What Tongues are Wagging About Now:
- SouthWest Airlines Twitter PR Crisis: Kevin Smith, a chubby comedian with 3,000+ Twitter followers caused a huge news event when SouthWest booted him off his plane for “endangering the flight” (euphemism for not fitting into his seat). He tweeted incessantly and most major tv stations picked up the story. SouthWest Air had to issue three formal apologies.
- Tragic Tesla flight crashes, killing three execs and wiping out all power in Palo Alto today. It crashed into a power line and a house that was also a daycare! Nobody on the ground was hurt but everyone is really stunned.
- “Secret London” stunt — Greg Marsh, Tiffany and an army of engineering volunteers pulled off the launch in a single weekend!
- iPad Developers scared to talk: Rumor is that the iPad is not a strong device, and Apple is strong-arming developers even more than usual.
- Sarah Silverman got in a little battle with Chris Anderson over her raunchy TED comments and ultimately Steve Case got into the fray. Funny.
VC and Portfolio Cos
- SXSW MSFT BizSpark Startup Winners listed here
- Mimecast podcast ran on the Cloud Computing Show as part of their announcement outreach
Notes from Mobile World Congress and Barcelona
- MWC is off the charts this year. Apps have arrived, there is a whole hall dedicated to it and the whole mobile advertising community is out in force
- Introduced Waze CEO to Juha Christensen who is on board of VirtualLogix. Meeting lots of app bloggers.
- The INQ booth is just gorgeous! Like an art gallery! They have a “pop shop” which is on the avenues and the full bar/cafe as a stand so two major booths. INQ is also sponsoring the Duran Duran concert
- Symbian was cracked on hard, as usual.
Conferences on our Radar
- PaidContent Conference– watch the livestream here
- CTIA Speakers delayer due to the snow but the lineup was announced today
- Official Pre-GDC conference 3/8 aty Bloodhound hosted by Spark
While most clients understand the value of social media to develop a direct connection with customers and build community around their brand, we do occasionally talk with folks who question the value of social media for their business.
For example, I was recently in a new business meeting with a company selling high-end analytics services to Fortune 500 execs. The VP of sales asserted that “the people we’re trying to reach aren’t on Twitter.” I replied, “that may be true, but the people WE’RE trying to reach are on Twitter.”
The fact is, media and analysts (and many of the rest of us) now get much of our news from social media sources.
A recent survey by Cision and Don Bates at GWU University backs up this claim: they found that an overwhelming majority of reporters and editors now depend on social media sources when researching their stories. Among the journalists surveyed, 89% said they turn to blogs for story research, 65% to social media sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn, and 52% to microblogging services such as Twitter. The survey also found that 61% use Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia.
Click here to read the full article on MediaPost – many eye-opening stats on where today’s stories really come from.
- Posted by Leyl Master Black (@mktgalchemist)
What Tongues are Wagging About:
- Owen Van Natta ousted at MySpace. Yikes!
- Google Buzz Backlash (plenty of analysis on this – stirred up privacy concerns, some erroneously reporting that they may remove it – lots of confusion!)
- New report: about $1.4 billion will be spent on social network advertising in 2011
- Zynga acquired Serious Business (Sparkpr client)
- TED conference – the question is whether this was as big a deal as usual. Jamie Oliver talk on what people are feeding their kids generated lots of buzz. What do you guys think?
- Facebook, Twitter Grow More than 100% – MarketingVOX story
- Huge snowstorms on East coast
- Stewart Butterflield, Flickr founder, took the wraps of his new project Glitch. It’s a massively multiplayer online game that hits alpha this week and is set to launch before the end of the year. People are calling it the next Farmville. (Disclaimer: Spark client)
- FourSquare adds Conde Nast and Marc Jacob deals to HBO, Time Warner, HBO etc. Sounds like they’re on a roll!
- Google finally announces it bought Aardvark for $50M (even though everyone knew about it months ago)
- Apple App Store breaks 150k apps
VC and Portfolio:
Press Riffs
- Went to the Thrillist party at Bloodhound on Wednesday. They sponsored an open bar and the party was packed, Thrillist is doing really well and expanding to San Diego where they will soon have a newsletter.
- The Economist’s Matthew Bishop launched his book this week titled, “The Road From Ruin: How to Revive Capitalism and Put America Back on Top”. Unfortunately, the launch party was cancelled due to the inclement weather here in New York. Hopefully we’ll have some news whenever it is rescheduled.
Awards
Conferences
February 24, 2010 | Mobile World Congress 2010 Debrief: All the info, none of the travel
Yesterday at TED, The Economist’s Global Correspondent, Vijay Vaitheeswaran, announced the “Ideas Economy” event series that will run throughout 2010 and aims to bring together top thinkers from around the world to discuss and debate the most important ideas of our time. The inaugural event will take place at UC Berkeley on March 23 and 24 and is called “Innovation: Fresh thinking for the ideas economy.”
This first Innovation event has a stellar line-up of tech visionaries from the Valley, including:
- Jacqueline Novogratz, Founder, Acumen Fund
- Ray Kurzweil, Founder, Kurzweil AI
- Andrew Kuper, President, LeapFrog Investments
- Tim Brown, CEO, IDEO
- Ed Catmull, President, Pixar and Disney Animation Studios
- Mark Bernstein, CEO, Xerox PARC
The full program, list of speakers, and details can be found here: http://ideas.economist.com
If you’re interested in expanding or overturning established thinking about what innovation is, where it comes from, and how to make it work, you should definitely consider registering for this conference. Attendees will experience hands-on design, strategy, and problem solving with some of today’s leading industry leaders and innovators. The goal is that folks leave the event with tangible ideas for how to disrupt their industries, and ideas for their next breakthrough product or company.
Let us know if you’re attending and we’ll look for you there!
- Jacqueline
What Tongues are Wagging About
- TechCrunch pay for play drama: Michael Arrington posted an apology late last night, and the offending intern, Daniel Brusilovsky was canned. A good play by play with links is here: http://www.inquisitr.com/60670/daniel-brusilovsky/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Inquisitr+%28Inquisitr%3A+All%29
- Daniel’s parents are also supposed BFF with Arrington, which he confessed to a Sparkster was how he got the gig
- Lots of ramping up from mobile companies of all sorts for the annual giant meetup Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Feb 15-18
- Big controversy this year about both Nokia and LG pulling their booths from MWC, but rumours are they have hired nearby venues to host meetings, events, etc.
- Android dominated the conversation and will again this year
- With the success of AppStore and the announcement of iPad and Kindle, expect more emphasis on the app ecosystem
- Spark has 6 clients attending the show: INQ Mobile, Ideaworks Labs, Waze, VirtualLogix, AlertMe and GetJar
- TechCrunch UK will host another half-day satellite event on Wednesday from 2-6pm and many Spark clients are speaking
- Popular mobile blogger Rudy de Wael is hosting a “Mobile Sunday” event with the international mobile blogger community as well
- Here is a great link for all the parties happening at MWC including those listed above:
http://socializemobilize.com/2010/01/14/mwc2010_parties_events/
Events:
- Mashable Social Media Party took place on 2/5 – will send recap in next WIM
VC & Portfolio Cos:
Awards:
- San Francisco Business Times Technology and Innovation Awards:
- Best CEO at a big company (companies with revenue over $100 million)
- Best CEO at a small company (companies with revenue under $100 million)
- Best Venture Capitalist (an individual, not a firm)
- Best startup (a company that is less than three years old)
- Best Gaming/entertainment company
- Best Internet advertising/marketing company
- Best security company
- Best social media company
- Best mobile application or service
- Best gadget or product
- Best business application or service
- Due 3/11/2010
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