At Adept, we are always thinking of new ideas that would make life easier. The only problem is that we are marketing people, not engineers, programmers or scientists. So, we just post the ideas here and hope someone can make them a reality.

The iPhone Remote Starter App
I was sitting in my office the other night watching the snow fall and accumulate on the cars below. I wanted to call it a day but was dreading the process of thawing my car in the freezing cold. That’s when it hit me. Someone should create an app for the iPhone that integrates with a remote starter system in the car. Ideally, you could start your car, set the temperature, turn on your defrost settings and let it all warm up while you sit comfortably in your office chair.

To those of you thinking, “but they already have remote starters,” think again. The remote starter is limited to a very short distance for it to work. If you park your car 100 yards or more away, it won’t work. The iPhone app would allow you to start your car from anywhere you have cell service.

One other bonus would be having the ability to unlock your car via your iPhone. You’d never have to worry about losing your keys again. Zip Car recently released an app that allows users to reserve a car and unlock it from their phone. How cool is that?

Mike explains his view on the subject in this great post…

Ive been conducting some informal research over the past couple weeks, and Ive discovered that a frequency of approx 20 tweets per minute mentioning the same word is enough to create a top trending topic on Twitter.

As I was watching the trending topics this morning, at 7am EST, I saw the word “peace” suddenly pop up on Twitters list of top 10 trending topics. Using Twitters search I quickly counted up the number of results over the previous 5 minutes, and found 69 mentions, mostly in reference to today being The International Day of Peace.

Over the next 5 minutes, there were approximately 120 new mentions. Combined, those mentions averaged about 19 mentions per minute at the time when the word became a top 10 trending topic.

This confirms an earlier bit of research I did last Wednesday, when I looked at the number of mentions for “Baucus” when Senator Max Baucus proposed health care legislation became a trending topic. Using Trendistic to determine when the term got hot, I went back through Twitter search and counted the mentions. I found that a frequency of approx 20-25 mentions per minute was enough to make Baucus become a trending topic.

The other key variable in the trending topic equation is the duration of the frequency of mentions. Once you pass the necessary threshold of mentions per minute to become a trending topic, how long can you sustain that frequency? Its this length of time that determines the strength and staying power of a trending topic.

View rest of post via Mike Arauz: Trending Topics on Twitter: What does it take?.

This article on AdAge.com reminds us that when evaluating the performance of online display ads, the art, copy, size and position on the page aren’t all that matter. The article points out the importance of environment. In other words, what is the visitor doing on the page when they see your ad. For example, if you run the same ad in an email inbox that you run in a side bar on a blog, you shouldn’t expect the same results. People in their inbox reading/writing email are a lot less likely to allow distractions than people reading a blog.

If you are running a Google Content Network campaign, you should take a closer look at how you are testing creative. Try some managed placements to help eliminate the environment variable.

Check out the article: Location Matters: How Ad Environments Affect Performance – Advertising Age – DigitalNext.