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Web 2.0, Marketing, Technology, Design, Rants, Musings

iLike Makes Music Happen at Web 2.0 Expo NYSeptember 27

The Disruption in the Music Industry session at Web 2.0 Expo NY was one I wanted to make sure I attended. I have a keen interest in the way that the social web is effecting the music industry. Brothers, and iLike founders Ali Partovi and Hadi Partovi are two pioneers who genuinely understand the potential of the social web to reshape the music industry. While old-school industry heavies have been doing their best to avoid the impending transformation, the Partovi brothers have embraced the opportunity presented and offered artists new ways to monetize and strengthen their brands through closer engagement with fans.

The brothers Partovi gave a clear and concise breakdown of how the shifting landscape in online music has diminished more traditional monetization opportunities, but at the same time created new, and potentially more lucrative ones. While physical record sales are tanking online

Breaking Out of the Echo Chamber - Identifying Early Adopters and Setting Sights on Mass Markets (Presented at NextWeb NY on 9/15/08)September 16

Breaking Out of the Echo Chamber - Early Adopters vs. Mass Markets - Upload a Document to Scribd

Read this document on Scribd: Breaking Out of the Echo Chamber - Early Adopters vs. Mass Markets

Below is an approximate transcription on the presentation, actually, it’s my notes, which are probably a better read than the actual transcription…

1.

2.
Has everyone seen Forrester’s technographic ladder?

It’s a way of categorizing how people use the web

the people in this room are not only at the top rung, they’ve climbed up on the roof and are looking down at the rest of the world like they’re a bunch of ants

3.
I’m going to talk a bit tonight about marketing. Many people mistakenly get marketing and advertising or promotion confused. Marketing means looking at markets and making sure that everything from your product to your UX to you messaging, really everything about your company, aligns with a market.

4.
How many people here are at a startup? It’s a sad fact that statistically speaking 90% of the startups represented here won’t make it past the first three years.

5.
There are many reasons why st

Breaking Out of the Echo Chamber - Finding the Blance Between Early Adopters and Mass MarketsSeptember 11

I like to take a holistic approach to marketing. Most people think that marketing is about promotion, or advertising, but that’s a misconception. Marketing encompasses everything a company does to acquire customers and maintain relationships with them. It’s about aligning a product with a market. Early adopters, or as Robert Scoble has taken to calling them, passionates are increasingly shaping and influencing the direction of online business both in terms of product development and communications strategies. There is currently a proliferation of shiny new toys that are being built for and marketed to early adopters, but is this a direction that is going to be profitable

Are We Digging Our Own Chasm?
Many in the industry reference Moore’s “Crossing the Chasm” as the key work in addressing the subject of transitioning from early adopters to a mass market. Two things come to mind:

1. When Moor

Caught in the Echo Chamber - Insights into the Marketability of Technology CompaniesAugust 26

This is a guest post I wrote for Mashable - I’ve republished it here.

I am pretty heavily involved in the expanding startup community here in LA, and make my way up to the Bay area on a regular basis. I meet a lot of entrepreneurs and see new startups every day. Many of these companies, and the entrepreneurs who found them are deeply ensnared in the echo chamber, they’re all drinking each other’s Kool-aid. We’re talking about people who are not just at the top of the technographic ladder, they’ve gotten to the roof and are looking down on everyone else like they are a bunch of ants.

We forget that there is a whole world out there. Most people have never even heard of Twitter, Brightkite or many of the other services that we have become accustomed to using. It’s a given that eventually these sorts of tools will be adopted by a larger audience, but only when they add real value and only if we present them in a way in which the barriers to entry are minimal.

I believe that if an idea is ever going to make it out of the echo chamber and appeal to a mass market, a company needs to be mindful of the market it’s hoping to serve from the get-go. It’s not enough to have amazing technology. In the end, very few of these companies are technology companies; they are simply built on technolo

Brand Hijacking Results in a Win For a Risk Averse CompanyAugust 20

As many already know, Scrabulous, the wildly popular Facebook game based on Scrabble, developed by bothers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla of Calcutta, India were sent a cease and desist letter back in January from the lawyers of rights holders to the Scrabble’s concept and brand; Hasbro (US and Canada) and Mattel (international), and then latter sued in July. Between January and July, Hasbro licensed the rights to Scrabble to Electronic Arts (warning: superfluous press release) and they began development on the official version of the game. Scrabulous was taken down by the developers and put back up days later as Wordscraper: Scrabulous with a slightly different look and point system. The officially licensed Scrabble for Facebook is still in beta, has some bugs, and users can bee seen complaining in the comments of the application, cursing Hasbro/EA for making a gaming application that is substandard in comparison to Scrabulous, and for not engaging the developers of Scrabulous so that it could become the official version.

What is interesting is that Facebook and the F8 platform were