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Most folks have probably seen the commercials: an upper-middle-class family is stuck in some domestic conundrum, then someone raises an eyebrow and exclaims: “To the Cloud!” And soon, thanks to some magical cloud computing wizardry, their suburban snafu is solved.

Working “in the cloud” is great for some things – anyone who uses GMail or manages projects on Basecamp will tell you that – but when it’s the foundation for an entire product, my advice would be: Wait for a sunny day to buy. Microsoft – purveyors of the afore-mentioned cloud-hawking commercials – have, in a fit of ironic self-interest, proven my point mightily.

You see, last year, Microsoft cozied up with Verizon Wireless to introduce the Kin line of mobile phones. Squarely targeted at tweens and hipsters, Kin devices were “cloud-based”, meaning they synchronized all their owners’ personal goodies – such as photos, videos, contacts and social networks – with “the cloud”. In this case, “the cloud” meant Microsoft’s Kin Studio online service. Which, as of the end of March, will be shuttered.

That’d be all well and good if Kin devices were as useful without cloud connectivity as they were with it – but sadly, this isn’t the case. In fact, without Kin Studio, Kin owners’ handsets will have around the same feature set as your typical feature phone. The moral of the story? Before you sink your hard-earned money into a device that derives its usefulness from “the cloud”, or worse-yet sign a 2-year contract to get such a device on a carrier subsidy, learn what might happen if the cloud services upon which your new toy depends should, one day, turn to vapor.

Not long before I went to work for GM in 2005 – which, as an aside, suddenly seems like it was a long time ago! – my Dad sent me a promotional video for the new Audo R10 diesel-powered LeMans race car. It looked something like this:

The first time I watched it – and every time thereafter – I got goosebumps. I remember thinking it did a damn decent job of scooping up most of the emotions that engineers feel when they stand back, and look at what they’ve designed and built, and smile a bit while they think, “yeah, that’ll do.” And not long after I got my first look at a GM fuel cell engine, I remember thinking how great it would be if GM produced a similar video. Just as Audi did, show just enough to convey the complexity of the machine and the care that went into building it.

Well, they didn’t quite make my dream of a top-down, time-lapse, pull-away video of a fuel cell engine build come true, but at least they put forth an inspiring effort on the new Chevy Volt. Here it is:

Lately, it seems like they’ve been popping up everywhere…friendly little 2-dimensional bar codes called QR Codes have been appearing in advertisements, on billboards, and even on this blog! For those not familiar, QR Codes are a type of bar code that can be read by smartphones – including iPhones, Android handsets and Blackberries. They can contain just about any data – from contact information (readily imported into one’s address book) to web site addresses (which open in a mobile browser) or even geographic coordinates (which open a map)!

Because QR Codes offer a recognizable way for smartphone users (who now account for almost one-in-three US mobile phone users) to access desirable content, advertisers, organizations and businesses have been making increasing use of these little black-and-white blocks to add value to customer interaction. For example, catching onto the trend that smartphone users were scanning UPC codes in-store to find better deals on their products, Best Buy introduced scannable QR Codes to their shelf labels, offering a quick link to the retailer’s web site for detailed product information. But, as can happen when marketing departments get ahold of new technology they don’t fully understand, the occasional faux-pas is inevitable… Head past the jump for some photos and stores of QR Codes gone awry…

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