David Feldt Proud father. Entrepreneur. Builder. Catalyst. Accelerator. Guide.

Is Google about to acquire SecondLife?

Remember Google Video? And what happened to YouTube?

Well, there’s a service being offered by BrightGIS that lets you promote three dimensional models of your business location within Google Earth. Its currently not an exceptional offering but one can see the possibilities. They are also offering Google Earth 3-D virtual billboards.

Are we about to see Google Earth morph into a SecondLife clone to be followed shortly by an announcement that Google has acquired SecondLife?

What do you think?

Firefox Stumps Phishing

I'm sure you've all received the phishing emails that ask you to update your bank account info. I normally spot them and simply ignore them / add them to my spam folder. This evening, I wasn't paying close attention and clicked on an email supposedly from Bank of America. Firefox popped up a warning telling me that the site was a suspected fraud site - Kudos to the Firefox team for helping us fight identity theft!

Naturally7 on the Paris Metro

I love this! Besides the incredible melodies and harmonies, I love watching the human interaction. At first there is an uncomfortable energy from the fellow Metro riders, then things start to warm up and people start engaging in the experience. Observe how people start capturing the experience on their digital cameras and mobile phones - a perfect intersection of music, technology and humanity. Enjoy!

Here's their MySpace site.

... and the studio version ...

Escaping the Scourge of Voicemail

SimulScribe has come up with an elegant solution to one of my pet peeves – voicemail and the ridiculously laborious and time wasting process of retrieving voicemail messages.

I just signed up and tested the system and it works really smoothly. They provide you with a call-forward number that you program into your (mobile or landline) phone. When someone leaves you a voicemail, their system converts your voicemail messages into text (using some very cool voice recognition technology) and emails you the transcribed message and a digital audio file of the message to your email with time-stamp and caller ID info attached.

You can now simply read and/or listen to your messages the same way you do with your regular email. And I can now use my Gmail / Google search to find key info from my voicemail messages!

The company has been featured in the NY Times, WSJ and most recently in “The Next 25 startups to watch" in Business 2.0

Forbes, please redesign Forbes.com!

I love Forbes Magazine - the quality of their reporting; their lists; their global coverage; the list is long.

However, there is one gaping hole - their website! I find their website to be poorly designed with little attention paid to the experience of the reader. Less than 20% of the area of the screen has the content I am interested in --- the story I want to read. More than 80% of the site is covered in advertising and promotions and things that are irrelevant to me - Spam!

Malcolm and team, please do something about your website - Think of your reader and not of your advertising dollars - please please please!

20+ years of Super Bowl ads

For those of you, like me, who can't get enough of Super Bowl ads, the New York Times has a cool interactive analysis tool of ads from 1984 thru' 2007.

The humor index has been on the rise and 2007 sees 72% of ads featuring humor.

Want a quick reminder of the "irrational exuberance" of the dot.com boom? Look at the pets.com ad in 2000.

Enjoy!

Bill Marriott telling stories, listening and learning in the Blogosphere

Bill Marriott, Chairman & CEO of Marriott International has recently started blogging. In my view, he has captured the true essence of what blogging is all about (telling stories, listening, learning, engaging in a dialog, nurturing the community and sharing one's passion) and I love reading his posts. Jonathan Schwartz at Sun may have some stiff competition on his hands

In character with Bill's love of talking, the blog offers an audio link so you can listen to Bill's story in his voice. For example: [audio:marriott.mp3].

His first post, on 01/16/2007, entitled "Uncharted Territory" (quoted below) received 80+ comments at last count - not bad for a first post!

Here's Bill on why he's entered the Blogosphere:

"I'm venturing into uncharted territory as I launch this blog. A year ago, I didn't even know what a blog was -- until my Communications team began telling me about all the blog traffic on travel and tourism. Now I know this is where the action is if you want to talk to your customers directly -- and hear back from them. Soon we'll add an audio version of the blog. That's how I'm most comfortable: telling stories and listening.

Pioneering new frontiers is how this company was built.

Blogging will allow me to do what I've been doing for years -- on a global scale. Talking to the customer comes easily to me. I visit 250 hotels around the world every year. This year I'll be traveling once again to China where we have 27 hotels, 16 under construction and many more in our development pipeline. At every hotel, I talk to associates, from housekeepers to general managers, to get their feedback. I call it "management by walking around." Like my parents, I value the input from our associates at all levels. I make lots of notes -- and my best ideas almost always come from our people in the field.

Our 143,000 associates are truly the people who make Marriott a world-class business. I want to share some of their stories with you in future blogs. We are a company that is built on opportunity, and that foundation has made us successful.

Bottom line, I believe in communicating with the customer, and the internet gives me a whole new way of doing that on a global scale. I'd rather engage directly in dialogue with you because that's how we learn and grow as a company.

So tell me what you think, and together we'll keep Marriott on the Move!

This blog allows us to hear from you and build on the community that we've nurtured for 80 years."

Mac Beautiful : Apple as a Human Brand

I came across this wonderful video on Youtube by HappySlip. For me it encapsulates many, if not all, of the current online marketing trends (Web 2.0, online story-telling, user generated media) and highlights how a passionate consumer can reach out with a personal message that is more sincere and believable than a piece of corporate generated advertising.

Steve Jobs was asked to describe Apple in an interview a year ago. His response was:

1. Apple is a company that takes complex technology and makes it easier and simpler to use
2. Our goal is to stand at the intersection of technology and the humanities
3. It's about empathy and understanding consumers, not about selling to them

In a post-modern world, companies no longer really own their brands; it's consumers who mold them; shape them to their needs.

Watch this video and see this all come to life:

GM cuts ad spending by $600 Million, Online up 19.4+%

AdAge reports on a TNS study today that "GM slashed ad spending by more than $600 million last year, a drop so stunning it should convince even the staunchest doubters that the age of mass-media marketing is going the way of the horse and buggy."

Betsy Lazar, executive director-advertising and media operations, said through a spokeswoman that "the automaker is continuing to shift more dollars online and that she believes TNS underreports digital spending."

Peter Kim from Forrester asked me if I believe this statement is a vote for digital. He felt that the decline has more to do with GM's overall financial difficulties.

I think its a combination of several things:

1. GM's financial difficulties
2. Major shifts in the industry away from mass and TV to more targeted and measurable channels
3. The huge importance of digital / interactive in the automotive space (80+% of people use the web to research their purchases before walking into a dealership)

Read the entire report here.

Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us

Here's a wonderfully elegant story told by Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. Its the story of our online lives and how it has evolved to embrace community, collaboration, commerce - everything.