Marketers must embrace shift of power to the consumer
There were three engaging presentations about the Future of Online Marketing at the Commission Junction University event for advertisers and publishers in London this week.
The message coming through loud and clear was that marketers need to wake up quickly to the shifting balance of power on the internet.
There is no escaping the fact that consumers will increasingly hold sway in the fast-changing digital environment.
Free Web 2.0 software doesn’t mean better…
TechCrunch posts a heads up on ActiveCollab, a new open source alternative to popular online project management tool Basecamp, by Web 2.0 poster children 37Signals, and talks about the possible threat to current monopoly and current business model if the software is of high quality.
Offertrax raises funds, launch set for August
Congratulations are in order for Ron and Ben at Boston-based Offertrax, who have raised an initial round of funding to help them launch their first product in August.
The company has raised “less than $1m - for now” according to CEO Ronald Pruett, who told me that he secured the funds from “private investors from the Boston area with high tech backgrounds and understanding”.
Offertrax is a social shopping site based around RSS technologies. The founders (Ronald Pruett and Ben Carcio) hope that the service will help join up the gap between consumers and merchants, via targeted alerts delivered by RSS. “It is time to put consumers back in the driving seat,” says Ron.
Blogging almost going mainstream?
If you’ve been blogging for any length of time, you’ll probably feel that it’s old hat. The principle is simple – you talk about something that you’re interested and/or passionate about, and through that you find people that are interested in the same sort of things that you are.
Over time if you’re a good write or really passionate or you simply create / get hold of good content, you’ll rise to the top of that niche vertical interest, which in turn will result in more readers.
The problem is that until very recently blogging was kind of hard to do – you have to be at least a little technically literate to be able to use the blog software interfaces. The result being that until recently blogging definitely wasn’t part of the mainstream consciousness.
Web 2.0 startups in the UK – questions to consider
There’s a pretty great post on Particletree about the kind of questions VCs ask when you’re doing a startup, so I thought I’d highlight them here as there seems to be a profound lack of 'noisy' UK-based Web 2.0 startups, and maybe finding finance is one barrier for entrepreneurs?
Where are all the UK web startups? Maybe everybody is just being very quiet (to fail in complete obscurity), or perhaps things are as dead as they seem to be (more than likely). The UK seems almost entirely barren compared with what's happening in the US.
It’s probably worth noting that local VCs seem to be a little behind their US conterparts (two local startups that I can think of off the top of my head have been approached by US investors – names of the innocent withheld). This too could be part of the problem.
Are all AJAX homepages doomed?
Dozens of personalised homepages (aka "AJAX homepages") have emerged over the past 18 months as developers started to programme lovely drag and drop interfaces, allowing users to customise the layout of their personal homepage. Cool technology, great use of AJAX, but is there trouble ahead?
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Web 2.0
Graham Charlton
Strategy & Planning
