Obviously one must consider that without true reform of advertising models away from CPM driven page view models how display in 2010 can do nothing to further the goal of lowering costs of marketing and sales for companies and improving our standard of living. CPM can only maximize revenue of an ad network with some residual benefits to publishers. A few days ago I considered writing something about this, but thought this was part of something larger than just Google and their display initiatives in 2010.

Surely, less than 48 hours later, Jason Calacanis started a discussion about comScore that has the Blogoshpere abuzz. Michael Arrington also chimed in (as did a bunch of other people) in his post, Jason Calacanis Punches Comscore In The Face. Comscore Punches Back. Fred Wilson Drags Us Into It. $SCOR” rel=”bookmark” href=”http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/24/comscore-calcanis-wilson-punch-face/”>Jason Calacanis Punches Comscore In The Face. Comscore Punches Back. Fred Wilson Drags Us Into It. $SCOR.The buzz around Jason and his conversation is ultimately about symptoms of the current ecosystem, not the root causes of the future end game.  While the conversation about the current state is certainly an interesting conversation to observe, it’s not the conversation I wish to take to the next level. We need to have a different conversation. There is so much more to achieve and limited marketing resources of companies need to be put to work effectively. There are advertising models of the future to consider where offline, mobile and Internet will collide and will someday make this entire conversation look primitive.

Sure enough reading this post brought me back to the conversation about Google and the worthlessness of poorly targeted and untimely display banner ads. You see there was not one but two large banners on TechCrunch that stood out as irrelevantly served by Google. What were they? They were display banners for a company I had interviewed with to be the CMO of in Spring of 2009 that I would have likely have increased the revenue significantly by now.  Unfortunately most CEOs don’t yet fully understand the magnitude of the amount of change  that is necessary to transform a company successfully for marketing on the web while improving customer satisfaction and the corporation’s profitability. I had researched them and their competitors back then. I was never a potential customer of the service. So now, a full nine months later, here I am looking at this completely irrelevant ad on TechCrunch of all places (which is completely unrelated to the vertical). Wasteful. Pathetic. Sad. Not something a rational business leader following the rules of being a Gen X CMO where search marketing becomes the top of the strategic process.  The first decade of the Internet got us to the batters box to start the game of corporate business strategy transformation, I look forward leading that conversation into the first inning during the next few years. The magnitude of the change and the amount of transformation needed is massive, whether it is a small company or a member of the Fortune 500.

You should read those comments in Michael Arrington’s post and think about their motivations – extremely carefully. You’ll also find a link to Jason’s original post there if you wish to read the full details. The future of not only the Internet, but also the future of business organizational structures and marketing strategy budget direction hangs in the balance.

So my question for Jason Calacanis, Fred Wilson, Michael Arrington and EVERYONE ELSE is the following, “Is it time to stop pretending that offline branding models simply converted online is the future of the advertising? If a world migrated budgets from CPM banner ads to CPA/CPL and other emerging forms, who would really care about unique visitors besides site owners seeking an ego boost? ”

Bonus question for Fred Wilson: Wouldn’t your energy be better spent on funding ideas that move the conversation in the direction of innovation of advertising instead of arguing with Jason about a company you exited long ago? (If you are up for it, I’d like to create those realities with you in start ups in that future arena.)

In the end measurement of the type discussed in Jason’s post only matters in an advertising world based on page view based(CPM) or time sponsored impressions. As in my example above, considerable display advertising occurs in an irrelevant way after the fact. For example, I bought a car last September, I’m still seeing increased banners on the models I considered now – after the purchase. Women planning weddings likely have seen related retargeted banners long after the wedding has occurred, possibly even after the divorce is filed in some cases!!! We must do better.

The convergence of offline, online, search and mobile marketing will require entirely new processes to effectively manage them as it becomes a real-time individual decision marketplace. To me, it will have similarity to the changes I made in the 1990′s at BlackRock, where we created new data, new structures, new standards and created better information for us to create strategic advantages.  I actively network with some outstanding nascent start ups, sadly many are ignored as many VCs look for traffic or who is involved rather than focus on revenue models, vision, market size and evidence that there might be paying customers for such a new , disruptive model.

The economy right now is bad, but to state that it is just an economic event is way oversimplifying it. It’s prolonged and drawn out due to the structural effects of the Internet not being managed to corporate advantage effectively. Stated simply, corporations and our society is not allocating resources in an effective manner as it fails to migrate budgets and marketing strategy to the highest ROI activities which attract relevant customers. It’s time for scarce, new and often misunderstood breeds of executives that understand these concepts to be allowed to realign corporations big and small, new and old to these new realities otherwise we will see more corporations destroyed “by doing nothing”. There is certainly a significant cost to tapping new leaders, with new skills to lead organizations into new frontiers in terms of realignment and retraining. However, the costs of doing nothing are far greater to our society as not allocating budgets to the most efficient channels and allowing those decisions to be made by people who understand these new realities is far greater.

All I can ask the both the blogosphere and the world business community is to please stop the bickering about these legacy models so we can move onto the real issue and work ahead – realigning our corporate business strategy and our society to the realities of Industrial Revolution 2.0. It starts with board of directors, CEO, CFO and COO executives asking their CMO and marketing partners the right questions. The journey will be fun.

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To be clear, it’s a thoughtful post and I don’t disagree with anything materially in what was said. So why write about this? I find the entire conversation to be 100% completely unnecessary.

First a story. When I was a teenager, I saw in ad in the back of a magazine, it stated to send $1 and a self addressed stamped envelope (SASE) to receive information on a tried and proven money making business strategy. It sounded good so I sent it in. A few weeks later I got a my envelope in the mail. It contained a small note that contained a message like this:

A proven way to make money:

- Open a post office box

- Place a small ad in the back of a magazine asking for $1 and a SASE to “learn a proven way to make money”

- Put your $1 bills in the bank and send notes like this one

Yes, I was scammed. But being scammed was an important event in making me a more careful and better consumer. I learned. It was necessary for me to grow. Did the magazine know the ad was a scam? Probably. Did that stop them from publishing it? No. Consumers need to judge each situation for themselves based on the data available and make the best decision.

So Dave why is this potential FTC regulation unnecessary (and possibly quite harmful)?

1. The content revolution is not well enough defined to regulate it – It’s changing all of the time, if businesses and individuals still have trouble understanding it’s implications on our society. How can a group of elder statespeople in our government know what is right? Simple answer. They can’t. As traditional media loses relevancy/power content will increasingly be created by the masses. It’s a simple fact. Get used to it, in the long run, it may actually lead to the removal of the abuse of monopoly power.
2. Traditional advertising is not generally marked in the manner the FTC is suggesting – When you watch TV, ADVERTISING is not in giant letters on the commercial during the program is it? No. It’s not on outdoor billboards. It’s not in newspapers, magazines or the majority of web site banner ads. Why? Because it’s obvious to those who look closely. Creating a double standard here is just plain silly and it’s insulting to people’s intelligence.
3. Previous FTC measures have proven to be massive failures – The FTC instituted the Do Not Call List Registry and the CAN-SPAM  Act several years ago. Yet I get numerous unsolicited commercial calls to numbers I’ve registered on the list. I get tons of spam from email lists that I have NEVER signed up for on a daily basis. Regulation without enforcement results in selective usage of the law. This is not good and can be abused on both sides. The FTC has a proven history of failure and should go fix it’s previous messes before creating unnecessary new ones.
4. Social media platforms should do everything possible to prevent fraudulent usages – I see tons of fraudulent Twitter users emerging daily. Twitter should be creating validation of each and every user which would lead to an immediate reduction in questionable activity. Why aren’t they? Because it would put holes and raise questions about Twitter’s “growth story” and that with no revenue model in sight would lead to lower valuations and less money being pumped into the company. Twitter has a responsibility here and I don’t see it doing everything it can to eliminate questionable activity on the platforms. If the social media platforms acted responsibly – unnecessary legislation could be avoided.
5. The traditional advertising industry is apparently using lobby influence dollars to try to maintain it’s declining monopoly power via regulation – Content is taking over the economy as search allows people to find it and social media networks allow it’s distribution.  This is similar to how the printing press once revolutionized content distribution. We are living in something like this again now.  Yes there will be pain. But regulations in the middle of the content revolution will hinder commerce and slow the process of replacing business models that are no longer highly relevant. Do we legislate against fuel efficient vehicles in favor of gas guzzlers? No, of course we don’t – why create unnecessary legislation that harms new forms of efficiency? yes, this really is this unnecessary. 
6. “All Marketers Are Liars” – This famous book by Seth Godin indicates that deceptive advertising has always been a part of society and likely always will be. This is NOT new. Don’t we respect people enough to make their own judgments? I do. Why then act like it’s new? It’s not.

Look at the facts of history, the proposed FTC regulations will solve nothing and do nothing besides place a greater burden on commerce in an already struggling economy. We can prevent this grave mistake. Now let’s go do it.

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“It’s clear that latency really does matter to users,” said Mayer, the VP of Search and User Experience at Google and today’s keynote speaker at the O’Reilly Velocity Conference.

Do ya really think so Marissa? Having unnecessary captchas, massive memory leaks in gmail, outbound gmail that gets improperly classified as spam, adding SMS features to Google Voice with no instructions on how to turn them off in the email – that does matter. You’re absolutely right, Marissa! But my question is what are you doing about it?

This message appears on my screen several times a week, nobody at Google (and I’ve let several people know, can get to the root cause to fix it), financial analysts should be modeling the revenue loss. I’m tired of sorry, I’d like to see a permanent fix:

We’re sorry…

… but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.

We’ll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, if you suspect that your computer or network has been infected, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your systems are free of viruses and other spurious software.

If you’re continually receiving this error, you may be able to resolve the problem by deleting your Google cookie and revisiting Google. For browser-specific instructions, please consult your browser’s online support center.

If your entire network is affected, more information is available in the Google Web Search Help Center.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we’ll see you again on Google.

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They say that when one door closes another one opens and apparently Barney Harford is the gentleman that was actually meant to darken the doorway. He’s had extensive experiences in Asia and elsewhere for Expedia and more recently as an advisor to Kayak.com and eLong. As mentioned in the article linked to above, I strongly believe that geographical diversity is important to high performing corporate cultures and I praise the Board of Directors for this choice. It is my hope that this will effect Chicago’s landscape in a positive way far beyond Orbitz. Time will tell.

I know what it’s like to arrive in a strange new place from my experiences living in New York and Cleveland. I’ve always appreciated people orienting me to the cities I’ve moved to so I thought I’d return the favor before giving you a few thoughts on Orbitz. Here we go:

- Odd objects in parking spots that have been shoveled clear of snow: You managed to move to Chicago in the dead of Winter. It’s not exactly the most friendly welcome the city can give you. In fact when I moved back here in 1999 – we received 22 inches of snow on during the day I was supposed to move in – it took me a week to recover. Anyway, if you see a chair on a side street claiming a spot, my advice is to pass it by and go elsewhere as you never know what that person that put the object there might do. Of course this practice is chronicled in detail on a blog from Montreal.

- Orginal’s Hair Designers – Good haircut for $16 with the bonus of then giving you a touch up between hair cuts at no charge. You want John to cut your hair there. He arrives at 6AM sharp Monday through Saturday going there between 6-7AM is the best time to go. No appointment is needed. They are located at 134 North Wells.

- Shoe Repair – Beehive Shoeworks gives great on the stand shines and they do an excellent job with any shoe repair you’ll need. Ask for Sam.

- Lower Wacker Drive – A cab can usually make it to the Lakefront or Michigan Avenue faster this way, but they’ll never do it unless you ask as Chicago pays cabs partially based on waiting time. Yes, this is the same Lower Wacker Drive as in the movie the Blues Brothers!

- Free Valet Parking at Most Restuarants in Greektown – Take advantage of this, my favorite place is The Parthenon on Halstead.

- Pizza – As you likely know Chicago is home of the deep dish pizza. My favorite is Giordano’s, the one where the primary office of the chain at 310 West Randolph tastes the best in my opinion and I usually order it withcanadian bacon and mushrooms. If you want something a bit lighter near your office (my answer would be different in the suburbs) , I recommend Tomato Head Pizza at 945 West Randolph. They make their pizzas with a somewhat rare Faulds pizza oven.  You may have experienced this special oven at Delfino’s Chicago Style Pizzeria in Seattle previously. I researched this as I’ve often considered moving to Seattle.

- Italian Beef – This is a rare sandwich that you’ll have to work hard to find anywhere outside of the Chicago area. It’s roast beef immersed in flavorful gravy that is properly presented on freshly baked French bread. If consumed at the right places, this can be heavenly. In the loop you will find this at a place called Luke’s (walking distance from the currentOrbitz office location) or Portillo’s. Like the pizza above, many will passionately advocate their favorite place over another. It’s kind of like a sport.

- Origin of the term Windy City – This is highly disputed. But I mention it because you can judge how much a person studies history by asking if they have any opinion on this subject. Statistically speaking, there are many places in the Midwest that are technically windier, so I personally do not favor this explanation. The most likely in my opinion is the explanation of the politicians being full of hot air. There are others that abound on the net.

- If Your Furniture is Damaged by Movers – Weber Furniture has been in business since 1950 repairing, refinishing and reupholstering fine office and antique furniture. I recently did some work on the site and it already ranks #1 for the term – Chicago furniture restoration. It still needs a bit more authority from off site factors but the link above should likely fix that. Thanks for the opportunity but I hope your furniture travels safely.

OK, now that you are oriented a bit, let’s talk business a little bit.

In terms of my thoughts and philosophy on Internet companies:

- The world is enduring rapid business transformation which historians will may one day judge revival the Industrial Revolution. Corporations need to constantly test and learn to create and maximize the optimal business model mix. Those who create rapid testing and learning cultures will outperform.

- Search engines are changing the foundation of branding from brand name to one of a brand’s attributes to be found by the searcher and user experiences when interacting with the brand. This is a fundamental shift from push to pull where the consumer controls the conversation and it’s about meeting those expressed needs.

- Quotes of business leaders I highly admire are on this page, they are my guide posts.

- I believe that corporations need to restore balance to focus on both revenue and expenses equally, recent focus has been on expense reduction and risk aversion is preventing focus on new revenue potential. This blog post sums up my thoughts.

Thoughts on Internet travel vertical in general:

- Too highly dependent on paid search, need to lower traffic acquisition costs (TAC).

- Desperate need to create long term relationships with customers outside of purchase transaction.

- Customer data models need to evolve to create niche experiences to create best in space customer experience to meet the evolution in branding mentioned above and to increase CPM advertising rates.

- Considerable business travel is booked manually via phone from legacy providers. This presents a potential opportunity.

In terms of Orbitz from a consumers point of view:

- Orbitz does yet not consistently win the price competition in the hotel + airfare category – for my three day trip to SJC to speak at UGCX at the same hotel – Priceline was $411, Expedia was $428 this morning while the Orbitz quote was $476.

- The current Orbitz Terms of Service appear to be in need of revision in regards to link policy in terms of winning the search engine optimization battle.

- I use a pop-up blocker, but I’m sure you’d win alot of points with people if you removed those completely.

There is other advice I have but will keep that private at this time. So again, welcome to Chicago! Please let me know if there is anything I can help you with as you settle in. Good luck with your role at Orbitz!

OK folks, sorry this post was a bit long.  What suggestions do you have for Barney to improve the customer experience, customer acquisition and conversion rates at Orbitz while still reducing costs and improving profitability? I’d love to see your comments on this.

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Forget about monetization, can Facebook survive without any useful customer service improvements? While 98% of the service works great on autopilot, there is absolutely zero customer service for the things where you do need help. I don’t mean bad customer service, I mean there is absolutely no customer service for certain issues.

Case #1 – Last month, I created a group called Interactive, Search Marketing and Social Media Change Managment in my haste to leave for a conference, you can see that I mispelled Management in the group name. This field is not editable by the group owner and after 7 weeks, I have had zero professional response from a real human at Facebook to resolve the issue.

Case #2 – Lack of ability to add Networks of former employers properly. As more people are using Facebook as a sourcing tool, the inability to update this for historical employers, in my case BlackRock, is not just an inconvenience, it could be costing me opportunities and monetization due to the lack of focus on data integrity of my profile to the level I’d like. On this matter I reached out to an executive of Facebook directly – they said they were sending it to customer service as “they should be able to rectify your issues”. Ten more days have passed without correction of my two data problems. I’m putting a deadline of October 30th on this for Facebook to fix this as this is a more than reasonable amount of time to do so.

Lastly, a necessary enhancement. How about a button on people’s profiles that says, take me to all the messages I have exchanged with this person? Thank you.

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However, high rankings on entrepreneurship education alone is not sufficient, the next steps are:
1) To build a transparent, quick and efficient marketplace for entrepreneurs, experienced and passionate management teams and startup capital.

2) Modify the focus toward commercialization of businesses in the model outlined above, ultimately success is measured by the number and quantity of companies that they’ve enabled to scalable, not just lifestyle growth curves. I look forward to participating in this journey.

Here’s the full announcement…

DePaul University’s entrepreneurship program opened the new academic year on a high note Sept. 10 with news that it has again been recognized among the finest in the United States in Entrepreneur magazine/Princeton Review’s annual “Best Schools for Entrepreneurs” ranking.

DePaul moved up three places to second on the list of best rated graduate entrepreneur programs in the national rankings, which are posted on Entrepreneur’s Web site and will appear in the October issue of the magazine. The university placed seventh in the undergraduate entrepreneur education category and was the only Illinois university ranked in that category.

“DePaul offers students exposure to thousands of successful entrepreneurs in a large urban setting with sophisticated financing services available,” the magazine noted. “Entrepreneurial supporters are extremely active in sharing knowledge, resources, contacts and expertise. The program provides very supportive administration and infrastructure through the Coleman Entrepreneurship Center.”

Entrepreneur partnered with the Princeton Review, a leading educational services provider, to solicit surveys from 2,300 undergraduate and graduate program administrators to determine the rankings. The survey covered three areas: academic offerings and requirements; student enrollment and faculty quality; and “outside the classroom,” which examined student organization, mentorship and scholarship opportunities. An advisory board of entrepreneurship educators also provided evaluations of the surveyed programs. Based on the data and review, a total of 50 programs (25 undergraduate and 25 graduate programs) made the list of the best.

“DePaul’s rankings are a tribute to the academic excellence of our program and the quality of our faculty,” said Harold Welsch, Coleman Entrepreneurship Chair at DePaul, who founded the program. “Using their education and start-up experiences, faculty members help students look to the future and identify viable business opportunities. They share their experiences with the students willingly and with great enthusiasm.”

Founded in 1982 at the College of Commerce, DePaul’s entrepreneurship program has grown to encompass 12 undergraduate and graduate courses taught by 16 faculty members. The faculty represents a mix of distinguished scholars of entrepreneurship and successful entrepreneurs.

Courses cover business plan development, entrepreneurial strategy and management, new venture financing, business growth, creativity, innovation and technological change, among other topics. More than 600 students take undergraduate and graduate courses in the program annually. Students have opportunities to participate in a number of mentorship and internship programs, as well as entrepreneur organizations, including Collegiate Entrepreneurs Organization, MBA Entrepreneurs Club, Social Entrepreneurship Club and Students for Entrepreneurs.

The program is supported by the Coleman Entrepreneurship Center, which manages education and outreach programs designed to stimulate the start-up and growth of entrepreneurial firms. The center also sponsors Launch DePaul, an annual year-long business plan competition that awards cash prizes and business start-up services for the most promising business plans submitted by students and alumni.

“We believe that today’s students need practical learning opportunities that extend beyond the classroom,” said Raman Chadha, director of the center and a member of the entrepreneurship program faculty. “The Coleman Center creates these opportunities by working with faculty to connect DePaul students with successful entrepreneurs, help them launch ventures and provide real-world experiences. Students are able to immediately apply what they learn in the classroom, acquiring wisdom that only comes with these opportunities. The entrepreneurial spirit at DePaul has never been stronger.”

The magazine’s “Best Schools for Entrepreneurs” top 10 graduate programs were:

1. Babson College
2. DePaul University
3. University of Southern California
4. The University of Arizona
5. University of South Florida
6. University of Illinois, Chicago
7. University of California, Los Angeles 8. Drexel University 9. Chapman University 10. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

The top undergraduate entrepreneur programs were:

1. University of Houston
2. Babson College
3. Drexel University
4. University of Dayton
5. University of Arizona
6. Temple University
7. DePaul University
8. University of Oklahoma
9. University of Southern California
10. Chapman University

To view the full rankings, go to: http://www.entrepreneur.com/topcolleges/.

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Let’s start an exploration of these issues in more detail:

- There is an almost total lack of imagination regarding potential emerging revenue streams – When I attend search engine conferences, I hear over and over how “63% of transactions occur offline after an online search (comScore 2006).” Tying together that transaction with it’s higher relevancy holds the key to a revenue stream potentially larger than Google’s Adwords product. Having once spent 6 months of my life trying to raise capital for a search advertising concept, I have to agree with Robert that there is lack of willingness to engage in serious funding conversations of this type – until half a dozen other people do it…that’s messed up!

- In large businesses, there is an obsession with basing business cases on expense savings rather than the potential for new revenue streams- Going back to that example above, financial services institutions could play a large role in this. However due to the lack of risk management processes that caused the housing crisis, they are risk adverse at this moment and risk removing themselves from this once in a lifetime opportunity. I saw 4 companies give presentations on their business cases on mobile retail banking and they all focused on the reduction of call center costs! Think about that a second, moving things from a PC to a phone will reduce call center volumes? Highly questionable at best form cost savings perspective, certainly missing the revenue opportunities completely.

- Everything in the world is converging, yet most companies have silos and are hiring specialists (set up for failure) – When banks are trying to become relevant in mobile and mobile is trying to get into advertising and payments, can you afford to hire people with one dimensional skill sets? The answer is no, not if you want to win.

- With increasingly rapid cycle times in technology, competitive benchmarking is becoming less useful – If none of your competitors has made a tough decision to reorganize a department, shift financial resources to new ways of doing things in marketing or customer service, how can you improve via benchmarking? Stated a different way, if your process is broken and all of your competitor’s processes are broken, you can’t possibly create market leadership by benchmarking. You have to hire the best and most brilliant people who hold little if any limiting beliefs and give them the authority to innovate based on what customers want. Serving those needs in the Peter Drucker fashion is the only way to create true market leadership. This does not mean that competitive analysis is dead. It does mean that the benchmarks you need to pay attention to are the breakthroughs regardless of industry.

- Existing legacy cost centers in large corporations are creating barriers to innovation and efficiency both internally and externally – These cost centers prevent reallocation of budgets to adopting usage of superior and more efficient technology or Internet/mobile advertising due to their all or nothing nature – smooth and frequent shifting to most economical resources is the unfortunate rarity. There is a large number of reasons for this and this topic is worthy of a post of it’s own (please submit suggestions). Cost centers make the silo problem worse and hard to solve.

- Traditional management consulting needs to acknowledge proprietary technology and data models as strategic and gain an implementation focus – If you come in for 6 months and never implement anything and nobody does any of the suggestions, your net present value is actually negative.

- We need to take back control of companies to focus on the customer as priority #1 – 5 year plans with a stack of initiatives in year 4 are interesting, but no longer practical. Notice I say take back control. This is the way the world used to work before endless Powerpoint and overly large bureaucracy like 18 month committee approval cycles. In fact Tom Peters stated on February 3, 1998 on Charlie Rose show as saying “I got tired of the McKinsey bureaucracy”

- C-level management and boards of directors treat social media, search marketing and Internet advertising like an island instead of integrating it into one’s culture and redesigning processes from scratch to support it – This is disruptive to companies using these products and companies that provide these products alike due to the lack of growth and monetization. But guess what? You can’t redesign these processes without bringing in people with a combination of skills that include both traditional management and the new tools. Right now we have people at the extremes. This doesn’t work.

Carolyn Shelby and I will be giving a talk to c-level executives on these an other related subjects this Wednesday at the Gleacher Center in Chicago. You may RSVP here. It is my first in a series of talks I hope to engage the world in over the coming years as we embrace this great challenge together! I need everyone’s help to help shape this vision and create this reality and maybe some famous quotes around the way. It is the furthering of a conversation that started with my appearance discussing these issues on SEO 101 – it starts at the 13:30 mark. Brian Mark said he’d love to see a Search Engine Strategies session on this, we are still working on fulfilling Brian Mark’s dream (24 minute mark).

I’d like to hear others like John Furrier, Fred Wilson, Dick Costolo and Don Dodge to chime in on this issues first chapter…

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I’d acknowledge the relevancy of Sara’s nomination of Dan Rosenweig but will dismiss Marc Cuban as he’s more focused on acquiring the Chicago Cubs at present.

I’d like to nominate my own slate of nominees all would bring dramatic culture change and growth rather than an expense cutting mantra and I’d enjoy being a part of their team if asked:

Dick Costolo – Yahoo! arguably has the world’s largest mountain of content. Dick is one of the world’s thought leaders on distributing and monetizing content. He is also well qualified to build a culture of customer responsiveness. He also might have played a lead role in the recent Yahoo!/Google monetization deal.

Rich Skrenta – His knowledge of search is highly regarded. His new startup could also be lifted out to build a new company to replace many parts of the old one.

Brad Garlinghouse – Many would argue he understands and communicated the challenges to execution that Yahoo! faces better than anyone and is willing to make his case about it as he did in the peanut butter memo.

Jim Lanzone – If given the chance, it would be fascinating to see him have the resources to execute some of the lofty things he tried at Ask on a shoestring budget.

Those come to mind first, am I missing anyone? I’m certain I’ve missed some people out west that should be considered.

I’ll Tag:

Fred Wilson

Michael Arrington (via Crunchnotes)

John Battelle

Carl Icahn (please give me a shout if you read this)

UPDATE: Michael correctly points out that he’s already written this post…my bad…

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New Ebay API Calls released today
- most watched items
- deals
- related category items
- top-selling products

This uses eBay’s New Services Framework! This is an API upgrade…

Cross Merchandising
- sell products using the brand
- promote contextually relevant market

Merchandising in Action at Ebay.com – Buyer behavior, interests are now creating personalization based on past purchase behavior

Visit developer.ebay.com for access to tools…

SDK upgrades and SDK/JDK for Java…

Many Large Seller Improvements
- Batch upgrades
- Easier variant listing
- Feedback automation
- ASQ: Redirection to CS email
- Invoices: Invoices to A/P email

Making eBay Better
- Create a first-class buyer experience
- Create a trusted marketplace

Improving Buyer Experience:
- Number of recent policy changes improve buyer experience
- Mandating “critical item information”
- Previously optional items, will be mandatory

Shipping
- All items must specify at least one domestic shipping service
- Suggest passing, weight info to auction, suggest passing tracking info back for my eBay…

Return Policy Needs to be Transparent

Paymentsb – Paypal required in most countries…Paypal only in limited markets

Anonymous Member Email Address:
- Anonymous until sale is complete
- Protect buyers from fraud during eBay purchase

New Links Policy:
- Generally speaking, no link off eBay, whether or not an item is being for sale on that site
- Not a comprehensive list, more specifics to come…

Verification of new sellers is occurring

Trusted Selling With Identity Confirmation

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Will the AIM interface ever be fixed? I found posting from IM to be the easiest and fastest method, it’s been broken (or blocked by AIM?) for months dating back to 2007.

What is the status of the Twitter AIM interface? Anybody?

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Wow! That was tiring, I stepped on the L at 7:30AM and didn’t get home until 1:30AM the next morning! 18 hours of pure madness! Most people noticed the great speeches by Gary Vee from Wine Library TV and Dick Costolo (aka ask the wizard) and others. But what I really appreciated was the other things that the day brought to me. When Frank Gruber and Eric started TECH cocktail, one of the goals was to enable the interaction of people and removing barriers between entrepreneurs, funding sources and removing the boundaries between Chicago and the rest of the world.

When I sit at the first TECH cocktail CONFERENCE Chicago watching great speeches and meeting people from startups from both the east and west coasts while talking, playfully joking about Internet concepts and trading ideas with a local Chicago angel investor in the back of the room for hours on end – it’s at that moment one can clearly perceive a vision is starting to become reality…

For a first conference, it was very well run. There were those little things with a venue that didn’t go quite right with the elevators and not having enough power outlets (but you could say that about any conference) but those were out of their direct control. You could see that Eric and Frank went out of their way to challenge the audience about topics that too often go ignored at startups, like how to set up a corporate entity properly, partnerships and most of these challenges and experiments went well.

So what’s next? I’d like to challenge each and every person in TECH cocktail community to take things to the next level by taking the following actions:

1. Follow Up – People need to work to get to know each other better and learn to leverage each person’s special gifts and talents and realize that 1 + 1 > 2 when we behave in this manner. For me, I know that creating new business partners while listening to help iterate the product, data model or service is my area of strength.

2. Change TECH cocktail from an event to an everyday process on your own – a three month cycle time is not sufficient to build relationships to the next level – it’s everyone’s responsibility to make an hour here and there to sit down with someone, learn about what they are doing, give them a fresh perspective and potential assistance. Don’t wait for the next TECH cocktail event. If this means you need to organize your contact info, make that important time investment.

3. Listen to what Dick Costolo had to say about Internet company NDAs and then change your behavior accordingly (where is the video of that speech anyway?) – Stop sending people NDAs that serve no purpose other than to destroy your access to people who are the most qualified to help you. Ideas are a dime a dozen, assembling the right people with the current knowledge and future potential to create that reality is what matters.

4. Go beyond lurking, participate!!! During the conference, I had at least 10 people talk to me about a blog post of mine in detail, yet they’ve never left a comment on my blog. That’s sad. Leaving a comment leaves you a hyperlink back to your business or blog and allows distribution of one’s business network organically removing them as the bottleneck, please use this viral tool.

5. Learn to hire people for their current knowledge, network, blogs and future potential - not legacy job titles and brands – this takes work, research and being involved in the community, but it is how you’ll find the breakthrough thought leaders and future superstars.

6. Become an ambassador to expanding the understanding of the tools we all use and expand our base of understanding to new people outside our core – If you have a client or operate a service do they understand what Internet advertising, blogs, rss, social media, twitter, etc do? If they do is their organizational culture and structure set up to handle it to serve a customer’s needs? Many people know there is a problem but do not know where to start to fix it – I want to help those people as it will ease the adoption and enhance demand for disruptive new Internet services. I’m planning a series of future posts on this important, yet highly untouched topic. If you have examples of success stories or learnings in this area, I’d love to hear from you.

What else would you add to this list? I look forward to your contributions.

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4 startups including Feedburner

Feedburner all founders had same equity percentage – very important to teamwork dynamic and success

Entrepreneurs worry too much about valuation

Market Opportunity – sizing, does the market need it, team, product, market

Location – No Black Swans

Funding
Cash – Don’t kid yourself

CCs, your misunderstood friends – finding the right one

Options/Equity – options, pool, common stock, dilution

Board Meetings – Should be strategic discussions, not operations, board package, timing and who should attend…

Hiring – Best Available Athlete, Roles and Flat Organizations, Hierarchy begets bureaucracy, replace with tools (eg SFA)…Don’t hire for position…hire people that can do almost anything…a jack of all trades…this reminds me of a lot of what BlackRock was like…I sat at 23 desks in 4 years, I don’t know how many projects I worked on during my time there, I understood every process in the company.

No offices. Open culture and communication are critical…

Experience or Enthusiasm?

Performance – performance reviews and subjectivity

KPIs

Growing the team
- Sales and Marketing – don’t hire until you are ready to sell
- Interview process – long

Product Development and Business Strategy
Serendipity and Adjustment – visit to the eye doctor

Launch Late to Launch Often – data models and programs architected for extensibility can beat point solutions every time (I agree this is critical)

Focus and Speed of Execution are a competitive advantage
- Internationalization
- Early biz dev can hurt you, so can any biz dev

Competitive advantage
- Be first to market, not most sophisticated, not the best product, be itirative and fast

Let people you don’t know help you win (open/api) and provide your products/service with the best opportunity to evolve in the market

Startups who ask people to sign NDAs are stupid! Gave a great (and way too fast!) discussion on this…I wish he’d write a detailed blog post of his rant. ?

Quantum barriers to entry and market share – Get market share, market share is the only thing you should focus on.

Revenue plan: Don’t kid yourself. Revenue ALWAYS ramps slower than you think it will.

Don’t do unnecessary things because you think you’re supposed to

Try to let the business model come to you
- Easy to say, not easy to do
- It’s easier to lower the price than to raise the price?
- Look for always on opportunities

Don’t worry about an exit strategy, worry about everything else

Be a big small company
- Public face of the company
- Have a specific voice, have a culture

Be competitive on your merits

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Without further delay, here’s their tips on designing with users in mind!

Be Yourself – informal, fun

Be Fast – the perceived time when people see speed, they perceive the experience and organization as reliable. Image sprites can help this. Steve Souders is a good source on this topic.

Be Willing to Give Up Control – Give yourself permission to outsource certain tasks.

Be Engaged – have a blog, more importantly, be engaged in other blogs. It’s important to get the early adopters and beta testers to help you. It allows you to iterate.

Be Polite – Try to be considerate…from the users perspective.

Be Surprising – Do things outside the norm. Hackathon. Had new feature coding retreat days. Engage random users.

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Problems

Scaling…printers, vendors, etc

Inventory is hard….

The Internet is Serious Business

Dealing with problems that we are not prepared to deal with… (can be an advantage too)

Advantages

Our Users – Do they care? Do they help?

Technology Agnosticism

Awesome Staff – “Innovation comes from the bottom up” – Golden advice on how to build a culture…

Harper then ended with an interesting comment about Bin Laden….implied that he saw some false flag elements…

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Please focus on the second item:

At the time that entry was still in Google blog search, it reached to a dead link. Why is Dell censoring and deleting information about these Inspiron line issues? Do they have something to hide?

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Dell will pay Gladden a $700,000 annual base salary and a minimum target bonus of the same amount next March, plus a $2 million signing bonus, 223,000 restricted shares of stock and options on 922,000 shares, according to a company filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

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“Businesses are not paid to reform customers. They are paid to satisfy customers.”

- Peter Drucker

“An organization’s ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage.”

- Jack Welch

“Innovation is the central issue in economic prosperity.”

- Michael Porter

“Learning is not compulsory…neither is survival.”

- W. Edwards Deming

“There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.”

- Sam Walton

To the rest of you, there is still hope for you and encourage you to come over to the other side.

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What Dell doesn’t know is A) people are now telling me their stories left and right and Dell’s inaction is increasing the likelihood of the groundswell to create the justifiable national Dell Inspiron recall (then maybe Charlene Li can tell the truth about Dell in her follow up book) and B) that when they sent me an email saying they consider this matter “closed” I could see that they then visited my blog several more times yesterday. I currently use a program called whoslookin.com to see who is visiting my blog. I find it beyond hilarious that Dell considers the matter “closed” yet they then visited my blog several more times yesterday further undermining their credibility.   

 Company Name                              Hits/Visits                       Last Request

Dell Computer Corporation                   16                               3:05 PM

I again repeat Danny Sullivan’s words:

 “My plea is simple. Empower your customer service people to simply replace things that don’t work rather than making them jump through whatever procedures you have in place that clearly don’t work.”

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It has had the following problems: slow boot times, frequent blue screens, unreliablity connecting to the Internet due to a flaky Internet card, weak and broken hinges due to a poor design in fact, the Inspiron line got rid of this altogether with the latest redesign, gee maybe it’s because it was a design flaw? 

This matter is made worse by the behavior of a certain inconsiderate Director of Dell’s community program, who rudely interrupted my conversation with a senior person from a major search engine last fall because he thought inspecting my hinges was important at that moment.

Dell was founded on reliable, highly tested equipment that was flawless, this experience and the experiences of others show that is no longer the case, they play word games and do not stand by their products and take responsibility for their design flaws – in fact my mahcine wasn’t even made in the US, which used to be one of Dell’s mantras.

This laptop is an unreliable and poorly designed machine. It is why people like Danny Sullivan and others are switching brands. I agree with my good friend Danny totally when he says:

 “My plea is simple. Empower your customer service people to simply replace things that don’t work rather than making them jump through whatever procedures you have in place that clearly don’t work.”

Update: It appears Dell VP Bob Pearson is more interested in selling new PC’s than creating satisfied customers who would then create positive word of mouth. PR does not equal customer focused culture and process improvement!!!

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It gives me great pleasure to announce these items as best of show:

VinJus – A unique non-alcoholic grape juice drink! Not yet publicly launched, it is scheduled to be distributed shortly. It’s a unique drink. They describe it as:

NAPA VinJus™ – the perfect non-alcoholic aperitif! Refreshing virgin vineyard grape juice – created for your sophisticated palette as an alternative to soda, water or energy drinks. It’s unique balance of crisp, tart and sweet lingers with a hint of green apple, honeysuckle, wildflower and lavender.

Made in the beautiful Napa Valley from early picked varietals, such as Chardonnay and more, this delicious drink is but one single ingredient – mouth watering virgin vineyard grape juice and nothing more! Compared to wine it’s almost half the calories and compared to regular grape juice it’s about half the sugar! And it’s made by a GREEN company!!!

Lucy’s – Smart Cookies. Made with Love. Norfolk, Virginia based Dr. Lucy Gibney M.D. has a son with major food allergies. Lucy describes it best on their website.

Every crispy, crunchy, delicious Dr. Lucy’s cookie is baked without wheat, gluten, dairy milk, butter, eggs, casein, peanuts or tree nuts. But you’d never know it. They taste delicious! We use only high quality ingredients in our carefully controlled bakery to be sure our products meet our tight allergen testing criteria.

Lucy was amazed at the lack of food available to serve that market. Lucy turned to the kitchen in order to change that and once a few varieties were perfected she decided to solve the problem for others without her unique combination of talents. They weren’t even supposed to be at the show, they got added to new items section at the last minute. I’m glad they did, Lucy is a wonderful person and I know her niche product will succeed. Terry Starbucker is already a huge fan.

Blackwing Meats, Inc. – A variety of elk, buffalo, ostrich and other exotic organic meats as wide as I’ve ever seen! They get bonus point for having an highly functional e-commerce site to ship Roger Gerber’s creations directly to you. Even in the down economy Roger says 1st quarter sales were up 77% over the previous year. These items have momentum and the distribution to match it.

Bionade is a unique German based, non-alcoholic refreshment drink that is scheduled to be introduced in the United States later this year. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever tasted, but it is truly outstanding. In Germany the Elderberry is most popular, however I like the Herbs flavor the best (see picture here). If they are able to get shelf space and have an affordable price point, it could easily be a hit in the USA.

Leggio’s herb infused olive oil - Chef Joseph Leggio creates an “amazing” herb infused olive oil product. While there were others at the show with offerings in this vertical, none match the taste of Leggio’s. Joseph started experimenting with the concept several years ago. Then one day asked his wife to ask her dad, a wine maker, to bring over some bottling equipment for him to test with. Though she thought he was crazy, she did it anyway and his hunch paid off, his business is growing quite briskly and he claims to have some other innovative ideas up his sleeve, I can’t wait to see what they are.

Sheila B’s Popcorn (web site under development) – awesome butter flavor, ultra high pop rate, doesn’t dry out upon popping, no aftertaste like most popcorn has and best of all, not really more expensive than other popcorn on the market! Really nice folks too that taught me about the current state of agriculture.

BigHorn Extreme Foods – Peter Andrews has unique sausage offerings as well as tasty buffalo and elk burgers for restaurants and retail outlets.

WowBacon – Amazing clean cooking micro-wave bacon preparer. 6 years to perfect as an invention. Works extremely well the first few times you try it. Durability is a question.

Tre Bella Foods Organic – Gail Tiburzi’s organic Italian foods were inspired by her grandmother’s original recipes. It’s not everyday you meet a former investment banker turned food distributor, my time with Gail was all too short as she had a meeting. I told her to call me if she had time during the rest of the show to compare projects, I guess she was too busy taking orders as I never heard from her!

For those needing last minute Mother’s Day gift ideas, there you go!

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Andrew was a fascinating guest! He was ultra low maintenance and had great stories to tell about living in New Zealand and then moving to the UK,  the music industry and his love for jazz (all too rare in the UK). He is the proud new owner of a Leica D-Lux 3 camera – which takes ultra sweet photos, even at high speed on Lake Shore Drive! More importantly I think I experienced several new things about Chicago that I never had before such as Chicago’s many jazz clubs and music stores. Andrew experienced Italian Beef (pictured below), Greektown and tasty BBQ ribs and cornbread! I’m glad he stopped by for a visit and I hope to see Andrew again someday soon!

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Modalities:                             Usage   Capable phones
Texting                                        50%     100%
Mobile Browser,                         25%      >60%
Downloadable Application        17%      >60%

Application download cons are pretty significant – carrier control, downloading, device management, etc

Browser cons – sign-on, complex navigation, lack of awareness

SMS text message cons – Simplistic UI, Security, Plain Text

Distributing services in the mobile ecosystem requires a highly complex series of relationships.

Wells Fargo and external research shows that there is adoption interest.

Most frequent uses presently: checking balances, fund transfers and activity monitoring

Browser usage presently 2.5 times per week, 66% active users (last three months)

Text banking – 83% of all mobile banking enrollees are including the text banking service. Sending 19 text messages a month overall, becoming more engaged with the accounts overall.

Mobile Contactless Pilot with Visa…

Mobile delivers strategically – when, where, why and how?

What is the potential value?
Customer retention, reducing servicing costs by controlling call center calls, reduced risk and fraud, customer acquisition and usage revenue (P2P, Panic Play, Mobile Contactless, etc)

Security order: SMS, Browser, Application

Mobile customers slant towards a desirable demographic overall due to the very fact they are heavy mobile users.

Future state is for SMS, application and browser to be ubiquitous and the three will be tightly integrated.

Well Fargo is trying to build usage of the channel, not charging for the service at this time. Getting techno-savvy users so servicing has been minimal.

Reaction: I’m highly impressed with the full deployment of SMS, Browser and Application download models as they will be fully able to determine which best meets customer needs based on actual usage data. I chatted up Eskander afterwards and he’s a joy to speak to.

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If people were truly energy conscious, wouldn’t they want these lights to be off in these empty buildings every night, all night? Wouldn’t that do something actually meaningful? Have we gotten to the point where the American media is so incapable of independent thought that a completely meaningless story like this gets way too much attention? It appears so.

It’ll be a real story when all of these empty office buildings have these lights completely turned off in the middle of the night, every night.

Why isn’t this the focus? It should be. 

Others are even more critical of the event.

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What’s upsetting is that just like the mismanagement of the CTA for decades, many of the comments allude to years of neglect and mismanagement by the government of the City of Chicago. CBS put together a story on how to file a claim for damage. Why must everything become a crisis before anybody does anything about these things? Maybe the city and state will put in resources to fix the lack of easy access to entrepreneurial grants and angel investor tax incentives like Wisconson has next – while we still have an economy…

Here are a few answers Chicago Tribune readers gave (some make you laugh and cry at the same time):

Potholes on my entire way to work on Devon Avenue Between Northwest Hwy and Caldwell Ave. Noticed several vehicles with flat tires this morning causing a traffic jam

Westbound on North Ave, there are are at least 2 or 3 massive potholes just before and after Elston Ave. Stay out of the right hand lane

On Webster between Clybourn and Ashland. There is a fifty foot section with about 25 potholes

One more vote for Lincoln Ave. between Petersen and Devon — avoid at all costs if you care about your car

Central Road, from Milwaukee west to River Road. It is like driving a road in a third world county. Cars bob and weave into oncoming traffic. You can’t driver over 20 mph. Someone at county should be fired for letting a road deteriorate to this degree

Just as you get off LSD on to LaSalle North exit going south right lane is full of potholes

Park Ridge: Cumberland Avenue between Devon and Higgins

Worst — take your pick, LSD Irving Park Road to Foster. Second worst — Oak Street underpass northbound to LSD. Third worst. 47th underpass to LSD. Some of these above holes are a foot deep and several feet across

Cicero Ave and Lawrence, in the left hand turn lane on Cicero… it’s like an unavoidable abyss

On westbound Lake Street between Ashland and Western there are so many little potholes the drive seems like you are off-roading

Under the pass to get on Lake Shore Drive from Oak it’s been like that for over a year! Disgraceful! The CTA ride is awful and 311 doesn’t do anything about it! The drivers try to drive on the left side when possible as the busses bounce horribly!

Western bridge going over Belmont, southbound, west lane. They’ve been there for at least a month

Have you seen the pothole on the bridge at Division and Halsted… Big enough to make a person disappear

Westbound on Grand just east of Milwaukee Ave. The whole thing is one series of huge potholes

The pot hole at Archer & Cicero in the northbound lanes just cost me $550 in repairs – yeah lets spend some more $$ on the Olympics -idiots

Like others have said, Cicero between 21st and 51st is a landmine. It’s so bad, I saw a small car driving along and it just disappeared into a hole….lol

I CANT BELIEVE DALEY HAD ALL THAT MONEY TO USE TO TRY AND BRING THE OLYMPICS TO CHICAGO BUT DOEST HAVE ENOUGH MONEY TO FIX OUR STREETS. WHAT ABOUT THE BRIDGE ON 31ST BETWEEN PULASKI AND CICERO IT LOOKS LIKE MINES WENT OFF

Southbound on N. Clark Street, just north of Upper Wacker Drive, right lane swallowed my car. Still can’t find it

Right lanes of Ridge Road in Evanston. Very bad in both directions

The worst pothole is on the east edge of the southbound Fullerton entrance ramp to LSD. A close second are numerous potholes on Halstead between Chicago and Erie. You have to drive like you are going through an obstacle course

Almost all lanes of LaSalle Street between the Lake Shore Drive ramps and the intersection of LaSalle and Clark

4200 South Ashland. Even the CTA bus won’t go near it! And avoid at all costs Pershing Rd. between Halstead and Ashland

Bridgeport – 31st street between the Dan Ryan Expressway and Halstead (especially under the viaduct near Canal St) and the ENTIRE 31st St ramp getting onto the inbound Ryan. I’ve already replaced two tires this year.

Try driving on Cicero Ave. anywhere near the Stevenson. Pot holes deep enough to strand tanks. Been this way for weeks.

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Unfortunately, the one contact I had at Plaxo, Mark Jen, has left to join Tagged.

Someone from Plaxo needs to get in touch with me and rectify this problem and/or revert me to a previous version that I trust. I’m not very happy with you right now at all Plaxo, but I had previously found it’s service useful. The changing of the logo along with this is really destructive to their brand. I hope they do the right thing and fix this and give me a free dedupe for this incredibly foolish action on their part.

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Due to insufficient state funding, the CTA will be forced to raise fares and eliminate service on January 20, 2008.

The CTA will eliminate 81 of its 154 bus routes; lay off more than 2,400 employees; and raise fares to record levels. In addition, with more than 700 fewer buses operating due to the bus route eliminations, the CTA will close three of its eight garages. Service on the remaining routes will be provided by other locations.

The CTA is fighting for funding to avoid these cuts. Contact your state legislators and tell them how important mass transit is to you. Go to SaveChicagolandTransit.com (UPDATE -site is  offline 7/2009) for more information.

Meanwhile, San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit Commission (BART) is scheduling a 33% increase in service while increasing fares a nominal amount (about 5%):

“Just as everyone is winding down with their holiday gift giving, we’re going to deliver our customers a goody bag of great service,” BART Board President Lynette Sweet said. “We hope our plans for richer service will put a big smile on the faces of all our 360,000 weekday riders.”

Starting January 1, 2008, BART riders will see enhanced service including:

• More trains, more often after 7 p.m. Monday-Saturday & all the time Sunday
• Double the trains to most stations on the San Francisco International Airport (SFO)/Millbrae extension
• Faster commutes times and direct service from Millbrae to downtown San Francisco
• Earlier start time for train service to SFO

33% SERVICE INCREASE MEANS MORE TRAINS, MORE OFTEN
The new schedule change will mean more frequent service after 7 p.m. Monday through Saturday and all the time on Sunday. During this time period trains will run every 15 minutes instead of every 20 minutes.

“That’s a 33% increase in service,” BART General Manager Dorothy Dugger said. “We’re extremely excited to be able to offer the same frequency of service at night that our customers currently enjoy during the day. This will be a boon for drivers who are becoming increasingly frustrated with nighttime and weekend traffic jams. We have plenty of parking during this time, giving people a greater incentive to avoid the traffic tie ups, save the environment, jump on BART and enjoy a hassle-free ride.”

FASTER, MORE FREQUENT SERVICE ON SFO AND MILLBRAE LINES
Starting January 1, the popular Pittsburg/Bay Point (Yellow) line will begin serving SFO at all times while the Richmond (Red) line will go directly into Millbrae Station starting January 2 (January 1, BART will run on a Sunday schedule). This means that commuters going from Millbrae to downtown San Francisco will see a six-minute (16%) drop in their travel time.

Which region is truly more green? Which region is more focused on quality of life? It’s amazing how two similar web sites in terms of function can send such massively different messages, isn’t it?

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Many of my thoughts are contained here and I’m kinda busy lately, so linking to this post will serve as a proxy.

I hope your 2008 is most outstanding and prosperous!!!

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I’d like to see this problem fixed by Tmobile preferably (or the map updated) no later than December 28, 2007.

The address is 1000 West Roscoe, Chicago, IL 60657 (Roscoe and Sheffield)

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I wish they would have given more details about the release instead of pointing us back to overly dated speeches on the mobile advertising subject. I would have expected to see more examples than just movie tickets.

Microsoft has the potential to lead this market with it’s array of assets if they are integrated in the right manner – see my post on Web 2.0 was NEVER a business strategy for business strategy ideas.

Maybe they will start a larger conversation on this subject once they see this post? We’ll see.

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Charles Knight from Alternative Search Engines also blogged this session

Websitepros, Tobias Dendel

255,000 customers/providers, 700 employees

It’s a mess to figure out how to position a small business online.

Do I spend money on radio, newspaper, whatever?

Even for a small business a web site is a critical factor in creating trust.

We don’t believe per action will be effective as it’s too complex.

Example, roofer in Indianapolis 15 unique calls and 15 qualified emails.

Local.com, Bruce Crair

1 million people advertising online, 18 million listings which shows the great opportunities still ahead.

Too many choices, the small business owner is confused. Even if they do understand the choices, the cost is hard. Then how do they create an ROI?

Most businesses don’t have websites, they need them to do the job. They need to figure out how to make the data accurate. All too often, it’s not.

Any business can do it. Just doing paid without organic is a waste of time.

Pay for placement, click bundles, pay per click, make sure you start witht eh simple stuff first.

Locallaunch, Justin Sanger

150 people, thousands of orders per week.

We intended to create the SME (Small Medium Enterprises).

Innovation outpaces adoption.

The innovation is amazing and significant. The SMEs don’t feel this. These enterprises are not yet able to take advantages.

Destinations and inventory abound.

Yahoo! local and Google local  provide new experiences all the time. Vertical search plays nice together with geos. This is pretty complex.

Who is winning?

Yellowpages are winning due to directional relationships

Pure Plays

RH Donnelly is a sales company. Google and Yahoo! realize this and are partners.

Margin pressure is intense and unsustainable.

Marketplace trends

Sales Organizations are driving the experience for SMEs

Content aggregation is a strategically vital business strategy

SME aggregators strive to collect and store richer, vertical-specific local business content

IYP is an old heading. It is now simply local search

Pure sales organizations are selling at non-sustainable margin – this is a critical driver of consolidation or service pressure

PPC pricing pressure will further compound an already fragmented marketplace

Marchex, Scott Finholm

We are a local online advertising company and leading publisher of local content.

Advertisers of all sides, we work with sales forces to teach them how to sell search.

Sites:

SEM and SEO aren’t the same thing

A great site isn’t necessary..but a “good” site is…

Services:

Can’t automate creativity

All businesses are not created equal

Clicks and calls both matter

Sales:

Small businesses look to trusted, proven providers

Simple product = more sales

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Should organizations be smaller like tree trunks instead of the traditional pyramids?

How can this change take place if most leaders don’t know it’s necessary and are not up to speed about what to do or how to do it even if they acknowledged the issue?

How will recruiting morph to put the generalist thought leaders in place to lead this change – perhaps those with competencies derived in other industries or through accelerated self learning?

Other coverage of Seth Godin’s Search Engine Strategies Chicago speech:

Meatball Sundaes and the Smelly Old Guard

Seth Godin Tells Marketers How to Avoid Meatball Sundaes

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Marketing (r)Evolutions

Mass advertising on passive customers was what used to work.

People sleep while watching TV, hard to pay attention to advertising when sleeping.

Sleeping while surfing the Internet is not something that happens.

Godaddy.com Super Bowl XL TV commercials didn’t use the same model on the web site. Did Godaddy leave money on the table.

Money is better than traffic.

Apple had to give rebates due to word of mouth on iphone pricing.

Marketers still think customers are dogs.

But search puts the power of when and how in their hands (the sonsumer).

Overcoming sales friction – 85% of car purchases start online – you arrive knowing more than the salesman in many cases. Attack of the blogs – Consumers trust other consumers more than marketers. 54% resist, 56% avoid, 69% block ads – yet we still want to buy.

Customers will control the conversation. People have forgotten how to have relationships.

The web is a major influencer, a mere 26% of consumers were SATISFIED with the experience. They are missing the BASICS. Conversation rates are continuing to fall.

All new brands are based on the experience model. Invest in the customer experience.

We are obsessed with the how many, not the who. This needs to change.

Customers desire great and meaningful experiences.

SCENT, ads must think it has scent to be useful.

80% of traffic dies off within three clicks.

GEICO – connects the story…

Zafu – bras in launch video didn’t match website.

Usability – Frederick Winslow Taylor is the father.

We are all connected and customers will control the conversation. It involves persuasion architecture!!!

Traffic generation is about money. Don’t imitate your competitors. It’s the tiny pieces that matter. Focus on making your service better.

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What you’ll find on that site is a rather revolutionary tool that allows you to set a custom alert for the expressway of your choice based on traffic speed. If the data is accurate this could be highly useful. Let’s say you normally leave to go somewhere at 6:45AM based on normal traffic. This tool apparently allows you to set up a 6:15AM alert if the road was moving below 20MPH so you could start your trip earlier. Sure this tool could still be more granular in both speed and in picking the exact section of road you want on that expressway but this trend towards a self-service, but a micro-controlled alert is nothing short of revolutionary compared to the traffic radio mass distribution model.

Chicago area commuters can now set up their own alerts here. I’d be interested in hearing about people’s usage stories and potential suggestions in the comment section, perhaps IDOT is listening.

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CHICAGO

I’ve learned that certain merchandise that was once carried by Kmart, yes Kmart, is now carried in the landmark Marshall Field’s store that is presently labeled Macy’s.

There will be a rally at noon Sunday to bring back the great name of Marshall Field’s, prior to the NY Gaints game against the Bears in downtown Chicago (60602).

Jim McKay had this to say about the Black Friday Marshall Field’s protest:

How successful was it? Over 8,000 leaflets and over 1,300 buttons were distributed on State Street over the two days. Friday’s distribution exceeded our previous busiest day (Saturday, December 23, 2006) by roughly two-and-a-half times! Part of this was due to an unprecedented number of shoppers on State Street. Another part of this was simply those former Field’s shoppers who came to check out what was happening in the building that used to house their favorite store and were unhappy. They came in droves to get leaflets in buttons. At more than a few times, people stood in line to get leaflets and buttons from us. A couple of times, the lines were 10-12 people wide, although 5-7 people wide was more typical. That’s right–people waiting in line for buttons that say, “Forever Marshall Field’s” and leaflets explaining why it is important to continue boycotting Macy’s until Marshall Field’s is restored in service and quality as well as name. It was quite unprecedented. What’s more, there were those who picked up a leaflet or button or both and then came back minutes for even hours later with other family and friends to get more.

Amazingly, it appears the movement to bring back Marshall Field’s seems to be growing stronger over time in Chicago!

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Registrant:
 Facebook, Inc
 156 University Ave, 3rd Floor
 Palo Alto, CA 94301
 US

 Domain name: FACEBOOKS.COM

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I’m not going to rant about it, others have quite well…

Techcrunch

Kevin Burton

Zoli’s blog

Deep Jive Interests

WinExtra

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At first I was thinking this would be a long speech, it was in actuality a short, crisp presentation followed by a spirited, fun and playful question an answer session. It far exceeded my expectations and Kevin Ryan should be commended for having this type of community event.

Now onto a discussion of his new book, Meatball Sundae. The foundation for a new economy is being built. The past several years have laid the foundation for a new industrial revolution.

Told the detailed story of Josiah Wedgewood and his high standards for pottery.

There are 14 main themes occurring right now in the world – though there are many smaller and industry specific trends playing out. These 14 trends are (I typed them fast in a live blog situation so I might not have them exactly right):

- Direct communication with customers is creating massive change

- Individuals can amplifying their voice and become a critic – these are not hassles to be dealt with. The answer is building an organization that thrives and survives on this…

- Having an authentic story is vital

- We don’t have attention spans anymore (why are you still reading this post? )

- The new marketplace long tail – very few organizations are embracing it

- Create innovation – If you can describe a job it can get done by somebody cheaper

- Google and the shredding of information and bundling

- Noise and infinite channels of communication

- Consumers can talk directly to consumers without the middleman or company

- The changing balance of scarcity and abundance – it’s hard to imagine people being bored

- Big ideas can reach many people quickly

- The shift from how many to who – the idea of being on the today show instead of a blog is higher value is over

- Democratization of the wealthy – the gap between the rich and poor is getting wider but the rich is going up

- Gatekeepers are more important as they distribute information yet less important as you can go around them easier than ever

After the short speech on the trends there was a free for question and answer session…

Is your marketing out of sync?

SG: They should say how change your marketing (what you do) so that it’s in sync with what the market demands.

Why don’t most companies get it yet?

SG: I spent many years selling advertising. People buy TV advertising, it’s fun and it’s not measurable. When the Internet came along and they went running to Yahoo! to buy ads that aren’t measuring. Google and Overture were used by small business people in the ad. The choice is Superbowl ads that don’t work and measurable ads that are harder to make work. It’s naïve to hope that they will shift in a month or a year. They will eventually have to shift. The prices will continue to go up. People still applaud the commercial not the SEM.

(At this point the Gmail javascript froze all of my browsers. I had to reboot and relaunch. OF COURSE THIS WAS THE MOMENT KEVIN RYAN CHOSE TO ASK THE QUESTION I SENT IN – SO I’LL HAVE TO WAIT FOR THE AUDIO THERE.)

Where do you find thoughtleaders to lead organizations and instead of hiring people with “experience”?

SG: I wrote a post on a similar topic about the loss of relevancy of credentials today. Basically, there are two types of leaders qualified to do this:
- People who have managed change before
- Idea people who don’t necessarily know better

How do make a corporate blog work?

SG: Blogs don’t reach people, people reach blogs… You need to be quick and candid. It’s all about change and being iterative in nature.

Everyone attending SES Chicago will receive a copy of Seth’s book. I look forward to continuing our conversation and maybe even hearing his answers because Gmail’s javascritpt won’t be interfering with his in person appearance!

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New term POST

People

Objectives

Strategy

Technology (notice how this is listed last? Charlene pointed out that this is on purpose! In other words don’t execute until you have things thought through!)

Mantra: Embrace your customer to turn revolt into reformation

Ask yourself: How do you turn (customer) revolt into revolution?

Hopefully both speeches will be online later.

What was the high point of the speech for me that told me that a revolution was taking place at Forrester?

It was when Charlene pointed to a technology adoption benchmarking slide and then put a red X through it saying “don’t pay attention to that”!!!!

What does this mean to me? It means that benchmarking it starting to die due to the increased cycle times and shorter shelf life of information. I’ve long felt that you can’t benchmark your way to the top. You have to lead and take risks. To lead and take risks you must have the top generalist thought leaders of our times on your team. People who understand things like search engine optimization as a strategic tool, social media, bottom up communities and cultures, defining a defensible data model from the start and who practice customer listening for their innovation.

After Charlene, Christie Hefner gave an amazing speech about the history of Playboy’s brand and demonstrated how it’s always been customer focused dating back decades and how it’s embracing the demise of the one to many media model. I hadn’t been aware of this but Playboy has had a mobile presence since 2002! Wow.

She also talked about the brands usage in search and have it’s a frequent search term. In fact a quick check of Google trends indicates a large lead in search volume for Playboy over the New York Times.

Her speech was fascinating from the historical side, yet the brand of Playboy is softening as it’s constantly evolving, Charlene’s conversation was far more disruptive and unnerving to many of the people seated around me. Yet it became clear to me that Playboy is a company that has lived many of today’s social media principles long before they were fashionable.

In in the end, it’s all about building a bottom up culture that has the executive support to constantly innovate. Most people don’t get that yet and if they do it’s even more unlikely that they view customers and other stakeholders as critical to success. We are just starting this journey and I can’t wait to participate fully in the fun parts of this revolution to come!

fcf07

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Anyone else have some travel/security tips?

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Quite likely the busiest session of the day to the fullest house. One can’t help but notice that if Greg Jarboe had gone to Google and designed Universal Search himself he likely couldn’t have designed it to play into his strength areas in news and pr related issues. The implications and transformation for universal search are still evolving, but they are clearly changing the landscape. One other thing that became clear from this event was that Ask is becoming a serious contender in this marketplace.

Greg Jarboe –

Universal search is the biggest event since “Florida” update. 70% of what I used to know is now obsolete. The patterns are not yet clear in personalization.

News results ranked #4 if you searched for the term iPhone on June 29

In the #8 position, was a Youtube video. We don’t know if it was done on purpose.

July 17, Rupert Murdoch – news with image – brings up a whole new reputation management – be prepared to optimize images.

Early chapters of Henry Potter were leaked, the blog results are on page one of results

Investor relations now is moving to the front page of Countrywide. Few companies have complete control of their brands now on Google.

Unflattering images of Hillary Clinton and that vast right wing conspiracy is building links to unflattering results.

Blogs on Hurricane Dean already on front page. Images will likely come next.

All of the rules have been rewritten – how do I research this? Focus on the upper left links. News seems to be on the top left all the time. Search remains #1 way journalist find information about a company.

Newsknife and Google News Report – be checking this. Your PR people aren’t ready for that yet. If you are not giving a jpg file in a release, start now.

Google News right now doesn’t do video news. Likely to create that.

Social mapping tools can help identify most influential bloggers. In certain categories they show up.

A couple of years ago there was vertical creep session here at SES – I now rank for that term. Not a good thing.

You can’t afford to ignore Universal Search Today

Google is making specialized or vertical content more visible through Universal Search

Sherwwod Stranieri, Catalyst Online

This throws a lot of  curves into the theme. Ask 3D and Google cut new paths.

Conventional web pages that once rank well are going to move around maybe down. Other things will move updates.

Number of videos is significant in the Youtube world. Are the search engines using comments as an indicator?

We are looking at it as search marketers. Showed client example.

How to look at it: Google PR, Y! Page links, keyword phrases in tags.

Videos ranking correspond well with views, comments, etc.

Bill Slawski

Why does news, images and video show up there.

I’m not sure I see this all as a revolutionary concept. How do we get out content into our results.

Showed examples of screen prints from each engine for the word spider.

Showed the Google patent, oddly looks quite different than Google’s universal search does now.

Google acquired several Infoseek patents.

Discussed Onebox and log file data.

Ranking in Vertical databases – how do you rank for that vertical?

User behavior – key value pairs, be certain definition and being defined. Questions and Answers work the same way. Html formatting may play a role.

Enhancing the user experiences.

David Bailey – Google
Technical lead for the vertical search.

What are our goals?

Make google.com the search box of first resort.

Display special features for special results

Keep it fast. Keep it simple. Above all, keep it relevant.

Showed example: origami crane

This will continually improve and extend to more result types.

It’s still about the web.

But: think about creating quality content in other forms. Expect similar SEO guidelines to apply.

Create quality content, describe it well and we’ll see what happens.

Tim Mayer, VP Product Management

We are transitioning to a better optimized user experience

Freshness and user intent became relevancy issues.

News, local and other verticals – the possibilities are infinite. Federation plays a role.

Some implantation examples:

Music Artist Shortcut

Movie Shortcut

Hotel Shortcut Inline

Consumer Electronics Shortcut

As we go forward, it’s going t be more about the intent of the searchers.

Eric Collier, Director of Product Management

“We are the scrappy innovator of search.”

Ask.com 3D: SERP Design

We moved the content up top and removed the top links.

Large jumps in user satisfaction seen in both the site analytics and surveys

Increase in vertical channel usage

Starting to see a reduction of multiple query sessions around the same keyword term.

Expect to see a larger percentage of SERPs with blended results

User location will play a larger roles in SERPs

Expect to see fewer web results in SERPs

Blogs, Images and Video results will take online reputation into account when ranking

Pay attention to other search drivers

Other coverage of this important session:

RB Digital Boots

Rustybrick

AIM Clear Blog

Lee Odden’s Toprankblog

Bonus coverage:

Lee Odden interviews Tim Mayer

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So it begs the question, what if the backbone of the Internet was to fail or be attacked in some manner, how much chaos would ensue?

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David Sifry today announced that he has stepped down as CEO of Technorati. While the search for a new CEO continues, Teresa Malo (CFO), Dorion Carroll (VP-Engineering), and Derek Gordon (VP-Marketing), will manage the day-to-day operations of the company. Sifry will become “Chairman of Technorati’s board”. What does it ultimately prove? It again clearly demonstrates that Internet experience is not the primary indicator of Internet executive future success.

Hello people. Technorati did a redesign that refocused on mainstream media as I noted in my earlier post the death of blog search. Then Technorati used tags to grow traffic from other search properties. As Arrington asked in early June “When will the Technorati traffic party end?” Apparently Google and others took notice of this and the party ended in July based on Alexa data – I’m surprised Michael did not discuss this at length today in his post actually. This dip exposed the payday to payday advertising dollar budgeting leading to the departure of Sifry and 8 others. It should be noted that this followed the dismissal of several other employees during the July 4th holiday.

Looking at a May 9th Mashable post, it seems that around $1 million was raised when it expanded a round of funding from 10.52 Million to 11.52 Million. It appears that Technorati was spending more cash than it was taking in, even before the traffic decline in July, based on the early July layoffs. The traffic decline in July only made that situation worse.

This leaves Technorati in the unenviable position of needing to generate new advertising dollars at a time when the engineering needs an overhaul it can’t afford. Repairs such as Typepad blog overcounting, flawed link metrics and many other flaws can not occur at this time.

In fact, someone suggested to me in a phone conversation today that perhaps they should shut Technorati off completely now and just sell it’s likely most valuable asset – a 301 redirect of the Technorati domain. The talk of taking Technorati public via IPO will likely be nothing more than that talk in David Sifry’s previous blog posts.

So where is a blog searcher to go now?

Ask – They have recently revamped their offering dramatically and comment search is now combined with post search. It is an offering that is available directly on their front page.

Google – They should move blog search to the front page as I suggested previously and ideally should build and option to show it mixed with news sites.

Icerocket – Plain, simple, no nonsense blog search.

Other players like Topix, if they were to index the blogosphere fully, could also emerge as an alternative that would properly mix news and blogs together demonstrating that most news is being lifted from blogs by the mainstream media.

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Did they release new software into the network without testing it fully? Who knows, but that would be my best guess.

One of Skype’s best features has historically been reliability. If they lose that, people will likely rapidly migrate to other solutions.

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How does one avoid this? Simple. Integrate blogging into your C-level management team. Don’t have any bloggers in your C-level management team or board of directors? Maybe it’s time to consider a new approach altogether with fresh faces. Is a highly educated and experienced person who is a blogger, with startup and innovative company experience mutually exclusive? No. But it’s a requirement if you are going to win in today’s increasingly complex world that requires broad generalist thinkers to navigate not only the blogosphere, but the constantly changing world we live in everyday. Stop building organizational pyramids from 1975 and start building effective organizations that look more like tree trunks! An informal survey at Blogher07 showed that are almost all self taught people and therefore innovators of the future.

So, where are your C-level bloggers? I know where you can find more than a few that understand that blogging is about living the Peter Drucker principles of innovation and customer listening.

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“”At some point you think, we all think, it’s time to let somebody else do this,” said the 58-year-old. “Somebody else might have a different, fresher approach.”"

No kidding! I’ve stated previously that UPS is not customer service focused and I’ve advocated major changes in the way UPS does business for a long, long time! If that board of directors ever wants to build an efficient company that package RECEIVERS love, my contact info is on my bio page.

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” The McCormick Convention Center is, unsurprisingly, operated by a series of labor groups who, working hand in hand, rip apart the building and put it back together to fit the needs of whichever group happens to be renting space here. So for YearlyKos, the teamsters, and the plumbers, and the electricians all come in to haul partitions, and divert piping, and… lay wiring. One catch is, of course, that the more wiring you need, the more you have to pay. The other, less obvious catch, is that any wiring you try to do yourself–running extension chords and power strips across the room–might well violate your contract and cost you a big fine. So the result is a lot of dead laptop batteries. At a frickin’ blogger convention.”

Matthew Yglesias points out similar sentiment.

Then last weekend Kristy Sammis, the wonderful hard-working conference organizer, pointed out the following issues on her blog in regards to Blogher07:

“The City of Chicago has a lot of rules. A LOT of them. And also taxes. And fines. Like, did you know that there’s a 3% soda tax? Or that our caterer could have lost his license for letting attendees leave with bottles of wine, even though the nice people at Hess were willing to give the extras out? Or that moving one single air wall would have cost FOUR HOURS of labor?”

“The shuttles cost approximately 18 billion dollars. (They would have only cost 17 billion, but we paid that extra billion to have a dedicated dispatcher ensuring that all five shuttles were running all day.)

I do not know why the drivers didn’t know where they were going. I don’t know why they just sometimes stopped showing up. I don’t know why they weren’t labeled, a la BLOGHER SHUTTLE. And I really don’t know HOW you can get into an accident when you’re driving at 3 miles an hour in Pier traffic.

But I, too, would sure like to find out.”

Kristy so would I. Why is Chicago turning off it’s last golden goose, the conference industry? If we can’t run shuttle buses less than a mile for 800 people how can this city possibly even dream of executing on hosting huge events with the current state?

As someone who spends alot of time at Chicago conferences, the time to improve these situations is now – before there are no more Chicago conferences.

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Without a doubt, Mobile Location Enabled Services is a premier and unique event due to the variety of verticals in one place. Abbie Badcock has brought together a great mix of mobile search, mobile marketing and advertising, mobile local content, mobile social networking and a serious discussion to building the conversation regarding the resolution of the many to the realization of the potential of mobile location. I look forward to participating and driving the conversation in future years.

Symbian – Jerry Panagrossi, VP, US Operations, Symbian

The original STAR TREK Comunicator 1965-69

Fast forward to the 21st Century – PND, GPS Bluetooth, etc

1 Billion mobile phones shipped in 2006

Mobile subscribers projected 3 Billion by YE2007 and 4 Billion by YE 4 Billion!!!

Showed chart migrating from voice, data enabled then 3G phones – many with built in GPS.

Showed chart with why smart phones have high mobility and utility more than other presently available devices. Symbian believes that there is going to be mass market adoption.

Mobile Telecoms + Internet + Location Services + Automotive = Innovation

Emerging Disruptive Market Forces
Mobile Market Saturation
Open Mobile Platforms
Ad$ (advertising)

Data Services Deployment Trend
- Market Saturation
- 3G Deployment
- Service Rollout
- Smart Phone Adoption

Traditional economies are saturated with cell phones while others are not.

LBS ranks highest in consumer interest – survey Compete, Inc.

Services Segmentation – Public Safety, Consumer, Enterprise

Sports Tracker

Pixto, recently acquired my Nokia. Shows amazing technology that will categorize photos by location and combine is with relevant data about the location.

LBS Deployment challenges
- Locations indoors, underground, tunnels
- Reflection with large buildings
- A-GPS evolution
- Wifi
Database fragmentation
- Traffic updates and POIs
- Mobile data roaming – predictable billing when roaming internationally

A glimpse of the future
- Improved smartphone car communication

Trueposition – Joseph Khoury – VP of Business Development

$200 Million in Revenue, 480 employees, 100 international patents, subsidiary of Liberty Media

Incorporates all location technologies

History of company started with E911 emergency services in the USA.
Asset Tracking
Secure inter-carrier location information provider

Trueposition offers high accuracy Finder System, 75,000 Base Stations Deployed, 270 million POPs covered in the US.

High Accuracy Wireless Location System – best in class platform.

Finder System Benefits
Consistent accuracy across entire network – better than 50 meters most of the time – also incorporates velocity, heading power level signal to noise ratio.

Consumer interest – Turn by Turn Navigation

Market growth is happening again, but has conditions in a complex cross-industry ecosystem.

Drivers of LBS demand ramp up are many and they are complex.

Is getting into the business of building devices.

Mark Jacobstein, EVP, Loopt

Amazing privacy advocate, doesn’t store what they don’t need.

Monetizing Local Content for the Mobile Marketplace

Presentation was rapid fire short statements – amazingly engaging – hard to take notes on though.

Peter Friedland, Analyst, Soliel Group
Charnsin Tulasthien, Product Manager – Consumer Application and GPS Solutions, Sprint
Michael Nappi, VP of Media Development, Traffic.com
Christ Hazelton, Senior Analyst – Mobility Device Technology and Trends, IDC

Charnsin – How do we provide relevant POIs?

Michael – There are other areas to discuss in regards to bringing in advertising in context.

In regard to traffic, we brought in traffic information to you originally via alerts. The data can be brought into mobile and GPS applications. When traveling it’s an informational thing. I might be looking for more information in an unfamiliar information. These models will flourish.

Charnsin – Traffic is just another piece of information. We can provide not only alerts, but rerouting information.

Will it be the walled garden? The Google or Yahoo! approach?

Charnsin – There are things that are accessible via our phones.

LBS Advertising will users accept it?

Michael – We deliver information on an opt-in basis. Click per Route. Advertising based alerts. We own the content and vertically integrate it all the way up. Phones are becoming multimedia devices more each day. There is a lot of useful advertising models. There is an integration from focus groups that will lead the way.

Mobile Search Panel – Mobile Search + Location = Fulfilled User Expectations?
Jeff Rice, VP Market Development, Skyhookwireless
Matt Ward-Sheinman, Director of Product Management, Medio Systems
Neal Karasic, Director of Product Management, Jumptap
Steve McGuigan, VP Business Development, Hallmark
Peter Classen, Director of Business Development, Infospace

How is it appropriate?

Matt: The advantages of having it in your pocket is great. The comparison to the Internet is not accurate.

Steve: It comes down to relevancy and speed.

Peter: I aggress as well. The difference between web vs. mobile. Frisbee is a good example. If someone is typing that in a mobile phone they probably want to buy one at a store.

Location based, which ones are tied to a search.

Peter: 90%+

Matt: Statistically not very good. 15% percent are local search, though this is undercounted. You get ringtone content and other related items.

Steve. A search can be about sports,

Neal: User supplied location is not ideal. Most people search near home, so that is important data. Yesterday, I looked for a taxi in Detriot even though I was still in Boston. There are things around that.

Peter: I agree with Matt about the Madonna. It’s better when you can add the local context to the search.

Pizza, question on voice search

Peter: It would be great but it’s complex. We partner with Voicebox.

Peter: Human assisted search won’t work. Mobile search only when it’s free. Consumers are free.

Matt: Search on the Internet and advertising. I expect a rich client app to be there. There is a cost to a GPS fix. It needs to be free and advertising supported. Put them in when appropriate. Never sacrifice the user experience.

Neal: I basically agree. Search being free. That is the model that is going to work and users expect. We bring advertisers to the table. We want the ecosystem to work.
Steve: Local search and directories haven’t changed enough for mobile. Until we get there we need to use the directory model.

Jeff: We are reworking the paid model in Internet, I understand that is changing….

Matt: Carriers want to defend their advertisers. It’s hard to go across the operator networks. Google and Yahoo! have tried. They have large groups.

Neal: We partner.

Profit from Proximity Based Marketing
David Williams, CEO and Publisher LBS Globe
Jay Gould, VP of Business Development, Profilium Inc.
Scott Pearson, VP Sales, Enpocket
Brian McNiff, Vice President of Marketing, Technocom Corporation

How fast is locational proximity going to factor in?

Jay: We believe that throwing location in the mix is critical.

Brian: We believe it’s vital to mobile marketing. I got 4 Starbucks sms messages today. For small business to justify moving away from the yellow pages, we need to see it.

Jay: We need to build the value chain going up.

Brian: The operators are giving

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After sifting through what occurred, we figured this to be the current state:

1) Skype appears to now install as the default setting integration of your Microsoft Outlook.

2) This only displays and you only have the option to change this when you have Microsoft Outlook open.

We discussed my preference for this to be an opt-in with a large text encouraging the opt-in. Chaim said he would pass this onto the Product Management team and get back to me at some point in the future. He also said that Skype has had over 5 million downloads on Windows Mobile platform! That’s alot. We also talked about the N800, if you haven’t checked out my interview with the Nokia N800 product manager Victor Brilon please do so.

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After installing it, I noticed that it now puts highlights phone numbers on web pages so you can call them in one click, this is sorta cool.

Later, I noticed it had autoloaded my entire address book from Outlook into Skype. This is not cool as I don’t remember being asked for permission to do this among other reasons. Any idea on how to revert this change?

Please let me know if you get any unexpected messages from me of any kind regarding Skype. Thank you.

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Oddly the iphone + Blendtec blender on eBay is selling for above retail of both items new. People will buy the strangest things.

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We’re sorry, but your inbox is temporarily unavailible while we do some routine maintenance.
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Notice the spelling, here’s a screen print. Is this what a $6 Billion dollar spelling error looks like?

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1) NO SERVICE.

2) BUSINESS MEMBER? – STILL NO SERVICE.

3) BAD DESIGN.

4) RELEVANCY.

A little bit too harsh perhaps, but I’ll I’d add some constructive suggestions to his list:

A) Data cleansing – Linkedin should make it a priority to combine duplicate accounts as they are disrespectful to a user when they are forced to view and interact with dead accounts. They should also make the last login date viewable for the same reason.

B) Explain and put focus on the value of endorsements and competencies over company brands and job titles and prioritize them accordingly. I was at a dinner party recently and overheard a woman say “those endorsements don’t mean anything who knows who wrote that stuff.” Linkedin has failed to promote what I thought was it’s most valuable asset and make it a driver of usage, this is unfortunate.

Linkedin needs to take drastic action to improve it’s customer service and data quality. They should also leverage it’s most valuable assets like endorsements of former co-workers more wisely amongst users who do not currently utilize them.

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Without further delay here are the comments that left URL addresses or made pingbacks – I think I removed the duplicates:
:: jozjozjoz ::
365questions.org
Aaron Brazell
Abe Olandres
Adam Hertz
Adam Lasnik
adrian
Agerhart
Alan Wilensky
Alexandre
An ongoing Press Release
anatol
Andrew
Andy Beal
Angela Vargo
annieo
Atari
Cartoon Barry Blog
Barry Schwartz – Search Engine Roundtable
Bill Hanekamp
Bill Slawski
Blogging Pro
BlogSchmog
Blueheart Blossip
blyberg
Brian
Brian Ray
Brian’s Business Blog
Bryan Eisenberg
BusinessBlogWire
byron
Carl Bromley
Carolyn Shelby
Charlotte Web Design
Chris Garrett
Chris Messina
chris williams
Craig Smith
Dakars
Dan
Dan Schawbel
Dana Todd
Daniel Sitter
Dave Pasternack
Dave Van de Walle
Me in Chicago
David Sifry
China Search Marketing Tour
David Temple
Dawn Douglass
Digged Stories
discreet_chaos
Don MacAskill
dwlt
Easton Ellsworth
Ed French
Ed Kohler
Ed Kohler
El Cable
Elaine Vigneault
Eli Sand
EveryDigg
Famous Quotes – Famous Sayings
Florchakh
For once and for all!
Forever Geek
Frank Gruber
Garrett French
Geeky Housewife
gl hoffman
Glenn Sheiner
Guy
Henri Duong
Hiten Shah
Ian Kennedy
Bill Slawski
Inside the Mind of an Internet Marketer
Internet Marketing Monitor
Internetno
Ivan Minic
Jakob
Jason Alba
Jason Bartholme
Jason Jacobsohn
Jeff Barson
jennifer jones
Jeremiah Owyang
Jeremy Zawodny
Jim Santo
Joe C
Joel Lemieux
John
John
John Carcutt
johno
Jonathan-C. Phillips
Joost
JR
K T Cat
Karl Long
Kathie Thomas
Kathy Sierra
Kevin Dugan
Kevin Lee
Kevin Makice
Kris Kolodziej
Kyle Korleski
Kyle Libra
Lake Neuron
Lawrence Lugar
Lee Odden
Life Rocks ! 2.0
Liz Strauss
Lorelle
Loren Baker
lucas josh
Manataseosolutions
Marketing Strategy Innovation Blog
Mathpoints
Matt Keegan
Mexico501
Michael Arrington
Michael’s Views
michaelzimmer.org
Mike Maddaloni
Mikerochip
ModernMagellans
Nancy
Nashville SEO
Nate Koechley
Neil Patel
Netpaths
News Doggy
Next Google CEO
Nice
Nick Chandler
Nicki Dugan
Not So Relevant
Nunsuni
Office-Ninja.net
OFlaherty
Ordinary Folk
paisley
Pamela
Pascal Van Hecke
Pat Phelan
Patrick Schaber
Perfect Blogger
Pete Cashmore
Pete Prestipino
Peter Harkins
pigduck.com
PR meets the WWW
Problogger
ProfitPapers
Project Syndicate
Ranking Konzept
Reality Me » Today’s Political Video
RichardatDELL
Robyn Tippins
rod/techfold.com
Ryan M
Robert Scoble
SEA Expert NL
Sean
Search Engine Land
Search Engine People
SELaplana
SensibleWords
shel israel
Shoemoney
Showeb2.0
SirNuke
SMSWorld.
spacecowboy ian
Steven
Sumit Chachra
Takuya
TechCrunch en francais
TechFold
Technology Evangelist
TechTxt.Org
The Article Writer
Chris Dinges
The Wannabe Venture Capitalist
TheBizofKnowledge
TheVanBlog
Tilak
Tom Shelley
tom sherman
Toma e Embrulha
University Update
Vidize.com
Weblog Tools Collection
WebProNews
Website Magazine
Wendy Piersall
Whoisandrewwee
Wiglaf
WildBlueSkies
William C. Spaulding
WindyBits
techtagg.com
Xbil
Year Zero at (((withoutsound)))
ymarketing
Zeppelin Media Blog

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There are too many things to list from a user standpoint, here are just a few:

1) No resume posting section in the jobs section. The reply to blind ads system in America is completely broken, why build another one? Why not create some unique value.

2) The user interface to reply to an ad is not good. Manually entering a bunch of data on a screen with a captcha is just plain brutal.

Improve and refine the data categories and user interface and then please try again. Thank you.

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Read Jerry’s thoughts here on the Yahoo! blog

Official Releases

I can’t say I’m totally shocked by this based on recent events. No need to rehash those – you can read those on the other blogs and outlets.

Although it was clearly emotional and difficult for all, it was unique and class move the way that they did it with Terry participating in the call announcing his departure.

Good luck to Jerry Yang in his new role and congrats to Susan on her promotion. I look forward to hearing from them again with more details shortly.

It would be great if Jerry Yang was to reach out to members of the blogosphere to hear and see their thoughts and it would be delightful to actually share those ideas with him. It should be a top priority if the company is to regain it’s prominence.

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Here are some concerns about the TSA the other 1% of the time and in the handling of this case:

1) In March when returning from the CTIA conference in Orlando, I took a bottle of water through security. The TSA agent allowed me to consume it on the spot and toss the container. As he should have. Why the inconsistency in treatment? The issue of TSA inconsistency is a serious one.

2) On my way to Orlando, I experienced a TSA agent who screened my bag 4 times and was downright rude. So rude in fact that I filled out a complaint form upon my return and received a form letter from the TSA two days later. The body language of the first man in this video with the woman is almost exactly the same I experienced and we should see the whole tape. So why the selective video release of the woman spilling/dumping the water? What is the TSA hiding? I’d like to request in the interest of fairness that the TSA immediately release the WHOLE VIDEO. This will likely not be so flattering to the TSA. 

3)  Since we as travelers pay fees for the TSA to operate, why aren’t we treated like the customers that we truly are?

4) 2008 candidates for President have questioned the TSA in general. In his May 22, 2007 speech, “In the Name of Patriotism”, Ron Paul stated:

“The war mentality, and the pervasive fear of an unidentified enemy, allows for a steady erosion of our liberties, and with this our respect for self reliance and confidence is lost.  Just think of the self sacrifice and the humiliation we go through at the airport screening process on a routine basis.  Though there’s no scientific evidence of any likelihood of liquids and gels being mixed on an airplane to make a bomb, billions of dollars are wasted throwing away toothpaste and hairspray and searching old women in wheelchairs.”

The inability to have a consistent culture and the selective release of video shows serious problems at the TSA that needs to immediately addressed. The selective release of the partial video is outrageous. It’s sad that an incident like this had to occur to bring the national spotlight to this issue. I wonder how this will be resolved?

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Here are the bands that are being webcast.

Friday, June 15th

Uncle Earl                     12:30pm – 1:15pm
Cold War Kids                1:15pm – 2:15pm
Brazilian Girls                2:15pm – 3:30pm
Kings of Leon                 3:45pm – 5:00pm
Paolo Nutini                   5:00pm – 6:15pm
Gillian Welch                 6:15pm – 7:45pm
The Nightwatchmen       7:45pm – 9:00pm
Lily Allen                       9:00pm – 10:00pm
The Roots                      10:00pm – 11:30pm

Saturday, June 16th

Old Crow Medicine Show                        12:45pm – 1:45pm
Spearhead                                             1:45pm – 2:15pm
Regina Spektor                                      2:15pm – 3:30pm
The Black Keys                                       3:30pm – 4:15pm
Damien Rice                                          4:15pm – 5:45pm
Ben Harper & the Innocent Criminals       5:45pm – 7:45pm
The Hold Steady                                     7:45pm – 8:15pm
Mago: Billy Martin & John Medeski           8:15pm – 9:45pm
TBD                                                       9:45pm – 10:15pm
The String Cheese Incident                     10:15pm – 11:30pm

Sunday, June 17th

Robert Glasper Trio                     12:30pm – 1:00pm
John Butler Trio                          1:00pm – 2:00pm
Flaming Lips (Sat Night Show)      2:00pm – 3:00pm
Bob Weir & Ratdog                      3:00pm – 4:30pm
Wolfmother                                4:30pm – 5:30pm
Wilco                                         5:30pm – 7:00pm
The White Stripes                       7:15pm – 8:45pm
Widespread Panic                       8:45pm – 11:30pm

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This is how Mazda did it recently:

- Sent me an email in early March inviting me to test drive a Mazda and get a $25 gift card as I had previously signed up for promotions as some of the new models were of interest

- Printed off pdf file

- Filled out form

- Went to Mazda dealer

- Found salesperson who didn’t know about the promotion

- Had manager figure out the details

- Test drove a Mazda

- Mailed in form

- After 8 weeks card had not arrived and wrote blog post about it

- A week later, the card arrives in the mail and I pick it up as I leave the apartment

- Since it has no sticker on the card saying it’s not active, I proceed to try to use it at a gas station and the guy tells me it’s not activated

- Went to myecount.com and filled out a form that was just way too long (see below)

- Put in mazda as my password for secret questions – for $25 this just is not necessary

- Unchecked default boxes to get updates from myecount.com

- Finally spent card

- Wrote post on this non-optimal customer experience in terms of duplicate data entry, time, cost and user utility

This is a great example of how not to run a promotion, not exactly a good idea when you are trying to get someone to build trust in your brand for a 5 figure purchase.

See the full size of this form here.

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Not surprisingly, Gary Price of Ask has the most detailed coverage. I’m not going to go through each item as you can read his post. It’s great to see them being scrappy and innovating – it looks like it is a fun time to be working at Ask as they’ve clearly decided to not stay with the status quo.

Let’s start with what I love about the changes:

- Blog search is featured on the front page! This is one of my wishes for all search engines. If they added an option to aggregate News and Blogs together that would totally rock as a next step.

- With Google’s recent home page redesign, the simple interface which resembles the old Google layout can’t be categorized as a ripoff. Awesome timing for this change to be made. Props.

OK, what is weak then? Well let’s start with the fact that at SES Chicago last year, Ask City, was launched. When someone inquired as to why I hadn’t blogged about it, I told the senior person that I had not received the memo, advance notice and was not invited to the Ask City launch party so I had no basis to write anything. That person told me that I would be added to the list to receive future communications and he took the time to introduce me to an Ask publicist who obviously has not followed up on that promise as of the six month mark. It is a shame because I’ve loved all my interactions with the people from Ask when they have occurred.

I didn’t spend a lot of time on it, but here are my first three concerns that need attention before I’d consider playing with it much deeper on a regular basis.

- Ask’s search bot doesn’t index my site regularly and it’s not indexed thoroughly and completely enough. According to my stats in May the Googlebot visited 812 times, MSN/Live visited 899 times, Yahoo! visited 2030 times. Ask’s bot? It visited a mere 63 times. Sigh. Ask still isn’t asking my site for enough data to index it fully.

- A word about that blog search, it’s nice that you have my feeds. It’s nice that you show relevant links to me and comments. However at the moment a search on my first and last name in the post section doesn’t show my posts! Yikes.

- Longtime readers of my blog know that my title used to start with David “Dsquared” Dalka. As much as I love that nickname, I dropped it in the blog title sometime in late 2006 because it was driving a ton of one page visitors from Italy that were clearly looking for something else. (BTW, anyone know what that means there?) OK, so Dave what does this have to do with Ask? The entry for my blog on a web search on Ask still contains the old title. If Ask indexed my site regularly this likely would not be the case.

The good news is that I’m confident these a issues are easy to fix with a little attention. I look forward to seeing progress on these issues shortly and hearing from Ask on these issues.

UPDATE: The Ask.com blog didn’t accept my trackback. Why?

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Few things I’ve ever seen on an online newspaper site have shown such a true respect and understanding of the radical change in the newspaper medium as the homepage of Cleveland.com did today. More and more people read only online. There it was in the middle of the page it said “Download today’s front page”(of the paper edition). Wow! I downloaded the pdf and it looked sweet.

I bet that pdf file becomes the De facto cube poster in every office in Cleveland on Monday. Cool Cleveland.

That pdf file is interesting for other reasons as well. It’s also a great branding and advertising tool in stealth form. Take a closer look at the pdf file again. It brands the Plain Dealer in the top left corner. It is also a sales piece. Look at the bottom left corner now. It has URLs to purchase both pictures from the game and a larger poster of the front page.

Now if only cleveland.com would remove the age, zip code and sex question on the entry pages like Cleveland‘s Joel Cheesman wants. 90210 anyone?

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