Marketing Articles About Data Search Results

Results for: data

48 items found:

Stocks Fall on Weak Jobs, Retail Data.

(09/04/08 09:01 AM)

Benefits of 2D Data Matrix Codes over Conventional 1D Barcodes. Take a close look at any electronic devices, whether it is an automotive keyless entry system or home audio equipment, and you will come across a unique coding standard called Data Matrix which is use... (09/03/08 09:01 AM)

Early Stage Investing in an Uncertain Economy.

I'm on a panel on Tuesday September 9th from 5pm - 8pm titled Early Stage Investing in an Uncertain Economy. It's being sponsored by the Rockies Venture Club and is being held at the Denver Marriott City Center. If you are interested in attending, you can register here.

Since the Rockies Venture Club is largely targeted at angel investors and entrepreneurs it should be an interesting conversation. The TechStars Demo and Investor Day two weeks ago was packed and the 2008 TechStars teams are seeing very high interest in their early stage rounds. If this is a data point, it would indicate that the "uncertain economy" isn't having much impact.

As an early stage VC investor, I don't pay much attention to the macro economy. I've written about this in the past - some of our best investments have come during crappy economic periods (say 2001 - 2003). We are funding very early stage companies with an expectation that it will take them 5+ years to mature into a successful business. Lots can happen in 5+ years.

I'll save my snarkier remarks for the panel.

(09/02/08 09:01 PM)

What Happened To The 4GL?.

On today, this day of endless blogging / talking (and hopefully downloading) of Google Chrome, I thought I'd go retro and write about my renewed hunt for the 4GL. But first, a little context on how this came about.

This summer I spent some time playing around with Google AppEngine to try and understand it better. It didn't take long before I realized I needed to really understand how to program in Python to do anything. So I spent some time reading about Python and ultimately realized that if I wanted to make any progress, I needed to spend a chunk of time actually learning Python. Fortunately, I found a nice MIT course titled 6.00. I took the equivalent (6.001) in 1984 when it was taught using Scheme; now it uses Python. Oh goody - I can re-live my 18-year old student self if I want.

As I started digging around in Python, I instinctively compared it to the languages we used at my first company, Feld Technologies. We wrote business applications in the late 1980's and early 1990's and our language of choice was Clarion. We also wrote one large system using DataFlex and one with Oracle7, did plenty of work with dBase and FoxPro, ultimately adopted Microsoft Access as our 4GL of choice, struggled through some stuff on the Mac with 4th Dimension, and explored doing things with PowerBuilder right at the time that we sold the company. Some of these applications (including some of the larger ones) are still being used.

When I was playing with Google AppEngine, I kept waiting for the 4GL "aha moment." That's the moment I had using Clarion, DataFlex, Access, and even FoxPro where I realized how easy it was to do certain things. That moment never came during my exploration of Google AppEngine - the deeper I got, the more confused I got.

My plan for Google AppEngine was to write a very simply application to help me manage my art collection. I've searched long and hard for a web based application to do this - the closest I've come is a program called Yallery written by a local friend Jennifer Ross. Yallery is very cool and does a lot of things that I'd want to do, but like most applications it misses on a handful of very specific things I want, while adding lots of things I don't want. So - when AppEngine came out, I thought writing a simple art collection management system (ACMS) would be a great way to solve two problems: (1) really learn how AppEngine works and (2) get my little ACMS up and running exactly the way I wanted.

Like all good software developers, I sketched out a quick design. Like 99% of the software I've written in the past, the application is table driven - there is a simple data structure underlying all of the various screens that I'd want. I'd use the app via a few different modalities which would be accessed through a simple menu. The screens, menu, and underlying database describe 80% of the application; the final 20% is something any run of the mill report writer should be able to handle.

The optimal time to do this was when I was in Alaska in July. I try to take on a few new things each summer "to learn" and this seemed like a perfect one. I carved out some two hour chunks and went after it. However, two days in and I was completely lost. It was clear that whatever construct I had in my head about what I needed to do didn't map in any way to how I needed to do it in AppEngine.

Now, some of it may be me. I stopped programming around the time that people were making the shift from procedural programming to object oriented programming. C was the language of my day; not C++. The idea of "Object Basic" or "Object Pascal" was amusing. So - I've always struggled a little with object / method syntax. Oh - and at my core there are two languages that have influenced me the most - Basic and Scheme - which probably explains all of my weird programming predilections.

But something just seemed wrong to me. Clearly AppEngine wasn't the right tool to build my ACMS in. But, I didn't really know what the right tool was. I know what I want - something like Clarion that works in a web-browser world. Something that provides all the magic Ajax UI goodies for me without me having to really do anything other than specify what I want the screens to look like. Something that knows how to bind data fields to the screens and then to a table to a database and allow me to do all kinds of data entry, sorting, and reporting on them. Something that completely isolates error handling for me so I don't have to think about it. As I worked through my list of "wants" I realized I was defining what a 4GL does.

I know that there are some companies working on this. In an attempt to be trendy, this is now called PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service). But it's really the reincarnation of the 4GL. And I'm not sure I really want a PaaS - I think I just want a 4GL that works with today's web-based environment.

(09/02/08 09:01 AM)

The Importance of Selling and Strong Ad Copy. Boy were they wrong! Industry experts predicted that no one would want a giant box that held data and took up an entire garage full of space. Now just about every household has a computer and many hav... (09/02/08 09:01 AM)

US Mobile Web Surfing to Surpass UK Levels. Mobile web use is gaining traction in the United States and may soon surpass use in the United Kingdom, where consumers have accessed the internet from phones for years, according to data released by...

(09/02/08 09:01 AM)

Predictive Analytics Invade Email, Subscriber 'Personas' Targeted. Email marketing solutions firm iPost has launched a production release of Autotarget, its predictive analytics tool. Autotarget analyzes data from a company's business channels, segments customers...

(08/29/08 09:00 AM)

OAuth Promises to Spread-Eagle Social Web. Oauth, a data application cooked up by Twitter devs Blaine Cook and Chris Messina in November 2006, has finally received passing marks by the people and companies involved in its development. The...

(08/28/08 09:01 AM)

Made to Stick: The Myth of Mutual Funds.

Let's pull off the Band-Aid quickly. You've come to believe that mutual funds are a smart place to put your money. They're not.

That's the assessment of the smartest minds in finance, supported by a mountain of historical data. If you own actively managed mutual funds, you will almost certainly retire with less money -- a lot less money -- than if you'd simply dumped your money into boring index funds. So two questions: How can this possibly be true? And why, in gleeful defiance of the data, do more people keep buying mutual funds every year?

(08/26/08 09:00 PM)

Managing Marketing Performance: The Role of Data, Analytics and Metrics. Performance management has been applied to various parts of a business for quite a long time, particularly when it comes to manufacturing, logistics, and product development. Applying the concept to marketing is finally coming of age. (08/26/08 09:01 AM)

"Sites like Twitter and Facebook will never make much money from advertising: social media users are too busy being social to pa.

Kunz lists several ways in which Twitter could potentially try to make money, and then systematically takes apart each and everyone of these.

Twitter could ask users to pay ? but once a free service has already been established, it's hard to get them to pony up.

Twitter could get messages to pay by selling them as product placement ? users would likely rebel if their tweets were hijacked for text ads.

Twitter could get money from selling user data ? users would definitely rebel and privacy concerns don't make this viable.

(08/21/08 09:01 PM)

Gluing EventVue and Twitter Together.

At Foundry Group, one of our investment themes is Glue. We've done a handful of investments in this area, including Gnip. Since Gnip's launch last month, it's been put into production in a number of cases - some obvious, some subtle. Part of the fun is watching the adoption of it evolve rapidly as we continue to build out the core capabilities of the what Gnip can do.

I had a long conversation with a VC I work closely with about the value Gnip ultimately provides to its various constituencies (data providers, data consumers, and end users) and how / where it expects to get paid in the long term. During the conversation, we covered a number of different potential areas, but I realized that my thinking could be much crisper. That's normal for this stage of a startup as Gnip is still very early stage (we've done one seed round of investment and are gearing up for the next financing) but the exercise of defining a clear business endgame (vs. just a technology endgame) is extremely helpful and self referential, as it creates more focus on what we should actually be building.

There is nothing quite like an example. Yesterday, we had the TechStars 2008 Investor and Demo Day. EventVue - one of the TechStars 2007 companies - provided the online community infrastructure for the event. They automatically extracted all the data from the registration system and build an online community. As part of this, members of the community could add their twitter account and - if they had already been a member of another EventVue conference community - like me - would automatically have all their information already in EventVue and wouldn't have to do anything.

The then created a techstars08 twitter account. This rebroadcast all the tweets from anyone at the event that had a twitter account set up in their EventVue profile. However, rather than writing the polling software to Twitter to continually check for updates in the twitter stream, the used Gnip for this.

EventVue had a data set (I don't know the number - but lets say it was 100 userids) of twitters at the conference. They wrote a tiny piece of code that monitored Gnip's twitter notification stream. Whenever someone in the set of 100 usersids appeared in the twitter notification stream, EventVue's handler then queried twitter for that one discrete piece of data and then rebroadcast it on techstars08.

This took a huge load off of Twitter. It was much easier code to write for EventVue. It created a virtually real time twitter rebroadcast stream. I'm sure I'm missing at least one of the technical nuances - hopefully the guys at EventVue will write up a deeper post on what they did, how they did it, and why it was valuable to them.

Look for plenty of more thinking out loud from me on our Glue theme as we bring some of the investments we've made into sharper focus.

(08/21/08 09:01 AM)

Retailers Should Tell Customers About Security Breaches When They Happen. After a huge identity theft ring involving the thefts of 40 million credit card numbers was busted last week, most retailers were under an obligation to tell customers whether their data was stolen. According to the Wall Street Journal, however, some retailers kept their mouths shut instead: Most states mandate that companies tell their customers when [...] (08/11/08 09:00 AM)

Lead Nurturing Best Practices Research and Data. MarketingSherpa just published data on lead nurturing best practices based on a survey of 1,000 marketers. Sherpa's research focuses on the following nurturing best practices: Using multiple tactics rather than relying on email only Timing of teleprospecting response to web... (08/08/08 09:00 AM)

I've Deleted All My Alerts And Replaced Them With Filtrbox.

I have been looking forward to this day for a while. I've always been obsessed with following any news or blog mentions of any of the companies I'm an investor and the people I work with. For the past few years I've satisfied my obsession with an extensive set of Google Alerts (via email), Yahoo Alerts (via email) and Technorati Alerts (via RSS). Occasionally I'll add something else to the mix usually through RSS (such as a FriendFeed or Summize keyword feed.) My email rules shunt everything to my "daily" folder so I only have to look through it once a day (when I read through my RSS feeds.)

Last week I deleted all my alerts. I was able to do this because Filtrbox - one of the TechStars companies from last year - is now finding much more than 100% of the information that my alerts were picking up, including 100% of what I got from the alerts. I'd been running the two in parallel for about six months and saw the lines cross about two months ago, but went ahead and had both run just in case. I'm now confident that I won't miss any of the alert stuff.

Dealing with Filtrbox is so much easier and more pleasant. I enter my keywords into one UI instead of Google, Yahoo, Technorati, and others. I get a daily email digest of everything Filtrbox found. I have a history of all the data so if I want to go find an article from a month ago, I can easily find it in Filtrbox. And I get a bunch of cool data visualizations.

I've watched Ari Newman, Tom Chikoore, and team evolve Filtrbox from its starting point last summer at TechStars. I'm blown away - they've really nailed it. Ari and Tom took a deliberately "slow and steady" approach - making sure they really built something deep and robust before releasing it to the world. They accomplished this - and it's ready for action.

As a special bonus for all you Olympic fans (like me), they've put together an Olympic Blog Widget that is customizable and pulls from their data sources. Guys - super cool.

(08/07/08 09:00 PM)

Enterprise 2.0 and Defrag.

Eric Norlin has a good post up titled Enterprise 2.0 as part of a larger theme. In it he addresses the question "Is enterprise 2.0 bullshit?" Eric doesn't think it is, nor do I. However, there is still a lot of difficultly getting real alignment on what it means, what is unique about the enterprise characteristics, and why anyone should really care.

I've seeing an interesting and predictable phenomenon occurring. Corporate IT has gotten energized about implementing "social computing" and "all that Web 2.0 stuff." The analyst crowd is writing about all the different Enterprise 2.0 categories and starting to extensively position products in pretty matrices. Several big software companies, including Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle are making major pushes into this "category." Loads of startups are emerging in every segment. TechCrunch even has an a new property called TechCrunchIT.

Early adopters are doing what they always do - pilots, proof of concepts, workgroup deployments. White papers are appearing. Web conferences are happening. Inevitably an "Enterprise 2.0 Conference" (or several derivatives) will appear.

But Eric and I think something is missing. What is going round and round as Enterprise 2.0 is a subset of something bigger. For example, we are in the beginning phase of new issues surrounding the entirety of identity computing and the web. We are now in a land where people have multiple online personas - their "work self", their "home friend self", their "secret second life self", their "hidden porn login self", and their "this is what I wish I was like self". While "identity management" has been an endless "IT problem to solve", this isn't really "identity management" anymore - it's "I consume and generate a shitload of data in different contexts that are persistently stored out in the open for all to see - how do I deal with that?"

I could give another dozen examples of the subset issues contained in what we are trying to explore with Defrag. I expect Eric will keep banging away on them on his blog. And - more importantly - I hope you'll come join us at Defrag on November 3rd and 4th in Denver as a group of really interesting and smart people attack some of these issues and try to make sense of them. If you register this month, use the code "brad1" and get $100 off your registration fee.

(08/07/08 09:00 PM)

Glue and Comments.

Since last summer I've been talking about comments as the Dark Matter of the Blogosphere. I use Intense Debate* for the comment system on my blog and have learned a lot by experimenting with it.

In the past six months comments have moved to the forefront of the discussion around user generated content. While the various new commenting systems that have emerged have played a part in this, I think the broad activity around systems that enable small bursts of user generated content (Twitter, BrightKite*) and systems that aggregate a wide variety of user generated content (FriendFeed, SocialThing*) are playing a huge role in this and more "comment-like" data is being generated all over the Web.

One of the investment themes I'm most fascinated with right now is the one we call "Glue". We've made a handful of investments in the Glue theme at Foundry Group including Gnip, AdMeld, and Topspin. We've also been working with our good friend Eric Norlin - the creator of the Defrag Conference - on a Glue Conference.

I'm always looking for great, simple examples of Glue and I found one accidentally the other day. I put up a blog post titled Brilliant Op-Ed Crushing McCain On The Economy. I posted it on Sunday morning and then went out for a two hour run. I came back to about 20 comments on it in my inbox. Even though the post was done on my blog, I noticed the comments were from FriendFeed accounts being emailed to me by Intense Debate.

Here's what happened. My blog is one of my FriendFeed services. A vigorous debate broke out on FriendFeed between a couple of people. I wouldn't have noticed it until Monday when I checked my FriendFeed ego feed (I only do this once a day.) However, Intense Debate is "glued" to my FriendFeed account so any comments that show up on a blog post of mine on FriendFeed automatically show up in Intense Debate on my blog. It's a small feature, but a brilliant one, as it brings the overall conversation associated with my blog post back to my blog where I actually want it.

There are now 46 comments on this particular blog post (unexpected - I don't write that much about politics and it was a Sunday post.) Most of them are from the FriendFeed discussion, but some are from my blog readers. They are intermixed where I want them - on my blog. Even though they are coming from multiple sources, they persist permanently on my blog due to a tiny feature in Intense Debate.

Now - this is all much too complex still, but it's why the Glue is so interesting to us. We are continually looking for unnecessary complexity in the metaverse and ways to build really large companies that (a) take advantage of the complexity, (b) simplify the complexity, or (c) both. If you make glue, email me!

* Yes - I'm aware that each of Intense Debate, BrightKite, and SocialThing are TechStars companies from 2007 - and I'm immensely proud of the progress each has made and the fact they are in the midst of what I consider to be a very interesting and vigorous segment of our little tech universe

(07/22/08 09:01 AM)

Gnip Starts Getting Twitter Data.

One of the questions I've been asked numerous times since Gnip launched a few weeks ago is "when is Gnip going to start working with Twitter?" The answer is: today. Gnip's current partners now include Twitter.

Thanks Twitter guys! This happens to coincide with the end of my experiment of "a week without Twitter" (yes - I missed it) so to commemorate this I turned my Twitter client (Twhirl) back on and started tweeting again.

The Gnip data producer and data consumer universe is getting larger quickly; drop me an email if you want to come play and I'll get you gnipped-up.

(07/18/08 09:01 PM)

Social Search.

Last week, Me.dium released its Alpha version of Me.dium Social Search. This coincided with Yahoo!'s launch of BOSS - Me.dium was one of the initial launch partners. This was picked up by Techmeme and prominently talked about throughout the blogosphere, tech media, and even the mainstream media.

I've been involved with Me.dium since its first financing and the launch of Me.dium Social Search is a key pivot point as it starts to capitalize on the initial vision of the company. If you are familiar with Me.dium, you may know of it as a company that has a browser sidebar that enables real time browsing with friends. This concept started out as a "recommendation service" where the algorithms suggested alternative web sites and people based on how your browsing patterns matched the browsing patterns of your friends and the overall community.

This was - and is - a pretty neat idea, but it's really hard to do effectively in a browser sidebar. Me.dium built out a lot of backend infrastructure to process a large amount of information in real time, which is necessary to make the algorithms useful across a large user base. In the process of doing this, it occurred to the team that the sidebar might not be the best way to surface the information and that search might be a better way to deliver its value to the user since Me.dium's collaborative filtering algorithms are an entirely different search algorithm than the PageRank type ones we've gotten used to.

A group of folks at Me.dium went heads down and starting working on using the stream of data they were getting to turn out a real time social search engine. Along the way, Yahoo! decided to open up their search engine infrastructure through Yahoo! BOSS and a natural collaboration was born.

Rather than hold on tight, create a "closed beta", and limit the use and exploration of Me.dium Social Search, they did what I wish more companies would do and went "straight to Alpha". Even though it's alpha and still evolving rapidly, Me.dium Social Search produces some really interesting search results that correspond to the web pages that people are looking at right now about specific topics.

The notion of the Me.dium Sidebar has morphed into a Social Toolbar which, in addition to providing a bevy of social features, also starts including your clickstream in the corpus of data that Me.dium is using for their social search algorithms. Me.dium is fanatical about your privacy and includes a simple one click way in your toolbar to turn Me.dium tracking on and off and never tracks information on secure (via HTTPS) sites.

Yahoo! has stirred the search pot in an interesting way with BOSS. Me.dium's going after one particular vector - that of social search - by building on a lot of work they've been doing over the past eighteen months. I expect you'll hear a lot about The Future of Search in the coming year - I think Me.dium will be one of the companies regularly mentioned in the mix of folks trying new approaches.

Give Me.dium Social Search a try (simply type your search term into the little box and hit the "I Feel Social" button) and tell us what you think. And - if you want to go deeper on the ideas, take a look at Robert Reich's (one of Me.dium's co-founders) blog titled Why to hear him riff on search.

(07/17/08 09:01 PM)

Survey: Better Data, Measurement Abilities, and ROI Metrics Boost Marketing Performance. Want to take your performance to that ideal level of highly effective and efficient marketing? It takes better access to detailed data and ROI discipline, but it also comes along with greater growth and better levels of budgets, according to the recently released study. (07/15/08 09:01 AM)

Soldotna, Alaska Rotary 10 Mile Race.

Amy and I woke up at 5am this morning (which was still several hours after dawn here in Homer, AK) to head the big city of Soldotna, Alaska (population 4,087) to run the 2008 Soldotna Rotary Unity 10 Mile Race. As part of my marathon training I've decided to run a lot more races between 10k and a half marathon to try to build up my "racing brain" while having some extra fun wherever I happen to be in the world.

Soldotna is about 75 miles from Homer. I snoozed while Amy drove. She woke me once to inform me that there was a moose on the side of the road and asked if I wanted to stop and take a picture. Since I'm afraid of horses, and a moose looks like three horses stapled together to me, I declined and went back to sleep. We got to Soldotna High School (home of the Soldotna Stars) and met up with the other 100 or so people involved in the race.

About 50 of us hopped on a yellow school bus and drove to the bustling metropolis of Kenai, Alaska (population 7,464) and stopped at the Kenai High School (home of Kardinals). Ten minutes later the 50 of us lined up at the starting line painted on the ground in the school parking lot and took off on our race back to Soldotna.

Since I'm targeting a 4:45 marathon in Ashton, Idaho next month, I decided to do the first half in 55 minutes (11 minute miles) and then see what I had in me, being happy with anything under 1:50. I had a hard time holding myself back - my first mile was in 9:16 and my second mile was in 9:48. I think at this point I was near the back of the very small pack. I managed to settle down and did the next three miles around 10:30 and then realized that I was probably in last place. I felt great so I kicked it into gear.

I cruised through the second half of the race and executed on the elusive perfect negative split (where every subsequent mile in the second half of a race is faster than the previous mile.) 9:45. 9:14: 8:36. 8:26. 7:58. Total time: 1:34:30. Avg HR: 154. Max HR: 190. I passed seven people between mile 5 and mile 7, so I came in 8th from last.

For the full data, take a look at what my trusty Garmin 305 recorded (yes - I have a 405 - it arrived yesterday - but I didn't want to tempt the new device monster by trying a virgin 405 on my race.) We grabbed some lunch at Froso's in Soldotna, Amy drove home (and I napped), and then I took a shower and napped some more. I feel great - we'll see how I'm doing at mile 10 of my 13 mile run tomorrow.

(07/12/08 09:01 PM)

Olympic Games Widgets From NewsGator and AFP.

I've been really pleased with the way NewsGator's widget business has taken off. Two years ago I regularly got questions from people about "how would NewsGator monetize the consumer web reader business." The answer to that is "they won't - but they'll use the infrastructure they've build - which is rock solid, scalable, and unique - to build a really interesting widget and data business based on RSS content."

NewsGator now has over 100 paying customers for their widget business. Over the past 30 days, they've served almost 19 million unique users over 250 million widget views. They've also served over 44 million API calls to paying data partners (a total over over 385 million API calls if you include all the free clients out there, including NetNewsWire, FeedDemon, and NewsGator Go! that call the API on a regular basis.) This is in support of 2.8 million feeds and 211 million articles over the past 30 days. The overall NewsGator feed archive now stands at 2.1 billion articles. Non-trivial!

Today, NewsGator - with AFP - announced a new initiative called The Road to Beijing - the 2008 Games widgets. This is an Olympics game news widget with a twist - NewsGator will guarantee you a $0.20 CPM for distribution of the widget on you site! You'll get co-branding on the widget, traffic, great Olympics content, and a guaranteed CPM.

Jeff Nolan - who runs this part of NewsGator's business - has a long blog post up at NewsGator and AFP Olympics Widgets, Guaranteed CPM - explaining how it all works. Join NewsGator and APF on The Road to Beijing and make some money while you are at it.

(07/09/08 09:00 PM)

Here Comes The Sun and More Daily Stuff.

If you follow my tweets you know that I am starting to get desperate for some sun. I could never live in Seattle. There's a rumor that we'll see the sun in Homer again later today - if it comes out to play I'll post a picture of it (did you hear that Mr. Sun - that's called a blibe ("blog bribe"). Here are some interesting things I've collected over the past few days of my cloud induced web reading.

Boulder Olympians weigh politics, pollution as they prep for Beijing: I'm really glad I didn't quality for the 2008 Olympic Marathon. If I had, I'd currently be struggling with whether or not to compete. I sure hope no one dies.

Frontier going under the knife: It looks like there might be more to the Frontier bankruptcy than Frontier getting shafted by First Data. Unlike Southwest, apparently Frontier didn't hedge oil prices (nor - apparently - did any of the other major airlines.) Oops. My prediction - Southwest cleans up in the Denver market and United goes bankrupt again.

Thank you, Adobe Reader 9: Here's a scathing review of everyone's favorite bloatware, Adobe Reader. Oh - it's also sort of a virus if you've ever gotten stuck in the "update - oops - didn't work - try again" infinite loop. I've switched to Foxit Reader - much nicer.

You Just Dont Get It: Outstanding short post from Mark Cuban. If you tell me that "I don't get it", you are either (a) being lazy or (b) being lazy. You are also indirectly calling me an idiot, which isn't necessarily a good way to get someone's attention for your idea.

Secret report: biofuel caused food crisis: I put this one in the "well duh" category. The real irony is that the World Bank - through a confidential report - suggests that global food prices are up by 75% due to biofuels, while the US claims the number is only 3%. Who knows what the real truth is - like most "economic indicators", we will only know what really is going on sometime in the future when we look at back and study the past. Regardless, don't believe everything you read and hear in the media or from our world leaders. "Well duh!"

Dispatches: A Post-Wimbledon Dialogue: I love tennis. I used to be really good (as a junior) - I'm now able to occasionally torture - but not beat - someone that is a 4.5. Watching Federer and Nadal play is a joy that harkens back to my childhood watching Borg and McEnroe play (I loved Borg because my game was like his but rooted for McEnroe because I was an angry and volatile tennis player.) This is a brilliant recap of some genius tennis.

Electronic Papyrus: The Digital Book, Unfurled: I love my Kindle (I haven't read a physical books since I left for Alaska last week.) I'm not sure that I love the Readius, but I'm definitely game to try it.

Time for a run. The sun is still not out.

(07/08/08 09:00 PM)

I've Been Gnipped.

Earlier this year we made a seed investment in a new company called Gnip. Yesterday, Gnip launched their first service - a free centralized callback server that notifies data consumers (such as Plaxo) in real-time when there is new data about their users on various data producing sites (such as Flickr and Digg). I've written my version of the overview on the Foundry Group blog in my post titled Gnip is Ping Spelled Backwards, there are a couple of posts up already on the Gnip blog, and a number of people have already written about Gnip including TechCrunch, TechCrunchIT, ReadWriteWeb, VentureBeat, Dave Winer, and Joe Smarr (Plaxo's Chief Platform Architect). Rather than repeat what Gnip is here, I'm going to tell you how this investment came about.

It started in 2004. I got an IM out of the blue from someone named bpm140 (my IM addresses are easy to find - AIM/Y!: bfeld; Skype: bradfeld; MSN: brad@feld.com.) bpm140 asked me if I'd be willing to take a quick look at a business plan he had. I IM'ed back that he should email it to me - I got it 30 seconds later.

I took a look and scheduled a call. It was a plan for an educational game thing that I didn't really get but I was intrigued by some of the stuff in it. I talked to bpm140 (Eric Marcoullier) and gave him some feedback. After talking for a little while I told him it wasn't my thing, but he should feel free to holler if he thought I could be helpful.

Over the next few months I periodically got IMs from Eric. We'd have quick interactions - usually around a specific question - and he shared with me a new idea he was working on. He and his partner Todd Sampson (who I only knew through Eric's references to him) had this idea for a thingy (this was before little lines of javascript that you put on a blog were called widgets). You put this thingy on your blog and it gave you statistics of how many times someone clicked on a link. I'm a stats junky so I loved it. Eric said it would cost $3 / month. I told him it was stupid to charge for it, but I'd prepay for a year for $25. He took my money.

Over the next few months I gave him plenty of feedback on this new thing he was calling MyBlogLog. The UI of the stats service was hideous, but the popup link data on my blog was awesome and the stats were killer. By this point I had invested in FeedBurner, so I introduced Eric to Dick Costolo - FeedBurner's CEO. More feedback ensued.

One day, I got a familiar bpm140 IM saying something like "we came up this amazing idea to turn your blog into a social network." All I needed to do was put a little different piece of javascript on my blog. I did and the old version of the MyBlogLog widget - with names only and a really yucky font appeared on my blog. For those of you that remember it, it was one of those amazing widgets that you suddenly couldn't ever remember living without. Names were great, but soon little images appeared and the idea of seeing who had recently been on my blog was incredibly satisfying. MyBlogLog took off like a rocket.

Up to this point, Eric and his partner Todd hadn't raised any money. I remember the first "are you interested in investing call" happening in May 2006. Amy and I had rented and apartment in Paris for the month and I can remember the conference call with Eric and this new guy Scott Rafer who Eric and Todd had brought in to be CEO. They were considering putting together an angel round with the idea of going for a venture round in three or four months. I committed $25k on the spot, although I remember Scott saying he really didn't want investments of less than $50k.

MyBlogLog continued its torrid growth over the summer, appearing on virtually every blog I read. Fred Wilson - one of my co-investors in FeedBurner and another fan of MyBlogLog - and I started talking about doing a VC round. We came close to do a deal (the documents were a few days away from being signed) when Yahoo! acquired MyBlogLog shortly after getting excited about them after seeing them at the Web 2.0 conference in 2006. I had one awkward conversation with Eric where I quickly told him that while I was disappointed that I wouldn't be investing in MyBlogLog, I was psyched for him, Todd, and Scott and wished him luck. I also told him that I'd love to stay in touch and have another chance to work with him in the future.

I didn't expect Eric to stay at Yahoo! very long (he lasted about six months, although Todd is still there trying hard to keep the MyBlogLog flame alive.) True to my invitation, Eric and I stayed in touch, he and Todd were a big help at TechStars in 2007, and Eric started making occasional trips out to Boulder to see me.

I spent most of 2007 raising our first Foundry Group fund. By the fall we had finished raising our fund and had turned our focus towards making investments. It was in this context that Eric and I sat down on one of his trips in the fall of 2007. Over a couple of hours, Eric ran me through a half dozen ideas he had for a new business. He was hedging a little - struggling with whether to go deep on one business or try to start a few. I strongly encouraged him to focus on one. I told him that four of the six ideas were stupid, one wasn't for me, but one was awesome. It was the seed of what turned into Gnip.

During that trip, I dragged my partners Ryan and Seth into a conference room to sit with Eric and sketch out Gnip more. Eric was originally calling the idea Pingery but somewhere along the way Gnip popped out and it stuck ("meta-ping server" was a little awkward). Gnip fit perfectly in a new theme that Ryan, Seth, and my other Foundry partners were calling Glue and we told Eric that if he wanted to do Gnip as the exclusive thing he worked on, we'd be game to go after it with him.

I got a call from Eric a few weeks later that he'd decided to go all in with Gnip. We'd recently made an investment in Zynga and Eric had spent some time with Mark Pincus, the founder/CEO of Zynga. I think Mark's single-minded obsession with the business he was creating made a deep impression on Eric, especially since Mark is a multi-time successful entrepreneur who also has plenty of angel investments and can basically spend his time wherever he wants.

Part of Eric's success in MyBlogLog was his partnership with his technical co-founder Todd. I told Eric he needed either Todd, or a technical co-founder like Todd, as part of Gnip. Todd wasn't available as he was committed to staying at Yahoo! so we introduced Eric to a few people, including Jud Valeski. We'd known Jud for several years as he was a Netscape/AOL refugee that had settled in Boulder. Jud had recently left Me.dium and was working out of our offices as he contemplated his next gig. Jud and Eric hit it off immediately and started working together remotely (Eric in the bay area; Jud in Boulder) to both flesh out the idea behind Gnip as well as see if they could work together.

A few weeks later Eric and Jud gave their formal pitch to us for Gnip. It was a 10 page PowerPoint presentation that outlined the idea, opportunity, and how they would go about it. We committed to leading a seed investment of $1m on the spot - either by ourselves or with another VC firm. A few weeks later we closed a $1.1m round with SoftTechVC (Jeff Clavier) and First Round Capital (Josh Kopelman) and were off to the races (BTW - Josh has written a really clever post about Gnip titled The Story of Francis Bates.)

Eric, Jud, and Gnip have surpassed all of our expectations from our seed investment at the beginning of the year. They've totally nailed the concept we were kicking around when we first started talking about Gnip, have built a superb initial service in a remarkably short period of time with the help of Pivotal Labs, and have added a handful of awesome technical people to their team. They've managed to do this while still being split between the bay area (Eric, Tiffany, and Pivotal) and Boulder (Jud and the rest of the team).

It took a three year courtship, but Eric and I are now working together as partners. As my grandmother used to say, "My Gnip Runneth Over."

(07/03/08 09:00 AM)

Unintended Consequences of Hybrid Vehicles.

I heard a "superb" cynical statement today. I have no idea if it is factually correct, have no data (empirical or anecdotal) to support it, but it is such a great potential example of unintended consequences that I thought it was worth putting out there.

The statement was "While hybrid vehicles make us feel better, they actually do more harm than good because they result in more driving."

The follow up thought is that for hybrid cars to really work (at today's efficiency levels), people still need to modify their behavior and drive less (e.g. relying on public transportation or carpooling.) However, once you've bought a hybrid, you suddenly feel like you are doing your part and subsequently drive more! This additional driving adds up across the system and increases total system fuel (and other resource) consumption.

Ponder that the next time you get in your hybrid.

(06/26/08 09:00 PM)

It's The Little Things - Or Why Windows Mobile Contact Search Sucks.

There is a great Bill Gates email from January 2003 titled Windows Usability Systematic degradation flame that is making the rounds on the web. I love a good rant and even though this one is dated, Gates says in great detail what a large number of Windows users have summarized over the years as "shit - why won't my damn computer do <blah>."

I'm a heavy computer user and have some variation of this thought on a daily basis. One of my special talents is finding bugs and breaking things - just ask any of the companies that I've invested in who their most "useful" (where useful is a euphemism for "annoying") alpha tester is. Think of me as helping improve software quality on planet earth.

Now - software quality is a complicated thing to measure. Not all bugs are overt ones. Let me give you an example of a particular pernicious Microsoft one that no one seems to ever prioritize to fix (no - I'm not going to pick on Windows Calculator again, although I could.)

I use a Windows Mobile-based Dash. I expect I'll try the iPhone again on July 11th now that it actually syncs with Exchange, but until then I'm tethered to my Dash. I love the form factor and have trained my muscle memory to deal with having to press multiple keys to do things that I should be able to do with one keystroke - mostly due to design flaws in Windows Mobile. I've used some variant of Windows Mobile for the past eighteen months (I think starting with Windows Mobile 5; I'm currently using Windows Mobile 6.1.) If I were Mr. Windows Mobile UI Designer, I'd change a bunch of things, but it works well for what I need it for, which is primarily email, calendar, tasks, contacts, phone calls, IM, and twitter. And sync. My data needs to transparently sync with my Exchange server without me having to do anything. Oh - and my BlueAnt bluetooth headset. And I'm sure there are a few other things.

Here's the problem - the sort algorithm on contact lookup is terrible. I have a large contact list (5048 as of today). Searching for "Stan Feld" should be immediate since that's how it's listed in the address book. Progressively typing S then T then A then N should bring up "Stan Feld" immediately. Typing "Stan Feld" into the To: field on the email program should be immediate.

Nope. The delay is anywhere from 10 to 30 seconds. At some point I decided to try to figure out the underlying algorithm. My guess is that it's doing a full table scan of first_name + last_name for each letter typed. There doesn't appear to be an index - either fixed or dynamic - and as a result the time for most searches is approximately linear based on the number of letters typed.

Now - if this problem was in Windows Mobile 5 but fixed in an update, I'd let it slide. I've done at least three (I think four) major updates of the software since I've had my Dash. There has been virtually no improvement in this feature.

Whenever someone asks me about my Dash / Windows Mobile, I tell them that I generally like it except for this one thing. I then describe the thing. Occasionally I'll show the thing. And then I feel stupid that I'm still using this phone since I spend so much time looking up contacts or completing names in email fields.

Having written my share of sort algorithms, I expect this is less than 50 lines of code regardless of which language it is written in. It is sophomore in college computer science type stuff, not PhD stuff. Optimizing this to improve performance by 10x - 100x is maybe a day or two of a single programmer's time.

This is not a Microsoft-specific problem. I could have picked on anyone. I've got a long list of Apple issues like this, plenty of Google issues including some remarkably silly ones, and - well - don't get me started on the Yahoo ones. All of the companies I invest in have problems like this. It's just an endemic part of software. And one that users shouldn't have to put up with.

It's also not limited to software. When filling up my car recently, the gas pump clicked off at $75. I'd noticed this happening periodically, but now it was happening every time. Gas is now over $4 / gallon. Each of my cars has a 20+ gallon gas tank. $75 doesn't fill up the tank in any of them (and in at least one it doesn't come close.) There was a point in time when I'm sure someone decided that a way to mitigate credit card fraud at the gas pump was to limit the amount of each transaction to $75. Now all that does is inconvenience a large number of customers with a mysterious cut off point.

If you develop products (especially software) for a living, never forget that people remember the little things.

(06/25/08 09:01 PM)

Up Your Cashflow. Harvey Goldstein a no-nonsense CPA and author of several books and software programs, including UpYourCashFlow stopped by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast to spread his small business cash flow gospel. UpYourCashFlow really isn’t financial software in the strict sense, it takes your real data and tells you where you are headed and where the cash [...]
(06/02/08 09:00 PM)

Web Analytics for B2B Lead Generation . In the complex sale, the length of the buying cycle makes the connection between on-the-web activity and the off-line decision to purchase much more difficult to trace. So the challenge is connecting our website log file data (analytics), with marketing... (05/02/08 09:01 PM)

Want more signups/subscribers? Test your forms!.

This from Bill Flagg of RegOnline talks about how he has continuously works on optimizing the account signup page for the RegOnline website to maximize the conversion rate. [via Brad Feld]

What a great post to encounter first thing this morning. I just had this discussion with two separate clients in the past two days on how to optimize their account signup and newsletter subscription forms. Some great advice from Bill:

Here's what I learned to ask myself and my team... 1. Which information is a must-have? Do I have to know where they came from or can my web analytics tell me? 2. Which information could we collect later? For example, we collect billing information when the client goes live with their event. 3. Eliminate the rest. If a piece of information doesn't create a change in action, then I eliminate the field.

I agree with Bill 100% and often ask a couple more questions to get this right. Of course, you're never done asking questions. You should always be testing you forms to achieve greater conversion!

1. What data can you market to? If you're asking for address, birth date, phone number and the like - are you really going to market using all of that data or are you just collecting it because you think you need it (or your CEO thinks you need it)
2. How does the data tie into the rest of your CRM and database marketing efforts? If you're a B2B company you'll want to and need to know different things than a CPG company.
3. What's the "form fatigue" factor and how do you eliminate data point collection to ease up on your customer's patience.

(05/02/08 09:01 AM)

How to Hear the Voice of Your Customers: Hone First-Person Intelligence From All Forms of Feedback. Today's technology offers ample opportunities to start conversations with and among customers, fans, foes, competitors, and the press?any person or group who cares to listen and, perhaps, act on the messages received. By some estimates, 85% of the information companies collect is not in a form that they can access or analyze?it is unstructured. The Gartner Group reports unstructured data doubles every three months while seven million web pages are published every day. This cacophony presents the one of the biggest challenges companies face today. (04/29/08 09:02 AM)

All Search Engines Love Spiders: How Meta Commands Can Help You Love Them Too. Nearly all search engines use spiders (also known as robots, their original name) to go out and scour the Web looking for Web pages. These search engine spiders then bring the data back to be indexed by the engine. Since roughly 1996, individual meta commands have been used on individual Web pages to modify how search engine spiders behave. The most useful of these commands are fairly universal and respected by almost all search engines. Here are some of the more popular ones and reasons you might want to use them (or not). (04/15/08 09:01 AM)

How to Make Email Marketing More Mobile-Friendly. Mobile technology continues to develop. The number of consumers with mobile devices capable of retrieving and viewing email continues to increase rapidly. The early adopters of the Blackberry have given way, in numbers at least, to those using what are fast becoming fully functional internet-ready devices. With multiple mobile platforms on the market and mobile phone companies vying for the sale of not only the devices but also the data plans that supply the bandwidth, these "mini-messengers" are in the hands of millions of consumers. Could your email be more mobile friendly? (04/08/08 09:01 AM)

Mystery Solved!.

The other day, I wrote about some of the top websites that refer people to my site. One of those sites is the US House of Representatives, which has been sending people to my Guestbook page for quite some time. Well, yesterday I decided to try to find out where on the House site the link to my own site is listed.

It took me only a few seconds to find it using Google. I searched for "US House of Representatives government grants" and the first site listed on the search results was this one: Federal Funds Express - a site I'd never seen before. But apparently a lot of other people have.

Federal Funds Express may be a good place to start looking for government grants and other sources of funds, but it's not really an in-depth resource. However, there are some good links on the site (including mine, of course), which in turn can lead to other good resources. Links are listed under the following categories:

How to get and manage grants
Federal charitable and corporate sources of grants
Resources to help small businesses
State and local government funding, data resources and disaster assistance
Educational resources for students, schools and colleges
Property, surplus, donated and unclaimed
Family issues: health, housing and consumer protection

The website hasn't been updated since October 2007, but you may still find some good sources of information there. I checked a few of the links, but didn't have time to check them all.

I'm thinking about sending an e-mail to the Webmaster asking him or her to direct people to a page on my site other than my guestbook. But maybe it would be best to leave it as is.

(03/20/08 09:01 AM)

Referrals From Great Sites.

Every once in a while I take a look at the Google Analytics reports for my website. These reports provide detailed statistics about the number and type of visitors to a site, where they came from, what pages they visited, etc. The reports contain a lot of data and take a while to review, which is why I only look at them occasionally.

But one of the reports I do like to look at is the Referring Sites Report, which indicates which sites referred people to my site via a link. And if you are interested in grants (both government and non-government grants), grantwriting, or grant research, you'll want to take a look at some of the websites that send the most visitors to Proposalwriter.com . Among my top 10 referring sites are:

The Grants Information Collection at the University of Wisconsin. This fabulous site has a wealth of information on grants, funding, and other related topics. I'm delighted to say that they link to my site on four different pages. They have consistently been my #1 referral site.
My #2 referral site is The Foundation Center, which sends visitors to my site via links on 3 of their many pages. If you want grant-related information from the nation's leading authority on non-profits, The Foundation Center's site is one of the first places you should investigate.
The third site that sends the most visitors to my site is the US House of Representatives. Somewhere among the its many pages there has been a link to my site for several years. Except I don't know where it is, and oddly enough the link is to my Guestbook. I've never taken the time to try to figure out how people get to my site from this site.
#9 on the list is the University of Michigan's Proposal Writing Help Page, which of course contains info and links on proposal writing.

In addition to Google Analytics, I use Google Webmaster Tools to find out how many other sites have links to mine. At present, Webmaster Tools shows that there are over 4,100 external links from other sites to the various pages on my site. But this number seems to include quite a few dupicates, so it's hard to tell what the real number is.

Nevertheless, I'm pretty satisfied.

(03/06/08 09:01 AM)

Prioritizing Marketers Top Priorities. This morning I got a research brief from Mediapost summarizing the findings from the Marketing Effectiveness Networking Group (MENG) and Anderson Aanlytics study. This study surveyed marketing executives to identify key trends and strategies of effective marketing. The subject line of the email said: "Marketing Execs Say Basics Are Most Important in 2008". By "basics" I thought they meant strategies such as becoming measurement-oriented, shifting ad portfolio, investing in email infrastructure, build operational data warehouse, and improve web site. However the 'basics' by definition from this study were more customer-centric and more concepts and objectives rather than strategies. And unfortunately for most companies, they're not all that 'basic' in achieving success. 60% of marketing executives said the following 'marketing basics' were important: Customer satisfaction Customer retention Segmentation Brand loyalty ROI I have a copy of the study. To be clear, the study asked marketing executives to choose from over 60 concepts or buzzwords (such as the 5 above) which were then categorized. Other categories, in order of votes, included: SEO (by itself) Personalization: concepts include Data mining, CRM, Lead Generation, Personalization, Ecommerce, Competitive Intelligence Green Marketing: Multicultural / Ethic issues. Breakdown of old media Innovative Branding Viral / WOM: concepts include viral, WOM, blogging New Media: concepts include Web 2.0, Mobile, CGM, Long Tail, Social Networking Macro Economics Tech Strategy Outsourcing Social Issues Other Now, as a marketer, if I participated in this study I may have answered the same way. After all, the 'marketing basics' are overarching objectives. What... (01/02/08 09:00 AM)

Choosing an on-demand lead generation solution. Link: Choosing an on-demand lead generation solution. Choosing an on-demand lead generation solution this article By Frank Vaculin, Spoke Software October 4th, 2007 An on-demand data prospect database can boost the success rates of lead generation campaigns and help marketers... (10/08/07 09:00 PM)

Mindblowing numbers on Internet Video.

I was speaking with some folks this morning at a local Green Bay college about the growth of video and their thoughts about YouTube, vlogs (video blogs) and the like. (they've even started to put St. Norbert College Videos on YouTube) It's not coincidence then that this report from ComScore shows that we're all but consumed with Internet Video!

Some of the more interesting data points:
> Fox Interactive (Fox News) ranked second for most video streams with 680 million, following the top ranked Google/YouTube with a combined 1.8 billion streams.
> 2.5 minutes is the average duration of an Internet Video Stream - keep this in mind when developing your videos
> Nearly three out of four (74.3 percent) U.S. Internet users streamed video online.
> The average online video viewer consumed more than two videos per day!

This online video space is far, far more pervasive than I once thought.

The whole Fox stat blows me a way too. I often watch videos from Fox after the fact, but I know that when I do catch the broadcasts, they're incessantly pimping the online follow through videos. Great strategy on their part! It's paying off.

[ref ComScore via Paul Kedrosky]

P.S. I didn't see St. Norbert listed, but for some time, YouTube has had a schools channel. Way cool!

(10/03/07 09:00 PM)

Links for 2007-08-16 [del.icio.us].

Hitwise Intelligence - US: New York Times Select Rumor - Data Perspective
Data showing traffic to NYTimes Select declining and drawing a less desirable demographic than the free NYTimes.com.
Tech Trader Daily - Barron’s Online : Dell Confesses It Was Cooking The Books
Makes you wonder of this is why former CEO Kevin Rollins stepped down.

(08/17/07 09:01 AM)

Disruptors Video: Not Your Typical Rental Car (Zipcar). Most people associate rental cars with airports and travel. But Boston-based Zipcar is trying to turn the car-rental equation on its head. It targets urban dwellers who need a car for a few hours at a time to run an errand, go out on a date, or get groceries. Using the Web, the cellular data network, and RFID cards for entry into the vehicles, Zipcar has created a self-serve car rental business that is targeting not so much the Avises of the world as it is the very concept of car ownership. Since Zipcar members, who now number more than 100,000 in 23 cities, book and pick up their own cars, the company can manage its fleet of cars much more efficiently than incumbent car-rental agencies. (Zipcar can manage nearly twice as many cars per employee as Avis, for instance). It is on track to make $60 million in revenues this year, and says it is profitable in its four largest established markets (Boston, New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.) The downside to Zipcar's distributed network of cars sprinkled throughout residential neighborhoods is that there might not be a car available on the weekend when you want it. Or if the car you reserved is broken or dirty, you might be stuck without an alternative. Zipcar is trying to mitigate against such scenarios by clustering its cars together in denser packs. I visited Zipcar CEO Scott Griffith to learn more in this week's episode of the New Disruptors (video).... (08/02/07 09:00 PM)

Andreessen Rakes in $92 Million on HP-Opsware Deal. Marc, originally uploaded by Gina Bianchini. Hewlett-Packard's (HPQ) $1.6 billion acquisition of Opsware (OPSW) announced this morning strengthens its hand in the market for automated data center management software. Corporate data centers are getting bigger and more complex, so software to automate it all is a growth area for HP.The big winner in this deal, though, is Marc Andreessen. Yes, that Marc Andreessen. Opsware was his second startup after Netscape (originally dubbed Loudcloud). At HP's offer of $14.25 a share, he stands to make $92 million off the deal personally (according to Yahoo Finance, he owns 6.5 million shares.) Now, all he needs to do is sell Ning (which he also co-founded), and he'll have a hat trick.Opsware has had many ups and downs since it was formed during the dotcom bubble in September, 1999. As Andreessen notes on his blog:Loudcloud took off like a rocketship, raised $350 million in equity and debt financing, went public in March 2001, and was rapidly nearing $100 million in annual recurring managed services revenue when the entire market blew up and virtually all of our competitors and peers went bankrupt.In September 2002, we did a complete restart as a public company -- we sold our managed services business to EDS and turned Loudcloud into Opsware, a software company based on the core intellectual property developed at Loudcloud. Over the next five years, we executed on our original vision -- automation of large-scale modern datacenters and computer systems.We have become the clear market leader,... (07/23/07 09:01 AM)

Human-Powered Search Already Popular in Korea. ??? Originally uploaded by toan_sagittarius86 The most popular search engine in South Korea is not Google or Yahoo. It is Naver. And one of it's addictive features is the ability for searchers to post questions and receive answers from the crowd of other searchers, somewhat like Yahoo Answers (which itself originated from Yahoo engineers in Korea—Were they inspired by Naver?). Naver calls it "Knowledge iN." The NYT looks into it today. Excerpt:“When people I have never met thank me, I feel good,” Mr. Cho, the lottery ticket seller, said. “No one pays me for this. But helping other people on the Internet is addictive.”Each day, on average, 16 million people visit Naver . . . But Naver users also post an average of 44,000 questions a day through Knowledge iN, the interactive Q.&A. database. These receive about 110,000 answers, ranging from one-sentence replies to academic essays complete with footnotes.Naver has so far accumulated a user-generated database of 70 million entries. Typical queries include why North Korea is building a nuclear bomb, which digital music player is best, why people have cowlicks and what a high school boy should do when he has a crush on a female teacher.The question left unanswered is whether human-powered search yields better results, or whether it is simply the best alternative in a country where, as one analyst quoted in the story puts it, there isn't "enough Korean-language data to trawl to satisfy South Korean customers.” Can someone who speaks Korean post that one one... (07/05/07 09:00 AM)

50-Strand Template for Building a Word-of-Mouth-Worthy Business. It’s been a month in a half since my last post. Yikes. I’m hoping you (haven't) noticed. :-)I’m back.One of the reasons for the absence has been a lot of traveling, including a trip to London. See my picture here in downtown York. U.S. history is nothing compared to a place like this! I also spent one day in the UK with David Rance, CEO of Round. I worked with David to bring a customer centricity framework into Dell several years ago. There are two powerful parts of the Round system. First is the simplicity of a baseball metaphor and measurement system. As you analyze the customer centricity of your company, you move along the bases, closer to a home run. The bases even bring a language that your people can use to explain why things don’t line up. Second is the sophisticated part of the system: the “Strands”. The Strands represent key areas in your organization, each of which can be measured towards customer centricity based on feedback within the organization…like looking in a mirror. Strands are things such as leadership style, employee engagement, customer data, marketing metrics, etc. On a jet-lagged bank holiday at David's 400-year-old house in northern England, I shared my opinions of what it took for a company to have word of mouth. David opened up his laptop, opened his software, and over the next hour we identified the key strands that are critical for a company to earn word of mouth. Brand Values Collection... (06/18/07 09:03 AM)

3 Emotions to Drive Execs to Action. Yesterday I was on a panel for a Forrester bootcamp on Social Media. One of the common questions was how to convince senior management to agree to and resource these new emerging channels and marketing strategies. What moves consumers to action? Emotion. It’s not much different than with executives and managers…you just use data to create those emotions! In my experience, there are three emotions I’ve seen drive executive action: Fear – show the competition is having success with a strategy that you are not. I’m putting this first because fear is the biggest motivator in the human psyche. And the first reaction for executives when they see a competitor doing something successful is to react. I’m not suggesting this is always right, but it’s reality. It’s a call to action event. If a competitor is launching an emerging channel strategy, your executives have to decide to do something or nothing. Use this time to drive a recommended strategy. Excitement – show and prove the revenue impact from such a strategy. Changne resistance is typically due to prioritization and predictability. Corporations, and management in them, have a need to drive predictable growth and mitigate risk. Priorities are driven based on familiarity of strategies that drive confident results. Something that can be proved to drive better results and meet or beat forecast excites executives. Pride – most forward-thinking executives want to be first to market, forward thinking, innovative and cutting edge. Some want this because it is right for the company,... (03/22/07 09:01 AM)

MarketingSherpa Data on the Best & Worst Lead Generation Offers for 2006. I've been quiet here for over a week, but not because I don't have a ton of things to write about. Actually, I'm focused on getting a special project ready that I’ll be releasing to tomorrow. Stay tuned. In the... (02/28/07 09:00 AM)

E-mail and the phone have high response rates, DMA report finds. BtoB Magazine points out some interesting findings in the DMA 2006 Response Rate Trends Report which includes data for more than 1,500 campaigns received in 2004, 2005 and 2006. The DMA report found that the phone and e-mail produced the... (02/28/07 09:00 AM)

I found the websheet. In September I wrote about the websheet, a tool that would allow me to put live Google and web data into a spreadsheet. Four months later, the best version I've found is right here. The web lookup part needs more... (01/06/07 09:01 AM)

Search marketing works for B2B, too.. Thanks to a reader, I learned that there was a 'B2B Case Study' session at the recent Search Engine Strategies conference in San Francisco. The article reviewing the session, titled, Search marketing works for B2B, too, starts with this gem:

"Most people assume search marketing works only to reach consumers, but it's actually quite effective for businesses wishing to connect with other businesses, as well."

Um, I'd counter that SEM is more effective for B2B, but I think this comment just shows the lack of knowledge of the author--obviously B2B is off the charts for some folks. The article throws up comments about basic SEM for B2B but this bit is probably of interest B2Blog readers:

"Rick Brown, President of NetTrack closed out the session with a discussion of the effectiveness of paid inclusion in vertical aggregator sites like ThomasNet, GlobalSpec and Industrial Quick Search. Brown articulated his endorsement of such aggregators cautiously, saying that they can bring in relevant traffic as well as provide valuable links to a company's homepage but that many of the metrics such websites use to promote their services (such as "reach," "page views," and "brand activity") don't have much impact on a client's bottom line.

He also noted that the value of the links from content aggregators is highest when the landing page can be controlled and there is a one to one relationship between the product category being searched and the landing page on a firm's website. Brown suggested than firms who invest in paid inclusion on a vertical aggregator site have their own analytics like ClickTracks to determine the value of the traffic coming in from sites like Industrial Quick Search. "

Um, get an analytics program? Duh. What most B2B folks don't do is actually look at the data and ponder its meaning.

One thing that Rick Brown said that is innovative, is that he proposes a 1-to-1 relationship between the seller's landing page and the product categories on the directories. I've opined before that part of the problem with directories is that once the user clicks-thru, they have to start their search over again.

BTW: A rather interesting post by Marketing Headhunter Harry Joiner about a SEO specialist looking for a new job. Key fact: $125-150K pay for specialists at SEO agencies. Wow! (08/28/06 09:03 PM)

B2B content trapped in need for completeness?. The one thing I like about writing is that I get to address the topic as completely as I feel I need to. Over the years I've found that the one detail I leave out in a email or brochure or webpage is the one piece of information that folks call back looking for. When blogging, I write until I feel I've addressed the topic until it is resolved in my mind. Writing saves interuptions and makes revising easy. The end result is a complete document.

Reading an article in this month's Wired called What Kind of Genuis Are You (a facinating article about two types of creatives, nicely summarized here at Reveries), I find myself identifying with 'experimentalist' creatives like Cezanne who only signed 10% of his paintings because he was never sure if they were complete or not.

Regardless, the point is that one goal of B2B marketing is communicating information effectively, which means completeness. But perhaps we are overachievers. Engineers need certain data from our materials, but they aren't dumb. They can connect the dots. We don't need to spoon-feed them.

Yet we continue to produce 'features and benefits' lists that treat them as dumb. That's because we are told that benefits sell, not features. And it becomes complete that way. How many of you have written something like this...

"Our latest model features a smaller footprint to save your valuable lab space."

Perhaps we are lacking feedback on our writing, because on the other side, this is what is happening:

Engineer reading web page: "Duh!"

How much smarter is it to leave your marketing incomplete and let the reader do the heavy lifting? The conclusion may be obvious, but the conclusion is now theirs. They own the idea now. Even complex concepts may fair better, because explaining them takes more effort then just pointing the reader in the right direction. (This happens in art and B2C advertising, but they also have the benefit of multiple mediums to make this more effective.)

Or to quote a Chinese proverb I saw somewhere else this week:

"Tell me and I'll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I'll understand."

I think I've reached the asymptote of completeness with this post, so I'll leave you to figure out what it means to you. (Of course I'm wondering if your reading this going 'duh', how obvious.)

UPDATE: Kathy Sierra latest post complements (adds to) this one: Hooverin' and the space between notes (07/29/06 02:28 PM)

Tips, Tricks, Tools, and Lessons Learned
Get the guidance we wish we had when we were beginners, inspiration for professionals, and time savings for everyone. A membership comes with access to all of our tutorials and workbooks for a single price that is much lower than purchasing them separately. Win more business by becoming a member.