Wednesday, February 28,
Thursday, March 1, 2007
OnlineSpin: Mobile Social Networking Opens The Door For Advertisers
Estamos adiante nesta tendencia. ;o)
Friday, February 23, 2007
Smartphone market poised for growth
De: "CEA SmartBrief " <cea@smartbrief.com>
<http://r.smartbrief.com/resp/gmjIlnydnvmBpRCibvcSSPEB>
Roughly 24 million smartphones were shipped worldwide in the fourth quarter of 2006, according to IDC <http://r.smartbrief.com/resp/gmjIlnydnvmBpQCibvcSJMpQ> . Many analysts expect the market to post 30% growth this year. Financial Times
<http://r.smartbrief.com/resp/gmjIlnydnvmBpRCibvcSSPEB>
Roughly 24 million smartphones were shipped worldwide in the fourth quarter of 2006, according to IDC <http://r.smartbrief.com/resp/gmjIlnydnvmBpQCibvcSJMpQ> . Many analysts expect the market to post 30% growth this year. Financial Times
Thursday, February 22, 2007
América Latina terá redes 3G ainda este ano
América Latina terá redes 3G ainda este ano
Quinta-feira, 15 de fevereiro de 2007 - 17h15
MADRI - Os 300 milhões de usuários de celular na América Latina terão acesso a redes móveis 3G ainda este ano.
"Os primeiros lançamentos começarão este ano e esperamos que em 2008 as redes de terceira geração sejam uma realidade em grande escala", disse Erasmo Rojas, diretor regional da 3G Américas, associação que promove a tecnologia GSM nas Américas.
Rojas acrescentou que as grandes operadoras regionais devem liderar a adoção do 3G já que precisarão recuperar os gastos com a migração de seus clientes das redes de segunda geração.
América Móvil, Telefónica e TIM controlam atualmente mais de três quartos do mercado celular latino-americano.
Para este ano, a América Móvil, que lidera o mercado com uma participação de cerca de 38 por cento, e Telefónica (28 por cento), anunciaram investimentos de 3 bilhões de dólares cada para modernizar suas redes na região, mas não fixaram datas para o lançamento da tecnologia de terceira geração UMTS na América Latina.
Rojas disse que o grande volume de investimentos leva as operadoras a buscar a maximização do retorno antes de oferecerem aos clientes o salto para uma nova tecnologia.
"O Arpu (receita média por usuário) na região oscila entre 13 e 15 dólares por mês", disse Rojas. É um valor bem abaixo dos cerca de 40 dólares por mês que a Telefónica Móviles obtém na Espanha.
Rojas disse que para defender seus nichos e obter vantagens competitivas, algumas das operadoras locais ou governamentais já anunciaram que colocaram em marcha a adoção da tecnologia 3G na América Latina.
No Chile, que conta com uma taxa de penetração de celulares de 80 por cento, a Entel já lançou uma rede 3G. Também existe uma rede de terceira geração em Porto Rico e há planos concretos para o lançamento no Uruguai e Argentina.
Rojas acrescentou que a recente queda nos preços dos celulares pode se constituir outro impulso para a tecnologia 3G na região latino-americana.
"O congresso 3GSM (que acontece em Barcelona) foi marcado por notícias muito promissoras nesse sentido", disse Rojas, referindo-se aos planos da sul-coreana LG Electronics de vender celulares 3G a preços de cerca de 70 dólares.
Rojas também afirmou que os governos latinos poderiam fomentar a implantação da tecnologia 3G mediante marcos regulatórios que incentivem o setor.
"Diferente da Europa, não deveria haver leilões muito custosos de licenças 3G", disse Rojas. "(Os governos) poderiam recorrer a outras fórmulas como ´pague à medida que cresça"´, afirmou.
Wired News: Web 2.0 Winners and Losers
Web 2.0 Winners and Losers
By Michael Calore
| 
Also by this reporter
02:00 AM Sep, 20, 2006
A few weeks ago, I implored readers of the Monkey Bites blog to sumbit their votes for the best and worst Web 2.0 sites out there.
I asked them to build a list of their own can't-live-without-it and oh-please-make-it-stop destinations. After tallying up the votes from our readers, I posted the people's choice list on Monkey Bites blog. With their picks in mind, I set out to build my own roster.
There are plenty of good ideas in the Web 2.0 world, and an even greater number of bad ones. In the interest of brevity, I've chosen five sites from each category. The web services industry certainly has more than five winners and five losers, so we've only highlighted the exemplars.
I visited the very top of the iceberg and descended all the way down into the depths of suckitude to compile this list. Enjoy the results.
First, the Winners.
Flickr
A picture is worth 1,000 tags. I've known for a long time that if you want to demonstrate what tagging is all about to somebody who's new to Web 2.0, just send them to Flickr. The photo-sharing site has the best application of semantic categorization on the web. This is because they ask a question that invites creativity: What words would you use to describe a photo? The setup also makes searching the site a breeze.
Other things Flickr gets right: enhancing the community through pools, clusters and groups; options to preserve rights through Creative Commons; free and pro accounts; the open API.
Odeo
Listen up. When podcasting arrived, everyone wanted in on the game. All you needed to get started was a microphone, some audio editing software, a web server, knowledge of peak limiting, compression, EQ techniques ... Ouch. Then Odeo breezed in and de-mystified the podcast.
Odeo allows users to record and share audio using simple, browser-based tools. A browser with Flash installed, an internet connection and a microphone are all you need to start podcasting. The site has tools for sharing and managing audio feeds, an extensive podcast directory and a contact manager that facilitates sharing audio between friends. The company even offers a component that gives mobile users the ability to record a podcast from their mobile phone.
Writely
Who needs MS Word? The big, groundbreaking idea behind Web 2.0 is that the web should and will take over application hosting duties from the desktop. In other words, all of your documents, contacts, lists, e-mails and -- most importantly -- your office productivity tools live on the internet. They're all available no matter where you are or whose computer you're using.
Writely is a word processor that runs in the browser. It offers everything you'd expect from a word processor, including spell check, extensive formatting capability and support for dropping in images. Writely also makes it easy to collaborate with others. Your colleagues can log in and edit a document you started. Users can also collaborate over e-mail, and then publish the results to a blog when they're done. And, yep, it's free.
del.icio.us
Where'd I put that link? Without del.icio.us, I'd be drowning in a morass of bookmark clutter. Seriously, drowning. Every article I've saved for later, every YouTube video I've earmarked for repeat viewing, every cache of free MP3s, every (ahem) NSFW page I come across. It all gets posted to del.icio.us. It's truly a lifesaver.
Del.icio.us takes a while to catch on with some people (what is "social bookmark sharing" anyway?) but once they get the hang of it, they're hooked. One-click posting from the browser bookmark bar, the ability to peek at what your friends are reading and the crazy stuff you find by running tag searches all add up to a truly useful web app. Not to mention the API that gives you RSS feeds, blog posting functionality and import/export capability between del.icio.us and your browser. I'll never lose a webpage again.
NetVibes
Start here. Remember start pages? Those portal-riffic pages that displayed local weather, news, daily horoscopes and sports scores were last seen in vast numbers circa 1999. But with the explosion of RSS and Ajax, a smarter breed of start page has emerged -- and the king of the hill is NetVibes. The Parisian company has created an aggregation tool that lets each user create a personalized page that pulls news feeds and data from web services into modular boxes. The boxes update automatically, and their display options are totally customizable.
NetVibes is built for nine languages. Users can pull in any RSS feed on the web, as well as Flickr photos, Alexa charts, to-do lists, Writely documents and shared calendars. There are even interfaces for webmail services like Gmail and Yahoo Mail. And, unless you want to access your personalized start page from another computer, no user registration is required. Trs bon.
And now, the Losers.
MySpace
No thanks for the ad. They say 100 million users can't be wrong. Well, can't they? Regardless of how popular MySpace is or how many bands, web celebs or stalkers it continues to empower and enable, the social networking site is about as pleasant to look at as last week's cat vomit. The user interface is clunky and counterintuitive. Advertising is ubiquitous and invasive. The garish backgrounds and animated images seem sucked from some terrible time portal that leads straight to the nascent web of 1995. Oh, and auto-launching audio widgets and video players? Don't get me started.
Unfortunately, MySpace is going to be around for a while, so we'd better all get used to it -- or build something better and get everyone to switch.
Squidoo
Advice 5 cents. If you're an expert on some obscure topic, you should be able to use that knowledge to gain fame and notoriety -- and maybe make a little bit of dough in the process. That's the idea behind Squidoo. It's a community site that encourages experts create a "lens," or a page that concentrates on a single topic.
The Lensmasters, as they are known, point curious users to resources on the web about their topic of expertise, giving topical search a more human touch. The Lensmasters earn royalties in the process through Squidoo's revenue sharing program. Sounds pretty revolutionary, except that the Lensmasters don't point you to anything that you can't find on Google. Some of the Lensmasters do a good job, but a number of the lenses are just glorified ads and many are bogged down by opinionated writing.
The bulk of the lenses on Squidoo are made up a few sentences written by the Lensmaster, followed by a dozen or so ads for books and CDs from Amazon. And, as TechCrunch points out, the best Lensmasters are only receiving about $30 per month for their work, much less than they could be making if they started their own blog and pulled in AdSense ads.
Browzar
Huckzter. Upon its release in late August 2006, this new web browser promised the most secure browsing experience possible. Browzar purportedly kept your browsing secret by covering all of your tracks. The application wouldn't keep a history or cache, it deleted cookies and didn't record form or search data, according to Freeserve founder Ajaz Ahmed, Browzar's creator.
The blogosphere gave Browzar a glowing review, even though it was a little clunky and only worked in Windows. Then, a few days later, reports started showing up about Browzar's inability to completely delete page caches or browsing history. It was a lemon. And just in case that wasn't enough, it pushed users to its own branded search page full of contextual ads. No cookie for you, Browzar.
Fo.rtuito.us
Gimme.a.break Fo.rtuito.us turns the social networking model on its head. Instead of relying on the traditional social software experience where you connect with people you already know or bond with strangers over common interests, Fo.rtuito.us delivers a total stranger, chosen at random, to your virtual doorstep.
You interact with that person for four days, discussing interests, sharing ideas and generally getting to know them. Then, you decide whether you have enough in common to actually be their friend and offer them the prize of adding them to your network.
It's an interesting idea, but it never took off. Even if you ignore the silly del.icio.us rip-off URL, you can't ignore the fact that traffic to the site has almost totally flatlined. What good is a social network that nobody uses?
Friendster
Tipped scalability. Friendster was the original social networking golden child. When it first arrived, it was the coolest thing in the universe -- everyone just had to run to the site and set up a page. In fact, everyone did, and Friendster wasn't ready for its newfound popularity.
As the site's traffic grew and grew, page loads ground to a halt. People stopped going to Friendster, but they had already tasted the joys of online social networks. So, when the new kid on the block (MySpace) showed up and offered them a site with the same functionality that didn't timeout during the login process, the masses bailed. And the rest is history.
By Michael Calore | Also by this reporter
02:00 AM Sep, 20, 2006
A few weeks ago, I implored readers of the Monkey Bites blog to sumbit their votes for the best and worst Web 2.0 sites out there.
I asked them to build a list of their own can't-live-without-it and oh-please-make-it-stop destinations. After tallying up the votes from our readers, I posted the people's choice list on Monkey Bites blog. With their picks in mind, I set out to build my own roster.
There are plenty of good ideas in the Web 2.0 world, and an even greater number of bad ones. In the interest of brevity, I've chosen five sites from each category. The web services industry certainly has more than five winners and five losers, so we've only highlighted the exemplars.
I visited the very top of the iceberg and descended all the way down into the depths of suckitude to compile this list. Enjoy the results.
First, the Winners.
A picture is worth 1,000 tags.
I've known for a long time that if you want to demonstrate what tagging is all about to somebody who's new to Web 2.0, just send them to Flickr. The photo-sharing site has the best application of semantic categorization on the web. This is because they ask a question that invites creativity: What words would you use to describe a photo? The setup also makes searching the site a breeze.
Other things Flickr gets right: enhancing the community through pools, clusters and groups; options to preserve rights through Creative Commons; free and pro accounts; the open API.
Listen up.
When podcasting arrived, everyone wanted in on the game. All you needed to get started was a microphone, some audio editing software, a web server, knowledge of peak limiting, compression, EQ techniques ... Ouch. Then Odeo breezed in and de-mystified the podcast.
Odeo allows users to record and share audio using simple, browser-based tools. A browser with Flash installed, an internet connection and a microphone are all you need to start podcasting. The site has tools for sharing and managing audio feeds, an extensive podcast directory and a contact manager that facilitates sharing audio between friends. The company even offers a component that gives mobile users the ability to record a podcast from their mobile phone.
Who needs MS Word?
The big, groundbreaking idea behind Web 2.0 is that the web should and will take over application hosting duties from the desktop. In other words, all of your documents, contacts, lists, e-mails and -- most importantly -- your office productivity tools live on the internet. They're all available no matter where you are or whose computer you're using.
Writely is a word processor that runs in the browser. It offers everything you'd expect from a word processor, including spell check, extensive formatting capability and support for dropping in images. Writely also makes it easy to collaborate with others. Your colleagues can log in and edit a document you started. Users can also collaborate over e-mail, and then publish the results to a blog when they're done. And, yep, it's free.
Where'd I put that link?
Without del.icio.us, I'd be drowning in a morass of bookmark clutter. Seriously, drowning. Every article I've saved for later, every YouTube video I've earmarked for repeat viewing, every cache of free MP3s, every (ahem) NSFW page I come across. It all gets posted to del.icio.us. It's truly a lifesaver.
Del.icio.us takes a while to catch on with some people (what is "social bookmark sharing" anyway?) but once they get the hang of it, they're hooked. One-click posting from the browser bookmark bar, the ability to peek at what your friends are reading and the crazy stuff you find by running tag searches all add up to a truly useful web app. Not to mention the API that gives you RSS feeds, blog posting functionality and import/export capability between del.icio.us and your browser. I'll never lose a webpage again.
Start here.
Remember start pages? Those portal-riffic pages that displayed local weather, news, daily horoscopes and sports scores were last seen in vast numbers circa 1999. But with the explosion of RSS and Ajax, a smarter breed of start page has emerged -- and the king of the hill is NetVibes. The Parisian company has created an aggregation tool that lets each user create a personalized page that pulls news feeds and data from web services into modular boxes. The boxes update automatically, and their display options are totally customizable.
NetVibes is built for nine languages. Users can pull in any RSS feed on the web, as well as Flickr photos, Alexa charts, to-do lists, Writely documents and shared calendars. There are even interfaces for webmail services like Gmail and Yahoo Mail. And, unless you want to access your personalized start page from another computer, no user registration is required. Trs bon.
And now, the Losers.
No thanks for the ad.
They say 100 million users can't be wrong. Well, can't they? Regardless of how popular MySpace is or how many bands, web celebs or stalkers it continues to empower and enable, the social networking site is about as pleasant to look at as last week's cat vomit. The user interface is clunky and counterintuitive. Advertising is ubiquitous and invasive. The garish backgrounds and animated images seem sucked from some terrible time portal that leads straight to the nascent web of 1995. Oh, and auto-launching audio widgets and video players? Don't get me started.
Unfortunately, MySpace is going to be around for a while, so we'd better all get used to it -- or build something better and get everyone to switch.
Advice 5 cents.
If you're an expert on some obscure topic, you should be able to use that knowledge to gain fame and notoriety -- and maybe make a little bit of dough in the process. That's the idea behind Squidoo. It's a community site that encourages experts create a "lens," or a page that concentrates on a single topic.
The Lensmasters, as they are known, point curious users to resources on the web about their topic of expertise, giving topical search a more human touch. The Lensmasters earn royalties in the process through Squidoo's revenue sharing program. Sounds pretty revolutionary, except that the Lensmasters don't point you to anything that you can't find on Google. Some of the Lensmasters do a good job, but a number of the lenses are just glorified ads and many are bogged down by opinionated writing.
The bulk of the lenses on Squidoo are made up a few sentences written by the Lensmaster, followed by a dozen or so ads for books and CDs from Amazon. And, as TechCrunch points out, the best Lensmasters are only receiving about $30 per month for their work, much less than they could be making if they started their own blog and pulled in AdSense ads.
Huckzter.
Upon its release in late August 2006, this new web browser promised the most secure browsing experience possible. Browzar purportedly kept your browsing secret by covering all of your tracks. The application wouldn't keep a history or cache, it deleted cookies and didn't record form or search data, according to Freeserve founder Ajaz Ahmed, Browzar's creator.
The blogosphere gave Browzar a glowing review, even though it was a little clunky and only worked in Windows. Then, a few days later, reports started showing up about Browzar's inability to completely delete page caches or browsing history. It was a lemon. And just in case that wasn't enough, it pushed users to its own branded search page full of contextual ads. No cookie for you, Browzar.
Gimme.a.break
Fo.rtuito.us turns the social networking model on its head. Instead of relying on the traditional social software experience where you connect with people you already know or bond with strangers over common interests, Fo.rtuito.us delivers a total stranger, chosen at random, to your virtual doorstep.
You interact with that person for four days, discussing interests, sharing ideas and generally getting to know them. Then, you decide whether you have enough in common to actually be their friend and offer them the prize of adding them to your network.
It's an interesting idea, but it never took off. Even if you ignore the silly del.icio.us rip-off URL, you can't ignore the fact that traffic to the site has almost totally flatlined. What good is a social network that nobody uses?
Tipped scalability.
Friendster was the original social networking golden child. When it first arrived, it was the coolest thing in the universe -- everyone just had to run to the site and set up a page. In fact, everyone did, and Friendster wasn't ready for its newfound popularity.
As the site's traffic grew and grew, page loads ground to a halt. People stopped going to Friendster, but they had already tasted the joys of online social networks. So, when the new kid on the block (MySpace) showed up and offered them a site with the same functionality that didn't timeout during the login process, the masses bailed. And the rest is history.
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Contagious Commercials | How to get in on the YouTube craze.
Contagious Commercials How to get in on the YouTube craze.
From: Inc. Magazine, November 2006 | By: Jennifer Gill
One day in June, MerlynDHZ shot a digital video of himself and his buddies flying down ramps, gliding across railings, and doing other skateboardlike stunts in their Heelys, sneakers with retractable wheels hidden in the soles. The next day, he uploaded the clip onto the video-sharing website YouTube. Within a month, more than 2,000 people had viewed the 90-second snippet. A few fans even linked to it on their personal MySpace homepages.
What MerlynDHZ's fans may not know is that he and the other skaters in the video work for Heeling Sports Limited, the Carrollton, Texas, company that makes Heelys. Heeling Sports is one of a growing number of businesses seeding YouTube with short videos to generate buzz on the cheap. The homemade quality of the clips appeals to young consumers who are constantly bombarded with ads, says Brooks Radighieri, Heeling Sports' marketing manager. "It has more validity if it doesn't look like a corporate-sponsored video," she says. "Kids are sharp--they know when you're trying to sell them something."
So-called video viral marketing has exploded over the past year, thanks to increased broadband capacity and sites like YouTube, which make it easy to upload and share videos online. Indeed, seven out of 10 Internet users have watched an online video, and 30 percent of those people have shared one with friends, usually via e-mail, according to a survey by the Online Publishers Association, a research group in New York City. "Videos seem to have replaced the jokes in my in box," says Stefan Tornquist, research director at MarketingSherpa, a research firm in Warren, Rhode Island. The same study shows that viral videos translate into sales. Sixty-six percent of the people who watch videos online have seen an ad clip. About one-third of those viewers visited the marketer's website, and 8 percent made a purchase.
A lot of that is thanks to YouTube, the dominant player in a category that includes Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) Video and AOL (NYSE:TWX). Every day, people watch more than 100 million videos on YouTube and upload 65,000 new clips. Many videos are posted by amateurs playing around with camcorders in their backyards, but sprinkled in are Hollywood movie trailers--and clips created by companies eager to capitalize on the craze.
Amid such clutter, it's easy to get lost. The funnier or more creative the spot, the better, Tornquist says. To build buzz for its new iced-tea malt beverage, for example, Smirnoff posted a two-minute parody of a rap video that featured country-club prepsters rapping about finger sandwiches, croquet, and, of course, Smirnoff Raw Tea. Within a few weeks, more than one million people watched the "Tea Partay" video. "You can't be a classic brand manager, worried about having the right words," Tornquist says. "The companies that are going to benefit will be the ones willing to stick their neck out."
Even then, there are no guarantees. Case in point: Robert Alvin, founder and CEO of online swap shop BarterBee.com, who donned a bee suit to kick off an online video contest this summer. Contestants shot 60-second films with bee motifs and submitted them to BarterBee.com, which reviewed the clips for questionable content before posting them on YouTube. BarterBee offered flashy prizes, including a 42-inch plasma television, and sent e-mail blasts to registered members of its site. In the end, though, only 30 videos were submitted, including the grand prize winner, which featured a man in a bee costume skateboarding through suburbia to deliver a BarterBee package. Still, considering that the campaign cost less than $10,000--"We didn't make the creative and we didn't host the videos," he says--Alvin may try again next year. For one thing, he adds, the clips still have legs on YouTube: One entry that spoofs the Mac vs. PC commercials has been viewed almost 5,000 times since August.
Heeling Sports has adopted a subtler approach. MerlynDHZ is actually David Chau, a 33-year-old member of Team Heelys, a group that the company formed six years ago to demonstrate its sneakers at in-store events. The skaters, who range in age from 10 to thirtysomething, try out for regional teams and are paid per event. They also help Heeling Sports stay current. Based on their feedback, the company set up a MySpace page this year and Chau began filming videos with a digital camcorder. Every other month, when he uploads one on YouTube, fellow team members post alerts on Heeling Sports' online message boards and on the company's MySpace homepage. Fans leave messages on YouTube, mainly in awe of the team's tricks, and Chau occasionally responds with plugs for Heelys.
Radighieri admits that the campaign hasn't had the same effect on sales as, say, the company's commercials on Nickelodeon (NYSE:VIA). Still, she's pleased with the low-cost exposure. Heeling Sports' sales more than doubled, to $44 million, last year. The company filed an IPO request with the Securities and Exchange Commission in September. "It's helping us build brand recognition," Radighieri says.
There is one thing about YouTube that Radighieri doesn't like: Heeling Sports can't stop fans from posting clips that don't jibe with the company's message. Many of the 150 videos that turned up in a recent search for Heelys on YouTube feature kids skating without the safety gear that the company recommends. One video depicts a Heelys-clad teenager hanging on to the back of a moving pickup truck until wiping out. Such videos make Radighieri cringe, but so far she hasn't tried to remove them.
Right now, Radighieri's more focused on making her own films. Plans are under way for a series of clips starring Team Heelys members showing fans how to perform skate stunts. Perfect content for YouTube, right? Maybe, but this time Radighieri is posting the videos on Heeling Sports' official website.
Copyright © 2006 Mansueto Ventures LLC. All rights reserved.
Inc.com, 375 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10017
The Power of Suggestion | Social shopping sites turn online shopping into a group activity.
The Power of Suggestion Social shopping sites turn online shopping into a group activity.
From: Inc. Magazine, February 2007 | By: Ryan McCarthy
Online marketing once was a savior for small companies, allowing businesses with limited budgets to reach a new world of consumers via banner ads and keyword searches. But marketing on the Web isn't what it used to be. A large number of search engine clicks are fraudulent. And competition from large, deep-pocketed marketers has driven up prices, pushing smaller companies to the margins.
Fortunately, there is a new alternative for online marketers, one that combines elements of yesterday's killer app, the search engine, with the best parts of today's, social networking. Known as "social shopping" sites, these services combine the networking power of MySpace with the data-crunching muscle of Google (NASDAQ:GOOG), and in the process bring a little more humanity to the act of shopping online.
What's different about social shopping? For all its power, Google can't tell shoppers what's cool or what their friends or like-minded consumers recommend. Social shopping sites, on the other hand, do just that--which provides new opportunities for small online retailers to reach consumers. A search for "men's shoes" on a typical search engine, for example, yields the most prominent brands and retailers within the first few pages of results. The same search on a social shopping site not only displays a wider array of smaller, and arguably cooler, brands, it points users toward the haberdashery recommended by the site's most fashion-conscious and influential users. These sites are geared to consumers, not marketers, so you have to tread carefully. Still, a single recommendation from a well-connected and influential user can generate considerably more visibility than many marketers could achieve on Google or Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO) --and, even better, it's free. On the major search engines, "it can be all but impossible for small retailers to percolate to the top of the search process," says Sucharita Mulupuru, a senior retail analyst at Forrester Research (NASDAQ:FORR). "There's no question that social shopping could be hugely beneficial to small businesses."
The medium has proved perfect for Alex Kump, co-founder of Topo Ranch, an apparel manufacturer based in Venice, California. Topo Ranch gears its T-shirts, fleeces, and jackets toward young, active consumers, who can be resistant to traditional marketing. And the start-up does not have much of an advertising budget; it gets most of its new customers via word of mouth.
Last August, Kump discovered ThisNext, a social shopping site geared toward design-centric consumers. After perusing the site, Kump decided it might be fun to post his own "Shopcast," the term ThisNext uses to refer to the personal lists of product recommendations that members post. Kump's Shopcast included an Ikea bookcase, the board game Scrabble, Niman Ranch bacon, and his own Topo Ranch hooded sweatshirt. That simple act managed to expose Kump's brand to thousands of potential customers, many of whom clicked through to Topo Ranch's website. The result of this zero-cost, ad hoc marketing? Since Kump began posting on ThisNext, the company's daily Web traffic has increased by almost a third and sales have risen 165 percent. "This is an opportunity to express what the Topo Ranch lifestyle is," says Kump. "All of a sudden, I'm not just making pants, sweatshirts, and clothing, I'm giving you a lifestyle that's made up of my favorite bands, my favorite board games, my favorite shoes, and my favorite furniture."
The idea behind social shopping sites is that online shopping, however efficient and easy, has almost nothing to do with the way people actually like to shop. In the real world, people make shopping an event; they do it in groups, they browse, share recommendations, and search out reviews by trustworthy experts. Indeed, even though online shopping remains largely a solitary act, 60 percent of U.S. adults who plan to shop on the Web viewed recommendations from friends and family as the top factor when choosing a small online retailer for holiday gift buying, according to a November 2006 poll from Yahoo and Harris Interactive (NASDAQ:HPOL).
This type of collaborative behavior has not gone unnoticed by large corporations. In 2005, Yahoo launched Shoposphere, its own version of social shopping, and in June eBay (NASDAQ:EBAY) partnered with the social shopping site Kaboodle to launch a service aimed at collectors called My Collectibles. Such activity does not surprise Gordon Gould, who co-founded ThisNext in September 2005 and now serves as CEO. "The search engines have spent the past decade educating people to think that they have to know what they want in advance when shopping online," he says. "But there's a whole swath of consumer behavior that's been well established since time immemorial that just doesn't get serviced online."
To facilitate collaboration and spur-of-the-moment purchases, Kaboodle, which launched in February 2006, lets shoppers with similar tastes form their own shopping squads, within which they trade recommendations and post messages. Groups such as the 45-member "decor and design" group, for example, have their own lists of their favorite home decorating products.
Tony Rekhi, owner of WineGlobe in Redwood City, California, began encouraging his customers to make lists on Kaboodle in July. "We were able to see a 10 to 15 percent increase in our conversion rate without spending a single dollar," says Rekhi. That compares with a return of just 1 to 3 percent on marketing campaigns like a bimonthly newsletter and paid ads on Yahoo.
Though most social shopping sites remain small, they are beginning to establish a presence. As the sites have grown, some have had to police their own communities. Manish Chandra, CEO and founder of Kaboodle, says that he's already taken action to keep intrusive marketers out of the site. Social shopping sites, says Chandra, represent a new challenge to brand marketers and retailers. "You can't just treat this as a pure merchandising exercise," says Chandra.
But approach the medium correctly, and you could end up with a small army of volunteer brand evangelists. The site Stylehive actually ranks users within areas of expertise based on the number of users who've followed product recommendations, and it allows users to track their favorite recommenders. Crowdstorm points out what it calls the "buzziest product." ThisNext, for its part, ranks users based on an internal "interestingness" algorithm, a proprietary formula that Gould thinks will allow ThisNext to target consumers making the most influential recommendations. "Not every consumer is of equal value," says Gould. "What we are setting out to do is to quantify influence for the first time."
Copyright © 2006 Mansueto Ventures LLC. All rights reserved.
Inc.com, 375 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10017.
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Fwd: Yahoo! mobile phone ads coming soon...
"Yahoo! is taking a leadership stake here, apparently in a race to beat out Google ,..." 
Get ready for some ads on you mobile device. We knew it was coming back in November when Yahoo! announced that they were testing banner ads on mobile browser based services. U.S. users that accessed mobile web email, finance, news and sports information were the first lucky viewers of these ads. Now Yahoo! has announced that it has signed up advertisers on its mobile advertising network to run ads on mobile phones in 19 countries including Britain, Ireland, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, the U.S., Canada and Mexico. This world is run by advertising, so can we expect anything less? I would totally understand the use of mobile advertising to subsidize mobile devices, and monthly carrier fees. But the second you drop it onto my mobile device, it's not going to make me a happy camper, especially since each image I download on my mobile device I have to pay to see in data charges. Yahoo! is taking a leadership stake here, apparently in a race to beat out Google, so expect to see ads from Hilton, Infinity, Intel, Pepsi, and Nissan coming to that mobile device in your pocket soon.
Posted Feb 13th 2007 9:30AM by Chris Gilmer
Filed under: Business, Web services, Yahoo!
Get ready for some ads on you mobile device. We knew it was coming back in November when Yahoo! announced that they were testing banner ads on mobile browser based services. U.S. users that accessed mobile web email, finance, news and sports information were the first lucky viewers of these ads. Now Yahoo! has announced that it has signed up advertisers on its mobile advertising network to run ads on mobile phones in 19 countries including Britain, Ireland, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, the U.S., Canada and Mexico. This world is run by advertising, so can we expect anything less? I would totally understand the use of mobile advertising to subsidize mobile devices, and monthly carrier fees. But the second you drop it onto my mobile device, it's not going to make me a happy camper, especially since each image I download on my mobile device I have to pay to see in data charges. Yahoo! is taking a leadership stake here, apparently in a race to beat out Google, so expect to see ads from Hilton, Infinity, Intel, Pepsi, and Nissan coming to that mobile device in your pocket soon. Wednesday, January 24, 2007
Fwd: Mobile Insider: Pushing The New URL
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: MediaPost Publications <mobileinsider@mediapost.com> Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2007 11:57:24 -0500 Subject: Mobile Insider: Pushing The New URL
Pushing The New URL by Steve Smith, Tuesday, January 23, 2007
AS WE LEARN MORE ABOUT engaging consumers through mobile media, I keep experiencing that deja-vu-all-over-again vibe. Back in the late '90s, Internet mavens ruminated about the best ways to push their print and TV audiences to the new medium -- where to put the URL, how much instruction neophyte users needed in these other media about how to operate this kludgy new one, etc. From their two cubicles somewhere to the left of the furnace, digital teams at agencies fought with the TV and print creatives over how much space and time they could get for that precious URL push. Where and how large should it be, we wondered aloud. Do you need to put the entire "http://www..." address in there, just "www," or will the "brand+.com" suffice? I remember when the "online side" of magazine brands crowed about securing a few lines in an upcoming issue that promoted the book's Web site complement.
We're going through a similar phase in mobile's relationship to other media, especially TV. Short-code promotions are the new URL pushes. How and when to insert that SMS pitch is becoming a dark art with its own set of conventions and oddball controversies only a direct marketer could love.
Air2Web is among the most experienced firms that mobilize on-air SMS polling and contests. Their latest project empowered viewers of Proctor & Gamble's People's Choice Awards to text in votes in select categories. Vice President of Marketing Alfredo Narez and CTO Dale Gonzalez recently walked me through some of the early learnings about the TV-to-mobile push mechanism. The little nuances involved in dialing up a successful campaign are eerily reminiscent of the Web circa 1997.
Ironically enough, offline media remain the most effective ways to engage users in mobile campaigns, Air2Web finds. Except for ringtone offers, which Web sites can demo easily, TV, radio and billboards beat the Internet for driving people to first engage a program via texting. Frequency matters. The more times a short code gets promoted in a TV program, the better the results. Ongoing programs are by far the most effective, however. A one-shot polling opportunity, like SMS voting in an awards show or sporting event, requires more teasing prior to the event and thus more costly broadcast investment. You also need to fight for more reminders in the course of the show. Understandably, air time is precious, so mobile marketers are always struggling for more, while the programmers are always calculating the cost and benefit of devoting extra seconds to a short code explanation. Shows that maintain an SMS program across multiple episodes are most successful, because the traffic tends to grow as the season progresses. "Over the first two months you see the ramp go up," says Narez. The overall cost may decline as well, since viral distribution among the fan base begins to replace explicit on-air pushes. Follow-up and following through appear to be the secrets of SMS engagement. Sending users back a message that pulls them into an ongoing conversation and acknowledges their contribution in some way is very powerful on a platform that is designed, after all, for one-to-one intimate conversation. "The most successful campaigns have been when they actually see what their outcome path produced," says Gonzalez, "when they immediately see who they voted for and what the result was." In fact, the actual proximity of the results to the SMS voting can relate directly to the level of traffic a voting opportunity will produce. When SMS voters are influencing shows and seeing their contributions live, "that real-time involvement gives them a strong sense of interaction and command and keeps them coming back," he says.
A year ago simply explaining the technology to viewers/listeners was a major hurdle for SMS campaigns, especially when marketers ventured outside of what was considered the sweet spot for the once-hip platform, 18- to 34-year olds. The age range for texting promotions has widened considerably, Air2Web says, just as the need to educate audiences about how to send text messages is going away. And in some respects less is more when it comes to on-air prompts. The most effective on-air mentions combine personalities promoting the texting option and a superimposed graphic spelling out the short code. But too much explanation can undermine traffic. Clarifying the fee structures of an SMS program has become the choke point for on-air messaging, and it may take a while for this one to go away. Many SMS promotions entail premium pricing (i.e., $.99 a vote) that requires notification, but even "free" programs involve some kind of ancillary cost to a consumer. Since data-plan pricing is all over the map, it is nigh impossible to explain all of the possible ways a simple SMS vote could cost the user. And it turns out that the more marketers try to outline the fee structure the more they lose participation. "The more of that stuff you include, the less traffic you are going to see," says Narez.
Balancing frequency with length and complexity will be the new art of on-air SMS pushes. As the market evolves, it would be nice to see mobile marketing and other media settle on some kind of boilerplate language that communicates responsibly the necessary provisos and exception for SMS interactivity without sounding like a pharma ad. Even better, it would be nice to see the carriers work together for a "free to use" model that relieves data plan customers from ancillary costs associated with a marketing campaign. Let the marketers absorb these costs, if that makes the process of engaging users in SMS exchanges truly frictionless. The mobile phone can become a highly interactive universal remote control for TV shows and marketing - but, like every universal remote, we need to learn more about programming it properly.
Contributing writer Steve Smith is a longtime new-media consultant and columnist, and current editor of Wireless Business Forecast for Access Intelligence at TelecomWeb.com. Contact him at popeyesmith@comcast.net.
Fwd: Mobile Mkt na China
---------- Forwarded message ---------- <http://leonardoxavier.typepad.com/mobilizado/2007/01/mobile_marketin.html> Mobile Marketing na China
Vale a pena ler esta matéria publicada no Wall Street Journal <http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB116787863206166699-lMyQjAxMDE3NjA3Mzg wNzM4Wj.html> sobre o crescimento do mercado de mobile marketing na China.
Pontos interessantes sobre o mercado chinês: :: Base de 450 milhões (!!!) de usuários :: Dobrou a taxa de acesso à internet pelo celular em 2 anos: de 10% para 20% :: O celular é praticamenteo único meio de acesso ao mundo digital :: A taxa de abertura de um SMS é de 95%
Com estes números, já pipocam os primeiros cases de sucesso.
A Coca-Cola investiu numa campanha na qual moradores de Beijing eram estimulados a enviar um SMS com seu palpite sobre a mais alta temperatura na cidade todo dia, durante um mês. Os vencedores da promoção receberam um ano de produtos da empresa. Foram registrados mais de 4 milhôes de SMS em 35 dias de campanha.
<http://leonardoxavier.typepad.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/ bmw_1.jpg> Bmw_1A BMW lançou um mobile web site (ou wap site como costumamos falar aqui no Brasil) para promover test-drives para os novos carros da série 3. Neste site, as pessoas podiam saber sobre características do carro, criar um carro virtual customizado (cores, opcionais, etc.) e ligar (click-to-call) para um call-center para agendar um test-drive. O site foi divulgado através de banners e links em portais mobile e obteve 2 milhões de page-views (de aproximadamente 500.000 consumidores em toda China).
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