Todd added me to his interesting list of Top Marketing Blogs, (150 to be exact). He uses a combination of Technorati, Bloglines Subscriptions, Google Page Ranks, and of course his editorial subjective opinion, read his thoughts on the analysis. Great Resource there Todd, I read many of the blogs on there, fantastic list of thought and practice leaders.
I’m not a parent, but Cyberbullying has been talked about very heavily this week.
Wendall Davis of Symantec (one of PodTech’s customers) has a very informative podcast on what is Cyberbullying including some important facts on what consumers, parents and event companies should do to prepare for this. They suggest you check out their family resource website.
I’ve quite a few conferences that I’ll be speaking at, here’s what’s coming up. Please leave a comment if you’ll be at any of these.
I’ll be at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, from April 17-18th
I’ll be on two panels, one which i’ll be moderating Scoble, Pirillo and Thomas Hawk on Social Media for Startups. I’m thinking of doing something unique with this panel, and make it more of a shortened version, so that all the answers are short and brief, perhaps something like a ‘Twanel’I’ll also be on a second panel with Lionel of Dell and Scott Hirsch regarding Online communities, I hope you attend that as well.
The week after, I’ll be running around the bay area:
I’ll be on a panel at Ad:Tech (watch out for the talking people on the website) in San Francisco, April 24th, regarding Business Blogging with Rohit, and Steve of Adrants.
Are you at the Customer Reference Forums in Berkeley, April 25th? The day right after Adtech, I’ll be running a session at the Customer Reference Forums, where my new friend Bill Lee and older buddy Mario Sundar will be attending as media. The topic will be based upon this post I wrote a while ago
WebVisions in May, kinda like a manageable and sane version of SXSW
I’m really excited to return to WebVisions in Portland on May 3-4h, in which I’ll be presenting Social Media Strategies for Corporations. I attended last year, and chronicled all the blogs and images from the event.
I’ve a few other ones coming up in June and July, more updates to come later.
Last night, I witnessed Tom Foremski sign papers with CEO and Founder John Furrier as a content partner. Tom is an innovator in media and as a former mainstream media guy that started his blog in the earlier days.
“…In 1999 he joined the Financial Times’ San Francisco bureau fulltime to help expand the newspaper’s coverage of US technology markets and Silicon Valley. He left the Financial Times in 2004 and continues to write columns on Silicon Valley for the Financial Times, and on his personal site, SiliconValleyWatcher.com“
Welcome Tom, you’re one of the powerhouse bloggers, the following video shares the moment of signing.
Earlier this week I had Justin TV come to the office, that was an interesting real-time experience.
Today, ABC 7′s David Louie comes to interview Robert Scoble and John Furrier at PodTech HQ. The subject, the hot topics of online behavior and civility. It will air tonight at 6pm on Channel 7 in the bay area. I’ll link to it if it goes online.
It was pretty “meta”. As CBS walked in, we Twittered they were here, people talked about it, I took pics from camera, and posted on flickr in less than 2 minutes. They started videoing, conversations started on Twitter then on flickr. All this before the actual piece has aired on TV. when they air it, hopefully we’ll link to it and it extends it’s life. If only Justin TV was here. Media compounds media.
Update: the video from ABC is available online, I’m impressed, they’re getting the whole online experience thing.
I posted the following pics to flickr in near-real time and then twittered it, it made for an interesting intersection of media.
Amused by the Twitterati conversations about us posting pics in real time
Scrapblog just announced their next rev of their website. I had the privilege to view some of the demos of this product at the WeMedia conference in Miami recently and it is just amazing.
They’ve created a 5 minute tour that shows how this user experience just blows away most web applications out there.
It integrates images, scrapbook features, text, music and videos with various ways to share it within myspace, flickr, or blog.
Techcrunch has this very interesting live demonstration, which I’ve also embedded below (warning: music)
Yesterday, I shared Why I still think that users will be paid to use Online Data Storage (like Yahoo Mail), today, to my surprise, Yahoo has launched a web service that enables Developers to build custom applications on top of Yahoo Mail and monetize.
This means that developers that are able to build some new application that connects to Yahoo mail (and it’s unlimited data storage) will receive 10 dollars for every new sign up of a pro-account.
“Yahoo! Mail offers an incentive for developers to build applications using the full functionality available for premium Yahoo! Mail accounts. Specifically, Yahoo! Mail provides a commission of $10.00 for every new Yahoo! Mail Plus account referred by developers.” says Yahoo
Yahoo has created a massive developer “channel sales” network that could scale it outwards. Is suspect Jeremy Zawodny had some influences on this, he’s been keeping close tabs on Amazon’s S3 web services, these Yahoo offerings will help developers scale out infrastructure, without having to hire a sys admin or deal with excessive web hosting.
What will come out of this? I can think of a few application developers that I know that could really benefit from this. I can think of a websites that could build in infrastructure Approver, Hipcal (now with Plaxo), Linkedin, Plaxo, 37 Signals, 30 boxes, Twitter, or any of these White Label Social networking sites.
My prediction yesterday was right, developers can pass on some of the residual revenues to users, incenting them to sign up, with the benefit of storing all of one’s data in the “cloud”. If done correctly, a savvy business model will let developers make revenues higher than the $10 premium sign up, so there’s profit sharing with the developer and the user.
What is “Paymium”?
The model is flipping, soon we’ll say good-bye to “premium” (sites you have to pay for) web sites and hello “paymium” (websites that pay users to use them). Did I create yet another stupid jargon term, probably. Welcome “paymium”. Chris Coulter will probably rant on this post, I look forward to it.
As I stated previously, I’m a Yahoo mail user (non-premium) a Yahoo Shareholder, and Yahoo is a client of PodTech. Contact me if you’ve something interesting to share.
I had a great time hanging out with Justin TV today, he stopped by the SF MOMA to say hi to me (I was at my client’s event, HP) and he certainly already had some very avid fans. The SF Chronicle was following us around, they were taking pictures of him, maybe I’ll appear in the upcoming front page article. Apparently, there are some Jeff Yang from SF Gate comments on the Justin TV experience. He apparently was watching while I was touring Justin PodTech and the surrounding Palo Alto:
“As I’m writing this, for instance, it’s March 26, 12:21 p.m. Pacific time, and Kan’s driving a car. Looks like he’s not alone — hey, he’s talking to another Asian American guy. Based on Kan’s handy calendar, I think he’s someone from Podtech Network, a startup that offers videoblogs from the likes of Jason Calcanis and Robert Scoble. “Where are you from?” asks Podtech Dude, from the passenger’s seat. “I grew up in Seattle,” says Kan’s invisible, offscreen voice. (When Kan’s wearing his HatCam, you can’t see him, of course — you’re looking at the world from his first-person perspective. Actually, you can see Kan himself only when he’s asleep, because that’s when he turns the camera around to face his half-naked bad self in bed. Note: This is not titillating in the slightest, unless you get off on dimly lit, low-resolution sleep-lab videos.)
They talk briefly about growing up Asian American: Kan’s grandparents were born here. Podtech Dude is fifth generation — and then Podtech Dude asks one of the two questions that comes to everyone’s mind when they encounter Kan: “How the heck are you going to find a girlfriend if you’re wearing that all the time, dude?” Kan’s response: “I’m looking for a girl who’s an exhibitionist.” Such girls do exist: Kan notes that the other night, he got his first “onscreen” kiss from some drunk woman at a Laughing Squid party.
And then his second. And his third. “
Yeah, that Fifth Generation American Chinese guy from PodTech is me. I should also note that Justin is breaking how people think, both technologically, as well as culturally.
“I never really thought about it from this perspective before, but I guess this isn’t a typical stunt for an Asian American to do,” admits Kan. “If I heard about this in the news and it wasn’t me, and I found out it was an Asian American guy doing this, I’d be a little surprised. But that’s a good thing, right? Maybe this is in a small way breaking down some stereotypes.”
Also, it appears there’s a Justin TV fan site, it’s chronicling the adventures of Justin, from a more mature perspective, unlike some of the chat rooms. I’ll be talking to the creator sometime tomorrow.
A few months ago I wrote Why I think future Online Data Storage companies will Pay You to Upload Data, and while not everyone agreed with me (some from the mainstream data storage industry may have felt threatened) I still stand by my prediction, and in some cases, it’s already started to happen as Google announced it will pay residuals to YouTube users.
Yahoo has just announced unlimited Yahoo Mail storage, which I believe is a huge treasure trove of user data, marketable information, and preference information that will help Yahoo market it’s ads or ads of others. We all know that about 85% of Google’s revenue is from Adwords, one could assume that a healthy chunk of Yahoo revenues is also from contextual marketing.
While the details of Yahoo’s mail increase are not clear, such as Allen Stern asking for clarification on what exactly can be stored and Christopher Salazar questions if we users really want our data in the hands of a marketing company.
I still believe that companies that offer Online Data Storage will pay you to use their services in the near future. Online Data Storage is getting cheaper every month, so the determining factor will be how to bundle this service in a way that can help users store their entire life online, and make some residual money from contextual advertising.
I predict that Google Mail will follow suit, then the price war will happen, it won’t be about which is cheaper, but which mail client, Gmail or Yahoo Mail will pay users more money.
Having worked at a traditional data storage company and having a web career, I’m watching the Online Data Storage market carefully, which is a significant portion of the infrastructure of Social Media, you can see all my posts titled Data Storage. If you haven’t read my 40 points on the future of online data storage, now would be a good time.
While it doesn’t impact my predictions, you should know that I use Yahoo mail, and other Yahoo storage products like Flickr. I’m also a Yahoo shareholder, and Yahoo client of PodTech.
As promised, Justin showed up at PodTech HQ today, he was here from 11:30am till about 2pm. You can go to his site and look at the archives. I video interviewed Justin at STIRR before he went live, it’s a good summary. There’s an archive of him coming here, it will be at this URL (but doesn’t work yet)
We started to Twitter it, and Scoble Twittered it (he has over 2000 friends, most which are bloggers) and then Justin’s chat room started to have problems (related to the visitors, dunno?) I started to get Text messages and phone calls from folks that were watching, it was pretty cool.
Justin TV Factoids I learned today
-I learned Justin is a graduate of Yale, and him and his former college buddies came up with this idea.
-Justin has a very serious battery pack of lithium ion batteries in his backpack, and they heat up real well (I had to hold his backpack while he drove).
-He’s also sponsored by Bawls energy drink, and Zipcar, he’s hoping to land more sponsors.
-He’s getting called by major media, newspapers, and we expect him to get invited to Oprah show, and other mainstream shows.
-He’ll prob need to upgrade his platform to handle the load. He’s using Amazon EC2 Web Services for computing power.
-It took him and his team a few months to build the backpack platform.
-Justin moved here from Seattle a few months ago
-He’s single
-Got his first ‘on screen’ kiss this weekend, followed by others
-Seeking a GF that’s an inspiring actress
-Is 3rd generation Chinese
-Can only go places where the EDVO card can reach
-Is invited to many parties
-The camera is on him 24/7
-There’s a 15-30 sec delay
-He tilts the camera up when going to bathroom
-There was a false alarm prank call made to the police, which brought them over to his house
-The police are aware of these false alarms and will be cautious going forward, they won’t be tricked again
When we went to eat at a local med wraps place on California Avenue, people who were watching Justin TV in the area figured it out, and one photographer showed up to take pics. Eddie and Irina showed up and then invited Justin to go film a show for LunchMeet.
Things are starting to happen in real time, people are sharing on the net.
Social Media is going from Asynchronous to Real-Time.
I posted this less than 30 minutes after he left…I can’t keep up!
Update:
Justin is on CBS5, a local news firm, see video. I wonder if the news industry realizes this could be a threat.
Update March 27th
Jeff Yang of SFGate covers the Justin.TV story. He even watched me live in the video, and referred to me as “Asian Guy”. Now he knows, it’s me Jeremiah
