My top 10 reads for the week. This is a SMALL sampling of what I come across in my weekly media consumption addiction. If you’d like to be on my email list, please email me and I will add you.
It’s no secret that location is quickly becoming one of the key decision points when it comes to marketing to an ad receptive demographic. The newest trend is on the mobile platform – ala Foursquare and Gowalla. However, the offline practice is still very relevant (think the Zagat and it’s restaurant ratings – side note – they just integrated with Foursquare this year). Web based companies are starting to make it more relevant and more ubiquitous with their signage in local businesses. Yelp was one of the first in the growing the trend of sending out stickers to local businesses that integrate an offline analog experience with your favorite social network. Google was quick to follow with their ‘Favorite Places‘ decals. Facebook continues the trend of letting others pioneer and then swoop in to dominate an established practice due to the sheer size of their user base. Who wins moving forward? Mashable bets on Facebook.
“…one decal will prevail and we tend to think Facebook’s more than 400 million userbase and the value of an instant Fan will make Facebook’s offering especially appealing to local business owners.”
In my role at Intel, I am presented with some pretty unique digital marketing opportunities. One of my favorite was working with the team over at Digg on creating a new visualization in their Digg Labs environment – called Digg Arc. This was a real-time visualization of the top content being ‘Dugg’ on the main Digg site. It’s an interesting way to digest content and show the threading of how it’s rising in relevancy as your watching the infograph expand, shift, and change.
It appears that our work together was a bit ahead of it’s time (that was back in 2007) when compared to some of the visualizations that are being released today around Twitter. Yesterday, in my media perusal over a quick lunch, I came across a pretty cool visualization tool that shows the conversation in real time on Twitter. It’s called ‘Revisit‘ and it shows the ‘conversational threads between Twitter users over time‘. Pretty interesting to follow – especially showing the extension of the conversation through @ replies and retweets. One could waste, ahem ‘spend’, a lot of time on this site watching the Twitter-verse play out…
My top 10 reads for the week. This is a SMALL sampling of what I come across in my weekly media consumption addiction. If you’d like to be on my email list, please email me and I will add you.
With Universal ‘Like’ Button, Facebook Spreads Across Web – AdAge
Facebook: What They Announced At F8 – The Next Web
Google Acquires Another Piece of the Tablet Puzzle – NYTimes
Big week for Facebook as they rolled out some big news at their annual F8 developers conference. They have cached all their live stream videos on their site. The areas that they’ve made their biggest strides in? Personalized Search, Micro-Blogging, and an increased footprint in their ever-growing Ad Network business. Pete Cashmore sums it up well in his CNN Tech Blog – going so far as to lead with the headline:
“How Facebook won the web”
I think it’s a little early for the rest of the Web players to wave the white flag of defeat, however it is impressive how Facebook is recognizing the key growth areas and making the right partnerships to win those areas. I’m personally very interested to watch the partnership with Pandora play out. We’re (Intel) currently a sponsor of the ‘sharing’ mechanism in Pandora – literally, letting your social network know through Twitter and Facebook, which song you are listening to at any given time you choose to share. The new announcement with Facebook extends that even further, sending the sharing both directions. Full details on the Pandora FAQ page. Smart companies, smart partnership.
Well, I guess we ARE the Sponsors of Tomorrow… last year, Business Week had us ranked as the #33 most innovative company. After a long year in the middle of the pack, we’ve surged forward. It’s been a great year. We’ve released a major brand campaign, a new product line, and have gotten some great press to boost our visibility. Oh yeah, and we knocked the socks off the Street earlier this week with our Q1 earnings announcement. Looking forward to cracking the top 10 next year…
Today, Google announced that they are adding a great new feature to their real time search capabilities – the ability to ‘replay’ a moment in time in Twitter, via it’s Twitter search capabilities, to see what people were saying on Twitter at any given moment – literally, to the minute. For now, Tweets are being indexed back to February of this year – however, according to ReadWriteWeb, they will soon be able to index back to early 2006. The power of the internet ‘archive’…What a great way to find out how, when, and by whom news was broken on the social graph…
As an employee and shareholder, it always pleases me when we successfully navigate our analyst call and the stock actually goes up (that’s rare). Today beat everyone’s expectations. Here’s the snapshot:
First-Quarter Results
Revenue $10.3 Billion
Gross Margin 63%
Operating Income $3.4 Billion
Net Income $2.4 Billion
EPS 43 Cents
That took the Street’s breath away and pushed our stock into territory we haven’t seen in a while. Granted, that’s not saying a ton if you’ve been tracking our stock the last couple of years, but any north bound growth is a big deal during these financial times. What I’m most pleased about is the fact that our CEO, Paul Otellini, paints an optimistic picture for our near term outlook as well:
“The investments we’re making in leading edge technology are delivering the most compelling product line-up in our history, said Paul Otellini, Intel president and CEO. These leadership products combined with growing worldwide demand and continued outstanding execution resulted in Intel’s best first quarter ever. Looking forward, we’re optimistic about our business as Intel products are designed into a variety of new and exciting segments.”
This was passed along to me this morning by a trusted contact who has a keen eye for interesting tidbits on the Net… Our own Any Grove gets a mention, being quoted as saying “Google is a company on steroids, with a finger in every industry”. He couldn’t be more right – we’re seeing that every day.
Big week for Facebook as they rolled out some big news at their annual F8 developers conference. They have cached all their 