Net

Joined the Board of Chinese P1.cn

I'm very happy to announce that I joined the Board of Directors of P1.cn. P1.cn is a private (by invitation only) social network for young affluent Chinese, a target group that is expected to grow from 20 million to 80 million over the next decade.  I've been impressed by the different approach they have taken to social networking and the high quality brands and advertisers they have managed to attract. Looking forward to start working with the Swedish/Chinese founders & the board on this exciting venture!

MX Play - 3D Audio Mashups

Last week I meet with Ruper Dolasia CEO and Marcy Keenan, VP Business development of MX Play - a new and very cool music player based in San Francisco. At first I asked myself, who needs another music player? But MX Play is different from other players out there in that they have really emphazised on the audio quality. The founders have a strong background in working with audio codex and technologies - and you can hear that.

MX Play makes you music come alive with 3D audio. For serious music lovers this is music to your ears. But there's more to it than that. MX Play even lets you mash your own music with videos from YouTube and let's you discover new music as well.

• Mash your music with videos in the 3D AudioSpace
• Organize and import  your music from anywhere
• Browse the web in MX Play and discover new music

Technorati Tags: mxplay, mxplay, music, audio, mashup

Have You Become an iPuppet?

Must say that I Iove this campaign for SanDisk’s Sansa. Very creative and funny and using Apple’s marketing trics against themselves to promote their own alternative.

Check out the mini-site called lilmonsta . Love the creative and copy. Came across this while searching for Maxthon users on MySpace.

In a world of streamlined smooth advertising, this  kind really sticks out and at least graps my attention.

Sansa - Me? I have 3 iPods and a MacBookPro, so I guess I am guilty of being an iPuppet too..

User Generated Maxthon Promotions From China

There is nothing more stimulating than when you see passionate users creating their own stuff to promote their favorite products & services. This is true love. The Maxthon community is a perfect example for this. I digged through the Chinese Maxthon Forum and found a couple of cool banners with a unique twist.

I have no idea what they say yet (Chinese readers - help me out on these two ;) but I like them. And there are tons of them. I will digg some more and see if I can find some more interesting stuff.

Technorati Tags: Maxthon, user generated, marketing

Advice to Start-ups : Do Not Sponsor Big Conferences

I am surprised to see how many new web start-ups that are sponsoring big conferences like Web2.0 Exp, Web 2.0 Summit, Digital Hollywood etc you name it.

I have only one advice to these companies:

If your target audience is not conference attendants (and they very seldom are) Do not waste your marketing budget on these events! It's a total waste of money. Your potential users/customers are most likely not early adopters, partially half-converted Internet savvy media people and developers. If I would be an investor I would be very upset to see resources wasted like this.

Believe me, if you as a start-up would instead pay anybody on the street $50 to become a user - I bet that it would be a better return of investment that paying outrageous sponsorship fees for web conferences.

Go where your users are. And they are everywhere. The big challenge is to aquire real users - Go and get them!

Technorati Tags: Web2expo, Web2.0expo, Marketing, Advertising, Start-ups, Web2expo

Great Ideas For Guerilla Marketing

Technorati Tags: Sopranos, Marketing, Guerialla Marketing, Sopranos, Sopranos

"All Marketers are Liars" - Seth Godin speaks at Google

                 

Here is a very good and entertaining video wih Seth Godin, the author of six bestsellers, most recently, All Marketers are Liars. The video is a part of the Authors@Google series. The bottomline: Be personal & relevant and most of all: Tell a story - don't sell blue boxes! It's amazing how  many companies and advertisers that still don't understand that.

Hyundai & Locate Three Strangers Contest

Hyundai is running quite a cool Mash+Seek contest to promote a new Elantra. 16 people have been picket and split into four groups. The contestants then have to locate three other people in their teams - with only a quarter face as a lead. The first team of four to find each other wins a new Elantra each. Cool. Adverlab thinks that this is a very good way to do consumer-generated content since people have to make themselves visible through blogs, Craighslists, Goolgle Adsense - you name. I agree.

Technorati Tags: Advertising, Hyundai, Mash+Seek, Mash+seek, Locate Three Strangers

Advertising On Loading Screens - New Oppertunity

Have you ever wondered why there are is no advertising on loading screens of Flash-heavy sites? So does Adverlab , and they really raised a good point. I actually tend to skip Flash-based sites if they don't load at once, and I dont think I am alone. Taking advantage of the loading time is actually a very good idea for either advertising or information snippets.

Joined Plymedia's Advisory Board

I am very delighted to announce that I just joined Plymedia's Advisory Board. Plymedia is a great Israeli start-up and behind the super cool site BubblePly , that let's you add bubbles, callouts', sub-titles, links,  - you name it, to any video you like and share it with the world.

The viral power of BubblyPly is staggering. People are uploading their videos, or adding bubble's, comments and links to other people videos on YouTube and other video sharing sites. Naturally most people like to turn videos more into more funny and entertaining by adding all kinds of comments. But it has also become very popular for people to translate videos and create sub-titles to foreign language movies as well.

Another interesting usage of the Ply's (that is what the bubbles or video layers are called) is for educational purposes. Personally I love the concept and can easily see how this will become very popular. As with all user-generated stuff, the users will show us best the way for how BubblePly should be used.

Plymedia was founded by Ben Enosh (serial entrepreneur, and amongst other things, co-founded Cyota Inc - an Internet security company that was sold last year to RSA for $145 million) Yuval Klein, David Markowitz, Yoni Silberberg and Miki Dotan. I was first introduced to them by Gil Dibner from Genesis Partners and was really impressed by their product, great team and vision.

Although the Online video space is getting really crowded, I believe that PlyMedia has a very good chance turn this into something very exciting.

Business model? Advertising my friends - advertising! I can definitely see how advertisers could flock to this..

And by the way, Plymedia is raising financing, so if you are a interested - feel free to get in touch with me to learn more.

Tags: Plymedia, BubblePly, YouTube, Google Video, Metacafe, Video, Genesis Partners, VC, Venture Capital ,  Israel , Start-ups