Next generation of transactional statements?

Is this the next generation of billing statements?

I think two and a half minutes is a little long.  It is an interesting idea and good use of personalizing video.  But it doesn't make it any faster to review a bill.  This is for the laziest of bill readers.

Video probably won't be the thing that makes paper bills obsolete, but it might be just right to move a few customers into eStatements.

Viral Marketing and Red Bull's Mission to Kill Someone

Today I watched a man jump from the highest point ever. Pretty awesome to watch, considering that it was a flawless jump and he landed safely on two feet and walked away. (time passes)

Cool. . . So he landed a little more than a week ago and he has been making the talk show rounds, declared he is retired, and stated that he did not enjoy the fall until his parachute opened.

I remember watch the guy in Vegas on New Years jump a motorcross bike up and down the faux Archtriumph.  It is amazing that guy made it up and down was even crazier.  . . . powered by Red Bull

The Flugtag.  Per google: "Red Bull Flugtag is an event organized by Red Bull in which competitors attempt to fly homemade size and weight limited human-powered flying machines. The flying machines are usually launched off a pier about 30 feet high into the sea."

It is amazing no one has been seriously hurt.  . . . powered by Red Bull.

And there are a bunch of other teams, athletes, and events that are sponsored by Red Bull and they are all high octane, high adrenaline, and high energy.  Red Bull has done a great job of finding the physical manifestation of their product and slapping a logo on it.  The most important part of their marketing strategy is that they are doing more promotional events that have the potential to go viral.  They appeal to short attention spans and are short enough that you want to and will watch them over and over again. . . powered by Red Bull.

I make no judgement about Red Bull's morality or the social effect of their campaigns.  They market their product to adults and adults should be able to know that they can not build their own flying machine and get it flying off the docks of Lake Erie.  They may actually kill someone some day, but they will continue to rack up MILLIONS of youtube views.  When posting this Red Bull had over 27 Million views of the above video.  No Gangnam Style, but pretty effective.

Now what is their cost per impression for advertising?  Well I saw their costs estimated as high as half a billion dollars.  Now that is ridiculous, right?  This message board discussing their marketing budget and estimated it at $900 Million in 2010 on revenue of $4.4 Billion.  So over 5 years, they could have dedicated 20% of their budget to the Stratos program.  Their cost per impression will continue to decline as they get more views, more mentions, and more sharing of their record breaking even.

Bottom line: They know how to get people talking about Red Bull and they know their customer profile.

Why the world needs the cloud -or- Hoarders: Data Edition

The cloud will / should play has a crucial role in the long-term viability of the internet.  Big data has made the crunching of huge amounts of data open source by some.

Cloud is necessary because duplicate data on multiple systems will require an exponential amount of storage.

Data hoarding is something that others have written about: see video

Data hoarding today (pictures, documents, videos, and a record of everything) It has increased the demand for local storage and with lots of competition in the hard drive and storage market, storage has been commoditized.  Data's cyclical pricing as technology is improved and storage becomes cheaper.

There have been times when storage would go from $1000 to $200 in a year.  It will continue to drop in price.  Amazon Glacier has taken storage to a new low at the cost of a penny per gigabyte per month.  

Facebook Stock Prediction: Outsmart the Market

The Pump/Hold/Buyback

Facebook waits to go public.

Early investors make their money by selling stock at the opening IPO price of $40.

Quickly, anyone who purchased at the opening price loses a significant percentage of the stocks value as the media reacts to information on Facebooks relatively low annual profits and projections.  None of this information is new.  But the buzz of the IPO and the strong desire to get in on a potential boom leads investors to ignore the fact that facebook profits are 1/100th of the valuation.

The first date where employee stocks are able to be sold creates an influx in available shares, driving the price down.  Stock hovers around $20 / share.

Peter Thiel dumps his stock, still makes a boat load of money, but doesn't get as much as he could have if he sold his shares at the opening IPO price.  As the first Facebook investor, rumors and speculation that he knows something we don't know further hurts the stock price.  Stock drops slightly.  Thiel remains on facebooks board.  What could he know that we don't?  He shouldn't know anything the public does not know, but that is impossible.

The second date where employees can unload stock comes and shares drop even further.  I predict a low of between $10 and $15 / share.

What is facebook doing?  Monetizing mobile, being more agressive with ads, harvesting more user data, and further targeting.  All equaling higher revenues.  What does facebook need to increase stock price significantly?  Projections of 200% annual profit growth.

Zuckerberg has outsmarted the system by capitalizing on buzz to sell shares at a high price.  Then he waits for them to drop, going as far as referring to it as disappointing.  The public must know about financials and company management, it does not have to know about R&D and upcoming product development (look to Apple as an example of extreme secrecy from a public company).   

New product developments and acquisitions increase revenues.

Zuckerberg and insiders buy back significant shares of stock to "Show Faith" in the future of the company.  What they really did was buy back their company for significantly less while still getting a massive payday.

Because Zuckerberg has majority control and has decision making power that trumps the board, he is able to convert his public company back to private.  His early investors got their exit.  Loyal employees got their reward for low pay and long nights.

Facebook is once again able to focus on making a great platform that people will use without the restrictions of shareholders.  Profits can become secondary again and Facebook has enough cash to run the company on zero profit for many years.

Wallstreet weeps, Nerds rejoice, Zuckerberg outsmarts the market.  

@rynmcmns gets Visual.ly Inforgraphic

@rynmcmns Check out visual.ly  You can't build your own infographic yet, but for companies that want to add some cool to their marketing, this makes it pretty easy.

What is white label software?

White label exists in all industries. Unknown to most customers white label or "private label" products or services are developed and maintained by one company while branded by another.

Definition
Labelable (Label-able): software made available for private labeling (aka white labelable to be labled

Software that is labelable or available to resellers that apply their brand or create a new brand to market the software.

www.labelable.com

Tell your facebook friends that you pay your taxes, but don't tweet about it?

I get why people post pictures and the inane details of their life of facebook.  I get why we all post articles we read on twitter.  But I still don't get why some people want to share some of their online interactions on their social pages.  You would never auto-tweet from the ATM that you just withdrew $500 from Chase or post on facebook that I transfered money from your checking account to your savings.

When I finished up my taxes this weekend, there was an option to tweet or post to facebook that you had completed your taxes.  This was the first year I had seen this.  With the socialize-everything mentality of b2c marketing, I was not really surprised to see it.  I was intrigued by the disparity between posts to facebook vs twitter.  The social sharing prompt came up twice during the verification / checkout process and I snapped a screenshot of each.

This screenshot was taken first.

Even more peculiar was that the second prompt I saw had fewer facebook posts and now only 1 twitter post.  I will give them the benefit of the doubt and say that each link had its own count and that's why there were different counts.

This screenshot was taken second.

Would you share that you pay taxes with the friends you know of facebook or the strangers that follow you on Twitter?  

It must be that people want to tell their friends what good tax paying citizens they are.  If turbotax offered a discount for anyone who clicked on their link, I think their tweet count would be on par with their facebook count.  In many ways, facebook is about boosting your ego and twitter is about boosting your personal brand.

PS. they must have a low threashold for what "fattened your wallet" and "big bucks" means.