Tshirts from the internet
Maybe the title should be Tshirts about the internet? Either way, every month I get a shipment of dot.com paraphernalia from startupschwag.com. I just received my 3rd shipment and so far I can only report positive things. I liked all the companys they have sent for the shirts and any cool stickers are a bonus. I believe it to be well priced at $15, especially for a web geek like myself! Below is my latest shipment with a tshirt from lijit (blog stats & search company) and the other three have recently been added to my flickr.
Impromptu SXSW interview
I am heading down to SXSW in austin tomorrow for the interactive portion of the show. I somewhere marked down that I was going and that information ended up in the hands of Paul Walhus (see previous comment). He wanted to chat about my company Media Refined Inc and my overall view on the tech geek fest.
On another note I am testing out Vimeo and have uploaded the interview to the service. The video appears to lag compared to sound at times but seems to catch up. I think it mostly has to do with the quality of the original. Makes me want an HD camera.
Video below (warning: video is 15 minutes long). sorry about the opening scene nose pick.
Jim Crews Interview - SXSW 2008 from Jim Crews on Vimeo.
OU Digital Initiative - personal interest piece
A nice personal interest spin on the conference I spoke at last week.
Her name is Liz Maute, and she’s a 21-year-old senior at the University of Oklahoma’s Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication, where I’m teaching this fall.
She says she’s an advertising major, but that’s just a ruse. What she really is is a budding entrepreneur who’s learning how to use interactive digital technology to help her realize her dreams and ambitions, make a decent living and ultimately help revive New Orleans’ Katrina-battered economy.
I met Liz last Saturday at the end of “Digital Initiative” week organized by Gaylord College Dean Joe Foote that brought ten top people from the fields of journalism, public relations and advertising to the OU campus to explain to students how they can build a career by mastering the complex tools and techniques of the Internet.
read the rest here - I asked them to keep my name out of the piece, didn’t want the press.
Goin’ Mobile?
Yesterday I attended a Yahoo! Summit Series (an afternoon symposium for people in the digital ad industry) focused on the Mobile industry as it relates to marketers. It was a pretty standard event, little mixer at the start and 5 or 6 speakers covering a few topics over the course of 3 or 4 hours. The speakers were from a number of companies (Qwikker, Scanbuy, MobiTV, and Yahoo!), I hadn’t heard of Qwikker or Scanbuy in the past - although I am familiar with the technology they deploy campaigns with.
Qwikker is a proximity based mobile messaging platform… what the means: You are standing at a bus stop and your phone vibrates with a message… the message comes in through the bluetooh on your phone and prompts you to do - something. Advertisers can send songs, movies, photos, just about anything your phone can handle it can send. Pretty cool.
Scanbuy is a company that enables users to get enhanced information buy taking a picture of a special barcode that is on products, billboards, toys, etc… The technology hasn’t hit the US really, but is huge in the asian markets. You can check out a demo of them on their site.
MobiTV is a pretty big and popular company - if you have a newer wireless handset than you probably have been offered or seen the product. Sprint calls it SprintTV and is bundled with capable phones. It live tv for your cellphone… As 3G rolls out we will probably see much more from them, but I think it is still a bit far fetched to watch long form content on your small cellphone screen.
The point of this post wasn’t to detail out the companies, but instead say how surprised I am at the penetration of Mobile phones… here are some global numbers from the summit.
- ~ 1 Billion TVs in households
- ~ 1 Billion PCs in households
- ~ 2 Billion Mobile phones
- ~ 3 Billion Projected Mobile phones by 2010
The one key takeaway was that the mobile landscape in the US is completely out of control. The carriers don’t speak to each other and certainly don’t agree on things, phones run on all different platforms, and customers haven’t grown out of Talk/SMS yet. What I mean by grown out of Talk/SMS is that most of the successful advertising campaigns in the mobile space involve some sort of multimedia which as most of you know isn’t highly adopted in the US yet. In the next few years we will be seeing the second wave of the mobile explosion. Consumers will be more likely to watch short form video, take/send/receive video and photos, surf the web, and maybe one day scan crazy barcodes on the site of products.
Working at my past two jobs at Draft/FCB and Avenue A | Razorfish I had done exhaustive research in this field but ultimately never recommended a mobile initiative for any clients due to the low adoption rate of newer phone technologies. For example: To deliver mobile coupons/barcodes to be read out by a scanner at a later date, you have to send the coupon/barcode to a phone that supports images, typically to a user who had to opt in previously for the offer, and on the sales side a special barcode reader has to be installed. Due to the reflective plastic used on mobile phones normal barcode readers can’t get to the actual data on the screen. It just isn’t terribly feasible… Some smaller SMS campaigns in the US have been successful but again they were very limited and small in size.
acquired
two companies that I have very close ties to are now one. Microsoft announced that they were aquiring AQNT yesterday shooting the AQNT stock sky high. I have done business with microsoft for the past 3 years and have close friends who work there. As most of you know Amy has in the past year joined the ranks of the microsoft elite… would have been nice of her to let me in on this little peice of business!
I am a bit sad to be sitting on the sidelines for this exciting time but I am happy for my friends who are involved. Once finalized this will be the largest acquisition in Microsoft history - 6 billion in cash.