St. Cloud-based W3i is in the app distribution business — in a big, profitable way (33 successive quarters thereof).  But till now that business has been all about desktop apps, and Windows only. Well, mark down yesterday as the day they entered the world of mobile, with this bombshell: W3i Launches New Incented Mobile App Distribution Service for iOS App Developers.  A separate version of the release, for consumers, gets more to the benefit: Consumers Can Now Earn Rewards for Installing Apps.  Those rewards, my friends, would be cash — for consumers who register at a W3i site called Apperang.com.

Naturally, app fanboys and girls everywhere loved the news — after reading about it on some of the sites they frequent the most.  TechCrunch (MobileCrunch) ran this story: Apperang Pays You Cash to Download iPhone Apps… Ka-Ching! And VentureBeat (MobileBeat) ran concurrently — amazing how that happens — with their take: Get paid to install apps with W3i Mobile Solutions and Apperang.  Numerous other sites and blogs picked up on it immediately, and Twitter was going crazy on it (just search on hashtags #apperang and #w3i).  [Oh, sure, there was a story in the StarTrib last week, too, but that didn't light up much of anything... <rimshot>]

I asked the CEO of a local app development company for his reaction to this W3i news, from a business perspective:  ”The model and integration W3i has developed for desktop distribution has been a huge success in the past, so I wouldn’t bet against them on making their mobile version a success,” said Wade Beavers, CEO of DoApp Inc. “For developers wanting to get a core base of users fast, it makes sense to use this service. The key will be how long those users keep your app, because that’s where the return on investment is.”

I also asked one of Minnesota’s most experienced iPhone app developers for his reaction: “Will app publishers readily jump to use this type of service? Small developers, maybe,” said Bill Heyman of CodeMorphic. “But small developers may not have budget to support this type of promotion… Will it be enough to hit the tipping point for more organic sales because of a higher App Store ranking? Well, ultimately, it would depend on how much a company wants to spend to buy a ranking.”

But, actually, W3i signed on some pretty successful big developers for its private beta before the announcement yesterday (the service is now in public beta).  That list of launch advertisers — just those that let W3i use their names for PR purposes — includes these firms, with the name of their app in parentheses: Big Stack Studios (Sigma), Inert Soap (FingerZilla), Booyah (MyTown), Gist (Gist), Thinking Ape (Kingdoms at War), Flixster (Movies), Slacker Inc (Slacker Radio), xCube Labs (My Health Records – Health n Family), and infinidycorp (Zombies vs. Aliens).

I’m sure we’ll be hearing about a lot more, as W3i tells me they are crazy-busy now following up with other app companies who are inquiring.

(Disclosure: the author has had a consulting relationship with W3i for providing PR services.)

W3i Lights Up the ‘Net with Its Latest App News is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

As social media and networking continues its advance and integration in to the very fabric of our lives (which is especially the case as more of us become a part of the always on, always connected online culture) it continually intrigues us at Minnov8 that most organizations are still either taking a wait-n-see attitude toward the whole category while others have quickly become a part of the smart and select few taking calculated risks and subsequent bold actions. We’ve seen very little in-between, even as the shift in marketing and communications has accelerated as traditional media has downtrended rapidly while social media and networking use has increased dramatically (e.g., Twitter grows to 8M users).

Fallon, a division of Fallon Worldwide (a part of Publicis Groupe S.A., based in Paris), has moved forward with an innovative new lifestreaming application called skimmer. Lifestreaming is the practice of collecting one’s online digital breadcrumbs and presence — on sites like Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube or Blogger — within applications or services which enable we connected folk to bring all of our friend and acquaintance connections (and everything we’re each doing online in all of these various online venues) together in one central place and with a single, unified application.

What is skimmer exactly? As Fallon describes the value proposition for the app they say, “Skimmer is an Adobe AIR-based desktop application that serves as a dashboard for a person’s social networks, saving people the time and hassle of manually checking Facebook®, Twitter®, Flickr®, Blogger® and YouTube® by consolidating their feeds into a single stream of real-time, relevant content on the desktop.” Skimmer was developed in conjunction with the firm that seems to be popping up everywhere, Sierra Bravo, and the application has performed flawlessly for the few days I’ve been using and feels rock-solid.

I had a chance to to talk with Chris Wiggins, Creative Director at Fallon about the motivations and strategy behind skimmer and what initially appeared to me to be fuzzy reasons why a creative brand agency would deliver such an application. I also wanted to potentially uncover whether the app they’re delivering is intended as a true value giveaway or just another scheme to surreptitiously give away a platform that would end up as another backdoor carrier of ad or messaging distribution. 

We started off talking about the motivations behind why they moved in this application direction within the context of the downtrend in traditional media distribution channels while the growing social web is shifting the need for brands to engage with their audiences.  Most agencies aren’t moving forward. “In our industry, there are a frustrating number of ad agencies who are looking at the social web in a quizzical way and poking at it and wondering what to do,” Wiggins explained. “Those agencies aren’t spending their time experimenting or getting their hands dirty actually trying to sculpt what it is.”

He was clear that this experiment, “in the grand scheme,” is a small but important step for them to have taken, but illustrative of their drive to get their hands dirty and deliver something that has true value for the social web. As I discovered, the outcome they are moving towards from this effort and giveaway is all around building the Fallon brand and, most importantly, walking-the-talk they give to clients about the brand concept they’ve strategically aligned the agency around: branded generosity.

In an January 2009 article by Fallon’s Director of Brand Innovation, John King, in Contagious Magazine (a quarterly intelligence briefing publication that identifies the ideas, trends and innovations behind the world’s most revolutionary marketing strategies), he began by positioning brand generosity in this way,

“Earlier this year, Fallon Minneapolis reached for the crystal ball. We didn’t like what we saw in the mirror. We had become schizophrenic, pitching new business under the banner of everything from ‘platform creativity’ to ‘challenger branding’ to ‘return on imagination’. We made the collective decision to call time-out. We stopped. We took a breath. We quit trying to fit words around an assignment, and stopped trying to read clients’ minds. Instead, we wrote down where the leaders of the agency saw the world going instead of what we thought could help us win the next pitch. We didn’t need another banner; we needed an altar — a movement we could all believe in.

We believe generosity is the recipe for modern branding.”

Those of us primarily in the Web space would describe this concept as the “freemium” model (a business model which works by offering basic services for free while charging a premium for advanced or pro features) but it’s much more. Even though a free entry point for a Web application is somewhat analogous to Fallon’s approach, the deeper meaning of branded generosity takes this concept to a far higher and broader level, ostensibly touching every single aspect of a brand and therefore can be a guiding principle behind delivering value to ones prospects, customers, ecosystem, or audience with the “return on generosity” being greater acceptance of the brand, more loyalty, deeper trust, perhaps delight, and all the other desired states brand builders struggle to attain.

THE PLATFORM
Curious about why they chose the Adobe AIR “container” vs. using a dashboard vendor (e.g., NetVibes) or some other method for creating and delivering a lifestreaming social web application, we talked about the relative merits of each approach and Wiggins was clear about why they chose AIR, “It’s a pretty safe bet. Especially at this point in AIR’s existence when they’re gaining such incredible momentum. I don’t remember the statistic exactly, but it was mind-blowing. Something like 10 million installs of Adobe AIR have occurred. Add to that it works on all three platforms (Mac, Windows, Linux) and it was the clear choice.” (UPDATE: Adobe’s PR agency saw this article and sent a correction. AIR’s install base is not 10 million, but rather 100 million).

Though Fallon sets expectations in their FAQs that they won’t be able to provide support like an app developer would (it’s free, after all) they also point out elsewhere that they do have a feature roadmap and will continue adding functionality to the app over time (including the possibility that they will deliver a “premium version” as well as a mobile version of skimmer). They’ve also been receiving many feature requests and feedback — including things like a “night mode” so there isn’t so much white — so no question they’ll continue to drive forward. Any further development will, of course, be dependent upon the level of acceptance of skimmer.

Though there are other Adobe AIR apps and web applications which deliver lifestreaming-like capabilities (e.g., TweetDeck or FriendFeed), the former is Twitter-centric and the latter is delivered as a webpage requiring a manual refresh. Skimmer is targeted at people who are engaged with multiple offerings on the social web (and whose friends are as well) and is meant to make engaging with all of these services and your friends in a more efficient and delightful way.

After our platform discussion, Wiggins wanted to step back for a moment and add something to the motivation questions I’d asked earlier. “Our overarching philosophy at Fallon is that for ad agencies to continue in the same direction — interrupting people with what they’re engaged in to deliver a message — isn’t effective now and is becoming less so all the time, especially with today’s socially connected people online. Interruptions work if the message is entertaining enough (which also hints at deeper meaning with the brand), but it’s just not enough and is far too limiting.”

He then went on to discuss how it is their belief in the imperative that all brands must deliver deeper intrinsic value to people today which engages them far longer than those sorts of fleeting messages ever would. Obviously this is the key to them expending the effort and resources to deliver skimmer and why they harnessed their creativity, and that spirit of generosity, to give something to the social web community that would add value to our lives.

FREE VALUE…FROM AN AD AGENCY?
As soon as I downloaded and began to use skimmer, I instantly noticed the gray header area with significant open space. Same thing along the left sidebar column with a lot of open white space. Both of these areas were ones that I assumed would be space within the application in which Fallon (or clients who’d deliver ads or even brand this app to give away to their own customers) would target for ad delivery once a critical mass of skimmer users had downloaded, launched and were keeping the app open all day long.

My skepticism continued since I’m acutely aware of the capability and momentum of other “containers” to deliver value (e.g., iWidgets; Sproutbuilder; BrightCove) and how most of these viral deliverables have, as a key part of their value proposition, the ability to track and quantify use (and where they’re embedded). I was thus fairly certain that there had to be some form of analytics behind the delivery of skimmer and the possibility to measure and identify location and presence by users.

As it turns out, these were faulty assumptions on my part.

Doing any of those would run counter to the entire meaning of their branded generosity philosophy and, as Wiggins so diplomatically pointed out, was “too obvious” and would be an unwelcome intrusion shunned by users and therefore be totally against their belief in that philosophy, creating a great user experience and generously delivering something of real and actual intrinsic value.

Upon reflection, I’ve realized that the folks at Fallon have completely immersed themselves in the zeitgeist of today’s social web and are making their strategic moves in an extraordinarily enlightened way and exhibiting true thought leadership in the ad agency space. As we ended our discussion, I tried to probe a bit on what’s next with their strategy of branded generosity and what Wiggins thought was particularly exciting and cool at this moment. “Ahh…I’d rather not get into that at this time,” he said with a chuckle.

I suspect we’ll be delighted.

Fallon Releases Free Social App? is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

In addition, if you’re an investor with any money left in your 200.5k (i.e., half of a 401k) and could stomach some internet investing, then viewing opinions and recommendations on where to invest is key.

In both cases, an analysis of the potential of various sectors of an internet economy — by one of the world’s leading financial institutions, JPMorgan — is reason enough to spend the time necessary go through their “Nothing But Net” report.

Highlights of areas covered within it include:

• US Sector Outlook
• Ad Networks on the Rise
• eCommerce Outlook
• The Mobile Market
• Social Networks Primer
• Cloud Computing Outlook
• Internet for Social Good

…and much more.

The paper is embedded after the jump along with a download link.

Download PDF here.

JPMorgan Internet Investment Guide is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

Today’s hosts: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott, Graeme Thickins and Phil Wilson. (Photo credit: Lee Odden (TopRankBlog; Flickr).

Joining us on the podcast is a brand new Minnov8 contributor and participant, Gary Koelling, who is Senior Manager, Social Technology at Best Buy Inc. After interactions with Graeme Thickins — who isn’t bashful about promoting Minnov8 — Gary decided he’d like to create for Minnov8 and completed the form (hint: you could too!).

Gary is the founder of BlueShirtNation.com, Giftag.com and leads several social technology projects within Best Buy. He describes himself as a tinkerer, gadfly (and an aspiring iconoclast), reader, tryer (someone who tries), teacher and listener (with a fairly tuned bullshit meter). Due to the success of the efforts he’s involved in, and the high profile of our hometown consumer electronics retailing giant, Gary has been able to talk to lots of people and companies around the country about social media and social technology.

Our favorite quote about his speaking around the country from his LinkedIn profile? “I don’t know if it’s helping, but I enjoy it.” We sure think so since he’s in-the-game, taking risks, experimenting and driving towards high value outcomes for his employer.

LINKS
Here are links to sites, products or other resources discussed during the podcast:

• Good economic news for MN tech firms in Q4 2008: MTS revs up 9%, EPS up 21% (view MTS “Test Suite“) and NVE up 24%, EPS up 44% (view NVE “Fun Facts” page)
• Mashable article on 40 Best Twitter Brands and the People Behind Them (Scroll down to the “Retail” section)
• Fortune Top 100 Best Places to Work: Mayo (24th) and General Mills (39th) as great places to work (via MNHeadhunter)
• Forbes listing America’s Top Most Wired Cities: Minneapolis is #7 on the list
• The (mostly mythological) “Osborne Effect” but is there some reality to it in an online world?
• Macintosh image editors increasingly used by Tim Elliott: Acorn and Pixelmator
• Gary headed to Etail in Phoenix and a Computerworld event (both he and his cohort and colleague, Steve Bendt)
• EVENTS: Social Media Breakfast 1/30/09; Minnedemo (RSVP if you want to get in!) 2/6/09; Unsummit 3/7/09.

Minnov8 Gang Podcast – Episode 22 is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

As you can see from Phil Wilson’s Unsummit post, there were those who ignored the hype and chose to do their own (free) concurrent event at a nearby pub, thank you very much. (Okay, many of them were too cheap to pay the big MIMA fee.) And the MIMA folks actually cheered them on (even from the stage the day of the two events), since they felt bad they couldn’t have accommodated more people. But the venue — the very nice Depot downtown — could literally take no more. (MIMA has vowed to find a bigger site next year though that won’t be easy — maybe the Convention Center?) This year’s attendance, I believe, was something north of 700. MIMA’s membership is now about 950, but the Summit’s attendees also included some non-members and invited speakers, of course.

So, how did the event go?  This was my first year attending (they have not given press passes to us lowly bloggers in the past), so I went courtesy of my employer, to do some serious working of the crowd.  My assessment: the hype didn’t quite meet the reality as far as the overall content, as quality conferences go. But this is an association, after all, not a professional conference producer. And don’t we all kinda forgive a certain percentage of marketing build-up most of the time?  Nonetheless, the logistics were handled quite well, and my hat’s off to the MIMA officers and their band of volunteers who pulled this thing off. (I’m sure they’ve worked out a lot of bugs over the several years they’ve sponsored this event.)

As with any event like this, I attend much more for the people, the networking, the connections, and that part was excellent. The chance to exchange notes and news with your peers, meet new folks in our amazing marketing and advertising community, and meet out-of-town speakers as well made the event very worthwhile. As they say, it’s what goes on in the hallways that matters, not in the meeting rooms. In the age of Conversational Marketing, this was indeed a blab fest of the highest order.

The highlight of the day for most everyone was surely the lunch speaker, Ze Frank. This guy is a polished, well coached and practiced speaker to large audiences (including the likes of the TED conference and other high-brow affairs), and he did not disappoint. The man is flat-out funny and entertaining. He’s a bona fide Internet celebrity since launching his first video (him dancing) several years ago, a video that went viral beyond all viral to that date. (He talked about getting a $30,000 bandwidth bill from his ISP after that experience.)  See more about the Ze Frank Show at this page of his archived links or visit his blog at www.ZeFrank.com. (By the way, if you want to be cool, you pronounce his first name “zay.”)

It’s a good thing Ze was so well received, because the earlier keynote, to open the event, was horrid. Note to planners: one hour is too long, and editors may write well, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they know how to speak. (I live-Twittered the event: here’s my archive page, which is six screen shots of my tweets, starting with the beginning of the event on top.)

So, what else did I pick up about the event, what was the overall buzz?  Well, there were those who said it wasn’t “interactive enough,” which is an interesting take for a gathering of interactive marketers. But it can be hard to have participatory discussions with such a large group (impossible?), even in the breakout sessions — some of which easily drew 150+ in packed rooms with many standing.  Choosing breakout sessions is always a challenge, and I missed some very good ones because, well, I had to make one choice each session. I’m sure many went away feeling the same.  There were just too many not-to-miss talks scheduled concurrently (not good planning on the part of MIMA) — six each in two particular sessions! Way too difficult to choose, and jumping from one to another, to catch two concurrent sessions you like, just never really works.

Funny thing was, two other breakout sessions had four choices each and were largely duds — none of the choices had much appeal to me at all.  So, I left feeling I missed what could have been some really good content.  Example: I just had to attend “Mobile…2009 and Beyond” (which was good), but missed the concurrent session with the Zappos guy talking about “Making the Customer Connection in 140 Characters or Less” (that would be Twitter). But I made up for it by chatting with him at the cocktail reception later.

I was only able to catch two other breakout sessions: one on ad exchanges vs. networks (by Google), which was only mildly interesting to anyone except a media buyer, and another called “Marketing Mix Challenge,” which had four panelists describe how they would spend “only” $500k on a fictitious consumer product launch. I heard criticism later from people on that one who just don’t relate to the large agency world, which thinks $500k is a small budget.

But, all in all, it was as successful an event as each individual made it to be. And I made it a good one — lots of great new connections with whom I look forward to following up.

MIMA Summit Packs The Depot is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

Ms. Thomas, a hardcore road warrior and globetrotter, was not the easiest to person to catch up with for an interview. Though Pokeware is based in Edina, we traded emails and phone calls between here and London, a cab in New York and somewhere in LA. Why the constant travel? According to Thomas, all for relationship building.“We found that there were many who were interested in building a similar type of system and felt that we would be better off securing strong, long term relationships with content providers and partners.” says Thomas. The intention was to hold off on showcasing the technology.

To help them do it, Thomas dropped this: “The biggest news is that Tommy Mottola is joining our team,” not hiding her enthusiasm.

If you are not aware of him, Tommy Mottola‘s resume includes a solid and successful career in the music industry. Outside of that community, many will recognize him from the likes of Entertainment Tonight, as head of Sony Music Entertainment, and more glamorously as the former husband of Mariah Carey. Thomas noted that Tommy is “very excited about the prospects of Pokeware” and will focus on helping her shore up those all important relationships.

Who are some of those relationships she’s cultivating? To name a few: the TV, publishing, book, home icon, Martha Stewart; Channel 4 in London (and the reason for her trip to the UK), the firm known best for the Big Brother reality series and Outside Line who will be selling Pokeware in the UK. In addition, Pokeware recently signed an exclusive agreement with the German company St. Elmo’s as a partner in Europe.

The idea for Pokeware came to Ms. Thomas some five years ago and has been a passion ever since. I asked her if she was happy where Pokeware is right now. “I would love to tell you, after five years, that all video is Pokeware enabled but…we’re selling something that changes the way things are done in the advertising world. Pokeware is a disruptive force and, at the highest levels on Madison Avenue, where client deals are set for four and five years, they don’t want any disruption.”

My own experience in the media advertising space backs up Pokeware’s findings. For the most part, there is a great deal of comfort, though plenty of disaapointment, with the way things have been done. Sellers are still quite content with charging an advertiser a large sum of money to cast a large net of advertsing to reel in customers. According to Thomas, Pokeware offers advertisers a chance to pay for direct results. “If you want to get a “hot spot” on a celebrity you’ll pay a onetime fee and then only when that hotspot is clicked, similar to Adwords.” Currently, rates are $100 and $.50 per click-through. Not a bad price for, say, Catherine Zeta-Jones or a Beyonce video. In fact, you can get a shot at trying out Pokeware this holiday season when a compilation DVD from Beyonce is released that includes all of her Pokeware enabled videos.

Maryse Thomas and Pokeware will continue to target “highly trafficked online video” and clearly the likes of a Tommy Mottola can’t hurt the effort in engaging more entertainment and music video adoption. Though I can’t help but wonder: is there a way to accelerate the adoption past online? Granted, the resistance from traditional broadcast is a formidable obstacle, but with the advent of high-definition/digital TV and cable, surely networks and local outlets alike are anxious to establish new revenue streams as they fight the Tivo effect. Mottola himself is no stranger to the changing business models of an industry being impacted by online, and is certainly searching for new ways of driving revenue.

Surely there’s some guy out there just dying to click on Kit in an episode of Knight Rider to find out where he can buy those rims. No, that guy isn’t me…honest.

Damn the Airfare: Pokeware Takes Global Approach is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.