Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Pudding Media would like to do for your phone calls what Google AdWords does for your inbox: make it free, by giving advertisers access to you during your call.  They accomplish this magic by listening in on the call for specific keywords, and then pushing the advertising back to a PC based on what you're talking about. 

Sound a little big brotherish?  Yup.  Will people do it?  Bet on it!  Today's web surfer willingly lets Google read his or her inbox, surrenders a cookied click trail to whatever site asks, and walks the downtown streets under the unblinking stare of thousands of surveillance cameras.  Letting Pudding Media eavesdrop on calls just won't seem that scary. 

Yeah, it's probably not going to be a compelling proposition to start.  The likelihood is that it will be a little clunky, and people cautious.  But sure as water flows down hill, we're going to have advertising on our telephones… relevant, contextually targeted advertising. 

I'm opposed to Dave Winer's proposal to chuck the term social graph and replace it with social network.  The internet was conceived of as a tool for good, and a means for the education and edification of the public at large. It wasn't supposed to be an endless dripping pipe of pornography, drivelly blog postings, stolen music and banal choppy video.  I'm sure we can all agree that bringing graph theory to the masses is a far more noble cause than endlessly surfing for Britney Spears' latest faux pas.  

You know, understanding graph theory ought to be a pre-requisite for being allowed to use the internet.  Prospective internet surfers could line up annually at the Department of Internet Licensing, solve the Seven Bridges problem (or some other equally trivial enumeration problem), and receive their photo-ID permitting them to use the Oracle of the W3C's creation for one more year.   In fact, this such a good idea I think I'll go propagate this meme to a few edge nodes in my graph to see if I can get them to join the cause!

Besides, Dave, just between you and me… how bad can a thing be when it results in the shaming of Nick Carr?

[n.b. At least one person mistook the idea that we might have a "license to surf" as serious on my part. This is a humorous suggestion, and in actual fact I agree with Winer and Carr.]

Blackfriar's The gutsy marketing and strategy behind Apple's iPhone price cut is a succinct dissection of the iPhone strategy.  The piece points out that Apple is trying to reorganize the telecom value chain by making the phones the story for consumers — not the carrier.  This strategy can work well in a market where carrier choice exists.  The obvious question, then, is why would Mr. Rogers ever bring this phone and business model to Canada?  With Rogers' monopoly on GSM and GSM devices, the deals that Apple is cutting in Europe simply wouldn't be attractive.

The market research possibilities on Facebook are amazing.   

• Need to ask a targeted demographic a few key questions?  Run a poll for pennies a response. You'll have your answer in a few hours.
• Want to test an offer?  Buy a flyer… again for pennies a response. Within a few hours, you'll have accurate click through numbers.
• Need some qualitative data? Forget about focus groups.  Just ask a selection of people in your target audience via messages.

At one time in my career I ran a market research group for Microsoft with an annual budget in the millions. Testing product concepts, and advertising can easily cost tens of thousands of dollars to get the most basic results. For our FREE Conference Calling application on Facebook, we've done product concepts, messaging and offer testing for a few hundred dollars. 

Innoculate, culture, and read the results… Facebook is a petrie dish… for marketers, that is. 

One of the things we did when we created our Facebook Free Conference Call application was to allow people to create public conference calls.  The idea behind this feature is that you will be able to create public events that happen on a conference call.  Market research showed that Facebook users would be interested in being able to hold live events with sports stars, musicians and political figures… just to name a few.

So I've created an event.  On the October 10th ballot in Ontario, we're going to be asked to vote on whether to change our system of elections from the current first past the post model to a mixed member proportional model.  What does this mean?  What are the pro's and con's? 

If you're on Facebook today, join me on September 20th at 10 AM to discuss this topic.  And if not a Facebook user, but you still want to join the conversation, drop me a piece of email and I will send an RSVP link. And for more information about the ballot, visit the Referendum Ontario site.