Overstock Rebrands As O.co

March 9, 2011

The .co domain is hot... at least from a marketing perspective. GoDaddy and others have run large television campaigns (including during the Super Bowl) to promote the new domain. I have no data to suggest that the .co domains are gaining traction (although I suspect that is not the case). The first major .co move? Overstock.com which is rebranding themselves as O.co. It will be interesting to watch whether they gain branding / marketing traction with the move (again, I suspect that will not be the case). It is an interesting / bizarre move considering that Overstock is already a prominent brand and advertising efforts around a rebrand are challenging... no matter how short or clever the new domain is.

This ad, which is currently running in prim time television, is proof: the spot is focused on explaining the rebrand while reinforcing the core brand qualities.... tough, confusing and probably not worthwhile.

Eightbit.me Requires iPhone "Add to Homescreen". Aggressive & Clever.

March 8, 2011

In July, I raved about YouTube's innovative mobile "Add to Homescreen" promotion. Eightbit.me has gone a step further and actually requires users to "add eightbit to [iPhone] homescreen". In fact, each time you visit Eightbit.me, you have to add the icon to your phone's homescreen. In other words, if you visit http://eightbit.me on your iPhone, you see the following screen. You cannot advance through the site without adding it to your homescreen.

It's aggressive.

It's also clever.

And, while dangerous as part of the core site experience, it has interesting applications. For instance, it is well served as part of unique flows. Perhaps a promotional campaign or special reward / unlock is only accessed after adding to homescreen. If measured properly, marketers have the opportunity to incent behaviors measured through downstream efforts (ie Facebook Likes : viral sharing; Tweets : retweets & visits; add to homescreen : repeat engagement).

Of course, the experience itself has to be rewarding enough that users will choose to click on the icon and reengage. Thanks to notifications and increased functionality, applications have easier times driving reengagement... as HTML5 improves and mobile developers innovate, perhaps that changes.

This is a step (albeit not perfect) in that direction.

What mobile apps have been successful without a web component?

March 7, 2011

Continuing to post select Quora answers on my blog – you can view them here.

A few obvious themes and a couple apps associated with them:

- Gaming. Games make up the majority of the most successful paid applications. Examples: Angry Birds, Cut The Rope, Electronic Arts, etc. - Photos. There are numerous successful apps around photos - either as a network (Path (company), Instagram, etc) or around functionality (Hipstamatic, etc). They are improving a core utility around the device itself. Neither Path nor Instagram launched with web components. And Hipstamatic and others are entirely on the phone.

- Local & Device-Related Companies. Applications where location and/or the device are required components. Examples like FlightTrack, Uber (formerly UberCab), Shazam, etc.

- Messaging & Communication. Kik, Beluga, GroupMe, Tango, etc

Hiring: I am Guessing It's a Familiar Topic / Pain

March 6, 2011

I apologize for this not being a full blog post - but Twitter's 140 characters weren't enough. I need just a little more =) Businessweek's recent article, Techdom's Talent Poaching Epidemic, is an important and under-discussed topic. Here is the quick takeaway and my short-hand comments: "Despite the appeal of startups to some job seekers, new companies often must do lengthy hunts and sharply increase salaries to snare talent. Vitrue, an Atlanta company that does corporate marketing on Facebook and other social media, now pays starting salaries of up to $90,000 for engineers with one year of experience, compared with $70,000 six months ago. "

Why is this important?

- hiring is a problem for everyone... from newfound start-ups to the big boys (Google, Facebook, etc)

- as Google, Facebook and others compete for talent, they are driving up prices for start-ups (the above example is a ~30% increase in a 6 month period. And it's a company based in Atlanta.)

- and the big boys are putting big price tags on talent (new and retained) in part because there is an influx of early stage / seed capital (in other words, entrepreneurs have the option to pursue their own project and raise capital). And in part because it is hyper competitive.

- this in turn affects start-ups which struggle to compete with the paycheck of a bigger company and the ownership opportunities of founding a company. And while salaries and equity grants are rising, start-ups need to compete on different terms: upside, culture, ability to make an impact, etc.

There are other downstream effects of the tangled hiring issue. For instance, talent acquisitions have become relatively prominent strategies at larger companies (Zynga, Facebook, Twitter, etc).