Dell’s new marketing video — WTF?

Just for the record, I think it’s great when a company has some fun with things, shakes things up a bit, lets its hair down (fill in your favourite metaphor here). But at the same time, I think a company with some image problems — like say… oh, I don’t know, like Dell, for example — might want to make sure that if it spends a bunch of dough on an attempt to be funny, that it is a) actually funny and b) funny. The video clip that Michael Dell introduced at OracleWorld doesn’t qualify.

dell -- jibjab

In fact, as almost everyone who has seen it seems to agree, it is mind-numbingly bad. Not just un-funny, but cringe-inducingly un-funny — like say, your grandmother dressing like 50 Cent and trying to do a rap about adult diapers. What was Dell trying to do with this video? It isn’t aimed at consumers, because it’s all about proprietary standards. It’s clearly aimed at suppliers — specifically, aging suppliers with no sense of humour, or taste for that matter.

Not only is it un-funny in the worst way, it’s also about five times too long for a self-deprecating joke video (Nick Douglas will pay you if you sit through the whole thing). If the guys behind JibJab.com — whose style this imitates — were involved in this clip in any way, they should do themselves and everyone else a favour and go directly to Hell (Note: one of the founders responded in my comments to say they weren’t involved). And Larry Ellison should sue.

Update:

My friend Stuart said that howlingly lame videos like this are made all the time for supplier-type conferences, and that it wasn’t really designed for regular people to see — to which I replied that the lesson here is, in the age of YouTube, everything will eventually be seen, whether you want it to or not.

The solution is, well… Obvious

Evan Williams — founder of Blogger and of the podcasting startup formerly known as Odeo — took a lot of heat from certain sections of the blogosphere awhile back, after standing up at the Future of Web Apps conference in San Francisco and freely admitting that he had screwed up with Odeo in a whole bunch of different ways. Among them, he said, were “raising too much money too early,” “trying to do too much” and “not listening to my gut.”

In hindsight, that was kind of a red flag (or white flag, depending on your perspective) about Evan’s intentions toward Odeo. So it’s not that surprising to hear he and some other members of the team have bought out their venture backers and taken the company back in house, renaming it Obvious Corp. And while Evan has taken some flack for blowing it with Odeo and/or not knowing what he really wanted to do when he grew up, like Fred Wilson I think he should be congratulated.

odeo

From what details we can gather from Om and others, the VCs who backed the company have been “made whole” (to use the curiously Biblical term favoured by Wall Street types), and now Evan and his team can concentrate on doing more experimental things. Will any of them work out? Who knows. But they should be congratulated for knowing when to change the playbook.

Evan has some thoughts here, and one of his former investors has some thoughts here.

Getty needs to cannibalize itself

I was interested in the stuff that Robert Scoble and Thomas Hawk have posted about meeting with Getty Images, the giant stock photography company, but not necessarily because I’m all that interested in photography (although I am). The interesting thing for me is how Getty — like a lot of other companies in different industries — is trying to find a way of transitioning its business from one model to another, effectively cannibalizing itself before others can do it.

Scoble mentions how people such as Thomas (or whatever his real name is) and services such as Flickr and Zooomr are a threat to Getty, and they are — although not so immediate a threat that you can draw a direct line between the disappointing financial results the company reported and the rise of consumer photo-sharing sites. And Getty essentially tried to build a bridge between its old business and a new one by acquiring Calgary-based iStockphoto, one of the largest Web-based stock photo services out there (it recently added video as well).

getty images

Getty’s business, like that of competitor Corbis (owned by Bill Gates) consists mostly of high-quality, hard-to-come-by photos of celebrities and events, used in glossy, high-quality magazines, and for those the company gets paid anywhere from hundreds to thousands of dollars, depending on use. iStockphoto.com, by contrast, sells photos for as little as $1. And it does big business with small and medium-sized publications, Web sites and so on, with photos for $10 or $50 or $100.

In effect, Getty is hoping that owning iStockphoto can expand its business rapidly enough that it can counterbalance the decline in those hundred or thousand-dollar photo jobs, and prevent the recent financial pressure from becoming a sustained downturn. Other companies will have to find ways of doing the same in their industries, as James Robertson points out.

Rocketboom vs. Ze — apples vs. oranges

Far be it from me to take issue with Robert Scoble, or for that matter Jeneane Sessum — who doesn’t suffer fools gladly — but until we can measure likeability or engagement then downloads will have to do. And it seems obvious that unless Andrew Baron of Rocketboom is a complete and utter liar when he talks about his statistics, Rocketboom is leagues ahead of Ze Frank. This all stems from the recent throwdown between Ze and the Rocket.

Does that matter? Not to Jeneane and Robert and other Ze fans — of which I am one. We care that he is bizarre and funny and engaging. But I bet it matters to Ze. Like Rocketboom, I assume that Ze Frank is looking for revenue so that he can keep buying those expensive props (like the duck) and new paint for the wall he sits in front of. And when it comes to video, downloads and unique eyeballs are the currency that advertisers want to hear about. As Scott points out, old or new media, you have to have the stats.

ze frank

Once Ze and Rocketboom get more advertising, then (strangely enough) it will get easier to measure engagement — because then you can track who clicked for the $10-off coupon on Swiss Chalet or the discount pass to Six Flags or whatever the hell they decide to advertise. Scoble is on the right track when he talks about how a mention in USA Today gets more readers but a mention on Scoble gets more clicks.

If Ze wants to really thumb his nose at Rocketboom, all he has to do is find a way to turn those duckie-lovers into clickers. Maybe his duck-sponsorship program, which Google Checkout recently axed and then changed its mind on, will give him some new numbers for a future Rocketboom smackdown. In other video-blog related news, the guys at Ask A Ninja are looking for ad money based on a $50 CPM, which would mean $50,000 to $100,000 per show (assuming their stats are legit).

Edgeio — not an eBay killer after all

Although it kind of got lost in all the hoopla about Google launching a customized search tool, Edgeio got financed to the tune of $5-million on Tuesday, in a round led by Intel Capital. Edgeio is the Web 2.0 classified service that Mike Arrington of TechCrunch co-founded along with Keith Teare, and remains a shareholder and board member of, as he mentions here.

At the time Edgeio launched to much acclaim, it was thought by many — including yours truly that it could become a kind of eBay-killer or a successor to Craigslist, because it allowed any blogger or person with a webpage to place an ad on their page and have it appear in the Edgeio index. But there seems to have been an evolution of sorts in Edgeio’s business model, or maybe something closer to a 180-degree turn.

edgeio

According to Pete Cashmore at Mashable, Edgeio is now integrating listings from eBay and Amazon, among other sites. In other words, rather than an eBay-killer, it has become an eBay partner. Pete says “this always seemed like a more solid business plan that aggregating blog entries, and perhaps the “listing” tag served more as a way to get bloggers talking than as a core strategy.”

Fair enough, but it still seems like a completely different approach to me. Maybe it makes more sense, maybe not. It looks like opening it up to all kinds of classified services has boosted the number of listings — to more than 100 million, according to the stats on the site, in over 14,000 cities and 140 countries — but possibly at the expense of utility. Searching for cars, for example, brings pages full of results from the same commercial auto dealer.

How exactly is that “listings from the edge?” Not what I would call hugely useful so far, and certainly not a Craigslist or eBay-killer. Venturebeat has more detail if you’re interested, and Fraser Kelton has some interesting thoughts in my comments section.

Coke finally grabs a clue

Coca-Cola, the giant sugar-water purveyor, has finally seen the light when it comes to the famous Diet Coke-and-Mentos video that became a viral hit on YouTube and Revver earlier this year. If you haven’t seen it, the video shows the Eeepybird team — two guys in white lab coats and goggles, who are really a professional juggler named Fritz Grobe and a lawyer named Stephen Voltz — conducting a sort of choreographed dance involving bottles of Diet Coke (some of them hanging from strings) and packages of Mentos mints, which together produce giant geysers of pop and create a kind of moving fountain.

The company that makes Mentos (a subsidiary of an Italian concern called Perfetti van Melle) quickly saw the benefit of this video, which they said was equivalent to about $10-million dollars worth of advertising, and arranged to have the Eepybird team create some other videos just for them. Coca-Cola, however, took the “Hey, quit fooling around with our product” tack, and said it had no intention of doing anything with the Eepybird guys, because — as Coke told the Wall Street Journal — that type of craziness “doesn’t fit with the Coke brand.”

Obviously, someone at Coke gave their head a shake and decided that getting millions of dollars in free advertising was probably a good thing (Gee — ya think?) and the company recently announced a new Poetry in Motion contest, as Kevin Nalty describes on his video blog here. Congratulations to Coke for finally grabbing a clue. Too bad it took so long.

TheGoodBlogs launches blog network

Like a bunch of other bloggers, I’ve been trying out a blog network and recommendation engine called TheGoodBlogs, whose widget you can see in the right sidebar of this blog. It’s a great tool that gives you headlines from posts at various blogs and allows you to find new blogs about topics you’re interested in. TheGoodBlogs just went public with its beta, and I highly recommend it — I’ve gotten some new readers from it, and I’ve also found some new blogs worth reading and linking to. My Name is Kate has a great overview here, and the service has also gotten good reviews from other bloggers.

Will Apple pay you to share your headphones?

According to rumours that are making the rounds of the gadget-blogosphere, Microsoft is planning to add a social-commerce aspect to its new Zune player. In addition to being able to share songs with other Zune users wirelessly, owners could be compensated with points if another user eventually buys one of the songs that was shared. Those points could then be redeemed for products, services, etc. It’s an interesting idea, if true (this research paper suggests that it is).

For me, one of the biggest missed opportunities with the iPod is this kind of sharing and community aspect. When mp3 players first appeared on the scene, sharing music wirelessly was one of the things I hoped they would eventually be able to do, and I remember early rumours that the iPod would allow that. For whatever reason, it has never come to be.

And maybe Microsoft’s Zune will suck, and the sharing will be clunky and stupid and it will also suck. But I think it’s worth trying, and it kind of bugs me that Steve Jobs has spent a lot of time dumping on the idea just because Microsoft is doing it instead of Apple. Take the Newsweek interview in which he said (the tone of derision is implied):

By the time you’ve gone through all that, the girl’s got up and left! You’re much better off to take one of your earbuds out and put it in her ear. Then you’re connected with about two feet of headphone cable.

Well, that’s great Steve. But is Apple going to pay me for every time I stick my headphone in someone’s ear? They’d have to pay me more just to compensate for the whole ear-wax-sharing thing, but that’s a separate issue. In any case, I hope Microsoft does do this, because I think it could turn out to be something interesting — even if it doesn’t come from Apple.

Rollyo and Swicki feel the giant’s breath

Update:

Google has launched its personalized search tool (but it’s not called Google Co-op as Mike Arrington says at TechCrunch, it’s just one of the things that falls under the Google Co-op banner). The tool allows anyone to build a CSE or customized search engine and then not only share it — and make money from Google AdSense on the search pages — but allows them to continually update it by using a toolbar bookmarklet called the Marker.

Matt Cutts has a good breakdown of how it works, while Om says Google should be compensating CSE creators with more than the usual AdSense dosh.

Original post:

According to a report in the Financial Times, Google will be launching a customized search tool on Tuesday, one that can be embedded in a webpage and will search inside websites you specify. Not only that, but you can apparently add new sites to your custom search index as you surf, by tagging pages with a keyword. This is something that Google sleuth Garrett Rogers hinted at not long ago, after poking around in Google’s code.

When I read the headline of the FT story, the first thing I thought of was Rollyo.com, and the second thing I thought of was Swicki.com. Both are services that allow you to produce — or “roll your own” — customized search engine. I have tried and like both tools, which have some differences (Swicki lets you create a tag cloud of search terms and Rollyo has a built-in site search) but I removed them both for a variety of reasons. Are their days numbered now that Google has appeared on the scene?

shark

Some might recall that this discussion has occurred before, with a Web-based calendar called Kiko. When Google Calendar appeared, Kiko quickly decided it wasn’t worth going up against a $130-billion behemoth — a decision Paul Graham said was the right one and David at 37signals implied was the wrong one — and sold itself on eBay (and was eventually bought by Toronto’s own Tucows). Will Rollyo or Swicki be making the same decision?

Nick Carr is right this time (cringe)

I don’t want to make a habit of siding with Nick “The Prophet of Doom” Carr when it comes to all things Web 2.0, but I have to agree with him that Lawrence Lessig’s swipe at YouTube for not enabling “true” sharing does seem a little over the top. I know what Larry is up to — trying to point out why allowing people to download and make use of content is better — but I still think YouTube kind of sharing is a whole lot better than not sharing at all.

share

Call what YouTube does “Sharing 1.0” if you want. That doesn’t make it wrong, and “true sharing” right — and Larry probably wouldn’t put it in those terms. But there is definitely a moralistic tone to what he has written, especially since he explicitly says he’s talking about the “ethics of Web 2.0,” and I think that’s unfortunate. YouTube got to be so popular in part because it made it so easy to share video clips, by allowing anyone to embed a video in a web page or blog. To me, that is sharing. It may not be all that it could be, but it’s a big leap forward nevertheless.

As Scott Karp and Mike Arrington have both pointed out before me, the users of YouTube have pretty much voted with their mice, and they seem to think YouTube is doing something right. That’s good enough for me. Larry has since clarified what he was driving at here.