s digital media player, with streaming adding a 15% increase to the company’s total radio audience.

The ultimate irony?

Clear Channel, the company most commonly associated with homogenizing the airwaves with restricted playlists and redundant oldies stations, wants to become the ultimate artist-discovery tool for music fans online. It’s even taking a few cues from satellite radio, tapping the likes of Christina Aguilera and The Eagles to curate their own radio stations. “We haven’t looked at ourselves as just a radio company for some time now,” said Evan Harrison, Clear Channel Radio’s exec VP-head of online.

The moves have also helped Clear Channel distinguish itself from No. 2 competitor CBS Radio, which recently acquired Last.FM and added Yahoo and AOL’s streaming radio players to its network. aggregating an audience that often competes neck-and-neck for online radio share. Keeping the competition healthy, Pandora, the web’s top streaming audio site, tapped Clear Channel to lead its audio ad sales, an ironic move for a startup whose founder set out to become the world’s largest standalone radio company.

Ponyo is Hayao Miyazaki’s latest “animé” release following a string of acclaimed cartoons that had limited success in America.

In his native Japan Miyazaki enjoys widespread critical and popular acclaim for his exquisitely animated films, which take viewers into surreal alternative worlds of shape-shifting dragons and floating castles. My roommate in Tokyo loved each one and even has all the DVDs.

But while he is a superstar at home in Japan as the master of animé, the director has struggled to capture the public imagination in the US.

Miyazaki’s hopes for a breakthrough in the biggest movie market in the world now rest with Ponyo, the tale of a playful goldfish who longs to be a little girl, released by Disney in the US this weekend.

Positive reviews of his previous work have failed to prompt more than a lukewarm response from moviegoers in North America. In 2003, the year his Spirited Away won an Oscar for best animated film, box office sales in the US and Canada reached a modest $10m, compared with $356m in the rest of the world. The pattern was repeated two years later with Howl’s Moving Castle, which made $4.7m in North America but $230m elsewhere. I actually liked that one.

Inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, Ponyo earned $160m in Japan and sealed Miyazaki’s reputation as the country’s foremost living director.

After sneaking away from her underwater home, Ponyo befriends Sosuke, a five-year-old boy who lives in a cottage overlooking the coast, and her transformation into a human begins.

While much of the film’s charm hinges on its fanciful storyline and impeccable production values, there is room for consideration of the weighty theme of environmental destruction as the plot takes a darker turn.

Chastened, perhaps, by past disappointments, Miyazki, 68, has taken no risks in preparing for Ponyo’s US release in partnership with the Pixar and Disney creative guru John Lasseter.

Audiences will be treated to an English-language original produced by Lasseter, the wizard behind Toy Story and Cars. In an attempt to broaden the film’s appeal the makers have recruited an all-star cast of character voices including Liam Neeson, Matt Damon and Cate Blanchett. This should help.

The inclusion of Frankie Jonas, the younger brother of the Jonas Brothers, as Sosuke, and Noah Cyrus, the younger sister of Hannah Montana star Miley Cyrus as Ponyo, should help attract the youth market.

Miyazaki’s ability to tap into a child’s fevered imagination, coupled with his richly colorful, hand-drawn frames, have been rewarded with almost universal critical acclaim in Japan and huge earnings for his Studio Ghibli, near Tokyo.

Experts say he deserves more credit for his record in the US. The US box office figures aren’t great compared with Pixar and Disney, but compared with other Japanese films in the States they didn’t do badly.

Few Japanese movies have traveled well in the US in the past 30 years, with the notable exceptions of Tampopo (Juzo Itami, 1985), Shall We Dance (Masayuki Suo, 1996) and Dreams (Akira Kurosawa, 1990).

Despite his lower profile in the US, Miyazaki, instantly recognizable from his shock of white hair, has been nicknamed the Japanese Walt Disney, a comparison he is said to find discomfiting.

In the US it has received mixed reviews. The film critic Christy Lemire suggested it would appeal most to children under five and adults on hallucinogenic drugs.

For everyone else, Lemire said: “Ponyo will seem beautiful but surprisingly boring: a children’s film that’s at once overly simplistic and needlessly nonsensical.” Wow that was harsh but I get her point…it is very “Japanese” in style.

The New York-based film critic Ethan Alter was more generous. “If you have never seen a Miyazaki film before, now’s a great time to start.”

When it came out in Tokyo last year the theme song drove me and all of my friends crazy!

There are still a lot of people who don’t believe man walked on the moon. Heck members of my family don’t believe it..I do have one high school friend Wade Adams that works at NASA who is sure!

I suppose Buzz gets tired of hearing about it. Here he punches a reporter square in the mouth when asked about whether the moon walk was a farce.