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Recent Posts
- Reflecting on 2012 and looking forward to the year ahead
- Facebook’s inability to stay focused and be original
- Achieving exponential user growth: Marketing in the new age
- Twitter’s walls are going up! And soon.
- Technology Trends and Disruptions in 2012
- The Social Enterprise is here in full force! Profiling 3 Toronto startups in the space
- Reminder on why Business Blogging is essential
- The iPad2 and my Top 5 native iPad apps
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Category Archives: Innovation
Technology Trends and Disruptions in 2012
In this video blog post I talk about technology trends and disruptions I see coming in 2012. Some key themes include — enterprise software making a comeback, how there is a true globalization of startups and VC money, how social is changing for the better and lastly how reading and education are being disrupted.
Whats funny though is that I recorded this video over the weekend and Apple’s iBooks 2.0 and iTunes University announcements came out on Jan 19th (yesterday) and focused exactly on the last point I make — about education, learning and reading needing to be disrupted.
In any case, you must watch the recorded live stream of the Apple educational event if you haven’t already. Do it for your kids if not for yourself, because it will be their new reality very soon.
In a nutshell, Apple is first in line (and likely soon to become the leader) to completely changing the face of education by allowing students to access textbooks on their iPad, textbooks that are a lot more fun, interactive and engaging. And probably more impactful, by partnerning up with more schools than ever to release even more free classes on iTunes University from leading educational institutes like Stanford, Harvard, MIT etc. These free classes while intended for students and teachers in those schools and programs, can also be accesses for free by anybody with an iTunes account.
Almost unbelievable. I mean who wouldn’t want to take a 2 hour class at Stanford, for FREE, while sitting in their living room, right?
Posted in Funding, Innovation, Media, Social, Startups
Tagged apple, deal flow, dealflow, disrupt, education, enterprise software, iBooks, iTunes U, learning, pay it forward, reading, social media, startups, technology, trends, venture capital
3 Comments
The iPad2 and my Top 5 native iPad apps
Folks, I had recorded this back in August during my road trip to Philadelphia and Atlantic City and completely forgot to post it here! Take a look at the video, after which you can check out the top 10 list of my most-loved, most-used “productivity” iPad Apps.
Steve Jobs: You’ve got to find what you love
“You’ve got to find what you love” These are the words uttered by Steve Jobs – at the Stanford Commencement speech in 2005 – who just stepped down today on Wednesday, August 23rd 2011, as the CEO of Apple Inc., …
Posted in Gadgets, Innovation, Profiles
1 Comment
Google Pluses and Minuses – What Works & What’s Missing with Google+
Google’s latest offering in the social networking arena – Google Plus (Google+) has now been out for over a month. Google Plus has already surpassed 25 million registered users. To put this in perspective, know that Facebook took 3 years to reach this goal!
Google’s failure to effectively launch Google Buzz and Google Wave a few years ago, made this new foray into social networking seem like a monumental task, but it looks like this is one of their best efforts yet. The company may have finally figured out how to do social well, their key mantra being: you don’t have to share your content with everyone. Instead they expect content to be targetted to specific contacts and groups of people.
Below are my thoughts on some of the less obvious features that are awesome and some comments on what might be missing:
Posted in Innovation, Media, Product, Social, UX/ UI
Tagged apple, comscore, facebook, google, kevin rose, privacy, social media, social networking
5 Comments
Using Influence as a Marketing Metric to Measure ROI
Marketing ROI can be one of those arbitrary phrases that sometimes has no real meaning. It is kind of like trying to put a finger on what corporate culture means. How does one define it? Measure it?
Does the term only exist so that us marketers could prove our existence… our worth to the rest of the organization? Or does it even matter what the organization feels about marketing; since every other organization in the world seems to have some sort of marketing department? And so, often I would find marketing would mean creating flyers. Or worse, doing support tasks for sales teams.
Due to scenarios such as these, Marketing ROI quickly became the de facto standard for proving the value and worth of certain marketing activities. It became a quantifiable way to prove that what we did as marketers – mattered.
The problem however was that no one really knew what exact numbers and metrics to look at! What’s lacking, even to this day, is a good understanding of what metrics work for a business and what don’t.
Having been in B2B marketing for many years, I have come to understand that some activities can be tangibly measured and some cannot. I also believe that some things do not need to be measured at all.
Einstein knew what he was talking about when he said “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”
Posted in Innovation, Marketing, Media
Tagged B2B, buying process, Einstein, Influence, marketing, Marketing ROI, marketing strategy, metrics, ROI, trust economy
11 Comments
The End of Communication As We Know It – part I
Gartner says that in about 5 years, social networking services will replace email as the primary channel for interpersonal communications for 20% of business users.
Well, this has happened across many businesses and brands already. In fact, several large brands already use social networks to communicate with their customers, prospects and partners.
Think Air Canada’s new twist on customer service, Dunkin Donuts taking complaints and Dell computers giving out deals through Twitter. Not to mention the massive number of business and product pages on Facebook and the benefits that brands associate with being a fan of those pages. Theres a lot of communication happening through those. And more importantly, it is a two-way conversation, not just one-way communication like in email.
Posted in Innovation, Marketing, Media
Tagged Communication technologies, facebook, Gartner, Social paradigms, twitter
7 Comments
The Emotional Aspects of ‘Life in a Startup’
Sure, there’s all the obvious stuff about how you won’t get any sleep when you are working on a startup, how you might end up neglecting your family, friends, girlfriend or boyfriend, how you will need to develop an unimaginable tolerance for risk, how you will have to learn to live in a shoebox or worse – with your co-founder, only to work through nights while eating left over pizza slices… and many more along the same lines.
Even though we know all this; it is always the emotional aspect of startup entrepreneurship that always gets us.
Learning to deal with this early on and being prepared for some low-blows while you build, iterate and make connections, will help you get there faster while saving you some stressful moments. Hopefully.
Posted in Funding, Innovation, Marketing, Startups
6 Comments
Creativity and Innovation Go Hand in Hand
What do creativity, music and innovation have in common?
I recently watched a TED talk by researcher and musician Charles Limb, who conducted a bunch of experiments on jazz musicians and rappers – highly creative people – to see if the functional MRI scans of their brain activity was similar. He wanted to try and determine (and tap into) the secrets of the creative mind.
Best Overall User Experiences of 2010 (Top 5 picks)
Having great User Experience is a great way to get control of your audience while satisfying user needs. It all comes down to how much importance you give to user engagement, customer satisfaction and solving process-related problems.
Since we’re coming to year-end, it only seems fitting that I identify and profile my top 5 picks of 2010 for the Best Overall User Experience.
Posted in Innovation, Marketing, Mobile, UX/ UI
Tagged best ui, best user experience, best ux, flipboard, instagram, quora, quora UI, qwiki, seesmic, seesmic desktop 2
9 Comments
Google Whale Swallows Up Several Nifty Companies
A running list of all the companies acquired by Google in 2010. techkik describes the amount of each acquisition and Google’s rationale behind it.
Posted in Innovation, Startups
Tagged aardvark, blindtype, bumptop, google, Google acquisitions, jambool, metaweb, slide, socialdeck, zetawire
9 Comments