Kaiyzen Group

I will be attending the Net Neutrality event at USF tomorrow.  I receieved word from Christina Gagnier that there will be a wireless connection so I will do my best to post throughout the day as the speakers are doing their thing.

The event materials are also supposed to be posted after the event, I will post some links to them when they are up.

A video here of a clip from the DLD Conference going in Deutchland (Munich), damm I wish I was there right now. Hopefully will be attending next year. For those of you who dont know I am a trade show whore.., I will pretty much attend any trade show or conference in any business sector.

So back to the post…, the most popular solutions and sites out there on the web are in their position for one main reason.., branding. Dont get me wrong, you have to have a good or decent product and solid team working with you, but ultimately, it comes down to having a good brand, with good design, that clicks with people.

Of course with my passionate disliking for all things Google, I have the stance.., and know for a fact that they are in their position b/c of branding and the they have made their name synonymous with search amongst the drones out there. This has become very apparent recently with my continued efforts to educate, and brainwash, individuals on search alternatives. I cant tell you how many times I will talk about a service to someone, and they just say.., “oh you mean they do that too.., I just go to Google and search xyz”.

In the video there is Mahalo and Wikia founders talking about human powered search and how Yahoo! and Google have great search solutions that are algorithm based, but for general searches their human powered sites will best them. They go on to talk about how everyone things Google is so great just because of the branding and perception of their results.., when in fact people are not so happy and trustworthy with search results.

Search aside.., branding and design is where it is at. You give a user a choice between the exact same service, with the exact same feature set, with one having a lame name and lame design, and the other having the opposite, people are going to choose branding and design every time.

Unfortunately this post marks my first occasion of embedding a youtube clip on the site.., tis a sad day, but enjoy the video none the less:

Everyone of course knows that the G guys are the 20,000 pound gorilla in the search advertising space…, thats right, 20K, not 500.

Pretty much all of their revenue…, somewhere in the 90%+ percent range the last time I noticed it written somewhere comes from their adwords and adsense programs.  For all of their great success with search ads, they still struggle to find their mojo elsewhere.

One of the biggest programs to keep an eye on is their foray into the print world.  They have continually struggled to make significant inroads into that space.  The latest write up here from our friends at AdWeek.  Tim Armstrong, president of advertising at Google, addressed the crowd at the UBS Global Media Conference, and once again reiterated their continuing struggles in print.  Armstrong mentions that they are probably 2.., or 3.., or 5 years away from achieving significant inroads in the print world, and my guess will be that it will come through acquisition, not from their own offering.

A perfect example we will probably see is similar to what we saw with their purchase of dMarc in the radio purchasing space.  dMarc was kickin their arses in the space, achieving great growth so Google swooped in and purchased them back in early 2006.  Since then the founders of dMarc, Chad and Ryan Steelberg, have left the company because of not seeing eye-to-eye over the operation and direction of dMarc.

It is actually refreshing to hear Armstrong openly say that they are not being too successful and are probably 2, no wait, 3.., no wait, 5 years from significant progress.  I had the pleasure of attending the FTC Privacy event in D.C. last month where he also talked.  At the FTC event he pretty much provided no information and was a walking press release.

Google will be hard pressed to achieve their goal of being the all inclusive, one stop shop, advertising “operating system”, as Mr Schmidt likes to call it.  They have achieved such massive growth in the past few years that people are scared to get too involved with them with their new business ventures.

This is the perfect time over the next 3-5 years for innovative, hard working startups to take on the areas the big guys are trying to enter into.  If new players can offer competitive solutions it provides a great alternative to Google offerings especially with all of the paranoia flying around the G guys.

This posting from TechCrunch

Verizon is announcing their intent to open their network to any device or application that meets their requirements.

This is a great first step…, its very timely with the release of the Kindle product by Amazon which is using Sprints network.  Hopefully we will see more third party devices such as digital camera/video devices and GPS devices like those from Tom Tom hook up to the without requiring a data plan.

I am still not all that excited until reading more of the details, more news to come over the next month most likely as they prepare to launch their testbed to qualify apps/devices in Q1 next year.  Supposedly we are looking at the end of ‘08 to early ‘09 to have the whole “openess” fully going.

Well, I have finally gotten around to setting up my site on a new web host.  I am starting fresh with this.  Hopefully with the holiday weekend I will get to catch up a little on some posts.

 Happy Thanksgiving!!