2 – Online Technology

2010 Prediction: Digital Marketing IPOs Up

December 27th 2009

There’s pent-up demand on both the buy and sell side for fast growing tech firms to IPO. I say this while noting that my favorite local search company, ReachLocal, has filed for a  $100M IPO. (see Reuters coverage.) This shouldn’t be a surprise. They were #1 on Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500™(PDF).  Their investors, VantagePoint Venture […]

Digital Marketing Regulation: Google Analyltics May Be Illegal in Germany

November 26th 2009

First They Came for the German Marketers… Continuing my theme that regulation should be a much higher concern to digital marketers and their professional associations, I submit that one core digital marketing tool may already be illegal in the world’s third largest economy. Zeit Online reported today that numerous German privacy officials are convinced that […]

Google Sidewiki Panics Brand Managers: Some Use Hacks to Jam The Service

November 24th 2009

Seth Godin may not want comments on his blog, but Google does.  Google’s Sidewiki service allows anyone with their tool installed to post and view comments in a frame right beside web content. I’ll provide a few examples of how this service is taking root, and some options for your Sidewiki strategy, including the choice […]

False Identity: A Federal Crime in the US, But Heroic in the UK?

November 23rd 2009

On The Internet Nobody Knows If You’re a 14-Year-Old Girl In Wales, a 61-year-old woman suspected that her husband had been sharing elicit emails with a 14-year-old girl, and feared he was a pedophile. She logged on from a computer elsewhere in their home, pretended to be such a girl, and found he was all […]

Litl Computer: Meet the Next Apple Computer While It Still has 40 Staff

November 20th 2009

Litl Computer is to netbooks as iPods were to MP3 players. The beauty of the iPod was that it was designed to fit people’s worlds. It fit physically and it conceptually allowed  users to find and get music from the web without being transfixed by technology. Imagine a laptop built from its roots to be an easy, […]

Court Rules Domain Registration Privacy Services = ‘Material Falsification’

November 16th 2009

There are lots of legitimate reasons people don’t want their names on domain-ownership records. These range from exercising the privilege of anonymous speech, to avoiding spam, to simply preserving one’s own privacy. Of course this practice makes tracking down responsible parties for infringement or other offenses harder, as it requires a court order to learn […]

Do You Need Liability Insurance For Your Personal Blog? You May Already Have Some.

November 15th 2009

If you’re blogging, you’re a publisher.  Yesterday I posted about how Cyber Liability Insurance may help firms mitigate the risks of new online business activities. But what about your personal blog? Liability for Your Personal Blog? Oh, yes. Andrew Hamilton published a website, Forgotten Ohio, in which he retold a local ghost story about a […]

Cyber Liability Insurance: Large Firms Should Hedge Risks

November 14th 2009

Online marketing has moved many firms toward a publishing model to generate market awareness and engagement. This has spawned a broader range of public exchanges with both customers and the public as they share ideas on company sites, and as company staff participate on others’ sites in official or quasi-official roles. There may fewer customers […]

Beating Censors With the World’s Only Whiteboard Based Blog

November 9th 2009

In Monrovia, Liberia, there’s a guy taking the matter of a lopsided, state-run media and reshaping it into a free-of-charge, independent news-aggregator—all accomplished with a whiteboard and couple of markers. (No Internet required!) Each morning, at 10:45 a.m., Alfred Sirleaf heads to his bulletin board to post the day’s news, culling together a slate of […]

Pay for Play Raises Concerns from Gartner’s Magic Quadrant to Paris Hilton’s Twitters

November 7th 2009

Discussions of regulating digital marketing were just below the surface at New York Ad:Tech.  My last post gave an overview of efforts to regulate digital marketing. Now, here’s an interview at Ad:Tech by reporter David Spark with Ted Murphy, CEO of Izea, the company that makes the paid blogging service Social Spark. Ted’s been in […]