Watch the webinar outlining the uses of NFC and check out this video by our friends at Endeavour.

NFC Application Demo by Endeavour from mobilitycompany on Vimeo.

Our striking new cards are unique and different.  They feature our cardinal logo printed on a square, black card. On the back, note our QR code that, with the help of a smartphone, will take you directly to this website.

The cards were the creation of design genius Justin Dill, who worked closely with us to produce a card that is informative, artistic and memorable.

Tom

Austin is buzzing with festivals featuring everything from art to live music to delectable fare. Recently, Laughing Cardinal Productions created a video for Art Seen Alliance for their Art Outside festival going on the second weekend of October.

Check out the Art Outside Video:

Click here to see more projects Laughing Cardinal Productions is working on.

Laughing Cardinal Productions, the branch of Tom Parish Inc. dedicated to producing quality videos, has officially launched its website. Click to explore our videos, blogs, latest projects, and just what makes Laughing Cardinal a unique, eccentric and creative production company.

Check often for the latest news and to see what we’re doing and how your business can benefit from a Laughing Cardinal video.

Let’s begin this week’s headlines recap with the news of Foursquare teaming with American Express on cash-back deals.

Here’s how it works: Users will need to link together their Foursquare and credit card accounts. When you check in to an establishment and pay with American Express, a discount will appear on your monthly bill. Read more about this at PCWorld.

Here is an article that gets us back to a central theme at The Appconomy – “The App Economy – Who Is Really Making Money?” Several points raised by this article are obvious:

• Apple is making a great deal of money
• Google is struggling with a consistent billing platform for paid apps
• Mobile ad networks and exchanges are doing well, but…
• The average app developer isn’t thriving, given the ‘needle in a haystack’ problem resulting from a plethora of apps

The article goes on to say RIM’s efforts seem pretty stale and Microsoft Mobile has yet to find true resonance with consumers. I found this article quite revealing, so I encourage you to give it a thorough read.

As a newsworthy side note, it seems RIM’s VP of Digital Marketing defected to Samsung. More on this at MobileBeat.

Bet you didn’t know this tidbit: Twitter’s own iPhone app uses twice the data of TweetDeck. Isn’t that interesting…?  More details at TechCrunch.

If you haven’t yet heard, Cisco is about to release their entry into the tablet marketplace. It’s called “Cius,” it’s running the Intel Atom processor and the Android OS, and it ships in July. Cisco is bundling virtual desktop features so you can use VMWare and Citrix to run a Windows virtual desktop. I can see this option being helpful to enterprise users.

If you’re a fan of Forrester Research (I am), then you will want to catch their webinar on June 23. “What Retailers Need to Know When Selecting and Implementing an Mcommerce Offering” is an hour long, and it’s free. You can sign up directly here.

I’m going to end this week with an article from eSecurityPlanet.com on “How to Secure Mobile Devices.” We should all give this some thought, considering the details of our personal lives that now reside in our smart phones. Some of us might be carrying critical enterprise information, or even important tidbits like other people’s Social Security numbers.

I imagine each of us worries at times about what could happen if our phone fell into the hands of others who want to use it for their own gain. Give this article a read and familiarize yourself with the security options of the phone you’re using–then use them!

That’s all for this week. See you again next Friday.

Tom Parish, lead curator – Enterprise Mobility news

So how exactly can mobility transform the customer experience and how do you make this really work for your business?  You’ll find some important perspectives in a Vodafone article that references GSMA research showing how smartphone users spend more time with their apps and messaging than they do on calls and web browsing.

The punch line?  Don’t think of your app as the “call to action” landing page that a marketing splash page delivers; instead, invest the resources to learn about users’ behaviors, making sure that you’ve pulled IT and other parties into the process so they can help interconnect mobile apps with existing business intelligence processes.

For those of you following Google Chromebook progress, you might take a look how Apple’s OS X Lion features could give the Chromebook products a tough competitor.  This is going to be an interesting summer as we see Samsung and Acer being the first out of the gate with their Chromebooks.

How about we line up Apple, Google, RIM, Nokia, Palm, and Microsoft and create a graphical look comparing how each is doing in the market place.  This App-o-graphic provide some very relevant notes that developers and business development managers will want to scan, in addition to the clever, graphical comparison.

And, while we are on infographics, here’s another from last week that vividly shows mobility trends in the enterprise and the explosion of users and applications.

Speaking of apps, here is a look at the “Best iPad Appsfor IT Administrators.” Being a IT guy myself, I just have to toss in the most useful app I have for home and client work: SNAP.  This is a useful security tool that automatically sweeps a local network to find devices and identify them by manufacturer and name information. Whenever I’m debugging a problem on a wifi network I have it with me on my iPhone.

I’ve mentioned on numerous occasions the growing awareness by many enterprise managers, seeing the need to have their own app store for mobile devices. There is a good article on this topic that talks about new trends emerging around federal application stores.

Are you curious how tablets and smartphones are being adopted by the global mobile workforce? You can get lots of graphics and data on this trend at Marketingcharts.com, including information like how many use tablets at work, how often they check their smartphones during downtime, how likely Gen X is to check their smartphone during the day and so forth.

Finally, learn more from the speakers at a recent Search Marketing Expo about the interactions among traditional, mobile, and social marketing methods. There is no ‘single’ solution anymore, like the old days of simply making your website more visible. These days, you want to consider a more integrated approach.

That’s it for another week.

Tom Parish, lead curator – Enterprise Mobility news

May 2011 might seem a tad early to begin predicting 2012 mobile application trends but Gartner Group believes they have pinpointed the top ten mobile apps for this time next year. Check out this list and see if you agree:

1. Money Transfer
2. Location-Based Services
3. Mobile Search
4. Mobile Browsing
5. Mobile Health Monitoring
6. Mobile Payment
7. Near Field Communication Services
8. Mobile Advertising
9. Mobile Instant Messaging
10. Mobile Music

My sense is they are pretty close on their thinking, but given Gartner’s corporate-heavy crowd, I wonder how much this list varies with users that have enterprise-provisioned phones, who aren’t (officially) allowed to use them for personal apps and activities?

If this sounds interesting, then visit the article Three Mobility Trends that Change Your Business by Maribel Lopez; it will broaden your understanding of the tidal wave of changes sweeping through the business sector this year.  What is your mobile strategy looking like now? Time to be considering it, regardless of the size of your business.

Remember all of the not-so-flattering news about RIM’s PlayBook last week? Well, here is a new piece of the puzzle in their new mobile strategy that makes a lot of sense. Quoting from FireceMobileIT:

According to Chris Smith, RIM’s senior director of the BlackBerry developer platform, RIM’s Androidplayer will simulate an Android 2.3 smart phone and will enable Android apps to access the phone’s sensors, multimedia pieces and native file system.

In addition, RIM may upgrade the Android player after its launch in the summer to support Android tablet apps, but the move will depend on whether Google makes the Honeycomb OS for tablets open source, RIM representatives said.

There is a rumor that RIM’s Playbook 2 will have an iPad-sized screen. Looks like RIM is hard at work establishing itself as a contender to be reckoned with in the tablet market in 2011.

And, finally, speaking of Apple, here’s an article with a handy list of Five Document Collaboration Tools for the iPad.  Now go collaborate with your brothers and sisters to get your mom something nice for Mother’s Day weekend!

See you next week!

-Tom Parish, lead curator – Enterprise Mobility news

scoop.it

One of the key issues with adopting the iPad in the enterprise is security. Are the iPad’s security features robust enough? Kurt Marko from InformationWeek talks about this in his article “How secure is iPad?”

AT&T is investing $1B in enterprise mobility. They are going to allocate this to mobile and cloud services for business expanding their connected devices program. Caroline Gabriel says this is a “…strategy for emerging devices, in which it aims to connect millions of non-phone gadgets to its 3G and future 4G networks, generating additional data revenues but also the opportunity to create new value added services.”

Hotels.com is giving consumers the ability to search from more than 130,000 hotels to book their travels via iPhone and Android applications. The result – an increase in bookings. Makes sense if you consider nearly everyone that travels has a smartphone and finding a hotel quickly while on the road can be tricky, especially when plans change suddenly.

If you’re like me you’ve been hankering to start using your iPad for presentations but you just haven’t quite made that step. Here is a review of 9 presentation apps for the iPad that might help you over the edge on this one.

It seems like this week retail executives are stepping forward with their opinions about mobility. A Target executive says mobile is the ultimate connector for retail success, yet an Ebay executive as a contrarian perspective saying that iPad consumers are only a small group of upscale and affluent. I’m curious what others think of this. Seems like if you can afford an iPad (and millions are being sold) then you are likely affluent enough to be buying products and services for other purposes – especially online. What do you think?

That’s all for this week. Be sure you check out all the curated news on Enterprise Mobility on a daily basis or subscribe to the RSS feed for consumption on your own ‘mobile device.’

To toot our own horn some this week, Appconomy hosted a Mobile Enterprise Summit in San Francisco. To pique your interest, check out this session from SalesForce.com on “The Age of Vertical Tablets.” This is an intriguing fireside chat between Mike Wolf VP of Research, GigaOMPro, and Sean Whiteley, SVP of Product Marketing, Salesforce.com. There are eight other sessions.

See you next week!

-Tom Parish, lead curator – Enterprise Mobility news

scoop.it

This week there were a number of articles on how and why you want to be crafting a mobile strategy for your company.  Here is a place to start: “6 Steps for Building a Mobile Strategy” with some background on this trend here: “Enterprise Mobility – It’s real and It’s Happening now.”

Looking into the future as far as 2020 for mobile strategies is clearly a guess at this point given the speed of change, but that’s ok. Here is a slide presentation based on a number of collaborations to provide some thoughtful insights into the future.

If you’re still not convinced a mobility strategy is important let’s look where AT&T is placing a $1B investment in their enterprise mobility infrastructure. If you’re curious about mobility from a marketing perspective then be sure to read Shaheen Kazi’s “Why marketing Programs Should Begin with Mobile.”

Let’s talk about the App Economy for a moment. That’s a fairly new term that I imagine gets people wondering -huh? You’re going to be hearing more about this notion sooner than you think. These two pieces help reveal what this trend is about: “What the App Store Future Means for Developers and Users” and this paper from Bill French iPad CTO – “The App-Centric Enterprise.”

Of personal interest to me are the app trends in the airline industry which is only recently getting on board with testing out various mobile strategies. Even if you don’t use an airline app yet, there are a number of airline travel apps that are big time savers when traveling through airports. My favorite is TRIPIT.

RIM’s Playbook is still receiving some criticism around the lack of apps, problems with batteries, and a sudden recall of a 1,000 tablets. David Pogue of the New York Times gives more on the woes of the Playbook.  That said, the Business Insider reports that 250,000 have been sold since mid-April and 500,000 may sell in the first quarter.

So it’s Friday and the evening is near. Start thinking about what movie you want to stream into your living room and, hey,  let’s order a pizza and not have to mess with dishes.  Pizza Hut is expanding it’s mobile offerings with applications for the iPad and the Android so check those out. Now you don’t have to make a telephone call and worry about understanding the person on the phone who always seems to be in such a hurry while you’re figuring out what kind of toppings everyone wants.

Enjoy your weekend!

-Tom Parish, lead curator – Enterprise Mobility news

scoop.it

I would imagine everyone is aware that Apple has their annual WWDC event scheduled for June 6.  Word on the street is the headline news will be the official release of Lion, the next  major operating system update for Apple computers.  They are finally moving to a full 64-bit architecture and making better use of multi-core CPUs.

There is a lot of talk about your iTunes music library being available to you from iCloud with a promise for videos and TV shows also becoming available in the future. You can find out more from Mac Rumors over the next few days.  I’m hoping we’ll see a merging of the desktop OS and the mobile OS making them more seamless in the way they work together for sharing information with mobile devices.

One example of creating a mobile app with greater engagement is to include mobile sharing, written about in this week’s Mashable. People love sharing photographs so give some thought as to how that could help you in your business. Every time a person uses your app, they think of your business.

One of my favorite articles this week is from Mobile Commerce Daily, “The Dirty Little Secret about Mobile Apps“  Why? Because everyone in business is wanting to build an app for their customers and clients to use.  Spoiler alert here – it’s not the number of downloads that gives you success, it’s how often people ‘use’ your app that counts.  So the trick in building an app is focusing on the social aspects of using the app.

How can your customers use the app and interact with other customers about your products and services? Author, Daniel Odio makes a number of other relevant points. Recommended reading if you’re wanting to determine the business value of your investment in a smartphone app.

Are you following the mobile wallet debate with Google’s Wallet announcement? This is a tricky area for success.  Let’s face it, we all give so much personal information to Google already.  Giving Google access to our wallet makes a lot of people nervous.  I’m not hankering to do so myself yet, but I’m watching and learning. See more inPC World at “Google Wallet: The Debate Rages.”

Speaking of Google, do you monitor search hits on your website? Mobile searches are an excellent indicator of your clients’ and prospects’ interest in your business via their smartphones. From the businesses I know, mobile traffic from mobile searches is rising quickly.  Learn more about mobile behavior and search trends from thisMobile Commerce Daily article, “Google Search is Top Site as Total Mobile Traffic Grows to 105M Uniques.”

In addition to mobile searches being on the rise, so is the use of mobile barcodes. Take a look at the trends and best practices to see where marketers are looking to unlock value from their existing media placements and 2-D mobile codes from this article at eMarketer.com.

-Tom Parish, lead curator – Enterprise Mobility news

scoop.it

Are you still wondering “How Mobile Can Help Business-to-Business Marketers and Retailers?” That’s the title of an article by Lori Colman where she provides the following three data points for you to consider:

• More than half of devices connected to corporate networks will be mobile by 2015.
• Mobile is already the preferred method to accomplish many tasks, especially social media engagement.
• Mobile search is now an $8 billion industry, accounting for 11 percent of total searches.

This is one of those articles worth circulating to your B2B management if they remain skeptical about the medium being relevant to consumer brands alone.

If you’re a fan like I am of these information-packed graphical representations called  “Infographics” then check out this one on the “Mobile Commerce Revolution: Smartphones & Smarter Shoppers.” The information was collected from the team at Microsoft Tag, a bar code scanning app for mobile. Accuracy can vary, but from an overview perspective, it’s a useful indication of trends.

One of the big mobile app development debates of 2011 for enterprise is whether or not HTML5 is going to become the best solution for most, if not all, mobile apps – versus hand crafting native apps for each mobile platform. Phillipee Wintrop takes a stab at this debate in his article, “HTML5 is Not (Yet) a Panacea for Mobile Enterprise Applications.”

Spurred by the news that Financial Times decided to snub Apple by launching a new mobile app that runs entirely out of a web browser, this happened just weeks before Apple began retaining 30 percent of all revenue made by publishers who sell through Apple’s App Store. There is a lot more to the HTML5 issue than merely creating a publishing app. If you’re following the HTML5 app trends, then read both articles for some insight. As a side note, I interviewed James Pearce during SXSW2011 about HTML5 trends.  James covers this topic in greater depth during the podcast so when you have a moment, give it a listen.

Speaking of app development for the enterprise, another trend that is quickly coming on the horizon is the demand for enterprise app stores.  There is a growing need for business service providers and enterprises to come up with their own stores to service a global ecosystem of apps for their enterprise.  Dana Gardner delves into this topic at length in his article, “Rise of Enterprise App Stores Point to the Need for Better Applications Market Place Services.” I highly recommend giving it a read considering it’s astute depth.

Are you considering a Home Depot run to replace your tungsten light bulbs? I for one have been wondering if I could save on my electrical bill this way, but it’s difficult to be sure. Here’s a little app that might wet your whistle – Eco App. It calculates the cost of savings when the light bulbs are replaced. I have yet to try it out, but it sure looks cool!  

Alright, thanks for being with us this week. Be sure to check out the twice daily updates on mobile trends for business here every day or subscribe to the RSS feed for instant updates on your mobile device!

-Tom Parish, lead curator – Enterprise Mobility news

scoop.it

If there was ever any doubt concerning the acceleration of mobile apps adoption in today’s society, check out the projected combined revenues from the four major mobile application stores run by Apple Inc., Google Inc.,Nokia Corp. and Research In Motion Ltd.

There is a projected 65.7 percent leap in 2011 to $3.91 billion according to new IHS Screen Digest research. As you might guess, the Apple App Store is projected to dominate with the lion’s share with three-quarters of the total market.  This is from iSuppl Market Research where you can find additional research and news on the mobile market place.

There is a new term emerging – inspirational marketing. Hmm, is this the same as impulse buying for the mobile economy?  Consider: eBay has  partnered with Shazam by sponsoring the latter’s Android app and giving Shazam users unlimited tagging.  Quoting from the article in Mobile Commerce Daily: ”This is the first exclusive app sponsorship deal agreed by eBay anywhere in the world, and the first time Shazam has selected a partner to provide free services to its customers.”

“For example, a consumer in a car hears a song he likes. He ‘Shazams’ it and is served a little ad that says the unlimited tagging is brought to him by eBay. When clicked on, the ad asks consumers to download the eBay Android application and the company can now connect the user with products that can be bought on eBay that have to do with the artist or the song.”

I think we’re at a tipping point in 2011 where companies will move beyond simply publishing an app to partnering with other mobile app companies, thereby increasing interaction with the user.  Makes sense really.  How many apps do you have on your smart phone that never get used?  If those apps served multiple purposes, they could be of greater benefit to you, as a customer, and the app developers.

Moving from phones to bigger screens, have you been considering how the iPad can improve project management activities in your company? You’ll want to check out these 4 iPad apps briefly reviewed at ReadWriteWeb.com.

Likewise, there is nothing like a little real-world experience with new technology. So, if you’re considering an iPad rollout in your enterprise, check out the 5 pieces of wisdom shared by  Florida State College‘s CIO Rob Rennie.

For once, though, the iPad had to share its considerable spotlight with another tech titan, as RIM’s Playbookwas in the news nearly every day this week.

Recently I’ve started to see how history is repeating itself in the Internet world. I found this from Wikipedia:

“Usenet was the initial Internet community and the place for many of the most important public developments in the commercial Internet. It was the place where Tim Berners-Lee announced the launch of the World Wide Web, where Linus Torvalds announced the Linux project, and where Marc Andreessen announced the creation of the Mosaic browser and the introduction of the image tag, which revolutionized the World Wide Web by turning it into a graphical medium.”

Well, doesn’t that sound like what’s happening on Twitter as we’re seeing events reported there BEFORE they show up in the news?  And Bittorent would be the parallel to Alt.Binaries, but I digress.

Just thinking out loud and wondering. In the meantime, read Scoble’s Quora on how he sorts through all the Tweets he receives. And check out his curated Twitter Lists – he’s conveying some very helpful tips.

Tom

This video podcast example works with an iPad, meaning it’s HTML 5 compatible. I’ll be updating all the interviews on the BMC Podcast show and the Enterpriseleadership.org show to work on iPhones and iPads soon. Twistage.com is the video management hosting service and (this is a plug) those guys rock when it comes to serious support for custom video management projects.

If you have any questions, let me know.

Tom

Multitasking Support

True Enterprise Support

Local Push Notifications

New Addition – Game Center

After iBook, now iAd!

Avinash covers some good news and the not-so-good news. For example, the new OS4 upgrade will not be coming to the older iTouch and first-generation iPhones. The second-generation iPhones will get an upgrade, but no multitasking. The 3Gs will have the full upgrade (lucky me).

The iPad will get the OS4 upgrade this fall. I’m somewhat bummed about that as I’m looking forward to these new capabilities in the iPad, which I’m using more and more each day.

Avinash downloaded the SDK and BETA firmware upgrade where he observed some crashes and one instance of things freezing up. Well, we all know how it goes. It’s going to take some time to sort out some of the bugs before  fully testing and then delivering apps with  this rich new array of APIs.

Avinash also mentioned something I did not know:

“I did the firmware upgrade on my iPod Touch (2G). It has a nice home screen, enhanced folder feature on the menu icons and nice iPod features to create my own playlist, folder view of the playlist! I like it ”

He has a follow-up article where he talks more about additional technical aspects of the OS4 upgrades from a developer’s perspective. This is where I think things get more interesting. It’s the developers that work with these tools on a daily basis and really know what’s possible with enterprise mobility. It gets complicated fast when you work in the enterprise arena where apps have to be ported to multiple smartphones, and services are being accessed from a combination of public and private  clouds. It’s important to step back and ask myself what am I wanting to accomplish and will it be perceived as a benefit to the business. Helps to work with people who have done this before too.

Reminds me of when I was a kid and the skate arena guy would say, “OK, it is guys and girls. Now pick a partner for this tune.” Yeah … pick your partner but make sure they can stand up without falling. That skating arena was tricky.

OK, back to work.

Tom

(26:31)

In this podcast, Dr. David Tennenhouse, a partner at New Venture Partners, a venture capital firm focused on corporate spinoffs, talks about different approaches to open innovation. New Venture Partners practices what Tennenhouse calls inside-outside open innovation.

Partners and other staff members at New Venture Partners, a venture capital firm with about $700 million under management, do not spend their time slogging over business plans looking for the next Amazon.com or Google.com. Instead, New Venture Partners works with global companies to spin off prospective new product ventures residing in research labs and business units. To date, the firm has invested in more than 50 spinoff ventures from companies such as British Telecom, Philips Electronics, and Freescale Semiconductor. A spinoff from Lucent, New Venture Partners became a stand-alone venture capital firm in 1997. The firm has its roots in Bell Labs, where it incubated new projects and then created new ventures from them.

David Tennenhouse, a partner at New Venture Partners, calls his firm’s approach to investing an inside-outside form of open innovation. He says, “The companies we work with practice open innovation in two ways. First, they have an inside component where they input knowledge into the company. Second, they use an inside-outside component to use external vehicles, such as venture capital firms, to create spinoff ventures. Open collaboration becomes the way we work together to amplify the dissemination of a company’s internal research and to enable it to influence the surrounding ecosystem.”

Tennenhouse has had much hands-on experience practicing inside-outside open innovation. He was previously a director of research at Intel. He says, “Many of Intel’s corporate research projects made a successful transition to existing business units. Some projects created new business units, which is the gold standard for a research director. Many projects, however, did not have a natural home within the company. That situation allowed me to undertake the mission to spinoff the project or engage in inside-outside open innovation. The job included taking the benefits of the company’s learning about the prospective product and influencing the ecosystem around us. The difficulty was to do this while knowing we were not going to make and market the product.”

In this podcast, Tennenhouse talks about the need for companies to turn to open innovation, the way open collaboration enhanced open innovation at Intel and other organizations, the emergence of innovation that venture capital firms are seeing, and the takeaways CIOs need to be aware of it they want to promote innovation and open innovation.

Bio
Dr. David Tennenhouse is a partner in New Venture Partners. He joined the firm from Amazon.com where he was vice president of platform strategy and chief executive officer of its A9.com subsidiary. Before Amazon/Z9, Tennenhouse was director of research at Intel Corporation. He also worked as a chief scientist at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Project Agency.

Tennenhouse is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery and a Fellow of the IEEE. He is also an advisor to Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science and to the Mechanical Engineering Department at UC Berkeley. Tennenhouse holds a B.A.Sc. and M.A.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Toronto and obtained his Ph.D. at the Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge.

Resources
Verizon Leads 4G Investment Group, The New York Times
http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/06/verizon-launches-13-billion-4g-investment-group/

New Venture Partners Looks to Find the Next Big Thing, Fox Business
http://www.foxbusiness.com/story/markets/innovation/new-venture-partners-looks-start-ups-corporations/

Innovation in Stormy Markets, National Venture Capital Association
http://nvcatoday.nvca.org/index.php/current-issue/112-innovation-in-stormy-markets.html

CTOs Embrace Open Innovation, Computerworld
http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/127254/ctos_embrace_open_innovation?fp=16&fpid=0

Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer

Audio Editing by Doug Marcis

I’m not sure this is a fight as he indicates at the end of his manifesto. However, I do believe this is the dawning of a new lifestyle and the core of the new economy. I’m including his post in its entirety for others to read and see how it fits for them.

Tom (aka a member of the creative class or digital creatives, as we say at SXSW each year)
—-

The Creative Class Manifesto
We are the creative class. We breathe change. We move fast. We will change the world!

We are web designers, bloggers, SEO experts, interactive experientialists, flashers, refined political critics, social media experts, geeks, artists, account executives, storytellers, managers, strategists, polymaths.

This is the awakening of the Renaissance.

It is 1402 once again. Druker is the new Petrarca. Tom Peters is Dante, and Seth Godin the young Giotto. Google is our printing press and Page+Bryn = Gutenberg. Let me be your Machiavelli.

The revolution is approaching. The creative wars are beginning.

Polymaths of all countries, unite!

THIS IS OUR MANIFESTO

1. We are creators. We create everywhere and anything.

2. We buy what we sell. Always. This is our mantra. We create ingenious yogurt products and the campaigns to sell them. We create ingenious running-shoes stores, and the funky videos to make ourselves relate with billionaire multinational brands.

3. We create and consume random content. This is our inspiration. This is our world-changing idea: The freedom to consume and produce random stuff for free.

4. We all understand that the planet needs our help and that we should stop using plastic grocery bags. The images of dolphins caught in plastic beercan polymer chains break our hearts. Video repeats of baby polar bears slowly drifting at sea on tiny melting glaciers haunt our dreams.

5. We are outraged by all inequalities, especially when governments we elect decide to tax us more in order to pay for errors of previous governments that we have also gloriously elected.

6. Our creativity builds or breaks cities. We are not a demographic. We are a way of life.

7. We hate hypocrites and our high capacity of critical thinking allows us to detect the true conspiracies versus the fake ones.

8. We can do everything we put our minds to! Our tweets are wise and our posts rejoiceful.

9. We feed on liberty! A LOT.

10. We move fast, we are agile and profound. We strive on getting-things-done theories; we love quick wins and fast solutions.

11. We always get something done!

12. We are open-minded. Everything is acceptable as long as it is spoken in a soft but determined voice.

13. We like to laugh. All those crazy vids of cats dancing and playing pianos crack us up. All the time.

14. We are the real thing! We are right because we care!

15. We will change the world! For sure!

16. We are dead serious. What thou avoidest suffering thyself, seek not to impose on others!

17. Carpe diem!!

Spread the word! This is your fight!

We’re speaking today with Len Hause, Internetologist and founder of MashBrain where he consults on Internet marketing and technology strategies. Today we’re talking about the Transformation of the Grid. I’ve known Len since the early 1990′s where we worked in IT at Motorola. Len and I where involved in dozens of Intranet and Internet-based projects during the early days of the enterprise learning how to use the Internet.

There’s been quite a bit of discussion lately about the nation’s electrical grid, from aging components, demand exceeding output, discontinuity from sector to sector to potential for terrorist attacks against it.  So, I thought a conversation with Len would be helpful to get the bigger picture of how the lessons learned in building the Internet could be applied to a new generation power grid for the nation.

1. - How has the the transformation and maturity of the Internet affected other sectors? What analogies can we draw between the Internet and the electrical grid?
2. – What are the driving forces and technologies?
3. – Who are the players?
4. – What are some of the initial changes we will see?
5. – What is the scope of the transformation?
6. -What role will open source, or internet standards-based technologies play?
7. – What new markets will emerge?
8. – What role will Social Media play in this transformation?

If you stop and think about this, it just makes sense to some degree. Google dominates in the area of search. But they don’t do ‘real-time’ search of conversations and that’s where Twitter is strong. If you haven’t used the http://search.twitter.com — do so and you’ll see the power of this new era. Type a few keywords in and watch as it updates for you in real-time, listing the Twitter conversations going on with those keywords.

We’ll see… rumors are rumors.  But just because it makes sense to a bunch of bloggers doesn’t mean it will happen.  Personally, I’d like to see it occur provided Google doesn’t sit on Twitter like it did Blogger and slow the development of the platform.  But I have my doubts Google will make the leap because there is so much in flux right now. New developments in social media and social networking tools are happening almost weekly from startups and the majors.

For example, where does FriendFeed fit into the picture with their announcements this coming Monday (April 6th) for major changes?  I’m personally more interested in these developments because it’s a more powerful communication tool then Twitter.  And what will Facebook do?  My goodness; there are so many changes occurring in the social tools space that 2009 is an exciting year of unpredictable change for most of us. Hardly a new concept though considering the last few years, but that’s another more philosophic topic.

Robert Scoble seems to be leaning away from the idea that Google would buy Twitter. As you know, opinions are like noses, everyone has one. What do you think?  Kara Swisher is reporting that there is no Google deal under discussion to buy Twitter.

Tom

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Tom

◊ The big event was the launch of ’showbizzle,’ and that started with a bang.  Unique visitor traffic and views of the episodes shot up rapidly the first two weeks after launch. From what I can tell, about 50% of the traffic view the episodes on the showbizzle.com site and the other 50% of the views are coming from the 10 video distribution sites we’re using with TubeMogul.com. It’s heart-warming to see episode views shoot into the thousands in such a short period.

If you have not visited the showbizzle.com site yet, then make a point to check it out. Have fun, and while you’re there go ahead and become a member. The quality of the video and performances is stunning. Though I’m biased, I’ll have to admit that I check the new views each day (three new ones Monday through Friday) to see how the characters are doing in their very dramatic and at times funny lives.

◊  My copy editor, Jenny Meadows, at her so-appropriately-named business (MyCopyEditor.com), gave me some good advice during one of our conversations. Once a week (or so) she’ll post here a very short summary of all the media I produce for various clients. I create two audio interviews a week typically; one for EnterpriseLeadership.org and one for TalkBMC. I am in the process of making some of these video-based for BMC Software who sponsors both the sites. I am working closely with the BMCtv group to define a workflow that is fast yet maintains good quality for video podcasting. The issue, as you can imagine, is how to capture an interviewee on a video podcast in some kind of consistent way that has appropriate quality. BMC folks are spread out all over the world, though the majority are in Houston, Austin and the San Francisco area. So I’m testing a variety of approaches: Capturing video from webcams; sending out a camera for them to use; and, of course, scheduling them into a studio at BMCtv (Austin or Houston) when they come into town. It’s an interesting project and I’m enjoying the journey. You’ll see results from this in a couple of weeks.

◊  Gary Powell hosted a Friday afternoon social media training event at his place. It was a non-stop question-and-answer affair with some extremely talented independent individuals who have businesses on the web. Truth is, I learn a lot during these kinds of small-group trainings, and one of the points that kept coming up was expanding the use of Facebook for your business.

I’ve been hesitant to recommend Facebook for business use until recently. However, there seems to be a gradual shift in adoption of greater numbers of people across a widening demographic. A good reference to learn more about marketing on Facebook is an e-book by Justin Smith called The Facebook Marketing Bible. You can download this sizable PDF for a very resonable price considering the insights it holds. Smith claims to be keeping the book up to date, which is a plus considering how quickly Facebook use is evolving and changing.

◊  Have you heard about the game-changing product from Canon: Canon EOS 5D Mark II? It’s a still camera that shoots HD video at 1920x1080p with audio. Yeah … amazing. If this rings any bells of interest for you then you simply must check out this review of the Canon EOS 5D Mark II. (It has me interested and I’ve been a Nikon guy for years).

Tom