How cool is this? Thanks to a guy I was interviewing for a PR slot @ SecondRotation, had a very nice chat with Helen Glover about SR. Listen here:
Unfortunately for the potential PR guy, was shown the door right after getting back from this interview, (apparently, was too radical green! 
) so no job for him, (or me! ). Ah well, such is life!
Anyone looking for a radical nutcase social mission marketing guy?
Just saw an excellent article on ReadWriteWeb about Yahoo & eCommerce 2.0. Since starting with Second Rotation, is especially poignant for me. We’re actually building a tremendously simplified used consumer electronics buyback service for the purposes of keeping these materials out of landfills, basically sitting right atop eBay, (and others).
We collect data on point and trend individual SKU liquidity from eBay and several other sources, and then use it to basically make selling as simple as 5 Y/N questions, and putting a 1-4 star condition rating on. We then cut you a check, so you’re done, and then _we_ deal with all the hassles of actually using the backend, (i.e. eBay).
For the 1/30 folks who actually sell on eBay on an active basis, (1/125 on a registered basis), they remain an excellent choice to go directly to, just as some folks like to go back and play with the raw database to get ultimate optimization.
For the 29/30 who, whether they could or not, as a practical matter just _don’t_ sell on eBay, (i.e. it’s too much of a hassle for the reward they’re expecting) there’s a great opportunity for companies like us to be able to create much more value by much better matches between user experience and the bits and bites behind.
Nice piece, Richard!
For more on the company I’m working with right now:
We’re a local startup based in Waltham that’s working to keep old electronics out of landfills by offering cash for them. Here’s How it Works:
1) Quote
Go to http://www.secondrotation.com and find your device. We’ll ask you a couple of quick questions, and ask you to tell about its condition - 1 to 4 stars. Click “Calculate” and Bang - there’s what we pay you in Cold, Hard Cash!
2) Ship It - It’s Free!
Wrap it up, Drop it in a box and call DHL at 1-800-CALL-DHL from anywhere in the United States and they’ll come to you to pick it up - No Hassles, and No Charge!
3) Cash It In!
When we get it, we do a quick check to make sure all’s well, then Cut you a Check which’ll be in your mailbox in 2 weeks or less.
Take that money and put it toward something New and Shiny, the children, the mortgage, (you know what to do with it! )
And, if you manage to actually trade in enough stuff to get that next gizmo for free, we’ll send an email to that certain someone, (you know who I’m talking about) certifying that this time, you did indeed manage to get this Shiny New Doodad without a penny in new outlay, (think how that’d go over! ).
3a) Come on Back!
And when that Shiny New Doodad is not so shiny and new anymore, come on back to http://www.secondrotation.com and Spin Us Again!
——-
If you’ve read this far down, here’s a little bit more about what we’re up to. Right now, the average American throws away the equivalent of 2 laptops, 3 iPods and 3 cellphones each and every year; containing some of the most toxic and non-biodegradable materials on the planet.
By making it easier to get cash out of old consumer electronics, we magnify the impact of sustainability by helping folks participate in the mission whether they care about it or not, (i.e. if you care only about the cash, fine, here’s the cash - if you care about the mission too, fabulous - here’s cash and a mission! ) and thus, just like Ben & Jerry’s, The Body Shop and others, we put the power of business to work in making a social difference.
And yes, just like both of those and other values-led companies, we will indeed be making money from what we’re doing. And also, as we grow, we’ll be increasing the impact we’re all having in keeping these materials out of landfills, our groundwater and the food our children eat - not a bad day at the office, at all!
If you have any questions, comments, etc, don’t hesitate to comment, or ping me at dylan [at] dylanhunter.com. Would be more than happy to answer!
Thanks,
Dylan
Just got the below email, and as someone who waited 8 months for an iPhone, despite its ludicrous expense, but then was so horrified by AT&T’s below stance that I couldn’t possibly buy it, couldn’t put it any better myself. Posted in its entirety:
———
At a packed San Francisco hearing today, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) defended your Fourth Amendment rights and urged the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to let our class-action lawsuit against AT&T go forward. The case demands that AT&T stop illegally assisting the National Security Agency to snoop on its customers’ telephone and Internet communications.
There’s much more at stake here than stopping the Bush Administration’s illegal spying and holding the telco giant accountable, though. The President is arguing that thin claims of “state secrets” can trump the courts’ constitutional duty to uphold the rule of law.
Without judicial review, there’s no way to protect ordinary citizens against government abuses of power. No president, now or in the future, should be allowed unfettered authority to evade the courts and trample on your freedom. As Judge Vaughn Walker wrote in rejecting the government’s claims at the lower court, “The compromise
between liberty and security remains a difficult one. But dismissing this case at the outset would sacrifice liberty for no apparent enhancement of security.”
For the past 17 years, EFF has been proud to take on the hard cases to ensure that your liberty is not sacrificed unnecessarily. Please support us in this critical case by donating to EFF at http://secure.eff.org/att. And please spread the word to your friends and family.
Join EFF today! http://secure.eff.org/att
For a News.com story from the hearing:
http://news.com.com/Appeals+court+may+let+NSA+lawsuits+proceed/2100-1028_3-6202865.html
For more about the case: http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/att
Tell Congress to stop the illegal spying: http://action.eff.org/fisa
The company I’m currently working with - how cool is this!
Brian Cooley, Tom Merritt, Kevin Rose, Alex Albrecht, cnet tv
(Image Courtesy of Valleywag, cropped to <500 px for blog use)
“Facebook is the website du jour, but in Reach Students’ experience it delivers appalling ad clickthroughs.
“We’ve run four targeted campaigns this year using its flyer ads, and each time the results have been disappointing.
“Our most recent campaign saw 1.4 million page impressions delivered at specific universities - and only a 0.04% clickthrough rate. Ouch.”
…..
“Until solved, I think we’ll stick to PR initiatives through the site - such as our work for Avenue Q that generated over ¼ million mini-feed messages through user profiles. And on a budget significantly smaller than it costs to buy the same number of Facebook clickthroughs.
In fact, at least $199,000 smaller!”
Further Discussion on Valleywag
A nice mini-list for some items from Smart Money.
In summary:
Sunday - Groceries, Hotel Rooms
Monday - Cars
Tuesday - Dinner Out, Groceries
Wednesday - Airplane Tickets, Entertainment
Thursday - Books, Clothing, Gas (before 10am)
Friday -
Saturday - Department Store Wares (evening)
To add to, for those buying stuff on eBay, auctions ending during the daytime obviously do better for the buyer than evenings, but as to days of the week, from highest buyer advantage to lowest, (reverse for seller advantage):
1) Tuesday
2) Wednesday
3) Monday, Thursday
4) Friday, Saturday
5) Sunday
For the mathematically-inclined, (or at least those not frightened off by! ) if you have a fairly active forum, and want to start getting a better sense for which concepts / topics are discussed more and less often across threads, you can use this sort of analysis to help surface these, for use for further product development, customer acquisition, etc.
(Note: it talks about comparing a query to a document, but since there’s no conceptual difference between a query and a document - they’re both just bundles of words - can also be used to compare any document in a collection to any other document in that collection).
Dropping in the “useful” folder…. Will also have to check out some of the blogs listed…
“Lime, a green health and lifestyle Web publisher, has launched an ad network that aggregates inventory across environmentally-focused sites and blogs.
“Included is the green-tech focused EcoGeek.org and the beauty/cosmetics-oriented The Beauty Brains. Additional sites in the new Lime Ad Network include Mongabay.com, an environmental science site; the organic foods-oriented SavvyVegetarian.com; and Eco-chick.com, a blog that covers environmental issues from a female point of view.”
….
“According to LOHAS (Lifestyle of Health and Sustainability Organization), consumer spending for this segment is estimated at $230 billion, and Lime estimates that 139 million Americans are interested or active in the green market.”
(Might help if I actually included the link…)
Simple, nicely designed, and most importantly, right motivation - trying to do their own little part to try to make the world better. And even if they help only a little, they’ve still helped, (not to mention couldn’t possibly agree more with what they said about becoming fathers. )
From their About page:
“….people passionate about a cause can do little more than directly give money. What is lacking is the technological means for an online volunteerism to flourish, where individuals can raise money on behalf of others in a highly personal way. This is why we created Pledgie.com
“Pledgie.com was created by an artist Mark and a programmer Garry…..Garry and Mark are both new fathers and as such the words “discretionary income” are no longer in our vocabularies. Yet, becoming fathers actually increased our desire to make the world better.
“It is in this spirit that we hope Pledgie as an idea directly or indirectly makes the world a better place. “
If you think about as an attempt to minimize losses of current customers, that’s exactly what you’ll get - losses of current customers. If instead, you think about as the beginning of a sincere set of opportunities to thrill and delight the folks who believe in you the most, you’ll find they tend to have friends…
A cute look @ Kevin Rose promoing Digg 1.0 on The Screen Savers, located by Michael Arrington, (Mike, do you ever sleep? 
- and, like Philip, I totally concur - was a huge fan of the show before G4 took it over and got rid of Leo, Patrick and anyone else over 12).
Now, granted, Digg in ‘06 doesn’t really look all that different from how it looked in ‘04, (I mean, amazingly not different! ) but is definitely a good reminder for all of us to turn the cameras on right now, pop on YouTube, (and hence back to your own blog) to both help us see how far we’ve come, as well as to inspire the next generation of builders by how rough all of us once were.
Think how cool it’d be to see Woz and Steve Jobs demoing the first Apple, Ed Roberts the first Altair, Dan Bricklin the first version of Visicalc, Tim Paterson the first version of DOS, Jerry Yang the first Yahoo, or Larry & Sergei the first version of Backrub / Google!
Was an excellent post on O’Reilly Radar by Nat Torkington reminding us in the course of designing social suggestion-based sites / software to not forget one of the most critical reasons for in the first place - serendipity / new discovery. Sometimes this is best accomplished by “more like this,”‘es and/or “people who viewed this purchased..” kinds of things, (i.e. narrowing / refinement goal-oriented) and sometimes best accomplished by purposely broadening / adjusting the scope to introduce some new variance and seeing where things progress from there.
Many years ago there was a little search startup called Direct Hit here in MA, (who earned $500M on a cheaper version of what I wanted to do, but that’s another story) who really was the first entity to hang their hat on social suggestion-based search results, knowing full well that most folks only look at results 1-3, and almost no one beyond 10, so that those results that it initially presented as 1-3 would almost always tend to stay there, whether they were the best results or not - i.e. for anyone who’s ever used Excel, an infinite circular error.
As we all took this kind of click-through analysis / adjustment functions in to become one of the ranking criteria we used, (and / or at least used to internally evaluate how good a job we were doing in delivering relevant results - with all of the appropriate mechanisms for negating bounce - i.e. clicking through on a link, saying “this isn’t what I wanted” and hopping back to the search page, etc) the import of regularly introducing different results into the mix to make sure we were actually doing a much better job of delighting folks became more and more clear then, and still holds true today.
But enough of me babbling, Nat does a superb job of describing, so go read it from him!
He takes feeds of the latest posts from sponsors’ blogs and puts that in an ad box on Techmeme. That’s their ad. It’s brilliantly simple: dynamic advertising controlled by the advertisers, who will make their ads - their content - relevant to the readers who see their feeds on Techmeme….
Gabe is charging $4,500, $3,500, and $3,000 respectively for the three month-long spots (I’ll save you the cipherin - that’s $132,000 per year). For the advertiser, that works out to a $5-8 CPM, which is good.
I definitely agree on the excellence of the idea… For years now, the advertising network folks, (including me while @ Miva) have been talking about how advertising is becoming the content, with this being the perfect pinnacle of that concept - 0 incremental maintenance on the advertiser side, and assistance in feeding the sucking content creation monster, while making money on the publisher side - what the heck’s not to like?
At some point down the road would definitely love to have something that does a contextual match between any given post on the publisher’s side, and X back on the advertiser’s side, to maximize both relevance of the content & CTR, but first things first, and definitely agree with Jeff Jarvis - would definitely be an ad unit that I would think about using myself!
Another excellent exposure opportunity for New England-Based Startups from Doug Banks, Editor of Mass High Tech, (posted here by permission - Thanks, Doug! ):
Hello all,
For those of you running companies that may be looking for funding, for a strategic partner or on the hunt for a CEO/COO, Mass High Tech is looking for companies to include in its weekly feature called “The Pitch.” It appears on Page 3 each week and showcases a startup company from New England.
A recent example can be found here:
Consider it an elevator pitch - in print for 55,000 technology readers to see each week. It is free and is considered an editorial feature in our newspaper.
To be included, all we ask is that you fill out the questions below, email them back to me, and then we’ll contact you. (If your company is chosen, we’ll ask you to provide a headshot of the CEO.)
Thanks in advance for your help in getting more recognition for New England’s technology companies.
Doug Banks,
Editor
Mass High Tech: The Journal of New England Technology
www.masshightech. comMHT’s “THE PITCH”
Company Name:
Headquarters:
Employees:
Founded:
*THE PITCH*: Seeking [HOW MUCH]
Web:
E-mail:
Phone:PITCHING THE TECHNOLOGY
Describe what makes your technology/business model unique?
PITCHING THE PEOPLE
Who are the company’s founders? Where were they before your company?
Who is on the management team?
Have executives been involved in a cashout prior to this venture?
Who is on the board of advisers, and what other companies have they been with?
PITCHING THE BUSINESS
How much money is being sought?
What partnerships, collaborations or affiliations are already in place?
List any federal or state grants, contracts or awards received:
What’s the market size being pursued?
Who are the likely competitors, direct or indirect?
Is the company profitable?
Current annual revenue:
Now go get it!
For anyone who’s not keeping a close eye on the O’Reilly Radar, (and if you’re not, you should be! ) looks like they’re looking for speakers for their Web 2.0 Expo in April ‘07. Given the tracks suggested, looks like they’ll be talking about just about everything, so am sure it’ll be an excellent conference for both speakers and attendees!
Tracks:
- Strategy & Business Models
- Marketing & Community
- Design & UI
- Web 2.0 Fundamentals
- Web 2.0 Services & Platforms
- Workshops
More here.
Now here’s hoping that the registration costs will be something we normal humans can afford, (am sure an Un-conference it is not! )
Very glad to hear that AOL took the “riskier” path, (see prior discussion on my post here and that it’s doing so well for them.
New York - A Time Warner executive said on Tuesday that the media giant’s strategy to offer AOL’s content for free has attracted new users at a faster rate than expected, Reuters reported. Jeffrey Bewkes, Time Warner’s COO, told investors that 40% of the service’s new users were not previously paying subscribers, adding that AOL’s advertising sales have been “very robust.” Bewkes also said that former subscribers were adopting AOL’s free services more quickly than originally predicted, Reuters reported. The company announced its radical change in strategy in early August, all-but abandoning its dial-up Internet model in an attempt to increase its ad revenue by attracting larger numbers of users.
More temporarily here. Unfortunately, since Yahoo keeps expiring their news articles, which really makes for a significant hole in the discussion if one reads one of my prior posts, am sure will be finding a good substitute soon. BTW - note to Yahoo: Please seriously rethink this expiring thing - I know one of the last things you care about anymore is linklove, but for those of us writing about stories you post, you’re really giving us every incentive to find someone else to use / link to / send traffic to. Does that sound like a good long-term strategy for an online media company?
After seeing this post from Tim O’Reilly, decided to order the two books suggested for myself. Currently reading Juicing the Orange, and one of the things they point to in the book is this mental beatdown of 127 questions that they use to diagnose a client’s situation to figure out what to do for creative campaigns with them.
Obviously won’t be able to, and don’t need to answer / use all in the normal course, (we all have actual progress to make, Man! ) and definitely seems to be oriented toward much more mature companies, but still looks to be a good source for thinking about the kinds of things that are, or will be, important when launching / relaunching your own company, product, etc.
Whew, does this one bring up some haunting memories of some very similar conversations we had back at ATW a long time ago. We, like AOL, were generating far and away more revenue from an older, dying, rev stream, with major downward pressure on it, (ours being white label B2B licensing fees - dropping even more precipitously than AOL’s - down 80% in 16 mths) with new customer win rates and renewals on our older line of business falling through the floor, again, as AOL’s.
We really had two major choices - either go whole hog consumer, turning ATW.com into a formal search portal, (we had been dancing around for 2 yrs). My opinion, this gave us both the highest degree of control over our future as well as highest long-term potential once we adjusted focus, but also required restructuring, as well as a strong leap of faith that our newer efforts would work, or shop around the internet business entirely, keeping it going via the older dying rev streams in the interim. In our case, the choice was made in favor of the status quo / liquidate - the lure of the drug of current revenue, even if dying, has, and will always be, amazingly powerful, making leaps of faith, especially when also requiring restructuring/firings, very hard to pull off. From the view up here in the Nosebleeds, I would agree that this is the right way for them to go, but we’ll have to see whether their Board bites.
Dulles, Va. - Two weeks away from pitching his radical plan to transform AOL into a free, ad-supported service, CEO Jonathan Miller is expected to call for thousands of layoffs and a “near halt” to marketing of the company’s trademark Internet service, The New York Times reported on Monday. Miller, who will detail his proposal to the board of parent Time Warner, is expected to “defend his unusually draconian plan by arguing that trying to wring every last dime from its dial-up subscribers is preventing AOL from being as aggressive as it can in competing with Yahoo, Microsoft and Google on the web,” The Times reported, citing anonymous AOL executives. The plan, however, could be a tough sell to some board members, since they would initially have to accept lower profits until the company is able to boost its advertising revenue. The plan is scheduled for public announcement on August 2.
Link
BTW - Since I absolutely hate places that put content behind forced registrations, will hopefully be moving the above link away from the NYT very soon. Apologies to everyone for including links to this kind of crippled content if you hit this before then. 
This really is the most disgusting part of a dying tech company. When they can’t actually make a business out of doing what they were supposed to be doing, the investors start getting the IP lawyers to start poking the carcass to see if they can pull a Unisys, (especially on really basic stuff) building themselves an annuity on the backs of those who actually succeed, turning what at least might have passed into history as something to have once been proud of into a future plague.
It really is sad to see this kind of ridiculous IP protection, especially on the Internet, used by bottom-feeders who fail against those who succeed, (especially for this kind of really stupid common sense ones) or, in this case, use as a method to try to force someone with a useful social network asset to buy Friendster out for the patent, when the business itself couldn’t justify. Here’s hoping that the numerous companies that will receive the soon-to-follow flight of C&D threats do what many of us did with those from Unisys - insert them deeply into the circular file.
P.S. Can you tell that these kind of IP issues really get under my skin?
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