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Darren Herman - Marketing, Advertising, Media and Technology Blog

Marketing, Media, and Technology Conversations


The First 72 Hours: New Platforms Fund (Hb)January 4

I thought I’d write this post to recap the first 72 hours of launching the New Platforms Fund thru Herman blackbook.  Upon waking up this past Friday morning, we received front page coverage on TechCrunch with a less than stellar headline and then became top billing on Mashable.  Upon logging onto Twitter, started receiving DM’s from friends and folks I’ve never met with strong support for both the New Platforms Fund and Herman blackbook.

The initial gut reaction that most people had to the fund, as illustrated on TechCrunch, was in some cases negative, as $1-3k investments are

Announcement: New Platforms FundJanuary 2

Happy New Year to everyone!  I want to start 2009 strong by announcing the New Platforms Fund to empower developers of applications on top of platforms such as Twitter, Boxee, AppNexus, Trulia, iPhone, and more.  The goal of the fund is to seed up to 10 cutting edge ideas with both money and human capital to bring them from concept to alpha stage.  New Platforms Fund investments will range from $1-3,000 each.

I woke up this morning to having the news be on the front page of TechCrunch.  While not the ideal headline, it’s still up on TechCrunch.

As many of you know, I LOVE new technologies and rolling up my sleeves to help entrepreneurs bring their ideas to reality.  We’ve seen some amazing platforms built in 2007/08 such as the aforementioned and now, we’ve got quite a few applications and layers being built on t

Pet Peeve: “Social Media”December 28 2008

I generally hate buzzwords.  I can stand them for a short period of time, but when they become mainstream they turn into my pet peeve.  Social Media has been a word that we started hearing about a few years ago and now everyone and their mother have turned into social media experts or have even launched social media consultancies.  I can’t tell you how many people I meet at conferences or through this blog who have newly launched social media consultancies, but when talking to them in-depth about their organization, they are nothing more than a glorified PR consultant.  There’s a newly launched group of “social media experts” who band together to provide social media bootcamps for a few grand a day which tell marketing executives to put a few tags on their blog posts, create microchunked video content, and other web marketing tactics.

I was joking on Twitter earlier today and asked how many social media experts were needed to screw in a light bulb and my friend @jonburg answered:

Wikipedia has a fairly comprehensive definition of social media and it compares it to industrial media.

Social media are primarily Internet- and mobile-based tools for sharing and discussing information among human

THE Digital Media & Internet Uber 2009 Prediction ListDecember 27 2008

It’s that time of year again.  Approximately 360 days ago, I posted the 2008 prediction list that was picked up all over the web.  We all know that any prediction in itself holds little weight but when you aggregate many predictions together, you can start to see trends and use this for guidance to where industry/market is headed.

Take a peek at the links below of the 2009 predictions.  All of them are tagged by their content:  technology, digital media, social media, marketing, PR, Internet, consumer, etc.

Scaling in an evolved worldDecember 22 2008

I was speaking with a friend and co-investor (@infoarbitrage) last weekend and we were discussing scaling issues in this new world.  One of the comments that we both wrote down was, “anything above buying power is organizational inefficiency.”

Big business used to be about building an infrastructure and then leveraging it as a competitive barrier to entry.  Think of the automotive world.  Think of the advertising world.  Think of the airline industry.  Think of pharma.  Are these businesses where you want to be today?  In a broad sense, probably not.

It used to be, “the larger you become, the more you can make a market.”  How many of us in the digital media world do not envy Yahoo!?  Yahoo is still a $17 billion company but full of inefficiencies.   What about MSFT?  IBM?

In the advertising world, how many holding companies and agencies do you know that have multiple companies, which in turn, duplicate organizational structure.  In a world that is shifting towards transparency and collaboration, why separate all of these companies out?  The knowledge and personnel that exists within each of those four walls is invaluable to the future of any one of the clients.

The future structure of organizations may be leaner and more nimble, and the discount of infrastructure may play out more than we may think.  Think about Toll Brothers (real estate) ri