10 Internet Startup tips from the Silicon Valley trenches (Part I)

For 17 months, I haven't posted anything on this blog primarily because of the startup grind.

Long story short, in June of last year, I went all-in to execute full-time on an idea that I had when I was twelve years old.  After getting started in an hybrid mode for months, where I was still holding a leadership role full-time at a Fortune 500 company, while being a dad of two inspiring daughters who are now three and seven years old, I just took the big plunge -- all-in.

Based on my achievements so far, I believe I have yet to deserve the title "startup entrepreneur"; however, I have been through an amazing startup journey that started in Florida, took me to Boston before flying me out to the Silicon Valley for months, and eventually, relocating me there. 

I believe there will be some value added to the startup community sharing the key highlights of this entrepreneurial adventure as it could help some aspiring and active startup entrepreneurs move along their way to successfully scale their dream faster, and in a smoother way.

1.  Don't waste your time with traditional early stage fundraising if you don't need to!

Traditional fundraising (Early VC, Angels) is a full time job for the leader of the startup.

There is only one leader in a startup, the co-CEO workaround that you may see/have seen at a few startups is generally not well accepted by most early stage investors who make a clear point of the necessity that one guy/gal on the team (max three founders) makes the call to move the venture forward when decision making stalls.

This leader will have to be the one pitching the startup.  He/she will have to get up to speed on the pitch requirements and be fully involved with advisors, and potentially, pitch coaches to deliver the pitch in the way that best resonates with the target audience (traditional investors: most common formats are 1-minute and 2-minute pitches).  There is no eye rolling here, it's a full time job that will take a lot of the focus away from the key product buildout and distribution activities in the startup's early stages.

Why do you need to raise money at this point in the game?
What are you precisely going to achieve with the amount you are looking for? 
Are you crystal clear on that?
Do you have enough traction (minimum user base month-over-month growth over 20%, hockeystick revenue growth) for early stage investors to have any interest in backing you up?

Ideally, challenge your assumptions on traditional external financing. 
Are you still in a very early stage (Minimal Viable Product buildout phase) where you should be able to validate your concept with minimal amounts ($5k - $10k ballpark) that could be raised through crowd-funding (legislations seem to be changing fast from a year ago when this solution was not recommended), consulting cash or friends and family bootstrapping?

2.  You need a CTO from the mobile cloud era from the onset

The principle of singularity profoundly applies here.  Technology is extremely volatile, it's an ever changing business value delivery channel and you need a nimble mind aware of the latest in mobile and cloud if you want to scale, and/or raise money for your Internet startup.

It's a must.

3.  Get accelerated by the right program if you can and only if it makes sense

The best thing that can happen to you as a startup entrepreneur is to be challenged  in your entrepreneurial journey so you can fail as fast as possible.  By as fast as possible, I mean that you want to get to the point where you can see if you can make your startup fly towards the skies of sustainable growth without having jeopardized or wasted too many assets.

In that sense, many startup entrepreneurs actively look to join a startup acceleration program (to be distinguished from startup incubators that generally are real estate businesses looking to achieve their return on asset objectives on the back of lean startup founders).

I learned the hard way that you have to be very clear on the adequation of your personal situation with the requirements and props offered by such accelerators.  Most accelerators (execept the Y combinator which is awesome apparently and very straight forward) have a lengthly selection process that is going to take away a lot of your valuable time (time to convince the right people, plus the time to get to the "active window" of the program), energy and not necessarily be of much added value in relation to what you can garner from active networking in the Silicon Valley.

My piece of advice: make sure to have kickass traction first, then consider joining Y Combinator as a priority.

Having said that, if you are knocking it out of the park in terms of traction (user growth, revenue) you may not even need acceleration if the CEO knows how to sell the current win (if external funds are required to get to the next stage of growth).

Stay tuned startup entrepreneurs, Part II coming soon (with the next scrum ;-)

Our Fluid Society

In 2008, I saw this short presentation by Paola Antonelli "Design and the elastic mind".
It was quite of a wake-up call...



When I watch it again about four years later, I can't help thinking that many of the things that she touches on in this video, that all appeared to be pure wishful thinking at the time, turn out to look very much like very deep and powerful intuition into what's happening right now (including the "facebook timeline" if you take 2 seconds to listen to what she says exactly 13 minutes into this video... LOL).

Elasticity is the seed of our fluid society.

The post WWII era has seen the advent of the "big box" culture.  The local started to globalize and leading economies whose GDPs are heavily correlated to sales at "big box" points of sale grew in large part through massive manufacturing companies embracing the cost efficiencies of the six sigma culture in the far East.

Mass production led to very controlled, and very low, fixed and variable costs per unit to the greater competitive advantage of the "big box" players across many consumer goods industries.

Nonetheless, massive production comes in chunks.  If you look at the balance sheet of most of the traditional manufacturers who supply the "big box" retailers, you will notice that there is a massive chunk of value tied to investment in working capital since by definition of globalizing the supply chain, you increase your cash cycle which in turns considerably lowers your overall business value.

Innovative companies in their own time, such as Dell, have explored more adaptive, leaner models through build-to-order supply chains combined with direct-to-consumer marketing and sales.  This was one of the first attempts at building more elasticity, removing the "chunks" towards a more value added business model.

The singular growth of information permeating our daily lives is pushing our minds to become more elastic, more nimble, more adaptive.  The moving digital landscapes and emotions that surround us continuously challenge us to morph in real-time.  Antonella is actually very clearly touching on this in her short video.

So what happens when the fluidity of these digital flows springs through more and more aspects of our lives as consumers and as designers of the future?

Can the fluidity of the intangible things in our lives translate into more fluidity in the tangible ones?

We may want to ask the question to a fast growing start-up called "Shapeways".
Take a second to check out their site at shapeways.com

They recently raised over $10 Million to continue to make a dent into our increasingly fluid society, they empower consumers to print tangible goods from the web...

Another inspirational video on the riveting subject of 3D printing comes to life with Lisa Harouni at her TED presentation in January of 2012:



Will the globalized local start to globally localize again?

Will companies manage to self-organize to develop new internal capabilities to rise to the innovation challenge of embracing our fluid society?

Social Commerce: the Corsican donkey is still ahead of the digital curve!

Off the west coastline of Italy, right above Sardigna, there is an island called Corsica:

Somewhere in the center of this Island there is the rocky village from my mother's side called Castiglioni:

 About 50 houses perched up at an altitude of about 3,000 feet overlooked by the unbeliveable dents of the "Pulasca Peaks" which should actually be named "Castiglioni Peaks".

Social commerce has been the staple of the local economy for dozens of decades there.

Communication from one valley to the next was almost impossible, let's take a closer look at these peaks to understand why:

As a result, the notion of "Community" took on its full meaning from the onset because the people from my village didn't have much contact with the outside world to the extent that from one valley to the next, each community was developing its own Corsican language in a parallel fashion with very few overlaps (the few who could make it to the next community by climbing over the peaks could create slight overlaps over time though).

Beyond the nature of the local environment that organically favored human communities, at that time, the only means of transportation was the famous Corsican donkey, and it certainly didn't help to boost the openness of the village-based communities.  Information and goods could only travel as fast as their sluggish, near dormant pace:

However, I have a lot of respect for the donkey for being the source code of one of the first human social commerce apps.  On the picture above you can see how milk (on the donkey) and water (on top of the lady's head) were converging from the mountains back to the village's church square along with all the other hyperlocal social commerce items (wheat, tomatoes, salads, eggs, wild boar, venison, trout and other fish from the river, and you name it).  In essence, the Corsican square represented a first iteration of the virtual Facebook wall at the scale of a village, you could get in a few minutes all the social updates from the community directly into your ears, from human voices.

WOM (Word Of Mouth) marketing was already at the epicenter of social commerce at that time as each community leader (the expert in wheat a.k.a. "Ours Antoine", the expert in tomatoe a.k.a. "Mimi", the expert in wild boar a.k.a. "Pascuale" etc...) would organically acquire a fame from their product expertise that would virally spread across the community and make them emerge from others in their respective social commerce vertical.

Does that sound familiar in the digital age of consumer ratings and reviews?

If we step back for a second, we realize that Corsica had already historically come up with a first version of Facebook where clusters of semi-private communities coexisted in their native valleys.  It even looked a bit like that if I try to represent the "social network" with the new version of Syncpad for iPad:

Even better than the Facebook that we have today, the Corsican social network from that time already included a social commerce application driven by a donkey-based source code.  Today, we are beginning to see this social integration on Facebook with brands getting to the conclusion that the user experience is as important as the value proposition of the service or product that they strive to market.  Therefore, brands start seeing the value of ensuring that the commercial interaction happens within the walls of Facebook and not necessarily within their branded site that would disrupt the social experience of their target audience.  Milyoni led by John Corpus is one of these first social shopping startups that integrate the e-commerce shopping experience within Facebook.

It's funny to see how the future is trying to catch up with the ancestral past of social commerce.  As the disruptive innovation of the explosion engine came to life, the robust social commerce experience of the Corsican social network saw an upgrade of the source code of its social shopping app with the "local vendor van".  The communication between the valleys was now possible and the structure of the local industry (local suppliers of village-grown produces mostly) suddenly became more competitive.  This gave rise to a cross-pollination phenomenon where the best cross-community experts rose above the masses to cater to the more limited needs of a shrinking target market as more and more natives left the island to find new opportunities to accomodate the new needs of a more modern society on "le continent" (a.k.a. continental France) thanks to lower prices on the engine-powered boats' tickets.

The baker's, butcher's, vegetable grower's vans sent the donkey to an unexpected early retirement and personal cars acquired by the few helped accelerate the WOM in the consolidated ecosystem of the neighboring valleys...

The cross-pollinated social commerce network picture had then shifted this way:

 Yes, the Internet did lower the heights of the peaks, steamed up the seas surrounding the islands, and sped up the information flows onto new digital highways but...   What the hell is truly innovative in the digital wave of Social Commerce so far?  Am I missing something?

Well, what about the advent of the 500+ "collective buying" companies that have bloomed all over the Internet over the past two years?  Would that be where disruptive social commerce innovation is coming from?

Wait...  It looks like the notion of "Tuangou" (a.k.a. collective/team buying) has been around in Asia for quite some time and it has even spawned some interesting situation at a local Ford dealer in China where the sales rep decided to change the price up as the team of buyers showed up in-store to pick up their pre-negotiated cars!

Team buyers at a Ford dealer in China

So...  It looks like the Corsican donkey is still ahead of the digital social commerce innovation curve in the end, "doucement le matin et pas trop vite le soir" (slowly in the morning and not too fast in the evening).

2011 will require some more #gamestorming to finally see disruptive social commerce innovation take the ancestral social commerce applications by storm and redefine social commerce in unprecedented ways.

Maybe it is time to become human again to create sustainable social commerce models?  Models that will stick for a long time to the donkey's back...

Let's start #gamestorming right now then, @davegray can surely help us then:

The Path to Infinite Return Marketing

Who the hell will be investing in traditional TV advertising in 10 years from now?

The short answer is most likely something like "very few marketers based on the dimensions that characterize their core target audience" because TV as we know it today will be a dinosaur of the past.

C'mon, let's look at the current "User Experience" a.k.a. UX with TV.  Isn't it clumsily awful?  How easy is it to find content that you reasonate with from your remote control?  How about to find new content based on a real-time aspiration that might come up?

I would argue that I am not the only one who believes that the current TV UX is to the TV industry what the Icarus' wings are to the plane industry.

The myriad of unmet consumer needs in the TV UX represent a multi-billion dollar market in the future of digital TV.

For years, I have been an advocate of new video technologies, as early as 2000 I had the incredible opportunity to be involved in the launch of the first broadband wireless Internet Service Provider in Europe.  One of our core offerings was a video conference service that was streaming live over our high speed broadband network.  It was a great window into what the future of TV carrying over the Internet could hold and what the cost benefits could be for those who operate traditional TV networks broadcasting over older types of networks.

Then, a few years later, I actually worked for a High Definition Satellite TV provider called DISH Network in the U.S.  At that time, we were still focused on our core TV programming service while trying to leverage synergies with Internet and phone service providers in the "triple play" market.

The subsequent years, I have followed with interest the swings of the Internet Protocol TV (IPTV) as the strategic forces at the software and hardware levels continuously evolved in an hard-to-predict pattern and volatile ecosystem.

These days, we hear more and more marketing buzz around the advent of such IPTV solutions.  In the U.S, the main incumbent telecommunication carrier - AT&T - unrolled its U-Verse service that already makes an interesting step towards the interaction of traditional TV with the web (Verizon offers a competitive alternative called FiOS).  Programs are streamed over their IP network and DVR integration throughout the house is simple and also leverages the easiness of wifi IP solutions.

The notion of cloud that blurs the traditional borders of personal computing is now extending to the mysterious realm of interactive TV.

The big search guys like Google saw the unmet UX TV need, big time, and are jumping two feet into the circle of IPTV:



Interestingly enough, they even sealed a partnership with my old friends at DISH Network and it clearly is the "enhanced experience" that is being promoted, the "there is an app for that" angle to highlight the differentiated TV value proposition:




Now, it will take some time.  The ad big bucks are at stake and when you own the walled garden content that flows along the traditional conduits of TV media, you are going to make sure that the ambitious cyber TV movers will put their hands into their deep pockets before they can surf your wave.

I found this interesting article on Twitter about Google discovering some of the inherent hiccups related to trying to tap into the TV industry.  But it is just a matter of time before smart win-win business models that make the pie much bigger to all actors in the value chain are worked out.

So advertisers will be investing in new forms of TV advertising that are more likely to be a mix of the traditional TV ad placements and of the social marketing/paid per click search ones.  It is also possible that new forms of layered marketing will come in.  A great concept along those lines is what Jean Touboul has initiated with Encontext Media.  How cool is that?  How large is the target market?


If we look at the current return on traditional TV, I am not so sure about the rationale.  Based on my growing marketing experience, I tend to believe that traditional TV is an act of marketing desperation.  What I mean by that is that most companies invest in TV because it was a disruptive mass marketing channel in the twentieth century as mass retailing started and it allowed companies to "get the word out there" to the masses.  Nowadays, companies still invest massive amounts in TV advertising because they think that they don't have other alternatives to drive their target audience from the stage of product awareness to the stage of purchase decision.  Once they have spent what their marketing budget allows on other channels and see that there is not much apparent scalability, they still believe that TV is the magic wizzard that is going to sustain their sales growth.

Alright, does that really make sense?

I certainly do not have worked on a sample of TV campaigns that is large enough to represent what's going on in the entire industry but I have had the chance to cross-pollinate my thoughts with leaders in the industry throughout my career and what I have seen so far is the following:

I used a cool app called syncpad on iPad to put this together, not so sure if the stamp above is readable though.  What I have tried to represent is that the correlation between your weekly media TV spend (Generally depending on the company and the type of TV campaign, weekly spend hovers around at least $500,000 a week) and your weekly revenue through your retail and direct sales channels (Generally much higher than the media TV spend otherwise, past the launch phase, it is hard to justify from a P&L standpoint) is of very poor quality.  An increase in media spend has a low probability of translating into an increase in sales, even if you don't spend anything for awhile, your sales are going to fluctuate a lot sometimes north of 30-40% from their average value without any dime in media spend...

That's another way to say that the notion of cloud expands into the TV industry :-) 

Directionally, although it is extremely messy in terms of level of investment and also cause-effect relationship over time (there generally is a lag between the time you invest in TV media and the time when this investment might have an influence on your sales), there still is some sort of volatile upwards trends though.  That's what most marketers look at when making multi-million dollar/billion dollar investment calls.

In my humble view, this is very sad and very scary to think that what is perceived as a core driver of our global economy is in actuality a volatile medium that will undergo much transformation before becoming truly accountable and scalable from a return standpoint.

But the path to infinite return marketing is near.  As companies understand the power of pull and weave in their traditional marketing new forms of social marketing that have a zero cost of production, a zero cost of media placement, and a high conversion rate on a highly targeted audience, they will gradually shift their marketing dollars to the pull media.

Could that pull media have legs in IPTV?

The Mysterious Marketing Matrix

How can we represent marketing?

Over the past few years, I have tried to challenge my thinking on how to best represent how a target audience responds to a marketing stimulus.

At a high level, if you investment money as a company in marketing it is because you believe that it will eventually drive sales for your organization that will deliver and sustain an ongoing level of profit margin.

From a distance, this is fairly easy to understand.  However, if you want to understand the underlying dynamics of delivering profit margin through an integrated set of marketing channels, it is a different ball game.

Most phenomenon in nature are not linear, they actually are more likely to be quadratic with a significant level of statistical noise that makes any modeling attempt quite tricky.  Nonetheless, human nature likes to believe that business can fairly be represented in a linear way.

So, to keep it simple, if you keep the range of your marketing investment within the bounds of reasonable, there is a way to linearize marketing.

Let's start with a simple example.  Let's assume that you invest $x in a direct marketing channel like paid search (Google, Bing or other) to promote a new book called "The Marketing Matrix".  You'd set up your campaign and would use your $x on a cost-per-click basis when consumers click on your ad displayed in the search engines:

From this investment, you would deliver $y in sales (hopefully $y > $x at least).  A high level way to determine the effectiveness of your investement is to look at your return on marketing investment a.k.a. ROMI=y/x

This linear metric represents what you supposedly got from paid search conversions for having invested in paid search.  In this case, I am going to call the ROMI of paid search via a paid search investment r(ps,ps).

Real marketing life is more complicated than that though.  Most of the time, people naturally tend to look at their marketing investment in isolation, believing that each investement in a given channel returns revenue from this same channel only.

This is not true.

As always, the art of business blurs the lines of channel isolation and value overlaps among all channels...

Let's assume that you are investing $Xtv in a TV campaign to drive sales through your call center and your online assets and that your have $Xps to run your paid search campaigns at the same time (to promote the same product/service).

If we stuck to our one-point linear vision of marketing, $Yps representing the revenue generated by the PS campaign, we'd be inclined to believe $Yps = r(ps,ps)*$Xps

This wouldn't make much sense because the first thing that your target consumers do when seeing your TV commercial is to look up your core keywords from the spot in the search engines, and often times, click on the related paid search ads.

What this means is that a portion of your total paid search budget is specifically going to be used to capture some of the traffic generated online by your TV campaign.  Assuming that your TV landing page or microsite or website has had time to be optimized from an search engine optimization standpoint and properly referenced, you will also organically capture some of the online visits generated by TV without paying a dime.

Well... we need to introduce new value drivers here:
- Xps|ps the portion of your total paid search budget (Xps) that is truly used by your target consumer looking for information on the search engine and clicking on your ad
- Xps|tv the portion of your total paid search budget (Xps) that is used because people saw your TV ad first which caused them to go online to look up core keywords and click on your pay-per-click ad

All in all, in this example:
Xps = Xps|ps + Xps|tv

Your apparent total revenue from "paid search" will therefore be:
Yps= r(ps,ps)*Xps|ps + r(ps,tv)*Xps|tv

Reciprocity applies here.  Let's assume that the consumer saw and clicked on your paid search ad first, withtout converting, then saw your TV which sold him on your product/service and called your call center to buy.  This is much less likely but can occur.

In that case, using the same notations:
Ytv=r(tv,tv)*Xtv|tv + r(tv,ps)*Xtv|ps

Where Xtv=Xtv|tv + Xtv|ps and good luck in real-life to accurately determine Xtv|tv -the portion of your TV budget that directly converts in to sale from TV exposure , and Xtv|ps the portion of your TV budget that closed the deal for your product/service on people who had seen your paid search without converting first.  LOL  How is that for art as long as we are not able to track what's going on in people's minds?

With this example, if we stick to the 2 channels aforementioned (TV and Paid Search) we see that our vision of marketing is a 2*4 matrix from the R2*R4 vectorial space.  If we look at our revenue as a vector from R2 and at our marketing investment as a vectror from R4

Y = RX

Where:

Y=  |Ytv
       | Yps    

X=  |Xtv,tv
       |Xtv,ps
       |Xps,ps
       |Xps,tv   

and R=|r(tv,tv)      r(tv,ps)        0              0    |
            |    0                0       r(ps,ps)   r(ps,tv)|


This is the easy part, if we throw a 3rd channel in the mix like Direct Mail, it becomes a tad more complicated and it becomes almost impossible to model if you assume that someone can receive your Direct Mail, see your ad on TV that promotes the offer that was on your Direct Mail, and decide to go on the web to click on your paid search ad to finally buy your product/service...

I could have some fun modelling this in N dimensions where N is the number of marketing channels where you are investing your marketing dollars, I am not so sure that it would be of tremendous value.  The point is that the marketing matrix is a mysterious one where hops and bounds among channels eventually result into bottom line results.

Therefore, I believe that it is important to feel the matrix "like a splinter in your mind"



and understand that the only way to determine if marketing campaigns are successful is to look at the overall power of integration.  The continuous hops and bounds of your target audience among all channels weave a solid fabric that holds the keys to the success of your marketing campaign.

If you don't create this fabric or pokes holes in it by isolating channels, your success will slip through the holes of lower returns.

In my next post, I will value feedback on how we can apply digital signal processing techniques to better understand the marketing value drivers behind noisy mass marketing campaigns such as DRTV.  We will also try to determine if it is possible to make media placements calls based on facts rather than subjective impressions on these highly volatile random marketing signals.

Happy turkey to all!

Paplet will also disrupt electronic marketing

A few days ago, I had a brief, yet interesting, exchange of tweets with @loic a.k.a. Loic Le Meur, ceo @seesmic www. seesmic.com and great blog for any marketer who wants to get powerful social media insight www.loiclemeur.com 

Here is the thread:

As a matter of fact, a few weeks ago, I did buy a tablet computer.

Originally, I didn't want to because I couldn't figure out what the value proposition truly was. As a mobile passionate since my childhood and early GSM engineering days, what I have always valued about a mobile technology solution is that it's conveniently mobile. You can easily carry it around with you and can engage with the mobile applications while being as free as a birdie flying in the blue skies of wireless ubiquity.

That's where my first tablet hiccup came from. The form factor and the weight seemed to be way out of range in my perception for being considered as a wireless, painless device to be carried around. On top of that, unlike most women, I do not carry a purse with me, at least not yet, and I had a hard time to picture myself stuck with a tablet in hand every time I am running out and about while needing to freshly pick real-time data from the net.

On top of that, I realized that even if I were to decide to narrow down the scope of use at home only, which would solve the nomadic catch 22 that I just mentioned, it wouldn't make much sense neither. Why on tablet earth would I bother squinting on a small screen at home when I can complete the same computing tasks on a much bigger screen from my every day computer?

The third hiccup came from the availability of production tools and the inherent memory space needed to save their output on a local drive.

Well, looking at the tablet beyond it's huge commercial hype pushed by brilliant experience marketers didn't bring much decision making incentives for me to become an early adopter.

However, because of a niche need and the prospect of co-creating digital drawings with my babies as they are about to fall asleep at night, I challenged my stiff thinking and bought one.

A few weeks later, as evidenced by the tweets above, I no longer use any regular computers even when I am at home.

Why?

The short answer is that the user experience is stellar.

I am touchtyping this blog post (without looking at the keys as @loic does on a regular laptop apparently) by using my tablet horizontally, it simply lies on my knees as I am enjoying spreading out on my couch as a Sunday potato. Yes, the touchtyping is slightly more intuitive as, for the moment, you no longer have the volume of each key to give you valuable insight as to where exactly is each key positioned. It did take me a few days to adapt to this new spatial challenge. However, I do recommend to everyone starting working on it as Google recently bought BlindType that has an interesting keyboard solution that is only reliant upon the relative spatial position of each keystroke. In other words, just imagine that you can type in a more open minded zone as long as your typing pattern is kindda consistent with the keyboard that is installed on your computing device.

It's even easier to remove the blindfolds from my words by just checking out this short video:

Furthermore, as evidenced in the Morph concept by Nokia (see very first post on this blog if interested), this "glasstyping" experience is very likely to be enhanced by smarter electronic and hardware that will create volume on demand. As the keyboard application is selected, instead of keys just showing up visually as on a regular tablet, the forms of the keys will emerge from the electronic substrate. Imagine electronic chickenpox in a way! :-)

But wait, I still haven't addressed the production issue that really stood in my purchase decision way originally and... there's more.

If you want to use a few minutes well spent, check out the OpenVibe video:

The principle is not new and is already used in very advanced segments of health care. What this means is that as opposed to leveraging a mechanic interaction that is subsequently transformed into an action-triggering electronic signal, it will be possible to use the source signal in the human brain to directly trigger the electronic action.

That's huge and the future applications are like a universe of disruptive innovations!

If we look at the evolution path, the future is clear. The traditional keystroke on a traditional computer is extremely mechanical and puts two pieces of conductors in contact which create a current (electronic signal) to trigger the key information. The next step is tablet computing, starting with touchscreen applications awhile ago, where either more subtle resistive interactions or capacitive ones map out the target information from the screen and convey it to its intended destination.

So the logical next step could be BCI: Brain Computer Interface where the mechanical interaction totally disappears, the command is purely virtualized.

It is then just a matter of time before we can start the disruptive experience of "thinktyping". Gosh, I would have already finished typing up this novel blog post! I should have asked my parents to have me a few years later ;-)

By then, I am not so sure "laptops" will have any sort of market share, or at least it will shrink exponentially because the tablet experience will be boundaryless and we will have extremely light tablets as all users will be used to saving their data on cloud computing services like the many incumbents these days that are making significant growth inroads (even FaceBook actively considers becoming one of the key players in that space soon).

To a greater extent, as the Internet access networks will be much faster, most applications will be cloud-based too and we can very well imagine that the tablet will evolve into the new concept of "paplet", see it as a tablet as thin and flexible as a piece of paper.

Fun... I hope to see that soon, much sooner than most people may want to think because singularity is not that far.

How will BCI-driven e-commerce and other marketing applications look like?
How will we ensure that our dreams do not interfere with our social actions from the conscious part of our lives?

By living our dreams?

Quantum innovation in Marketing

On my way to an innovation conference last week (that's how I use many of my few days of vacation a year - I am crazy!), I had voiced my concern about the huge marketing inefficiencies stemming from the traditional, broad forms of mass marketing that most companies generally embrace.

Sad.

I wish only 10% of the estimated wasted annual dollars would go to creating new learning and personal development opportunities for children around the world.  This would already make a big difference and certainly open the doors for a better future to many.

Anyway, it's like in politics, those who criticize generally do not have the guts to drive change themselves.  I am not one of those, and even if these are just words in essence, I hope that these few marketing thoughts will evolve towards actions that can help make marketing investments much more focused on contribution margin efficiency and scalability.

As a matter of fact, I don't believe that marketing is a continuous channel.

What I mean by that is that on the other side of any marketing channel there are people.  Psychology plays a key role in marketing as the core driver of any marketing result is the ability to shape the target audience's perceived value of your product or service to trigger the intended strategic action.  The objective of a marketing campaign along the funnel of purchase decision making can generally take six forms: awareness, consideration, liking, preference, persuasion, or purchase.  The value pricing model is a great one to consider to understand how direct marketers are sculptors of perceived value and how cost of good sold, total economic value, perceived value, and price interact and come together to influence sales behaviors.

Nonetheless, all models appear way too smooth and continuous when scalability in the marketing world is much more discrete.  I am speaking to this from experience, not theory.

The most successful campaigns that I have seen around me, or led in some of my marketing positions, were intimately related to their ability to tap into the irrational zone of the target audience's minds.

It's all about quantum in the end as there is no linear path to this mysterious interactive universe.

Energy is a lot about quantum too when we think about it.  I remember from a long time ago the discrete levels of energy in the materials that surround us are not continuous, they also are discrete.  The Schrodinger's Equation is a classical way to represent level of energies, it's about spots, not flowing streams.

It's actually fun to play with that equation.  When you solve it under a few basic conditions, it's quite artistic to see how the density of the orbitals come along.

It looks a bit like tribal signs from another world, a world where modern art and quantum science come together in perfect unison.

 

So how does quantum of energy relate to innovation in marketing?

There most likely is no equation to tap into human "irrationales"; however, I believe that design thinking in marketing is the key to unleashing the viral power of irrational emotions. 

As creativity is able to spawn irrational emotion, through what I call design content, the target audience's reaction is of quantum importance, and so are the bottom line results.

There is a slew of fresh minded entrepreneurs who have started to understand that marketing scalability and sustainable growth is coming from that angle.

I met a few of them last week in San Francisco, it was like a breeze of fresh air arousing my constant entrepreneurial dreams.

One of them was a young guy from a College near Boston that is very active in the area of entrepreneurship.  He created VS (ViralSkool) http://www.viralskool.com/ 

Another one was more experienced and it was a pleasure to discuss his vision with him.  This guy understood that one of the key dimensions that any marketer should excel at is loyalty.  Loyalty is complex.  Way too often, the true potential of creating engaging loyalty program with target consumers to build sustainable lifetime value is overseen, most marketers barely scratch the surface by distorting the true long term value of consumer advocacy on the sake of short term financial incentives.

Badegeville got it: http://www.badgeville.com

They empower marketers to leverage a much broader spectrum of motivators, beyond the rationale, to spur a new level of viral loyalty fan interaction.

Real-time video is also an area where we are just scratching the surface of something big.

It's getting late, I have to go to bed but, I'd just like to share "Brandlive" with you, they rock:

All of this is pretty cool and exciting but there are many more pending question marks.

How do we take these great ideas and ensure that they are scalable over time?  

Are they just a few minuscle steps towards new quanta of disruptive innovation?