If you have an iPhone you gotta try this

I saw this on Digg this morning:

http://photojojo.com/content/photojojo-original/smooshtacts-iphone-contact-pics

 
Just funny. Another funny rant on the iPhone:

http://duggmirror.com/apple/The_iPhone_is_a_piece_of_shit_and_so_is_your_face/?u=iphone 

The Facebook Platform Launches TONIGHT!!!

It’s official, Facebook’s opening up their new platform (F8) tonight to all. At a the platform launch event today Mark Zuckerberg laid out Facebook’s new platform strategy, along with 85 3rd party applications (including 2 of ours ) that are ready for the launch. Starting tonight (or very early Friday morning) all Facebook users will be able to add these apps to their profiles and developers will be able to access new API information on how to develop and distribute applications of their own.

Marketing, schmarketing. Focus on customer service first.

This morning’s first session was about leveraging customer service as one of the more effective forms of marketing. Of most interest in the session was Tony Hsieh, the founder and CEO of zappos.com and his take on their marketing strategy. The short of it is that their strategy from day one has been to take money a normal company would spend on marketing and invest those resources in exceptional customer service. The strategy is that by focusing on creating an amazing customer experience they create their own evangelists who market for them. If you’re familiar with Zappos and their story, it’s clearly working. They boast incredible growth and over 65% repeat customers. For a 3rd party take check this article from CNN . A few notes from the session on the inner-workings of Zappos:

• No measurement of call times
• No sales-based performance goals for CSRs
• They run the warehouse 24/7 (at significant expense) to ensure the fastest delivery possible
• They inventory all items and drop-ship nothing. They made this decision a while back to stop drop-ship business that cost them 25% of their overall revenue. The decision was made to ensure that Zappos could deliver on their promise of exceptional customer service
• They have a 4-week customer service and culture training for everyone in Las Vegas
• Everyone gets a culture book
• Interviews and performance reviews are 50% based on core values and culture fit

Lonelygirl15 Case Study

This session was a behind-the-scenes look at lonelygirl15.com story. If you’re not familiar, lonelygirl15 is an online video series following the life of Bree, a fictional teenage girl in the format of a personal video blog. When the site first came about the community wasn’t aware that the girl was fictitious and she developed quite a following. These guys got a ton of press last year when it was discovered that she was an actress and the series was a scripted, serial drama. For the full history of the series, check out this article by Wired. The session was with Miles Beckett, Mesh Finders, & Greg Goodfried the guys behind the series.

Quick facts/observations from the session:

• They average 300,000 views per episode
• Some episodes have topped 600,000 views
• They produce 5, 2-minute episodes a week
• The series has transformed in format from a videoblog format to a more produced, serial, soap-opera
• in its new format each scene is shot by a character and edited by that character
• The site has a community of about 30,000 regular contributors
• An element of the concept is that the fan base interacts with and effects the series via email, blogging and uploading videos of their own
  • An example of this is that in the series they may create a puzzle that the character must solve to progress in the storyline. Then the fanbase solves the puzzle and emails the character to help out
• No surprise, but the business model behind the series is advertising, and more specifically, brand integration (product placement)
• They’re using the concept to get themselves into the industry. They’re writing, directing and producing a seperate movie, creating a lonelygirl15 movie
• The entire site runs off wordpress.
• They posted a video live during the session. Before they could click back to the site to see the new video they had 6 comments. People literally live on the site waiting for new videos. There’s no schedule that they release to and people sit on the site all day/night waiting for a new vid.

In a word: fascinating. These guys created a truly innovative concept that leverages the best of the Internet and they’ve built an impressive community around what they’ve built.

The future of TV?

The premise of this panel is a a group of industry experts pulled together to discuss the disruptive effect of web-video, the future of content creation, and where television as we know it is headed. Notes/observations from the session:

• the web is the land of niche content, clearly niches are the land of web-based video
• the gap in today’s web-video world is a lack of cohesive, visionary content creators
• corporations are driving some content generation for their own properties (entertainment brands)

The takeaway from this session for me was that much of television as we know it isn’t changing anytime soon. The influx of semi-professional / web based content developers are typically developing content only for the web. This video has lower production value and 99% of viewers view this content on a computer. Hollywood will continue to excel at high production value, creative content for the masses that we all enjoy watching on our huge, high-definition televisions.

First session – 3D lands of adventure

The first session of the day (@ the crack of 10am) was a panel discussing various virtual worlds (SecondLife as an example) from a number of different angles. If you’re not familiar, SecondLife is a virtual world where you create a new (improved?) version of you, wander around this 3D land, meet people and have adventures. There are very few rules and the platform’s open architecture allows the world’s inhabitants to create just about anything they choose, should they have the aptitude to figure it out. Since its inception in ‘03 there have been a couple of notable developments:

• SecondLife has developed its own economy, with an actual, market-driven exchange rate against the dollar
• people have started making a good living creating virtual items and selling them online. Everything from clothes to real estate to guns can be purchased in SecondLife and savvy virtual citizens are cashing in to the tune of 6-figures a year selling what amounts to 1s and 0s somewhere on the Internet
• A number of “real-world” corporations such as Starwood Hotels, Toyota & IBM have been investing in creating a SecondLife footprint

The last bulletpoint is what interested me in this session. If corporate america is jumping on the bandwagon, I’d like to know why.

SxSW – First Day / First Post / New Blog

So, it took me heading off to a conference to get me off my ass and starting to blog. I’m at South By Southwest (hereforeafter referred to as SxSW) and I’m attending all sorts of interesting sessions concerning the Internet, Interactive, and Technology. I figured rather than hand-write some notes that’ll never again see the light of day, I’ll keep track of my learnings, thoughts and experiences in this blog for others to leverage.