I ran across a couple of very interesting articles/posts -

1. Olinda - a social broadcast radio with beheavior mining and a hardware API! Read here.

2. Google’s upcoming data center plans. Can you imagine how big a data center Google needs…? Read here.

The second day has flown by and was just as wonderful as the first day. The day was full of sessions on different tracks ranging from beginner level (Email 101) to advanced tracks (Email 201, Integration and Deliverability). Many attendees stopped by the Right On Interactive booth (in fact we had more stop by in the morning than the whole day Monday). I asked several of them what they thought of the conference and the sessions. Every one of them reported that they were very happy and were learning things. A handful did mention that the challenge to them is to take all this back and incorporate in their daily work life. Yep, that is definitely a hallmark of a successful conference.

The evening was a formal sit-down dinner and awards ceremony. The food, company and setting was wonderful. ExactTarget pulled a surprise on everyone when they had the “The evolution of dance” guy perform live on stage! He was just awesome!

Closer to home, 5Buckets has been very successful. We had several people walk up to the booth unsure of what we do; but I see their eyes light up just as soon as we walk them through 5Buckets. Check it out here if you are interested :)

The first day of ExactTarget’s Connections ‘07 conference has been absolutely wonderful! Scott Dorsey kicked off the conference at 1pm with his keynote followed by Scott McCorkle showcasing upcoming Fall release. Beyond email, ExactTarget will now support SMS and voice messaging! The focus seems to be on “one-to-one” marketing and a new feature called “Interactions” is being introduced. ExactTarget’s UI has been one of it’s strenghts and now there are some new features that take the UI to the next level. Thumbnail previews, context menus to edit emails in place! All good stuff.

One astonishing fact I learnt today - ExactTarget has invested $5MM in infrastructure. Wow, I can’t wait for the application to get speedy.

ExactTarget has their annual conference - Connections ‘07 - going on in Indianapolis, IN. ROI is a proud sponsor. We have a booth and several ExactTarget users have already stopped by and shown interest in “5Buckets”.

With over 500 attendees, this is going to be a great event. Come visit at Booth #10. Oct 1st through Oct 2nd, 2007.

A lot of us  have been in webinars and web conferences. I have attended many and even presented in one. I really loved it and was amazed when they first came out with the concept back in the late 90s. I think it must have been 1998 or 1999. I am not sure if WebEx pioneered it, but they were the first ones.

So recently when a client asked for my help setting up a webinar he could host (it is his first time), I pointed him to WebEx. We went to the webex.com site together and tried to sign him up for a webinar. The web site was really good at giving some information. There were a myraid of options but fortunately it was easy to locate the section that talked about webinars. However, there was no pricing online. So, we decided to pick up the phone and call Webex. The person on the phone was nice and took down all the information - but was nothing more than a secretary. He could not give us pricing and had to setup an appointment for someone to call us back. Alright, I walked over to the client’s office again at the appointed time - but no one called. Finally, almost an hour later we got a hold of our appointed inside sales rep. He said it was a “consultative” approach to tell us what the pricing is. After answering some of the same questions as before here is pricing we got -

33 cents a minute for the web conference

20 cents a minute for the audio portion (which, btw, he shared only after we specifically asked about the audio portion)

Adding up to 53 cents a minute. I about fell out of my chair. Client is expecting around twenty attendes, for about 60minutes. That would be $636.00 for a one time webinar!

Ok, so it was time to shop around. We, Right On Interactive, use ReadyTalk from time to time. And have had good very experience with it. I wasn’t sure how much we paid, but I knew it wasn’t 53 cents a minute. So, next place to shop was ReadyTalk. A quick call to the ReadyTalk sales number told us that the rates were 13 and 8 cents for web & audio portion. Much better! That adds up to 21cents per minute per attendee, or about $252.00. Still expensive but cheaper than client driving out-of-town to present in person.

I didn’t get to watch the LiveEarth concerts on TV. It was a busy weekend and I got about 5 minutes in front of the TV. But in honor of LiveEarth and all the good citizens of the world that do wonderful things to slow down climate change:

1. Change your light bulbs at home, even if it is one at a time. See the site www.onebillionbulbs.com. I really love what they are doing there, and it all started with one person deciding to make it happen. Here is a snaphsot of what Indiana is doing -

2. Please, please don’t idle your car. At the parking lot, at the gas station, when you are picking up your kids at school, when you want to run back in to your house quickly because you forgot something. Or don’t start your car and then spend two minutes in the garage before you back out and get on your way. You can probably afford the gas but we all can’t afford to keep hurting the environment.

We are getting ready for the initial launch of two products. I will talk about the products in future blog posts. But the real challenge we are having is with naming the products. Rather naming the product something and finding an available domain that matches the product name. I knew a lot of domains were taken, and there are cybersquatters blocking all kinds of domain names. But why in the world are these taken:

www.ideaz.com
www.socialrank.com
www.2engage.com

Ok, so you think those aren’t that out of the ordinary? How about these -

www.asdfg.com. Like randomly typing the letters a, s, d, f and g. And there is nothing at that site.
www.two2.com Like the number two twice.
www.dontalktome.com - another parked domain

And here’s some “interesting” ones (these are actual web sites)

www.juliusceaser.com: its a good thing the emperor has his site.
www.asdf.com: an actual company site
www.rockpaperscissors.com: some company out of west Hollywood
www.badabing.com: a game site

There was a great article posted by B2B that does an outstanding job of discussing Web 2.0 and I wanted to share it here. If you have time check it out - its a very good article.

Happy Marketing!

This is the best video I have ever seen explaining Web 2.0. Very cool…

It explains it in a way that I think might resonate…especially with those marketers who are critical of all things Web 2.0.

Let me know what you think…

h/t: to Michelle MacPhearson for the article and video…

I got an email from a colleague today pointing out that Firefox now has 31% of the brower market! That is awesome!!

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp