Andy Boyer

Dad | Marketer | Psychology Student | Author | What's Next?

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Welcome to Fall, Where The Tech Industry has Forever Changed

September 2, 2008 /

So i won’t be one of those people who pretends to know how the new Google browser, aka Chrome, will affect the stock prices of Google and Microsoft, or what it means to Mozilla and the Open Source Community.

But I think it’s fair to say that the launch of Chrome fundamentally changes the landscape of the how the tech industry will operate.  I mean, you have to be curious about what the Google Browser will look like, and how they will integrate Docs, Calendar, mail, etc….

Now, contrary to the Open Source guys, I won’t be saying that a Google Browser is a Microsoft killer.  For example, as much as I love Google Docs for collaborating on a shared whiteboard, as an actual device for building a real document, it’s fairly useless.  So while there will be a lot of anti-MSFT sentiment that will put Chrome on a pedestal, I’ll test it out with an objective mind.

But my point is, Chrome will be a game changer on the tech environment one way or the other.  After years of people saying, “Google will kill Microsoft when they release a browser,” they will finally have to deliver.  So mark this date as a critical moment in technology.  Chrome either rocks (like Gmail), is ok (like Docs), or becomes irrelevant (like Froogle).  Test it out and see what you think.

Viewzi – Cool Little Search Engine Toy

August 21, 2008 /

I stumbled across a cool little search engine in beta, called Viewzi.  Now I’m not making this out to be a Google killer or anything, but it’s a kind of fun way to troll through web sites if you are looking for a visual representation of the page.

My favorite of their searching options was the “Web screenshot” view.  Now, my take is that this will be less helpful for certain types of searches than others.  For example, I think it did better with a search on Cristiano Ronaldo (below) than the Georgia-Russia conflict (above).  And the algorithm isn’t perfect.  When I searched on my own name, it at first attached me to the usual places, but then attached me to a bunch of web sites with “Spring Creek” in the name.  So, it was a good effort to look at say, AndyBoyer.com, see a link to SpringCreekGroup.com and make that connection, but then it took it to far when it surmised I also must be part of SpringCreekFishing.net. 

But I’m not here to criticize.  It’s kind of cool to play with, and there are a few target markets I’m sure they are already very popular with.  Check it out at Viewzi.com

Which Olympic Athletes Can you be Facebook Friends With?

August 19, 2008 /

So Valleywag reports that you cannot be Facebook friends with Michael Phelps, because has more Facebook “fans”
than Will Smith, Miley Cyrus, and the Jonas Brothers — 767,885 at last
count! Phelps tells Bob Costas that besides the fans, he’s got about 7,600
pending Facebook friend requests, too. “I can’t accept any more.”

But that makes me curious.  I wonder how many of the thousands of other Olympic athletes you could be friends with.  Sure, the guy who won 8 gold metals is off limits, but how about a 24 year old track and field guy who didn’t qualify for the finals?  What percent of these competitors are happy to communicate with new fans, and what percent think it’s creepy.

I think if I was some obscure archery or triple jump Olympian and got a few requests, I’d think it was cool.  Maybe less so if I was a 14 year old female gymnast.  (that’s 16 in Chinese years).

Let me know if you make Facebook friends with anyone.

A Story About Packaging

August 19, 2008 /

Hey, it’s a slow news week since all of the Marketing world is on vacation.  And I’m still tired from a fun weekend in Oregon.  But I know the rules of blogging say I need to post something tout suite…so here’s what you get for this Tuesday’s entry.  To connect it to marketing, let’s call it a story on how every detail on your packaging or direct mail piece is important.

“In 1878 the French had acquired rights to construct a canal across the
Isthmus of Panama. For numerous reasons, the project failed. However, a
young French engineer, Philippe Jean Bunau-Varilla, still believed that
a canal could be built in Panama. Unable to get any action on the
project in France, Bunau-Varilla went to Washington, D.C., to see if he
could interest any congressmen in the venture. There he found that a
bill was pending to build a canal through Nicaragua, not Panama,
especially since the existence of Lake Nicaragua would cut the costs of
construction. “Bunau-Varilla promptly became a one-man lobby. He
obtained several hundred Nicaraguan postage stamps, which showed a
picture of one of the country’s small volcanoes in full eruption.
Bunau-Varilla wrote a brief letter to each congressman, asking, in
effect, if it was really wise to build a canal–at great cost to the
American taxpayers–through a country which was filled with active
volcanoes. With each letter went one of the Nicaraguan stamps. The
congressmen read the letter, looked at the stamp, and decided not to
vote funds for a canal through Nicaragua.” Two years later, in 1904,
Congress approved the canal project for Panama.”

Of course, this story could also be titled, “Apparently U.S. Congressmen are no smarter or dumber than those of 130 years ago.”

Election Watch – Obama and Texting

August 12, 2008 /

I’m starting a new category, covering some interesting tactics the Presidential campaigns are using when it comes to technology or social media marketing.  Here’s the latest email I received from the Obama camp:

People keep asking me if we’re really going to announce Barack’s VP directly to our supporters. 
The answer is yes. 
Let me be very clear. You are the ones who built this campaign, and
Barack wants you to be the first to know who will join him in leading
our movement for change.

So, if you haven’t signed up to receive an email or a text message, sign up now. Or you can text VP to 62262 from your mobile phone. 
Make sure to forward this message to your friends and let them know about this special opportunity.

Thanks,

That’s a pretty neat gimmick.  I don’t know if it means that if you text the campaign, they will call you later to ask for money.  But it’s a neat way to use text messaging to communicate directly to their base.

Meanwhile, we think the athletes are real

August 12, 2008 /

So what have we learned about China so far thanks to year’s Olympics.  Well, let’s start with some nuggets from a British paper, The Times of London, in this article.

Let’s set aside all the pre-Olympics Tom Foolery of throwing out journalists, censoring Internet sites, jailing a Japanese television crew in West China, shutting down factories, and trying to magically make the pollution go away.

But in the first week of this Games, we have:

  • Fake fireworks so the TV audience thinks they are seeing something spectacular
  • Lip-syncing of the opening song by a cute 7-year old Chinese girl, because the 7 year old girl who really sang it wans’t “cute” enough.
  • Oscar-style “seat fillers” who sit and watch the preliminary rounds of events, then leave when the ticket holders show up, so it doesn’t look like there are any no-shows.

I’m not exactly sure this is what drove the spirit of the games more than 100 years ago.  So if the games themselves can be fake and manufactured, tell me again why the athletes aren’t allowed to use drugs that enhance their own performance?  Don’t sterioids seem to fit perfectly into this charade?

Does the future of travel involve smaller airports?

August 11, 2008 /

I may be completely wrong in this, but I think  Alaska Airlines is capitalizing on a way to get us stubborn Americans to travel more.

Last week you may have seen my 14 million word play-by-play on the Vineman Triathlon in Healdsburg, CA. Because of my pride in the fact that Rich had finished the race, I kept last week’s posts to a minimum so the story would stay on top.

But there was another personal story from that trip I wanted to write about. In order to get to California wine country, I did not have to go through megalopolis SFO, or the dingy Oakland Airport, or even the small and semi-charming Sacramento runways. I was able to fly from Seattle, directly into the little berg of Santa Rosa on a Horizon Airlines turbo prop.

Santa Rosa is a mere 15 minutes from Healdsburg and I went down Thursday on the extremely convenient 5:55pm flight. The airport has one “gate” if you can even call it that, so getting in and out was a breeze. To add to its charm, it’s named after Charles M Schulz and has famous Peanuts comics on the walls.

Returning home was even better. I headed home Sunday on the even more convenient 8:35pm flight. Since only one plane leaves every hour or two, and each plane is only a 70-80 seat turbo prop, you have no check-in or security pressure. You get to the airport about 30 minutes early, watch the plane arrive, wait for everyone else to go through security, then jump through yourself. This convenience allowed me to see another old friend of mine who lives in Healdsburg mine on Sunday afternoon, cruise to the airport about 8:00 for the 8:35 flight, hang out on the airport patio with my friend until it was time to leave and never feel an ounce of pressure.

This made me think about what I like and hate about air travel. Traveling from SeaTac or SFO is a jarring experience. It takes hours to check in. But I positively loved the freedom afforded me on this Santa Rosa flight. Why can’t we have more regional airports, say in Everett, North Bend, Olympia, etc..that only take me to other small tourist towns so I can have a long weekend without feeling like I’m crossing the Russian border? I don’t know the economics, but I hope it doesn’t cost that much to run a tiny one gate airport.

Ironically, I was sitting in the Santa Rosa airport thinking about all this, when I saw another old Seattle friend of mine, a former co-worker who had come down from Seattle on the same flight I was about to board to head back home. I couldn’t believe that the world was so small that in the Santa Rosa airport, I could see someone else from Seattle. But obviously I am not the only one to appreciate flying into a place like Santa Rosa.

Alaska/Horizon has the right idea – in a world of chaos, we want to travel places where it’s easy. I hope to see them pick more “single gate” airports leading to tourist cities I want to explore.

Lake Union Kayaking

August 10, 2008 /

The Spring Creek team hit Lake Union for a little kayaking Friday afternoon. and we decided to take some pictures and show how a small business, say a Lake Union Kayaking company, could use something as simple as a blog to climb to the higher parts of Google.

Local businesses usually do a great job of owning their own name on Google Searches.  But that only works to attract people who ALREADY know your name.  If you have no awareness, you need to know what people are looking for.  For example, say you suddenly win a million dollars and want to buy a big, fast boat.  Well you are going to Google, big, fast boat, not Evinrude or the name of some other boat company.   If you are Evinrude, you need to win the words that people type in when they don’t know who you are. 

Lake Union Kayaks could be our name if Spring Creek Group owned a kayaking business where you could rent boats on Lake Union. 
Or, we could call it Spring Creek Kayaks. Either way, we want our blog to have pictures titles “LakeUnionKayaks” and have the term sprinkled through the post.

So this post is boring, but consider it a simple test to see how high we could get in a Google search on Lake Union Kayaks, without much effort.  Plus, it gives everyone a chance to see 4 of the 7 members of the growing Spring Creek Group having a litle Friday afternoon fun.

Over the next few days, we’ll add a few links to this post from Facebook, the Spring Creek Group Blog, and other relevant places to make this become an article people stumble upon when looking for places to row boats on Lake Union.

Editor’s notes:

Monday,.8:30am: After about 2 days online, Google now makes the 11th most relevant post for “Lake Union Kayaking.”  Today I’ll add a link from Facebook to see how that helps.

Qvisory – “Tools for Life”

August 7, 2008 /

I encourage everyone to take a quick trip over to Qvisory.com,.a extremely socially conscious and responsible project headed up by Eileen Quigley, the former head of RealNetworks’ philanthropic arm, RealImpact.

Dubbed, “Tools for life, ” the site helps young people (and old ones too) achieve their work, money and life goals.  Here’s what they said in a recent email:

Our mission is to help young people build their economic future and
gain more control over their lives. Today’s 18 to 34 year-olds face
significant challenges in our evolving economy. We’re providing them
with information and tools to help manage and meet their money, work,
and health goals. And we’re advocating for change to ensure that their
voice is heard in Washington, DC, in board rooms, and in state capitols.

I have long been an advocate of our school system shifting gears and actually teaching things that people need to know – little things like how credit card companies make money, how to fill out tax forms, why interest only mortgages are a bad idea, what happens if you eat fast food and chips every day, etc….So, I think this is a great project.  Check it out and let me know what you think.

LeBron James Wants to Play in Europe? Why the NBA Should Make it Happen

August 7, 2008 /

The caveat:  I think the NBA is kind of boring these days.  I don’t hate basketball, but the NBA just under-achieves in my book.  Now, if you only speak English and have never traveled outside the US, I can understand why the NBA might seem cool. Similarly, if you’ve never been to a city with more than 200,000 people,  I can see why Appleby’s seems like a real culinary treat.  But I’m not here to bash.  I’m here to push forward a ridiculous notion.

Some background: In European soccer, something called UEFA governs European football. Independent leagues in England, Spain, Italy, France, Germany, etc… participate in two European tourneys – the UEFA Cup and Champions League. – which make dump trucks full of money. So in the middle of their regular seasons, Italy’s best teams also play England’s best teams, etc….  It’s pretty cool – and more importantly it makes huge amounts of cash for the teams and leagues.  Now this works for European soccer because there are 3 dominant leagues, 2 or 3 second-tier leagues and about 20 third tier leagues that sneak someone into the later rounds from time to time. 

The ridiculous notion: You could not replicate this in basketball today, because the NBA teams would win almost every game.  But this kind of International tourney could happen in just a few years if some recognizable US players headed to Europe.  Imagine this scenario:

Your favorite team is the New Orleans Hornets.  Towards the end of last season,  with a playoff birth locked up, you had to keep battling to finish in 4th place, and a birth in next season’s Champions League.  You qualified, so several times next season, instead of hosting the Jazz or Bobcats, you are hosting teams from Greece, Spain, Russia or Italy.   Twice per year, the Hornets head out to Europe for a 3-4 game swing.  As a fan, you may even travel with them to Madrid or Rome.

Now to make this happen, a few stars need to be playing for Olympiakos or Moscow or whoever.  If you are a true basketball junkie, what would be better than players and games that you care about playing across the globe starting at 9am your time?  There could literally be basketball on TV morning, noon and night.

The rivalries could be intense.  And because of the extra games, you’d see more players on your own team playing important minutes.  Teams would really have to ration how many minutes they give their old guys versus how many to give their developing players, the same way Ronaldo and Rooney occasionally have to skip Manchester United games.

So if LeBron wants to go to Europe, as this article implies, I think the NBA needs to gather the international basketball powers that be and figure out how to exploit it.  Prop up the Euro leagues and build an international championship that everyone owns a piece of.   Imagine  Lakers vs Moscow – Kobe vs LeBron – in Paris for the World Championship, with a TV audience of 100 million.   That’s real money. 

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