"The Incredibles", by Disney/Pixar pictures opens in one week, November 5th 2004. Before the movie has even officially opened, over $200 million dollars has been spent (or committed by partners) for marketing, promotions and merchandising.

As has become a has become an infrequent habit of mine, I've gathered together a list of Incredibles Movie merchandise, promotional items, contests and more. Listed are nearly 200 (as of 10/29/04) official Incredibles-related items and promotional deals.

My favorite quote about all of this - a fabulous piece of Marketing-Speak from Brett Dicker, EVP of Marketing for Disney's Buena Vista: "We will have tens of thousands of touch points with the consumer"

Update 11/01/04 - "The Incredibles" premiere in the UK will take place November 7th. Immediately following the premiere, "Mr Incredible and his superhero family will light up London's most stylish shopping destination" - kicking off the official Holiday Shopping Season on London's Regent Street. Could the message be any clearer? See the movie - then get out and shop.

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Back in 2003, I became curious about the identity of a certain burning building shown in many news photos as the Iraq War began, and as a personal obsession, made a web page about it. The Building's identity was never fully resolved, and I just left it at that.

Early in September of 2004, I received email from a civilian contractor with the U.S. Special Forces, stationed in Baghdad - also looking for the identity of this building, since they have been stationed just a stone's throw away from it since late 2003. The email said, in part: "I have met hundreds of people (locals, military, gov officials) and no one seems to know for sure what that one specific building was for... I have heard the pyramid called Baath party HQ, Secret Intelligence, and too many others to recall".

The contractor stumbled across this web page, and sent along some nice photos, a couple stories, and allowed me to reprint them here. There are two small updates - a few more press photos, and the four large images from my new Pen Pal in Baghdad. The mystery is still not solved to my mind, but it's nice to see a couple more first-hand viewpoints, and some more-personal insight into life in Baghdad right now.

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I'd really like to be attending the Web 2.0 conference right now. It's not in the cards for me at the moment though, so I'll be living vicariously through blogs & friends. Looks like they've got a fantastic lineup of speakers and topics. I also like how open-ended everything appears (at least from the literature).

A number of folks have been associating Amazon Light 4 with Web 2.0 / Web as Platform. In my opinion, it's only a baby-step in that direction. Most of the connections I built to other services are rather lightweight, and most (Gmail, del.icio.us, dropcash, etc.) take advantage of a simple open-ended input system (forms that pre-populate fields based on querystring). A real interconnection of web services would be much more integrated and aware.

For example, if you were viewing a page about a Nikon D70 camera, it would be great to see (in the same page) if this item were on any of your friends' wishlists (better yet - if they had had one purchased for them), if Flickr had some nice photos taken with that camera, what the lowest price from Froogle/MySimon is, available Digital Camera books from your Local Library, a link to the manufacturer's home page, latest news about the D70 (recalls/firmware updates), etc. Sure there are stumbling blocks, and a lot of this would be hard work, but the coolest bit about it is there aren't any sort of Show-Stopping roadblocks. The biggest concern I'd have moving forward is not how many connections can we find and cram into an app, but what are the best and most useful connections to the end user.

Case in point - I tried hard to figure out a good way to integrate Flickr's API with Amazon Light 4.0, but could not. There weren't many appropriate crossovers in my opinion. The only connection between a storefront (Amazon) and a social sharing experience (Flickr) that I could find was the cameras being used to take the photos. But, to be frank, the cameras being used are almost irrelevant - except in a few cases, (and Camera Types aren't exposed fully in the current Flickr API). So I chose to not include Flickr for the moment, though I wish I could have (I am still a big fan and wish them well).

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Yes, I've revved my Amazon Webservices engine again for one more version of Amazon Light. Amazon Light 4.0 is based on Amazon's Webservices 4.0 release (coincidentally). This means it's a bit deeper and richer than previous versions - more reviews, searchable wishlists (look people up by name or email).

I've also made an effort to tie together a number of existing popular and/or useful web tools into the site itself - Yahoo News for relevant news stories, Google Search for relevant sites, One-click offshoots to GMail, Netflix, iTunes, Blogger, Dropcash, Del.icio.us, Local Libraries and a couple more things. I really like the idea of "Web as Platform", and consider this an exercise in integrating the best Webby bits I could get access to.

There are one or two further tools to come as well. But for the moment, you might want to see some of the new bits, like Wishlist Search - by email or name. Samples: Jeff Bezos (there are four!), or jeff@amazon.com (only one). Also, based on a given wishlist, see additional gift ideas in a Giftlist (here's one for Bezos).

There's also a "settings" page, where you can choose any associates ID you wish (go ahead and use mine if you like, but there's an option to change it). You can also choose your Local Library for book lookups, and choose to have any one of the above mentioned tools switched off, if you'd rather not have them in your face. There are no ads, and won't be any added.

I'm weary of labeling projects as "beta", so I'll just call this one "New", as in "just finished", and "probably a bit wobbly", and leave it at that. Over time, it will become less new in both senses.

Also, as I've had it pointed out to me numerous times, the more I add to this, the less "Light" it becomes. I agree - to an extent. The spirit of "Light" in Amazon Light is preserved I hope, by leaving out the gimmickry (Gold Box), the upsell (You know what you want), the associated ads (Google Ads...in a store? - sheesh) and other general clutter strewn about the landscape at Amazon.com. Don't get me wrong, I love Amazon, but clutter is clutter regardless.

edit - I forgot to send out thanks to everyone who helped me test this along the way, especially my Mac-using friends (I really need to get a Mac, at least for testing), and a special shout out to Andre for his help in getting Dropcash to play nice.

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