Connecting the dots ...
Why is it that all the blogs I follow are pushing the very same tired Lenovo ad in their feeds? 
C’mon guys, you can do better… if you insist on advertising, at least let’s have some variety!
Tags: blogging, ads, advertising, blog advertising, blog marketing, feed ads, blog feeds
(Updated)
MommyBuzz launched today announces Steve Rubel.
Business model? The same that Ziki started with: commission-based deals with sunglass-manufacturers. If you visit the site, you’ll see it yourself – but not for long, your eyes will burn (sans shades).
Ziki toned down there colors in a few days – let’s see how soon Mommy gets the buzz ….
Btw, in my usual Johnny-come-lately fashion I thought I would register Toddlerbuzz … too late.
Update (1029): Mommybuzz does not seem to care.. apparently they think the eye-burning colors work. See VentureBeat on this and other Mom-sites.
I have no clue how on earth my little post became the second hit Google brings up on a “Duet SAP” search, but I am certainly not complaining. The first one is Microsoft, then comes yours truly, followed by the Gartner group (hey, InformationWeek was right, after all!) and only then comes SAP itself.
Keep up the good work, Google, I like it.
After the Fedex Furniture ( more pix here and here) here comes the Gatorade raft!
Two MIT Students used empty Gatorade bottles (gee, do they consume anything but Gatorade?), and duct tape to put together a raft, then row
ed across the Charles River.
Gatorade is sending them some coupons. C’mon Gatorade, you can do better! How about sending them a full years’ supply, making them spokesman, building a survivor-style commercial …you’ve gotta be more creative!
See more photos of the collection, construction process, then the test ride and the big trip here.
You Know Wikis Have Arrived When …. they become the feature post in your regular junk mail – this time from an Executive Recruiter firm:
What in the World is a “Wiki”?
If you don’t know what a Wiki is, you probably should.
The term “Wiki” refers to both a collaborative site on the web or your company’s intranet/extranet and the software that runs the Wiki.
A wiki is a website designed for collaboration. Unlike a traditional website where pages can only be read, in a wiki everyone can edit, update and append pages with new information, all without knowing HTML, simply by using a MS Word type interface.
Wikis are the latest, greatest tool for group collaboration, project teams, document editing, etc. And, best of all, they are easy to use, affordable, and extremely flexible.
The easiest way to learn more is to click on the link at the end of this section of the newsletter and try it for yourself!
What can you do with a wiki?
Whether you’re at work or at home, you can access and use a wiki. The wiki allows free-form collaboration, but most wiki software providers and hosts also offer structured applications that allow you all kinds of very helpful functionality.
Here are some of the things that can be done (depending on whose software you use and what applications may be available:
A wiki can be hosted on your company servers or there are a number of hosted versions available. There are a number of suppliers, each touting advantages over their competitors, of course.
One important aspect of a wiki — it is highly cost- effective and versions/solutions range from those for the smallest teams on the most limited budgets scaling up to full enterprise versions.
If you are unfamiliar with this explosive growth phenomenon, you may want to take a look for yourself. [Company name] has found one supplier offering free trials. It’s pretty neat stuff and has become indispensable in our own operations. Click the link below for a free trial.
This is not a [Company name] product but we have used the free trial ourselves and had no problems, no hassles, and no sales calls. It just takes 30 seconds or so to sign up.
Confluence and Socialtext are both Enterprise Wiki’s , robust, well-supported, targeting corporate customers.
JotSpot is more geared towards smaller businesses and consumers and in fact it’s a mix of a wiki plus a few basic applications.
Central Desktop is a “wiki without the wiki”, more of a full-featured collaboration platform with calendar, task, project ..etc features.
WetPaint blurs the line between wiki, blog and discussion group, providing an amazingly easy to use interface, but it’s currently at beta stage.
The above list is by far not complete, it’s just a few of the top of my head – feel free to contribute in the comments section.
Now that the Blue Frog is officially dead, I’ve come up with a creative way to fight at least some of the spam we all receive. It only works with otherwise legitim products where you can identify not the spammer, but the company whose product or service is being pushed. Find the email address of a company executive; send a polite email telling them from now on you will forward all their spam until they can stop it; then set up an autofilter to do just that: forward all spam to the individual’s email address, deleting the original from yours.
Please note, I’ve only said it’s a creative way, as a theoretical approach, I have no clue about legal ramifications, so am not recommending you follow this method. Perhaps a lawyer-reader can jump in here (?)
Thanks to Panda software for providing the inspiration. (scroll down to updates).
Tags: spam, antispam, autofilter, email, spamfilter, panda, pandasoftware, bluefrog, bluesecurity, zoliblog
(Updated)
Panda Software offers “protection against viruses, spyware, hackers, spam and other Internet threats“.
I find it ironic to receive on average two spam emails per day from the spam-protection company (it’s just the average, on 5/17 I received 5!). Or is it some twisted logic that says eventually I surrender and buy their product, then, and only then I can stop their spam? C’mon guys, I am used to receiving spam from others, but not at this rate… Let’s suppose I am in the market for antivirus software, and let’s suppose yours the best, I would still not buy it after the way you treated me!.
What kind of idiot does it take to think that making customers hate them will drive them to buy their products?
Update (5/23): Apparently I am not the only one. There is a whole thread on Panda Spam at the PC Pitstop:
“I responded to their Unsubscribe address, but it didn’t help at all. I
went to Panda’s site and wrote to a few of their support and sales
email addresses, explaining the situation and asking to be removed from
all of their marketing lists. No response, and the emails keep on
coming.
I set up my spam filters to stop them, but they still
keep coming almost daily! (Using K-9 with Pocomail) How do they do
that? I guess that they are, after all, experts in the spam department
and would know how to circumvent such filters. But why would they?”
Update (5/23): After all the bad experience a pleasant surprise: Carolina, PR Manager at Panda emailed me in perhaps less than an hour, apologized and promised to fix it. Kudos for paying attention and being so prompt. Of course, ideally, it would not take PR’s intervention to fix this … and again, what happens to all the other people complaining on the PC Pitstop? Carolina, again, thanks for helping me, but the real nice solution would be to revise your spam and opt-out policy. If you do, I’ll write about it. 
Update (5/25): Well, whatever Carolina did, had no effect, I am still receiving Panda Spam. To her credit, she responded to my email in less than a minute: “I’ll contact the marketing again. I will walk over there
myself.” Thanks, Carolina. Just so you know, I took out a little insurance: set up a filter that forwards all Panda-mail to you, deleting the original copy. Don’t worry, you won’t get a lot of spam – if you can stop it, that is. 
Update (6/2): Panda is unstoppable. It no longer bothers me, since I have it auto-forwarded to Carolina. She is clearly motivated to stop it, but apparenly can’t – I can still see the forwarded copies in my trash folder. Perhaps she gave up, too, and created an auto-delete filter. 
Related posts:
Tags: Panda, Pandasoftware, spam, antispam, antivirus, zoliblog
NetSuite, the provider of perhaps the best hosted integrated software solution for the SMB market tried to rain on SAP’s parade during SAPPHIRE 06 in Orlando. They planned to host a cocktail party in a hotel suite right across the Convention Center. The party’s theme was “SAP for the rest of us” and the email invitation posed a question/answer: “Who will become the SAP for the midmarket? (It Ain’t SAP),” Cute.
Of course SAP got p***ed and enforced it’s contractual right to cancel competitive events in any of the SAPPHIRE venues. SAP’s Spokesman Bill Wohl called NetSuite’s move “guerilla marketing“.
Now, what’s wrong with Guerilla Marketing? It’s fun … if you have humor to appreciate it. Last week SAP didn’t.
The result? NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson laughed off the “loss” and will hold a web-conference instead. This being a juicy story of course it got picked up in the media and quite a few blogs – the media blitz lasted a few days, then will start again around the web-conference … so basically SAP’s decision to kill the party provided NetSuite with a fair amount of publicity – exactly what it needs as it ramps up for its IPO planned later this year. Zach should send a thank-you note to SAP.
Here’s what I think SAP should have done: let it happen, and set up their own counter-party. Had it been allowed to proceed it would have been a noon-event. Not that NetSuite is a negligible company, in fact they have an excellent product. Some say Salesforce.com is just a glorified contact manager relative to NetSuite, and I tend to agree. (I put my money where my mouth is: in my last corporate job I became a NetSuite customer, after careful comparison to Salesforce). That said, NetSuite is targeting strictly the SMB market, in fact more the “S” than the “M”, while SAP despite all their SMB initiatives is still largely the Enterprise Company – SMB is just not their sweet spot. SAP had their own SMB people in Orlando (I interviewed Gadi Shamia, SVP for SMB Solutions, and intend to write about it soon) – they should have set up their own party right next to NetSuite, and present SAP’s vision for that market segment. In fact they could have embraced the NetSuite event (steal their show) and make up SAP logo’d signs pointing to both events.
The impact of the NetSuite party, especially in an environment where most participants are already biased towards SAP would have been minimal. In fact NetSuite had more to gain from the cancellation and the resulting media blitz then actually proceeding with the party … so much so, that I wonder if NetSuite intentionally leaked the news to SAP – a brilliant PR coup, if you ask me.
Related Posts:
Liveblogging Mike “TechCrunch” Arrington‘s Web 2.0 – Why Now? panel at TiEcon 2006. (note: I am obviously publishing this, as well as other TiEcon posts after the Conference, but will only do very basic editing, and some linking, essentially posting my original notes. My added comments appear in italics)
Panelists:
Mike: For warmup, let’s talk about the individual companies. Kaboodle is basically bookmarking, social shopping. Statistics show that 80% of all Internet activity is research, not transactions. Kaboodle does not close deals, trying to make money on research side. How did Manish come to the idea?
Manish: Was remodeling home, a lot of pain to find stuff – hence the idea (do all consumer sites really start based on personal experience, or are these just sellable stories?)
Emily: Since she is a VC, will talk about a portfolio company that she’s a Board Member of: Tagworld. Mike: That’s a little startup that’s going up against MySpace and others – how can it have any chances? (The little guy vs. big guy issue came up in the morning session as well) and Emily’s reaction is similar: people want to have presence on the web, relationships ..etc – Tagworld provides tools.
Mike: Huge fan of Digg:. 50% of TechCrunch’s traffic comes from digg. TechCrunch has significant traffic on its own, but when one of his articles gets digged, the combined traffic typically brings startup sites down. Kevin: It started as an experiment giving power back to community. Coolness is not determined by editors like it is on Slashdot, but by member votes – “diggs”. It’s also a social application, digging an item also bookmarks it to your name, you can share, set up friends…etc.
Tony: Sphere, the new blog search engine. Previously he invested in Oddpost, (acquired by Yahoo, fastest return of all his investments), that’s when idea started. He saw when celebrity bloggers like John Battelle and Dave Viner blogged about them, their traffic spiked: that was his “aha” moment re. blog-power. Blog search engines typically bring posts in reverse chronological order… trying to dig up interesting stuff using a more intelligent algorithm.
Jeff didn’t get to talk about his company (SAP), since it’s not exactly a startup or a Web 2.0 🙂 However, previously as VC he backed several startups and in his current role (or outside that role?) he is SAP’s internal Web 2.0 evangelist.
After the warmup round Mike moved on to audience questions.
Question to Mike on criteria for picking what gets covered in TechCrunch. –
Mike: anything new, exciting Web 2.0-related. What is Web 2.0? He has a user-focused definition. Web 2.0 is about conversation. In the years after the crash the Internet did not “go away”, innovation continued behind the scenes. Joe Kraus’s famous quote about how cheap it is to build a company (new cheap tools).
Kevin: Spent $99 on a shared server, used Open Source stuff … total pre-launch cost for Digg was less than $1K.
Jeff: LAMP stack important. Php, Python powerful. Tension between what developers built and what users want resolves itself in the increasing number of mashups.
Emily: There is a major mindset-change. everyone has access to computers, pdas, cellphones .etc. Even the kids have web presence. It’s become a lot easier to self-publish and even build applications.
Question: Is Web 2.0 real or a bomb waiting to go off?
Mike: There is real innovation. Web services, mashups.
Jeff: Web 2.0 is not really new, it’s the realization of everything that’s been happening for 5 years. Barrier of entry for startups is low.
Manish: Closed platforms are out of fashion , the trend to opening up leads to mashups. Power goes back to the individual. People create new shopping pages of their liking on Kaboodle. This is like walking into a store and rearranging the shelves the way we want it.
Tony: Brings up the example of the Chicago Crime Scenes mashup. Nice application, hugely popular, even useful, but likely not a business. Business opportunities are for those that open up their API. The Blog space brings about businesses (e.g Technorati) with significant core IP, but most mashups are just nice presentation layers without core IP.
Question: How to market? Importance of early adopters?
Mike: refers to the Same 50K people meme – echo chamber. TechCrunch readers themselves often re-blog his posts. They are all early adopters, which is demonstrated by the browser stats: 65% use FireFox.
Emily: VC’s also check out TechCrunched applications – then forget them, don’t come back (I have positive personal experience on this, when VC’s who earlier heard about SQLFusion came back with renews interest after the Open Source Fusion beta. So it does not hurt to to get on VC’s “keep an eye on” list). Emily: Simply quoting high registration numbers is not compelling to her – repeat user base is.
Manish: Blogs can create good initial exposure, then incresingly use SEO, SEM… early days 6-7% was organic search (google, yahoo), now it is 20%. Real viral effect occurs when people start marketing your product.
Tony: Despite the criticism, the early adopter crowd makes sense, after all we’re in tech businesses, of course we attract the geek crowd… like if you’re in the sailing business, you go after sailing enthusiasts.
Mike: Asking Panel for example of successful marketing that gets beyond early adopters.
Tony: Flickr is definitely way beyond the early adopter crowd. Mike: Flickr is geeky, overall it has a lot less users than Yahoo photos (even though Yahoo acquired Flicker, they are treated as two separate domains for now), or even Easyshare by Kodak.
Short debate between Tony , Jeff, Mike on the role /importance of early adopters. Tony : blogging needs to get into topics that attract the mainstream, be it the Chicago Cubs, christianity .. whatever.
Manish: Skype forced adoption by uncles & aunts in Chicago, Ohio …etc. since it has a very attractive value proposition compared to expensive telephone services.
Jeff: many companies are building features ONLY for the early adopters – they will not transition to mass market, will not become businesses, just features.
Kevin: Digg has 9 million page views, 1 million unique users a day, with $0 spent on marketing. He still thinks they are early adopters, the site hasn’t hit mainstream yet.
Tony : Sphere received 1 million pageviews in the first week, from 136K unique users.
Jeff: Blogs are key in early adoption: Even if you’re not a techie you will search on a car, a new TV ….etc, you’ll get blog entries mixed with other search results (My personal experience confirms this, blogs even penetrated news at “elite” positions).
Tony: Bloggers have huge influence. Rob Hof is here in the audience, he is the Silicon Valley bureau chief for Business Week and also writes a personal blog. Jeff: Matt Marshall is here, too – I don’t read the Merc anymore, but SiliconBeat.
Manish: Print media still has bigger effect. He suggests Web 2.0 companies should look at both print media and blogs for marketing.
Mike: The New York Times is crap. .
Question: Can open API’s can bite you in the ass? (pardon my French, I’m just quoting here) Giving away your best stuff, people won’t come back to your site – i.e. Google or Craigslist if the mashup is better.
Manish : Open API’s bring huge adoption. Get users first then figure out how to make money.
Mike: At the same time ate least you can’t have negative margin – this could be Youtube’s problem. There are essentially three types of business models:
Tony: There were debates in the early days about email as a business, since it’s supposed to be free. But would Yahoo exists without email?
Jeff on network effect: Flickr, del.icio.us are used in a lot of other applications..
Question: Is the barrier of entry different between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0?
Mike: It’s become easy to to recreate applications. I could hire offshore programmers and recreate Digg cheaply (especially considering Kevin’s own statement that it cost less then $1K to launch). This is where the network effect and being first to market becomes important. We need to understand how network effect and first to market are related. Tony has the 8th or 9nth search engine (Sphere), Emily’s Tagworld is also a “latecomer” yet they have a chance to make it, they are not dependent on the network efffect of the huge existing user base, and they have new IP. Digg is a different story, it’s not core IP, it’s all about the huge network effect.
Kevin: There are too many copycats doing he same things…like online notepads… Disagreeing with Mike, does not see value in being a me-too, startup should do new things.
Out of time, (session got cut short due to security for the Schwarzenegger keynote) Mike asked all panelists to name their favorite Web 2.0 companies (except their own). The list:
Flickr, Myspcae, Digg, Digg Spy, (yes it is part of Digg, but Emily made the point of specifically listing Spy) TechCrunch, Youtube, Akismet, WordPress, Del.ici.us, Riya, Skype.
If you were a panelist /participant in the discussion and I misinterpreted you, please feel free to correct / expand on your ideas in the form of comments. Thanks.
Tags: tiecon, tiecon2006, conference, entrepreneurship, technology, innovation, startups, marketing, forum, paneldiscussion, techcrunch, kaboodle, digg, sphere, web2.0, tagworld, oddpost, opensource, mashups, flickr, networkeffect, blogs, blogging, zoliblog
Stowe Boyd “created this market” : his eBay bid on wearing logo’d t-shirts totaled him $3,600 – he sold his body for a year. As we know, in business being a first mover is not always an advantage – the second player comes in having learned all the mistakes an conquers the market.
In this case the second player is likely not smarter, but most definitely cuter : Baby Jake will wear an advertiser’s clothes for a whopping $10,000 a month, or .. are you ready for this?… $100,000 for an entire year. (via Steve Rubel)
My prediction: I doubt any company will pay $100K for the year, but someone probably will be “crazy” enough to cough up $10K for a month.
Prediction #2: we’ll soon see (baby) Jake in a movie.
Tags: Baby Jake, Clothe Stowe, Advertising, Marketing, Body Business, zoliblog, zolierdos
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