Google Android platform coming to a store near you

Here's a swell video about Google's Android platform, which I reckon will become the platform of choice for many cellular phone companies in the coming months.

Google says "Android is a software stack for mobile devices that includes an operating system, middleware and key applications. The Android SDK provides the tools and APIs necessary to begin developing applications that run on Android-powered devices."

Motorola launched its new Android platform device on Friday in Verizon stores. And it's being rumored that Sony Ericsson will also launch an Android platform phone next week. (Stay on top of all Android buzz on Twitter.)

The video below starts and ends with Google co-founder Sergey Brin for a bit, then Engineering Director Steve Horowitz takes you through the demo (which gets to the good bits at 1:20).

More DIY videos at 5min.com

Here's a new Google marketing ad that runs smack up against what the iPhone platform does not do, and the Android platform does. Battle chargers Go!

Spunch - virtual punch card rewards for social media mentions

Pow! Click! Click! Spunch, the virtual rewards system for retailers and businesses, has launched in beta this week and I'm helping their team spread the word about it to greater PHX metro and worlds beyond.

Customers are already talking about brand and businesses online - so why not reward them with a virtual punch card loyalty tool? Spunch helps build word of mouth marketing and lets businesses reward customers already talking about them online. Spunch brings your local retail shop's 'loyalty card' to a whole new social media playing field, acting as a terrific lead generation tool with word-of-mouth marketing to give local businesses and customers a closer one-to-one commerce relationship.

• For businesses, Spunch's virtual punch card will boost lead generation, customer sales opportunities and buying relationships through a savvy use of local geotargeting via sites like BrightKite and Foursquare.
• For customers, Spunch rewards them with retail rewards for spreading news online via social media and other discussion forums.

For more information, visit Spunch. Pow! Click! Click!

Arizona Entrepreneurship Conference (Nov 12)

The 4th Annual Arizona Entrepreneurship Conference is coming up in nine days. It promises big talks about upcoming opportunities for entrepreneurs from a fantastic panel of smart people.

Word is the organizers are still seeking additional sponsors to help build awareness (and defray organizational costs), so if any big hitters and major leaguers out there can lend a financial helping hand, contact the AZ Entrepreneurship team.

Thursday, November 12, 2009
7:30 AM - 7:00 PM (MT)
Register at EventBrite

Desert Willow Conference Center
4340 E Cotton Center Blvd
Phoenix, AZ 85040

Ignite Phoenix #5

Once again, the innovative team behind Ignite Phoenix threw up a fine event Tuesday night at the Tempe Center of the Arts.

Ignite Phoenix is an evening of short presentations scheduled several times a year. At an event, you hear 18 passionate speakers talking about their favorite topics or projects for just 5 minutes each. Judges rank the submissions and they put in a lot of time to make sure the event gets a nice variety of creativity and fun.

I attended the first and third Ignites and really liked the format - if one presenter's topic isn't up your alley, you know another will be up shortly.

Using a ploy from Up on the Sun, I've culled some tweets around last night's presentations:

"iamchanelle: #ignitePHX rocked the casbah tonite. thanks to everyone who put in long hours to make it awesome."

"krysvs: thanks for all the kind words everybody. we had a great time at #ignitephx, and all the other presenters rocked it!"

nickhammond: Sites discovered at #ignitephx tonight: http://phxnom.com, http://scratch.mit.edu, http://pictureisunrelated.com, http://misusedthings.com

"KammieK: Much love for #ignitephx tonight. Kudos to all presenters & many thx to all the crew & volunteers. Super fun event & after party!"

But a seasoned miscreant also noted...
"tdhurst: Something was different about #ignitephx tonight. Could feel it."
(Ed. is that a good different? or a different different?)

In any case, a great event pulling together Phoenix creative web community artisans. Check out Tyson Crosbie's great photos here. Sad that my sniffles, chills and cold kept me away last night, but the presentations looked fine on their live UStream.

Brand distillation - "We're Juice Guys"

Great ideas and companies come in simple terms. How can you take your essence, your marketing juju, and boil it down to the simple concept of what it is you do best, and communicating that effectively?

Brand distillation is what Tom Scott, co-founder of Nantucket Nectars,talks about in this video clip found right here at OpenForum. (not embeddable)

"Tom Scott, the founder and former CEO of Nantucket Nectars, is famous for the phrase, "We're juice guys." In this video, he explains the key to any top-notch marketing campaign: distillation. In order to build a brand, you first need to boil down your idea and return to basics. And you have to be willing to throw everything away. Here's why."

Community-Building? Do it and they will come

Jonathan Kressaty attended last week's Phoenix Design Week (which I wrote about last week) and was thrilled to find the Phoenix design community one that was willing to do a lot to help to build a 'community'.

He wrote that he found "...an amazing group of people who are so passionate about their community that they're willing to go all out in order to further that community." And for those who couldn't make it in person...."Many people who were unable to attend PHXDW still participated and benefited from the panels, discussion, and interaction that was happening miles away from their location."

And he found correlation between the amount of social FACE time folk spend together with the amount of 'community building' that's happening. To wit: "The quantity and quality of our interactions online as a community is directly related to the time since our last large-scale social gathering. In fact, the size and scope of the gathering could even dictate the scale of this correlation."

And he provided a graph to make that point.


It's always a great time when online folks can meet together at a certain event (say, like last night's Gary Vaynerchuck book signing in Tempe or the Phoenix Design Week show), and it helps to further a community when everyone is aligned behind cetain goals and objectives for that community. But that's another topic for another day.

For now, get involved. Go to community building activities. I'll be at Gangplank on Wednesday night for the Crowdpitch event - should be awesome. You can get involved - check out Chuck Reynolds' great lineup of upcoming tech-related PHX happenings. Get involved. Don't just be a online observer.

Monday Minutiae

These are the days that we will remember....

- SHOCKER! Younger employees help senior executives unlock social media mystery - If I had a dollar for every bit of social media advice I had to give to 40-somethings and above, I'd be a millionaire. The Chicago Tribune writes" "The benefits are vast, starting with the intellectually galvanizing effect of breaking down corporate hierarchies. "The mentoring, the sharing of diverse perspectives of an older generation versus a younger generation -- that produces a lot of magic. It breeds innovative thought," Vitón said. Senior executives get expert guides to the online community; ideas on how to use social media to further their business goals; and even insights on how to manage their young employees. And young people get exposure to top-level executives, opportunities to learn from them and appreciation for their knowledge."

- US Newspaper circulation falling - "Among the nation’s largest newspapers, the biggest decline was reported by The San Francisco Chronicle, whose weekday circulation, about 252,000, was down 25.8 percent. The Star-Ledger of Newark and The Dallas Morning News each fell more than 22 percent on weekdays, and about 19 percent on Sundays."

- Cool Ad Age interview with Dom Sagolla, a former Odeo.com employee who worked on the early days of Twitter and whose first tweet was "Oh, this is going to be addictive."
Ad Age: "Has Twitter missed any opportunities? If so, why?
Mr. Sagolla: They've taken a little while to grasp geo-location functionality in the service. I think they've been preempted by Foursquare and other geo-specific applications. I think they will eventually eclipse Foursquare, but I think they're behind the ball there. Early on, it was designed as a dispatch service, or a blogging service. The effort to get it to scale properly took time and took away time spent on features."

- Free Kentucky Grilled Chicken today - one piece for you!

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Economy & Internet Trends (Mary Meeker)

Business Insider posted Mary Meeker's Web 2.0 Summit presentation earlier today and I think it's worth sharing on a wider scale, so I'm also posting it here. Mary Meeker works as a financial analyst for Morgan Stanley in New York.



The presentation covers the financial markets, the economy and how it impacts upon the Internet industry. Meeker looks at communications platforms, publishing and distribution platforms, mobile markets and more.

- TechCrunch provides other key points:
* Location-based services are the “secret sauce” of what makes the mobile web interesting.
* The iPhone/iPod touch is the fastest growing piece of hardware the world has ever seen.
* And usage share versus market share of the iPhone is incredible, meaning it will only grow.
* Facebook is becoming the multimedia repository, and it will allow you to do so much.
* Companies absolutely need to be on board with the mobile web. They have some time, but they need to act.

- ReadWriteWeb takes a cloer look at the presentation at its blog.

Where's the Color in Social media?

Every new tech-social media-communications conference I read about lately is filled overwhelmingly with... um, what is the circle on the forms? Oh right - white/ Caucasian.

- Take a look at this week's Web2.0 Summit speaker lineup in San Francisco - I see no color.
- Same with the upcoming Audience 09 conference. None.
- Last week's BlogWorld speaker lineup was only slightly differentiated - only 3-4 speakers of color out of about 90 in all.
- And peek at this week's Marketing Profs Digital Marketing conference - one exec of color?

Why is this? Are African Americans (or 'blacks' or 'people of color', whichever you prefer) excluded from social media? Of course not, but you wouldn't know it from the leading conferences. I'm no sociologist, but wouldn't a thoughtful presentation at one of these shows from an African American social media mover and shaker provide a different social media perspective? I think it would. Or does the the world of 'social media of color' exist on an entirely separate and unequal plane?

A quick Google search finds BlackWeb2.0 ('a different perspective'); Blacklife (from Glam Media); BlackAtlas (for travelers of color) and Pepsi just launched We Inspire a social network for African American moms. I'm sure there are others - leave 'em in the comments.

There seems to be a opportunity for bringing leading African American social media stars to the masses. I wonder how and when it can start to happen. If you have thoughts, drop 'em in the comments.

[I've also cross-posted this over at The Social Media Bible Ning site.]

The Business of Twitter

So ya wanna read more about this amazing thing called Twitter?

Steven Levy, who wrote the great 2006 book on Apple and the Ipod called "The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness" offers up interesting analyses on Twitter in his Wired story "Mob Rule! How Users Took Over Twitter".

He writes that "...according to internal documents leaked earlier this year, the company expects to have 25 million active users by the end of 2009 and 100 million by the end of 2010. In 2013, it hopes to become the first Internet service to sign up 1 billion users."

Wow - that's a lot of users! And this comes about all the while Twitter's hit a numerical milestone of 5 billion tweets (writes CNET's The Social)!

More from the Wired piece on Twitter's future plans:

"Williams and Stone, as you’d suspect, don’t want Twitter to become a commodity. They want to amplify Twitter so it’s as vital to your social life as Facebook and as important to your search as Google. “We want to make Twitter indispensable, so it tells people what they need to know and what they want to know and hopefully not much else,” Williams says.

If Twitter does that, he believes, the company will be wildly profitable, no matter what the skeptics say. Last summer Williams was invited to the exclusive Allen & Company confab of bigwigs in Sun Valley, Idaho. He was astonished to hear Barry Diller and John Malone, two pillars of the pre-Internet world, proclaiming that Twitter would never make much money. “I didn’t argue my case,” Williams says. “But all the Internet guys there were laughing at those media guys. Are you kidding? Do you understand how money flows to the Internet? When you know that Twitter is a vehicle for directing information and traffic to large audiences, you realize there’s obviously a huge business.”

Fascinating stuff - old media, say hello to new media. Again.