Crastinate

I just finished watching Jeff Bezos (founder and CEO of Amazon) on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Bezos (after maniacally laughing for a few minutes) was showing Stewart the new Kindle 2. I’ve never seen a Kindle but I hear they are really great. The problem is the cost. $350 is not cheap. So my guess is that until the price comes down, the Kindle will be reserved for the “innovators” and the very wealthy.

There is one target market that would love the Kindle. That market is me, a student. I spend hundred of dollars on textbooks every semester and would pay greatly for the reduction of weight in my knapsack (yes, I carry a knapsack. I know it’s lame, but between textbooks and a laptop, the health of my spine comes before looking good). If Amazon could start stocking all the new textbooks, students around the world would buy a Kindle tomorrow. Is anyone out there know anyone working at Amazon? Any chance of this happening any time soon?

Uncategorized

“I have seen the future and it looks promising.” I don’t know if I’m quoting someone with that line or if I just made it up myself. I do, however, believe it.

I just watched the demo of a mobile app that Google created (video embedded below) that allows web apps to work offline just like Google Gears allows certain Google apps to work offline (I’m actually writing this blog post offline on Google Docs).

This seems to be the direction we are going regarding the desktop vs. cloud debate. We can’t expect people to use applications that don’t utilize the usefulness of the internet. We also can’t expect everyone to be connected to the internet all the time. It’s just not realistic for the near future. We are seeing now the standards that will bridge that gap. This might seem like a small step to some. But I think this is going to big. Very big.

Uncategorized google, joseph shmulewitz

Writing papers is an important part of higher education. I should know. In my MBA program, each course has weekly papers that I have to write. This is understandable. Writing papers is the best way for the professors to gauge whether we understand the material taught and are able to use it in case analysis. I suggest, however, that there is a better way.

Writing essays helps us fine-tune our writing skills and more importantly, conveys our knowledge of a subject. How many papers, however, do I have to write for professors to be confident in my ability to write? The real reason I have to continue to write papers is because this is the only way for the professor to give their critique on my ability to use the information taught. That is, until now.

This is 2009. Professors should be utilizing the video revolution taking place on the web. Instead of having a paper due a week, have each student give a two minute video on their opinion for the assignment. It takes less time to create than a paper. It takes less time to critique. And most importantly, it requires students to communicate their opinion verbally. I’ve sadly met brilliant people who were not able to communicate effectively. Sure, they could write a hell of a paper, but who cares. We need a new focus of education on verbal communication. This is one small step that will not only improve education, but also improve the quality of students coming out of graduate programs.

Uncategorized

It’s been a week since SocComm and I’ve had some time to reflect on the experience. For all that don’t know, SocComm, Social Communications Summit, was a one day event held in NYC on Feb 10th. The event, organized by Jeff Pulver, had a fantastic group of speakers including Jeff Jarvis, Gary Vaynerchuk, Fred Wilson, Shelly Palmer and David Kirkpatrick. The event was amazing and before I go into my thoughts, I think everyone at the event would love to give Jeff Pulver a standing ovation for putting together this great lineup. I won’t go into length about what the speakers said but wanted to simply discuss what I saw at the conference, which was everything that is wrong and everything that is right about social media.

Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures spoke about the power of “trust” in today’s growing social media networks. Union Square Ventures is an investor in Twitter (as is Jeff Pulver) and when I asked about how to monetize these growing trust networks, I was given a generic answer of how if there are eyeballs, the money will come. I don’t like this answer. Friendster had lots of eyeballs. So did lots of other social websites. And yet, only the strong survive. It takes more than eyeballs to make the big bucks. Twitter has the potential for big rewards but it needs more than good traffic.

Gary Vaynerchuk did his thing (if you don’t know what I mean, check out his Tumblr blog which shows some of his previous speeches). Gary is a an entertaining and extremely motivational speaker. He makes me, and everyone who hears him, want to get up and do something great with our lives. Yet his approach doesn’t work for everyone. He talks about how people should do what they love and by putting all of yourself into your passion, you’ll find a way to make money off it. It’s easy for him to say. He loves wine and sells wine. What if I love Mork and Mindy? I don’t see myself making a career out of that.The room gave him a standing ovation with cheers anyway. Agree with him or not, you have to love his energy.

Shelly Palmer called Gary out on his pipe dreams that he was selling to the crowd. You have to understand. Most of the crowd are social media addicts. Most of the heads in the crowd were Twittering what they were hearing rather than looking at the presenter’s slides. They think they can change the world. Maybe they can, but it’s not likely. They want to hear Gary Vaynerchuk tell them that they are the future of media and Fox and NBC won’t be around in 50 years. Shelly told the crowd the honest truth. If they were talented enough to be on TV in front of millions of people, they’d be there. Social media is changing the world but big media has more money to experiment with everything until they find the right formula. Big media isn’t going anywhere. It’s just going to shift strategies. The crowd got a dose of reality. It was interesting to see their faces.

The highlight of the day came when Jeff Jarvis had a converstion with the crowd as to what a Google restaurant would be like. I thought my line of “you’d never be able to eat sushi in China” was funny and clever. The crowd thought differently. Apparently they are such big fans of Google that they try to forget about the whole China thing.

Chris Brogan pointed out, what I thought, was the most important point about social media. None of us know what the future holds. Gary has one idea. Shelly has another. Fred has another. Jeff another. Me…..well, I’m skeptical about everyone’s point of view. The point is that everyone agrees that social media is more than just a fad. It has power. And I’m looking forward to being part of that future, wherever it takes us.

Uncategorized

I used to work for a web publication that produced many webcasts. We used to get sponsors for the webcasts by handing off the information of the webcast attendees to the webcast sponsor. This was all in the T&C when the attendees joined. We didn’t hide it.

Our sponsors, many times,  would want a guaranteed number of leads they would receive before they would decide to sponsor a webcast. If a sponsor would want a 250 lead guarantee, we would say fine and deliver around 300 leads. Next time, the sponsor would want a 300 lead guarantee. So we would do additional marketing and deliver 350 leads. And typically, the next time the sponsor would ask for 350 but it would be a weak subject and we would only deliver 275. Suddenly we look bad because we couldn’t deliver on our promised guarantee.

Looking back at this scenario, I’m bothered by the way we let our sponsors/clients determine what our goals should be. How come our clients were telling us what was achievable? How come we weren’t pushing ourselves to grow the number of leads? I didn’t have the power to get rid of guarantees. I ran the marketing department and the sales department was the one giving these promises that my department had to deliver on. Regardless, if I was back in this position, I wouldn’t let sales, or our clients, dictate what our goals are.

I would tell the company that the marketing department is only guaranteeing 250 leads but our goal is to guarantee 300 in six months…and 350 in one year. And so on and so forth. Setting internal goals, I think, is much better that having clients push you forward because it allows us to constantly improve regardless of whether clients are demanding it or not.

Uncategorized