Archive for May, 2008

I’m seeing Moleskinerie’s popping up everywhere these days. I love them. What is even better is the artistic community around them. Stunning images.

• Intel on social responsibility…
• Free notebooks? Interesting idea… I’ve been wondering how long before we get to subscriber models.
• Thank goodness… In a Harris Interactive survey of 2,030 US adults of whom, 1,778 have actually flown in an airplane, a full three quarters say that cellphone usage on airplanes should be restricted to “non-talking features.” In other words, email, texting, and surfing the Web. That’s a pretty significant majority seeing as how the EC has cleared the way for calls within European airspace. 69% of consumers agreed that if voice calls are permitted, a special “talking zone” should be established so that other passengers are not interrupted.
• James has a great photo that brilliantly articulates the difference between press and bloggers. Can you guess?

• The move to the cloud will impact MSFT… Interesting… :: “In five years, 50 percent of our Exchange mailboxes will be Exchange Online,” said Capossela, who expects a portion of Exchange Online customers to come from customers switching from International Business Machines’ Lotus Domino system. According to research firm Radicati, Exchange will run about 210 million corporate e-mail accounts in 2008, growing to 319 million mailboxes in 2012.
• Here’s a post on how hard it is to make advertising on Facebook work. I’ve seen opposite results in some of the campaigns I’ve run using the same thesis. Perhaps the notion to challenge here isn’t the effectiveness of the platform in driving clicks but rather if traditionally presented and produced ads work. What if this was more inviting for the community? What if it encouraged participation? Better still, what if it rewarded participation? As this fella says: Instead, we need to challenge the impression-based advertising model and create marketing that consumers actually want to engage with. Now that’s a marketing model worth the hype, and certainly an improvement for both marketers and their consumers. Bottom-line is, bad ads deliver bad results irrespective of the media – but when misplaced or in not appropriate for the media, they absolutely deliver bad results. George Colony at Forrester has some great counterpoints to the belief that advertising will continue to drive business models.  Jon Fine at BusinessWeek reports more on how making money on YouTube will take longer than expected.  And Chris Anderson at The Long Tail reports that broad interest targeting is working better on focused networks through Ning.)
• Got a chuckle from this post on the The Steinbrenner Method of Management – from HarvardBusiness.org. There are ways to motivate and there are ways to demotivate. What Hank Steinbrenner, a senior executive with the New York Yankees, did the other day is decidedly in the latter category. “We’ve got to forget about all the injuries and start playing our butts off,” Steinbrenner told the New York Post. “These players are being paid a lot of money and they had better decide for themselves to earn that money.”

– Andy

• The move to the cloud will impact MSFT… Interesting… :: “In five years, 50 percent of our Exchange mailboxes will be Exchange Online,” said Capossela, who expects a portion of Exchange Online customers to come from customers switching from International Business Machines’ Lotus Domino system. According to research firm Radicati, Exchange will run about 210 million corporate e-mail accounts in 2008, growing to 319 million mailboxes in 2012.
• Here’s a post on how hard it is to make advertising on Facebook work. I’ve seen opposite results in some of the campaigns I’ve run using the same thesis. Perhaps the notion to challenge here isn’t the effectiveness of the platform in driving clicks but rather if traditionally presented and produced ads work. What if this was more inviting for the community? What if it encouraged participation? Better still, what if it rewarded participation? As this fella says: Instead, we need to challenge the impression-based advertising model and create marketing that consumers actually want to engage with. Now that’s a marketing model worth the hype, and certainly an improvement for both marketers and their consumers. Bottom-line is, bad ads deliver bad results irrespective of the media – but when misplaced or in not appropriate for the media, they absolutely deliver bad results. George Colony at Forrester has some great counterpoints to the belief that advertising will continue to drive business models.  Jon Fine at BusinessWeek reports more on how making money on YouTube will take longer than expected.  And Chris Anderson at The Long Tail reports that broad interest targeting is working better on focused networks through Ning.)
• Got a chuckle from this post on the The Steinbrenner Method of Management – from HarvardBusiness.org. There are ways to motivate and there are ways to demotivate. What Hank Steinbrenner, a senior executive with the New York Yankees, did the other day is decidedly in the latter category. “We’ve got to forget about all the injuries and start playing our butts off,” Steinbrenner told the New York Post. “These players are being paid a lot of money and they had better decide for themselves to earn that money.”

– Andy

Been out of the blog for a week or so. Preoccupied by a ton of exciting work. We announced a new CFO yesterday and are gearing for D next week.

Jawbone is out with a new range of unbelievable headsets. I’ve been a big jawbone fan for ages. These are simply gorgeous. Love the touches like the leather ear-hook. They also work better than any headset I’ve ever used.

And I just ordered one of these. This will remove the perpetual battle to prioritize the NetFlix cue… Roku looks brilliant…

We talk a lot about The Connected Era here at Dell. Nortel is out with a survey on the Hyper Connected. Looks interesting. Big takeaway here is that while we engage as members of the hyper-connected, the rest of the US is largely passive. Thanks to Steve for the pointer.

All of this data is consistent with what Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff talk about extensively in their new book, Groundswell. If you play with Forrester’s Technographic profile tool, you can zero in on just how wide the divide is within your target audience. They peg 52% of the US online population as largely passive.