A must read. A great list of immensely successful companies that Bessemer passed up on for ‘obvious’ reasons.
Link: Bessemer Venture Partners – Our Portfolio.
Bessemer Venture Partners is perhaps the nation’s oldest venture capital firm, carrying on an unbroken practice of venture capital investing that stretches back to 1911. This long and storied history has afforded our firm an unparalleled number of opportunities to completely screw up.
I missed this from Debi earlier in the month. I totally agree with what she says. Actually, she and I have had some great discussions around this topic of mobile myopia among the Internet leaders.
Yes, Debi, there is a need for mobile-savvy folks to start permeating all these Internet companies. In any case, it’s a business opportunity for mobile folks to leave traditional telecom companies and get involved with companies in different areas.
Link: The Supernova Mobile Apps Panel – Wasn’t | 8/8/2005 | mobile jones.
The only person on the panel to reference mobile audiences and the mobile life style was AJ Kim. This is an ongoing problem that is perceived in the view of Silicon Valley companies and not incorporating a mobile perspective in their product planning, and initially even in their language. This panel demonstrates the absence of comfort and ultimately understanding that these seminal user created content and social communication tools vendors have for mobile prosumers and their needs.
In the spirit of openness, I’ll give away my list of potential targets.
Companies who could use an infusion of mobility
– Six Apart – TypePad
– Yahoo! – Flickr, Search, Yahoo!mail
– Google – GMail, Search, Dodgeball
– Apple – iTunes, iPhoto, .mac
– AskJeeves – Bloglines
– 37signals – Basecamp, Backpack
– Kodak
– smaller companies – del.icio.us
And since this is a community, I have a list of people I know who get mobile and whom I’d call on to execute stuff with the companies listed above. I’ll keep that list to myself – to protect the innocent.
Laura Ramsey brings up a very interesting point regarding marketing of Open Source products (projects, things, stuff). The funny thing for me while reading (and re-reading) the post is that I kept thinking, not of ‘Open Source’ marketing, as in the marketing of Open Source products, but as on Open Source Marketing’, as in marketing in an Open Source way.
I think the answer to her question lies in my initial understanding of what she was saying – the marketing of Open Source has to come from the community in an Open Source way. Everyone feels passionate of the Open Source project they are working on and of the products they use that come out of the Open Source community. Why can’t some of the evangelist-inclined folks in the Open Source community run their marketing (or whatever you want to call it) like any Open Source project? The enthusiasm is from within, and the knowledge, too.
In a way, that was where I was going with my marketing with Lifeblog – I was trying to get others to own the marketing of the product, on their terms, and also to find others who would act as multipliers and do the same for me. Isn’t this how Open Source works? Organically grows from unguided, collective interaction in the community to create a self-organized, complex, organism with a life and direction of its own?
Sure, I greased my efforts with some money and gadgets, but it wasn’t all that necessary, it just sped things up, facilitated us getting off the ground. And, even with me gone, it’s still happening on its own!
So, my answer to where are all the Open Source marketers is: they are sitting right next to you. Use the tools you know and love to conquer marketing on your own terms.
Link by way of Kathy Sierra: Laura’s Box of Chocolates.
Neo-marketing, indeed. Kathy Sierra’s post and ensuing discussion point out a lot of issues I have been grappling with in the past 5 years since I was anointed Marketing Manager.
You see, prior to that, I was a writer and just before that a molecular biologist. Yes, quite odd.
Nonetheless, I have been able to kick some serious butt, getting folks excited about the products I was marketing, succeeding in spreading good will and positive energy, and in avoiding the regular pitfalls of standard Marcoms.
Why is that? I had no training in marketing principles or techniques. I had no clue on how to create a PowerPoint presentation or what Value Proposition meant. I never did a SWOT analysis or written up some USPs. Basically, I was less trained than a trainee. How did I do it?
Common sense. Honesty. Kindness. Trust. And a gut feeling as to how people really want to participate in the creation of a brand, the creation of a community around a product, in how they wanted to be respected for their opinions and not force-fed some rose-colored product-promise krap.
Sure, along the way I read some books and listened to some bright folks. But most of these just reinforced my beliefs into what makes good marketing PR outreach cheerleading evangelism oh, you know what I mean, What I Did.
In the end, I was doing a concoction of public relations, media relations, consumer outreach, strategic and collaborative business development, clever sponsoring of companies and events, and participating in the give and take of the community conversation (and all with way less money than the rest of the company). When I look back and see how these functions are so deeply separated in most companies, I can see why Marketing, Comms, and PR get a bum rap. It’s a half-assed, non-integrated, incomplete interaction with customers.
Enough of me. Go read the post and discussions.
Link, by way of our Chris Bouret: Creating Passionate Users: You ARE a marketer. Deal with it..
But the difference between what we now consider "old-school marketing" (otherwise known as The Four P’s — product, price, promotion, and placement — heavy on advertising and "branding") and the "neo-marketing" we’re doing here is frickin’ huge.
And don’t miss the rest of the blog – three braniacs write it and have some great posts on other topics.
I changed my personal email address a while back to reset the spam counter to zero. I don’t use my personal email address much and I managed to last a while, protecting my address from spam for about a year. Slowly the spam started appearing. It’s really not much – a few a day – but I don’t get much proper email, so relatively, it was a lot.
But, the main thing for me was that I heavily access my account with my phone. The spam headers were annoying to manage, since the email client on the phone has no spam filter. The only solution was either to pay my email provider for a spam filter or find some other free way of having a spam filter.
Well, I finally set up a Gmail account – forwarding my email to it, setting my reply address properly, and setting up the POP access from the phone. Yup, it all came together quite well, even better than before. I have spam filtering and my sent messages show up in my Gmail sent folder. Also, I can use my PC client to also access Gmail the same way.
The sad thing is that I had to go to a separate service provider to have all this done. If my email provider (in Finland, no less) had a clue, they would make spam filters free and make a more mobile-friendly email service.
Hmm, seems like practically everyone can use some help in making their services mobile-friendly. And of course, when I mean ‘mobile-friendly’ I mean integrated into the mobile lifestyle.
Mobile lifestyle – sounds lame, so feel free to suggest another term for me to use. 😉
One of the perks of working with a huge company is that there is no shortage of analyst reports and presentations you can peruse. I was going through a whole bunch of reports today and read closely two of them.
One was a presentation that was typical of analysts – fancy forecasts in a market segment we already know a lot about and nothing new was revealed (and for sure the numbers, winners, and forecasts changed quarterly). This was basic research, interviewing users and estimating trends. Yes, analysts are good at this, but you can forget about ever becoming smarter as a result of reading such reports. I ended up calling it ’20/20 hindsight into the future’.
The second report was a similar data analysis type of report, but the questions they were asking were much more clever. Therefore, the value of the trends were much greater, since it pointed out things in ways we normally don’t think of. Nonetheless, it was a trend report, a report on existing trends. More 20/20 hindsight, only with better guidance.
The second report was from: M:Metrics. I link to them here, since I poked around their website and was intrigued (they were new to me).
But, here’s my thought for the day. What if analysts backed away from the research a bit and used their big brains to guide innovation? What if they could figure out what could not be asked, what could not be measured, but what could use a bit of attention.
Isn’t that the best use of data? I have done this my whole career (I should say, my three careers) – measure and observe and analyze, and then kick butt with insights and innovations the data missed or suggested somehow. Data analysis is about now with a future predicated on now. Innovation is about tomorrow and a future predicated on tomorrow. You need to be able to go beyond the data of now to innovate in the future. I have never found analysts, with all their clever reports or presentations, to help me there.
Do you have what it takes to build a mobile app? Yes or no, you should read what these guys have to say.
Link: InterCasting Corp: Inferior Bathroom Technology and UI In The Mobile Space.
Rabble has been in development for a year. Sounds like a long time for a blogging and social networking app, doesn’t it? How about cramming that app into a 200k payload, working around caching limitations which are all different across hundreds of supported handsets, overcoming network latency issues unheard of on the web and doing it all in a presentation environment that requires creative solutions to the problems that are among the easiest to solve on the web? Now do it with 1.5 inches or less of screen real estate in a way that is logical and useful for the consumer. The coding was done in a few months. It’s everything else that goes into bringing a product to market that takes time. This is the kind of time I wish the automatic bathroom flushing people would have spent.
[…]Here are my five criteria for useful mobile applications. (All of our
planned mobile applications must have at least four, but maybe you
don’t think they are all that important for what you are doing. Time
will tell.)
Successful mobile applications:
1) Are not just mobile relevant, but mobility relevant
2) Are personal or offer some form of personalization
3) Leverage the network effect of mobile connected devices
4) Originate in the mobile space
5) Utilize and extend the upstream capabilities of the mobile device
(this could be as simple as texting and passive location or as involved
as massively multi-user networked games.)
A few comments about the list:
1) Yes. ‘Mobility relevant’ in my mind is ‘relevant to the user’s mobile lifestyle’.
2) Yes. The mobile is personal*, great mobile services are personal.
3) Hmm. This I think is a challenge in some forms, but now is a must to succeed – it’s all about communication in the end. The best services currently are about communication: voice and SMS. And I think there’s a lot that can still be built upon those two pillars of communication. Rabble is an example of a service that turns the phone’s camera into a mobile communication tool. I’d be curious to know how much Rabble uses other channels of communication available to the phone.
4) Hmm. I am partial to a mix of mobile and PC originated activities. I think some services have failed because they pushed the mobile-origination without complementing it in other ways. So, ‘mobile-originated’, yes, but in moderation. 😉
5) Hmm. not too sure what you mean here, but I get a feeling that it ties into the network effect in item 3. If so, yes, the phone has some pretty nifty ways of supporting the flow of information in a service.
Great stuff.
*personal services – some folks here say ‘intimate’ services, which clashes when they mention ‘sticky’ services. i’ll stick with personal.
Spot on. This is what you get when someone understands the mobile lifestyle. you need to live it to understand what it means and how to build for it.
Debi gets it. Do you?
Link: More on thought and jargon | 8/25/2005 | mobile jones.
New language to shape new thought
* Publish to web address and read everywhere versus location matters allot.
* Browser is the UI versus fragmented UI by device, activity or service.
* Information browsing versus information precision.
* Time measured as number of minutes on a single site versus minutes or seconds spent on all locations.
* All data lives on and is shared from the web versus data lives on and is shared across all devices.
The list above is a high level beginning. Just as many bloggers
are convinced that one must engage in blogging to comprehend a blogger
perspective, immersive experience as a mobile user and with mobile
experts would open new avenues of language and thought when considering
development of mobile services.
Without a marketing background, I understood this instinctively.
Link: gapingvoid: we want to be part of something.
Like I said, it’s all about Outreach. It’s about wanting to be part of something interesting, something larger than the actual product.
If I had had more time with Lifeblog, I just might have been able to have a case study to convince the mass marketeers in the rest of my company the value of participatory, conversational, personal outreach. In any case, it is amazing how far we got with what little we did (and spent). I even managed to get the flywheel going so that the conversation could keep going for many more months (still is!) after I was bumped and the Lifeblog team stopped talking.
Some more commentary on the Google WebOS.
Link: Om Malik’s Broadband Blog � Google, the ultimate deflator.
It’s not too difficult for me to imagine a day, very soon, when I rely on Google for almost all my computing needs and I buy hardware devices based on such criteria. That’s the day Google will have become my operating system.