Virtual Goods + Mobile Payments = Small Market Worth Fighting Fo. The promise of “virtual goods”–pretend things you buy with real money in cyberspace–has lured entrepreneurs and venture capitalists for years. Same goes for mobile payments–using your iPhone instead of your Amex to buy stuff. But what if you combined the two? You’d have a market that barely exists yet is worth fighting over. At least that’s what Zong, a Swiss-based company, and Boku, a rollup of two other mobile payment companies (Mobillcash and Paymo) are doing. Both offer the same thing: The ability to buy stuff online that gets billed to your wireless account.
In theory, you could use the same technology to buy actual stuff as well, but the businesses are really geared around microtransactions–pretend weapons on the “Mob Wars” Facebook app, piratey stuff on Puzzle Pirates–for which it wouldn’t make sense to use a credit card. The New Facebook News Feed and What It Means. Facebook just made one of the biggest changes to the site's user experience since the introduction of the News Feed three years ago. News Feed was the place in the very center of the site where all the activities of a user's friends were displayed in reverse chronological order. That feature is now called the Live Feed and the News Feed has become a filtered display of activity highlights instead. In September 2006 the News Feed was a radical idea; thousands of Facebook users revolted against the idea that all their friends would be shown every photo they uploaded, when their relationship status changed and other information as soon as it was available.
Today we live in a different world. The real-time flow of social activity data is very exciting, but many people have cautioned that it will be a net-negative for users' experience of the web as we're flooded with an overwhelming quantity of low-quality information. Everyone's trying to solve this problem. How It Works What It Means. Q&A: Dan Lyons Talks to Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg [Ne. Texas A&M Takes an Active Approach to Social Media Marketing. Features Texas A&M Takes an Active Approach to Social Media Marketing Multitudes of potential students are found online these days--tweeting, blogging, MySpacing, and Facebooking--but marketing to these prospects in their native environments isn't as simple and straightforward as it might seem at first. Diane McDonald, associate director of marketing at Texas A&M University, explained that reaching these prospects via social media takes more than a static institutional Facebook page; it takes an active approach to engage them.
With an eye on increasing admissions applications, in late 2008 McDonald launched a new marketing campaign via a microsite called Do You Wonder? It features audio and video recordings of various aspects of university life and student activities. "The vision was to create an online campaign that would put our students as the face of our marketing," she said. Welcome to Conference 2.0. AUSTIN, TEXAS (Fortune) -- We've all been there: the dull business conference. A half-empty room of half-asleep attendees answer their e-mail on laptops and BlackBerries, while some hapless speaker lumbers through a PowerPoint speech.
That scenario is about to change, thanks to the growing ubiquity of social media. Consider author Sarah Lacy's disastrous interview of Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the annual South by Southwest Interactive Festival here. Lacy, a Business Week columnist and author of a forthcoming book on Zuckerberg and other Web 2.0 titans, drew the crowd's wrath by asking Zuckerberg too many questions about his age and his company's outrageous $15 billion valuation and not enough questions about issues more fundamental to how Facebook operates - things like trust, privacy, and accessibility to software developers. On top of that, Lacy interrupted Zuckerberg, seemed to flirt with him, and then grew hostile as the crowd turned against her. Marketing Your Business With Facebook. How Many Facebook Users Will Go Public?
Captain's Blog: The end of blogging | Fortune. NEW YORK (Fortune) -- I'm not blogging as much as I used to. Part of it probably has to do with the job - it's just tough to find the time. (Despite what J.J. Cale might tell you, it's not easy to let it all hang out after midnight.) But I think a bigger reason simply might be that I have literally been Facebooking and Twittering (some say frittering) all my content away!
I get a thought, I meet someone interesting, I go somewhere cool, and then snap crackle pop, I put it up. Of course it's more complicated than that. That kind of stuff. The latest issue of New York Magazine has a cover story on this sort of: "In Defense of Distraction," but the joke at the Fortune morning meeting today was, "yeah I started it, but I just stopped after a while. " It won't stop any time soon either. The answer/solution here is unclear, but coping is absolutely necessary. And I am discovering and listening to Roy Hargrove and Benny Golson. Accenture takes a page from Web 2.0. One of the world’s largest IT consulting firms holds a conference in the eternal city of Rome to look at future technologies. Plus: How Fox Interactive turns brands into “friends” ROME — Donald Rippert’s 13-year-old son asked recently what his father’s e-mail address had been when he was 13.
Not feeling like trying to explain to his boy that when he was a teenager, e-mail hadn’t been invented, Rippert just told him it was “Commander Cool.” These days, having a teenage son probably helps Rippert do his job. He is chief technology officer for global consulting firm Accenture, and in the kinds of things teenagers are doing online he sees the future of computing in the enterprise.
Speaking at Accenture’s Global Convergence Forum, held this week, Rippert described how he is borrowing ideas from online services such as Facebook, De.licio.us, YouTube, Wikipedia and Second Life to remake Accenture’s employee intranet. There will be more. Comment: info@itbusiness.ca.