Voting is in full swing for the panels at next year's SXSW in Austin Texas.  Earlier this year I was lucky enough to do a panel on doing business in Europe - next year I'd love to go back.

I have two sessions you can vote for.

1) Is too much math killing marketing

Breakthrough marketing used to come from creative genius, from big ideas, from empathy with customers. But now all the attention goes to rigorous testing and algorithmic approaches to customer insight. So is the science driving out creativity - or are we focused on the wrong kind of maths?

To vote for this one, go here.

2) How Social Media CRM Will Transform Marketing Communications

If email is dying, what does this mean for eCRM? Can Twitter, Facebook Messaging and Google Wave do the same heavy lifting as a good old-fashioned email newsletter? The new social media tools may be free - but are they as useful for businesses as the ones they replace?

To vote for this one, go here.

You don't have too long to vote - actually voting closes at midnight on Friday the 4th September.

If you're interested in the second topic, I'm doing a cut-down version of this at the IDM Academy at Ad:Tech in London.  And no doubt I can find some way to get the first topic out into the fresh air.

So thank you, thank you, thank you!!

Nice little stunt in the street outside Sony HQ in Great Marlborough Street - Watchdog has a van parked up full of engineers who are repairing PlayStations for free to bring attention to Sony's charging policy.

This kind of consumer direct action reminds me of a Milton Jones' joke - available I believe on a nice shiny DVD just in time for Christmas. 

"I went to our local train station and they told me 'There's a bus replacement service running today.'  So I gave them a tin of pineapple rings.  'What's this?'  'It's my money replacement service.'

One definition of the shallowness of the modern world is that the focus at this week’s Nokia World conference will no doubt be on which handsets Nokia releases and whether or not they have an iphone beater tucked up their Nordic sleeves.

But more interesting than all this hardware is the pre-announcement last week of Nokia Money.  To quote from the press release, Nokia Money:

“…will enable consumers to send money to another person just by using the person's mobile phone number, as well as to pay merchants for goods and services, pay their utility bills, or recharge their prepaid SIM cards.”

This promises to bring simple 24-hour banking services to a huge number of people, particularly in the developing world.  Globally there are about 4 billion mobile phones, but only 1.6 billion bank accounts.

If Nokia can pull this off, then I think this would be a Very Good Thing. Of course, not as interesting as whether the Spotify app is approved for the iPhone </irony>, but decently cool all the same.

I’ve recently been playing with Wolfram Alpha, which pulls in some great statistical information when you search on a first name, including the age distribution of the name and the average age of people with a particular name.

All this makes me think that you could make some pretty reasonable assumptions based purely on a first name.

Take ‘Gordon’ for instance.  Most famous Gordon is probably our current prime minister.  Wolfram Alpha’s search on Gordon shows the birth dates of Gordon over time (US only data, unfortunately):

And from that data, you can generate another graph showing the age distribution of people called Gordon:

So the average age of an American called Gordon is 58 – which co-incidentally is the age of Gordon Brown.

Turning to David Cameron, David is a much more common name – but even so the average age of all Davids is 50.  Not a million miles away from David Cameron’s real age of 43.

So OK, if I could get hold of UK data this would be more interesting.  But my basic thought is that if your email address contains your first name, marketers could probably make a pretty good stab at guessing your age.