Three years ago I was in Portugal, working with Intel on solutions for educational technology in emerging markets. Portugal, of course, is in some ways leading the charge in terms of providing computers for students, having provided millions of netbooks in Portuguese schools. It was a wonderful trip, including time in both Porto in...
Sparkplug9 has been happily logo-less for 8 years. 8 years! However, since I’ve been consulting more intensely in the past 3 months, I’ve decided that Sparkplug9 MUST HAVE A LOGO. I mean, with a logo, even a solopreneur looks pro, right? So, I’ve been playing with Photoshop (bad idea) and searching the web for...
I’ve been doing a lot of work lately with businesses and organizations that are recognizing the need to do something – anything – with social media. The why is simple: they want to be where their customers are. The how: not so simple. Where do you start? What’s important, and what’s nice-to-have? How do...
We need to just pause for a moment and reflect: a blog has won the Pulitzer prize. Somewhere Bob Woodward (of Watergate fame, who just cast aspersions on journalism and the web) is squirming in his boots. The prize is for David Wood’s 10-part series on wounded veterans and their families: Beyond the Battlefield,...
I’m a little pumped. I managed to connect with VentureBeat over the past couple of weeks and just wrote my first post: 5 Reasons Mobile Fragmentation is Actually Good for App Developers. In it, I argue that a very competitive mobile landscape with Windows Phone and BlackBerry in addition to (of course) Android and...
If you’re clicking to see photos in an embedded gallery on a page, you should still be able to see the story, right? Wrong, according to Gizmodo: Not only does clicking the gallery links obscure the story, you can’t get back to it via your browser’s Back button … because with the miracles of...
I know Bing is getting better and better at search. I know they’re even increasing their market share, and not just because they’re also driving Yahoo! search results now. Frankly, more power to them – competition in any space drives improvements for all of us. So I hope they continue to push Google and...
I’ve recently incorporate social sharing icons from Share Post on Sparkplug 9 stories. You’ll see them on blog post pages … right above the story. The interesting thing for me recently is the numbers from StumbleUpon. For example, check out stumbles on this recent post: I’m not a long-term StumbleUpon user. In fact, I’ve...
Serious, HuffPo? Seriously? I saw this web page on the Huffington Post a week or so ago and saved it to post about it later (much later as it turned out). Take a look at the amount of actual original content on this web page. I call it a web page because there’s no...
From Michael Wolff’s excellent post on Newser: For the machine-loving consumer, Jobs’ triumph over Microsoft and Bill Gates is a marvel. Life seldom turns out this way. It’s a first in the history of architecture, where, in the mass market, the sensuous and beautiful triumphs over the functional and economic. The cost of such...
Why, why, why, Wired? 400 MBs of images in your 500 MB iPad app. Extremely uncool. From the story on Interface Lab: With the Wired app weighing in at a whopping 500 megabytes – just 100 shy of a full CD-ROM – how do they intend to maintain new editions of the magazine? 500...
Fascinating and (sometimes) annoying: By utilizing the simplest action-reward gameplay mechanic — borrowed from a Chinese game, which was itself inspired by a Japanese RPG — Facebook’s farm games have quietly turned millions of people into constant gardeners (and consistent gamers). Cheri Van Hoover, 56, tends a real 11-acre farm in Washington state, but...
Great article from a Ben Horowitz, a venture capitalist. Here’s a small snippet: The technology business is fundamentally the innovation business. Etymologically, the word technology means “a better way of doing things.” As a result, innovation is the core competency for technology companies. Technology companies are born because they create a better way of...
An interesting argument from RoughlyDrafted Magazine: What better curse could one wish upon one’s mobile platform competitors than a bunch of performance and security problems, poor battery life, a mess of user interface inconsistencies, and a malignant boil upon their efforts to develop their own third party development platforms? Jobs didn’t express such schadenfreude...
I find it interesting that many of the scholars and intellectuals of centuries past were, in effect, bloggers: I want to start with a page out of history—the handwriting of Thomas Jefferson, taken from one of his notebooks on religion. The words on this page belongs to a long and fruitful tradition that peaked...
Good insight into both Facebook’s business model and especially their aspirations … how high they think they can go. Over dinner at her favorite restaurant, a few blocks from her home in Atherton, California, her strategy for making money sounds simple. She takes my pen and notebook and starts drawing the classic marketing funnel,...
From the official Google blog: We launched Place Pages last September for more than 50 million places around the world to help people make more informed decisions about where to go, from restaurants and hotels to dry cleaners and bike shops, as well as non-business places like museums, schools and parks. Place Pages connect...
From AdAge: Facebook-home-page ads on average generated a 10% increase in ad recall, a 4% increase in brand awareness and a 2% increase in purchase intent among users who saw them compared with a control group with similar demographics or characteristics who didn't. But the increase in recall jumped to 16% when ads included...
From TechCrunch: Whoever knows what your interests are right now and can package them up for advertisers has the chance to make a lot of money. Of course, Google does this right now every time you declare your interests in a search box and it offers up matching ads on the side of results....
In its first 10 days, Apple’s iPad has captured almost as much online usage share as the BlackBerry or Google’s Android operating system, a Web metrics firm said today. According to data from Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based NetApplications.com, the iPad’s share has averaged 0.03% since April 3, the day Apple started selling the media tablet....
Speaking at the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., where the Atmosphere conference takes place, Schmidt said: “What’s really important right now is to get the mobile architecture right. Mobile will ultimately be the way you provision most of your services. The way I like to put it is, the answer should always be...
Some really good things we’ve learned: 1. Users are open to ads as long as they’re relevant to their realtime experience. 2. Advertisers really want to create ads that are relevant to the realtime experience. 3. Realtime applications are starting to make serious money through advertising! Some really hard challenges all of us face:...
Hola! John Koetsier here - I consult, write, and speak about web, social media, technology, and business strategy.
