the giant iPhone
via engadget.com
Dan Lyons flip flop on the iPad
"Either this week's story was heavily edited, or Lyons has learned an important lesson about writing for a newsweekly: The magazine can love or hate the thing it puts on the cover, but it can't do both.
Below the fold: Lyon's initial reaction to the iPad, captured on videotape by Om Malik, founder of the GigaOM blog network." [Philip Elmer-DeWitt at Fortune]
Good Primer On Customizing Facebook Fan Pages From Orli Yakuel
via techcrunch.com
Customizing tabs, adding a landing page and highlighting your team -- three quick things.
Building a 1909 Maxwell - The New York Times
via nytimes.com
"They decided to honor the 100th anniversary of Ramsey’s pioneering drive — still more than five years away at the time — by crossing the country in a 1909 Maxwell of their own. Unfortunately, only one 1909 Maxwell DA was known to exist. And it wasn’t for sale."
How “Location” Is Changing Marketing
Image via Wikipedia
Brian Morrissey had a quick piece recently that analyzed how “location” is increasingly tying together our virtual and physical environments.
If I’m a brand marketer or digital strategist, one of the nice by-products is I can now spend more time on engagement strategies. Here’s the way Morrissey described location’s impact on marketing.
This evolution has major implications for brands, giving them the possibility of tracking the success of digital campaigns to the store level and changing how they market to consumers.”
As Morrissey points out, the ability to track touch points throughout specific campaigns is where things start to get interesting. And if you add in the ability to tie a user’s social graph into the experience, well, you can see where it’s headed.
As location becomes more deeply embedded in everything from operating systems to in-car apps, it’ll be a key piece that provides a clearer picture of the digital bread crumb trail.
Think about the way check-ins and geo-fencing [a la Placecast] are changing the tactical approaches to one-on-one marketing and customer loyalty. In essence, brands can now have their own content delivery networks (CDNs] and almost automate the entire opt-in process within the mobile experience. It’s really pretty simple, if I’m near your storefront and you reach me with something valuable, there’s a good chance I’ll share at least some of my information or social profile. And as socialCRM gets more sophisticated and things like Twitter are more deeply entrenched in customer service, the brand experience will be much more fluid. Savvy organizations will proactively engage with you based on your preferences. It’s that level of personalization, coupled with the ability to track behavior, that has so many folks excited about location’s impact on marketing.Lastly, it’s probably not accurate to say ‘location” was the wild card when it comes to mobile, but seeing how rapidly it’s become the fabric that binds so many things together is fascinating if nothing else.
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Solving “Check-in” Fatigue Is Good For John Q. Public, But Customer Insight Is Why It Matters
I tweeted about Check.in a few weeks back after seeing some stuff on the BrightKite blog.
TechCrunch has early access and posted some glowing tidbits that, as usual, kicked off a flurry of other posts related to Checkin’s potential impact.
When you load it up, the browser asks for permission to pull your coordinates, and a few seconds later it pulls up a list of venues it believes you’re near. When you click on one, the app does some “magical matching” to find the venue across the various services."
‘Fatigue” seems to be the description “du jour” when describing the process of checking in, and if you’ve used any of the existing services like BrightKite, Gowalla or Foursquare, you can relate. Not to mention it always seems a little rude to stop in your tracks after a handshake and tell someone to hang on while you check-in. But I digress.
As far as Check-in’s impact, you can see Henry Blodget’s speculation in the embed I included. He hints that the ones to beat -- Gowalla and Foursquare -- could be relegated to a “dumb pipe” status should something like Check-in catch on. He cites TweetDeck’s use of Twitter’s API as an example.
But I think his second point is a clearer indication of where things are headed. With business accounts looming in the backdrop from Twitter and an improving Google Buzz, both companies pose a much more potent risk to location-based app providers. Twitter, for example, may tread lightly when deciding whether to add a similar aggregation element, but ultimately it’s a must-have.
Businesses large and small will pay for consumer analytics, especially ones that help distill online behavior and drive opt-in. Location-based services are accomplishing both of those things very well – and tied into a larger network – become even more compelling.If Check-in does anything, besides breathe life into BrightKite, it’ll provide a clearer roadmap of what all of us are willing to share and illuminate some of the challenges we still face with the open web and things like privacy.
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Om Malik on investment trends in Silicon Valley
The new reality of the social web (and the Internet) is that both Facebook and (to some extent) Twitter are dominating our online attention, siphoning minutes away from other services. In the process they are making it difficult for other services to capture our imagination and time
via gigaom.com
George Dearing
Founder @ Dearing Group LLC.
George can be reached via email at george@dearinggroup.com or on Twitter, and Facebook Subscribe to this site via RSS here.
