I really love the transformative and disruptive qualities of the Internet. Again yesterday I was reminded of how significant the impacts of this creation will be when I met “a company”:http://www.icmgroupltd.com/ that is transforming the traditional and downright irritating industry of paper flyers.
Think about it. You come home every day to see your mailbox overflowing with flyers stuffed there haphazardly by the local flyer kid. Easily ninety percent of it is not relevant and even within the ten percent that may be, only half of that has any immediate actionable value. Then what? You cut them out and pin them up somewhere until you can go to the store in question. It all seems very inefficient and wasteful, an industry ripe for disruption.
Enter said new company, “ICM Group”:http://www.icmgroupltd.com/.
They are approaching all of these flyer producers and telling them that “their technology”:http://www.icmgroupltd.com/pages/services/service_con.htm will take the same print file that they would send to the print shop and break it down into data and graphic elements, create a data table, and then dynamically create a flyer website. Presto! With no extra work, the flyer company has the beginnings of an online strategy.
But wait, there’s more. Because said company has now turned the paper flyer into data, the consumer can now actually sort or search through what they want and act on the flyer offer by clicking on an item of interest to find out more or take action. Who knows, some people might even be willing to build a changeable profile of their interests which could be mapped to offers and alerts. Whammo! You have instant e-commerce.
But wait, we are not done yet.
Category: Online Advertising
_This is part of our new “Interesting”:http://www.onedegree.ca/category/interesting feature “we announced in April”:http://www.onedegree.ca/2006/04/25/whats-interesting-in-canada but then lost track of. If you have an “interesting” site you think we should feature let us know._
Recently I asked Floyd Marinescu, CEO & Co-founder of C4media and founder of “InfoQ”:http://www.infoq.com/ to explain what makes his site interesting.
*One Degree: Who needs InfoQ?*
Professionals in the Enterprise Software Development community, including developers, architects, project managers, consultants, coaches, etc.
*One Degree: Why do they need you?*
InfoQ provides daily news and technical content for the Java, .NET, Ruby, SOA, and Agile communities written by domain experts (instead of non-technical journalists). InfoQ also connects the audience to each other via lively discussions associated with current news and content. For professionals in this space, InfoQ is the only resource available that allows them to track what’s going on across these communities in one place.
This post contains language which may offend some. You’ve been warned!
After a glorious week off in Cape Cod, I was catching up one morning on my RSS Feeds and came across this chart at Silicon Beat with the updated unique visitor stats on the hot Web 2.0 sites, YouTube, Facebook, Photobucket and MySpace.
Two things struck me looking at these trends. First, despite now being owned by “the man”, MySpace continues to grow incredibly. Clearly the average user hasn’t figured out yet that Murdock didn’t lay down $600 Million so this property could continue to lose money. Eventually the marketing push at the site will become noticeable and then we’ll see if the growth rates continue to sustain themselves.
My second observation is that YouTube has a faster growth rate than any of the other superstar Web 2.0 sites. In a traditional portal space, this growth in regular users would naturally translate into the site being a magnet for advertising dollars. But I ask you, would you advertise your company’s brand on YouTube?
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