Kevin Marion

Class is done, which will most likely mean the end of my blog, but i have actually somewhat come to like throwing my random ideas up here, maybe i should start blasting what i am doing every second on the internet so people can follow me and market to me better… tweet that.

honestly, i am pretty happy my name is Kevin Marion, apparently there is a nice little football player by the same name, he takes up all the results on Google, awesome! Even though a lot of people would disagree, i hate being in the limelight, i love being hidden and allowing to be found when I so choose. facebook does not allow for that, so i have taken all pre-steps needed to delete.
honestly i will probably just purge my list down to about 30 people, well hell even as I type that I know I cant, i have to bring in new members to my group next year and I know all of them will want to facebook me or what not. that is fine I guess, but looks like im locked in.

maybe ill try and get orkut to launch in the states. who know, it could happen. but all in all the class was fun, the topics we discussed are my bread and butter, i have worked in a web 2.0 company, i research this shut on the regular, i think about it even more often, so the idea that i could actually get credit for a class that allows me to further analyze this, nothing better.

ill be in NY for the city. hit me up on my email if you are ever in the city. I will not post it here, i expect you to have other means to find me.

http://swisstrains.ch/
oh ya, the fan boy hat is on snug and tight right now. Here is a perfect use of Google being a ridiculous awesome company and throwing up an API for all to use and do whatever you want with it. This application runs on Google maps api, completely free, (unless the company uses it internally) now that is a company “not being evil” the whole idea is to open up the api, let users use it, create stuff on it for free. nobody does it huh?… http://www.walkjogrun.net/
Why hello there Google map api again. and again free! come on, if that is not spreading technology and a host of other things to public i dont know what is. Additionally it allows developers to learn the Google api, and then Google will take care of modifying your website to mobile deployment.

And if you dont think that the top application, which has gps tracking of trains, is a web 2.0/ the future of what we will be seeing you are just crazy. This is the future, hell its happening right now in Europe, we need a little stronger wireless network (don’t even get me started how far behind we are from china and europe) once 4g gets rolled out (verizon coming out soon hooray!) we will see what awesome technologies can be developed, refined, and mystifying.

I have to say i am excited as a fat kid in a ice cream shop to see what is coming in the next couple months. but my real question is what this damn market is going to do? will it drop again, hopefully, i got some funds in an IRA right now that i want to throw in the market but have no idea when I should, long term investment (you can withdraw 15k for a deposit on ur first house, so might as well grow tax free till then) so it wont really matter that much, but im greedy, i want some free % points.

http://www.youtube.com/canneslions

yup there it is, a nice little competition on youtube for college kids (got to be under 28, so you can be a really old college kid at that) I think I will actually try to enter this contest, this is how web 2.0 can be used to spread and advertise. You are really creating a competition just for kids to be creative and give them a once in a lifetime type trip if they win. This is the type of social competition that should be implemented in this new environment. It allow people to actually get out and do something, showcase their talent, and hopefully it will result in a real vote to figure out who is the best.
If this competition gets overwhelmed with some stupid crap, and some stupid forums overtake it, lame. BUT, if this works out right, I bet you will see a lot more competitions come out like this.
side note: what company is this coming out of? of ya, you already know, GOOGLE, a great creative marketing scheme, please shed light on all of us by showing the right way to use 2.0 to spread ideas.

Ashton kutcher won, Anderson cooper was trying to win by advertising his twitter on AC 360. Cnn lost. and maybe in the end, twitter is the big winner. (did they somehow have a hand in stopping people from unfollowing the big players?)

Regardless, what a way to create a media frenzy and probably create the strongest growth for twitter since it realesed. I would estimate that the amount of people who signed up in the last two weeks was equivalent to the entire amount of people who singed up in the two months before that. (completely random guess based off no statistics, but I’d love to see the stats when they come out) I think this goes to show that if you want something to be big on the internet it needs to have that competitive feel to it. This felt like a race, it had coverage equal to that of a decent sized election. The people of twitter were voting for one or the other. That is the facts, twitter had a lot of popularity from a couple accounts’ race to one million followers. This will go down in history.

What I would like to see is what the future holds. Now that we have a person at one million does it sustain its growth? do people still find a huge benefit in the service? is there any way this service will get monetized? is an investor about to buy it out? or will it flop? all of these questions remain to be answered, but I feel we will see twitter continue to grow for at least the remainder of 2009. I think with the growth of twitter you will see a steady decline in usage of facebook. ( I think fb missed the boat here, but I think there will still be a lot of buzz about facebook from people who don’t know what they are talking about) And the best part is, by summer of 2010, I suspect there will be a whole new service that is growing faster, and has more hype than both of these. I think the main thing that will be apart of the new service will be mobility (android perhaps? oh and I would definitely put this in the same category because Android could be the linkage between iPhone and twitter/facebooks, not to mention it is an easily monetized multi sided platform mediated network…) And just my two cents, facebook connect will fail, it is to different of a concept to be launched by facebook, if it were supported by someone else yes, it could work, with facebook behind it, no it will not.

my two cents.
km

Three blog posts in one day? god the internet must be so happy to have kevin’s knowledge poured all over it today. jk.

Speaker from Thursday is what this blog is about, we got to hear the CEO and CMO from a local company called moximity. What a cool speech. This was probably my favorite guest speaker that has come in, these guys knew their stuff, and I agreed with a lot of what they had said. In fact, on the case we wrote in class on Tuesday had so many parallels with what the CEO was saying about mobile marketing and stuff, that it was a huge deja vu type feeling.

Another thing that I have to say I admittedly liked was that the CEO spoke very highly of Android (google product so the fanboy protection status definitely applies) and I have to agree with him on so many points made. Apple is great, but they are so stuck on keeping so many things proprietary, in this day and age it just cant be like that. Yes, Apple is obviously successful because they make up for this proprietary lock down by creating the sexiest and best marketed products out there, but this will not last forever. Android is on such a different level, its one smart software that has a sexy level to it (I guess Google just does it for a few people…) but it also is completely open.

Enough of ranting on those ideas, the main point of Moximity is HOT. I will def keep my eye on this company because it is such a great, and practical application of technologies. I think there are some big decisions that should be appropriately handled or it could spell demise, but with the correct security and privacy protections, as well as giving the user enough control over the service this will be big. I guess the whole idea has inevitably come full circle. originally these networks were created online to digitize our real world connections, the connections online soon grew to be more than we could manage in the offline world, so now we will have the mobile devices bring this online social graph to a tangible social graph. The only way this can be effectively accomplished is with mobile devices growing in strength and popularity because humans are inherently mobile and the graph has to be mobile with it. I also think this will be a great way to monetize a lot of these online websites, the paid advertising that can be targeted by gps and demographics could demand top dollar, and then the entire online activity would be subsidized by the mobile advertising. I think it would be creating a new platform for business that we have not seen yet which is exciting. Once again the internet has turned a competitive landscape on its head and everyone gets a chance to find new peaks and avoid the valleys.

Eyes open, full steam ahead.

km

Wine.woot a great online community

When it comes to buying products online I think this website has to be one of the greatest examples of creating a community around a product and service to create a unique online experience.

for those of you who dont know, woot.com is a website that has one deal, a “woot”, a day, normally it is an item that is heavily discounted. There is a discussion board for each item where people can discuss the offering, post a review and what not. wine.woot is an extension of this website which deals specifically in wines. Some of the wines are exclusive just to wine.woot, some of the wines are just great deals on a hard to find wine, and sometimes it is a wine that is made by the woot company.

Anyway, so wine.woot actually has something called a lab rat. In essence, if you are one of the first people to purchase a wine offering when it is released, you may get sent an extra bottle of the wine to “lab rat” for the community. This means that the site actually sends out an extra bottle to a few members so they can sample the wine, write a review (these range from almost professional wine tasting reviews, to a college kid talking about whether it was a bad hangover or not), and then hopefully influence the community whether or not to purchase some (each offering is only up for like 4 days so it must be done quickly because once the woot changes, you cannot get it back). Another cool item is sometimes the wine maker himself/herself would show up on the site to discuss the details of the wine and interact with the community.

I think this is such a great niche way of marketing. It has all the elements of a social network, there are ways to brag, there are senior wine.woot members who can boast about purchasing over 1000 bottles from the site, it is considered your lucky day if you get chosen for the lab rat (its called getting a golden ticket), and then there is a “quality post” count for the discussion board. Obviously intelligent members will become somewhat senior on the boards which reduces some of the internet spam guaranteed to pop up.

All in all, I think companies should recognize this niche market of online retailing that can be so individually focused. This ability to create such a niche site creates very strong lock-in and network effects. More users bring in more users (obviously to a point) and once you have established yourself on the website, you are locked in to that identity. I think this idea of individual identity’s on sites that I choose is better than having this one universal identity. I think the internet needs to have some anonymity to it. I think this idea of a single sign on for your entire life goes against the ability to escape that the internet affords us. The chemical engineer does not want his boss to know he loves to be a wizard on Wednesday night, and that is something that has to stay no matter what the evolution of the net is. The argument on “oh it will be so easy to login everywhere with one user credentials and you will have just one password!!” please, firefox and chrome and all the web browsers remember all that stuff for me.

Twitter worm story

A kid in brooklyn designed a worm that ran through the twitter infrastructure and put false updates all over the place. The worm has been claimed by a kid named Mikey, who said he put the worm into action to promote his website Stalk Daily. Stalk daily is in essence a twitter but it allows you to stalk people (profiles include pictures videos and more items).

First, I think it is hilarious that twitter got hacked, or wormed, or whatever you want to call it. Honestly this great website that is growing @ 140% with millions of users gets wormed by a teenager from brooklyn? I think it just shows that the youth in this country have unlimited access to learning about the internet and its most technical aspects. I think this is such a great example of the generation that is coming up next (the kids born from like 95-2005). They have such a different view on the world because most of them grew up with computers as such a backbone of their life. I think this generation will do some really cool stuff and I am super excited to see it.

second. Stalk daily. I question the whole idea of this site, first of all twitter is a cute name, people like to say oh “I am on twitter”, “I need to tweet” who in the hell is going to go around self proclaiming them self a stalker? (besides some of those college kids who joke about facebook stalking..) It has to be one of the worst names to call a website for social networking ever.
Additionally one of the attractable things about twitter ( I am told this, I do not have a twitter so I don’t know first hand) is that you DO NOT have to set up and maintain a profile. The anonymity of the site and ease of use is one of the pluses about the site. another check box in the fail category for this new site.

It must be said that a site like this does have the possibility of taking off, just because it is a niche market and it is slightly differentiated than anything else out there (except strikingly similar to facebook) but I would think the name alone kills it. Oh and the fact that you hacked another site to get your name out there, maybe a little to much negative press at launch?

km

President Obama had an online town hall style meeting last night through the internet. Over 90,000 people logged on and asked text/video questions through the internet. This is a new take on a president trying to be closer to the people (anyone ever heard of fireside chats?).

This the first time a president has used a Web 2.0 style medium to actually reach out to the people/allow people to reach out to him. What a wonderful idea! It has been decades since a president has felt as close to the people as this man has done. This is was also aided by his appearance on Jay Leno, the president was being broadcast on TV yet he came across so personal and real, that I felt it was an extension of my own room. What a novel idea, the president is human, he can make jokes, he can talk without the aid of teleprompters, and he is a NORMAL guy. He openly criticizes “the bubble” he is inside when he is at the white house.

Back to the town hall, like we saw briefly during some primary events, people are allowed to send in whatever question they want directly to the president. I am sure there is some sort of censor, but the censor was at least loose enough to allow the age old “lets legalize marijuana to solve the economy” question. Excellent, this is a perfect example of how connected the internet can make our country and our culture. It also is a great example of how the internet is peeling back these old paradigms that the president is “someone greater than me.” It is through these online actions that Obama can bring himself into every citizen’s house and home, he is eroding previous stereotypes and I cannot agree more with this.

Another benefit of the use of online web 2.0 tools is that it forces people to realize the benefits of the internet. It forces CEO’s and baby boomers and the rest of the world to take note, the internet has no bounds of what it can do. The internet (notice I am calling it the internet, not web 2.0, web 2.0 is just some buzz word to describe… the internet!) has the ability to connect people from everywhere. By having the president reach out to people, it validates an entire movement of internet technologies and internet communications. It also forces people to realize that these technologies are here to stay and hopefully this could be a catalyst to encourage people to alter the way they view the internet. Sure there is porn, child porn, racisms, and a whole hell of a lot of other stuff that would never fly in the real world, but the same technology that enables those sites, enables the president of the United States to connect to Joe Schmo in Missouri. I can see almost no negative effect of having the president so tangible to the American people. I can only see great things to come of this, and I hope that the president continues to push the envelope of making Washington connected to the American people.

Here’s a thought, Washington becomes so connected and available, that you can actually trace your tax dollars to the exact government expenditure that they go to. If this is a true democracy, I think there should be an increased level of transparency. What better way to open the doors of our republic than the internet?

Let me first remove my Google fan boy hat….

Alright youtube, I just watched a couple videos and I was so bombarded by advertisements I was getting “fast and the furious” (a new movie coming out) on the right side, coming up the bottom of my video, and then at the end of my video another ad played for “fast and the furious”. I understand that youtube is desperately trying to monetize, but do we really have to go back to the pop up/banner/annoying as hell ways of doing it? I understand how important it is to get some sort of revenue flowing from this business; I just feel that Google is taking a step back by going to this primitive banner ad style advertisement. AdSense and AdWords were revolutionary because they incorporated a degree of relevancy to the order in which they were placed. I feel there is no order on youtube, I feel bombarded, and if it wasn’t for such great content, I would be discouraged from using it.

I completely understand the dilemma of creating value from this part of the company, well for the whole internet, how do you monetize the traffic? This is something that is plaugeing twitter, facebook, myspace, youtube, almost every major site on the internet today. I think that if we compare this to television, commercials we watch there are very broad, and do not relate to individual people. I think internet advertising on big sites like youtube, twitter, myspace, etc. will eventually turn into nothing more than television commercials (the “branding” type advertisements). I think the smaller a website, the deeper the drill down effect, the closer an advertiser can get to a niche market, and the more directed advertisements can be used.

The main point of this blog is to say that I hope to see relevancy of online advertisements be important in their placement, not just how many people see it.

Google fan boy hat is going back on…

So I am sitting here watching the University of Texas first round basketball game, and I see a commercial for Vitamin water with Steve Nash making some jokes, I am fine with that pretty funny commercial. Then at the end of it, what comes up, a link saying “check us out at facebook.com/vitaminwater. This is very upsetting to me. I cannot believe a real company would advertise a facebook.com extension website instead of their real website. Does vitamin water really think that their Facebook site is more important than their real website? This is exactly the type of movement by a company that will push me away from A) the company B) Facebook. I can see no justification for a company advertising a site that is not their own website. I mean if you want to do something like that put a big link on your main page, not make a separate Facebook page.

Additionally, this is what I do not like about Facebook, it is selling out, it is becoming more about advertising, less about me and my friends. There is no benefit to me and my relationships by becoming a friend of vitamin water. I do not like this development, and I am going to be watching Facebook very closely in the next couple weeks to months to reevaluate if I want to continue my involvement with it.