Archive for the 'News & Ideas' Category

Startonomics is over but the presentations are online

If you were unable to to attend Startonomics today in San Francisco. You’re still in luck, as they’ve archived everything on Ustream.tv and on SlideShare.

Startonomics is a one-day workshop designed by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs on how to create simple, actionable metrics; and how to use them to make better product and marketing decisions for long-term growth and startup success.

One of the standouts for me was the presentation by Muhammad Saleem.com/


Wordpress releases iphone app

Wordpress has stepped up to the plate with their very own app. The new app supports both wordpress.com and self-hosted blogs. Some of the features are:

- photo support for both camera phone and library photos.
- support for tags and categories
- ability to password protect a post, save as draft or mark for latter review.
- Support for multiple blogs
- Post previews
- Auto recovery feature recovers posts interrupted by phone calls.

You can screenshots of the app in action here http://iPhone.wordpress.org/gallery/

I’m using the app to make this post. This will be a useful app for anyone with wordpress and a iPhone.

5 ways to improve your ecommerce revenue

I’ve recently been doing online Marketing consulting with an ecommerce client. They’re an old school ecommerce company with not very sexy products. Never-the-less they’ve been around for a longtime and will be going public soon. So, as a part of the process I put together a list of 5 ideas for their internal marketing team to review and hopefully implement or improve. I thought I would share those 5 things here. I know that most ecommerce companies do most or all of these, but you’d be surprised at how many “old school” companies that are out there that do not.

  1. Create a corporate blog, and brand it in a way that reflects your main site but also gives you the appearance of being an expert (which you should be). This is a good way to have an online presence that will possibly get you a new audience and get bloggers talking about you. Update it daily.
  2. Blog marketing: make a list of all of the authority bloggers that write about products in your niche and spend an hour or less a day participating in their conversations. It’s important to do this without spamming them. If you participate in the conversation you’ll get more respect.
  3. Be diligent about making sure sale items or breaking product/ technology news gets in front of the Digg, reddit and other social news sites audience. This could be huge. It might even be beneficial to do some sort monthly “overstock” item sale that’s by design just for the digg crowd. Everyone likes good deals.
  4. Boost up your affiliate marketing: I’m sure you are already doing some sort affiliate deal through CJ or others. In my experience, affiliate marketing is one of the best and least expensive ways to get your products out there.
  5. Be creative and unique: It would be awesome if you could create some sort of “contextual” ad network just for your products. Bloggers would eat it up, as they are always looking for ways to monetize their blogs.

The important thing to remeber is that all of these will work, but you have to be diligent and understand that it doesn’t happen overnight.

New 80gig iPod Classic at the Apple Store for $71

ipod classicHere’s the deal… If you have a 3rd generation ipod that’s currently on the “fritz” you can take it back to the Apple store and they will give you 80gig ipod classic for $71. Apparently for a limited time apple doesn’t have any spare parts for 3rd genetation ipods so they decided to give everyone the upgrade deal. I took mine in on Sunday, under the advice of an Apple employee and was in and out less than 10 minutes. My “battery” was the problem with mine and they didn’t even turn it on to see if it worked. So if you have 3rd Gen iPod take it on down to the Apple store to get your new 80gig classic. If someone was enterpriseing enough I’m sure you could purchase a broken 3rd generation for next to nothing and then take to Apple for a new ipod classic. But hurry up because this will only last a couple of weeks at the most.

Digg launches new profile features

digg.com logo

Digg lunched some new feature today that makes them a bit more like Facebook and myspace. They’ve added 50 new features, but most revolve around social networking.

  • Digg will notify you via email when certain activities happen, such as when someone adds you as a friend or a story you submit becomes popular. You can control what emails you want to receive in the Email Settings section of your Digg User Profile.
  • You can easily find your friends’ Profiles on Digg by searching for them by their email address. If you don’t want to enable others to search for your Digg Profile by your email address, or if you want to manage what personal information to display in your Digg Profile, you can reflect this in your Privacy Settings.

You can check out their blog for a video rundown of 5 of the new features.

All eyes on Steve Jobs and Apple for September 5th Announcement

Lots of folks are waiting to hear from Apple about the latest and greatest iPod’s and iPhone’s. So far a new ipod Nano and new touch screen design for the iPods, including WiFi have been announced. Get real time news from CrunchGear.

apple september 5 announcement

pic via crunchgear

Video content for your iPhone

With all the iPhone hype ( i don’t have one) of late, lots of companies are optimizing their content so that it works with the iPhone. Applications such as Digg, Meebo and many other are rushing to get their content and services in front of iPhone users. The other big thing for the iPhone is video content. Apple started out by showing commercials with Youtube content optimized for the iPhone. I suspect that short format video content will be a huge winner for iPhone users, assuming the AT&T’s EDGE network performs. One of my favorite originally produced video networks, On Networks, has high-def on demand content. They have shows that range from Cooking and Health to Comedy. Now you can can check their shows out on your iPhone. Video content optimized for the iPhone is going to explode.

Remembering Broadcast.com- 8 years old

Ok, I was never a big fan of Braodcast.com but they were unique at the time. On Mark Cuban’s blog yesterday he had a post on Broadcast.com and that it was now 8 years old. He had a video promo form Broadcast.com that was pretty funny to watch. I just thought I would share it with you here.

DemoCamp Austin June 2007

On Monday (June 25) I went to my first DemoCamp. It was at a great coffee shop on the south side of town called Cafe Caffeine. There were 5 presenters but the overall turn out was pretty small.

1. Jason Howell – SelfBookIt
2. David James – CommunityGoals | Raise money and find solutions for community problems and goals.
3. Paul Walhus – SearchSlides
4. Ash Maurya – BoxCloud | Dead-simple file sharing
5. Mark Phillip – AreYouWatchingThis

All presenters did a really good job of walking everyone through there product. The two products that stood out the most to me were BoxCloud and AreYouWatchingthis. Both are very polished and the guys behind them are very sharp. Boxcloud is a file sharing application that is one of the best I’ve seen. Their product is ideal for people in the creative field, as you can send large files to clients or other members of your team and have them proof the file and highlight edits without downloading the file. Go to boxcloud.com to find out more. AreYouWatchingThis.com is a sports alert community. You can think of it as a digg for live sports. It’s pretty cool because you can alerts on “exciting” games, as they’re happening. If you’re a sports fan, AreYouWatchingThis.com is a must. They hope to one day have an integration with Tivio witch will put them into some serious money.

Overall DemoCamp was a lot of fun and I look froward to the next. You can view some photos from the event here.

Oakley gets purchased for $2.1 Billion

Ilalian eyewear maker Luxottica Group S.P.A. has purchased Oakley, Inc in an all cash deal valued at $2.1 billion. I had no idea that Oakley was worth that much. Read more here.

I remember the days that oakley frogskins were the in thing. Now, I guess it’s just Oakley that’s the in thing.

Oakley Frogskins

Next Page »