Patent Marketing

Apple has filed a patent for a 'boombox' with a display in the center of the face panel, Electronista reports. I'm getting the feeling that Apple is just using the patent office as a hype machine, just pump it full with non-existing products and let the rumors flow.

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We are smarter than me: book on wisdom of crowds in business

Wharton School press has published a book by Barry Libert and Jon Spector about how businesses are using “the wisdom of crowds.” The authors eat their own dogfood, enlisting over 4000 people to contribute to their book:

Back in the Aussie summer of 2002, Liam Mulhall was ready to abandon the high-stress, high-tech business. He had put in his time at the local office of Red Hat, the big U.S.-based provider of open sourcing solutions, and now he and his two buddies had a new Plan A. They wanted to buy a pub in Sydney. The problem was, the price was more than the lads could afford. So they fell back on Plan B, which, in this case, was Plan Brew. With a nothing-to-lose attitude — “It was our money and not a lot of it,” Mulhall allows — they would make beer, but with a twist; they were going to tap the power of community.

Mulhall had stumbled onto the story of PK-35, a Finnish soccer club. The team’s coach invited fans to determine its recruiting, training, and even game tactics by allowing them to vote using their cell phones. The idea put the fizz in Mulhall’s lager. As he would later write, he had found “the best way to run a business — give the customers the reins.”

Luckily, Mulhall and his two friends didn’t know that the 2002 soccer season would be so disastrous that PK-35 would fire its coach and scrap its fan-driven ways. So they went ahead with their scheme, setting up a Web site, Brewtopia.com.au, and inviting 140 of their friends to describe their ideal beer. Within weeks, the community had built up a head of more than 10,000 people in 20 countries, and their votes determined everything from the beer’s style (lager), color (pale amber), and alcohol content (4.5 percent) to the shape of the bottle and the colors printed on the label.

The founders, however, were — and are — solely responsible for the beer’s name. For reasons comprehensible only to an Australian (let’s just say it has to do with sheep), they called it Blowfly.

Chief executive and “spokesmodel” Mulhall and pals, Greg Bunt and Larry Hedges, contracted with a brewery to make and bottle their concoction. But how to sell it? As the Brewtopia site explains, “In Australia there is a ‘brewing duopoly,’ two major brewers who have contracts with most outlets and bars that restrict the smaller boutique beers. If you don’t have the bucks to throw at retailers, you just don’t get exposure.” The solution: Blowfly would be sold in direct shipments through the Web site, beginning with the people who helped design the beer, and, thus, would have what Mulhall calls “viral equity” (a.k.a. shares in the company) and a predilection to try the brew. And in line with the company’s crowdsourcing origins, the site would enable members of the Blowfly community to customize the label on the bottle, choosing a template from among a dozen offered, typing in their own text, and uploading their own photos or artwork.

Four years later, in 2007, with, as Mulhall would have it, “no brewing experience, no industry experience, no marketing experience, no money, and no idea what [they] were doing,” Brewtopia had 50,000 customers in 46 nations.

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Second Life is soooo 1.0

"We believe what Second Life did was great, but it's time for 'virtual worlds 2.0' . . . unlimited, open, scalable worlds."

Yoicks! It's another virtual world - BizTech - Technology - theage.com.au

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del.icio.us Plans To Become A Social Network

del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter revealed to Read/WriteWeb that del.icio.us aims to add features that "help people connect with others within the system, either to people they already know or discovering new people and communities based on interest."

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Buy your piece of the .mobi Internet today

The net finally on your phone?

The latest addition to the internet - new .mobi domains - will go on sale from 3pm today (GMT).The .mobi top-level domain will be exclusively for use with mobile phones and other mobile devices, rather than relying on cut-down versions of normal websites, and so will "revolutionise the use of the internet on mobile devices" the company behind it says.

Buy your piece of the .mobi Internet today | The Register

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How Digg.com Affected Traffic, Alexa Rank And Other Metrics

On September 13 "Current Trends In Web Design" article got elected onto Digg home page. How did it affect web traffic, Alexa ranking and other indicators of popularity? Well, here is what happened.

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Marketing on Google: It's Not Just Text Anymore

"The project begins today with a test of a campaign for Saturn, bundling together several Google products and services like clickable video clips, the Google Earth satellite mapping tool and geographic finding of computer users."

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Why music stereotypes tend to be true

Ever wondered whether the classical music aficionado next door has had a bit more schooling than the guy blasting rap from his car? New research suggests you may be on to something. A lot of the stereotypes concerning musical taste and socioeconomic status appear to be true.

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In Search of The Valley

A new documentary on Silicon Valley premieres today on DVD. It was directed by Steve O'Hear, and the movie tells the story of three friends' personal journey in September of 2004 into the psyche of Silicon Valley. Watch the trailer as well as read an interview with Steve O'Hear and Richard Macmanus.

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How to get people to share photo's using their cellphone

I recently read a research that indicated that on a global avarage, only 35% of camera phone users send photo's using MMS. The majority seems to transfer photo's to their PC first and subsequently share photo's using email or websites. Apart from the lack of proper preprositioning, nobody seems to know the real reason. I can think of two.

First of all, people's lives are generally visually not interesting enough to share pictures on a day by day basis. Secondly, in order for a new technology to become succesfully adopted, it should stay as close to the original usage routine as possible. So in this case, the networks should provide for a tool that mimics real life usage of photography; sharing albums (or a staple of photo's) after a major event. What MMS delivers is the unworldly possibility to share one photo at a time.

So, copying Apple's photocasting concept, how about we let people compile albums on their handsets and publish an RSS feed of them on a operator hosted platform? We could then let users share a link to the RSS feed by SMS and let the recipient subscribe to the RSS album and download at will. The sender only pays a small premium for each invite.

Although the desktop PC will remain the dominant platform for sharing photo's, I'm sure this will increase the share of mobile photo sharing. If implemented properly offcourse.