Gmail as Competition – Another View? This week, while many from the industry have been in Brussels at the outstanding yet oddly-named MAAWG conference for ISPs and filtering companies, internet marketing pundit Ken Magill had a scary, scary headline related to Google’s insertion of ads in email — Is Gmail Feeding Your Customers to the Competition? The assertion is that Gmail’s contextual ad program, combined with image blocking in commercial emails, could easily lead to a situation where one of your subscribers doesn’t see your own content but then sees an ad for a competitor in the sidebar. Scary, I admit, but how much is that really happening? We analyzed some data from our Postmaster Direct business that is quite…
Archives / June, 2006
links for 2006-06-26
Kevin Menzie Slice of Lime, Inc. CEO Kevin Menzie, who I have known for years, writes a good summary of his thoughts on the early days of getting a startup off the ground and growing fast! (tags: Entrepreneur)
Environmentally Unsound
I received in the mail yesterday (by overnight priority mail, no less), a 400+ page prospectus from Mittal, a Dutch company in which I apparently own a few shares of stock through a managed mutual fund I’m part of. This book was BIG – well over 2 inches thick and big enough to have a binding strip instead of staples. And it had enough legalese in it to put anyone to sleep. What did I do with it? After ranting about how silly it was to ever print such a thing for mass push distribution to an audience that largely doesn’t care about it — straight into the trash. With a big thud, of course. What a ridiculous waste. Why…
A Good Laugh at Microsoft’s Expense, Part II
A Good Laugh at Microsoft’s Expense, Part II Three minutes of quick video entertainment awaits you. What if Microsoft redesigned the iPod packaging? Watch here. This could be any big company, not Microsoft. Makes you really realize how much “less is more” in terms of product design and packaging. Like Google. Thanks to Frank Addante from StrongMail for turning me on to this clip. See Part I if you want another quick clip about punishing developers for buggy code.
links for 2006-06-16
Not all successful CEOs are extroverts: Financial News – Yahoo! Finance Brad tipped me off to this article — it’s a good one and draws on a lot of the work and thinking done by Jim Collins in both Good to Great and Built to Last (links to both books on my blog in the books sidebar). (tags: Books Entrepreneur Management)
Counter Cliche: Sometimes You Need a Shortstop
Counter Cliche: Sometimes You Need a Shortstop Fred’s Chiche of the Week this week is about drafting the best available (corporate) athlete. I think he’s right lots of the time, especially in startup companies where people need to wear multiple hats. And it might also be a good rule of thumb in larger companies, when you want to have flexibility to move managers around from group to group and get them to easily take on new challenges or responsibilities. But sometimes, you just need a shortstop, and if you were the GM of a baseball team, your manager or owner would be pretty ticked off if you went out and hired a decathlete for the job. Companies who are in…
My 360 on Your 360
My 360 on Your 360 Last year, I wrote about the 360 review process we do at Return Path, which is a great annual check-in on staff development and leadership/management. In Part I of What a View, I described the overall process. In Part II, I talked specifically about how my review as CEO worked, which is a little different. This year, we changed the format of our reviews in two ways. First, for senior staff, we continued to do the live, moderated discussions, but we dropped having people also fill out the online review form. It was duplicative, and the process already consumes enough time that we decided to cut that part out, which I think worked well. Second,…
Yes, They Are THAT Important
Yes, They Are THAT Important Our enterprise spam filter has been down for about a day as we reconfigure some servers here. It has been just this side of crippling, especially travelling and getting spammed to death on my Treo. Spam filters have become good enough (though still not perfect on the false positive side, of course) and prevalent enough, that I had forgotten just how important a role they play in today’s corporate IT environment. We’d be in really sorry shape without them!
Naked Talking
Naked Talking Naked Conversations: How Blogs Are Changing The Way Businesses Talk with Consumers, by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, would have been mildly interesting had I never read, let alone written, a blog. So chances are if you’re reading this blog regularly, it’s not a great use of your time or money, but if you just ran across this post while trying to learn more about blogging – or really about any form of post-2002 Internet marketing – it’s probably worthwhile as a primer. But if you’re knee-deep in internet marketing or blogging, it may be a bit of a snoozer. I find it entertaining that leading bloggers like Scoble and Israel, who are part of the ultra-small group…
Counter Cliche: But It's Ok If Some of Them Turn Out to Be Frogs
Counter Cliche: But It’s Ok If Some of Them Turn Out to Be Frogs This week, Fred says You Can’t Kiss All the Pretty Girls, meaning that it’s easy for VCs to get a little carried away, get outside their strike zone or core thesis for investments, put money to work in too many places, and make some mistakes. Sure, some pretty girls turn out to be nightmares when you actually start to date them. But if you’re a VC, it’s ok if some of the pretty girls turn out to be frogs. You have a diversified portfolio. You invest in dozens of companies, and as many VCs have said over time — you lose all your money on 1/3,…
links for 2006-06-05
Why I think ClickFraud is far greater than imagined. – Blog Maverick – www.blogmaverick.com _ Dallas Mavs owner and Internet entrepreneur Mark Cuban on Click Fraud, a notorious member of the Internet Axis of Evil (tags: Email Technology Media Marketing)