UPEI - BUS442.0

Well guys, it’s been a fun course, but I’m afraid that this will probably be my last post. I don’t know about everyone else, but I’ve kinda become depressed when I read my RSS feed and realize that I don’t have to post on anything I read.

Therefore…… I’ve decided to make my own personal blog (woot, my first link!).  I’ll probably never write on it (like Dave), but I think it’s good to have one anyway. Here’s the link if anyone is interested, but it’s mostly just personal stuff, as apposed to being interesting like what we’ve talked about in class.

It’s been a good class and I hope everyone continues using what we’ve learned.

Cheers,

David McKenna

This may be a little bit of an overstatement, but from the talk of nearly EVERYONE over the last two weeks, Friendfeed is the next big thing. So far I’ve noticed Robert Scoble, Dave Winer, Fred Wilson, and Techcrunch comment on it, and I’m sure I’ve missed or dismissed many other bloggers commenting on Friendfeed.

What my understanding of Friendfeed is, is a one stop shop for all of your information needs. Tired of having to check out your Twitter, RSS reader, delicious, etc. accounts to get all of the latest news? Now all you have to do is join friendfeed, which amalgamates all of your friends twitter/blog/everything else together so you can get updated on everything they are doing, but in the same spot.

Besides the incredible benefits and A-lister recommendations, why is Friendfeed so good? For many reasons really. One of which, is their commitment to the user. Fred Wilson had a little bit of beef with a few aspects on Friendfeed, and so created a list of things they would like changed. Shortly after he received an email from one of the founders of Friendfeed saying he had passed the list around to the employees of the company, and they liked them and immediately began working on them. Now that is customer service.

Also, Dave Winer has been very impressed with the fact that Friendfeed has done a lot of work, and relatively quickly, dealing with Twitter users on Friendfeed. Although Twitter may be an acquired taste, people who use Twitter demand that it works well on Friendfeed. Friendfeed has worked very hard in making this possible.

Thats all for now I guess.

Cheers,

David McKenna

I guess I’m a little behind everyone else for the blog post about free, but I figure it’s about time I had my voice heard on the matter. I realize that probably no one besides Dave will read this due to too much free exposure to free, but here goes…

My first experience of free is when i got my first bank account. My mom and dad took me to Scotiabank to deposit money I had received for my birthday, and we put it in a bank account with an extremely low interest rate. About a year later, I received a notice saying that my account balance had gone up somewhere around the area of 1 cent. I was ecstatic. For some reason, the bank had decided to give me free money, for absolutely no reason (besides the fact that they had possession of my money for a year, but I didn’t know it then). I knew then that I would love free things for the rest of my life.

On a different note, I’ve recently been reading Seth Godin’s blog post called Where to find great ideas and arresting images. In it, he quickly discussed how Flickr is a great place to get free pictures (such as the one to the right), as well as free ideas that can be used to put the picuture/image in context. Therefore, looking for inspiration, I searched over 500 images hoping for inspiration. I don’t know about inspiration, but I sure did see a lot of pictures about “Free Burma”, and “Free Hugs”.

In my search of free, I’ve realized two things. Nothing is ever free (including hugs), and people appreciate things more, if they aren’t free. I’ll touch on the second one first.

If a person’s greatest ambition is to purchase a new car, and they spend years saving every penny for this car, then when they eventually do get it, they will treat it like gold due to the hard work and sacrifice placed forth in obtaining it. If the same person were given a car for free, say like a student receiving a car from their parents, it is doubtful that this car will be treated with the same respect that it would have if they had personally purchased it. Free breeds disrespect for a product or service.

My second realization, nothing is free, I believe under every circumstance, must be true. Nothing would exist without someone putting forth an effort to create or obtain it. For the most obvious examples, technology, such as open source software, is not free. Even if it is free to the consumer, it cost somebody something. The developers of Linux give their software to consumers for free, but it costs the developers substantially in time and money. How do they make up for this cost? They charge people for the support of the software, like IBM does for Linux.

Conclusion, nothing is free. If one person gets something for free, another person (or company) had to pay for it. Hugs are free? No, they cost the person the energy and time to give that hug. Google’s search engine is free? No, Google makes billions in revenue as a result of having a search engine. Even if you find a $20 bill blowing across the road and pick it up, it is not free, because you had to expend the energy to chase after it and pick it up (as well as it cost the person that lost it by having $20 less, and having expending the energy in actually losing it).

At the very minimum, a product or service that a person receives for “free” cost someone time and energy. It is the amount of time or energy that a person puts into something that classifies it has free. At what amount of time or energy, is a product or service not considered free anymore? That is a question for the class, if anyone has indeed read this.

Cheers,

David McKenna

Hey everyone,

I apologize for polluting our course blog with spam, but I’m doing a test for my marketing class and I don’t know where else I can post a blog entry. I’m doing a test to see if Google Alerts will find the words “Fortius Pharmedica” and “Maximus Whey Protein” and send it to my Gmail account. I’ll either update everyone in class or write a post about what I find.

Sorry for corrupting our class blog.

David McKenna

****************************UPDATE************************

Hey everyone,

Again, sorry for the unneeded spam on our class blog, but I’d like to pass on the success of my experiment.

I was wondering how our blog was being monitored on the web, even through our blog is relatively insignificant, and the web is so massive. Along my travels, I found that Google has two applications that will do this, Google Web Alerts and Google Blog Search.

For Google Web Alerts, you can choose to get e-mails sent to your account once a day, once a week, or the instant that your keywords/phrases are mentioned on the internet. I chose the instantly it happens, and was disappointed to discover that it took about a day for an email to be sent to my account.

Since I signed up for web alerts, I’ve received 3 emails from them that deal with my keywords/phrases. In each email, there are multiple times that the actual keyword is shown to have been used on the web, but only 4 have been relevant to my search. Even so, this is terrific results, because without it, I would never have even known that the company had been mentioned at all.

Another good thing is that I discovered that there is another company, called MaximusSport, that produces 100% Whey Protein, so I get all of their updates as well. Maybe the company could comment on these articles in support of their own product.

I’m very excited about this discovery, one because it will improve my marketing presentation, but mainly because of the power of using this new-found tool. When/if I start my own business, I know this will be a tool I use to monitor my reputation online and hopefully improve it and promote my product online.

Again, sorry for the unnecessary spam, but I think it turned out well worth it for the whole class.

Cheers,

David McKenna

This is great.  I’m sure you’ve all already seen it because it was posted by Seth Godin and everyone loves Seth, but just in case you’ve missed it I think everyone should watch this video on awareness.

This is one of those posts that would be better off in the social network that Tasha made, but oh well, it’s on here now anyway.

Cheers,

David McKenna

This is just a quick post because it affects UPEI.  Does anyone know what’s going on with the president elections?  Justin Douglas had the most votes, but it says online that he is disqualified and doesn’t give any details.  Z, Your in the student union aren’t you?  Do you know whats going on?

Cheers,

David McKenna

Sorry Mitch, I guess I’m going to be talking about the same thing as you. I had it half written when I noticed yours went up and I really don’t feel like choosing another topic and researching that one too. I guess if we have to write on the biggest news of the week there will be some overlapping anyway.

So the big news I’ve been hearing about is AOL’s purchase of the social networking website, Bebo. The price? $850,000,000. That’s a lot of zeros. Especially when AOL is slowly dying a painful and horrible *potential* death. I’ll go into a little more depth on both companies.

AOL (formerly America Online) was once mainly in the Internet Service Provider industry, with 30 million subscribers (down to 10.1 million as of Nov. 2007). Due to the dramatic decrease in dial-up (resulting in a decrease in their subscribers) the company has been trying to change their image to an Internet Content Provider rather than a service provider. As of February 2008, there was an announcement that AOL would split into two different sections: internet access and advertising. This is where the acquisition of Bebo comes in.

Bebo (Blog early, blog often) is a social media network (much like MySpace, Hi5, and Facebook) that has a substantial claim on the market. Although they aren’t quite as big as Facebook or MySpace in North America, it is extremely competitive in other countries, such as Britain and Ireland. It is actually the 66^th most popular English-language website (MySpace = 5^th, Facebook = 6^th, Hi5 = 8^th) according to Alexa Internet. *Sidenote: There are a few porn sites in the top 100, as well as Google having a bunch there too).

What makes this such a dangerous merger for other social networks is that AOL has the software that Bebo needs to grab top market share. AOL has the 10 million subscribers that could extremely benefit Bebo’s population, as well as the advertising software that Facebook has been struggling so much to make effective. With AOL’s AIM and ICQ potentially growing Bebo, and with Bebo a great site for mass advertising, this could be a great way for AOL to rebound and become one of the star online advertising companies.

A problem with this merger is that Yahoo runs the display advertising for Bebo in the UK and Ireland. If Microsoft is successful in the bid for Yahoo, what will be the outcome? Microsoft has put heavy support behind Facebook with their 1.6% purchase, so how can they justify a part of their company (if Yahoo is purchased) supporting the rival of their Facebook? Can Microsoft support two social networks?

Also, with Yahoo running the advertising display for Bebo, Google running the advertising of MySpace, and Microsoft running the advertising for Facebook, it makes the market pretty competitive. If Microsoft purchases Yahoo, then it gives Microsoft a great deal more advertising power, controlling both Facebook’s and Bebo’s advertising. Will this finally make Microsoft competitive with Google’s advertising power? I guess we will see in the coming months.

*UPDATE* Facebook has just announced that it will be having an instant message service built right into Facebook.  This is announced right after AOL has been talking about combining their AIM service to Bebo. *

Cheers,

David McKenna

I was just reading Mano-a-mano with Steve Ballmer by Guy Kawasaki that had a video from the MIX08 conference held in Las Vegas from March 5th -7th. It is a conference for developers, designers and business professionals, or so the website says. The video was of the Keynote speaking with Guy Kawasaki as host, interviewing Steve Ballmer. Incredible. It was over an hour long, and I watched all of it. I think anyone who has the slightest interest in Microsoft vs. the world, then you should watch this.

One of the things that made this keynote so good, and why I watched most of it, is because of the bantering going back and forth from Kawasaki and Ballmer. Steve Ballmer is now the CEO of Microsoft and was one of the original Microsoft guys (starting in 1980), whereas Guy Kawasaki was one of the original Apple guys which leads to much playful banter. In some cases, it is absolutely hilarious, one of which Ballmer threw Kawasaki`s Mac AIR on the ground (timing in video is given later). I laughed nearly the whole time.

Here are some of the topics (and the times they played) that was discussed:

Yahoo potential merger @ 2:30

Google competitor @ 4:30

Microsoft is an underdog @ 7:18

Anti-trust @ 7:35

Apple (Ballmer gives Cudos) @ 7:48

Facebook @ 9:28

Microsofts millions @ 10:40

Receiving mass email (or not) @ about 15:00

Bill Gates leaving microsoft @ 16:45

Hiring at microsoft @ 18:40

Silverlight @ 24:35

Vista (dodges topic by throwing Kawasaki`s Mac AIR on the ground) @ 26:45

Microsoft losing focus @ 28.30

Firefox vs IE @ 32:40

I think anyone who is interested even slightly in Microsoft, or even if you hate Microsoft and want to see their views on Google and Apple, you should watch this video. It is long, but well worth it.

After watching over an hour worth of video, I could write for forever on this topic, but I guess I can only put so much. Maybe I`ll make another 10 posts all dealing with this video. Thats all for now.

Cheers,

David McKenna

I was just reading one of Mike Arrington’s blog posts on Twitter about how Twitter can be used in classrooms for reminders of whats going on in class. An example was if there was a test or assignment due the next day in class, Twitter could be used for a friendly reminder.

Would this be possible in our class or is it going too far? I haven’t yet used Twitter, only read about it, so would it be too much of a hassle to try a class Twitter blog that everyone could Twitter too?

Just a thought.

Also, just a side note, one of Robert Scoble’s post called “Diapers that Twitter when they are dirty…” referred to a post written by Phillip Torrone called “HOW TO - Make plants talk! [...]“, which, in a sense, does exactly that.  He has been able to hook up a device to plants that will Twitter your “twitter blog” (for lack of knowing the right term), when they need to be watered.  If this is possible, almost anything could be possible.  Can you image how Blackberry addicts would use this.  They’d get twittered for just about anything.  I can’t wait to be one

Cheers,

David McKenna

Well, this week I’ve decided to look at more of the business side of things instead of the technology side of things. I’ve also decided to take a source outside of our weekly RSS reading (one from my personal list), and use The Globe and Mail’s financial/business area section.

This particular topic is on the newest budget from Steven Harpers government. I’m not overly interest in politics, as I’ve stated before, but I love personal finance and it seems the centerpiece of their budget is a new savings fund. Believe it or not, I know more about USA finance then Canadian, but what I do know is that I haven’t heard of this kind of fund in anything I’ve read of before.

Most savings fund cause you to be taxes at some point, whether it is prior to investing your money (through investing after income tax dollars) or when you withdraw your money from the investment. I haven’t yet read of any savings funds that taxation is avoided, that is, until now. The new budget states that this savings fund will be of untaxed dollars, and their will be no tax when the money is withdrawn. This is absolutely incredible. The only problem is that there will be an annual cap of $5000, which I’m sorry to say, is quite pathetic.

Regardless, I’ve very excited to see this new savings fund, even if the cap isn’t very high. I’m not going to have to worry about that anyway, considering I’m in school for the next couple of years and won’t come near that cap.

Anyway, even though I state that I love personal finance, I have only truly started to read up on it within this past school year. I’m by no means a pro, actually I still consider myself a rookie. If anyone knows more about this topic then me, I’d love to hear it. I’ll probably read up on it some more in the next couple of days.

If anyone wants to read the article I read, it is A savings fund but no capital gains tax break.

Cheers,

David McKenna