Andy Boyer

Dad | SUDPT | Marketer | Author | What's Next?

Category: Entrepreneurism (Page 5 of 6)

Amateur Writers, Start Your Engines

November 5, 2007 /

For months, maybe years, it’s been increasingly difficult to determine the blurry line between "professional" and "amateur" when it comes to news reporting or developing entertaining videos.  Now that line seems to be simple enough – If you are developing content, you are an amateur, and if you are a professional, you are on strike.

What a perfect storm for the aspiring amateur writer who never had the stomach to quit their job, move to LA, and battle for seats on ‘Joey" or "The Danny Bonaduce Show."

With the writers on strike, and thousands of cable channels still running 24 hours a day, content will be in demand.  Now if I was running programming for a network, I’d probably look two places – International and the Internet.

With only so many countries that speak English, the International channel dries up pretty quickly.  So the next stop is YouTube and the Blogosphere.  How many ways are there to turn some sort of blog or YouTube channel into a hybrid Internet / TV program?   And if a kid is developing content for kicks and giggles, how much do they really need to pay him?

It’s a huge open window for aspiring writers.  During the last threat of a writer’s strike, the "reality show" was hatched by networks as a defense mechanism, and that genre ended up dominating TV for nearly a decade.  What genre will this strike launch?

Ripple TV, and the Emergence of Localized Advertising

August 13, 2007 /

So I have to admit being very intrigued by a company called Ripple TV.  You may have seen Ripple at a neighborhood Tully’s.  The concept is pretty straightforward – a typical High Def TV, displaying canned news and sports information from CBS and ESPN.  But the catch is, the screens are designed to run locally targeted ads that small business can create and upload themselves.

Or to put it another way, the two major pains about advertising are the creative costs and the inability to target effectively.  Ripple TV solves both these problems.  I get to choose which Tully’s my ad runs, and they provide me the tools to create the ad on the fly and upload it.

"Ripple has partnered with many of the World’s leading retail brands to provide a powerful in-store digital media experience that keeps their customers engaged, entertained and informed. Ripple’s user experience is customized specifically for each distribution partner, providing a truly custom experience that perfectly supports the brand, demographic, geographic and user experience requirements of each partner. Ripple keeps your customers engaged with the very latest news, financial information, sports, weather, traffic, local information and entertainment programming from the World’s leading content brands." 

So, the only initial limitation, which I’m sure will be solved soon, is that they have relatively few major partners (Tully’s), and so the audience is not very diverse.  But, that’s hardly a criticism.  Instead, I applaud Ripple for landing such a great anchor partner.  That really is quite a coup.

I don’t this affects agencies at all, because if anything the Ripple system grows the advertising pie, catering to small business owners that agencies didn’t really care about anyway. And the small business owner only needs a rudimentary sense of style and analytical skills to run a test ad for $75 in a neighborhood, so the cost to get started is minimal.

Fascinating concept, and I hope it does well. 

 

Launch of MyElectionChoices.com

July 9, 2007 /

MyElectionChoices.com%20logo.gifAfter a few weeks of tinkering, we’ve launched the 1.0 version of MyElectionChoices.com.  The site will continue to evolve, but in its current form, visitors get to choose topics they care about in regards to the 2008 Presidential Election, then select positions they agree with from various candidates. 

At the end of answering a few topics, visitors then find out which Presidential Candidates they share political views with.  Since we have statements from 17 candidates, there’s bound to be a couple people that you’ve never heard of.

There are still plenty of improvements to be made, but give it a whirl and let me know what you think.  There’s a Groups option at the end to make it easy to invite others and compare how certain groups compare aggregately to National Averages.  And there’s a survey at the end as well that will help us shape the constant revisions.

Inspiration from an Unlikely Millionaire

June 28, 2007 /

If you had an Internet connection at work in 2000 or 2001, one of your colleagues forwarded you a link to HotorNot.com.  You played with it for somewhere between 5 minutes and 8 hours, helplessly clicking on the neverending stream of pictures of people who wanted you to judge how good looking they were.

About 1% of this crowd probably wondered if the founders were making any money, or if they simply launched the site for fun.  Well it turns out they were making GOBS of money.  Giant trucks were backing up and dumping bars of platinum into their backyard.  In a nutshell, it proved that a simple idea, at the right time, with the right people, was infinitely more powerful, satisfying and worthwile than simply attending weekly staff meetings.

Well, if you read techCrunch you probably already wandered over to this blog post from the CEO of HotorNot. If you have ever considered running off and starting your own idea, here are some wise words to help get you moving in that direction.

TixMob Launches in UK – New Way to Buy Tickets for Events

June 19, 2007 /

An old friend from Manchester sent me news about his company, Tixmob, this morning. Here’s a synopsis:

http://www.tixmob.com/ Is a new concert ticket agent, just like Ticketmaster and Seetickets we work directly with concert promoters and event organizers to sell tickets on their behalf.   Unlike Ticketmaster, Seetickets etc.. A Tixmob ticket is paperless. Upon purchase it is sent to your mobile phone in the form of an sms message with a bar code. When you get to the event the ticket taker will scan the ticket with our scanner to prove it’s valid and it hasn’t already been used. So ticket touting/scalping is more difficult, you’ll probably get in faster since, for a while at least, we’ll usually have our own que.   A big complaint people have about ticket agents like Ticketmaster is all the crazy fees they stick on top of the ticket price. Generally Tixmob will have a booking of 10% of the tickets face value. As some extra incentive for people to try the product, we’ve reduced booking fees on our first few events to as low as 2%.

While it appers to be UK based for now, the US possibilities seem far reaching as well.  I would assume sports teams would love the anti-scalping features.  Anyway, something to keep an eye on.

Lumosity – Something to Play With

June 14, 2007 /

I will take the leap and say that a small company called Lumosity falls into the world of Marketing.  For, positioned one way, Lumosity would simply be entry #3.2 billion in the category of "Ways to kill time online when you should be productive."

But instead, starting with the tagline of "Reclaim Your Brain" and extending through the core messaging, Lumosity is much more than a nice looking version of any casual games portal.  According to their literature, I will actually get SMARTER by spending time on their site. The multi-layered exercises and puzzles are designed to actively stimulate regions of my brain that have gone neglected, enriching my overall intellectual capabilities. 

So far, I don’t feel smarter, but it has kicked my paranoia level to an all-time high, as I wonder if I am simply a pawn in someone’s giant marketing copywriting experiment.  But, I have succumbed to sucker status, and the exercises are fun, so we’ll see where this gets me. 

This Company has a Marketing Budget

June 6, 2007 /

Because the blog entries here revolve around marketing, with a little start-up stuff thrown in, I’m pleased to find what could be the stupidest product of all time.  But these guys not only have a marketing budget – enough to advertise in Google Mail – but a Google Page Rank of 4, making their dumb product’s web site 100 times more important than this blog.

Here’s the tagline:

"The Safe Banana Guard will fit most bananas & give protection during your journey."

Yes, apparently there is a market for a product that’s specific job is to protect a banana.  And, the company is funded.

Not only does this product exist, it comes in 9 colors.  Because this is a family blog, you will notice that I am refraining from any jokes that could easily float their way to the surface from viewing the order page.  It’s not for a lack of material or imagination, I promise.  Just sometimes the fruit is so low hanging, you want to let someone else pick the tree.

I think possibly my favorite part is that they have a section called, "Testimonials."   Come on… Seriously?  Testimonials?  Doesn’t something called ‘SafeBanana" speak for itself at this point?  Do you really need to read a quote like, "Dude, this thing like totally protected my banana.  I know it’s called SafeBanana, but I didn’t see how it could be possible.  Now, I’m a believer."

Anyway, as a public service to all you people who have suffered and survived banana trauma, I bring you SafeBanana.  Please use responsibly.

Overachiever….

April 28, 2007 /

Not sure how I missed this last week.  And I’m not sure if this makes me feel inadeqaute or just dumbfounded.  According to sources, including FoxSports, Lil Romeo, the youth rapper and son of Hip-hop mogul Master P, is now going to play basketball for USC. 

The kid is 17.  His life to date includes the following accomplishments:
– The son of a record mogul worth $225 million
– A young hip-hop artist with several CD’s and concert tours
– And now, he’ll be a guard on a top 25 college basketball team.

Hello perfect life. 

Plus, I give him a huge amount of credit because you never see his name listed next to Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton or Nicole Richie. 

Can we look 30 years ahead and predict that this kid is going to either be the President of the U.S. or the guy backing the President?  Legacy, music, sports – with what is sure to be a future in film, TV and more.  This kid is obviously no dummy, and his father has certainly proved himself to be highly intelligent. 

What an exciting future this guy has in front of him.

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