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Marketing Strategy for Radio Shack

Our friend, and client, Hall Financial took a major stake in North Texas based Radio Shack a while back so we have been thinking of ways they could make that investment pay off. So when I read a post about the Sebastopol, CA Radio Shack showcasing Make: Magazine I wanted to point it out to our friends at Hall and Radio Shack.

If Radio Shack has not approached Make officially (i.e. assuming this was a one store thing) I would recommend figuring out how to more tightly integrate the two brands. Imagine if Radio Shack could coordinate their stock with the release of the magazine? They could have all of the parts needed to build various projects in the magazine to coinside with the release of each issue. I love Make and have always enjoyed browsing through the parts at Radio Shack (i just needed an excuse to buy a resitor or transciever ~ MAKE might just be that excuse).

What is Make:? Wikipedia explains: Make (or MAKE) is a quarterly magazine published by O’Reilly Media which focuses on do it yourself (DIY) projects involving computers, electronics, robotics, metalworking, woodworking and other disciplines. The magazine is marketed to people who enjoy "making" things and features complex projects which can often be completed with cheap materials, including household items.

Update: doing a little digging I noticed Make already sends business to Radio Shack as evidenced by a post titled, "HOW TO - Make a Radio Shack optical Theremin." Imagine if the two worked together a bit more. It seems like Radio Shack might need the help as John Moore points out that even Julian Day, the company’s new CEO "admitted he has “no idea” how the company makes money." Evidently I am not the only person who came up with the Make/Radio Shack idea. Piers Fawkes asked the same question last week in a post titled, "Will MAKE Magazine Save RadioShack?"

Gumball 3000

Update: May 4, 2007: Two British drivers lost control of their car and killed the driver of an oncoming car.  The race was cancelled as a result.  Nightmare.  More here. 

This year’s Gumball 3000 started today in Pall Mall, London. Several friends of mine paid the $55,000 entry fee (over 100 contestants signed up). I have always wanted to attend, maybe next year (if my wife agrees to forgo a new kitchen). What is the Gumball 3000? According to Wikipedia:

The Gumball 3000 is an annual 3000-mi (5000 km) international car rally that occurs on public roads, typically in Europe. With stops at tourist attractions or in large urban centers, the race is modeled after coast-to-coast races in the United States and garners international news coverage and participation from celebrities in film, television, music, fashion, and modeling.

Here are the details of this year’s race:

• 29th April 2007 Car display & Start in Pall Mall, London Cars drive to Amsterdam checkpoint
• 30th April 2007 Cars drive through the night to the Frankfurt Checkpoint. Cars and drivers loaded onto planes and flown to Istanbul Arrive in Istanbul
• 1st May 2007 Istanbul to Athens via Thessaloniki checkpoint
• 2nd May 2007 Athens to Dubrovnik
• 3rd May 2007 Dubrovnik to Bratislava
• 4th May 2007 Bratislava to Berlin via Prague checkpoint
• 5th May 2007 Berlin to London Final Party, music concert in London

You can follow along via Flickr. Here are some pics of the car display and start today:

Twitter’s biggest rival: Facebook?

I thought Jaiku was Twitter’s biggest competitor.  Turns out Facebook is, according to Alex Saunders who points out that Facebook is Twitter plus:

• aggregated feeds from outside sources
• significant personal / professional profile information available from members
• large networks of friends to draw from
• events, and groups to participate in
• conversation threads
• fine-grained privacy control
• a large audience already acquired

Note to Biggu guys, see if we can integrate egorcast’s functionality into Facebook. . .

Casual Development Part III: Egorcast

In part one on my series on casual development I highlighted the ‘what‘ in part two the ‘how‘ and now in part three I will highlight the ‘why’.

THE WHY:

So, why not?  Sometimes it is fun to build something for the sake of building it.  I got a call from a reporter doing a story on Twitter and she asked, "What is the business model behind Egorcast? Do you have an exit strategy?"  

I thought she must be joking.  I almost fell out of my chair and asked if she had been reading my blog as last week as I had written a post titled, "What is your exit strategy?"  The about text on the Egorcast website explains it fairly well:

EgorCast is a simple ‘mashup’ created by the development team at Big in Japan. The idea is to take two great ideas, put them together and make ‘two great ideas that taste great together.’ Leveraging various resources in the organization with expertise with Rails, SMS, Voice, VoIP, Postfix, Gentoo and Apache the team was able to build the service in less than a week. EgorCast was not designed as a business, but an example of the sort of projects our team is capable of building.  Big in Japan provides a unique combination of marketing and technology to help companies leverage social media. We work with leading companies like LEGO and FOX to build online communities and tools to help people use the web. Our social media services and tools can make your company Big in Japan. Big in Jersey. Big to all those who matter to you. Big is connection. Big is relationship. Big is success. Get big now!

At the end of the day I think the main reason why is, "because we can."  Hopefully we will learn from our efforts.  Perhaps potential employees will realize that our shop is a cool place to work (we are hiring).  Finally, we might inspire someone else to build something even cooler.  The Concorde didn’t have a business model or an exit strategy, but aren’t you glad they built it?

 

Linkbait…

Want someone to link to your blog?  There are several tried and true strategies you can employ (I am much too lazy to do any of them with regularity).  Need a nononsense guide to linkbaiting?  Check out Jason Calacanis’ ‘how-to’ post on linkbaiting titled, "New Calacanis link-baiting ruls."  The new rules are lettered A-I. 

Rule F resonates with my ego: post a picture of me when I wasn’t fat. I’m not gonna link to some post where I look fat… come on. Use an old photo of me from like 2000 and you’re getting the link for sure!

I could add, "also, when I wasn’t bald!"

Casual Development Part II: Egorcast

In part one of my series on casual development I highlighted the ‘what‘, now I will highlight the ‘how.’  

THE HOW:

Once we decided to build a Jott to Twitter application we had to figure out how to do it.  Of course we would be using the Ruby on Rails framework, but how would it work?  The actual operation of Egorcast would be fairly simple. 

• Step One: We create a unique @egorcast.com email for each user.
• Step Two: The user enters that @egorcast.com email in their Jott.com account.
• Step Three: The user enters their Twitter login information into Egorcast.
• Step Four: The user calls Jott and records a message and it magically appears in Twitter.

Of course, I decided to make things a little more complicated.  Leo Laporte left Twitter for a competitor called Jaiku.  I suggested, what if Egorcast could be a gateway to both platforms so that people would not have to choose between the two.  Then Mike suggested that we include the ability to post to your blog as well.  Suddenly the simple application got a little more complicated.

Jeremy was able to whip up a simple design in CSS within a day and we happened to have a logo ready to go (from another project we cancelled last year).  We printed out the API documentation for Twitter and Jaiku and Scott reviewed it over the weekend.  Twitter uses a simple REST API, while Jaiku uses a key based XML-RPC interface.  Next we implemented the Metaweblog API to post to WordPress blogs.  Finally, we selected Postfix to process the email.  By Tuesday night we were demoing Egorcast at DemoCampDallas2.  It was working well by Wednesday night.  Check it out yourself.  For our next installment I will explain the WHY. 

 

Speaking Today @ The Presidents’ Forum of Dallas

Earlier this year I was asked to speak at the The Entrepreneurship Institute’s annual Presidents’ Forum here in Dallas.  I had a chance to catch a few of the presentations before my panel.  I really enjoyed listening to Carlos Sepulveda, CEO of Interstate Batteries, talk about his experience leading employees.  I won’t bother to blog his presentation, but I will relay something he said at the very end that caught my ear. 

One of the audience members asked Carlos if he had or planned to write a book on leadership. Carlos said no.  In follow-up, Carlos explained he wouldn’t write a book he wasn’t willing to read.  He then admitted that he had never read a single business book from a CEO.  He then explained the only book that he reads is the Bible.  He then spent thirty seconds explaining how every aspect of his leadership style comes from and is inspired by the Bible.  It was moving…

 

Twitter’s Business Model

Since the Big in Japan team built Egorcast I have been playing with Twitter.  Without even trying I have 71 friends and 28 followers.  Lots of people, besides our own team, have been busy building Twitter mash-ups (click here for a partial list).  Why?  I don’t really know, perhaps ‘because EVERYONE is doing it?’

David Chartier wrote a post earlier today titled, "Six ways Twitter can make money."  He explains that the creators of Twitter are doing a lot of ‘hinting’ about practical uses for the service, but they aren’t saying how they plan to make money.  David has a few ideas:

• Twitter Pro (paid service offering more features ~ freemium model)
• Merchandise (Twitter t-shirts?)
• Twitter for Business (a la Google Apps)
• Twitter Forums with tasteful ads

David did talk to Ev who suggested how Obvious might start generating revenue in short order:

• Selling tasteful sponsorships
• Charging companies who use it for marketing or commercial purposes (like MySpace)

It will be interesting to see how Twitter’s business model develops.

 

D | All Things Digital Launches!

Valleywag points to today’ launch of Dow Jones newest website, AllThingsD.com.  According to the site AllThingsD is, "devoted to news, analysis and opinion on technology, the Internet and media. But it is different from other sites in this space. It is a fusion of different media styles, different topics, different formats and different sources."  The site competes with the likes of gigaom.com.  So what?  Well the site will be the new home for heavy hitters like:

• Kara Swisher (she started covering digital issues for the The Wall Street Journal’s San Francisco bureau in 1997 and also wrote the BoomTown column about the sector.)
• Walt Mossberg (he writes two columns, and edits a third, for the Wall Street Journal. He also publishes periodic interviews for the Journal, and occasional blog posts)
• John Paczkowski (he has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley’s daily newspaper.)
• Also Katherine Boehret, Beth Callaghan, John Sullivan and Lia Lorenzano-Kennett

 

Giga Liz Gannez explaines, "Swisher and Mossberg have clearly thought about which parts of the web they want to embrace and which they’d rather not, setting our a deliberate comment policy that requires registration and promises to excise comments that are “juvenile, venomous, self-promotional or irrelevant.” No ad hominem attacks whatsoever will be accepted — “There are plenty of places on the Web where you can accuse tech moguls of being greedy or vain. This isn’t one of them.” So while we at GigaOM might have some new competition, Valleywag has nothing to worry about."

Casual Development Part I: Egorcast

THE WHAT: 

The Big in Japan team has been super busy with paying work lately.  We have revamped most of our free tools (moving from hosted services to sourcecode releases) and we haven’t really worked on a public application since.  Last week I got the team together and we talked about what sort of ’side’ projects they were interested in working on.  We also talked about some guidelines for acceptable ’side’ projects:

• The application should build on the efforts of others, i.e. using one or more APIs
• The application should require less than a week of coding
• The application should be fun, simple and easy to understand

Using the whiteboard we listed a number of ideas.  We made a decision that each month we would pick one of these ideas and build it around our paying work.  The first idea was VERY simple and the guys got started building last Friday.  Everyone has been talking about Twitter since SXSW.  For those of you who don’t know what Twitter is I recommend the Wikipedia entry.  Internally we were intrigued by Jott’s transcription service (you dial a number, record a message and in a few minutes someone transcribes it and emails it to you).  The cool feature offered by Twitter is the ability to SMS messages to Twitter while you are on the go - i.e. that is why they call it mo-blogging (mobile blogging).  What if you hate typing on your cell phone?  How about being able to record a message that would then show up on Twitter?  Our idea was to mash-up Jott’s transcription service with Twitter using their API.  We decided to call our little application Egorcast.

The idea met our requirements: a) It used Twitter’s API and used Jott’s service, b) we could build it in less than three days, c) and we thought it would be fun (it was/is). 

My next post will describe THE HOW. . . 

Gun Town USA: 25 years later

Back in the early 80’s you may recall that a small town in Georgia passed a law requiring each head of household to own a gun.  My liberal friends predicted a blood bath, but 25 years later the town’s crime rate has plummeted without a single murder since the law was passed.  During the same time a small town in Illinois adopted a gun ban.  That town saw in an increase in crime after the ban.

Obviously it is not a fair comparison, the criminals in Illinois flock to the area where they know the people are unarmed, while the criminals in Georgia stay away from the are where they know the people might shoot back.  Clearly, criminals are more likely to focus on the weakest targets and stay away from the more dangerous ones.  To have a fair comparison we would need two islands without significant immigration or tourism.  [via]

Anti-Social Media: Russian Radio’s 50% Positive Rule

The Russian News Service has some new rules:

• 50% of news stories about Russia MUST be positive.
• The United States must be portrayed as the enemy.

This according to an article by the New York Times titled, "50% Good News is the Bad News in Russian Radio".   

Big in Japan Mashup: Jott to Twitter (Jaiku and WordPress too)

Big in Japan’s April ‘casual application’ (i.e. an application that can be built in less than a week) release is almost ready for primetime. We started coding the application on Friday and had our first release this evening (at DemoCampDallas2). It works for me, but it is not ready for primetime. Update: it is up and running here.  Here is the scoop:

EgorCast™ is a simple web service designed to integrate the functionality of jott.com and social mo-blogging (mobile blogging) services such as Twitter.com and Jaiku.com. Jott allows users to dial a predetermined number and record a 15 second message. Jott then transcribes the message and emails the transcription to your phone or email account. EgorCast provides a gateway between the messages from Jott and social mo-blogging services such as Twitter and Jaiku (or both if you want). EgorCast will also send your messages to your WordPress blog with a specific category or tag.

Dallas DemoCamp2

DemoCampDallas2 started out with a bang with Adam Keys serving as host? What is DemoCamp? DemoCamp is a variation of the un-conference style of event, started by the TorCamp group as an excuse to have more regular meetings. The idea is simple, just demo your application, no powerpoint slides, no marketing fluff, no exit strategy discussion, nothing but the application. Just Demo It! Check out the Flickrstream of the event here. Demos included:

• Joyomi - Bill Burcham
• Daytripr - Christopher St. John
• DreamCars - Curtis Garrison
• Podcast Pickle - Gary Leland
• iNearby - Jim Young, Kinan Sweidan
• Viewzi - Brandon Cotter

Bill Burcham started out the demo’s with Joyomi, a web application that helps you keep track of who owes you stuff. Ug, I hope he doesn’t use it on me… The last thing I need is a tool for people to use to hold me to my agreements.

 

Christopher St. John demo’ed Daytripr, a web application to help plan his day trips. The idea is to plan, take and share daytrips. Seems cool, but I would call it roadtripr instead. The most interesting application is relative to travels on the country’s highways and byways. Fun little application.

Curtis Garison demo’ed DreamCars.com a community auction website for classic cars. The is site is very early in development, but could be thought of as a Zillow for cars. You could claim your dream car and add photos and other information creating a permanent page for a particular car that might be transferred with the ownership of the car.

Gary Leland demo’ed Podcast Pickle. Neat podcast and videocast community. Great PayPal, Amazon, ebay and Flickr integration.

iNearby was demo’ed by Kinan Sweidan and Jim Young. The application applies location and group filtering for applications like Twitter. Twitter is too noisey, but with iNearby you can use your exisitng devices to login into a backchannel at events or venues you are attending.

Brandon Cotter demo’ed Viewzi.  Very cool.  New search tool that allows user to create ‘views’ of a particular topic.  Think Wikipedia for search with multimedia integration.  Very, very cool idea.

What is your exit strategy?

Periodically I take meetings with venture capital and private equity folks who want to invest in our business.  We are not interested in raising money, but I love an excuse to talk about our business.  The one question that I don’t have a good answer for is, "What is your exit strategy?" 

Exit strategy?  Why do I need one?  John Dovorak explained, "At one of the parties, a guy walked up to me to complain. "The trouble with you business writers is that you always ask about exit strategies. If I was Elvis Presley and you came up to me, would you be asking about exit strategies? Would you ask me what’s my business model?"

I want to build a business I don’t want to exit. . . 

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