Microsoft used to sell their (crappy) OS to companies. These days, apparently they are paying Nokia a billion dollars to get Win 7 Mobile on Nokia smartphones so they can get distribution, as the saying goes, hopefully attract developers for their App Store and… and then what? Make billions of dollars taking a cut on apps sold for 99 cents? Make billions of dollars selling ads on mobile searches on Bing, which, despite having a 30% market share in the US on pc-based searches, is still losing money to the tune of 2 billion dollars a year? Boy, I’d love to understand their ”strategy”…
So, apparently Firefox is out with a mobile browser. Good; actually, very bad. It’s not listed on Android Market. You need to ask them to send you an SMS and follow a link to download it. If you make your way to their website from your smartphone, they show you the same identical page they show you on the web – so much for being ‘mobile’ – they don’t understand which country you live in, they force you to choose your country from a drop-down list, then to enter your mobile phone number, and finally to guess their captcha. And I never got their SMS message. Well done, Firefox!
Daniel Ellsberg: “EVERY attack now made on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was made against me and the release of the Pentagon Papers at the time.” I think you should read this.
A few years after it was written, it seemed like the Cluetrain Manifesto really had it right. Back in, say, 2001, advertising on the Internet was broken. Banner ads didn’t work, tracking was little more than guessing, and buying ads was a time consuming thing which involved negotiating with different partners, dealing with different creativities and different ad-servers etc. It really looked like the web was a different ballgame, and companies better start doing something different.
Then Google came to the rescue. Pretty soon, you could buy ads next to search results, and then contextual ads, and then graphical ads, all from one single interface, one single check, no negotiations and for a price which seemed to make sense. For those who didn’t get it, or didn’t want to get their hands too dirty, search ad agencies were there to take care of their budgets. And just like nobody had ever been fired for doing Tv ads, the same was true for ads on Google.
For most companies, “marketing” was once again something which had little to do with their product. Or with their market. But with the success of YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, came a host of consultants that told companies that “in social media” they had to be cool, hip and down to earth. But there was no need to panic, or to change their ways, for they could do it for them, and provide them with stats about how things were going, and reassure them that there is nothing to worry about…
Not even The Onion could have made this one up: a new company called Shopkick will drive points-hunting people with nothing better to do in life into your offline retail stores, and get in the way of those who have a life and money and go there only when they need to do some shopping. Kinda like Flooz, or Beenz in Europe, but in the real world. And “2.0″. Gotta love the “New Economy”.
Show them not only where you are, but where you’ve been, and possibly all the places and non-places in between. This is really “web2.0″ onanism at its finest.
Or they have someone lie for them, which is even more pathetic.
is my social media strategy .com: whatthefuckismysocialmediastrategy.com
Expose new and relevant communities to the brand by providing assets to encourage brand evangelism
Ovvero: generatore automatico di cazzate per consulenti del web duepuntozero.
[via Dario]
Android-powered phones outsell Apple’s iPhone. Of course, this is important news for developers. But don’t reach for your handkerchief, for there’s really no reason to pity “poor Apple”. If smart phones represent 50% of the mobile phone market in the US, which either is or will be true very soon, this means that Apple, which before 2007 was selling exactly zero mobile phones, is (or will soon be) selling over 10% of all mobile phones in the US, or just shy of the number of Android-powered phones sold by Motorola, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, LG and HTC – combined. And not only that, but they’re doing so with just two models (the iPhone 3GS and the iPhone 4), charge a premium price, spend zero or close to zero on marketing (at least from what I see here in Europe), get a share of the mobile data traffic they generate from mobile operators, acquire your credit card details and often are able to sell you some stuff via the iTunes store, too. Poor Apple! ;-)
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