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Here’s something I wrote called the Whistleblower Report: A Short Story of Success With A Long Tail

It ruffled a few feathers when I published it because it outlines my approach to marketing and how I convinced CAA clients that aliens were responsible for a rash of dead car batteries at Christmas.

I even explain why eBay staff thought they had a corporate mole they heard about my special coupon marketing idea. All fun stuff.

No opt-in required. You can download it from Scribd. Enjoy, and remember if you like it – share the link on your social network.

Thanks!

James

PS. If you like this content, SUBSCRIBE to my email list for more.

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They’re calling the project the Hackerspace Global Grid (HGG) and are building plans for a grid of ground stations and communications satellites that would be independent of governments world wide. Long-term, if the initial project succeeds, they’d like to further prove the model that governments aren’t the only answer by staging the first moon landing since the Apollo missions.

The Challenges

Beyond the obvious challenge of funding, the technological feats here would be huge. So far, hobbyists and amateurs have only managed to put low-orbit satellites into space for short periods and tracking has proved nearly impossible without a large budget to afford complex and costly hardware.

Most of these attempts have been made with balloons with only a few successful rocket attempts having been made. Most amateur rockets that do make space are not capable of carrying a payload as large as a usable communications satellite.

Of course, none of this means that HGG would have to launch their satellites themselves. Or even make the satellites to be launched. All could be purchased from professionals already in the game, many of which are private and not government.

That goes back to funding. A satellite and launch can cost in the millions. Nick Farr, the hacker-activist (not the same as a ‘hactivist’) behind the HGG project, has only just begun asking for donations in August. So the project is still in its infancy.

The Ground Network Will Be Toughest

The toughest part of the project will be the ground network. Since virtually all land on the earth is claimed by one or another government, any buildings or equipment used to track and communicate with satellites in orbit would be subject to their laws (and enforcement).

Conceivably, a looser network of activists without a solid location could accomplish this in an underground fashion, but long-term, this is not likely to be a solution.

To counter this problem, the HGG project is proposing a ‘grid’ of small stations – something that could be in a person’s home, backyard, or even stashed on an abandoned property – that would act as a sort of reverse GPS. Rather than using a satellite to track geo-locations, the grid would use geolocation systems to track satellites. If the sites are fixed and in precisely-known locations, this would be easy and would not require expensive hardware.

HGG Overall

The total plan is ambitious, interesting, and definitely fun to speculate about. Would it make reality? That depends entirely on the will of those who are on-board with the project. Larger things have been accomplished by dedicated groups before. There’s no reason this one should be any different.

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Amazon proudly announced they sold over 4 million Kindle devices during the Holiday shopping season (late November through December). Over a million Kindles a week were purchased while e-book sales jumped 175% over last year.

More interesting information comes out of these figures. It’s not just about Amazon success. In fact, Amazon is suspected to have been losing money on every Kindle Fire sale (that can be read more than one way), but the huge increase in e-book purchases may have made up for that.

Kindle Sales Figures

The big news, from Amazon’s perspective, was in Kindle device sales. All three Kindle family products (Fire, Touch, and standard Kindle) held the top 3 spots on Amazon’s bestsellers list for the entire month of holiday shopping. The Fire was the most wished for and gifted product on the site this season as well.

Overseas, it was the top selling product in the UK, France, Spain and Italy.

Further, Amazon was prepared and had no back order issues this year and actually outpaced Apple’s iPad in sales as well.

E-Book Winners and Losers

With e-book sales up over 175% from last year, many authors and publishers made out very well this season. Interestingly, the number one and number four best selling electronic books this year were both self-published by the author independent of publishers via Kindle Direct Publishing. That’s an amazing statistic and shows something important: the old paradigm of publishing houses is falling.

E-books as gifts followed the sales trends, with year-on-year numbers matching sales growth. Christmas Day was the largest day ever for Kindle book downloads, which makes obvious sense.

The losers? Big publishing houses. Most of them count on hard-copy book sales during the holiday season and their sales figures this year were not so good. They remained relatively constant with little growth. Amazon reported that more e-books than hardcover books were sold during December and self-reported numbers from publishing houses seem to corroborate this with last year seeing more e-books sold than hard copies, as of February 2011.

Third-party Amazon.com Sales

Third-party sellers, now a big part of Amazon.com, also made out well this year. Third-party sellers experienced record holiday growth with 44% more $5,000+ sellers on Amazon than the year before. This makes sense, given the new, expanded, and easier-to-use seller platform Amazon rolled out and has been advertising heavily.

Bestseller Of All?

The best seller of all, according to Amazon numbers, was Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography. By a landslide. It was the most-browsed, most bought, and most gifted thing on Amazon ever.

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What’s enlightening is that Firefox came out last – even behind Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, which many would assume Google would target first. Instead, the target is Mozilla, Google’s on-again, off-again friend. The study itself is not exactly what I would describe as ‘in depth’ or ‘telling’ in its findings either, since it puts a lot of weight on emerging technologies that may or may not be enhancing our security while browsing the Web.

Read the rest of this story on the BFM Blog

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Who then owns the profile?

A lawsuit happening in a U.S. District Court in Pennsylvania is asking just that question.

The Back Story

Before we look at the suit itself, let’s look at the story behind it. A startup called Edcomm was purchased by another company, Sawabeh. Shortly after the buyout, the founders of Edcomm were fired. This quickly lead to a lot of lawsuits.

The lawsuit dealing with a social media account specifically involves Dr. Linda Eagle, PhD. Other allegations include breaches of contract and so forth. It seems that there may have been an agreement with Sawabeh that Edcomm would remain autonomous and retain its corporate officers (namly Dr. Eagle and two others).

The social media account in question, though, is Dr. Eagle’s LinkedIn account.

The Allegations

Both sides have different stories. Sawabeh says that it was Edcomm policy to create and maintain, at their own expense, social media accounts on behalf of their employees – specifically corporate staff and sales. Eagle says the opposite is true and that the account is hers.

The other founders involved in this case also had LinkedIn accounts, but are not, apparently, being included in this case because neither of their accounts were accessible by Edcomm employees when the company terminated them. Eagle’s however, was.

Sawabeh alleges that when Eagle left, she continued to use her LinkedIn account (which they claim as theirs) and that she took other items associated with it (a phone number she transferred to another phone, etc). Again, Dr. Eagle denies these claims and says the phone number was hers as was the laptop they say she took.

What’s really at stake here are the contacts made and networking achieved through Eagle’s LinkedIn account.

Social Contacts and Ownership

The real issue, as far as the LinkedIn account is concerned, are the contacts it has. When Eagle left, the company immediately changed her profile to hold the name of another employee and their photograph. This was what started the lawsuit. The company claimed ownership of the account, but was not claiming ownership over Eagle’s likeness or profile, just her contacts list, it appears.

That says something. The issue isn’t whether or not someone owns their LinkedIn profile, but whether or not they own the networking contacts that can be made through it. In a more broad sense, this would apply to all business-centered social media accounts.

So what do you think? Should a company be able to own the contacts lists their employees have on their social media accounts if those accounts are maintained at company expense? How far does this reach? If you are accessing your social media from work and even contacting business clients through them, you are in many ways using corporate resources for those accounts. Doesn’t that mean they have some kind of ownership interest in them? Or not?

These are hard questions, but it’s obvious that they’re going to become more and more common with the rise of social media in our daily personal and business lives.

Technorati Tags: employment, marketing, social media

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The pen is mightier than the sword. What a great line. Written no doubt by a pacifist I’m guessing, because I’m all for the power of the word (in the beginning there was only the word…) but facing someone in battle armed only with a ballpoint pen… I’d run a mile – unless of course I was Bruce Willis or Stallone, then I’d win no matter what.

But what has that go to do with the price of fish? Not a great deal other than the fact this annoyingly cute saying is in fact correct. Granted in physical combat it’s a no-win, but in todays wired world where we communicate at the speed of thought the sword is no match for the word.

And once you accept the power of the word – spoken or written, you begin to understand the true scope of its applicability to our very nature. The nature to which I refer to is that of our social qualities, the act of gathering together and exchanging stories, values, ideas and sharing perspectives and opinions.

The town square and village pub were slowly replaced online by the bulletin boards of the 1980′s and then again with the power of the Web and email. Today the next evolution has occurred with websites like Twitter, Facebook and other social networking venues. And if you think that these websites are just for kids talking about how cute someone is – you’d be wrong…very wrong.

Today many of these social networking ‘watering holes’ get more daily page views (traffic) than Google. Yes you read that right – MORE THAN GOOGLE. This watershed moment happened in the summer of 2007 and it’s been rising steadily since. This shift in “influence” has happened very quickly. The biggest surprise in the traffic game has been YouTube. This site now gets more daily traffic than Google by a very healthy margin and a visitor spends on average at least 15 minutes experiencing the content.

The other sites like Facebook are currently matching Google (however this is changing monthly and may well be higher by the time this goes to print.) You can see for yourself if you’d like by visiting www.alexa.com and typing in the names of the sites you’d like to compare.

Is this rapid rise of social marketing a surprise? Not to me. It’s human nature all over again. And if you stop and think about what this means to you, well it can be good or bad depending on how this new ‘force’ is applied. Today with Web2.0 and Social Marketing gaining momentum like never before, I’d have to agree that the pen is truly mightier than the sword – yet again.

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Evey: Who are you?

 

V: Who? Who is but the form following the function of what. And what I am is a man in a mask.

Evey: I can see that.

V: Of course you can. I’m not questioning your powers of observation, I’m merely remarking upon the paradox of asking a masked man who he is.

V: Voilà! In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran, cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of Fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished. However, this valorous visitation of a bygone vexation stands vivified, and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin vanguarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition. The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous. Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose, so let me simply add that it’s my very good honor to meet you and you may call me V.

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The Basics

Let’s start with the most basic (but, nonetheless important) differences between the two devices. Physically, the new iPad 2 weighs in at only 1.3 pounds, making it 15% lighter than its predecessor. It is also about 33% thinner – and of a physical change to make a completely noticeable difference in user experience between the two. The battery, which can be charged via USB or the included adapter, lasts up to 10 hours, even when you’re surfing the web, video chatting or playing games on the brightly backlit screen. Plus, the battery of the iPad 2 charges faster than the original, even though its 59% smaller.

The Hardware

Even though the physical differences are interesting, when you ask ‘What does the new iPad 2 have?’ you really want to know ‘What kind of cool stuff can it do?’ The new iPad 2 doesn’t let you down with new hardware that includes a forward-facing camera that allows you to chat face to face with other iPads and supported devices plus a rear-facing camera that can also be used. Both cameras are able to take both video and still pictures that can be morphed and changed using the included software.

There’s also a 3-axis gyroscope, 3-axis accelerometer and a digital compass housed inside so the device reacts quickly and accurately to tilting and shaking – making it the perfect controller for tons of games and apps.

The Speed

Here is where the new iPad 2 really takes off. It is powered by a dual core Apple A5 processor, which results in a processing speed twice as fast as the original iPad and graphics processing power of up to nine times that of the original. Translation? The iPad 2 has some serious ‘go power’, click the button and apps, games or anything else will load instantaneously.

The iPad 2 is able to surf the internet with blazing speed. It runs off of a Wi-Fi connection with the option to upgrade to a 3G connection so you can view just about any web content with incredible speed. You won’t have to sit and wait for your Facebook games to load!

We can’t forget about all of the optional accessories either. The new smart cover was made exclusively for the iPad 2. The incredibly thin cover attaches to the device magnetically and can also work as a tilt stand. Plus, the microfiber lining inside the cover cleans your screen every time you close it. There are also accessories that can connect the the devices video output to a television, connect a keyboard or control the device with a remote.

So, the next time one of your friends asks “What does the new iPad 2 have?” You’ll know just what to say – everything!

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