Month: December 2007 | Chief Business Futurist Blog

Posted on December 11, 2007May 7, 2019 by David Dalka — 1 Comment

Ask Launches AskEraser

Ask.com today officially announces AskEraser. What’s AskEraser?

When enabled by the user, AskEraser completely deletes all future search queries and associated cookie information from Ask.com servers, including IP address, User ID, Session ID, and the complete text of their queries.

An AskEraser link is featured prominently in the upper right corner of the Ask.com homepage and search results pages – clearly and constantly indicating to the user that their search activity will be ‘erased’ from Ask.com servers. AskEraser remains ‘on’ for searches conducted across Ask.com’s major search verticals: Web, Images, AskCity, News, Blogs, Video, and Maps & Directions – and can be turned ‘on’ or ‘off’ by the user at anytime.

AskEraser is a switch that enables you to turn off tracking on Ask.com, it’s located in the upper right have corner of Ask.com…

Is this important? Yes. Will it convert users to Ask.com? Yes, but I don’t know when the tidal wave will occur.

What do you mean by you don’t know exactly when? What I mean is this an event driven asset that is likely to drive conversions of people when Google or another search engine has a larger data or privacy breach that creates considerable news. These types of things are almost guaranteed to happen in the future, but does that mean today or a decade from now? I can’t tell ya that. In the meantime, Ask.com should continue to build budget for evangelist assets to convert one new user at a time – using the concept of “not how many but who” as Seth Godin points out in his new book Meatball Sundae. Good luck to Ask with the effort.

Barry Schwartz has a nice write up as well at Search Engine Land.

Some people have questioned the ability to have both privacy and bookmarks, a comment on Andy Beal’s blog asks this question:

Allen Taylor Says:
Yes, and there’s another reason this isn’t such great news. In order to use MyStuff you have to turn AskEraser off, which brings up an important personal security question. What if I save a website to MyStuff? Will the query performed to find that website be erased when I turn AskEraser back on? It seems I have a choice: I can have privacy or I can have bookmarks, but I can’t have both.

Could someone from Ask, say Gary Price or Patrick, please clarify this issue by answering Allen’s question?

Posted on December 10, 2007July 28, 2009 by David Dalka — Leave a comment

Matt McCall on Ray Kurzweil’s Accelerating Investment Returns and Black Swans

Matt McCall writes about his talk last Thursday at Ignite Chicago on the issues of Black Swan and on Ray Kurzweil’s theme of accelerating returns. The Powerpoint of Matt McCall’s speech is here.

Quick points:
— a Black Swan is 1) a rare event, 2) with high impact, 3) that is hard to predict (pattern attributed post event)* examples include 9/11, stock market crashes, discoveries like Penicillin, start-ups (eBay, etc)
— most of mankind’s development has been driven by black swans (unstructured randomness) — black swans key in driving big entrepreneurial successes (payoff inverse to predictability)

Speaking of Ray Kurzweil, a few months ago he was in Chicago for Transvision 07, I had a chance to sit down for a chat with Ray at that time (scroll to the bottom for the podcast), but I’ve had some problems with my WordPress audio software that I fixed over the weekend. My apologies to both Ray and his many fans for the delay.

Listen to the interview: daviddalka.com_Ray_Kurweil_2007

Ray Kurweil talks about some of the following:

hedge funds

reading device for the blind

dietary supplements

his newsletter and web site

by the late 2020’s artificial intelligence eventually matching the ability human brains

becoming non-biological

seeing the intersection of artificial intelligence and biology

the ability to track history and information to create predictive models and time device introductions properly

exponential growth

his passion for ideas

developing his own treatment solution for type II diabetes

health and biology has not become information technology

pocket computing technology to help the blind with OCR readers

Second Life’s potential and indication of things to come and his breakfast with Philip Rosedale

Second Life’s potential to be as real as real life

Posted on December 10, 2007May 7, 2019 by David Dalka — Leave a comment

Microsoft Launches Mobile Advertising on MSN Mobile

Microsoft just announced the launch of mobile advertising on MSN Mobile.

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.

Posted on December 10, 2007November 26, 2010 by David Dalka — Leave a comment

Michael Arrington’s Entrepreneur Post

Michael Arrington talked about entrepreneurs the second time around today. I think he should segment that audience further into dot com era and other era projects.

Generally speaking, experience counts for something. So you’d expect entrepreneurs who’ve been through the ups and downs of a tech startup to have an advantage over the newcomers. Or at least have an equal chance at success. But in fact the opposite may be true. A number of venture capitalists I’ve spoken with have said that too many “old guard” entrepreneurs are not being bold enough in their business decisions, and it’s hurting their startups.

Here in Chicago this is even more pronounced. There are a number of people who talk about amounts of funding they raised in 1999. They live off that first mover advantage. Why aren’t people judging each deal independently of the personalities involved?

Posted on December 6, 2007December 31, 2009 by David Dalka — Leave a comment

SES Chicago 2007 : David Isenberg on Net Neutrality

I’d like to think thank Kevin Ryan for bringing in this marketing speaker and challenging the audience to think about this issue. Marty has a great summary of the session.

My follow up question to Kevin is how can the SES community be best utilized to be an activist catalyst for this?

Posted on December 5, 2007December 21, 2016 by David Dalka — 3 Comments

SES Chicago 2007 – Digital Shelf – The Search Marketing Opportunity for Packaged Goods (CPG)

Moderator:
Kevin Ryan, Vice President, Global Content Director, Search Engine Strategies and Search Engine Watch
Marketing Speakers:
Matt Wilburn, Senior Category Director, CPG, Yahoo!
James Lamberti, Senior Vice President, Search and Media, comScore, Inc
Dana Todd, Board of Directors, SEMPO
Randy Peterson, Search Marketing Innovation Manager, Procter and Gamble

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Everyone on this panel clearly put a lot of long, hard work into the concepts, thought and research into this panel and this blog post won’t do the great conversation the justice it deserves. It’s bleeding edge, this is fun and interesting stuff that will eventually transform the way consumers chose products and discover need brands that specifically meet their needs.

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Does search help CPG? Comscore and Yahoo! provided the data for the SEMPO study.

James Lamberti, Comscore

The search marketing opportunity…100 million unique visitors in food alone, and babies

Who are these searchers? Average income, dramatically higher, 80% female

They enjoy cooking and entertaining.

Allergy sufferers are a prime underserved demographic. The opportunity to build brands via presences made through educational experiences.

Matt Wilburn, Yahoo!

Order of importance to searchers

– Information & Help

– Purchase Decision

– Promotion

– Company Website

Content matters more than a direct navigation. (I see a pattern developing here)

Consumers expect a digital shelf to be similar to a store shelf.

Out of stock, hard to find are issues.

Are you visible in paid and organic? Are you creating a nice impression?

Dana Todd, Sitelab

This is a compelling proposition. We believe in the promise of search for branding issues.

We need to think outside ROI. Back away from the spreadsheet. You need to get people thinking outside direct acquisition.

The first brand for cheese is on page three of the Google organic listings. Why?

Chinese toothpaste issue was a counter reaction to the ingredients article in Wired.

Develop problem and solution content.

If searchers are special, treat them as such!!!

End of session comments…

67% of searchers found a brand they weren’t aware of… (Kevin Ryan)

The term PPC is useless outdated and should be changed – Digital Point of Purchase? (Dana Todd).

Question by me in Chicago: Dana brought up the cheese in PPC and no brand organic terms, to use the Liz Strauss conversational blogging element, there are actually 10 posts on toilet paper on Technorati today, shouldn’t brand managers be engaging this, not only for the SEO benefits, but the innovation road map as well?

(all panel heads nod in agreement) Using the data during the planning process is the next frontier after this issue (which is still in the early days)…

This is certainly an area where the conversation will continue and evolve, it’s a challenging area due to the issues of massive change.