Tomorrow from 1-2pm YouTube Australia will be running their first live streaming event for the 2010 ICT ministers debate on the youtube.com/AustraliaVotes channel.
ICT policy is shaping up as one of the big issues of this election, which is great because ICT tends to take a back seat in Australian politics. The main issues are around the $43b National Broadband Network (NBN) project and the proposed Internet Filter. Each party has a different perspective on each of these major issues, which hopefully will make for an interesting debate. Regardless, I am proud to be helping to bring this first to Australia!
Edit: The debate ran successfully on YouTube Live! You can now see it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRHbeONYdUc
Cadbury Australia RollPack
Mimicry involves producing a custom gadget within a brand channel (home page is no longer allowed) on YouTube that mimics the YouTube interface and functionality. This requires a really close working relationship with the YouTube policy team and your Tech Producer. Here are the best examples of mimicry on YouTube that I wanted to highlight:
The most successful mimicry examples use an initial deception to draw the user in, but then they reveal that deception in a captivating way before the user starts to feel betrayed that they cannot interact with the standard YouTube controls (at least within the first 10 seconds).
Safari Develop Menu
Do you want to see what an iPad user sees when they look at your website? Well there is a simple way to check it out without buying an iPad on either Windows or Mac:
- Download and install Safari (if you don’t already have it)
- Edit -> Preferences (or Safari -> Preferences on a Mac)
- Go to the Advanced tab
- Check the “Show Develop menu in menu bar” option
- Close the preferences window
- A new “Develop” menu option will appear
- Select “User Agent” and then “Mobile Safari 3.2 – iPad”
It isn’t perfect (hard to simulate rotating the device) and you should also disable Flash, but it gives you a rough impression.
I am someone who learns visually. I absorb charts, screenshots, videos etc. a lot faster than any other medium. Business knowledge is something that often doesn’t come in this format however (perhaps why the first business discipline I learned was marketing). However I have found a Twitter feed (yes, there is useful content on Twitter) that I have really grown to love. http://twitter.com/chartoftheday
This graph was used to illustrate how poorly Microsoft Office 2010 was performing sales-wise, but wow what a difference between Windows Vista (Jan 2007 launch) and Windows 7 ( Oct 2009 launch). It completely masks the decline in Office sales, even though Office sales are obviously an equally big cash cow for Microsoft. It also makes the Server and Tools slice of the pie look tiny, even though it actually represents $1b a year in operating profit.
I also liked this chart of how Apple cannibalised the entire mobile phone industries’ sales with the iPhone. I am reading the Innovators Dilemma at the moment, and the release of a well executed touch screen phone certainly represents a disruptive technology in my eyes. It still amazes me that such a massive market filled with well established players can just be turned on its head in a few short years. More specifically Nokia’s share price copped a beating ever since the release of the iPhone, the subject of yet another chart. What is interesting to me is that Apple’s rapid rise ironically precipitated a huge boom in the adoption of open source mobile software in Android. I guess that the previous market leaders had their hands full competing with Apple’s hardware and didn’t have the time or resources to produce new software from scratch.
There are plenty more charts out there that will make you stop and think, and each one can be read into (rightly or wrongly) 100 different ways.
Setting up your Windows Mobile 6.5 phone for Google Apps should be simple, there are some clear instructions located here. However I have found that on some HTC Windows based phones the account creation process does not go so smoothly. After a bit of hunting around I found someone who had a fix for me. Here is the more detailed version of how to get it working:
- Connect your phone to your PC via the USB cable
- Disable all syncing with your PC by clicking Tools -> Options
- Click the Settings button and add your Exchange (Apps) account (do not check “Detect Settings”) and check Email syncing only
- Sync
- Edit the Exchange settings and check “Detect Settings”
- Sync
- Edit the Exchange settings again and check Calendar and Contacts (no tasks in Apps remember!)
- Sync again
And there you go! Not sure if this is a bug in Activesync, the phone or Apps, but it sure is annoying. At least it only occurs on setup, after that everything seems to keep up to date with no problems.
On the 30th of June I became Google Adwords Qualified in the category of Display Advertising. To achieve this I had to complete 2 120 multiple choice question tests with a pass mark of 85% or above. You can check my qualifications here:
Google Adwords Qualified – Display Advertising
Proves that Google dogfoods its own qualifications. 
July 1st, 2010
By Scott
Categories: dasBlog
Out with the old...
Today I moved my blog to Dreamhost, upgraded to WordPress 3.0 and changed themes. Please let me know what you think! I am moving towards shutting down my Windows VPS system as I simply no longer have the time to maintain it. Web hosting is such a mass-produced commodity these days that it makes no sense to maintain your own DNS, WWW or mail server. Dreamhost and Google Apps are now splitting the roles for well under $100 a year. That saves me a lot of time, and my time is worth about $100 an hour right?
Each year Google runs a GoogleServe week, where we each choose a non-profit project we would like to contribute to. I chose to present to a group of 30+ non-profit organisations here in Sydney on how they can benefit from our recently launched YouTube non-profit program. Despite being only a small contribution it was a very rewarding experience, and I was really impressed with how sophisticated many of the charities are.
I am posting my presentation here so that any other charities who didn’t attend can view it at any time. I am also posting a 1-sheeter handout that I gave to all attendees which summarises the simple steps to getting their non-profit onto YouTube. I hope they help!
I have just finished reading Crossing the Chasm (Revised Edition) by Geoffery A. Moore. I purchased this book on Amazon after seeing it on a number of Googler’s Amazon wish-lists on LinkedIn, which is a good way to prepare for an interview with a new company! Truthfully however I decided to read the book because I have a deep appreciation of marketing and a strong desire to be an entrepreneur.
The Whole Product concept instantly resonated with me. The only thing worse than an engineer that thinks “I built it, now I just have to wait for them to come” is a sales person who thinks “we need a custom version for every customer who promises millions”. The central theme to the book is that getting a product to be successful is like organising a battle; from amassing a strong force to landing on the beach and finally taking the flag. At each stage there is a huge pit of despair that you can easily fall into. The key to it is where you spend your effort. Don’t focus too much on satisfying every product need, but just enough to appeal to a mass market. Don’t focus too much on a sophisticated marketing message, customers will get confused by and forget anything that is longer than two sentences.
One of the key learnings for me was that you shouldn’t pitch your product as a one of a kind, because nothing freaks a pragmatic buyer out more than having nothing to compare you with. How can you make a decision without a reasonable comparison? First you need to establish a market alternative (a familiar problem you are solving in an innovative new way) and secondly you establish a product alternative (a familiar solution that you have uniquely tailored to this application). By drawing a line between these two points of reference, you have created a new niche that customers will understand and appreciate.
The only aspects of this book I didn’t like were some technology references were a little outdated (even the revised edition is now 11 years old). I understand the historical examples where there was a conclusion, but some predictions are a little off (although probably good “what went wrong?” case studies). I also felt the book was a little repetitive in places, with the author jumping ahead and back again.
Overall however it was a great book and really thought provoking. It is a hard topic from my perspective because how do you teach minimalism, balance and keeping things simple? It is easy to go off on a tangent and over-invest in the area that has your short attention span as an entrepreneur. I guess not seeing the forest for the trees is a simple analogy? Anyway, I will no doubt use this book as a source of re-focusing when I do eventually realise my entrepreneurial dreams.
Today I was the guest author on the Official Google Australia blog! I helped the guys from TEDxSydney upload and present their valuable content on a non-profit brand channel. It is great to see so many talented Australians contributing to the huge public pool of knowledge that TED and its derivatives are generating. These HD quality videos really are the best way of transferring and retaining this knowledge.
Tomorrow from 1-2pm YouTube Australia will be running their first live streaming event for the 2010 ICT ministers debate on the youtube.com/AustraliaVotes channel.
