“It’s clear that latency really does matter to users,” said Mayer, the VP of Search and User Experience at Google and today’s keynote speaker at the O’Reilly Velocity Conference.

Do ya really think so Marissa? Having unnecessary captchas, massive memory leaks in gmail, outbound gmail that gets improperly classified as spam, adding SMS features to Google Voice with no instructions on how to turn them off in the email – that does matter. You’re absolutely right, Marissa! But my question is what are you doing about it?

This message appears on my screen several times a week, nobody at Google (and I’ve let several people know, can get to the root cause to fix it), financial analysts should be modeling the revenue loss. I’m tired of sorry, I’d like to see a permanent fix:

We’re sorry…

… but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.

We’ll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, if you suspect that your computer or network has been infected, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your systems are free of viruses and other spurious software.

If you’re continually receiving this error, you may be able to resolve the problem by deleting your Google cookie and revisiting Google. For browser-specific instructions, please consult your browser’s online support center.

If your entire network is affected, more information is available in the Google Web Search Help Center.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we’ll see you again on Google.

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Seemingly almost out of nowhere, after several years of being virtually invisible to the public, click fraud appeared on the pages of the New York Times and Microsoft took on the role of being the white hat with the filing of a unique lawsuit.

Whether the timing shortly after the launch of Bing is on purpose or not, this is a highly important event.  Time may one day look back at this first of it’s kind event as the most single important action Microsoft has ever taken in the battle with other search engines.

Tim Cranton, Microsoft’s Associate General Counsel, wrote a post about the lawsuit on the Microsoft on the Issues blog, entitled Using Enforcement to Crack Down on ‘Click Fraud’, Cranton stated:

Once we became aware of the click fraud attacks we quickly took action to address any impact on advertisers and to enhance safeguards to further protect our network.  Today’s suit seeks an injunction to help stop this activity and to recover damages.

As I’ve stated on this blog before, the Internet is all about trust. If Microsoft can build trust by taking these actions, that is outstanding. Over time, the question is this, “Will Microsoft will be able to take trust away from other search engines regarding this issue?”

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Highlights:
Google’s data can now predict home sales and home sales numbers with search numbers.

The data can be correlated with stock prices at this time.

B2B search terms are growing. Conversions are bouncing back in Q2 2009!

Research, online and offline, big company c-suite, SMB and government sectors.

Commentary: First a note about the c-suite portion of the survey, I have concerns about an offline study asking senior executives about actions used for decisions being accurate. Or worse assuming the numbers were generated from search itself when it wasn’t. Executives might answer what they think is the best practice, even if they don’t do it to appear competent. I know of Fortune 500 CEO’s who still have their emails printed, so I have doubts about the number actually being this high. I’d love for this data to be 100% correct more than anyone, I really would, but I have concerns.

First findings form the C-Suite:

- 73% of the C-suite is using the Internet for information verification and vendor selection.

- 92% Internet exceeding, 87% at-work contacts for referrals.

- 64% of C-level executives conduct 6 or more searches per day to locate business information.

Video and podcast content usage is growing in importance.

Small and medium size businesses:

77% of business owners use search to find suppliers.

Half are using blogs and social media sites in some form in their business.

Government:

Searches are way up on stimulus, energy, health care and related issues.

Huge impact of search results, with just an Adwords ad:

28% Brand Association

36% Message Recall

Commentary:  I’d live to see an example with a smaller, lesser known B2B example.

With both a top organic and Adwords listing, incremental increases are significant

53% Engagement

43% Message Recall

63% Brand Association

Commentary: Sam Did not provide data on organic listings alone. I’d love to see if this was higher of lower than the Adwords ad alone.

“Mobile Search Growing Rapidly” Start testing…(audience did not react much)

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It was also nice to meet Matt Mullenweg and Jim Turner in person for the first time.  Having all of my great friend from the Chicago SEO meetup group was awesome as well.

It was fun to be part of a late afternoon speaking trio that put myself in between Kevin Palmer and Micah Baldwin. My talk was about the lessons of social media and search engine marketing measurement and how the driver is truly becoming web analytics management consulting to determine the proper course of action in the content strategy revolution. On your domain and blog you own your terms of service, on a social network you do not – this has major implications that need to be considered deciding what is the right path for your content. The talk got some nice reactions both offline and online…

All in all, it was an outstanding weekend and I made some great new friends.  I’m looking forward to Wordcamp Chicago 2010!

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After lunch he gave a highly intense 50 minute speech. He talks fast (as do I) so I think I missed a little bit of the talk in this blog post, but I hope that you are still able to glean the vlaue out of it that I did, seeing him live brought his ideas to a new level for me. He’s done a fantastic job of simplifying the complex, we shoudl all learn from his example.

Without further delay, here is my live blog post of his talk (please forgive brevity and language errors):

In the past 30 to 60 days have you used or replied to the following media:
Direct mail – 3% replied
Mainstream Media – 22% replied
Print Yellow Pages – 3% replied
Google, etc 100% replied
Tapped peer to peer network to get URL 80%

Why are we still focused on the 2-3% methods rather than the 80% and 100% methods?

Cindy Gordon at Universal Orlando told 7 just people the wizarding world of Harry Potter. Mainstream media and other people followed – when 7 = 350,000,000 million

What are we after? Attention. Cindy Gordon earned that attention via a Midnight conference call with 7 people.

David Meerman Scott – in 2002 he was fired laid off from Thomson for practicing cutting edge marketing. People are afraid of content based marketing. They are still afraid of it. THis fear is harmful in a multitude of ways.

Dentist in Boston. Started a blog. Wrote “Healthy Mouth, Healthy Sex” a free ebook. The ADA hated it. Her business is now doing $1 million dollars a year.

“You must unlearn what you have learned.” –Yoda

Prospects. Tell your story to an interested market.

Every hotel web site is the same. Boring, product focused.

Imagine a hotel website that was customized for each buyer? Businessperson, corporate travel manager, family choosing a vacation spot, wedding planning, event planner, etc

Who are your buyer personas?

What do you want your buyer personas to believe?

You can…
Buy attention…TV attention (talked about how silly CPM banners are would you like to buy space on the back of his laptop?)
Beg for attention…
Bug for attention…
Earn Attention…the best way…in the new rules!!!

Example: Approva
Internal Auditors…. iloveagoodaudit.com
Videos on Youtube “Happy Birthday Sarbanes Oxley”

On the web, you are what you publish…

It’s all about people…and some people aren’t playing nice on social media…

He put 14,000 post it notes on Jaguar, 3M liked it and contacted him. He asked for $2,000 for more notes. They said no. They got slammed and destroyed a positive thing.

If your mother would say it wrong, it probably is.

Encourage sharing…

Why do people use this Gobbledygook? 350 most overused phrases. Then counted the number of times this was used. The Gobbledygook Manifest.

Visual Gobbledygook – don’t do it.

Parents against reprehensible metal music…was a bait and switch – Toyota Matrix 2009

Causes this  “You are trapped on this website, you are screwed” syndrome

The back button is the 3rd most used web feature. (Sad isn’t it?)

You must lose control of your marketing!!!

The Grateful Dead allows bootlegging of their concerts and  music. Millions of people download it and adore the music. Lose control of your marketing… (I’d like to point out that this is not a new concept great to see an old school example)

Example: Mailer Mailer – made a whitepaper totally free – created a 20x increase in downloads – all for abandoning the email address! A good trade you should all make.

Put down roots – be where your audience is.

Kadient – The new rules of sales enablement – landscape rather than portrait, color rather than black and white.

Point the world to your virtual doorstep! Queensland, Australia had a contest, 34,000 entries and one guy creating content once he won.

FEAR – You have to unlearn what you learned

We want 330,000 people to be in Public Affairs.  In a world where people block social media, the Air Force promotes and social media.

I can’t do this…I’ve heard every excuse in the world…if a B2B German Toilet company can do it, you can.

STOP MAKING EXCUSES!!!

David like my recent post about VP of Communications at Universities enough to tweet it, check it out!

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In the “cage match” post, there is one phrase that got me out of my silence because the ignorance was too much for me to hold my tongue… Eric Clemons said:

“Mr. Sullivan argues that in all his years thinking through and working through issues in internet advertising he has never heard any company or any individual complain about paid search. In contrast, I have been hearing this complaint from senior vice presidents in travel companies for years, and this year the chorus has been joined by retailers and manufacturers”

Dear Mr. Clemons,

Perhaps it’s time for you to get some new senior vice president’s to talk to? It’s time for a new breed of leaders who know how to truly lead and not whine about taking the easy way out using purely 100% paid search.  Someone at that level should understand content strategy, social media strategy, seo strategy (do you even know what SEO is Professor Clemons?) and paid search and should be managing them strategically in conjunction with each other. All too often, I see executives whose qualifications to be a senior leader in an Internet company or large ecommerce division amount to little more than they worked at an Internet company since 1999, they worked and some ‘elite‘ management strategy consulting company(where they never executed or implemented anything), they’ve been passively recruited from place to place and it hides that they can’t move the needle or that they were a brand marketing person a long, long time ago and still think in terms of campaign awards…sigh.

To manage customer acquisition via the Internet effectively and create an awesome customer experience using all of the tools in the tool box isn’t tough if you have the right leaders in place who understand that strategy is about incremental daily improvement not hiring a 20th century management consulting firm. As a top 10 MBA holder myself I can honestly say that the education in almost all programs is lacking relevancy to today’s Internet world. I discussed this with the heads of the a major marketing professor conference here in Chicago recently – I was pleased by their receptiveness to my outreach. It’s too bad Mr. Clemons wasn’t there to share the conversation with us. My experiences at BlackRock managing data structures, living offline social media, creating elite customer service via the web and driving standards that created competitive advantages that have lasted a decade. Due to BlackRock’s B2B nature, much is still not understood publicly, but the Internet world would be wise to learn from BlackRock’s lessons.

The combination of my experience BlackRock, my top 10 MBA (least important of these) and the wonderful experiences I’ve had immersing myself in search engine marketing when Danny Sullivan was kind enough to let me hold a microphone in lieu of registration fee at my first SES conference in December, 2005 had led to the amazing learning that followed over the last several years. My life has never been the same since! I now have an amazing and wonderful small circle of the world’s greatest search marketing minds whom I can pick up the phone and discuss how search marketing is creating the largest change in business since the Industrial Revolution two centuries ago! I’ll admit it’s challenging and frustrating some days to be part of a tiny group that understands the massive power of how pull marketing via search is changing organizational structures and profitability at their very foundation.

The paradox is most of the leaders of companies don’t have the right combination of old and new skills to lead this change and the number of people in the world truly qualified to lead the largest change managment project in the history of the world (I’d love Tom Peters as a mentor btw if anyone can make the introduction) I can truly count on two hands at most at present – yet senior management and the world’s understanding of search marketing is so limited at this juncture that those people aren’t even coveted…yet. How can one hire the best leader or search marketing if they are still basically clueless about what they are buying? That’s right, they can’t effectively!

Retained marketing executive search consultants are still picking most CMO candidates based on 1989 standards and position specs and/or last job title held nonsense – oddly a side effect of the effect of search being used too heavily in candidate sourcing and job search. Worse, they are letting the roles be defined by the CEO, CFO and boards of directors who don’t know the first thing about how search engine optimization, content strategy and marketing are changing the world. This causes people with outdated skills to frequently be placed in leadership roles again and again with less than optimal financial results and creating an unpleasant working environment (and a high turnover rate) for the wonderful and hard working search marketers and social media folks that they manage.

It doesn’t have to be this way Professor Clemons. It’s about time you had some new senior vice presidents to talk to that understood search, understand the theory of exactly how and why they need to transform their new organizations and will test and learn their way to success – the kind of success that you can write case studies about and that I can one day come visit your class and share about. But for now, I’d challenge you to name the SVP’s that are complaining instead of performing…I’d love to consult for them and make them look good…or be their replacement if they’d like to continue to complain and not build a balanced (and profitable) traffic acquisition strategy.

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They say that when one door closes another one opens and apparently Barney Harford is the gentleman that was actually meant to darken the doorway. He’s had extensive experiences in Asia and elsewhere for Expedia and more recently as an advisor to Kayak.com and eLong. As mentioned in the article linked to above, I strongly believe that geographical diversity is important to high performing corporate cultures and I praise the Board of Directors for this choice. It is my hope that this will effect Chicago’s landscape in a positive way far beyond Orbitz. Time will tell.

I know what it’s like to arrive in a strange new place from my experiences living in New York and Cleveland. I’ve always appreciated people orienting me to the cities I’ve moved to so I thought I’d return the favor before giving you a few thoughts on Orbitz. Here we go:

- Odd objects in parking spots that have been shoveled clear of snow: You managed to move to Chicago in the dead of Winter. It’s not exactly the most friendly welcome the city can give you. In fact when I moved back here in 1999 – we received 22 inches of snow on during the day I was supposed to move in – it took me a week to recover. Anyway, if you see a chair on a side street claiming a spot, my advice is to pass it by and go elsewhere as you never know what that person that put the object there might do. Of course this practice is chronicled in detail on a blog from Montreal.

- Orginal’s Hair Designers – Good haircut for $16 with the bonus of then giving you a touch up between hair cuts at no charge. You want John to cut your hair there. He arrives at 6AM sharp Monday through Saturday going there between 6-7AM is the best time to go. No appointment is needed. They are located at 134 North Wells.

- Shoe Repair – Beehive Shoeworks gives great on the stand shines and they do an excellent job with any shoe repair you’ll need. Ask for Sam.

- Lower Wacker Drive – A cab can usually make it to the Lakefront or Michigan Avenue faster this way, but they’ll never do it unless you ask as Chicago pays cabs partially based on waiting time. Yes, this is the same Lower Wacker Drive as in the movie the Blues Brothers!

- Free Valet Parking at Most Restuarants in Greektown – Take advantage of this, my favorite place is The Parthenon on Halstead.

- Pizza – As you likely know Chicago is home of the deep dish pizza. My favorite is Giordano’s, the one where the primary office of the chain at 310 West Randolph tastes the best in my opinion and I usually order it withcanadian bacon and mushrooms. If you want something a bit lighter near your office (my answer would be different in the suburbs) , I recommend Tomato Head Pizza at 945 West Randolph. They make their pizzas with a somewhat rare Faulds pizza oven.  You may have experienced this special oven at Delfino’s Chicago Style Pizzeria in Seattle previously. I researched this as I’ve often considered moving to Seattle.

- Italian Beef – This is a rare sandwich that you’ll have to work hard to find anywhere outside of the Chicago area. It’s roast beef immersed in flavorful gravy that is properly presented on freshly baked French bread. If consumed at the right places, this can be heavenly. In the loop you will find this at a place called Luke’s (walking distance from the currentOrbitz office location) or Portillo’s. Like the pizza above, many will passionately advocate their favorite place over another. It’s kind of like a sport.

- Origin of the term Windy City – This is highly disputed. But I mention it because you can judge how much a person studies history by asking if they have any opinion on this subject. Statistically speaking, there are many places in the Midwest that are technically windier, so I personally do not favor this explanation. The most likely in my opinion is the explanation of the politicians being full of hot air. There are others that abound on the net.

- If Your Furniture is Damaged by Movers – Weber Furniture has been in business since 1950 repairing, refinishing and reupholstering fine office and antique furniture. I recently did some work on the site and it already ranks #1 for the term – Chicago furniture restoration. It still needs a bit more authority from off site factors but the link above should likely fix that. Thanks for the opportunity but I hope your furniture travels safely.

OK, now that you are oriented a bit, let’s talk business a little bit.

In terms of my thoughts and philosophy on Internet companies:

- The world is enduring rapid business transformation which historians will may one day judge revival the Industrial Revolution. Corporations need to constantly test and learn to create and maximize the optimal business model mix. Those who create rapid testing and learning cultures will outperform.

- Search engines are changing the foundation of branding from brand name to one of a brand’s attributes to be found by the searcher and user experiences when interacting with the brand. This is a fundamental shift from push to pull where the consumer controls the conversation and it’s about meeting those expressed needs.

- Quotes of business leaders I highly admire are on this page, they are my guide posts.

- I believe that corporations need to restore balance to focus on both revenue and expenses equally, recent focus has been on expense reduction and risk aversion is preventing focus on new revenue potential. This blog post sums up my thoughts.

Thoughts on Internet travel vertical in general:

- Too highly dependent on paid search, need to lower traffic acquisition costs (TAC).

- Desperate need to create long term relationships with customers outside of purchase transaction.

- Customer data models need to evolve to create niche experiences to create best in space customer experience to meet the evolution in branding mentioned above and to increase CPM advertising rates.

- Considerable business travel is booked manually via phone from legacy providers. This presents a potential opportunity.

In terms of Orbitz from a consumers point of view:

- Orbitz does yet not consistently win the price competition in the hotel + airfare category – for my three day trip to SJC to speak at UGCX at the same hotel – Priceline was $411, Expedia was $428 this morning while the Orbitz quote was $476.

- The current Orbitz Terms of Service appear to be in need of revision in regards to link policy in terms of winning the search engine optimization battle.

- I use a pop-up blocker, but I’m sure you’d win alot of points with people if you removed those completely.

There is other advice I have but will keep that private at this time. So again, welcome to Chicago! Please let me know if there is anything I can help you with as you settle in. Good luck with your role at Orbitz!

OK folks, sorry this post was a bit long.  What suggestions do you have for Barney to improve the customer experience, customer acquisition and conversion rates at Orbitz while still reducing costs and improving profitability? I’d love to see your comments on this.

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Speakers:
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Barbara C. Coll, CEO, WebMama.com Inc.

I didn’t get to attend this session due to other conference activities.

However, I did learn that Greg Jarboe is working on a book about Youtube (I’d love to contribute or read an early version if you are reading this btw).  I look forward to seeing it.

I’d encourage people to check out my highly ranked post “How to do Youtube Video View (Search) Optimization” in addition to other posts about this session.

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Matt Wilburn, Senior Director, CPG, Matt WIlburn and Beth Uyenco went over example of how CPG companies are starting to use search. I missed Eli’s position of the session and Brian Lipman discussed the Hunt’s response to the tomato scare earilier this year and talked about the importance of cycle time. Randy Peterson’s talk was very similar to the 2007 Consumer Package Goods session.

Matt Wilburn, Yahoo!

Search Marketing for CPG Brands – Search provides scale and relevance for CPG brands percomScore study.

Is there brand equity in search results? Yes! Brand awareness rises 160% for items in search results

2009 need – greater accountability! 98% said a lack of standardization in reporting of internet statistics

Metrics that Matter – If you can’t tie odd knots, tie a lot of them…

Accountability will drive adoption of search…digital shows better ROI than broadcast

Beth Uyenco, Microsoft:

How search fits into the digital lifestyle of CPG’s primary shoppers

Moms are experienced and tenacious “Searchers”

86% feel that search engines are the best way to find information – compare prices, find retail locations, gather production information, product reviews, find sales, coupons and incentives

Women prowl for ‘good deals’ – how can we get them smart before the cart?

While the Internet has changed the shopping game, but its just trickling down to CPG…

Price leveler, ratings/reviews, trusted sources

Toilet paper surprisingly is researched at a high level

Randy Peterson, P & G

Presented 10 myths

70% of CPG searchers believe you are not a leading brand if you are not on page one of the search engine results page for the product type

Position matters and evidence is increasing that this increases brand recall

Reduce prices through improved quality scores.

Competitor isn’t there, why do I need to be?

Lipman
Rapid Response SEM Process: Identify the issue, Understand the issue, Respond

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Speakers:
Craig Macdonald, VP of Marketing & Product Development, Covario Inc.
Ellen Watson, Relationship Marketing Manager for Child Care Brands, Kimberly-Clark Corp.

This is a live session blog from Search Engine Strategies Chicago 2008, please excuse any typos and/or fragments. Thank you!

Ellen Watson – Kimberly Clark:

Paid search strategy requires balance:
Budget, Volume and Traffic Quality

2007 Strategy at Kimberly Clark was like this:
Fixed Budget
Max CPC set
Campaigns optimized for conversions

Sacrificed:
Impression share
Average position
Branded terms vulnerable

2008 Strategy now looks like this:
Maximize impressions share
Compete aggressively for top terms
Maintained good conversion

Required:
Increased budget
Regular monitoring

Agency partner priorities:
Forecast annual budget
Managed bids daily
Changed reporting to include new metrics
Adjusted match type, ad copy, landing pages to maintain performace

Global Search Lessons Learned:
US engines sufficient for North American campaigns
Server location is a big issue for international and localized sites – ip address of the site should be in the same country as the address of the server, but local may require a large investment in IT infrastructure

Craig McDonald, Covario:

The New (economic) Reality:
PPC growth at 5-10% level (down from 35%+ growth)
Need to get more from SEO
NO headcount increases in foreseeable future
Squeeze 15% cost improvements out of programs
3 month payback periods, max

The Role of Technology
Paid Search – campaign management automation
Natural Search – automation of audits and tracking and performance
Comprehensive Search Management – SEO/ content convergence, Automation PPC program impact on natural search results

There was then a lively question and answer session on spending in organizations.

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Speakers:
Dr. Larry Cornett, VP, Consumer Products, Yahoo! Search
Mike Grehan, Global KDM Officer, Acronym Media
Chris Blakely, Director, Client Services, comScore, Inc.
Todd Schwartz, Group Product Manager, Live Search, Microsoft Corporation
Jack Menzel, Senior Product Manager, Google

This is a live session blog from Search Engine Strategies Chicago 2008, please excuse any typos and/or fragments. Thank you!

Mike Grehan:

You need to think differently.

Vertical creep is pushing organic results down the page.

Eye Tracking shows that people are not scrolling the way that they used to.

This creates a problem, you need to be at the top of the listings.

Local business center creates opportunities for local businesses.

New paid search results like paid results.

Chris Blakely – comScore:

Leverage comScore search data shows traction of universal search efforts.

Feature sets of search expanding. 48% of searchers are seeing different types of blended search results from their queries.

Lower clicks on sponsored links with the exception of ecommerce and travel.

Organic search strategies need to evolve from that standpoint.

Jack Menzel – Google Product Manager Universal Search:

Universal search has the following elements:
Comprehensiveness – Images, Maps, News, Products, Video, Books and more
Relevance – Run every query against every index, decide what to show only after we collect all of the data
Presentation – Summarize the content in the most efficient way possible.

Recently, there have been made into search results pages.

Better Ranking – Universal search is just a subset of ranking.

What’s next?
Keep improving relevance
Help users explore
Improved results summary

What does this mean for web masters?
- Publish the best and high quality content that you have.
- Take advantage of prominent new verticals

Todd Schwartz – Group Product Manager – Microsoft Live Search:

Evolution of Search:
Search – Directories, Keyword Trends, Rich Semantics, User Experience
Market – Immature, Closed Trends, Open Item????
Consumer – Search, Keyword Trends, Actions

Deliver, Simplify, Implement

Showed Samsung lcd tv model – showed elements of a shopping review, rating and engine – an interesting change

Showed weather and Barack Obama examples

More engagement
Better reach
Higher ROI
Update Product and Business Info
webmaster.live.com

Larry Cornett – Yahoo! Search:

Transformed from a static experience to a complete information in one search

Showed several Blended examples using Yahoo! Search:
Kyle Orton – Chicago Bears fantasy sports
Movies – including times and local listings
Beyonce – music videos on the search page
Sushi in San Jose
Barack Obama
Puppy

Richer, more relevant links…

Searchmonkey – publishers collaborate, meaning behind the link, richer experience, relevant and personal, etc.

Yelp is a Searchmonkey partner. (How does this affect Yahoo! Local?)

The infobar – Steve Jobs example

Share structured data: Publishers > Searchmonkey > Tell your users

Why is blended search important?
Unmatched opportunities and control for publishers
Key step for building a smarter search engine with structured data
gallery.search.yahoo.com

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IFBYPHONE SECURES $4.6 MILLION IN NEW ROUND OF FUNDING
Infusion of Venture Capital Insures Continued Expansion Despite Economic Downturn

CHICAGO–Nov. 18, 2008—In the middle of an economic slowdown and a drought in venture capital funding, Ifbyphone said today it has secured $4.6 million in a second round of institutional funding from five venture capital firms.
Ifbyphone is a hosted telephone application platform company that provides small and medium-sized businesses with telephony features that enable them to create phone solutions that enhance customer conversations, increase sales and lower costs.
The funding round was jointly led by Apex Venture Partners and Origin Ventures, who also invested in Ifbyphone’s first round of institutional funding. They were joined by Spring Mill Venture Partners, i2A and Blue Crest Capital Finance, L.P.
“We view this new round of funding as a strong endorsement of our growth and expansion strategy,” said Ifbyphone founder and CEO Irv Shapiro. “It positions us extremely well to continue our expansion during these complex economic times.”

“We are very excited to be a part of the Ifbyphone investor group,” said Ken Green, co-founder and managing partner at Spring Mill Venture Partners. “We believe that Ifbyphone represents the next great wave of Internet-enabled business services, allowing small and medium-sized businesses access to capabilities previously only available to their larger competitors. This kind of service offers an opportunity to level the competitive playing field.”

To learn more about Ifbyphone’s affordable suite of online telephony applications, such as voice broadcasting, Smart Toll Free Numbers, Google Analytics Call Integration and interactive voice response (IVR), visit  http://www.ifbyphone.com.

# # #
About Ifbyphone
Ifbyphone is a hosted telephone application platform company that provides small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) with tools to enhance customer conversations, drive sales, and lower costs. Leveraging Ifbyphone’s extreme usability, developers and marketers can quickly create solutions ranging from simple click-to-call links to sophisticated call-routing and interactive-marketing systems. Ifbyphone’s solutions are available directly to SMBs and through a network of resellers. For more information, click to speak to a sales professional or visit the Ifbyphone Web site.

About Origin Ventures
Origin Ventures is a venture capital firm investing in early-stage companies. The firm invests capital and leverages its entrepreneurial, marketing and management expertise to help facilitate the growth of early-stage companies. The principals of Origin Ventures have been involved in successful entrepreneurial activities since the mid 1980s.

About Apex Venture Partners
Apex Venture Partners is a national venture capital firm based in Chicago. With more than 20 years’ experience financing early stage IT businesses, Apex has invested in more than 140 companies since inception. The partners at Apex look for companies that have unique products or services that address large potential markets in which customer needs are not being addressed.

About Spring Mill Venture Partners
Spring Mill Venture Partners is an early stage venture capital firm focused on investing in strong management teams in high-growth information technology and life sciences companies located in the Midwest region. We take an active role by providing the strategic and tactical assistance that early stage companies need to grow and prosper. More information is available at www.springmillvp.com.

About i2A
The Illinois Innovation Accelerator Fund (i²A) is an innovative $10 million early-stage investment fund which invests in companies primarily in technology-enabled products and services, new media and education products and services, and consumer and retail products.  The fund’s goal is to provide the first external professional capital raised by companiesand nurture them through their early stages of growth. Visit www.i2afund.com for more information.

About BlueCrest Capital Finance, L.P.
BlueCrest Capital Finance, L.P., a U.S.-based commercial finance company, provides debt-financing solutions to development-stage companies in a broad range of industry sectors including IT, Communications, Hardware, Software, Semi-Conductor, Electronics, Energy, Medical Device and Life Science. The team, which has been together continuously since 1998, pursues debt transactions in the $1 million-$25 million range and has consummated approximately 900 transactions with total commitments in excess of $1.9 billion.

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The University of Chicago Booth School of business, formerly Chicago GSB

The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, formerly The University of Chicago Graduate School of Business sent this note earlier this month.

I am very pleased to announce a remarkable gift of $300 million to the University of Chicago for the benefit of the Graduate School of Business by University Trustee and alumnus David G. Booth, MBA ‘71, his wife Suzanne Booth, and their children, Erin and Chandler Booth. This is the largest donation in the University’s history and the largest gift ever in support of any business school. In recognition of the Booth family’s extraordinary generosity, the Board of Trustees has voted unanimously to name the school the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

I don’t have any comment on this at this time other than Ted Snyder would be wise to take action on the issues in this blog post about business school rankings in determining how to use these funds and needs a multi-million dollar communication plan for the world’s experienced recruiting community so that this brand does not cause alumni great harm.

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Forget about monetization, can Facebook survive without any useful customer service improvements? While 98% of the service works great on autopilot, there is absolutely zero customer service for the things where you do need help. I don’t mean bad customer service, I mean there is absolutely no customer service for certain issues.

Case #1 – Last month, I created a group called Interactive, Search Marketing and Social Media Change Managment in my haste to leave for a conference, you can see that I mispelled Management in the group name. This field is not editable by the group owner and after 7 weeks, I have had zero professional response from a real human at Facebook to resolve the issue.

Case #2 – Lack of ability to add Networks of former employers properly. As more people are using Facebook as a sourcing tool, the inability to update this for historical employers, in my case BlackRock, is not just an inconvenience, it could be costing me opportunities and monetization due to the lack of focus on data integrity of my profile to the level I’d like. On this matter I reached out to an executive of Facebook directly – they said they were sending it to customer service as “they should be able to rectify your issues”. Ten more days have passed without correction of my two data problems. I’m putting a deadline of October 30th on this for Facebook to fix this as this is a more than reasonable amount of time to do so.

Lastly, a necessary enhancement. How about a button on people’s profiles that says, take me to all the messages I have exchanged with this person? Thank you.

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Hurricane Ike’s larger than category 2 impact suggests need to modify Saffir-Simpson Scale hurricane measurement and communication metrics. It is heartbreaking to see and hear the stories of people who wouldn’t evacuate before the areas on the Texas coast because Hurricane Ike was “only a category 2 hurricane”. The reports and pictures from airborne helicopters indicate massive hurricane property damage and, unfortunately, loss of life from Hurricane Ike. I dedicate this post to these victims.

This begs the question, could this loss of life been reduced with better communication of risk to the people in the areas of projected impact, causing them to evacuate?

Places like Galveston, Bolivar, Crystal Beach, Gilchrest, High Island, etc. had lower evacuation rates than during Hurricane Rita. This could have been much, much worse if it hit a more densely populated area. But the loss of any life is undesirable (and potentially is preventable).

A friend of mine who lives on the Gulf Coast has repeatedly suggested to me that there is a need to have “less media hype” and “more factual metrics” when hurricanes approach. As you know I think about metrics a lot in terms of the Internet and business processes and I started thinking about this issue and the implications of it.

The last National Hurricane Center report before Hurricane Ike made landfall in Texas contains the following two paragraphs:

DATA FROM NOAA DOPPLER WEATHER RADARS AND RECONNAISSANCE AIRCRAFT
INDICATE MAXIMUM SUSTAINED WINDS ARE NEAR 110 MPH…175 KM/HR…
WITH HIGHER GUSTS. IKE IS A STRONG CATEGORY TWO HURRICANE ON THE
SAFFIR-SIMPSON SCALE AND COULD REACH THE TEXAS COAST AS A CATEGORY
THREE…MAJOR HURRICANE…JUST BEFORE LANDFALL. STRONGER WINDS…
AS MUCH AS 30 MPH HIGHER THAN AT THE SURFACE…COULD OCCUR ON HIGH
RISE BUILDINGS.

IKE REMAINS A VERY LARGE HURRICANE AND HURRICANE FORCE WINDS EXTEND
OUTWARD UP TO 120 MILES…195 KM…FROM THE CENTER…AND TROPICAL
STORM FORCE WINDS EXTEND OUTWARD UP TO 275 MILES…445 KM. DURING
THE PAST HOUR…HURRICANE FORCE WIND GUSTS HAVE BEEN REPORTED ON
GALVESTON ISLAND AND REPORTS FROM NOAA AND AIR FORCE RECONNAISSANCE
AIRCRAFT INDICATE SUSTAINED HURRICANE FORCE WINDS ARE JUST OFFSHORE
GALVESTON ISLAND.

I’m not certain how many years ago the National Hurricane Center started reporting Hurricanes in this format with the “hurricane force winds extend outward from the center ### miles” and “tropical force winds extend outward ### miles”, but I find that information useful as there is a significant correlation to size of the hurricane and the impact of the storm surge and geographic area that are affected. This is therefore extremely useful data, but it’s locked up in giant blobs of text that don’t allow it to be communicated effectively.

I’d like to therefore propose and suggest that the National Hurricane Center make the following modification the to Saffir-Simpson scale to the following new format:

Saffir-Simpson Scale number – hurricane force wind miles from center number – tropical storm force wind miles from center number

Hurricane Ike would have therefore been the following at landfall:
2-120-275

It is my opinion that this would be a much more useful as the overall radius of the hurricane force and tropical force wind fields would be communicated effectively and consistently instead of in inconsistent references. One could argue that you should use the circumference to make it more dramatic, but not all tropical cyclones are perfectly symmetric so I prefer usage of the existing communicated metric radius.

This humble blog post is clearly just the first of many conversations to openly discuss hurricane scale and metrics and creating this needed reform. The reform itself is more important than the exact final form of this reform prior to the start of the 2009 hurricane scale and metrics season. I look forward to seeing comments and other blog posts.

I look forward to someday having a clearer metric that can save more lives. Thank you for your participation in making this a reality!

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However, high rankings on entrepreneurship education alone is not sufficient, the next steps are:
1) To build a transparent, quick and efficient marketplace for entrepreneurs, experienced and passionate management teams and startup capital.

2) Modify the focus toward commercialization of businesses in the model outlined above, ultimately success is measured by the number and quantity of companies that they’ve enabled to scalable, not just lifestyle growth curves. I look forward to participating in this journey.

Here’s the full announcement…

DePaul University’s entrepreneurship program opened the new academic year on a high note Sept. 10 with news that it has again been recognized among the finest in the United States in Entrepreneur magazine/Princeton Review’s annual “Best Schools for Entrepreneurs” ranking.

DePaul moved up three places to second on the list of best rated graduate entrepreneur programs in the national rankings, which are posted on Entrepreneur’s Web site and will appear in the October issue of the magazine. The university placed seventh in the undergraduate entrepreneur education category and was the only Illinois university ranked in that category.

“DePaul offers students exposure to thousands of successful entrepreneurs in a large urban setting with sophisticated financing services available,” the magazine noted. “Entrepreneurial supporters are extremely active in sharing knowledge, resources, contacts and expertise. The program provides very supportive administration and infrastructure through the Coleman Entrepreneurship Center.”

Entrepreneur partnered with the Princeton Review, a leading educational services provider, to solicit surveys from 2,300 undergraduate and graduate program administrators to determine the rankings. The survey covered three areas: academic offerings and requirements; student enrollment and faculty quality; and “outside the classroom,” which examined student organization, mentorship and scholarship opportunities. An advisory board of entrepreneurship educators also provided evaluations of the surveyed programs. Based on the data and review, a total of 50 programs (25 undergraduate and 25 graduate programs) made the list of the best.

“DePaul’s rankings are a tribute to the academic excellence of our program and the quality of our faculty,” said Harold Welsch, Coleman Entrepreneurship Chair at DePaul, who founded the program. “Using their education and start-up experiences, faculty members help students look to the future and identify viable business opportunities. They share their experiences with the students willingly and with great enthusiasm.”

Founded in 1982 at the College of Commerce, DePaul’s entrepreneurship program has grown to encompass 12 undergraduate and graduate courses taught by 16 faculty members. The faculty represents a mix of distinguished scholars of entrepreneurship and successful entrepreneurs.

Courses cover business plan development, entrepreneurial strategy and management, new venture financing, business growth, creativity, innovation and technological change, among other topics. More than 600 students take undergraduate and graduate courses in the program annually. Students have opportunities to participate in a number of mentorship and internship programs, as well as entrepreneur organizations, including Collegiate Entrepreneurs Organization, MBA Entrepreneurs Club, Social Entrepreneurship Club and Students for Entrepreneurs.

The program is supported by the Coleman Entrepreneurship Center, which manages education and outreach programs designed to stimulate the start-up and growth of entrepreneurial firms. The center also sponsors Launch DePaul, an annual year-long business plan competition that awards cash prizes and business start-up services for the most promising business plans submitted by students and alumni.

“We believe that today’s students need practical learning opportunities that extend beyond the classroom,” said Raman Chadha, director of the center and a member of the entrepreneurship program faculty. “The Coleman Center creates these opportunities by working with faculty to connect DePaul students with successful entrepreneurs, help them launch ventures and provide real-world experiences. Students are able to immediately apply what they learn in the classroom, acquiring wisdom that only comes with these opportunities. The entrepreneurial spirit at DePaul has never been stronger.”

The magazine’s “Best Schools for Entrepreneurs” top 10 graduate programs were:

1. Babson College
2. DePaul University
3. University of Southern California
4. The University of Arizona
5. University of South Florida
6. University of Illinois, Chicago
7. University of California, Los Angeles 8. Drexel University 9. Chapman University 10. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

The top undergraduate entrepreneur programs were:

1. University of Houston
2. Babson College
3. Drexel University
4. University of Dayton
5. University of Arizona
6. Temple University
7. DePaul University
8. University of Oklahoma
9. University of Southern California
10. Chapman University

To view the full rankings, go to: http://www.entrepreneur.com/topcolleges/.

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So this could mean one of a few things are the culprit here…

1. Barack Obama Google Link Bomb – While it doesn’t rank #1, the fact that there is an indent entry after the Barack Obama entry is an indication that Google is seeing that page as important or having a link spike. Recently, Barack Obama had also recently been ranking highly for the term “Linkedin” so it appears that the Obama campaign is trying to utilize search engine optimization techniques on social media sites to compete with John McCain and Sarah Palin.

2. The www.new.facebook.com pages when mixed with old Facebook pages is confusing the Googlebot? - It wouldn’t be out of the question. It could be that it looks like a regular domain and a subdomain.

3. Other parts of Facebook are being opened up to search and these pages are causing issues somehow – several sites reported this. Facebook’s continuing inconsistently about what is public and not public to search is frustrating and is inviting an unnecessary future firestorm. They should really be more clear and communicative, have they forgot the previous lessons of the past?

4. None of the above – What is your theory?

While I’m at it – Dear Facebook – you have not solved the problem I submitted in August to your help desk. After waiting a week you sent me a message which did not even address the issue or indicate that a human has read it. I’d appreciate professional resolution of this request.

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However, her assertion that Jason Calacanis has “retired from blogging” is utter complete nonsense (some would say bullshit) that indicates a lack of research into the issue that distracts from an otherwise excellent article.

As you likely know, Jason Calacanis now has an email newsletter that seems to have a rather well organized “guest blogger” distribution network associated with it. Though Jason will likely never admit it publicly, it appears this was his plan all along. I have to tip my hat to him in as much as it actually increases his overall distribution network. Jason (and his “dogs”) also use Twitter which is called micro-blogging. Wikipedia defines it this way (as of this writing)

“Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.”

So to say Jason has retired from blogging is, in reality at this time, factually inaccurate. But a simple reaching out to other bloggers and sources by the Washington Post could have easily revealed this issue. This is important as others may misinterpret “Jason’s retirement” and it could adversely affect someone’s blogging strategy due to such misinformation.

Sarah – could you please check out the situation a little deeper in the future so that thousands of people aren’t misinformed?

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Please feel free to comment or reply if you have figured this arena out yet. As Facebook continues to grow in usage this is an area I’m seeking out information. Thanks.

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It’s a kinda different show this year in both the crowd and some of the content type.

Already have had great meeting with Jim Hedger, Bryan Eisenberg and many others. Bryan has a new book, Always Be Testing, which just came out. I can’t wait to read it!

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During Cluecon, I was able to drop in and catch Irv Shaprio’s speech, what follows are my live blogging notes of the session:

What does ifbyphone provide? Phone mashups – combine data from the world wide web with phone inputs and conversations.

ifbyphone goals:
- Technology Agnostic API – any language, host, data or location
- Dialog Support – Voice Forms (IVR), DTMF, Text to Speech, Automated Speech Recognition
- Call Management – outbound (termination), inbound (origination), Scheduling API, Broadcast API, Call Completion API
- Support Services – documentation, blog, user support forum, free development accounts and live support people

Lots of documentation is available, telephone scale

Phone mashup example – getting request from a form

Build a Voice Form Setup Form
Built in grammar allow branching of questions (Survo voice form setup)
ifbyphone uses forms instead of selectors for 100% reliability

Check out phonemashup.com for more examples.

Marketing people are using this to put the telephone into the existing treatment processes.

———————

Analysis: ifbyphone is enabling a bridge between web 2.0 and the phone. What I love about this is I think it’s part of a trend, removing silos to create effective solutions for companies and their customers. It’s small space with the potential to have large business impacts in terms of efficiency and customer satisfaction that will be fun to watch develop and watch who steps up to implement the solutions rapidly.

A recent interview of Irv can be found here. I certainly look forward to seeing and learning more about how ifbyphone will be impacting business results shortly.

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After this exercise, I now think there are groups of Digg users with different tendencies. I’ll tentatively entitle these tendencies Super Socialites and Relevants – users who wait for can’t miss content. These users fall into two subcategories – High Submit Success and Infrequent Participation. Check out the wide variations in these new metrics sources, which are agnostic as to the tenure of the Digg  user:

Digg User   # Popular
MrBabyMan 2644
msaleem 1681
zaibatsu 1410
supernova17 1210
MakiMaki 1046
mklopez 913
skored 842
tomboy501 563
IvanB 485
pizzler 459

Digg User   High Submit Success Ratio
kevinrose 97.105%
FirstDigg 80.180%
haxr 63.095%
diggboss 61.184%
sepultura 60.773%
macbot 55.556%
openthink 52.301%
lazycat 50.314%
supernova17 49.187%

Digg User   Diggs per Popular  (lowest voting participation)
normalkid 7.373
tarkullu 15.327
macbot 19.133
lnfiniteLoop 20.118
mklopez 24.648
Vinvin 25.163
kevinrose 27.827
MrEMan 27.909
MrBabyMan 36.769

Digg User  Diggs per Popular (highest voting participation)
ShuTian 1025.769
numberneal 901.385
maxyRO 820.896
zoomtechtv 767.209
emberjohn 713.982
FamilyGuyFan 711.771
lekahe 679.068
vroom101 675.685
iching 563.242
Konstantino 554.347

While every change of the Digg algorithm, these rankings shift anew in unpredictable ways.  These new metrics show some clear differences in the tendencies of some Digg users. It would be be wise to pause and analyze these different types of Digg users and how their mixture of roles create value on Digg.

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If I were the lead product manager at Twitter, I’d be setting up two primary screens:

1) Keywords across the entire network overall which toggle switches for the frequency compared to normal (it would be cool if this was somehow “normalized” so that less frequent words with huge percentage increases actually got noticed – so that everything wasn’t Angelina Jolie, Barack Obama, Brad Pitt, Michael Arrington, Jason Calacanis, Fred Wilson, etc).

2) Graphs and/or alert spikes of user defined keywords – ie ones that are important to oneself personally or to one’s business or clients. I would dare to say this might actually be a business model that could lead to meaningful monetization – I think alot of web services haven’t thought this through nearly enough. Organizing real-time data for useful decision making as a business model worked out OK for Michael Bloomberg if I recall correctly. Some might say Google Trends does this already from a search perspective, but it doesn’t break down the word clusters to core words with “sidekicks” and is not the leading indicator that Twitter is by an uncertain but definite time margin.

Before I’d get to this though, Twitter would have to become stable and Twitter would have to fix the AIM problem I posted about on June 1 and have not gotten a response to yet. Good luck on getting those items in order first, then feel free to give me a shout Biz.

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Let’s start an exploration of these issues in more detail:

- There is an almost total lack of imagination regarding potential emerging revenue streams – When I attend search engine conferences, I hear over and over how “63% of transactions occur offline after an online search (comScore 2006).” Tying together that transaction with it’s higher relevancy holds the key to a revenue stream potentially larger than Google’s Adwords product. Having once spent 6 months of my life trying to raise capital for a search advertising concept, I have to agree with Robert that there is lack of willingness to engage in serious funding conversations of this type – until half a dozen other people do it…that’s messed up!

- In large businesses, there is an obsession with basing business cases on expense savings rather than the potential for new revenue streams- Going back to that example above, financial services institutions could play a large role in this. However due to the lack of risk management processes that caused the housing crisis, they are risk adverse at this moment and risk removing themselves from this once in a lifetime opportunity. I saw 4 companies give presentations on their business cases on mobile retail banking and they all focused on the reduction of call center costs! Think about that a second, moving things from a PC to a phone will reduce call center volumes? Highly questionable at best form cost savings perspective, certainly missing the revenue opportunities completely.

- Everything in the world is converging, yet most companies have silos and are hiring specialists (set up for failure) – When banks are trying to become relevant in mobile and mobile is trying to get into advertising and payments, can you afford to hire people with one dimensional skill sets? The answer is no, not if you want to win.

- With increasingly rapid cycle times in technology, competitive benchmarking is becoming less useful – If none of your competitors has made a tough decision to reorganize a department, shift financial resources to new ways of doing things in marketing or customer service, how can you improve via benchmarking? Stated a different way, if your process is broken and all of your competitor’s processes are broken, you can’t possibly create market leadership by benchmarking. You have to hire the best and most brilliant people who hold little if any limiting beliefs and give them the authority to innovate based on what customers want. Serving those needs in the Peter Drucker fashion is the only way to create true market leadership. This does not mean that competitive analysis is dead. It does mean that the benchmarks you need to pay attention to are the breakthroughs regardless of industry.

- Existing legacy cost centers in large corporations are creating barriers to innovation and efficiency both internally and externally – These cost centers prevent reallocation of budgets to adopting usage of superior and more efficient technology or Internet/mobile advertising due to their all or nothing nature – smooth and frequent shifting to most economical resources is the unfortunate rarity. There is a large number of reasons for this and this topic is worthy of a post of it’s own (please submit suggestions). Cost centers make the silo problem worse and hard to solve.

- Traditional management consulting needs to acknowledge proprietary technology and data models as strategic and gain an implementation focus – If you come in for 6 months and never implement anything and nobody does any of the suggestions, your net present value is actually negative.

- We need to take back control of companies to focus on the customer as priority #1 – 5 year plans with a stack of initiatives in year 4 are interesting, but no longer practical. Notice I say take back control. This is the way the world used to work before endless Powerpoint and overly large bureaucracy like 18 month committee approval cycles. In fact Tom Peters stated on February 3, 1998 on Charlie Rose show as saying “I got tired of the McKinsey bureaucracy”

- C-level management and boards of directors treat social media, search marketing and Internet advertising like an island instead of integrating it into one’s culture and redesigning processes from scratch to support it – This is disruptive to companies using these products and companies that provide these products alike due to the lack of growth and monetization. But guess what? You can’t redesign these processes without bringing in people with a combination of skills that include both traditional management and the new tools. Right now we have people at the extremes. This doesn’t work.

Carolyn Shelby and I will be giving a talk to c-level executives on these an other related subjects this Wednesday at the Gleacher Center in Chicago. You may RSVP here. It is my first in a series of talks I hope to engage the world in over the coming years as we embrace this great challenge together! I need everyone’s help to help shape this vision and create this reality and maybe some famous quotes around the way. It is the furthering of a conversation that started with my appearance discussing these issues on SEO 101 – it starts at the 13:30 mark. Brian Mark said he’d love to see a Search Engine Strategies session on this, we are still working on fulfilling Brian Mark’s dream (24 minute mark).

I’d like to hear others like John Furrier, Fred Wilson, Dick Costolo and Don Dodge to chime in on this issues first chapter…

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A few weeks ago I was sent a Nokia N81 8GB mobile phone. This post will contrast it with Nokia N73 it replaced.

Image by tnkgrl via Flickr

Positives of the Nokia N81 8GB:

- The first thing you notice is new radically different navigation on N-series phones. The green and red call and hang up buttons are on the edges of larger buttons – it takes a few phone calls to get used to the new placement!

- I love the one click swipe to lock or unlock on the top of the phone!

- Now 1 click to writing a text message

- Battery life is really long, especially considering the extremely well lit back keys

- WIFI connection works well, I’ve been able to surf and test mobile web sites much more clearly.

Areas to improve on the next version:

- The Nokia N81 8GB is black background with white text – this can be hard to read in bright sunlight situations.

This phone should definitely serve me quite well until US version of 3G comes out.

I’d also like to give Andy Abramson special props for getting me in touch with someone at Tmobile regarding a coverage problem I’ve been having. Much appreciated.

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I’d acknowledge the relevancy of Sara’s nomination of Dan Rosenweig but will dismiss Marc Cuban as he’s more focused on acquiring the Chicago Cubs at present.

I’d like to nominate my own slate of nominees all would bring dramatic culture change and growth rather than an expense cutting mantra and I’d enjoy being a part of their team if asked:

Dick Costolo – Yahoo! arguably has the world’s largest mountain of content. Dick is one of the world’s thought leaders on distributing and monetizing content. He is also well qualified to build a culture of customer responsiveness. He also might have played a lead role in the recent Yahoo!/Google monetization deal.

Rich Skrenta – His knowledge of search is highly regarded. His new startup could also be lifted out to build a new company to replace many parts of the old one.

Brad Garlinghouse – Many would argue he understands and communicated the challenges to execution that Yahoo! faces better than anyone and is willing to make his case about it as he did in the peanut butter memo.

Jim Lanzone – If given the chance, it would be fascinating to see him have the resources to execute some of the lofty things he tried at Ask on a shoestring budget.

Those come to mind first, am I missing anyone? I’m certain I’ve missed some people out west that should be considered.

I’ll Tag:

Fred Wilson

Michael Arrington (via Crunchnotes)

John Battelle

Carl Icahn (please give me a shout if you read this)

UPDATE: Michael correctly points out that he’s already written this post…my bad…

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Skype: Enabling Conversations

If you put all of the time spent talking on Skype put end to end you would end up going back to the start of human species.

Skype is a thriving ecosystem 190+ hardware devices, 10,000 developers, partnership with world class companies.

Skype Developer Program (SDP) Vision:
More delighted users doing more with Skype
A vibrant ecosystem of external innovators
Supporting the long tail or outside innovation on the Skype platform
Growing selection of SDKs
Clear route to market

Where We Are Today:
Public Client API
Skype Extras Framework
Support Resources
Software Certification

Next Step: Software Certification Update
Focusing on a few really important issues
Much easier to understand and follow
Shorter test rounds

Coming Up: Next Version of Skype for Windows
Redesigned user interface
User and partner feedback is important
Extended beta program
API overhaul will follow

Later On: API & Extras Program
- Multi-Layer API
Core Functionality (cross-platform)
UI integration (platform-specific)
- Distribution and Management:
Extras Gallery
Extras Manager
Blacklist and Whitelist
- Backward and forward compatibility

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New Ebay API Calls released today
- most watched items
- deals
- related category items
- top-selling products

This uses eBay’s New Services Framework! This is an API upgrade…

Cross Merchandising
- sell products using the brand
- promote contextually relevant market

Merchandising in Action at Ebay.com – Buyer behavior, interests are now creating personalization based on past purchase behavior

Visit developer.ebay.com for access to tools…

SDK upgrades and SDK/JDK for Java…

Many Large Seller Improvements
- Batch upgrades
- Easier variant listing
- Feedback automation
- ASQ: Redirection to CS email
- Invoices: Invoices to A/P email

Making eBay Better
- Create a first-class buyer experience
- Create a trusted marketplace

Improving Buyer Experience:
- Number of recent policy changes improve buyer experience
- Mandating “critical item information”
- Previously optional items, will be mandatory

Shipping
- All items must specify at least one domestic shipping service
- Suggest passing, weight info to auction, suggest passing tracking info back for my eBay…

Return Policy Needs to be Transparent

Paymentsb – Paypal required in most countries…Paypal only in limited markets

Anonymous Member Email Address:
- Anonymous until sale is complete
- Protect buyers from fraud during eBay purchase

New Links Policy:
- Generally speaking, no link off eBay, whether or not an item is being for sale on that site
- Not a comprehensive list, more specifics to come…

Verification of new sellers is occurring

Trusted Selling With Identity Confirmation

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Will the AIM interface ever be fixed? I found posting from IM to be the easiest and fastest method, it’s been broken (or blocked by AIM?) for months dating back to 2007.

What is the status of the Twitter AIM interface? Anybody?

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Wow! That was tiring, I stepped on the L at 7:30AM and didn’t get home until 1:30AM the next morning! 18 hours of pure madness! Most people noticed the great speeches by Gary Vee from Wine Library TV and Dick Costolo (aka ask the wizard) and others. But what I really appreciated was the other things that the day brought to me. When Frank and Eric started TECH cocktail, one of the goals was to enable the interaction of people and removing barriers between entrepreneurs, funding sources and removing the boundaries between Chicago and the rest of the world.

When I sit at the first TECH cocktail CONFERENCE Chicago watching great speeches and meeting people from startups from both the east and west coasts while talking, playfully joking about Internet concepts and trading ideas with a local Chicago angel investor in the back of the room for hours on end – it’s at that moment one can clearly perceive a vision is starting to become reality…

For a first conference, it was very well run. There were those little things with a venue that didn’t go quite right with the elevators and not having enough power outlets (but you could say that about any conference) but those were out of their direct control. You could see that Eric and Frank went out of their way to challenge the audience about topics that too often go ignored at startups, like how to set up a corporate entity properly, partnerships and most of these challenges and experiments went well.

So what’s next? I’d like to challenge each and every person in TECH cocktail community to take things to the next level by taking the following actions:

1. Follow Up – People need to work to get to know each other better and learn to leverage each person’s special gifts and talents and realize that 1 + 1 > 2 when we behave in this manner. For me, I know that creating new business partners while listening to help iterate the product, data model or service is my area of strength.

2. Change TECH cocktail from an event to an everyday process on your own – a three month cycle time is not sufficient to build relationships to the next level – it’s everyone’s responsibility to make an hour here and there to sit down with someone, learn about what they are doing, give them a fresh perspective and potential assistance. Don’t wait for the next TECH cocktail event. If this means you need to organize your contact info, make that important time investment.

3. Listen to what Dick Costolo had to say about Internet company NDAs and then change your behavior accordingly (where is the video of that speech anyway?) – Stop sending people NDAs that serve no purpose other than to destroy your access to people who are the most qualified to help you. Ideas are a dime a dozen, assembling the right people with the current knowledge and future potential to create that reality is what matters.

4. Go beyond lurking, participate!!! During the conference, I had at least 10 people talk to me about a blog post of mine in detail, yet they’ve never left a comment on my blog. That’s sad. Leaving a comment leaves you a hyperlink back to your business or blog and allows distribution of one’s business network organically removing them as the bottleneck, please use this viral tool.

5. Learn to hire people for their current knowledge, network, blogs and future potential - not legacy job titles and brands – this takes work, research and being involved in the community, but it is how you’ll find the breakthrough thought leaders and future superstars.

6. Become an ambassador to expanding the understanding of the tools we all use and expand our base of understanding to new people outside our core – If you have a client or operate a service do they understand what Internet advertising, blogs, rss, social media, twitter, etc do? If they do is their organizational culture and structure set up to handle it to serve a customer’s needs? Many people know there is a problem but do not know where to start to fix it – I want to help those people as it will ease the adoption and enhance demand for disruptive new Internet services. I’m planning a series of future posts on this important, yet highly untouched topic. If you have examples of success stories or learnings in this area, I’d love to hear from you.

What else would you add to this list? I look forward to your contributions.

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4 startups including Feedburner

Feedburner all founders had same equity percentage – very important to teamwork dynamic and success

Entrepreneurs worry too much about valuation

Market Opportunity – sizing, does the market need it, team, product, market

Location – No Black Swans

Funding
Cash – Don’t kid yourself

CCs, your misunderstood friends – finding the right one

Options/Equity – options, pool, common stock, dilution

Board Meetings – Should be strategic discussions, not operations, board package, timing and who should attend…

Hiring – Best Available Athlete, Roles and Flat Organizations, Hierarchy begets bureaucracy, replace with tools (eg SFA)…Don’t hire for position…hire people that can do almost anything…a jack of all trades…this reminds me of a lot of what BlackRock was like…I sat at 23 desks in 4 years, I don’t know how many projects I worked on during my time there, I understood every process in the company.

No offices. Open culture and communication are critical…

Experience or Enthusiasm?

Performance – performance reviews and subjectivity

KPIs

Growing the team
- Sales and Marketing – don’t hire until you are ready to sell
- Interview process – long

Product Development and Business Strategy
Serendipity and Adjustment – visit to the eye doctor

Launch Late to Launch Often – data models and programs architected for extensibility can beat point solutions every time (I agree this is critical)

Focus and Speed of Execution are a competitive advantage
- Internationalization
- Early biz dev can hurt you, so can any biz dev

Competitive advantage
- Be first to market, not most sophisticated, not the best product, be itirative and fast

Let people you don’t know help you win (open/api) and provide your products/service with the best opportunity to evolve in the market

Startups who ask people to sign NDAs are stupid! Gave a great (and way too fast!) discussion on this…I wish he’d write a detailed blog post of his rant. ?

Quantum barriers to entry and market share – Get market share, market share is the only thing you should focus on.

Revenue plan: Don’t kid yourself. Revenue ALWAYS ramps slower than you think it will.

Don’t do unnecessary things because you think you’re supposed to

Try to let the business model come to you
- Easy to say, not easy to do
- It’s easier to lower the price than to raise the price?
- Look for always on opportunities

Don’t worry about an exit strategy, worry about everything else

Be a big small company
- Public face of the company
- Have a specific voice, have a culture

Be competitive on your merits

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Without further delay, here’s their tips on designing with users in mind!

Be Yourself – informal, fun

Be Fast – the perceived time when people see speed, they perceive the experience and organization as reliable. Image sprites can help this. Steve Souders is a good source on this topic.

Be Willing to Give Up Control – Give yourself permission to outsource certain tasks.

Be Engaged – have a blog, more importantly, be engaged in other blogs. It’s important to get the early adopters and beta testers to help you. It allows you to iterate.

Be Polite – Try to be considerate…from the users perspective.

Be Surprising – Do things outside the norm. Hackathon. Had new feature coding retreat days. Engage random users.

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Problems

Scaling…printers, vendors, etc

Inventory is hard….

The Internet is Serious Business

Dealing with problems that we are not prepared to deal with… (can be an advantage too)

Advantages

Our Users – Do they care? Do they help?

Technology Agnosticism

Awesome Staff – “Innovation comes from the bottom up” – Golden advice on how to build a culture…

Harper then ended with an interesting comment about Bin Laden….implied that he saw some false flag elements…

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The effectiveness hits home when you see it happen to someone you know who is less famous (but no less remarkable)…

Congrats, Dan! See you soon.

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Please focus on the second item:

At the time that entry was still in Google blog search, it reached to a dead link. Why is Dell censoring and deleting information about these Inspiron line issues? Do they have something to hide?

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It’s my expectation that interest in innovation in the text input, voice input or even new forms of shortcuts will accelerate in the near future as it’s a critical area to create an optimal user experience while increasing frequency of usage and monetization potential.

Are you aware of companies doing interesting work in this arena?

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Dell will pay Gladden a $700,000 annual base salary and a minimum target bonus of the same amount next March, plus a $2 million signing bonus, 223,000 restricted shares of stock and options on 922,000 shares, according to a company filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

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“Businesses are not paid to reform customers. They are paid to satisfy customers.”

- Peter Drucker

“An organization’s ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage.”

- Jack Welch

“Innovation is the central issue in economic prosperity.”

- Michael Porter

“Learning is not compulsory…neither is survival.”

- W. Edwards Deming

“There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.”

- Sam Walton

To the rest of you, there is still hope for you and encourage you to come over to the other side.

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What Dell doesn’t know is A) people are now telling me their stories left and right and Dell’s inaction is increasing the likelihood of the groundswell to create the justifiable national Dell Inspiron recall (then maybe Charlene Li can tell the truth about Dell in her follow up book) and B) that when they sent me an email saying they consider this matter “closed” I could see that they then visited my blog several more times yesterday. I currently use a program called whoslookin.com to see who is visiting my blog. I find it beyond hilarious that Dell considers the matter “closed” yet they then visited my blog several more times yesterday further undermining their credibility.   

 Company Name                              Hits/Visits                       Last Request

Dell Computer Corporation                   16                               3:05 PM

I again repeat Danny Sullivan’s words:

 “My plea is simple. Empower your customer service people to simply replace things that don’t work rather than making them jump through whatever procedures you have in place that clearly don’t work.”

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It has had the following problems: slow boot times, frequent blue screens, unreliablity connecting to the Internet due to a flaky Internet card, weak and broken hinges due to a poor design in fact, the Inspiron line got rid of this altogether with the latest redesign, gee maybe it’s because it was a design flaw? 

This matter is made worse by the behavior of a certain inconsiderate Director of Dell’s community program, who rudely interrupted my conversation with a senior person from a major search engine last fall because he thought inspecting my hinges was important at that moment.

Dell was founded on reliable, highly tested equipment that was flawless, this experience and the experiences of others show that is no longer the case, they play word games and do not stand by their products and take responsibility for their design flaws – in fact my mahcine wasn’t even made in the US, which used to be one of Dell’s mantras.

This laptop is an unreliable and poorly designed machine. It is why people like Danny Sullivan and others are switching brands. I agree with my good friend Danny totally when he says:

 “My plea is simple. Empower your customer service people to simply replace things that don’t work rather than making them jump through whatever procedures you have in place that clearly don’t work.”

Update: It appears Dell VP Bob Pearson is more interested in selling new PC’s than creating satisfied customers who would then create positive word of mouth. PR does not equal customer focused culture and process improvement!!!

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To access the live audio webcast of the presentation, please visit
investor.google.com/webcast.html.

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It gives me great pleasure to announce these items as best of show:

VinJus – A unique non-alcoholic grape juice drink! Not yet publicly launched, it is scheduled to be distributed shortly. It’s a unique drink. They describe it as:

NAPA VinJus™ – the perfect non-alcoholic aperitif! Refreshing virgin vineyard grape juice – created for your sophisticated palette as an alternative to soda, water or energy drinks. It’s unique balance of crisp, tart and sweet lingers with a hint of green apple, honeysuckle, wildflower and lavender.

Made in the beautiful Napa Valley from early picked varietals, such as Chardonnay and more, this delicious drink is but one single ingredient – mouth watering virgin vineyard grape juice and nothing more! Compared to wine it’s almost half the calories and compared to regular grape juice it’s about half the sugar! And it’s made by a GREEN company!!!

Lucy’s – Smart Cookies. Made with Love. Norfolk, Virginia based Dr. Lucy Gibney M.D. has a son with major food allergies. Lucy describes it best on their website.

Every crispy, crunchy, delicious Dr. Lucy’s cookie is baked without wheat, gluten, dairy milk, butter, eggs, casein, peanuts or tree nuts. But you’d never know it. They taste delicious! We use only high quality ingredients in our carefully controlled bakery to be sure our products meet our tight allergen testing criteria.

Lucy was amazed at the lack of food available to serve that market. Lucy turned to the kitchen in order to change that and once a few varieties were perfected she decided to solve the problem for others without her unique combination of talents. They weren’t even supposed to be at the show, they got added to new items section at the last minute. I’m glad they did, Lucy is a wonderful person and I know her niche product will succeed. Terry Starbucker is already a huge fan.

Blackwing Meats, Inc. – A variety of elk, buffalo, ostrich and other exotic organic meats as wide as I’ve ever seen! They get bonus point for having an highly functional e-commerce site to ship Roger Gerber’s creations directly to you. Even in the down economy Roger says 1st quarter sales were up 77% over the previous year. These items have momentum and the distribution to match it.

Bionade is a unique German based, non-alcoholic refreshment drink that is scheduled to be introduced in the United States later this year. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever tasted, but it is truly outstanding. In Germany the Elderberry is most popular, however I like the Herbs flavor the best (see picture here). If they are able to get shelf space and have an affordable price point, it could easily be a hit in the USA.

Leggio’s herb infused olive oil - Chef Joseph Leggio creates an “amazing” herb infused olive oil product. While there were others at the show with offerings in this vertical, none match the taste of Leggio’s. Joseph started experimenting with the concept several years ago. Then one day asked his wife to ask her dad, a wine maker, to bring over some bottling equipment for him to test with. Though she thought he was crazy, she did it anyway and his hunch paid off, his business is growing quite briskly and he claims to have some other innovative ideas up his sleeve, I can’t wait to see what they are.

Sheila B’s Popcorn (web site under development) – awesome butter flavor, ultra high pop rate, doesn’t dry out upon popping, no aftertaste like most popcorn has and best of all, not really more expensive than other popcorn on the market! Really nice folks too that taught me about the current state of agriculture.

BigHorn Extreme Foods – Peter Andrews has unique sausage offerings as well as tasty buffalo and elk burgers for restaurants and retail outlets.

WowBacon – Amazing clean cooking micro-wave bacon preparer. 6 years to perfect as an invention. Works extremely well as I’ve tried it out. Please note it will not stand upright without 7.75″ of clearance. See a review here with some photos.

Tre Bella Foods Organic – Gail Tiburzi’s organic Italian foods were inspired by her grandmother’s original recipes. It’s not everyday you meet a former investment banker turned food distributor, my time with Gail was all too short as she had a meeting. I told her to call me if she had time during the rest of the show to compare projects, I guess she was too busy taking orders as I never heard from her!

For those needing last minute Mother’s Day gift ideas, there you go!

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Andrew was a fascinating guest! He was ultra low maintenance and had great stories to tell about living in New Zealand and then moving to the UK,  the music industry and his love for jazz (all too rare in the UK). He is the proud new owner of a Leica D-Lux 3 camera – which takes ultra sweet photos, even at high speed on Lake Shore Drive! More importantly I think I experienced several new things about Chicago that I never had before such as Chicago’s many jazz clubs and music stores. Andrew experienced Italian Beef (pictured below), Greektown and tasty BBQ ribs and cornbread! I’m glad he stopped by for a visit and I hope to see Andrew again someday soon!

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I was massively disappointed by what followed…

A giant and unnecessary pdf file weighing in at a hefty half a megabyte arrived in my mailbox.

Giant pdf files are anything but eco-friendly!

Sometimes those massive pdf’s are jammed into archaic email servers with small file size limits like the joke of the size of my chicagogsb.edu email address (the quota hasn’t ben raised from 20MB in it’s history and creates networking bottlenecks). Secondarily, large files are not eco-friendly in general as they take up larger amounts of hard drive space which drives demand for more hard drive space – this is hardly eco-friendly. This isn’t even mentioning RAM implications.

I would hope that Eco-Safe would chose to immediately work to limit the file size of it’s output or better yet eliminate pdf’s altogether…

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I was sitting next to Mike Sansone all day and I learned a ton about community! I got a little tip from Robyn Tippins who I’d known for years online and had never met in person! I met Lorelle VanFossen – one tough cookie who really knows her Wordpress – she got a cool mug recently – me I’m still waiting for an XL hoodie. I met other great online friends like Easton Ellsworth and Jason Alba for the first time. I built relationships with people that blossomed into subsequent relationships. Most importantly they are blogger relationships! So many other great stories from wonderful people.

For the 2008 attendees, I’d like to tag you and ask you to write what you hope to achieve from the experience this weekend. For the 2007 attendees, I’d like to tag you and ask you – what foundation did the experience create and how has it impacted you in the following year? If you were an attendee last year and will be attending this year, you will have been tagged twice but one post is OK…

For me I learned about conversational blogging and learned tons of blog tips and tricks! It was so much fun! This year I hope to continue that journey. I’d also like to learn how time strapped bloggers find or make time to blog when you are ultra busy…my frequency has been down recently for this reason…I look forward to hearing your replies to these issues!

Please take this html link lists and repost the link love to the 2007 folks as well as this year’s people too!
Click on the link, right click, then select all, then copy and paste!
2008 SOBcon Chicago blog link list
2007 SOBcon Chicago blog link list

SOBcon2008 attendees…
Cliff Atkinson
Shashi Bellamkonda
Chris Brogan
Harry Brooks
Anita Bruzzese
Dave Bullock
Mark Carter
Brian Clark
Tom Clifford
Valerie Combs
Chris Cree
Lisa Cree
Thomas Croghan
Donna Cutting
David “Chicago Mobile Marketing” Dalka
Kevin Dixie
Tim Draayer
Andrew Dubber
Monica Duncan
Easton Ellsworth
Kevin Ferrasci O’Malley
Jonathan Fields
Sarah Filipiak
Mary-Lynn Foster
Annie Galvin Teich
Brian Gardner
Chris Garrett
Jon Gatrell
Phil Gerbyshak
Jared Goralnick
Karen Hanrahan
Joseph Hauckes
Vicky Hennegan
Scot Herrick
John Hong
Stephen Hopson
Robert Hruzek
Timothy Johnson
Sara
Pete Jones
Todd Jordan
Bob “Internet Advertising” Kakoliris
Christine Kane
Adam Kayce
Kristen King
Jen Knoedl
Stephen Koernig
Bryan Kress
George Krueger
Amy L
Tammy Lenski
James G. Lindberg
Eli Litscher
Rick Mahn
Sim Margolis
Michael Martine
Becky McCray
Maria Meadows
Cory Miller
Ann Michael
Dawud Miracle
Debra Moorhead
Matthew Murphy
Paul O’Flaherty
Tim Padar
Jesse Petersen
Melissa Pierce
Wendy Piersall
Sandra Ponce de Leon
J. Erik Potter
Karen Putz
Susan R Quandt
Levy Rivers
Barbara Rozgonyi
Jeff Sable
Sheila Scarborough
Mary Schmidt
Derek Semmler
Maria Sharon
David Sherbow
Steve Sherlock
Brad Shorr
Louise Silberman
Sonia Simone-Rossney
Julien Smith
Stephen Smith
Michael Snell
Derrick Sorles
Terry Starbucker
Liz Strauss
Jon Swanson
Ruth M Sylte
Windsor Tanner
Michelle Vandepas
Lorelle VanFossen
Colleen Wainwright
Denise Wakeman
James D. Walton
Randy Windsor
Joanna Young

SOBcon2007 Chicago Attendees:
Sandra Renshaw
Brad Shorr
Timothy Johnson
Tammy Lenski
Muhammad Saleem
Lorelle VanFossen
David Dalka – Mobile Search Marketing – Chicago GSB MBA
Todd And
John Yedinak
Joe Hauckes
Tim Draayer
Jeremy Geelan
Carolyn Manning
Sheila Scarborough
Steve Farber
Dawud Miracle
Doug Mitchell
Jeff O’Hara
Dave Schoof
Jamy Shiels
Adam Steen
Hannah Steen
Chris Thilk
Barry Zweibel
Eric Bingen
Ellen Moore
Cord Silverstein
Jean-Patrick Smith
James Walton
Sharan Tash
Vernon Lun
Tony Lee
Scott Desgrosseilliers
Mark Murrell
Kammie Kobyleski
Easton Ellsworth
Mark Goodyear
Ann Michael
Kent Blumberg
Ashley Cecil
Robert Hruzek
Sabu N G
Mazur Krystyna
Lisa Gates
Franke James
Chris Brown
Troy Worman
Karen Putz
Jesse Petersen
Terry Mapes
Andy Brudtkuhl
Lucia Mancuso
Peter Flaschner
Derrick Sorles
Mike Rohde
Thomas Clifford
Rajesh Srivastava
Claire Celsi
Jason Alba
Cristiana Passinato
Sean R.
Alex Shalman
Cristiana Passinato
Brad Spirrison
Ari Garber
Dr. Rob Wolcott
Cheryll Cruz
Sharon Scherer
Jonathan Phillips
Jason Wade
Jill Pullen
Doug Bulleit
Wendy Kinney
Chelsea Vincent
Ayush Agarwal
Paul Mangalik
Premchand Kallan
Xochi Kaplan
Michael Snell
Ella Wilson
James Bergstrom
Raj Majumder
Keith Levenson

SOBcon2007 Chicago Speakers:
Andy Sernovitz
Phil Gerbyshak
Liz Strauss
Mike Sansone
Drew McLellan
Mike Wagner
Terry Starbucker
Rodney Rumford
Ben Yoskovitz
Chris Cree
Robyn Tippins
Diego Orjuela
Vernon Lun
Wendy Piersall

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The 2008 Industry Achievers:
Pete Blackshaw (Executive VP, Digital Strategic Services, Nielsen Online) has been an industry leader since co-leading p&g’s interactive marketing efforts. He founded PlanetFeedback.com, coined the term “consumer-generated media,” and co-founded the Word-of-Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA). He also has a forthcoming book, “Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3000″.

Kate Thorp (CEO of Real Girls Media) was named one of the Top 25 Women to Watch by Advertising Age (1998) and a Media All Star by OMMA (2005). She was also inducted into the AAF Hall of Achievement for executives under 40 (2000).

Rich LeFurgy (General Partner of Archer) was recognized by USA Today as “the Johnny Appleseed of Online Advertising” (1998), was inducted into Advertising Age’s Interactive Hall of Fame (2000), and received the IAB’s Lifetime Achievement Award (2004). Rich is the Founding Chairman of the Interactive Advertising Bureau and remains active in the trade association since it’s founding in 1996.

The 2008 Limelight Award Winners:

· Best Banner Ad: WaMu Friendly Banner, Avenue A | Razorfish

· Best Interactive Broadcast Ad: Nissan Rogue Campaign, TBWA\Chiat\Day\Tequila

· Best Large Format or Overlay Ad: Assassin’s Creed Roadblock, AKQA

· Best Next Generation Ad: HEMA Rube Goldberg Viral, CCCP

· Best Use of Rich Media: HP Gwen Stefani Yahoo Paper Dolls, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners

· Best Affiliate Marketing Campaign: Moosejaw – Growth and Profit, Schaaf Consulting

· Best Branding Campaign: eBay – Renew & Rethink, Agency.com

· Best Business-to-Business Campaign: EyeWonder Client Testimonials, EyeWonder

· Best Consumer Campaign: Nokia Jealous Computers, These Days

· Best Direct Response Campaign: Soccer Club Sells Seats with DRC, eStara

· Best Email Marketing Campaign: Sun APAC Re-engagement, Acxiom Digital

· Best Integrated Campaign: Heinz Top This TV Challenge Website, Smith Brothers Agency

· Best Mobile Campaign: Motorola “Say Goodbye”, The Hyperfactory & Ogilvy

· Best Multi-Cultural Campaign: Vivemejor, Media 8 Digital Marketing

· Best Social Media Marketing Campaign: Bamboo on Facebook, Guerilla PR

· Best Word of Mouth Campaign: Elf Yourself, EVB & Toy

· Best Campaign Optimization: Lincoln Educational Services, iCrossing

The 2008 Limelight Award Winners (continued):

· Best Search Engine Optimization Strategy/Campaign: Millennium & Copthorne SEO Campaign,
eMarketingEye (Pvt) Ltd

· Best Search Marketing Strategy/Campaign: HGTV Design Star Marketing Loop, Scripps Networks

· Best Business-to-Business Marketing Web Site: Mullen.com, Mullen

· Best Business-to-Business Transaction Web Site: FurnishedQuarters.com, The Buddy Group

· Best Business-to-Consumer Marketing Web Site: HP Serena Williams Site, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners

· Best Business-to-Consumer Transaction Web Site: Virgin America, ROKKAN

· Best Micro Site: Every journey needs a Journal, T3

· Best User Defined Experience: DesignMyRoom Website, andCulture

· Best of Show: Elf Yourself, EVB & Toy

The 2008 People’s Choice Award Winners:

· Best Banner Ad: Blue Shield of California Headbanger Banner, TAXI, Inc.

· Best Interactive Broadcast Ad: Ubisoft Rayman Video Inventory Ad, AdMission Corporation

· Best Large Format or Overlay Ad: Flight of the Conchords, Deep Focus

· Best Next Generation Ad: Motorola Rockstarizer, Draftfcb

· Best Use of Rich Media: Taco Fu, Blockdot and Draftfcb

· Best Business-to-Consumer Marketing Web Site: Breville Concept to Kitchen, Avenue A | Razorfish

· Best Business-to-Consumer Transaction Web Site: Virgin America, ROKKAN

· Best Business-to-Business Marketing Web Site: Business Breakthrough, Visa

· Best Business-to-Business Transaction Web Site: ADSDAQ Selling Desk, ADSDAQ by ContextWeb

· Best Micro Site: Funship Island, Avenue A | Razorfish

· Best User Defined Experience: Elf Yourself, EVB & Toy

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• ad:tech Chicago

Jon Kaplan’s talk starts here: Youtube was founded at a dinner party in 2005. There was no easy way to share video files.

Online video viewing in the mainstream

Americans stream of 10 billion online views monthly…

Explosion of Content = connection of people + democratization of the tools of production + broadband penetration + falling cost of data storage

Sharing is the new viewing – 150M unique users globally

Demographics: 2/3 of YouTube users are over 35, 37% earn above $75,000

800 content partners attended YouTube Videocracy in February

Four ways to think about marketing in 2008
- Target your audience with video profiling
- Integrate your brand into the user experience – on YouTube and Beyond!
- Leverage your offline assets and ones YouTube is creating
- Think about measurement differently

Video Profiling – Building Tools for Effective Targeting – using traditional demographics in the search by audience features…

YouTube’s Creative Standards – 20 million home page views a day

Animated flash overlay is the current YouTube ad format – NO Pre-rolls are shown
Promote Your Video: Video Search capabilities

Integrate Your Brand into the Experience – HP example

It’s all about interesting content: Turbotax

It’s about all about educational content: Vanguardinvestments brand channels

Launched test of video ads in the 1st Quarter of 2008

E*TRADE – pre-seeded SuperBowl commercials – 2,000,000+ views on Youtube.

American Express sponsored fashion week

YouTube Global Gathering

Metrics – the social side of YouTube
- Users can rate videos
- User can comment on videos
- User can add videos to their list of favorites
- User can share videos with friends
- Users can subscribe to their favorite channel

New metrics will accompany this, Google Trends data – admitted that this drives need for Adwords campaigns. Discussed other metrics in terms about how the video was measured and then closed with questions.

Audience question: Should YouTube provide statistics for videos with completed views or the average time of engagement with viewers so that more accurate measures of engagement could be provided?

Answer: That’s a good question. Said several things about exploration of new areas. Did not say yes we’ll add it or no we’ll never do that. It will be interesting to revisit this issue at some point.

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Modalities:                             Usage   Capable phones
Texting                                        50%     100%
Mobile Browser,                         25%      >60%
Downloadable Application        17%      >60%

Application download cons are pretty significant – carrier control, downloading, device management, etc

Browser cons – sign-on, complex navigation, lack of awareness

SMS text message cons – Simplistic UI, Security, Plain Text

Distributing services in the mobile ecosystem requires a highly complex series of relationships.

Wells Fargo and external research shows that there is adoption interest.

Most frequent uses presently: checking balances, fund transfers and activity monitoring

Browser usage presently 2.5 times per week, 66% active users (last three months)

Text banking – 83% of all mobile banking enrollees are including the text banking service. Sending 19 text messages a month overall, becoming more engaged with the accounts overall.

Mobile Contactless Pilot with Visa…

Mobile delivers strategically – when, where, why and how?

What is the potential value?
Customer retention, reducing servicing costs by controlling call center calls, reduced risk and fraud, customer acquisition and usage revenue (P2P, Panic Play, Mobile Contactless, etc)

Security order: SMS, Browser, Application

Mobile customers slant towards a desirable demographic overall due to the very fact they are heavy mobile users.

Future state is for SMS, application and browser to be ubiquitous and the three will be tightly integrated.

Well Fargo is trying to build usage of the channel, not charging for the service at this time. Getting techno-savvy users so servicing has been minimal.

Reaction: I’m highly impressed with the full deployment of SMS, Browser and Application download models as they will be fully able to determine which best meets customer needs based on actual usage data. I chatted up Eskander afterwards and he’s a joy to speak to.

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His post gives an all too rare but welcome dose of independent thought – more people need to be educated and make independent choices about Internet advertising. The world does not necessarily revolve around Adsense.

He is after all giving a glimpse the future of Internet advertising. One where the publisher is respected, given a fairer share as a true partner and rewarded with greater relevancy of ads on their site.

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If people were truly energy conscious, wouldn’t they want these lights to be off in these empty buildings every night, all night? Wouldn’t that do something actually meaningful? Have we gotten to the point where the American media is so incapable of independent thought that a completely meaningless story like this gets way too much attention? It appears so.

It’ll be a real story when all of these empty office buildings have these lights completely turned off in the middle of the night, every night.

Why isn’t this the focus? It should be. 

Others are even more critical of the event.

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Typical Fund Structure
- Management Fee 2.5% of committed capital
- Carried Interest – after losses offset by profits
- 80% Net Profit – Investors
- 20% Net Profit – General Partner
- 50-70% desired return…
- Vesting occurs over 5 years

- Experienced, successful entrepreneurs abound throughout the country
- Start-up companies have access to abundant early-stage venture capital
- Skilled attorneys, accountants, consultants are readily available
- The majority of start-ups can result in successful IPO’s within 2-3 years
- Increasingly hedge funds are an alternative financing source
- Angel capital is more available in Chicago than it used to be

- The space a VC plays in is extremely important – industry sector, growth

- Tom has changed management 3 times on average in the 60 companies he’s invested in

- Buckets of entrepreneurship seed entrepreneurs, beta stage, scaling skills

- Discipline = Success

Criteria:
- Proprietary product or service
- Sustainable competitive advantage
- Viable business model
- Large markets
- Experienced management team
- Appropriate use of funds
- Target 10-15x growth 5-7 years
- Objective: Sale of IPO in 5-7 years

Management:
- The most critical resource
- More important than all other elements
- Stage appropriate, later stages may require different management
- Must have a significant stake in success
- Tom says “Management experience is management experience, big company experience is just as good as small company experience in his view.” (Note: I actually find a *mixture* of both sizes in your experience to be of high value)
“We don’t make money on IPO’s, we make money selling to the Baxter’s, Motorola’s etc.”

“Nothing succeeds like revenue, it’s the cheapest form of capital.”

In 60+ company investments, I can only say that once it was the technology that made the company fail. It’s about getting the product in the marketplace.

What makes you say yes?
Passion. A product I have to get on the marketplace that solves a real problem. Management discipline which means they can step back and say realistically this is how long it will take, this is the team you will need, etc.

Revenue is an outcome, it’s not a driver. What is going to cause the business to scale? It’s business model testing. I don’t care about year 5, I care about what will get us more proof of concept and closer to a success.

The first screening process is where did this plan come from, if another VC sent it to us, we pay attention more. I ask, “Do I want to have a beer with this guy? You shouldn’t be there if you can’t say yes. ”

60% of the time we at least get our money back.

Scientific Board of Directors (compensated with a point of equity +/- a bit)
- Should be at least equivalent in stature to the scientific founders
- Like the Board of Directors, should have complementary skills
- Used properly, play a vital strategic role
- Typically meet semi-annually

Tom never signs an NDA.

The Business Plan
- Executive Summary is most important
- Shorter is better
- Assume the full appreciation of the technology will come in the due diligence
- Avoid jargon
- Avoid the hockey stick
- Focus on the revenue model
- Have a realistic exit strategy
- IPO’s are rare – most VCs are quite happy with a nice M&A exit
- Nobody reads the full business plan – I care about the executive summary
- Cashflow is more important than revenue during this phase

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What was Mary Ann thinking?
Though Spitzer rode roughshod over most of the week’s news, a few other stories still managed to slip to the top of Buzz. One of them was a Yahoo! News article on Dawn Wells, the actress best known for her portrayal of Mary Ann on “Gilligan’s Island.” The aging star was caught in a pot bust, fined several hundred dollars, and slapped with six months of “unsupervised probation.” But the indignity didn’t stop there.

The story stirred a tremendous amount of interest in Search—but not about Dawn Wells. Instead, lookups skyrocketed for Tina Louise, the va-va-voom redhead who played Ginger on the show. We registered an astonishing 13,076% rise in demand for her name (compare that to Wells’ 5,860%). Just the thought of Mary Ann triggered all these luscious old memories of Ginger, Ginger’s photos, and Ginger’s legs. Searchers also boosted “tina louise news” and “tina louise now.” What would the Professor say?

So TV character Mary Ann(Dawn Wells) gets into some legal trouble and Ginger’s (Tina Louise) traffic more than doubles the increase of Mary Ann’s. WOW! That is the first time I can recall a vivid example of a news story about one topic creating a massive increase in search volume for another topic that was not mentioned. In other words, it clearly shows the power of brands.

For those of you who say it’s due to another word starting with the letter B, I’d offer this picture of a young Dawn Wells to show in conjunction with the picture above that the scripts and wardrobe selection shaped Ginger’s superior brand recall when it came to their search of choice this week.

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1) I don’t know of any Six Apart family of product users that are overwhelmingly happy with the spam message filters. Akismet is still king of spam deletion. Though lately Akismet is showing cracks of vulnerability.

2) Trackbacks, I have yet to see Six Apart products reliably and consistently accept my trackbacks. This highly unfortunate and unacceptable as trackbacks are a major foundation of the blogoshere. Until you fix this, across both Typepad and Movable type, I will likely continue to be tempted yet decline your offer. UPDATE: I sent a trackback to Anil’s post and it did not immediately post to his blog.  

3) The duplicate, make that often triplicate, content problems that pollute the blogosphere from Typepad are repulsive and show a complete disrespect to all members of the blogosphere. It makes it hard for me to respect Six Apart as an organization as much as I respect it’s wonderful individuals such as yourself, Andrew Anker, Mena Trott, etc. The situation is simply unacceptable creating inaccurate Technorati link counts, duplicate and even triplicate content and is blogosphere pollution, plain and simple. I met a Typepad representative at last year’s Forrester Consumer Forum and she stated that this area was “not a priority to fix”. I was dumbfounded and confused by this response. Worse, she said Six Apart was working with Technorati to come up with a fix. I’m not exactly the world’s biggest Technorati lover, but why the heck should they write a kluge in their code to fix your massive flaw in your Typepad software? That’s right, they shouldn’t spend a minute on it, they should be fixing the death of blog search. Six Apart should immediately fix this mess and show you respect user’s time by cleaning up this duplicate and triplicate content that inflates Typepad users link counts. I’ve made a note to revisit this issue on May1st, 2008.

4) Your post URL (http://www.movabletype.com/blog/2008/03/a-wordpress-25-upgrade-guide.html) is well, really kinda lame. How about dropping the .html extension on the end? I mean I know of the warm, fuzzy feelings for dot.com 1999 era, but this would be so much cleaner (and better for trackback extension convention standards).

OK, onto WordPress.

1) Anil in my opinion did a fair job in communicating the current state. In fact, many WordPress users will consider this status generous.

2) The plugin problem jumps out at me as the one that is the largest laughing stock, the continual disrespect of the user by not creating a professional backward compatible process in both themes and plugins is NOT sustainable over the long run. Anil should have ranked this issue at the top of his list in my opinion.

3) The widening feature gulf between the Wordpress.com and Wordpress.org (self-hosted) is becoming absolutely embarrassing and needs to be addressed. It also creates massive potential new blogger confusion as to what is what.

Alright, WordPress I love you, but that love is not blind. Anil is right you need to do much better, in fact Anil didn’t go far enough in where you need to go. My number is on the bio in my blog if Anil or Matt care to reach out about the issues I’ve raised in more detail. I will be watching your progress and wish you both good luck!

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It’s also useful in Wordpress, if you haven’t downloaded the Google Website Optimizer for WordPress, now might be a good time to experiment with it before this valuable free seminar. It should be a treat as anyone who can analyze Amazon’s calls to action in the shopping cart and has literally written the book on call to action can surely teach you how to get more action from your website through testing!

See you on the call!

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To access the live audio webcast of the presentation, please visit investor.google.com/webcast.html

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OK, back to my highlights of Affiliate Summit West 2008!

- On Saturday meeting Ned Farra from Zappo’s, Patrice Kaddatz from Scrapbook.tv, Heather Paulson, Chris Graham from Syntrx and Carsten Cumbrowski was great! Learned some great things.

- On Sunday at the Meet Market I had tons of great conversations! I met John Chow for the first time and he wasn’t anything like I expected him to be! He was amazingly down to earth and easy to talk to. I ran into Kevin Lee from Did-it, we had a nice catch up chat. I met Dominic Sofia from DGM, Richard Forster from Buy.at and George Hansen from Digital River about their quality offerings – really awesome people I’m glad to now call friends. Also had a great talk with Geofferson Marcy at Advaliant about how they uniquely manage publishers.

- Meeting Shawn Collins on Monday during Jason Calacanis’ speech. Shawn complimented me which was quite unexpected but a nice surprise. As you know I attend alot of Internet conference however this was my first time at Affiliate Summit. I was immediately struck at how difficult this conference community is to manage and program due to it’s highly fragmented and unstandardized nature. The accomplishment of not only satisfying this community but growing it in the way that they have is something that both Missy Ward and Shawn Collins should pause to appreciate. The use of Twitter in a group manner as they did at the conference is also brilliant (note to self – I need to get instructions on how to set up a group Twitter like that – maybe Shawn will point me in the right direction!). I look forward to building an outstanding long term relationship with Shawn and Missy over time.

- Speaking of Jason Calacanis and Mahalo, you see me asking a question of Jason in this photo after his speech. Regardless of whether you love and/or hate Jason, I’d highly urge anyone to listen to his speech in the Webmaster Radio link (on Affiliate Tip). It was highly thought provoking talk that replaced the word seo with affiliate spam. So what did you ask him Dave? Let me set some background first. Since meeting Jason Calacanis in December, 2006, he sent Linkedin invites to his whole address book while an entrepreneur in residence at Sequoia and then did not participate in the ecosystem there, he’s sent me dozens of Facebook invites, yet last year when I was in Santa Monica and gave him a jingle and he didn’t call me back. Jason has stated that Digg was “Brilliant” yet Digg is causing content to be recycled and stolen from small blogs and pushed to the lazy masses. Mahalo also has the Alexa toolbar installed on all of the machines at Mahalo, which games Mahalo’s Alexa rating.

So Jason what is your role in creating and contributing to Internet spam? You are certainly not a totally white clean angel virgin here. Listening back to the recording today though, I admit you acknowledged and didn’t deny anything I said when I stated and asked my question. I gotta respect that. I’m left mildly confused if that is the blogger in you that is taught to engage the one that questions you or whether it is truly how you feel. I’m conflicted. To me a friend means going beyond the surface level, I’m still not convinced you are fully capable of it. I’d love nothing more than for you to prove me wrong. I’d also like to thank the dozens of people who came up to me during the rest of the conference and stated that they appreciated my bringing up relevant examples of how Jason (and everyone else) participates in polluting the web, some are more guilty than others of course but nobody is completely innocent.

I’ll ask you another question Jason, “You mentioned how you you have ego alerts during your speech, then you attacked Seth Godin and Squidoo. How can you reconcile how you are urging the creation of content with your ego alerts and how that is terribly different than your personal views on Seth Godin’s creation?”

Alright enough about what I think, here are the other posts on Jason’s talk:

Mahalo’s Missing DNA back at you Jason Calcanis

Affiliate Summit West Thank You

Calacanis is and the Real Hurdles for Affiliate Marketing

Live Blogging the Jason Calacanis Keynote at Affiliate Summit

Jason Calacanis Urges Affiliates to Think Big, Stop Holding Up Checks

Message board discussion of the keynote

“Don’t pollute the river”, affiliates told.

Jason Calacanis Keynote Recap (Affiliate Summit)

-Other people I met on Monday include Jamie Birch from Converseon, Mark Kirschner from Linkshare, Krissy Mitchell a Northwestern University Kellogg alum who works at Avon in New York City. Also met Gary Vaynerchuk from Wine Library TV who will be speaking at the TECHcoktail conference in May. Dan Murray at Ravenwood Marketing and Steve Schaffer from Vertive gave an truly educational talk about how to manage affiliate managers.

- Affiliate Bash – WOW!!! Daron Babin and Brandy really outdid themselves at this one! The Blue Man Group performance during party was amazing. The venue was awesome! Special thanks to Kris Jones at Pepperjam for being the primary sponsor of this event.

- On Tuesday, I sat at a table and there was a talk about Wordpress with Karen Jackie and Dana Rockel from Content Robot. Fun folks who know their Wordpress.

Attending Affiliate Summit was an outstanding experience, if you attend many other Internet conferences you’d benefit highly by attending the next Affiliate Summit and seeing how these folks fit into your existing web strategy – irregardless if you are a search or a brand marketer. See you in Boston in August! If you met me at Affiliate Summit, please feel free to add me on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin. See you soon.

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You’ll see me at Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas next week, I will look like that guy in the picture above. I’ll be at the Affilliatebash for sure, if you have other events you’d like me to attend, please drop me an email.

See you at the show!

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