Category: Geek Stuff

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Geek Stuff The Marketeer

The Strategy Paradox and WebInno

I’ve been running around like crazy with back-to-back events after work. Yesterday was a meetup for author Michael Raynor, author of The Strategy Paradox, a successor to the Innovator’s Dilemma. It was a great event over at Vintage on Broad Street, a place worth checking out. I had a laugh, I used to have to wear a suit every day and have recently taken it for granted until I saw the folks from Deloitte that were there.

I have yet to dig into the book, but had a chance to chat with the author and he explained the premise: While the Innovator’s Dilemma explains how proper management actually defeats an organization’s ability to innovate, there is a similar phenomenon in strategic planning where the strategies that would appear most likely to be a runaway success are the same ones that can be complete failures. In the middle are lower risk strategies that have a high probability of meager returns (please keep in mind that these are my words based on about 10 minutes of discussion).

Our chat has been captured in glorious stereomonic and will be included in this Monday’s M Show, so please take a listen.

Tonight was WebInno number 11. The event continues to be a huge success, they must be pushing 300 attendees now. Although Mara’s asking me if I was going to Nantucket nearly drove me to tears (that’s another story), I did persevere long enough to check out the latest:

  • Virtual Ubiquity has a rocking web-based word processor with some very cool features that Word should be embarrassed by. My concern with this one is that I do most of my writing offline, but they did say that they have (or will have) the ability to work offline.
  • Cardvio is on demand printing of customized greeting cards. I really liked these guys because it’s a good example of picking off a vertical. There are many companies doing on demand print, but by making themselves the best in a very focused area hopefully that will give them the runway they need to expand.
  • MyDesignIn has a basic online CAD system so consumers can design the home improvement projects they want to do. They have some great integration that can grab product vendor’s website to include in the plans. The demo showed the user going to Kohler’s website and selecting a sink and adding it to the plan. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to get to their site today but they were at Demo you can see MyDesignIn there. I also found a review from Brandon Watts who was enjoying martial bliss at last check.

Strong presentations across the board. In closing I have to congratulate Christopher Penn as tomorrow he will be rolling the 500th episode of The Financial Aid Podcast.

Categories
Brain Buster Podcasting

M Show and Terminators are Coming

It’s sunday, so that means The M Show will be rolling out later today. Some other interesting stuff:

I just finished reading a paper talking about applying the Long Tail to branding, rather interesting. Any blog that considers the Second Law of Thermodynamics relevant to Marketing is worth my time.

Project code name “Coffee” is scheduled to launch on Thursday if the current pace continues.

Bum Rush the Charts did crack the top 100, congrats to Christopher Penn and everyone else involved with the program. Looking forward to hearing the final numbers.

Chris Pirillo pointed me to this via twitter and then it hit me as a brain buster – until now computers could only hear, this guy has made them able to LISTEN.

Categories
Podcasting The Marketeer

Cracking the iTunes Code and Synchronicity

It’s strange how things all come together sometimes. For the past couple of days I have been listening to the audio presentations from the TED Conference (Mitch Joel – I will not stop until I have a beer with you at TED, and I don’t give a damn if it’s in 2037). Tony Robbins was speaking about what gives meaning to life and he broke it into 6 needs (a new Maslow, if you will). Four were base needs to survive, the upper two were spiritual – the need to grow and the need to give.

Instantly this focused the understanding of my fascination with Bum Rush the Charts. It’s a chance to grow and try to figure out the puzzle that is iTunes without being able to see behind the curtain. With the proceeds going towards a scholarship the effort has a higher meaning.

I also had two other threads weave together. Seth Godin made a lasting impact when I was listening to him months ago on Across the Sound. He refused to criticize a campaign because he said that at least the group was trying, the only people that deserved criticism were those who didn’t do anything, or took the safe route (he goes further to say that safe is the new risky). Since then I have made an effort to not criticize those who are brave enough to try something new. This echoed back to me today listening to Adam Curry on the DSC. It’s easy for people to complain, those are the people you don’t need to hang out with – spend your time with people who make an effort to do something.

So enough with the sermon – what have we learned? Rock is weak, the number 1 track in rock is number 5 overall, but it tails off quickly – only the top 12 or so tracks make it into the top 100 overall. Hip-Hop and Pop run the charts *groan*
Mine Again will continue to rise up in the charts. I’m going to put some chips down here. It appears that the track only moved once, it wasn’t on the chart and then everything moved around 11am Eastern. My theory is that the scoring is a 7-day moving average. Chris says that the landing page had over 10k hits, let’s say only half bought the track. I find it difficult to believe that more than 5,000 people bought Def Leppard’s Pour Some Sugar on Me during the same period (and that’s hard for me to say as I believe that could be one of the 5 greatest singles of all time). Assuming there wasn’t some kind of Def Leppard the Charts going on that I didn’t know about, we’d say it was a normal day for that track and if it did beat the bum rush there would be over 2 million iPods or more with this hot track from Hysteria on it.

I think we can safely presume that the track may actually be penalized right now for squeezing all the buys into a single day (in theory the total sales today divided by the length of the measuring cycle – i.e. if it’s 7 days we are only seeing 1/7th of the total impact as the previous 6 days are much closer to zero). Check out Christopher Penn’s latest update to see if I’ve still got the J-Funk.

Talk to you tomorrow.

Categories
Brain Buster Podcasting

Bum Rush The Charts Tomorrow!

Tomorrow (Thursday) is Bum Rush the Charts. Here’s the story:

A bunch of us who blog, podcast and vidcast want to show that focused, relevant content is the new king. We want to see how much impact we can have on iTunes and raise some money for a good cause at the same time.

The track to buy is called “Mine Again” by Black Lab.

As all Marketeers love stats – here are the critical ones:

On a 99 cent purchase of an RIAA artist:
– 19 cents goes to Apple
– 75 cents goes to the label
– 5 cents goes to the artist

On a 99 cent purchase of Mine Again on March 22:
– 14 cents goes to Apple
– 5 cents goes to the scholarship fund directly
– 40 cents goes to the band
– 40 cents goes to the scholarship fund via Black Lab’s donation

Click here to Bum Rush The Charts and make a charitable donation.

Here’s another special for you – I’ll be gifting the track to up to 50 subscribers to The M Show insider, the email newsletter of The M Show podcast. You can sign up on the homepage of the best business podcast.

How high with the track go? Keep your feet on the ground, and your head in the stars!

Categories
Geek Stuff

R2D2 mailbox


R2D2 mailbox

Originally uploaded by wsh1266.

Sorry but I have to geek out on this… The website cracks me up.

Categories
Brain Buster Podcasting

Spiki and the new M Show

It’s Sunday and that means a new M Show…

I ran into my first Wiki Spam today. That’s my brainbuster – Spiki

Here’s why you should listen to the show: (Go there now)
M Show 142 – Massive, Clothes, Racing Against the Clock

Intro – Julien Smith from In Over Your Head

News:
Massive Running the Game
Time to look like The Economist
L.L. Bean – Web beats Stores
Boston Now – Coming soon
Ben Edelman continuing to rock the house.

Talk:
Worn out clothes
Idiocracy
Wiki Spam – Spiki?

Entertainment:
Racing Against The Clock

Support the M Show by using this link to shop at Amazon

Feedback to john@TheMShow.com

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Podcasting Productivity Booster

iTunes Sorting and The M Show

Normally this would be my normal Sunday plug for the latest M Show (go listen to it, or better yet – subscribe!), but while tagging the file I found something cool in the newest version of iTunes.

You can now create separate tags such as Artist and Album for sorting in iTunes. You need to be a bit of a compulsive freak or have a huge music library to have seen the need for this (I’ll leave the judgement on me to your discretion). Let’s say you have your favorite artist’s new album and you rip it to iTunes. Then you’re searching by artist and you pull up the album and, Lo and behold, 3 tracks are missing. This often happens if the missing tracks are duets or have a famous backup singer, while you are searching under “Lawrence Welk” the track is actually buried under “The Lemon Sisters and Lawrence Welk”.

I used to just dump the second artist (in many cases I had no idea who the hell they were anyway), but now for those tracks with two famous artists you can choose which one you want to file the track under. Or, for the compulsive, have it in the library twice, once under each artist and still have it show as “The Lemon Sisters and Lawrence Welk”.

Happy Sorting!

Categories
Geek Stuff Graphic Design

Fantastic Four – and Craptastic Print Ads

I used to spend a lot of time at used bookstores when I was a kid in the 70’s. My mom loved to read, and passed that on to the rest of the family. It’s so funny that these places are, for the most part, a lost relic. There’s a unique smell in a used bookstore as the slowly decaying paper takes on its own odor. There were 3 different ones in Pittsfield that I remember, all three of them a big mess inside, but all filled with treasure. This was before the rise of the comic shop, so these were the only places to get comic books, and more importantly – back issues, because it was easy to miss issues that for some reason never made it to the convenience store.

I used to buy comics for a nickel that had no covers on them, it wasn’t until I was older that I learned that these are illegal copies, paperbacks and comics that were returned from the stores and were supposed to be destroyed. Through some gray market action they made it to the used bookstore.

One day I found a giant size Fantastic Four annual and was blown away by this story with Galactus, Gabriel and his Herald, The Silver Surfer. For years I wanted to get the issues but they are classics and one of them is over $150. The irony is that when they hit that price you don’t ever take them out of the airtight bag they are in. Marvel does have a reprint but it’s in black and white and that just never seems as much fun (the exception being material that was written and drawn with the intent of being in black and white.

In the last place I would expect to run into the power cosmic, I found a DVD at BJ’s (the local warehouse club) – 44 Years of the Fantastic Four. All of the issues, in the original format. It’s been fun to cruise through them and read the old stories, but much like when I finally found DVDs of The Six Million Dollar Man, the stories aren’t quite as tight and thrilling as the 12 year old John remembered, but Stan Lee tells and incredible story, and the artwork is classic. Even more fun has been laughing my ass off at all the original ads – here’s a couple classics:

Old Ads ’nuff said!

Categories
Daily Life Geek Stuff

Zen and Gadget Jones

I’ve been itching to upgrade my phone, I have a Treo 600 and there’s so much more cool stuff if I were to go to the 700. The problem is that I have been thinking all week about something I read from the Dalai Lama (who has a rockin’ website by the way, but no RSS or podcasts that I could find) – pleasure is not happiness. Yes, I would enjoy the upgrade, but I already have a bunch of features that I never use. I would get the consumer’s rush but that would probably fade within a week.

Unless I also installed the 24 ringtone…

Categories
Brain Buster Podcasting Productivity Booster

Gettin’ Funky with Smart Playlists

Greg had kicked this over to me when I did a video on using smart playlists in iTunes. I was hoping to wait until my blog template was updated so I could show it in Revver, but that won’t be for another couple of weeks and I’m tired of waiting.

If you are going to sync podcasts across multiple machines or need to do some other funky stuff, check out: using Juice, Podnova and SmartPlaylists.