Welcome to Fall, 2012! Hope you are getting your pumpkins, and your fall gear out this weekend. There’s a definite crispness in the air here in California. These stories caught my eye this week; All address the tension of scale and meaning, much like #SocialEra. 75% of the S&P500 in 2020 won’t be ones we [...]
Tag Archives | New Market Definition / Creation
What Steve Jobs Taught Me About Growth
Finding that first market — a few customers willing to pay for your early product – is hard enough. But there’s one thing that may be even harder. And that’s finding the second market. Especially because companies are often so focused on protecting what they already have. In 1996 when Steve Jobs first returned to [...]
Trend to Watch: Mobile Payments
Starbucks has become that much more convenient. Today, the NYT showed us that we can use our phone to buy coffee. No more carrying your wallet, and your phone. At over 7000 Starbucks locations, we can start to do micropayments with our phone app. Anything that gives us easier, faster access to coffee deserves a [...]
Using Past to Design Future
Nokia keeps doing its analysis and strategic planning and ending up with answers that suggest “stay the course” or “do more of the same”. It reminds me of GM circa 2004 and how they kept building big-ass cars the size of boats and then were “surprised” by the market wanting small cars. By 2008, they [...]
Nicholas Carr’s Rough Type: BusinessWeek’s Sarah Lacy Gets SaaS
In today’s Rough Type, Nicholas Carr comments about Sarah Lacy’s latest Businessweek article on SaaS. Turns out, as we see from Microsoft’s inability to turn a profit in this area, the frenzy of SaaS activity may be lemmings to the sea. Here’s an excerpt: Anyone who thinks the software-as-a-service business is a gold mine for [...]
In a bar fight, what are you prepared to do?
Competition in the tech industry is a fundamental. Without it, we would never have seen the innovations and incredibly cool stuff that have informed, transformed, and improved our daily lives. Think about search and how much we use it to find anything, anytime. Or email tools that allow us to be connected and exchange ideas. [...]
Google SMB Push…
Having launched what now seems like a bazzillion products, I think I can draw a conclusion about the simplicity of enterprise product adoption. Here goes. There are only 3 things enterprise companies need to adopt technology: security, scalability and support. Oh, and the product has to solve a problem that needs solving. Okay, so 4 [...]
Amazon’s Category Creation Going Again
Grid Platforms: The big idea? 5 steps to Category Creation: 1. See a critical gap. 2. Figure out how to fill and dominate it. 3. Establish innovation as a Differentiation. Must have a point of differentiation or others take advantage of your category creation. 4. Enable “platform momentum” so more people use your stuff than [...]
The guides
I met last week with this incredibly zany guy named Nick Hayes of Influencer 50. His firm understands influencer marketing at a very deep level and he’s now in the Bay Area establishing a presence here. In doing so, he’s studying the top 50 influencers who influence the influencer marketing field. Trying following that. But [...]
3,000 marketing messages per day
Today’s consumer receives over 3,000 marketing messages per day. That’s what Maritz Dialogue Marketing group says. Start counting and see how many you come up with in 1 hour. I think it holds true. Now the question I want to answer is what it takes to stand out amongst that crowd if you are marketing [...]