Archive for the ‘New Marketing’ Category
Matthew and the Atlas
Monday, April 19th, 2010CopySend for iPhone
Monday, June 29th, 2009
“CopySend is a must have application that provides the perfect fit with the iPhone’s new copy and paste features. Using CopySend you can copy and paste between your mac and iPhone (or iPod Touch) seamlessly…”
One of the loooong awaited features on the iPhone was copy and paste. Every single update to the iPhone OS (prior to 3.0) lead to blog posts and reviews groaning once more again that they still haven’t added the copy and paste feature. Now that it is released it is leading to some interesting innovations, one such being CopySend.
Main Features:
- take a photo through the program and send it directly to your mac
- copy and paste content quickly between your iPhone and mac (round trip)
- simple
Full disclosure, this is one of the companies that I am working with (and I designed the graphics and interface), but this app is so simple and useful. Hats off to Allan at Thinking Code Software!
Main feature
The Great Pricing Balance
Monday, May 11th, 2009I’ve used iStockphoto.com for I think 9 years now. They started as a sharing community with no charge. Then I remember downloads costing $0.25 for the highest resolution image (they only came in one size then). Nice and cheap still. Now today as I went to buy more credits for some of the homepage images (I’m creating the “crowd” from individual shots that I’ve picked) and the least amount of credits you can buys is 12 and then 26. Basically it ends up being $2/per credit. The xsmall images are a credit each (which are only good for small pictures on the web). Seems a bit pricey now. So had to get resourceful instead of using a credit for the grapes cluster I thought, “I bet if I do a google images search I could find a generic one that will work for me” also did this for the plate to put the salmon dish on.
My point. With raising the prices on iStockphoto.com they attract more serious photographers therefore there are more professional and higher end images. So better quality, good for us consumers. But with raising the prices on the consumer end I am thinking of how to be more resourceful and spend less credits. If they were a $1 per download I may have bought a few more pictures for my graphics without even thinking, and may have spent almost the same amount. Or maybe they rig up a tiered pricing system that prices lower for generic shots and higher for the more popular ones.
The same is going with iPhone apps right? If an app is only $0.99 then I am apt to download it without much thinking although the quality of the app may be exceptional or poor. Not much personal loss.
From an economy/tax example…
In 1916 the US government had a tax rate of 7% on incomes over $300,000 which produced about $80 million (1,296 returns filed)
In 1921 the US government had a tax rate of 77% on incomes over $300,000 which produced about $85 million (246 returns filed)
All the price raise did was increase tax evasion and avoidance.
Apple did a very smart thing by allowing $0.99 song downloads and $9.99 (varying) album downloads. What this did was stopped my resourceful evasive mind from thinking how else I could get the music to going with the simple, convenient and relatively cheap method. In fact I’ve bought albums again that I couldn’t find the CD for.
Convenience + low price point + wide reach = profit
…sorry for stating the obvious.
Social Entertainment (oops I mean) Networking
Monday, April 6th, 2009
I wasn’t really sure what else to title this but I was very inspired by a blog post by Mitch Joel over at Six Pixels of Separation. Check it out there for full post.
The thought that generated from it was from the theme of Social Networking being a strong form of entertainment, instead of sitting mindlessly drooling in front of the TV.
I like that.
There is the thought that the internet is causing us to avoid real human contact all the while building our lives online and therefore breeding antisocialism. While in part this is true (there’s nothing like a face-to-face coffee time) yet the usual turning-on-the-TV-and-turning-off-the-brain as our main form of entertainment is quite a bit more “king” in antisocial. We ARE connecting more, we ARE sharing ideas more, and we ARE sharing our lives more… and this is taking on our form of entertainment.
Peering into a soul is creepy and disturbing
Wednesday, March 11th, 2009In this case…
Am I missing something? I find this campaign creating a “disturbed” feeling for the brand… not endearment or attraction.
When using the concept “soul” I expected something deep and moving, you know, something to do with humanity. So you can imagine that after seeing the first commercial with the guy with the mask and then going to the website (because that is all the commercial gave) that I felt a complete disconnect, slight outrage, and generally a feeling of being ripped off.
I’m not sure, I’m still processing this one…
Small Makes It Big
Tuesday, June 24th, 2008
Jared Greenberg and Dan Zinger (from Prairie Sticks Bat Company) know the Internet has the power to change lives. They just never thought it would change theirs. Read the rest of the story…
This is another great story of what can change you company’s existence forever. It falls into the advice given by Greg Verdino and Joseph Jaffe that I played in episode 4 of Marketing From the Cottage podcast.
I’m proud to take on these guys as a new client.