Exclamation blog: Stories, Ideas and loud noises
Mobile TV, Are You Watching?
The range of tools and technological innovations that at first glance seemed completely obsolete (Twitter, anyone?) and now play a significant role in many peoples’ lives is staggering. If you get down to it, humanity is a great collection of skeptics—why watch moving pictures when you’ve got the radio?
In an age when online advertisers are increasingly claiming that TV is dead and online video is the new way of consuming entertainment, mobile devices are emerging from the backseat and trying to make their claim for the new age of entertainment. The New York Times recently had an article in its Media & Advertising section about an up and coming European sensation for watching TV on the phone that seems to be coming to the U.S. (as most great things do!).
According to the article, consumers in Italy, Switzerland and Japan are already hooked on watching a bevy of channels available for streaming on mobile devices and U.S. mobile providers seem to be eager to follow. Naturally, not everyone is sold on the idea of watching long-form content on a small screen, but the future remains to be seen. AT&T Wireless just announced AT&T Mobile TV in the United States, offering a 10-channel service which will sell for $15 per month and, according to the article, includes a Sony Pictures movie channel called Pix.
To watch? Consumers will have to purchase a cellphone made by LG Electronics and Samsung that streams the broadcasts. All of this innovation begs the question—are you willing to pay and watch? Yankee Group analyst Linda Barrabee suggests that adoption is likely to be slow. But, the rise of devices like the iPhone and increased mobility among consumers seem to suggest that watching TV on your phone may not be in the distant future. Perhaps one day, fifty years down the road, generations of mobile TV watchers will be asking: Why do I need to sit on my couch to watch something?
My Tech Obsession Du Jour: The 2-D Barcode
Arguably the coolest thing about life at LaunchSquad is meeting cutting-edge clients who introduce me to new technology that I never knew existed. One such client is StoreXperience, a mobile retail company that harnesses the power of my favorite new tech tool: the 2-D barcode.
I have developed a genuine obsession with 2-D barcodes (often called QR Codes). Though they resemble traditional retail barcodes, 2-D barcodes can be instantly scanned by advanced cell phones to bring complex online content straight to the hands of consumer.
Now all of that tech talk is dandy, but what gets me most psyched about 2-D barcodes is how creative types are bringing this tool into the real world: merging art, technology and design to make a real statement.
Since fashion seems to be the first frontier of 2-D barcode style, here are three companies to keep an eye on:
Lendorff Perhaps the most popular QR Code fashion statement comes from this English company, who have ingrained the barcodes onto scarves. The amazing Rob Walker dedicated his entire Consumed column to these guys last month. I now want to buy one for everyone I know.
Wikd This Dutch tech fashion company embeds individual codes onto shirts and hoodies, allowing wearers to customize the URLs on their clothing — and interested scanners to send private messages via their cellphone.
Denim Code This French company puts 2-D barcodes on the back pockets of their jeans. Can’t imagine this won’t lead to some seriously bizarre pick-up scenarios.
2-D barcodes are already very popular in Japan and Europe, and it is inevitable that they will be more widely seen Stateside soon. To get a peek at what’s in store for you, check out this Flickr gallery of international QR code statements.
Tech and the Economy? A Straight Answer is Hard to Find
Everyday we hear stories about the failing economy, whether we’re in a recession and the fallout of some bad decisions by big financial institutions. For many aspects of the economy, people have a pretty good idea what’s going to happen — mortgages will continue to be tough to come by for many people, some more bankers will probably lose their jobs, and Nintendo Wiis will continue to be impossible to get… Well, not sure that last one has anything to do with the economy.
But one aspect of the economy that’s near and dear to LaunchSquad is venture backed technology companies and how they will be affected. Many people have strong opinions and there is really no consensus on what will happen. On several occasions recently I have been asked by people outside the tech industry how the economy has affected, or will affect, the companies we work with and the VCs that fund them. My answer to them is that I really don’t know, and in my never-ending search for the answer to that question, no one else really seems to either.
Back in August, a prominent venture capitalist in San Francisco, Keith Benjamin received some attention from a blogpost he wrote about why the credit crisis would help venture capital. The New York Times and Silicon Valley blog VentureBeat also reported on his theory that venture capital is not based on credit and debt, therefore, investors will be more willing to invest in tech IPOs. There’s one theory.
But, the numbers show that those IPOs have not been plentiful the past few months. Hmmm?
More recently (and by recently, I mean, this week) another article in The New York times paints a dramatic picture of the slowdown in Silicon Valley. Silicon Alley Insider, a New York technology blog, agrees (but then again, they’ll never pass up an opportunity to prove superiority over our West coast counterparts).
On the flip side, here in New York, Union Square Ventures recently announced the closing of their most recent investment fund, apparently without much difficulty. Yesterday Reuters reported that New York is “fertile ground” for technology startups, and VC and tech/finance blogger Paul Kedrosky agrees, at least for financial tech startups. So now you’re telling me things are different based on location? It’s starting to get murky…
Probably the most convincing and level-headed post I’ve read on the topic comes from Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures. Yes, he is a VC and it’s in his interest for people to remain bullish on tech startups and the economic viability of the web, but he makes some good points and concludes that now’s the time for companies to build their business models for the long haul. There’s venture capital money out there waiting to be invested (see above, USV just got $156 million), but the returns may not come right away. So, companies need to build real, sustainable business models since Google won’t snatch them up anytime soon and they’re damn sure not going public… A real, profitable company, what a concept!
In the end, there really doesn’t seem to be an answer everyone can agree on. Overall, it seems that whether the effects of the downturn are negative or positive depends on your role in the tech community. For an entrepreneur, it may be harder to get money and convince VCs that his company can make it in this economy. Bad for them. For VCs, they’ll have to strategize on which types of companies can make it right now and advise accordingly once they’ve funded those companies. Not bad or good, just different. End-users of these technologies? It seems like we/they are put in a position of power. Products need to be made for end-users now, not for Google or Yahoo!, and consumers may ultimately decide whether a company is successful or not. With so many early acquisitions the past few years, widespread consumer adoption and revenue haven’t necessarily been the benchmarks of success for startups.
So, I guess we just need to sit back and watch it all unfold, and the next time someone asks you how the economic downturn is affecting tech, tell them to get comfortable cause the answer may take a while.
Update: Interesting post on Silicon Alley Insider today about computer science graduates not having any problem finding jobs. Seems like engineers are always in high demand though — a company is nothing without its product, and developers bring those to life.
23andMe Phase 3…A Family Affair
Well…a lot has happened since I last blogged about my 23andMe results. To start, my parents and sister also received their results, which is pretty neat, because we are able to share profiles on the 23andme site, much you can on social networks like MySpace or Facebook. Next, I found out that I am actually not from the Far East. More on that later. Last, there is inbreeding in my family. To quote my great-grandfather who married his sister-in-law, “I didn’t raise my daughters to marry strangers.”
What’s cool about being able to have “friends” on 23andMe is that my parents, sister and myself can compare our genomes. I can click on each of the traits in the gene journal (sprinter’s gene, bitter taste, body mass index, cancer, etc.), and a tree will appear that ranks each of my family members in increasing similarity to me. For example, when we compare weight/body mass index, I am related closest to my sister with 90.6% similarity, followed by my mother with 85.41%, and then my father, with 82.52% similarity. I also threw my brother-in-law in there as a friend, so it’s interesting to see that I had 81.2% similarity to him, someone I am not related to.
If you recall in my last post, my “ancestry” section said that I had the highest markers in the Far East, meaning that’s where I originated. Well, I thought it was strange, but I accepted the fact that there could be blonde-haired, blue-eyed Asians out there, and perhaps I was one of them. Recently, I went back to the ancestry section and behold! I am now from Sardinia! Since I have a close connection to 23andMe, I asked my brother-in-law what was going on. He made a few phone calls and found out that some of the site’s algorithms were incorrect, therefore giving out misinformation, but they had been since corrected This opens up a whole other can of worms and makes me wonder what other mistakes they made. How credible is this site? Or just like any other start-up product or service, it might just be in semi-perpetual beta. Seems like when it’s my chromosomes at stake here, they should be a little more careful…
Oh, yes…then there’s the incest. Simply, when I look at both my parents’ genomes in family inheritance and compare, there is a string common to both of them that is navy blue, signifying complete identity. For comparison, when I look at my genome, in this spot there is light blue, signifying half-identity, because they are my parents and I am half-identical to each of them. This means that they have descended from a common person or people.
So that’s the latest on 23andMe — new things keep popping up on the site — and Exclamation readers will be the first to know!
Virgin Nostalgic
Richard Branson sure keeps it interesting. In the past year, Virign launched three gamechanging services, and marketed them in ways that were just as innovative as the services they aimed to promote. First, there was the Virgin America launch, where influential bloggers were loaded into the company’s inaugural flights and then raved on their blogs about the experience. Nice one Richard, Adam would definitely approve.
Then, Virgin launched Virgin Money, a peer-to-peer lending service. What did Sir Branson do? He gave out red dollar bills with a picture of him and his mother to commemorate the $1,000 she lent him to start Virgin. $1,000 bucks, wow, I assume she got a pretty decent return on that investment.
His most recent launch was Virgin Galactic, and nostalgia took center stage. What’s intriguing and very successful about this campaign is that for something so futuristic as “space travel for the masses”, Virgin went BACK in time to hit home with likely patrons. Take their DNA of Flight logo, for example, which is a fixture on most marketing materials. It’s a brief history of aviation from strapping wings on your back, to the Spirit of St. Louis, to the lunar lander, to Branson’s own SpaceShipTwo:
Also drumming up emotions from the past is Galactic Girl. This character who’s picture will appear on all of the Virgin Galactic spaceships is modeled after Sir Richard’s mother, Eve, who was a stewardess in the early days of air travel. This depiction is a modernized version of her back in the day:
It all takes on a Space-Mountain-Star-Tours-Tomorrowland type feel and really seems to hit home with the affluent demographic who can afford such a trip — mostly people old enough to have lived through quite a bit of the progression of spaceflight and early dreams of space travel. It’s an interesting strategy of looking to the past to build up excitement and interest in the future. Who knows, maybe next we’ll see George Jetson and Spacely Sprockets doing Virgin Galactic super-bowl spots.
Movie Streaming: Last Nail in the Coffin for the Local Rental Shop?
I will begin by saying that my family’s weekly trips to Blockbuster are one of perhaps my most bizarre yet nonetheless cherished childhood memories.
I could be holed away in my bedroom slowly chugging my way through a homework assignment or distractedly practicing the piano on a Saturday afternoon when the cry would go up: “Who wants to go to Blockbuster?” My brother, sister and I would of course all come running, pile into our Aerostar mini-van and the trip would commence.
Needless to say, despite Blockbuster’s attempts to keep up with the competition and addition of an online movie rental service, the company’s local stores no longer hold quite the same appeal.
In fact, like many people, I can’t help but wonder if the increasing popularity of Netflix (and other similar services) and Apple’s announcement of iTunes instant movie rentals last week at Macworld, may truly spell the end for the actual physical movie stores so dear to me in my youth.
Since the launch of Netflix in 1997, for the regular movie renter it has become increasingly economical and convenient to join a Web-based movie rental service rather than trek to the local store. Now, with Steve Jobs’ latest announcement, the act of renting a movie has become instant and iTunes (and Netflix) users are able to stream films through the Web.
Neither service is perfect– both Netflix and iTunes have slightly annoying “window systems” that require users to watch purchased movies within a certain timeframe. Netflix does not have Mac support and much of both services’ libraries consist of somewhat archaic films that only the most particular movie buff has heard of.
Nonetheless, the appeal is clear, buzz rampant and demand is rising. There is enough competition between services that offerings will undoubtedly continue to improve and at this point I can be fairly sure that the Blockbuster trips of my youth will not continue into my adulthood.
While I do feel some loyalty towards my local movie store, I know I’ll be whipping out my iPod touch the next time the desire for an impromptu movie marathon strikes.
So long Aerostar.
If ‘08 Is The Year Of The Crowd, What Does That Mean For Marketing?
Some people are predicting that 2008 will be The Year of The Crowd. In a story last month, Karlene Lukowitz from MediaPost predicted that “Crowd” would be the word of the year. Lukowitz says, “Business people love buzzwords, and none will be buzzing more than terms paired with Crowd. She says “get ready for Crowdsourcing, Crowdstorming, Crowdbursting and who knows what else.”
The Year of The Crowd hails from the term Crowdsourcing. Jeff Howe first coined the term in a June 2006 Wired Magazine article.
Mountain Dew’s latest campaign is a great example of Crowdsourcing. In November of 2007, the interactive game Dewmocracy was launched, in which users vote to determine the can graphics, color and flavor of a new Mountain Dew product to launch in 2008.
Dewmocracy (officially written by PepsiCo as DEWmocracy) is a combination of the words Dew (a nickname for Mountain Dew) and democracy. It is an interactive game on its own domain that encourages users to vote for the next flavor of Mountain Dew that will make its debut on shelves in 2008. The game features a live-action short film and 3-dimensional characters. As the player goes through the game, users will help pick every feature of a new Mountain Dew, including can graphics, color, and flavor, from five choices for each aspect.
Mountain Dew and Pepsi aren’t only using this Crowdsourcing project to engage their loyal customers in designing their next product. They are also using this as an opportunity to market the new product between now and when it is released. They are betting on the fact that the consumers that come to Dewmocracy are loyal Mountain Dew customers, or brand evangelists. They are hoping ultimately that these brand evangelists will help spread the word about the new “Dew”. Word of Mouth Marketing has proven to be one of the most effective ways to market a new product, and to build buzz.
Paul Gillin, a social media consultant and author summed up brand evangelists best in a recent article in BtoB Magazine by saying,” Customers are a low-cost and high-powered extension of your marketing team. Their words carry more credibility than any ad or promotion you produce. Thanks to the new wave of online publishing tools, they have unprecedented potential to spread the word about your brand and seed the market with their spontaneous enthusiasm.”
But Mountain Dew isn’t the only company that is using the concept of the crowd for its marketing needs. Some large companies are using “Mob Wisdom”, or the “Wisdom of the Collective” to gain unique insights from customers.
Companies are realizing that if they could listen to all of the conversations customers were having around their products, their services, and their brand online, that they could then take that marketing insight and change their business for the better.
So, 2008 isn’t only the year of the crowd. It may also be the year of the online customer community. In its predictions for 2008, Forrester projects that at least one-quarter of Fortune 100 companies will launch online customer communities this year in order to create higher levels of engagement with their customers and prospects.
Companies are listening to customer conversations by tapping into the interactions between customers in online communities, and social networks. However some companies are only having basic customer communities built on their sites, or developing simple networks or groups for social networking sites. This creates added customer engagement between customers. But an online community on a company website can also be used to increase levels of engagement between customers and the company itself.
This happens by taking those online conversations, and using analytics to really see, monitor, and track what customers concerns, wants and needs are. Then, you are effectively using the crowd to help shape your company.
This type of Crowd Marketing has been described as many things so far. In a Chicago Tribune article from November entitled” You Talk, They hear on the Web,” Deborah Schultz called this emerging social practice Conversational Marketing.. Schultz consults on Social Media Strategies for Proctor & Gamble.
One of LaunchSquad’s clients is now using this Wisdom of the Collective to help provide companies with unique marketing information about their customers. Networked Insights allows companies to listen to conversations around a brand and tap into these interactions. This provides companies with actionable data they can then use strategically.
Networked Insights is currently working with The Guild and (The ArtfulHome.com), a marketplace for artists and collectors.
The Guild has been using Networked Insights for a little over three months and has completely shifted how they are strategizing in 2008 due to insights gained directly from their customers. The Guild realized that their customers were primarily buying products with interior design in mind. They were not aware of the scope and importance of interior design, and have now shifted their business priorities in the upcoming year.
Paul Gillin summed up this new type of marketing quite well by saying in a recent piece, “Your best product and marketing consultants may be out there right now, for free, waiting to help you. All you need to do is let them.”
Networked Insights and the Guild are a perfect example of this savvy interaction. What a way to start off the Year of the Crowd.
Wired Into Politics
Though 2004 was really the first election in which the Internet played a huge role, digital politics is very much starting to mature in 2008. Tech media site have interviews with candidates, viral videos are swaying voters for the first time, and, for God’s sake, John McCain has a MySpace page. There has, of course, been a lot of chatter about who has a voice, who deserves to have a voice and what they should be saying.
The traditional media complain that bloggers aren’t qualified to seriously cover something as important as presidential politics, bloggers complain that establishment reporters are too locked into their Beltway circles and have lost touch with mainstream America, and just about everyone agrees that political discourse is too shrill.
You know what? That’s great. That’s actually the essence of democracy.
I have never enjoyed politics as much as I have the past two years. For somebody like me, who is a politics junkie (it’s a medically-defined mental illness, I’m sure), this is the golden age of political discourse – there literally is too much information out there. For somebody who cannot get enough information, that’s heaven. I can instantly look at poll information, have access to political news from the best sources – both from traditional media and partisan outlets – and see or hear just about any speech made by any candidate.
It’s a fantastic, wonderful time to be a political observant – I spent last Thursday parked in front of my TV with my laptop popped open and I literally had every bit of information available sitting right there. Who cares if that information comes from a veteran journalist who’s probably jaded and too cynical, or a blogger who does this in their spare time. Too cautious or too loud, it’s still information, and too much is never enough.
Throwing A Party in 2008? A Wealth of Invite Options
Being devoted Seattle Seahawks fans, my roommate and I resolved to gather all our Seattle friends to sit down to watch our hometown team in the playoffs. When the game’s date and time was released Monday, we immediately started creating an invitation list and then, like savvy hosts, we clicked on our computers and set to choosing an event site to spread the news.
Hosting a party has never been so fun. Sure, sending out unique invitations in colorful envelopes used to be somewhat exciting, but with the advent of multiple event websites, greater numbers of party hosts are turning to the web when it comes time to handling all the coordination and logistics.
To be sure, the possibilities seem endless. While the invite industry is still relatively young, it is definitely beginning to get crowded. Evite is the oldest and perhaps most popular event site of the bunch, while nearly every social network, including Facebook, now allows users to create and advertise events to their contacts. For those that want to support the underlings, you can also choose between upstart rivals such as renkoo, skobee, MyPunchBowl and Socializr. [Check out our client TimeBridge, which is tackling the even more challenging problem of scheduling business meetings.]
Ultimately, my roommate and I decided on Facebook. For us, it seemed the easiest option as nearly all our friends are members of the site and the event application made it easy for us to sort through and find fellow Seattle natives. Unlike Evite, however, Facebook does not allow hosts to determine whether a guest has viewed the invitation or not — making it impossible to differentiate between the commitment-phobic and those who simply haven’t been checking their Facebook accounts.
So, while our Facebook experiment has been ruled a success, I might be tempted to look elsewhere in the future when I get the itch to host a party.
Maybe back to old faithful Evite when the Seahawks head to the Super Bowl…
One-To-Many Text Messaging: How Soon Is Now?
I’m an iPhone geek. I was the third LaunchSquad team member to get an iPhone, and I evangelized it until three more colleagues and my wife bought their own. Obviously, I was delighted when I read (on my phone, natch) in the Gearlive blog this morning that the new update of the phone’s operating system will contain one-to-many text messaging. A lot of brands have tried to create one-to-many and swarm-like many-to-many text messaging solutions, but few have seen mainstream success.
Many a business model has been built on the premise of solving the one-to-many text message problem. 3Jam and NetworkText have tried to solve this problem head-on, and rock brands and corporate brands have also done innovative stuff with text-messaging on the Mozes platform.
If you’re wondering about the usefulness of one-to-many text messaging, consider the following scenarios:
1. Four friends are going to meet at an Italian restaurant. One arrives early, and realizes the restaurant is closed, and wants to notify the others quickly, so they can coordinate an alternative plan.
2. The location for a business meeting is changed at the last minute, and all participants need to be notified, quickly
3. You want to send a message out to a large group of friends (”I just got engaged!”) without putting it in a public space like Twitter, Facebook or Jaiku.
Twitter, Jaiku and Facebook’s newsfeed updates do fulfill a similar function, but I think it’s a pretty big exaggeration to say that adoption of those technologies is widespread. With bloggers predicting that there will be 5 million iPhones sold by the end this month, I think it’s a pretty safe bet to say that one-to-many text messaging will be a pretty widely deployed technology by the end of the year.
A colleague showed me how he could do this on his Blackberry, but the process involves selecting the recipients individually, and they can’t tell that the message sent to them was sent to multiple recipients. It’s quite possible that RIM may have been the first brand to bring one-to-many texting to a widely deployed device, but I don’t know if they will be the brand to capitalize on this innovation. Maybe consumers will only adopt this technology if it’s really easy (and fun) to use. That’s something that Cupertino figured out about 24 years ago.
