Category Archives: innovation

Daily Reading 10/7/08

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  • WOMMA’s Influencer Handbook

    The Word of Mouth Marketing Association has come up with a compact and useful set of guidelines for marketing to social media influencers. It’s available for review and comment through Oct. 20, after which it will be published.

    tags: daily_reading

  • MediaPost Publications – Imagination

    Here is a passionate argument for a new form of engagement marketing in which the marketer’s task is to find where the customers are already going and to meet them there. Unlike a lot of social media enthusiasts, Tobaccowala sees a need for conventional as well as conversational marketing. The trick is to achieve a blend that invites interaction that enables customers to market to each other.

    tags: daily_reading

  • Is Your Blog Leaking Trade Secrets?

    More than 20% of US companies have investigated “the exposure of confidential, sensitive or private information via a blog or message board posting in the past 12 months,” according to Forrester Research. Data is leaking out of companies at increasing rates as Web 2.0 tools spread and media becomes more portable.

    tags: daily_reading, security

  • Five things social networks can’t easily do

    My Podcast partner, David Strom, has some practical insight on the limitations of social networks. The problem of separately work and personal identities is particularly annoying for marketers.

    tags: daily_reading

  • SpokenWord.org

    Doug Kaye, the innovator who came up with the IT Conversations podcast site, continues to pursue his goal of capturing important events in audio. What’s “important?” Well, in true Web 2.0 spirit, Doug leaves that in the eye of the beholder. SpokenWord.org is a new effort to catalog all kinds of spoken content.

    tags: daily_reading, podcasting

  • Nat Torkington – Open Source Therapy

    In this fast-paced and hilarious audio keynote from the O’Reilly Open Source Conference, Nat Torkington contrasts the major components of the open source stack to teenage children at various stages of development. It’s 15 minutes well spent.

    tags: daily_reading, open_source

  • MapTube

    Cool maps mashup site that lets you combine two maps; for example, a map of the London underground overlaid on a map of the city of London.

    tags: daily_reading, mashups

  • Protect Your Company’s Stock Prices From Noise Through Social Media | WATBlog.com

    Sound advice from a blog in India about how to make your story heard amid media noise

    tags: daily_reading, blog_business

Nantucket Conference Day One: Cool Products

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While the venture capital picture might not be so rosy in New England, there was still some interesting technology to see during a demo session at Nantucket Conference on Friday:

Zink is a printing technology developed by some former Polaroid engineers that eliminates the need for ink by embedding dye crystals in the paper. It’s basically an evolution of the Polaroid photo technology. This makes it possible to produce printers that are an order of magnitude smaller than those based on jets or ribbons. Wendy Frey Caswell, CEO, showed off a printer that fits in your shirt pocket and produces beautiful 2”X3” color images. The initial target market is cell phone users who want to print the photos they take with their phones’ integrated cameras.

I don’t know if that market is very big, but there are some interesting potential applications of this technology. It could be used to create point-of-sale ticket printers, for example, or to produce much more sophisticated and detailed ID tags. Larger but still portable versions of Zink printers could be used to deliver prints instantaneously to people at theme parks and events or to produce printed collateral on the spot. I’d personally like to be able to print out business cards when I’m on the road and run out my supply. Zink paper can also be produced in continuous rolls, making it easier to print banners and posters.

Zink will leave it to partners to figure out applications while it focuses on producing technology.

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Turbine showed off its new Lord of the Rings multi-player game, which just hit the shelves. I was impressed with the scope of work that was needed to create this product. It includes more than 3,000 monsters and 2,000 actors, each of which had to be designed by hand. The company has 25 engineers on staff, but outsources a lot of its development, as is typical in the games business. There are more than 40 developers in China, for example. The whole package probably involved more than 500 person-years of development.

Turbine CEO Jeff Anderson said early results are promising. More than 200,000 people have signed up for the online service that back-ends the game, and conversion rates are running at 70% for the $15/month service. The company is also enabling viral marketing to promote the product. Gamers are already posting customized characters and scenes on the Web

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PublicDisplay is a small Providence, RI-based software startup (really; it has no website yet) that’s building a prototype of what’s often called the semantic Web (I hate that term; no one can understand it). Its service filters lists of information into a format that can be imported into a calendar or spreadsheet. CEO Bill O’Farrell used his hectic personal schedule as a demo. His son’s spring lacrosse schedule is posted on a website, but the flat text document can’t be easily imported into his calendar. PublicDisplay parses the schedule and turns it into an iCal file of individual entries. You could potentially do the same thing with a financial report, price list or any other tabular data. PublicDisplay hopes to have a beta service by late this year.