Entries Tagged as ‘Hype’

March 9, 2008

iPhone Goes Corporate? Where’s PC Guy?

Now it gets interesting.
Word that Apple wants a slice of the corporate market by enabling iPhone users to load email and calendar items off their Microsoft-flavored company servers shows just how open we’re going to get.
For years, the BlackBerry has been first choice for corporations who equip employees with the productivity tool that [...]

March 7, 2008

When Authors Fake It

Q: Why would a major publishing house print a memoir without checking basic facts?
A: Intense competition to sell books.
News this week of the bogus biography of a woman who claimed to have run drugs for a Los Angeles gang as a kid is yet another reminder to publishers that non-fiction must be vetted and fact-checked. Magazines work to do it. Newspapers work [...]

March 4, 2008

5 Ways DKNY Can Adopt Bicycling in a Campaign

A month ago, DKNY thought it stylish to dot Manhattan with 70 neon orange bicycles chained to street posts and anything else of permanence. The orange color was garish but drew attention to DKNY’s fall 2008 line. The bicycles also served as a guerilla marketing signal to the company’s campaign promoting two wheels as a mode of transportation and urging New Yorkers to ”Explore Your City.”
Only one problem: The bikes (unintentional, [...]

February 5, 2008

Talked About Tuesday: 12 Minutes to Top 100

As the post-Super Bowl ad hoopla fades, an unassuming rocker got a bump in sales.  
Before Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers played their 12-minute halftime set Sunday, they were nowhere in the iTunes Top 100 songs.
As of Monday night (7:30 p.m. PST), all 4 songs the band played at the Super Bowl were in the same Top 100 (barely, see two in graphic).

Free Fallin’ - #33

I [...]

February 2, 2008

Saturday Brand-Off II

I’ll admit, I consciously pay attention to commercials during the Super Bowl. When 93 million people tune in, it’s part of the fun. Thirty-second spots fetching up to $3 million — upwards of $90,000 a second. It’s more than advertising. It’s a potential spectacle that apparently doesn’t hurt companies’ stock prices (except Under Armour, whose [...]

January 28, 2008

Kindle Online Community Outcry

A scan of the Amazon website tonight shows a steady flow of spirited comments in the Kindle forum. While some posts condemn Amazon for the Kindle shortage (4-6 week delivery from time of order), others defend the company, which has made a great business by providing prompt and accurate service.
Once you’ve become accustomed 2-day book delivery, waiting a month or [...]

January 28, 2008

How Fast is Fast? Ask Cisco

Cisco today announced it’s going to be selling a very fast network switch to help operators handle an expected wave of Internet data, driven in part by the trend of remote servers and applications otherwise known as “cloud” computing.
Marketing minds for network gear makers like Cisco, Nortel and Juniper are forever searching for memorable ways [...]

January 19, 2008

Amazon Kindle Redux

Browsing books to buy on Amazon, I suddenly wished for a Kindle — if just for a moment tonight. The ability to download books on a wireless device is brilliant if you want something now.
Remember the hype and Newsweek cover story two months ago? The product was out of stock less than six hours after [...]

January 19, 2008

5 Tips on How to Pick a Web Design Agency

Does selecting a web design partner or agency give you nausea? Is the idea of ideation funky to you? Are you ready to talk PHP, CMS, PPC, SEO, MySQL, .NET, XHTML or CSS?
Don’t worry.
The majority of corporate marketing VPs, directors and managers (and most owners of small- and medium-sized businesses) have never built a website [...]

December 20, 2007

How to Burn Through $500 Million

Ever burn through $500 million? A Seattle telecom startup did once upon a time. I worked for one of its competitors. We were in a bleeding-edge wireless sector known as free-space optics. Three companies in all (Terabeam, AirFiber and LightPointe) were going to hit it big with products that use invisible laser beams to tranmit data at speeds at about 500 times faster than your cable modem or DSL.
But weather (fog) [...]