July 2011
3 posts
3 tags
What does your corporate sports team say about...
I just celebrated my first anniversary at my third agency in NYC, Converseon. They have given me the entrepreneurial freedom to build a profitable division with a growing client SEO roster including 3 in the Fortune 100 in only one year. That has led me to wonder how one exactly goes about recognizing a good fit. One unlikely question I would ask in the future is which corporate team sports,...
6 tags
Stop crying wolf with security theater
The fact that a citizen can take another person or organization to court has been one of the bedrocks of American tradition. Unfortunately, as with any system, there will be some people who take advantage of it and risk ruining things for everyone else.
Someone’s coffee was hot. They sued. Now people joke that they could also sue if the coffee was not hot enough, but I bet someone has...
4 tags
Netflix makes a bet to risk profit over customer...
Netflix took a calculated risk this week in forcing a large number of their subscribers to make a choice that they already declined once. Attempting to bucket their consumers into costly physical media stalwarts versus more profitable instant downloaders, people now have to choose to receive discs by mail for $8, movies online for $8, or pay for both at $16.
They already gave users an...
May 2011
3 posts
6 tags
The best eReader features are not advertised
Now that every company is beginning to develop its own eReader or tablet, you should stop and think about the features that will really be important to you rather than being swayed by the technology envy that leads to an unfulfilled life and short-sighted incrementalism. Let’s weigh the options.
1) Functionality
The iPad could be the future of board games, but not reading. Photo from...
4 tags
Speaking at SheCon about Meals that Changed My...
Welcome attendees of the SheBlogs Conference! I’m about to go onstage to discuss SEO and blogging. It is a tough act to follow the excellent keynote speech by Guy Kawasaki about Enchantment. His new book was given away to everyone here at SheCon courtesy of Citrix and looks like a great read.
His point about being trustworthy is very salient. Perhaps it goes without saying, but you should...
7 tags
Incrementalism stifles revolutions and real...
I haven’t blogged here about technology and marketing much lately. Mostly because I have been too busy consulting on it at my new agency, Converseon, and wrote two articles elsewhere about trend curation and local search results. I’m also preparing for the panel I’ll be participating on regarding SEO and social media at the SheBlogs Conference next week. Too bad that even at a...
July 2010
1 post
8 tags
How HP and Palm can make the best slate tablet
Today’s discovery by TechCrunch that HP filed for a trademark on Palmpad confirms what many have guessed would happen. The acquisition of Palm will likely make its way into larger devices.
Palm’s webOS is the best mobile operating system and should translate better to a tablet than Apple iOS. However, I hope that HP does not make the same mistake that Palm did when it was...
June 2010
1 post
4 tags
Sidetalking with the iPhone 4
Apparently the iPhone 4 has antenna issues that prevent normal human beings from holding it naturally. Kind of reminds me of an old Nokia problem, sidetalking on the N-Gage…
I might have actually considered getting one of those back in the day if they made a screen with a horizontal aspect ratio instead.
Most games just haven’t designed to run vertically unless it’s Tetris. Of...
May 2010
1 post
8 tags
The Facebook plan to dominate SEO
Another recent online power grab involves Facebook’s changes in privacy SEO. Most of the information gathered in social networking is used to improve the relevancy of advertising presented to you (be it behavioral or retargeting).
Yet Facebook’s recent changes in layout and linking unveil an even more ambitious plan. They want to become a hub for all brands, products, and artists on...
April 2010
9 posts
7 tags
Problems with online overexposure and turning off...
Readers of my last post no doubt expected that I would write about HP and Palm next. I applaud the move for reasons I will explain later, but for now I want to talk about something perhaps more important: privacy.
Some people want to share absolutely everything online. The Foursquare satire, Please Rob Me, and heavily funded startup, Blippy, have shown that doing so is not always a good idea....
8 tags
Palm should set its sights on Blackberry, not...
Quick! Which major cell phone manufacturer has performed the worst over the past two years in the stock market? If you have been reading business or technology publications lately, you would probably guess Palm. You’d be wrong. They are actually outperforming their non-Apple competitors Nokia, Motorola, RIM, and HTC (Source: Google Finance).
In fact, they are also second only to RIM in...
5 tags
Unleash the potential of your website at the...
Prospective clients often ask me how you can prove there is a potential for improvement when there are countless competitors or seemingly no room for growth. This is particularly important to the field of search engine optimization (SEO), which some feel is harder to forecast than advertising. My mentor, Mike Levin, often talks about how there is a finite number of searches happening everyday. You...
6 tags
The Apple business model and the Adobe red herring
A lot of people in the tech world are up in arms over Apple’s continued denial of Flash on the iPhone, iPod, and iPad. That’s no surprise as many people love these products dearly. The problem is that their brand religion clouds their understanding of what is really going on, and loyalists have bought Apple’s red herring hook, line, and sinker.
Aside from great ads and a rabid...
9 tags
A good analyst should become a catalyst
Last night I gave a short talk on web traffic analysis to a data mining class taught by my friend, Dr. Aleks Jakulin, at Columbia University. Sharing the podium with Dr. Hilary Mason from Bit.ly and Blaz Fortuna from the Josef Stefan Institute in Slovenia, I decided to present a primer on the web analytics industry and leave the science to the experts.
It is a rare 400 level course with no...
5 tags
Facebook: PageRank 10
As I reported three years ago, one of Google’s chief competitors has been the beneficiary of its own algorithm. Only this time it is Facebook, and not Yahoo, to receive a vaunted PageRank of 10.
For those unfamiliar with the story, the PageRank concept was integral to the original thesis of Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford. Essentially it rates the billions of pages based on a 0-10...
9 tags
Let me pay more for what I want
Two weeks ago, I went looking for a veritable needle in a haystack. I managed to find the pin by some miracle somewhere within my many boxes. I also pulled out a few other items of interest, including two books I had previously started but never finished. One was the Brothers Karamazov. The other was the biography of IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad.
I just started another massive novel recently, so I...
6 tags
The profits and perils of personalization over...
One of my good friends was browsing through the bestseller list for an audiobook to buy yesterday when she found an author totally against her philosophy ranking at #9. That led her to discount the entire list as “garbage” and untrustworthy.
Are bestseller lists and platinum records obsolete in the Internet age? Does anyone care what is popular now that we have access to the long...
6 tags
The importance of immigration
Yesterday I met Jeffrey Miron, a Harvard economist and author of Libertarianism: A to Z. Some people may not agree with his views on health care, but I think it is important to recognize at least one group of people who are fighting to expand legal immigration.
I mention this because I recently joined the board of a non-profit that provides job placement assistance for immigrants who have entered...
March 2010
6 posts
9 tags
How to overcome brand religion
Some people are so adamant about the brands they identify with that their loyalty could almost be called religion. You know the type: when it is all but impossible to counter long-held opinions in a rational discussion, let alone through advertising. They simply won’t believe your side of the story, as voiced so fittingly by Apple in their latest Mac vs PC commercial.
Can companies ever...
5 tags
Social consciousness and civil infrastructure
I am usually more interested in Internet architecture than civil infrastructure, but living in New York for six years has helped me appreciate the importance of the nation’s most extensive mass transit network. I don’t think it is a stretch to say that this city owes much of its character, popularity, and economy to the massive 24/7 subway system.
The MTA has been getting a lot of...
9 tags
The Orwellian self-fulfilling prophecy of Google...
October 7, 2007 and August 25, 2008 are dates that will likely be heralded as landmark achievements in user experience, yet live in infamy for our online independence. That is when Yahoo publicly launched Search Assist and Google Suggest graduated from Labs to the Google homepage. Suddenly search engines began finishing our sentences — or at least our keyword queries.
Web browsers had...
4 tags
Facebook and Tumblr
Facebook is pushing me to the edge, but I have not quit the social networking site yet despite my last post. Thus I decided to set up the feature that posts my Tumblr updates to my wall. In other words, one of the main reasons I went with Tumblr. I was very happy to see a straightforward approval process.
It gave me the option to post my entries to my Facebook wall. Sharing something public...
5 tags
Here comes Facebook Beacon 3.0
Facebook Beacon was one of the first major missteps for the massive social network that shared your personal data across partner websites. So they toned it down and allowed you to opt-out. Yet Facebook continued to collect data, and a class action lawsuit ensued forcing Facebook to terminate the service in late 2009. Now it appears that Beacon 3.0 is looming on the horizon due to pending changes...
2 tags
Welcome to my new website
I stopped blogging for a couple of years because very few of my friends outside of my industry use news readers and I did not want to share links every time I wrote a new post. Silly, I know. Yet I did not want to launch a new website that was only a blog, either. So with a little magic, I turned Tumblr into a platform that I can use on my new domain, adamedwards.us.
I hope you enjoy it.