commbasics

I've mentioned our VComm event from last January a couple of times and the results are still emerging.  Today, however, I got an unsolicited response from one of the Scottish companies that participated.  Actually got a little teary reading it. "VComm represented an excellent introduction to the American venture capital scene. Not only was the room filled with the right people – they were warmed up, welcoming and ready to invest. The online training from the organizers was fantastic for the novice presenter and seasoned campaigner alike. Your YouTube and New Tech Press videos concisely focused on the key message and importantly only took ten minutes out of the viewer's day.  "By following your hints and tips on successful presenting we have been approached by 5 VC’s with an interest in investing. In turn the venture community is now talking about us and we have seen an uplift in our web traffic stateside as a direct result. The most significant devel...

One of the first interviews I did on State of the Media was with my old friend, Marty Weybret, publisher of the Lodi News Sentinel (which is one of the oldest family-owned daily newspapers left in America).  At the time, the LNS was still doing well but Marty saw the handwriting on the wall.  I've been pushing my friend to get more involved with social media and he finally got onto Facebook and is getting pretty active.  He wrote a note with 10 questions on the future on journalism and asked for my input.  I'm putting it up on his notes, but I thought it would be good for fodder here as well. Does "free on the Internet" mean news now has no economic value? The only reason free content is on the internet is because the people placing it there have not assigned value to it.  Case in point is the Wall Street Journal.  They still charge a subscription to see much of their content.  They got a lot of flack at the beginning of Web 2....

I was down in San Jose to meet with a company about a social media program and as potential fodder for New Tech Press and, since I was in the neighborhood, dropped into DVCon to see what was up. Not much, it seems.  I'm going back tomorrow because some questions popped up in the conversations so I'm going back to get answers.  But there were some things that surprised me, frankly. First, apparently some people are taking what I write about seriously and considering it.  That's good news.  So there is hope out there.  Now we need some people who will act on it seriously. Second, Sean Murphy spotted me and said "I thought you had given up on EDA!"  I can see why he thinks that considering I think most of the marketing in EDA is brain dead, but I'm not alone in that.  Let me be clear:  I think EDA is a fascinating industry that has the potential to be much more than it is.  But the problem is that most of th...

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OK, so I got no comments on my posting where I said “...advertising doesn’t work ...” on the blog site.  I did get phone calls, text messages and a few emails.  Mostly from advertising sales people I know.  They didn’t read the entire statement on advertising.  They only saw those three words.  So let me be clear: INTERNET advertising doesn’t work LIKE WE THINK IT DOES.  I’ll be even more specific.  ADVERTISING doesn’t work like we think it does. I’ve said this before.  Everyone THINKS advertising increases sales directly.  Everyone THINKS advertising drives lead generation.  It does none of that.  Advertising only reinforces and validates a decision that has already been made.  No one looks at an ad and says, “Holy crap, I need me one of them!”   Unless they are an idiot, that is.  No thinking person believes advertising.  Ask the minion in the next cubicle if he believes what ads push... unless y...

There is a common belief among the tech industries that the most important person to talk to is the engineer.   Magazines like EDN , EE Times , Electronic Design and Electronic Products are traditionally dedicated to the electronics engineer and providing "solutions" to the engineer's problems.   They are right, of course, that the engineer has to be convinced before a product can be sold, but the problem is that in today's economy, the engineer isn’t the final decision maker.   That decision rests with the CFO.   And they aren't buying anything right now because no one is telling them what they want to hear. The CFO asks only one important question and, invariably, the head of engineering answers that question wrong.   And the reason they answer the question wrong is because the vendor's marketing efforts are geared only to answer the questions the engineers ask, so the engineers are not prepared to answer the CFO correctly. Wha...

Back in the 60's and 70's a lot of young people got around the country by hitchhiking.   For a long time, that was considered a cheap way of getting around the country, but in the mid 70's some people started requiring hitchhikers to pony up some of the expense.   There was a popular bumper sticker that spelled it out. "Gas, grass or ass.   No one rides for free." This week there has been a controversy simmering over Facebook's revision of it terms of use , which essentially states that any content you post on your personal Facebook pages becomes the property of Facebook.   That includes the pictures of your kids and vacations, your essays (notes), and the information you share about yourself.   Lot's of people are pissed off about this and are considering quitting Facebook, but they can no longer pull the content out of the Facebook servers. The concern has to do with not only content ownership, but privacy issues.   Ove...

As I said in the last post, our hope lies in our willingness to move outside our circle of comfort.   What blows me away is that most people are less likely to make that move when their circle is putrefying around them.   The news is filled right now with the hope that whatever the federal government does with the stimulus package will solve the problem.   At the same time, no one believes it will.   So the nation's hope is in an organization no one has any faith in.   I've been peppering these posts on hope with pithy quotes from past presidents and now seems to be a good time to pull out this one.   "Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country." -- John Kennedy In a time when we are invoking the names of people like Kennedy, Lincoln, and Roosevelt, we aren't spending a whole lot of time paying attention to what they actually stood for, and that is the individual responsibility to not give i...

"If Not Us, Who? If Not Now, When?" —Rabbi Hillel (Ronald Reagan only quoted him) Hope requires faith, and as the Bible says, faith is not faith if you can see with your eyes what it is you are hoping for.   But for faith to live, someone's gotta have hope. Hope is not wishful thinking.   That's because most wishful thinking is being wistful to a return to the "good old days" before you lost hope.   Hope is looking forward.   There are some people doing just that and that's what we need right now, real leaders with hope. I've met several over the past few months that are hopeful about the immediate future.   People like former Synopsys exec Sanjiv Kaul,   Morgenthaler's Drew Lanza, and two guys forming a huge fund called NEOS that you will be hearing about over the next year.   Corporations like nVidia , Virgin, Siemens and   SAP are launching major investment funds this year and are looking all ...

A few weeks ago, I got an email from Dylan McGrath at EE Times asking me if I knew of any companies doing well, because he wanted to write some good news.  I told him that there was a lot of hope out there, but nothing that can be reported publicly right now. I thought about that email for a while and decided I should talk about what is going on in the world from a larger perspective.  So Dylan, this was inspired by you.   Bobby Kennedy said during his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination that,  "Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly."   A lot of people may think that the US economy indicates too many people have failed greatly already and are wondering when the great achievement is going to begin.   But in this first message of hope, I want to start by saying that what we have been daring to do in the past decade is mostly hold on to what we have.   We really haven't been doing much to reach for...

With the news that the General Assembly of Maryland is banning Facebook and Myspace connections, we have an interesting issue before us regarding social media.  Is "big" a good thing or do good things really come in small packages? Some people think Facebook, growing at millions of people every month, is a good place to build your community, but when you have a widespread network, hacker bozos like messing with you.  The reason Mac's are generally immune to computer viruses is that there are not enough people using them for malware hackers to cause the mayhem they like to do.  Facebook and Myspace present the kind of playground the web-vandals like to ransack. But so far, the smaller, more focused players in social media, like Linkedin and Plaxo have been fairly immune to malware.  So what I am wondering is, have we gone past the time of importance for mass media?  Are we, as Seth Godin sees it, becoming a planet of tribes again?   I...

Time Magazine had an article this week on " How to save your newspaper " and guess what?  They said dependence on advertising is a stupid way to run a newspaper. Duh.   So someone else is going to have to foot the bill for real news.  It may be the reader, or it could be sponsored, objective content.  What part of this are we not getting?