Carrot Beats Stick
WooHoo: You’ve just unlocked the URL of Blogville Badge! With Hostess becoming as bankrupt as the nutritional information in a Ding Dong and Kodak redefining the Kodak moment of another kind of bankruptcy, I immediately thought of my childhood. Thankfully those cheerful marketing images that blanketed the store shelves were…
Quips: The Slide Some Vendors Won’t Let Me Show On Social Media Tools
Social Media Explained In 140 Characters (More or Less) Some time back a tweet went out describing what all the tools were (Figure 1). I modified this a bit and now use it in alot of presentations to audiences around the world. More than 80% of the conference organizers usually are fine with this slide. [...]
American Express: the Fight for the Local Deals Market Heats Up
A bit of news you might have missed last week, considering all of the high profile (and very sad) headlines out there, was a partner / program announcement from American Express. I’ve watched the battle for “local” rage on for the last couple of years with location based apps, review sites, local deals and more [...]
Let’s Make a Deal: Social Offers
Groupon’s IPO is potentially valued up to $25 billion and it’s subscriber base is doubling once a quarter, LivingSocial raised $400M in venture funding, Scoutmob nails $1.5M in it’s first funding round, FourSquare hits 3M daily check ins and Facebook…
Monday’s Musings: Lessons Learned From Amazon’s Cloud Outage
Amazon’s Cloud Outage Catches Most Clients Offguard The recent Amazon cloud outage at its Northern Virgina data center from 5 am Thursday, April 21, 2011 to roughly 5 am Friday, April 22 has shaken the confidence of some executives on public cloud computing. Most notably, FourSquare, HootSuite, Reddit, and Quora publicly suffered visible performance issues. [...]
Facebook Aiming to be the Central Hub for Social Shopping?
I read that Facebook just started testing a new feature called “Buy With Friends”. It seems that the feature, which only works today with virtual goods inside games, let’s users get discounts on items that their friends buy. When a user makes an in-app purchase of a virtual product using Facebook Credits they are offer [...]
Why I’m Unplugging From Location Based Services Until The Privacy Issue Is Resolved
Convergence Of Smart Phone Affordability And Broad Network Access Drives Growth In Location Based Services I’ve been a big fan of location based services (LBS). In fact, many of you have followed my whereabouts on Yelp, Tripit, and other integrated Twitter services. As many of you know, location based services take your geographical position from [...]
The Left Over Prediction for 2011, Winning the Local Wars
The process of coming up with predictions each year is an interesting one. It involves a lot of brainstorming and idea pitching of course, and in the end quite a few ideas end up on the "cutting room" floor. Now…
Check in Fatigue
Danny Sullivan wrote up a piece on Foursquare that perfectly encapsulates the issue I have with Foursquare (and their ilk) these days… summed up as “really, who gives a shit?”. I have really made an effort to apply myself to FourSquare and have accumulated a handful of mayorships and a dozen badges in the process… [...]
Foursquare: Shiny Object or Mainstream?
Over the weekend, Foursquare scored a major coup via a new partnership with American Eagle: they got their name and logo plastered all over Times Square. The first story I saw on the subject was on Mashable, where blogger Samuel Axon noted, “It seems like just a short time ago that these location services were [...]
