Who thought this was a good marketing?

One day, I got a phone call from a number that I didn't recognize. The number looked like it's from the USA (and I live in Canada) so I had a suspicion that it might be a spam call.

Right on!

As soon as I picked it up, I heard a loud cruise ship horn sound followed by an automatic message starting with "Hello, ...". I just hung up. I don't even know what cruise company is behind that spam call because I didn't bother listening to it.

It was not my first time receiving this call. I probably got this call about 3~4 times in the past year. The marketing is definitely not working for me. It's not working for my (previous) co-workers either. I remember talking to people who received that phone call and they, surely, were annoyed by that.

Not only did they start the call with the annoying cruise ship horn sound, but they also put an automated message which we can't interact with anyway. This makes me want to avoid this company rather than making me want to book a cruise trip with them.

Marketing should be integrated into every aspect of the company. If a customer gets a phone call, it's a marketing. When a customer visits your website, it's a marketing. If your employee talks about the work life at your company, it's a marketing, too. And the list goes on... If people get positive experience from those things, I bet the company would get a lot more customers without having to spam people with annoying calls, which might actually have the opposite effect of what they intended.

Innovative Pen and Popularity

I was browsing the Internet and randomly came across this product Livescribe SmartPen. I watched a few videos and instantly fell in love with this product (I wish I had this pen when I was in school!). I was more amazed by this pen than when I first saw iPhone or iPad.

There are so many innovations embedded into it. Here are a few things that I thought were cool:

• It knows where you are writing using the little dots (almost invisible) printed on the paper.
  This pen has a little infrared camera close to the tip of it. By reading the dot pattern on the paper, it can figure out what page/what part of the note you are on. According to Jim Marggraff, CEO of Livescribe, if you layout the entire dot patterns on a piece of paper, it can "cover square miles of Europe and Asia combined." (see the video below @4:20). This technology opens up door for many other cool features.

• It can record audio while you're writing.
  I remember when I was in university, a lot of times I couldn't pay attention and digest what the professor was saying because I was busy writing while he/she was talking. So this feature would've been super useful.
  This feature alone is not that cool because you could've just used audio recorder to achieve the same effect. However, combined with the next feature, it becomes awesome!

• When you tap on certain part of your written note, it can replay the audio at the time of you writing that note.
  Whoa, this is so awesome and convenient. By combining the first and the second features, it can reply the audio at the time of your writing.

• When you connect the pen to your computer, it saves the digital version of your note on the computer.
  Since the pen knows where you wrote on, it can create a digital copy of your actual note without you having to scan it. It also supports OCR so that you can search for a certain keyword in the digital copy.

• And a lot more... A video is worth thousand words. Watch the video below.

In spite of the great innovation, it didn't seem to have taken off yet. This product, at least to me, is revolutionary. People gave very positive ratings to this product, too.

Why is it that I don't see as many people using this pen as they use iPhone/iPad? I heard it has sold more than one million pens so it's not few (and definitely not a failure), but since a lot of people write notes (or do they not anymore??), I feel like I should see more people using it around me. Maybe it just didn't hit the inflection point yet, even though it's been out there since 2008.

Does it lack appealing look? Was (or is) there lack of marketing push? Is it not as robust as it is seen on the video? Any thoughts?