Graeme Thickins on Tech

Reflections & analysis about innovation, technology, startups, investing, healthcare, and more .... with a focus on Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes. Blogging continuously since 2005.

Category: Marketing/Branding/PR (Page 19 of 29)

Some of the Great People I Met at DEMOfall ’07

October 1, 2007 / / 3 Comments

Well, once again — who’d have guessed? — I made a whole bunch of new contacts at DEMO! 🙂  Once I get home from these events and go through my cards, I’ve made it a tradition to do a post and say-hey to these folks. So, here ya go, friends!

Demofallstagebanner

The names below are just new people I actually got a card from. My apologies to all the others I met but didn’t have time to exchange cards with — that’s why cards are good: they help us remember!  Regardless, it was great meeting all of you!  And I hope to see you again soon in my travels, or at a  future conference. And to all those old friends and acquaintances I ran into again, it was awesome to see you, too!  I just wish I could have had a chance to talk more with all of you… Things are so rushed at these conferences, especially when you’re blogging like mad as well.  [That’s why the coming new DEMO.com community site will be so great!]

Here are those from whom I got a card (in alphabetical order by last name):
-Sean Ammirati, VP Business Development, mSpoke (FeedHub), Pittsburgh, PA
-Matt Biscuiti, VP, The Lippin Group, NYC (for PeopleJam)
-Alistair Campbell, CTO, TruPhone, London, UK
-Scott Chou, Chairman, iForem, Redwood Shores, CA (and Gabriel Venture Partners)
-Allison Clark, Ink Tank PR (for ideablob), Highland Park, IL
-Adam Darowski, UE Designer, BatchBlue Software, Providence, RI
-Chris DeMarche, Director, MotionDSP (FixMyMovie.com), San Mateo, CA
-Mike Garity, VP Marketing & Business Development, DEMO
-Thor Harris, President, Percepture, Lake Hiawatha, NJ
-Jonathan Hirshon, Principal, Horizon PR, Santa Clara, CA
-J. Johnson, Chairman, Global Communications, Houston, TX
-Ami Kassar, Chief Innovation Officer, Advanta (ideablob), Spring House, PA
-Zhenya Kirueshkin-Stepanoff, VP Sales, iForem, Redwood Shores, CA
-Joanne Kisling, PR, Sun Microsystems, Menlo Park, CA
-Colin Kurth, Events Manager, PR Newswire, Chicago, IL
-Rene Lacerte, CEO, CashView, Palo Alto, CA
-Dave Mawhinney, CEO, mSpoke (FeedHub), Pittsburgh, PA
-Macario Namie, Sr Director, Product Marketing, Jasper Wireless, Sunnyvale, CA
-Alex Olson, Cofounder, FilmCrave.com, Kansas City, MO
-Stephen Pieraldi, CEO, iForem, Redwood Shores, CA
-Trish Ridgway, Sr Account Executive, Ignite PR, Belmont, CA
-Michelle Riggen-Ransom, Communications Director, BatchBlue Software, Providence, RI
-Ori Soen, CEO, MuseStorm, Yahud, Israel, and Sunnyvale, CA
-Cathy Sperrazzo, EyeToEye Communications, San Diego, CA
-Oliver Starr, Senior Analyst, Guidewire Group, San Francisco, CA
-Sean Varah, CEO, MotionDSP (FixMyMovie.com), San Mateo, CA
-Rob Vickery, Clarinova, Del Mar, CA
-Amanda Wheatcroft, Principal, Beta PR, San Diego, CA

I’m gonna have to try getting onto BatchBlue’s free site for DEMOfall attendees (see my previous post on that company) so I can reconnect with people — both these and the ones I didn’t get cards from. There are so many conversations I wanted to have, so many great new companies and technologies I wanted to learn more about, so many old contacts I wanted to reconnect with, but (sigh) just not enough time. These two-day events are such a whirlwind!

DEMOfall 07: Day 2 – BatchBlue Does Contacts…Even Your DEMO Ones!

September 27, 2007 / / 0 Comments

Here’s yet another cool online app for small businesses: a customizable contact organizer called "BatchBook." It’s a sleek new way to upgrade your people network, from BatchBlue Software. Customization is the key, the company points out,  because no two small businesses are the same, and requirements vary widely by industry. The contact management needs of the hundreds of thousands (millions?) of micro-businesses out there (meaning fewer than 25 employees) are all over the map. And most are simply not being served by the usual CRM suspects.  Batchbluescreen
BatchBook has a simple address-book interface (a very clean, simple UI) that you tag and categorize, and you also customize it for your unique business needs. What may be the best thing of all is you can "build relationships between these records." BatchBook is actually a contact manager, a communications manager, and a task manager all in one. This online app is available now on a free trial basis, then it’s only $9.95 per month. Again, I say well worth it — bring it on!

But get this, DEMO fans: just for kicks, over the past few weeks, the kind folks at BatchBlue built an account for DEMO, populating it with contact info from the past three conferences! So, if you’re a DEMO alum and weren’t at the event, shoot me an email and I’ll give you the special code…  🙂 You’ll not only get access to all these DEMO presenters, press, and event organizers, but a free one-year BatchBook account for yourself!  You heard it right here, friends, from your buddy Graeme. As a DEMO alum, your own account will be populated with "all this juicy DEMO data," as the company told me.  You can then log interesting conference conversations, track new business leads or investors, send thank-yous to the event organizers, and much more.  Let’s hear it for the power of community, huh?  Especially the awesome DEMO community.

‘Conversational Marketing’ – Much Ado About Nothing?

September 13, 2007 / / 0 Comments

Well, take that Federated Media and your fancy-schmancy new buzz words. Or so Elinor Mills seems to be saying in this piece on CNet today: Want to ‘converse’ with advertisers? Me neither. Federatedmediaconf It’s her review of FM’s glitterati CM Summit yesterday — at SF’s Presidio of all places. All the kool kids were there.

But Elinor rips into the whole concept anyway, bursting the bubble pretty well. Brands are conversations? Hooey, she says:

Hold on. Who asked marketers to join readers online? I know blog publishers need to make money, and they do earn revenue off regular old text, video and banner ads. But I’m suspicious when the “conversation” is initiated by the marketer and not the consumer. And what’s this with the slogan of the conference–“Brands are conversations”? No, they aren’t.

And she wraps up her review, after giving us a few quotes from attendees and speakers, with this gem:

Just as advertisers have been able to get their ads printed on stickers on supermarket fruit, tattooed onto people’s skin and even written in the sky, they will surely blanket the online world in ways we can not even imagine. But let’s not confuse plain old advertising and gimmick marketing with a new form of commercial digital communication that ostensibly gives consumers more control.

I think Elinor ate her Wheaties yesterday. [And, no, General Mills did not pay me to say that…… 🙂 ]

Steve Jobs: ‘iFlubbed’ – I Don’t Think So!

September 11, 2007 / / 1 Comment

So, have you heard about the term being applied to Uncle Steve’s move last week regarding the iPhone? Yes, you could have guessed — it’s “iPology” 🙂 …. There’s some interesting insight on this whole overblown thing on a great new blog called MarketingApple. This guy (also named Steve) I think really sets the record straight. An excerpt from that post:

Folks, you are living through what has to be the Golden Age of marketing and Steve Jobs is its king.  Enjoy the ride.

Stevejobsiflubbed

Then, a followup post yesterday on the same blog heralds the latest news that — you got it — one million iPhones have now been sold.

I was discussing this whole thing as it happened with my close colleagues — all of us huge Apple users and supporters — and I got a great summation from one of them over the weekend. He doesn’t want me to use his name, but he’s a very smart guy (serial entrepreneur), and I just have to share his recap and insights with you:

Jobs is the king of concept and design. It’s easy to market the coolest phone ever and the best MP3 player ever, but good luck conceiving, designing, and developing them.

By cutting the iPhone prices, Jobs created a problem, then conceived and developed a solution. Typical Steve Jobs.

When the first rumors surfaced about Apple getting into the cell phone market, people laughed and predicted instant failure. Before the iPod, the Diamond Rio had more than 50% market share, and they were dropping the price quarterly to meet new competition. Apple came out with the iPod (with a hard drive) at 3-5 times the price of the average price of MP3 players at the time and couldn’t make enough of them. Other MP3 players with hard drives came out shortly after at half the price, and those companies couldn’t sell the ones they produced for the launch, while Apple couldn’t make enough of theirs. Then, when you could buy flash MP3 players for $20, Apple released the Nano at $250 and the Shuffle at $150, and, again, they couldn’t make enough of them.

Steve jumped on 2.5″ and 1″ hard drive technology for the iPod and, later, on multi-GB flash, when they were both expensive, new technologies, and Apple’s volume alone drove the technology towards commodity pricing. Apple never dropped prices, they just come out with new models at the same prices with thinner designs and more storage.

They can’t release iPhones the same way, even though their prices have fallen, because they are using so much flash. It costs them less to make the 8GB today than the 4GB four months ago. They could drop the price to gain wider market acceptance, so they did. Adding more storage and making the iPhone thinner won’t be enough to release a new model. They need to bump up the speed, make the display as big as the case (40% larger), add faster broadband, and add a VoIP softphone. (Nokia has them and HP just released the new iPaq with more features and a VoIP softphone built in.) All the new cellular chips designs have WiFi embedded, so ALL new phones next year will have WiFi. The cellular carriers may block the SIP (the de-facto standard for VoIP, session initiation protocol) ports to disable VoIP, and there will be a new RTP (real time protocol) invented to transmit VoIP over any open port — maybe that’s what Steve is up to next? 🙂

People just keep laughing every time Apple does the unexpected, but their concept and design is so good that they become the market leader. I can’t wait for the iTV-LCD, the iDVR, the iCarStereo, and the iGameBox.

Now, does that nail the situation, or what? (And also raise some interesting new possibilites.) I told you I hang around with smart guys….

UPDATE: To correct a typo….sorry.

Yahoo Eats Blue Lithium

September 4, 2007 / / 0 Comments

The advertising M&A game just keeps going and going…. MarketWatch reported earlier this evening that Yahoo will buy ad network BlueLithium for $300 million in cash. Yahooeatsbluelithium Blue Lithium, as I reported in my blog post How the Top Ad Networks Rank on August 18, is currently the fifth largest ad network. A few minutes ago, this Red Herring article went up, noting that Blue Lithium was founded in January 2004 and was backed by Walden Venture Capital and 3i. The article went on to state:

BlueLithium is also known for its behavioral targeting, which has become the must-have for online marketers. Behavioral targeting allows marketers to target users based on the sites they’ve visited, as well as demographic and geographic characteristics. Yahoo recently launched SmartAds, a nascent effort in this area.

YHOO was up 5.46% today, closing at 23.97. In after hours trading, it was up another 0.63% to 24.12 as of about 8:00 pm Eastern.

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