This is the best-edited video on this site! In fact, it's the best corporate satire I've seen anywhere. (That said, I don't believe many corporate satires are actually produced.) Thank you uShip team for making your corporate culture come alive! Obviously, this is a mocumentary, but it's clear that Matt and his team know how to have fun, and poke good-natured fun at themselves. Who wouldn't want to be part of a culture that knows how to NOT take life so seriously. As for the acting - not bad for a bunch of non-actors. Matt was convincing as a mildly unbalanced, delusional, hopeless 40-year-old virgin. Mickey earns marks for being an erratic and contemptible dweeb. But I must say that Jay was hilarious too. He captures the essence of a math geek - they do dream about numbers all day long. And, who was the guy screaming about the phone in the jello! That was a nice touch. Now, besides the female intern - who provided all the relevant information about uShip - all other females took a supporting role, so to speak. What's up with that? Otherwise, excellent production, and very interesting company concept.
This is a mobile service that pushes online content to your mobile phones. Itâs another service trying to capitalize on the pervasiveness of mobile phones. More than 72% of U.S. homes have mobile phones. Thatâs higher than the 70% of homes that have Internet access from computers. There are about 219.4 million wireless subscribers in the U.S., according to CTIA. And, wireless phones now make up 33% of home-phone minutes, vs. 25% in 2004, according to The Kelsey Group.) Additionally, 15% of U.S. wireless users accessed the Web in 2005 vs. 6% in 2004. And, some 30% of wireless subscribers have data services. Clearly, the mobile phone is expanding its usefulness. Great big market! But itâs still a great big problem to get any service. Thatâs because the problem with many mobile services is that theyâre not compatible with all phones, or theyâre not so easy to download. For instance, I tried to download Plusmo onto my Palm Treo 650. I couldnât download it onto my Palm Treo 650 because the Plusmo file wasnât compatible and I needed an expansion card (SD or MMC), which I didnât have. That said, downloading onto my Blackberry Pearl was easy enough. It took about 10 minutes to download. As for the Plusmo service, it wasnât bad. I like the fact that I could find cheap gas prices, based on the zip code I typed in. I liked the Starbucks locator too. Too bad Plusmo doesnât have an In-N-Out Burger locator. Thatâs always handy on that long ride to Tahoe and back. It seems the channels that are available, such as Google News, TechCrunch, GigaOm, ValleyWag, to name a few (goes to show you who Plusmo execs are talking to) also have limited content. I added the Google News channel and I only received three news stories. All this said, I think the idea is a neat one. I like visuals as the gateway to news or a movie. It's one reason I have the Slide (photo-sharing site) version of Google.
The Web is going to vertical niche sites! To that end, this is a great idea! If DadLabs can deliver authentic, original, and substantive conent about fatherhood, then it can rise above the clutter of male-focused sites generating content seemingly for brainless fratboys. If DadLabs can create compelling content, it'll get its share of the elusive, but highly attractive 25-45 male demographic. For a brief time, I co-hosted segments for Spike TV, the Viacom-owned cable channel targeting males 18 to 34 years old. There were many experiments in content, but ultimately the executive producer was let go. It wasn't because Spike failed in attracting an audience, but rather because Spike attracted a female audience. Who would have thought? Spike also launched a series on dads. It's unclear how much viewership the show ultimately attracted. Men, we know, like financial news - that's the demographic I attract on MarketWatch -- and they like sports, and women. That said, a niche channel on fatherhood is probably the type of on-demand content that works well for the Web. And, if DadLabs.com can create a nice little community around parenting for dads, I'm sure the marketers will come.
If you want to see where your kids will be spending their time in the future, take a look at Gemini Mobile’s platform that lets carriers offer their subscribers a social networking community on their phones. Essentially, the service is a mobile community – a MySpace on the go, but for more virtual reality. The platform is called eXplo, and it powers SoftBank Mobile’s S! Town. S! Town is pretty neat. A subscriber can have an avatar that walks around this virtual world. In the demo I was given, Michael Tao, Gemini Mobile’s CTO, had a black anime as his avatar. His avatar strolled through S!Town’s virtual town center, which was quite deserted, given that it was 4 am in the morning in Japan, where this service is available. At first, it seemed pretty silly and useless to be walking around this deserted town. But then Michael bumped into several females (or at least one might think they were female because their avatars were female). Michael tried to befriend them, while at the same time clicking onto a user profile to find out more about this person. All members have profiles that can be made public to the community. All community members can roam around this virtual town and meet other members. Watching this interaction was a bit frightening, especially when Michael could – with just a click of a button -- find out more about the person whom he was interacting with. When I was a little girl, I played tea with some dolls around a mini table. My future little girl will likely be playing tea on her mobile phone with (hopefully) other little girls. So, what's the business model? Consumers don't pay for the service. Rather they can buy content in the town. There are also advertisements on billboards in the virtual town. In 2007, the service is expected to be deployed with U.S. and European carriers.
Tumri wants to help retailers spread their products across a number of Web sites. Essentially, it's a bit like Google's Adsense, whereby any publisher can be the distributor of Google's ads. It's like Edgeio's model of letting publishers be distributors of Edgeio's classified lists. Tumri is a smart idea if it can help retailers find their target market for a specific ad across the fragmented Web. Getting a specific product, say carbon fiber bicycles, distributed across the right sites with the target audience is a tall order. Additionally, Google's advertising Adword clients can create ads for specific products as well and be distributed across Google's Adsense network. After all, merchants are advertisers. Going after the merchant market is essentially the same as going for the advertising market. Look what happened to eBay's merchants. They too are Google advertisers. That said, I like the idea. Additinoally, the cost for merchant is based on performance. To that end, they'll only pay per click. Tumri will probably have to deal with clcik-fraud issues, but for starters, it's a fair way to go for merchants., unless they push for a click-per-action or click-per-purchase model. The trick for Tumri (and Edgeio) is to increase the relevance on the ads for each site. I plan on becoming a Tumri distributor. I'll let you know what I think of the experience over time.
