More iPad

Just can't get enough iPad.  It is such an societal icon, David Letterman highlights it.  Does anyone remember Apple between Steve's tours?

iPad 2.0 is Here, long live the iPad 3.0

At this point you will have seen the iPad 2 announcement, unless you just got back from space.  Apple is the world's best Buzz Machine, Wow.  Seems like a nice incremental improvement over the original.  Nothing to get me so worked up that I will upgrade, but nice stuff, now the iPad 3 will really be sweet.  My rule is always skip over the next generation of upgrades.  Though eBay and Craig's list are reporting that sales of the original iPad are brisk with people getting ready for the iPad 2.  In any case the team at MakeUseOf have come up with a nice little guide for the iPad.  If you are an iPad believer you will find this useful, and it is free.

DOWNLOAD iPad: A Magical And Revolutionary Guide

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/ipad-magical-revolutionary-guide-pdf-guide/

As a reseller, you need to be adding software for the iPad and Android pads to your portfolio.  The space is growing to fast to ignore.  Bug your vendors for products to run on these devices.  Security for these devices is a big hole.  There is a future headline "Organization XXX, just lost an iPad with all of the world's social security numbers in it".  Then the pitch forks come out and somebody looses their job.  Don't let it be your client.


As a vendor, the same argument exists, these are viable platforms, develop for them, even if you are just doing it to show that your product line is modern and relevant.  


Okay, lots happening in the world that does not include iPads, here is a cross section.

Articles of Note

Social Media

Socialcast Town Hall Promotes Transparent Management

by Chelsi Nakano

Now that the Web’s biggest microblogging-based enterprise solutions are catching up with each other, what’s next?

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What is Chatter.com?

by Damien Scott

If you tuned in to Super Bowl XLV on Sunday, you were inundated with images of will.i.am, and not just during the Half Time Show. In several featured commercials, the Black Eyed Peas frontman wound up digitized and pitching a new service called Chatter.

The 4-Hour Startup: Marketing It
by Loren Burton

The "four-hour" title is a bit misleading, but Loren started a quick site selling "Snowpocalypse" t-shirts during the U.S. East Coast snow dump. This post details the marketing tactics he used to achieve 3,730 Facebook likes and tens of thousands of visitors to his site in a matter of days. 

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The Knack for Getting Money
by Sebastian Marshall

If you are a technical founder, what you need to look for in a business person is a "knack for getting money". You need someone not afraid to hustle, has skills, works hard as hell, and has enthusiastic drive. Just make sure their morals & values are all there too. 

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Never had an angry user? It's likely they don't care.
by SupportBee & Wufoo

We love Wufoo and use their product (check out our new signup form for the Reading Lists). They spend a lot of time and energy on customer service and this post highlights some of the channels they use and how they handle angry users. 

Instagram Raises $7 Million, Hits 1.75 Million Members
by Lauren Indvik, Mashable

Instagram is a photo-sharing app for the iPhone that has exploded in popularity since its launch in October. The news of the financing round is meaningful for anyone working for large brands, who can now work directly with Instagram to build social marketing campaigns (like NPR and Charity: Water are already doing) around the service's new hashtag feature.

Corporate/Startup

Cleantech investing hits $4 billion
by Matthew Lynley, VentureBeat

Investments in cleantech companies in 2010  are up 8 percent over 2009.  Most of the investments are going to late-stage cleantech startups, but a new group of internet cleantech companies are also raising capital to build online marketplaces to facilitate the sale of “green” products & services.

How to Get Your First 1,000 Users
by Vinicius Vacanti

This is an awesome tactical guide on customer acquisition, especially when you are just realeasing your product.

More Interesting Links and References

The beauty of the web is the amount of information at your finger tips, the horror of it is finding anything interesting to read.  Here goes a few suggestions of recent articles that you may find interesting, enjoy.


The Cloud is always controversial, here are few perspectives:
Leading Developers Dismiss Charge That Cloud Is 'Vapor'
By Charles Babcock, InformationWeek

Hadoop originator Doug Cutting, NASA CIO Chris Kemp, and other cloud pioneers defended cloud computing during a CTO Forum panel and pointed to an emerging generation of enterprise applications.  



Cloudy With a Chance of Transformation: New Microsoft Server and Tools Head Satya Nadella Speaks
By Kara Swisher, All Things Digital

After he was appointed the new president of Microsoft’s Server and Tools Division from his top engineering post at its come-from-behind Bing search unit, Satya Nadella now finds himself a leader of a business that also needs to keep catching up.  


A Bit of Social Media and New Age talk:
As collaboration goes social, where will it thrive?
By Dion Hinchcliffe, ZDNet

Social business is starting to get serious attention as an industry, like social media recently has in the investment community. Find out where the action has been when it comes to the places Enterprise 2.0 is most likely to thrive.  


Should Information Be On The Balance Sheet?
By Chuck Hollis

EMC VP of Global Marketing Chuck Hollis is calling for enterprises to put information on the balance sheet.  


What the Facebook Message Platform Means for Businesses
by Shannon Suetos, Social Media Examiner

Facebook's message platform gives marketers more options to directly engage group members faster.

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Video Marketing: DIY or Take It To a Pro?
by Neil Glassman, SocialTimes

Whatever you do, don't get too caught up in the production -- authenticity is most important.

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How Small Businesses Are Using Social Media
by Erica Swallow, Mashable

Small businesses are getting more direct engagement on Twitter, but Facebook drives much more traffic for them.


What Apple's 30% Charge Teaches Us about the Attention Economy
by Garry Tan, Posterous

It's great to be the owner of a successful company, but it's much more valuable (though much riskier) to own the infrastructure on which that company is built.

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There Are No Rules in Customer Development

by Andrew Skotzko

Lots of people are getting hung up on the "process" of customer development. There is no set process, only set principles -- question your assumptions and talk to your customers.

Practical Use of Social Media

Readers of this blog know that I am a proponent of social media in business. However candidly there is a great deal of activity and investment in social media that is wasted. You have seen them in action; fancy Facebook pages that are nothing more than a rehash of of the web site or tweets that tell you what the president had for lunch.

Well recently I came across an article that answered the question: How would a pragmatist leverage social media?  The theme of the article was about how to gain insight into your competitors via the social media outlets, brilliant!  With the transparency demanded of participation in these communities, companies freely share a load of information directly with specials on products or fixes to bugs or indirectly via the comments from users about great feature of a product or issues with support.  The article is worth reading:
         http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/how-to-gain-competitive-insight-with-social-media/

Well in that vein, I have uncovered a number of publishers of solid information and are interesting to read, let me share a few:

1. The publisher of the article mentioned above; WWW.socialmediaexaminer.com is a great source of information on...drum roll please...Social Media.
2. I like WWW.thesocialcustomer.com also it focuses on social as a tool to support your customer interaction.
3. For something completely different, WWW.gilsmethod.com.  It is a how to blog for the computer user.  The articles are clear an concise, very useful.

Enough for now, Happy Presidents Day.

Tell it like it is.

This Blog hits home. With the prevalence of email, getting noticed is a huge challenge. Offering value by providing great content is the way to get noticed and a winning headline is a must. Read her article, it is concise, informative and actionable. It will also help keep your emarketing from ending up in the spam filter.

http://achievement.im/8/how-to-write-headlines-7-tips-for-writing-effective-marketing-headlines/


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Got to see this Channel Guys

This is a wonderful video that insults and entertains everyone in the channel food chain.

Are VARs like Record Stores, Obsolete?

With all due respect to the great people at the 240,000 VARs in North America, what is the point of a VAR today?  Vendors are aggressively courting end users, i.e. Apple Stores, online stores.  Traditional direct marketing resellers (DMR) like CDW and Insight have always been "the boogie man" anyway to VARs and they are offering more value-add services while selling large volumes of goods at thin margins.

To quote my friends at VARBusiness:  a VAR or Solutions Provider is any third party company that deploys/integrates/resells and/or influences hardware/software/service to an end customer.  The most common value-add VARs traditionally provide is "Access and Advice".  When you think about it, the value proposition is pretty close to that of record stores, look what happened to them.  Do you even remember the name of a record store.  For the record I do....Tower Records.

10 years ago VARs kept inventory in order to be able to respond quickly to clients. It was a competitive advantage.   Presto! with the combination of FedEx, the internet and the huge economic buying power of the mega resellers it is no longer an advantage.  In fact tying up cash in inventory is a disadvantage.  And that was before SaaS eliminated inventory.  So access has gone by the wayside, what about advice?

Queue a discussion of social media....Much of the channel discussion that I have been involved in centers around communication between vendors and resellers.  It is about about becoming more interactive, relevant, and timely.  The goal being to better enable the channel to resell products and vendors to stay relevant to those resellers.  The same logic and technology can be used on end users with the same wondrous result.  However, another attribute of social media is a down side for VARs.

VARs filtered the "signal to noise" ratio for end customers by being knowledgeable about a set of products, i.e. reducing the noise.  These products are filtered, as they are preselected as a portfolio product by the VARs.  The good ones do it on the basis of product features, service, vendors stability, etc.  As VARs select the products before the end user uses the product, they are Pre-Filters.  The VAR can give advice about the 2 to 4 products that they carry in each product category.  The advice is valuable, in some cases invaluable.  But wait, there is a new source of information for buyers: fellow travelers. 

What is more compelling:  a power point from a sales person or a series of rhapsodic reviews from professionals in your position i.e. doctors, lawyers, coffee shop owners.  Unsure?  Well then try it for free for 30 days.  DIY (Do It Yourself)  in full bloom.  

There goes the "advice" portion of the VAR value proposition.  What happens when a company with a powerful market position, credibility, and aggressive prices like CDW or Insight offers user recommendations on their web site (which neither do today) or it is available on Amazon?  Is it game over for VARs?

The IT channel is at the cusp of a change.  My contention is that there is room for Value-Added Resellers but not for resellers masquerading as VARs.  In future posts I will develop the “whys and wherefores” a bit more.