Catalano on Digital

Last month the CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, a native of Blacksburg revisited our town and presented alongside Mark Warner about technology and policy. Below is an excerpt from Dr. Schmidt as he reminisces about growing up in Blacksburg and what makes this town so great.

A big shout out to Cory Donovan, Executive Director of the NCTC for making this event happen. I’ll post the full video of the event when I get some more time.

Modea won the distinction as Large Business of the Year for 2008 for the Montgomery County Chamber of Commerce. Here are a few pics from the event.

excerpt:

And the Winners are…

The Chamber honored businesses and individuals at its 7th Annual Dinner held on November 14, 2008 at the Inn at Virginia Tech & Skelton Conference Center.  Over 300 local business leaders were on hand to congratulate the winners and show their support.  Robin Reed, WDBJ – 7 Meteorologist served as the Emcee for the event.

For the first time in its history, the Chamber had two recipients for the Large Business of the Year category.

The Award recipients are:

DISTINGUISHED CITIZEN OF THE YEAR

Jim McAlister

SMALL BUSINESS OF THE YEAR

Under 25 Employees

LeClair Ryan

LARGE BUSINESSES OF THE YEAR

25 or more Employees – 2 Winners!

Modea

&

Polymer Solutions, Incorporated

The Montgomery County Chamber of Commerce congratulates the 2008 Winners!

(source)

Modea was selected as a finalist in this year’s Best Place to Work 2008 rankings in the Blue Ridge Business Journal!

excerpt:
This interactive marketing and advertising agency takes interactive to a new level with employees. The staff gets together every Friday for a free lunch and the kitchen is fully stocked. There are company Wii tournaments, birthday celebrations for each employee and free memberships to the gym across the street. The floor plan is open and conducive to creative thought with fruit trees and sunlight. The organizational chart is flat, with staffers often assigning tasks to the founders. Employees are allowed to work a flexible schedule. Management trusts them to work hard in the office and realizes they have things to do outside the office as well.

(source)

Today my long time favorite daily read, slashdot, posted an article about Gmail business email hosting being down for over a day. For a hosted email company that is not even close to being acceptable. I immediately thought that it would be great for Mailtrust, a division of Rackspace and a client of Modea to have a comment moderated up the chain promoting their competitor product. They did one better. Directly beneath the article text was an ad stating: “The answer to your email problems.” That is perfect ad placement.

Have you ever considered the user impact of displaying ads on your websites? I’m not talking about the distraction of seizure-inducing Flash ads. This post is about the impact on page load times that result from incorporating ads from even the largest ad networks.

This morning I surfed over to the Technorati Top Blogs page to see if my blog made the list. I don’t know because the page never loaded. Yeah, that’s right, Firefox kept on chugging away as if my bandwidth connection was reduced to a trickle. The only thing I could see on the page was a Verizon ad served up by DoubleClick. This is Ironic considering I am surfing at home using Verizon!

In the status bar you will see the frustrating words: “Transferring data from m1.2mdn.net…” Just to be 100% certain that it was in fact DoubleClick, I opened the performance monitoring tool Firebug. You will see DoubleClick is indeed the cause. If you are spending tens of thousands per month on hosting and content delivery networks, make sure you design your HTML pages to render before the transmission with your ad network is complete!

So the next time you find yourself excessively waiting for a page to load, look down at the status bar and take note. You will likely find the ad network to be the culprit.

At the risk of making this blog seem as though it is centered on Facebook, I do have one more nugget to share. Recently Facebook introduced Social Ads in an effort to “increase relevance” (and click-through rates). Here is an example of a social ad:

The ad is part of an awareness campaign for a targeted cross section of the US demographic. The ad drives traffic to the Modea Facebook page (previously plugged here). As you should know, Facebook pages are a new capability for bands, companies and products to ‘live’ in the Facebook universe. These pages have the ability for users to “Fan” them. The social aspect of the ad kicks in when someone you know has fanned the page. In the above example, Seth is one of my friends and has previously fanned Modea. By seeing your friends attached to the ad, the relevance and likelihood of you clicking on the ad will increase. Or so it is presumed.

I have been holding off on posting about this because I wanted to determine a way to quantify the increased effectiveness of these ads. Given the level of effort I’m willing to put in, it just isn’t going to happen. I would certainly be interested to know any stats that can help prove the effectiveness. Unless you are friending people you don’t really care for, social ads can’t possibly hurt—unless they creep you out!

Here is an FAQ on Social Ads (may require Facebook login)

@facebook request: I would like to see a break out of impressions and click-through performance when a social ad version is displayed from the non-socially enhanced version.

Do you remember way back in the mid 90’s when television commercials would advertise AOL keywords?  AOL held such a dominant influence over the online space that this was a necessity. By the late 90’s AOL keywords were being advertised along with the actual URL. AOL loathed the growing popularity of this thing Al Gore created called the Internet. They built their business on a closed platform and were able to control the user experience. Even as the Internet gained in popularity, millions of users preferred to stay within the familiar walls of AOL. Yet in the end, a closed system could not compete with the combined contribution of hundreds of millions of people. You no longer see AOL keywords being advertised in commercials.

Facebook (r)evolution

A few long years later Facebook has grown into a platform that is similar to the shell of what AOL once was, and what they could have been. Facebook has done this through the systematic addition of new capabilities and by maintaining the familiarity of the blue and white structured interface. When things get out of line they reign in control and shift to a new format. This is how Facebook recently kept their system from resembling MySpace through as users were installing countless apps.

A recent addition to Facebook is Pages. Now bands, companies, products and services can enjoy a presence similar to an individual within the Facebook closed system. Today, a Facebook Pages page can share notes/photos/videos/music about them as well as install applications. The ability to add custom applications allows an organization to build any functionality they require into their page in a manner that leverages the social interactions and demographic information available through the API. The NY Times has leveraged an existing application to promote stories on their page. This is a natural evolution of capabilities within the confines of the Facebook platform. It won’t be long before custom applications are built specifically for Pages. Modea has a Facebook Page providing a behind the scenes glimpse into our company culture. Check it out and while we’re at it, go ahead and Fan us!

The Future of E-Commerce

Major websites are now integrating with Google Checkout. Amazon has recently countered with Checkout by Amazon and Amazon Simple Pay. Why would businesses dis-integrate their system to open up other payment options? A: To lower the barrier to a sale.

Facebook has some issues to work out with respect to how organizations are able to monetize applications within their gates. In time, Facebook will provide a solution that fits within the concept of what they have established. So too will they introduce commerce.  The next major announcement from Facebook may be the introduction of commerce features into their API similar to what Google and Amazon provide today.

Conclusion

As users are able to get news, read blogs, research companies and products, explore bands and shop from their favorite stores they will have little need to venture outside Facebook. That doesn’t mean the Internet is going away, but the direction of Facebook has been to reduce the frequency for that quick hop over to Google (read: the Internet).

AOL pulled a coup by purchasing one of the most significant traditional news media companies, yet they were unable to keep the Internet at bay. Will Facebook be able reduce Internet traffic of its users to a trickle?  The push for data portability and open APIs presents both an obstacle and an opportunity for Facebook.

Read more…

Last month Richard Hammer, Modea’s Director of Web Application Development presented at our local software development forum. His talk was on Agile Methodologies and outlines the many flavors of agile with pros/cons of each.

The PowerPoint deck may be found here.

Enjoy!

The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell (buy it at Amazon)

I read this book a few weeks ago on my way to my brother’s wedding in San Antonio. I had the luxury of Internet access the entire time I read so I livebloged my notes using a service called ScribbleLive. Liveblogging is typically reserved for things like reporting at the WWDC. Why liveblog a book? I don’t know, seemed like a good idea at the time…

How to use this synopsis:

This synopsis doesn’t contain great insight gleaned from the book. It also is not intended to be a simple summary whereby relieving you from the need to read the book—if in fact, you feel that you must read it. I would suggest that you print this out and read it along with the book. The author goes into very detailed stories to reinforce the messages. Sometime I found myself lost from the overall point. If you find yourself often interrupted then I would suggest that you have this printed as a reference. I have tried to summarize the key points in each section and provided page numbers so you can match up what I have summarized with what you’ve read. So, without further adieu… Read more…

My blog: she might be ugly but she’s got a great personality. And by personality, I mean technology set.

Read more…