John McArthur’s New Venture Blog

When I was growing up, my family would occasionally take what we called “Penny Walks.”  We lived in western Colorado, where the towns were mostly laid out on a North-South, East-West grid.  A penny walk involved taking a walk, penny in hand, and every time you got to a corner, you flipped the coin. Heads you go right. Tails you go left.  You never knew where you were going to go, but you knew you weren’t going to get caught in a familiar routine.  With penny walks, you ran into different people or different things. You had variety. Penny walks don’t work as well in Massachusetts, where I live now, because the streets are laid out in the rough equivalent of a meandering cow.

My random walks these days are as likely to occur on the World Wide Web, as they are to occur in my town.  Did I mention we have almost no sidewalks? So here on the internet, thanks to a link from Jason Rakowski, I was lead on a random walk through his blog, to another blog by someone named Dejra to a service called Pingomatic.  The service helps writers/bloggers raise the visibility of their sites by updating search engines.  I’m trying it out today.  I’ll let you know how it goes. 

Given Dejra’s focus on affiliate marketing, I’m wondering if she knows my brother, Ken?

Dejra? Ken?

I’ve never met Jason Rakowski, but he introduced himself through a comment on my previous post.  As I always do, I checked out his website to ensure that the comment wasn’t originating from yet another linking/spamming news-aggregation site selling pharmaceuticals or worthless paraphernalia. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Jason writes a very good blog on customer service.

As a service to my readers, I’m providing a link to his blog posting on When It’s Time to Fire the Customer.  He even provides a helpful case study. It looks like Jason works in or with the auto industry, so I suspect he knows more than a bit about customer service, both good and bad.  Jason?

A Google search on “Top 10″ will get you all kinds of interesting results.  When I did the search this afternoon, the first listing was “Top 10 Naked People on Google Earth.” Sorry, but I’m providing no hyperlink, and for the record, no, I did not go there.  Next is Time Magazine’s  50 Top 10 Lists for 2007, which shows a surprising lack of appreciation for symmetry.  Then comes The Late Show with David Letterman, which I thought should have come up higher on the list.  There’s also the Top 10 Dunks and Top 10 Women Drivers of the Year available courtesy of YouTube. I’m just going in order here.  No offense intended. 

For any startup or new technology, it’s difficult to get the door opened long enough to allow the first presentation of a product, company or concept to a potential customer or partner.  It’s not that customers don’t want to look at new stuff.  It’s just that there’s so much new stuff, and who’s got the time to look at everybody. So whether it’s analysts, or bloggers, or the press, it’s nice to have a little bit of focused attention on new companies and new technologies, and have them do some filtering.  Thus the creation of Top 10 lists that say, “Hey, pay attention to this.  It could be big.” (more…)

As a follow on to my earlier posts regarding GoldMail, Bruce over at Iron Mountain sent me this note through Plaxo.

This is one of the typical Brainshark presentations we use. You can also embed other objects like videos, etc. in the presentations.

www.brainshark.com/ironmtndigital/vu?pi=5687813

Another interesting marketing company that uses word of mouth/viral marketing is called bzzagent out of Boston.
Regards,
Bruce

Iron Mountain uses Brainshark for some email marketing campaigns, and I asked Bruce to send me a sample one that they use to market their desktop backup service.  So here it is, and none to soon, since my Outlook application keeps crashing and I’ll probably lose my data soon.  Tell me again, why I don’t just use Gmail?

Don’t ever challenge my mother to a game of Jeopardy.  She answers every question correctly almost before you can get the question out.  You’ll leave the game having lost all confidence in your ability to remember highly-specific details or the picayune.  She’s pretty good at ping-pong (sorry, table tennis), too.  At least for an 81 year old. The people that Myndnet has recruited to answer questions for clients are a bit like my mother.  At least that’s my recent experience.  They seem to be able to answer anything.

StorMagic recently used Myndnet to identify IT directors at K-12 schools, at colleges, and universities. The question went live on February 15th and by Tuesday, four days later, they had fulfilled the 200 or so budgeted responses.  If you go to Myndnet, you’ll notice that the question is still up and you can still respond.  StorMagic has the right to reject leads that don’t fit the criteria, and StorMagic might want to acquire additional names, if the first ones work out well.  So why not keep it open for a few days? (more…)

About 10 years ago, I did several video segments with Caspar Weinberger on the show World Business Review (WBR).  I was one of the “industry experts,” whose job it was to keep the conversation on topic, and not let the episode go too far afield or become too much of an infomercial. 

Cap (he wanted to be called “Cap”), who was eventually replaced by Al Haig, passed away in 2006, but he was amazingly active well into his 80s, when he was hosting this show.  He used to record between 4 and 6 episodes a day. At the time, distribution for the episodes included broadcast on the business channel on United’s overseas flights to Japan.  I only know this because I spent so much time flying to Japan in those days and saw myself on the overhead screen from time to time.  WBR also licensed the content to schools, which I always found interesting.

Every startup is looking for cost-efficient and effective ways to get the word out on their products and services.  StorMagic decided to leverage wsRadio with this webcast.  It’s well produced. I don’t know the cost, and I need to hear from wsRadio regarding how many listeners they get and how the content they produce is distributed.  I’d also like to hear from anyone who has used wsRadio or similar services to get the word out.  Was it effective in raising visibility?  Did it increase end-user or partner leads? Did it help close sales?

OK, I just made a Black Swan-type mistake (read the book), when I wrote in my last post that Goldmail was “different.”  I have to constantly remind myself (or rather my friends do the reminding for me) that, just because I haven’t seen something like this before doesn’t imply that it doesn’t exist or that there aren’t a lot of them.  So in response, I received this post through Plaxo Pulse from a friend, Bruce, over at Iron Mountain.

John:
Goldmail looks very simliar to a service we use called Brainshark out of Waltham, MA. Very cool tool, create the presentation, send the link, get almost near instant reporting on who watched, how many slides, for how long… There are quite a few of these services out there. Best part about them as they usually don’t get caught in spam filters where a lot of marketing pieces do. Let me know if you care to see one.
Cheers,
Bruce

Thanks, Bruce and Mike, who commented on Windows Live Mail in my earlier post.  So now, let me leave it to the folks at Microsoft, Goldmail and Brainshark to inform us here in the comments section of the differences.  And, if anyone else has a favorite enhanced-email tool, please let us know here.  Comments are welcome.  And yes, Bruce, I would like to see one of your presentations.  Something about Iron Mountain’s online desktop backup solution, maybe?  I had a dream, last night, that I lost my PC.

This is different.  A friend at StorMagic, one of my clients, just forwarded a note that he received from a guy at Goldmail.  The email was an interesting twist on the more traditional email campaign.   What I like about it is the way in which graphics and voiceovers can be incorporated into an email in a relatively low-tech,  more-accessible way.  It looks to be quick and easy, so anyone should be able to do it.  Goldmail includes tracking statistics and some other tools. To anyone who is reading this, please go to the Goldmail site, take a look and tell me what you think.  Have you seen similar tools or tried this one?  Do you see uses beyond marketing?

Taylor Allis asked this question on his most recent blog post: “What is server virtualization’s impact on Storage?”  Here’s my opinion. But I’m interested in yours, too.

First, I think storage comes out of the server and into a shared pool. Some might say that’s a book-of-duh comment, but given the enormous storage capacity you can put inside a server today, why would anyone need to go external? Here’s the reasoning.  Server workload, virtual or not, is relatively independent of the storage workload.  By that I mean, running out of server resources to support an application has no implicit or explicit relationship to running out of storage resources (capacity or performance) to support that application.  If you need to move a virtual server from one physical server to another, because the physical server is running out of head room, there’s no explicit reason I should also have to move the data. There are some impediments, like unwanted down time, to moving data out of a server and into a shared pool, but one of our clients, StorMagic, has pretty much solved that problem with their non-disruptive data migration capabilities. (more…)

My goal when I started this blog almost a year ago was to:

1. Create a resource for entrepreneurs and inventors
2. Have a conversation with those entrepreneurs (or entrepreneur wannabes) on strategies, tactics, and best practices.  

On the second goal, I feel like I’ve fallen short.  There’s not enough dialogue.  (more…)