If you have $35 to drop on a gag gift, spend it on this remote control.
With giant buttons, this extra-large remote is easy to use and impossible to lose.
Sorry, it’s not social or media or biz … just geek chic. I had to post it. Just imagine giving that gift.
(Saw it first on Signal vs. Noise.)
[tags] remote, control, funny, tv, john koetsier [/tags]
I’m jealous …
It helps, of course, to have great corporate identity/branding.
Update: perhaps this card from Garrett Dimon is even better …
[tags] business, cards, flock, will pate, john koetsier [/tags]
Recently read …
Back from trick-or-treating with the kids.
Ethan counted his candy, and he’s got 135 chocolate bars, bags of chips, and assorted other candies. The other kids have about the same.
We didn’t go to that many homes …. many just give out 6 or 7 candies at a time.
Sheesh – when I was a kid we had to work for our candy!
[tags] halloween, kids, trick-or-treating, john koetsier [/tags]
The juggernaut continues: Jotspot is now owned by Google.
Wow.
Purely from an individual perspective, this is really, really cool. Jotspot has been focused on building specialized wiki applications for specific purposes like wedding planning or class reunions. They were cool when they cost money, and they’ll be even better when they’re free, as the big G will undoubtedly make them.
(As stated in the FAQ, which was amusingly posted at the same time as the post on Google’s blog … before there was time for any questions to be asked, never mind frequently.)
As per usual Google acquisition strategy, Jotspot is now closed to further sign-ups until they migrate to Google’s platform.
Steve Rubel has his take (how will Google monetize?) and, of course, the Google blog has a post from Jotspot founder Joe Kraus.
The American Marketing Association has an upcoming webcast titled Mining the Blogosphere: It’s a Whole New World of Marketing.
The title is a little ominous … I have never viewed myself as a resource to be mined. I’m sure most other bloggers concur. However, the content appears to be fairly good:
Mining the blogosphere gives you a unique opportunity to:
- Listen to what you’ve been missing
- Act faster because you’ll be the first to understand
- Win with customers and market share
What you will learn:
- How to listen and understand the needs of customers and prospects
- How they talk about you, your products, and your competitors, in their own words
- How to tailor messages and product development to suit different customer types
- How to measure the effectiveness, momentum and engagement of your marketing initiatives/programs.
- How these lessons were used to launch one of the most successful word of mouth movements in recent memory and a great example of a company empowering a community of kindred spirits.
If you are a CMO, a brand manager, a product manager, advertising agency or marketing strategist, you won’t want to miss this informative webinar.
If you’re reading this blog, you probably don’t need to join in. It’s always interesting to see what traditional marketers are doing, however.
[tags] marketing, marketing2.0, AMA, john koetsier [/tags]
Shutterfly is a well-funded, well-run, well-executed company in the online photo printing space. Why then is it just barely breaking even?
This post in the Tabblo blog got me thinking. Tabblo’s saying that Shutterfly is competing against nonconsumption … i.e., not printing your photos. And they’re right.
The other reason Shutterfly having a tough time is they’re in the bloody printing industry, which traditionally has margins of around 6% when things are good, and massive capital costs in the form of printing presses.
What a depressing industry to be in. Sure, there’s a ton of printing going on right now, and will be for the foreseeable future. But, printing is a commodity business, there are lots of printers, and printers compete on price and turnaround speed. Quality is assumed – you ante up quality to get in the game.
Shutterfly probably looked like a great technology start-up at the beginning. It must have seemed that way to the founders and investors. However, Wall Street seems to know better and is valuing it as a manufacturing company.
Shutterfly’s shares had a brief run-up after their market debut on Sept. 29, but since then they have dropped to $13.35, or 11 percent below the offering price of $15.
Realistically, the only technology piece to Shutterfly is how the photos come in, and how the products are created by clients online. Everything else is traditional manufacturing/printing/shipping … even if they are using the most modern PDF-x1A to paper printing workflow.
What’s worse, its competitors are similar companies who are owned by major, well-heeled giants.
Shutterfly’s two main competitors in online photo printing, Ofoto and Snapfish, have been acquired by Kodak and Hewlett-Packard, respectively.
But even that’s not the worst part. The worst part is that those parent companies, HP and Kodak, both build digital presses that are used by all three companies, Shutterfly, Ofoto, and Snapfish to print photos and assorted photo products.
HP builds Indigo presses – which Shutterfly has 20-30 of – and Kodak builds several lines of digital presses. In other words, Shutterfly’s competitors own the very machines that Shutterfly runs on.
Who do you think can buy them cheaper? Don’t answer, it’s a rhetorical question. And it explains this:
Early last year, the standard price of a 4-by-6 print was around 29 cents. Today, they cost 19 cents at Shutterfly, 15 cents at Kodak and 12 cents at Snapfish, though volume discounts are available.
Sucks to be in a commodity industry. ‘Specially when you’re competing against the people who built the playing field.
[tags] shutterfly, ofoto, snapfish, photo, printing, commoditization, john koetsier [/tags]
This just in … from 2005:
Click the pic to go to Flickr and check out the many, many notes.
[tags] web2.0, flickr, social media, john koetsier [/tags]
Want to get an insider’s view of the YouTube/Google deal? Check out Mark Cuban’s blog: Some intimate details on the Google YouTube Deal.
Includes such gems as:
The media companies had their typical challenges. Specifically, how to
get money from Youtube without being required to give any to the talent (musicians and actors)? If monies were received as part of a license to Youtube then they would contractually obligated to share a substantial portion of the proceeds with others. For example most record label contracts call for artists to get 50% of all license deals. It was decided the media companies would receive an equity position as an investor in Youtube which Google would buy from them. This shelters all the up front monies from any royalty demands by allowing them to classify it as gains from an investment position. A few savvy agents might complain about receiving nothing and get a token amount, but most will be unaware of what transpired.
Cuban doesn’t know if it’s true or not, but it sure appears to be.
[tags] google, youtube, gootube, tv, tv2.0, mark cuban, collusion, antitrust, john koetsier [/tags]
TV is racing to become … whatever it will become.
I happened to actually be watching some last night – a relatively rare occurence these days – and noticed ads for this service: GlobalTV online.
Beats my expectations
I checked it out today and it’s fairly cool. Cool in that I’m “watching” TV while I’m posting this. (Survivor, actually.)
Fairly cool in that they’re using a Flash-based player, so you don’t have to download some proprietary – or worse, Windows-only – video player.
And fairly cool in that while advertising is present, it is not ubiquitous.
But it’s not perfect
While the quality is probably a bit better than your average YouTube show, it’s small. The screenpic at the top of this post is full-size. I expected a little bigger.
And a couple of times when I paused the show, I had to actually refresh the page to get the show playing again, since it refused to restart when I pressed play.
And missing a couple of opportunities
But the TV station is really missing out on a couple of opportunities.
First of: why not put a sharing mechanism in place like YouTube or Revver? Let bloggers put TV shows on their sites with some cut&paste code. This would certainly increase viewership and ad revenue from pre-show, interstitial, and post-show advertising.
Secondly, if I was putting TV show up, I’d forget the pre and post ads, and just run occasional ads underneath the show – not obscuring it, but just taking up a bit of extra space below it.
That way you can not waste people’s time, ensure that if the show is seen, your ads are seen, and (potentially) show more ads in more innovative ways than the traditional 30-second spot. Plus, you don’t have to worry about giving fast-forward and rewind control
Not a TV “station” anymore
A little more social media marketing awareness would really help this take off, but one TV station on its own will not be compelling as one place that offers all or virtually all available shows.
After all, it’s not like they can only broadcast one show at a time anymore.
[tags] tv, global, survivor, social media, john koetsier [/tags]
Ars Technica branches out from their standard hardware reviews and shows how Weird Al Yankovic finally got his first #1 single: White and Nerdy.
In three words:
Everyone hates it when their sandbox is overturned, but the music industry has to realize the game has changed and the rules are different.
Indeed, it seems as if the Internet’s quick-spreading, viral nature has been almost singlehandedly responsible for Weird Al’s return to the spotlight. Free, non-DRMed downloads and user-uploaded music videos on YouTube are both things that the music industry has fought vigorously, but instead have managed to produce a Top 10 hit for Weird Al. Perhaps Weird Al’s success will prove to be a learning experience for the music industry.
But the business is still there.
[tags] weird al, yankovic, social media, marketing, youtube, myspace, itunes, music, john koetsier [/tags]
Talk about good timing – Chris Abraham jumped ship from Edelman just before the proverbial sh*t hit the proverbial fan:
Leaving my fancy agency and its cutting-edge online advocacy team in early August was a blessing in disguise.
Sounds like he would have been on the Wal-Mart team:
That was my team and was to be my project as the SAS. As SAS, Wal-Mart was my client. Never ever saw anything other than complete and utter transparency the entire time I was there.
Reputation is hard to gain, easy to lose. Good timing!
[tags] timing, social media, pr, edelman, wal-mart, john koetsier [/tags]
Imagine the classroom of the future. Does it look something like this?
Learn more at Sloodle – the “3D Learning Management System.” It’s a work in progress, as is most open source software. Here’s the vision:
SLoodle is a project to integrate the VLE platform Moodle with the 3D world of Second Life. Imagine a Moodle course that, if you wanted, could turn into a proper 3D interactive classroom with all your Moodle resources available to your students in the virtual world.
Wow. Wow, I say. I wish this group all the success in the world. This is just way too fabulously cool. All start-ups should dream big.
(I saw a link to this at A Media Circus while researching blogs for my weekly SLOB list).
[tags] social media, education, technology, moodle, second life, virtual reality, web2.0, john koetsier [/tags]
Yup, I’m working on a web start-up. Yup, it involves aggregation and filtering. And nope, I’m nowhere near ready to start talking about it.
But I saw this today with great interest:
One of the solutions to this media overload is collaborative filtering. I want people who are smarter and hipper than me, and who share my tastes, to filter out the junk and deliver me just the good stuff. Amazon.com pioneered this and took it mainstream. YouTube still has a bit of room to improve their social filtering capabilities.
The other part of the solution is media syndication. Once the good stuff has been identified by people smarter and hipper than me, I want it aggregated, packaged up and delivered to me; I don’t want to have to go out of my way to find and collect it.
With SplashCast, we are attempting to marry collaborative filtering with media syndication, and make it easy, easy, easy for everyone.
How cool is that?
. . .
. . .
(Some long-term readers of bizhack may remember this post on dreaming. It’s relevant to this pre-pre-pre-release annoucement of my new venture.)
Welcome to Sparkplug 9, John Koetsier's blog on technology and social media.
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