Snowcrashing

Mobile: The Inbound Marketing Missing Chapter

Posted on 08. Nov, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

HubSpot, a Boston based start-up, is on a roll to conquest the Long Tail of small and medium–size businesses to digital marketing, and help them convert visitors into leads and sales.

The founders, Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, recently published a book, not surprisingly titled Inbound Marketing: Get Found In Google, Blogs, and Social Media, which spells out the basic techniques to make the Internet an efficient business driver. As with HubSpot itself, the book’s innovative nature is not to be found in new or unheard of marketing principles, but in its attempt to empower everyone with the right knowledge. And since knowledge is power only when applied, the Inbound Marketing book is all about execution. Just as a text book, the book break inbound marketing up into 4 fundamental parts: decide who you are and why your story is remarkable, get found, convert, analyze & repeat. Examples and to-dos aim at making the reading easy and actionable.

Continue Reading

Google And Facebook War To Win The Long-Tail And Your Mind.

Posted on 06. Nov, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

Social networks are quickly morphing from destination to distributed networks around data, aka sites (the “shared” interests) and like-minded people. It’s not a user-driven innovation. The drivers of this (r)evolution are economic, and both Facebook and Google are upping the ante of the game, in the hope to be the ones who know you better, i.e. influence and make advertising money out of you.

If  Facebook has a clear advantage in terms of consumer adoption and existing social network functionalities, Google has the power of existing business relationships with millions of site owners through AdSense, and a sophisticated advertising platform that monetizes users’ intentions and behaviors. Its roadmap is therefore focused on piecing together existing or new social networks features. in order to make the world wide web its social network advertising net.

Continue Reading

6 Ways To Look At Twitter Lists

Posted on 01. Nov, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

This week, Twitter made its new Lists feature broadly available. Lists allow you to enumerate a collection of  Twitter accounts, and then easily read updates from just those accounts. Others can view your lists, and choose to follow them as well. Here are 6 ways to look at the future implications of the Lists.

Continue Reading

After AdWords and AdSense, Is AdFriends next?

Posted on 31. Oct, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

On October 26^th, Google rolled out the first release of its new Social Search, which pulls results from content posted on the Net by your most trusted sources, your friends.

It is still an experiment. To activate the social search feature, users have to opt-in and create a Google Profile with the list of their social networks. Google will do the rest, by indexing their social graph and applying its search algorithms to match the queries with the content posted by the users’ friends. The user becomes the link to what he posts.

Continue Reading

The March Of The Droids: HTML5 and Android 2.0

Posted on 28. Oct, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

The end of the Iphone monopoly is not going to happen in one day and with one single device. Don’t expect the masses to suddenly drop their I-cult and let them rant about the misses of the Droid, as Motorola and Verizon Wireless unveil their new creation to the world. Because they will.

Why I don’t care of what they’ll have to say?

It’s no secret that the iPhone App Store has been a walled garden. Mobile platform developers like Apple can and do control what runs on their devices in various ways: prohibit plug-ins (Flash),  keep their live video SDK secret, or simply forbid the app (Google Voice).

Continue Reading

Dympol: Paid To Play, Where Music And Brand Marketing Meet.

Posted on 21. Oct, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

What can save Recorded Music? Is it the magic of Free? Fans funding their artists? 5-cents downloads? A new slate of start-ups is emerging with radically innovative solutions.

Fan-funding seems a fascinating alternative, but the scalability of the model raises serious concerns. Sellaband, Slicethepie, the just announced Pledge are just a few names in the category.

Dympol, a New England based start-up, is advocating a different and unique proposition. Get paid to pay is the tagline of the company: by working with sponsors that believe in the value of music, Dympol is able to offer discounts that help fans buy more for less, while helping recording artists and labels earn more.

Continue Reading

ChangeHowWePay: PayPal And The Future Of Payments.

Posted on 20. Oct, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

Payments is an area that has long suffered from a lack of innovation. At the Web 2.0 Summit, today, PayPal announced that it is opening up a platform to developers on November 3. The move towards open API is a game changing one with a grandiose ultimate goal: make cash obsolete.

“How will you change the way we pay?”: the question is open to everybody. Tweet your ideas via Twitter with the hashtag #changehowwepay, all responses are collected at changehowwepay.com. Or sign-up for PayPal X Innovate 2009 conference which takes place November 3-4, 2009 in San Francisco and participate to a mega think-tank with PayPal developers as mentors!

Continue Reading

Music Videos New Frontier: Augmented Reality

Posted on 20. Oct, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

Music and Innovation hardly get together and, when they do, the War of the Roses is a more likely scenario than Star Trek. Not always though.

Augmented Reality might be a peaceful exception. A new wave of music videos is indeed emerging, with the promise to enable new creative ways for artists to interact with their fans.

Continue Reading

Fun And Innovation

Posted on 14. Oct, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

FourSquare

In less than 24 hours, FourSquare hard-core users, the newly elected SuperUsers, have helped dropping the duplicate venues in  the company’s database from 2000+ to 400.

Crowd-sourcing + Engagement under the forms of a Social Game= Disruption. Location-based services will never be the same after FourSquare.

Volkswagen and The Fun Theory

Volkswagen is crowd-sourcing a challenge to invent new “fun” ways to change people’s behaviors. The first results are in. Judge for yourself

-66% fewer people to take the escalator by adding a piano to the stairs case

Continue Reading

Spotify To Napster, Like Amerigo to Columbus?

Posted on 12. Oct, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

Columbus – which America celebrates today – was a disruptor but he didn’t really know to what extent. He dared challenge the ocean for 36 days, and landed on what he thought was India. He lived with that belief. And changed history forever, for the better or the worse.

It was supposedly Amerigo Vespucci, who realized that it was a new land, and the German cartographer, Martin Waldseemüller, named it after him: America.

Continue Reading