Marketing

Pornographic ads on Facebook (that didn't take long)

It was just a month ago that Facebook launched it's questionable advertising initiatives and people are already gaming the system...with porn! (There's a photo in the Valleywag post if you are curious. It's NSFW but not that bad.)

MoveOn.org is protesting the ads that reveal information about user activity and now the smut peddlers are taking over. Never a dull moment.

It kinda makes me wish I had done a goofy social network company instead of something practical like enterprise software.

Sigh.

Facebook decides to bastardize its community

Facebook on Tuesday announced its new advertising offerings. They seem pretty cool from a marketing perspective but have an underlying creepiness that should make users feel uncomfortable.

As CNET New.com's Caroline McCarthy writes:

Called Facebook Ads, the new program is threefold: Advertisers can create branded pages, run targeted advertisements, and have access to intelligence and analytics pertaining to the site's more than 50 million users. Partners can participate in all three components of Facebook Ads, or a combination of them.

Sounds good right? Who wouldn't want to target that active, young user base?

Additionally, Facebook has unveiled targeted advertisements that will allow marketers to target by any information inside Facebook profiles, from relationship status to favorite television shows.

Yikes, this is the part that freaks me out. Wasn't it just last month that we all enjoyed the Facebook privacy scandal? Kinda makes you wonder how it was able to develop algorithms for advertising that sound so detailed, doesn't it? … Read more

More SOA false prophets from Microsoft 'Oslo'

Once again Microsoft continues to muddy its SOA (service-oriented architecture) strategy with a push into model-driven development (MDD). While on the surface it may appear that this is meaningful, in fact all Microsoft is doing is dumbing down the already mediocre tools and "prescriptions" that currently suggest an obvious misunderstanding of the fundamental (primarily vendor-enforced) components of SOA, which usually include items like business process management, enterprise service bus, registry and governance.

Instead, Microsoft has a set of things that are not in line with any other vendor or standards group: "a bundle of BizTalk Server 2006 … Read more

Is your company screwed? (A quick analysis of BEA)

MySQL's Zack Urlocker published an article called Sitting Duck, which gives you a great 13-point checklist to figure out if your company is screwed. If you do a quick analysis you can predict a bit of the future and also use hindsight to figure out if the company's strategy went sideways.

In light of all the hub-bub around Oracle trying to acquire BEA let's take a quick pass and see if the company is flailing based on a few of Zack's points.

Is everyone in your market having trouble? No. In fact the application server/middleware/SOA space is growing at an alarming rate. The fact that Oracle wants BEA means that they see more opportunity that can be exploited and that they are more capable of generating dollars than BEA is with that product set. If we agree that BEA is struggling, they seem to believe it's because of their cost structure and not their products. Which leads to... … Read more

Understanding branding and viral marketing with A Bathing Ape

The best examples of corporate and product branding are usually found in consumer goods--companies like Apple, Coke, Nike etc. provide the rest of us with models to follow and relate to software. A great example in the fashion world is A Bathing Ape, a brand obsessively built and managed by Nigo and profiled on Portfolio.com. Back in 2001 I went to Japan and become semi-obsessed with the A Bathing Ape (BAPE) brand. Every hipster kid had a cool BAPE t-shirt or hat and I just had to have one. We finally found the store in Harajuku where the line … Read more

IBM ready to "kick Oracle's teeth in"

Ever wonder what the sales guys at BigCos like IBM are thinking about? Seems that IBM has assembled "what it calls a Viper 500 program with IBM's account teams to replace Oracle in more than 600 accounts."

I do enjoy a slap-fight amongst software vendors... "I am actively hiring people to go kick their teeth in," said Mike Borman, IBM vice president, worldwide sales for the IBM Software Group in a wide ranging 90 minute interview earlier this week before the hostile Oracle bid for BEA.

Despite it sounding a little bit silly, this is … Read more

Why isn't data encryption the norm?

The TSA recently demanded data encryption on all contractor laptops as two machines containing personal data of 3,930 truckers who handle hazardous material were lost or stolen.

This made me wonder why more attention and more startups aren't trying to come up with easier ways to safeguard data. My initial guess is that the data problem is more about users than it is hardware.

As I searched for information on this I came across a few things of note: Windows, MacOS and Linux all have encryption capabilities, but none do so by default. There are quite a few … Read more

Avenue A/Razorfish announces SiLC search engine optimization tool

I got a chance to sit down with William Flaiz, VP of SEO and Web Analytics at Avenue A/Razorfish today at ad:tech Chicago to talk about its new search engine optimization technology. For those of you who don't know, Avenue A/Razorfish builds Web sites and designs digital marketing programs and has done work for a ton of companies including XM Satellite Radio and Dell. Their parent company, aQuantive, was recently acquired by Microsoft, so Avenue A/Razorfish will soon be part of the Microsoft family, as soon as that deal closes.

Today, Avenue A/Razorfish is … Read more