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SXSW: 7 Fake Startups Compete for 'Worst Website Ever'
2008-03-10 02:38:00
As dedicated readers of the most popular business blogs are well aware, the web is positively awash in terrible ideas for startups. So many, in fact, that Waxy.org's Andy Baio was inspired to create a contest to see who could dream up the most awful, short-sighted and unfundable business plan.Read about all 7 Worst Startups Ever
More About: Website , Fake , Compete

Nick Marshall McCormack - Sydney Event MC
2008-03-09 11:23:00
Just a shameless plug for a man we know and love who is a fantasic MC and Event Speaker, Nick Marshall McCormack. Nick is a Sports Reporter on Channel 7 News, and has covered almost every major Sporting event in Sydney and Australia in the last 5 years.If your looking for a charasmatic, exciting and engaging Event MC in Sydney, i would have no hesitation in recommending Nick Marshall McCormack.View Nick Marshall McCormack's profile at CreativeRepContact Nick via Email for more information on MC Bookings

Using Web 2.0 to improve Enterprise Sales
2008-03-08 16:38:00
Its interesting to see how large corporates are embracing web 2.0 to improve the Sales and Business Networking performance within their CRM platforms.We recently attended an event held by Ernst & Youngs Rob Kingma and Stan Relihan discussing how Oracle is embracing web 2.0 within its products.Here's Doug Hughes Vice President, Customer Services at Oracle presenting how Oracle CRM on-demand integrates with the big web 2.0 communities (LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace and Digg)Above is a photo of Shifted Pixels Digital Director Nick Holmes a Court discussing Enterprise 2.0 with Stan Relihan and Doug Hughes.If your interested in finding our more about this, Check out The Connections Podcast with Stan Relihan on The Podcast Network
More About: Improve

Monkey House Theory
2008-03-06 23:23:00
Basically it boils down to this:The first time you walk into a monkey house at the zoo you are like OMG WTF is that smell; and it hits you like a ton of bricksAfter a hour in the monkey house you somewhat forget about the smell and look around a bit. If you live in the monkey house you never notice the smell again.I see this problem all the time in the online world. People easily dismiss their customers/consumers complaints and critiques about their website. They rather try to defend it and explain why it is the way it is instead of fixing the problem; Because they live in the monkey house.
More About: House , Monkey , Theory

Social Media driving TV Series popularity
2008-03-05 08:07:00
Just got an email from my friend at GPYR, Ben Phillips, who sent me some really interesting ideas on the effect of Social Media on TV Series success. "David Godes is a Harvard Academic who empirically demonstrated a correlation between online conversation with the future success of a television show. Frequency and breadth of conversation were identified as primary predictors of successful ratings. http://www.people.hbs.edu/dgodes/womfinal .pdf   Whether the same can be said for brands is questionable, particularly mundane bits and pieces like cleaning products etc. Despite this, his research shows how important digital social interaction and word of mouth are in determining demand and interest.   Soooo how do our campaigns promote conversation? How do our initiatives fit into existing conversation centers online and foster interaction? and on a slightly different note, how can we create environments that will house these exchanges?"...
More About: Driving , Tv Series

The Death Of Brands: Case Study, The Oscars
2008-03-04 23:32:00
Q: Why didn't I watch the Oscars ?A: Because I didn't care.But its not like I haven't cared before. The thing is I am watching less and less TV, and I didn't know any of the movies, and few of the actors. So I had no investment. But the real problem is not just that I didn't watch. It appears no one did. Anecdotally it was already clear by talking to my friends, none of whom watched this year.But the Nielsens don't lie. The Oscars, from a viewership perspective, was a train wreck this year. What does this say about our media landscape and the power of iconic brands, when one of the most famous media properties gets no more audience than a good networks series?I think what it really says is something quite significant about the value and role of brands in modern culture. The Oscar failure is is a reflection of the fact that we are inexorably headed towards a day when brands, as a concept, mean absolutely nothing. The fact that it was "The Oscars" had ...
More About: Study , Death , Case , Brands

Do schools kill creativity?
2008-03-03 14:40:00
"Professors look at their bodies as a form of transport for their heads." "We are educating people out of their creative capacities." "We don't grow in to creativity, we grow out of it...we get educated out of it."  Sir Ken Robinson<!--cut and paste--><object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96 b8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia .com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab #version=8,0,0,0" width="320" height="285" id="VE_Player" align="middle"><param name="movie" value="http://static.videoegg.com/te d/flash/loader.swf"><PARAM NAME="FlashVars" VALUE="bgColor=FFFFFF&file=http: //static.videoegg.com/ted/movies/SIRKENRO BINSON_high.flv&autoPlay=false&fu llscreenURL=http://static.videoegg.com/te d/flash/fullscreen.html&forcePlay=fal se&logo=&allowFullscreen=true&quo t;><param name="quality...
More About: Schools , Creativity , Kill

Creating great blog & podcast content and become an online influencer
2008-03-03 14:37:00
Just ran across an old GetShifted.TV Video Podcast on how to create great blog and podcast content... hehe nice to dig up some old yet suprisingly relevant content :)Joy for 2006 video skill (get a haircut and new hat nick)... the year of the podcast ehh :)
More About: Blog , Great , Creating , Content

Freeconomics
2008-03-03 13:52:00
This month's issue of Wired Magazine contains a great cover story by Chris Anderson titled "Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business"  From the consumer's perspective, there is a huge difference between cheap and free. Give a product away and it can go viral. Charge a single cent for it and you're in an entirely different business, one of clawing and scratching for every customer. The psychology of "free" is powerful indeed, as any marketer will tell you. This difference between cheap and free is what venture capitalist Josh Kopelman calls the "penny gap." People think demand is elastic and that volume falls in a straight line as price rises, but the truth is that zero is one market and any other price is another. In many cases, that's the difference between a great market and none at all. The huge psychological gap between "almost zero" and "zero" is why micropayments failed. It's why Google doesn't sh...

Shifted Pixels recognised in B&T Digital Media Magazine "Young Guns" Headli
2008-03-03 12:39:00
Shifted Pixels Director of Innovation, Nick Holmes a Court, has been recently recognised in the latest B&T Digital Media Magazine as part of the headline article "Young Guns - who's driving digital media in 2008"We are pleased as punch our hard work and constant depth of innovation development is being increasingly noticed by traditional media.Keep your eyes peeled for more mass media coverage of the great work we are delivering at Shifted Pixels

Understanding Social Media
2008-02-28 17:23:00
What is Social Media ?Social media is also an umbrella expression that defines all the various activities that integrate social interaction, the web, and the creation of media (news, words, pictures, audio, video). We think it's a nice term that basically just sums up the change over the last few years in the way people, companies, organisations, in short, everyone are using the web now. Social media is empowered by the "wisdom of crowds" to connect information in a collaborative manner, stimulating a bottom-up democratic approach to media influence. This is a big change in the way that Media has been produced and consumed in comparison to the past. Old Media Influence was limited to the few and or wealthy, and there were much fewer channels for feedback, discussion, error correction and critisism on a broad scale. Social Media (or New Media) is the democratisation of what Influence for Consumers, Businesses, Entertainment and News. So what are the major social media...
More About: Understanding

Choosing a CRM for your business, our findings and thoughts post-implementa
2008-02-28 15:23:00
Just recently we have gone through the process of choosing and moving over to a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system for our business.We evaluated SugarCRM and we had at least 20+ reccomendations to use it from our friends and contacts at LinkedIn. We got some great advice from those who had been there and done it before - The power of crowdsourcing huh!In the end we went with Salesforce.com and our guys love it. The outlook integration has made it easy to bake CRM into everyday communications without the need to copy paste between Email and CRM all day.Choosing to go through the CRM implementation process has been a great thing. It has already noticably increased our sales efficiency and we have closed more clients more quickly than ever before. Throughout the implementation we were forced to focus on making sure we sell our services in the way our clients like to buy them (at the advice of our friend at Ernst & Young, Rob Kingma). This has basically revolutionised ou...
More About: Business , Post , Thoughts

Build it and they will come?
2008-02-27 08:42:00
First, the "build it and they will come" mentality is a fallacy. You need to build something great and have distribution in order to succeed. And distribution is hard to get.There are many ways to get distribution. One of those is through press. If you have a great product, the more people that find out about you, the more people will know about you. And they'll tell their friends, who'll tell their friends, etc.Another subtle press benefit: you're getting links from a bunch of very highly-regarded sites, and this helps out your rankings in search engines quite a bit, which builds more traffic.There are plenty of other good ways to get traffic too, such as engineering for viral growth, but press can have huge benefits for the right product.Second, in order to get people to use your product, you have to stay alive. This sounds obvious, but a ton of people spend 6 months building a product, launch it, and give up within 3 weeks.Plain and simple, it's going to...
More About: Build

Beware of Freeconomics - The Dangers of Free
2008-02-27 06:58:00
A few weeks ago ReadWriteWeb published a piece on this blog entitled The Danger of Free , in which we discussed the rise of free - a marketing strategy where digital products are given away. This month's issue of Wired magazine features a cover story on the topic by editor-in-chief Chris Anderson. The article is a preview of his forthcoming book, called (you guessed it) Free. However in this post we look at two issues that make this new economic model rather worrisome: monopolistic markets and complex transactions. Chris and other advocates of freeconomics argue that with costs of digital products rapidly dropping, it is best to give them away for free. This ensures customer commitment, because people would much rather get stuff for free than pay even a penny for it. Chris cites examples like free web mail, free DVR, free 411 and even $20 airline tickets (not quite free, but getting close) as evidences of the emergence of freeconomics. While it is true that people like...
More About: Beware

The Demigods of Web 2.0?
2008-02-27 03:02:00
The Brash Boys at 37signals Will Tell You: Keep It Simple, Stupid is a four-page article in the March 2008 issue of Wired Magazine about 37signals. It should be on the newsstands this week. "Hansson and his partners at software developer 37signals have backed up the big talk. Rails has continued its run of popularity; over the years, tens of thousands of programmers have used it to create countless online applications, including podcasting service Odeo and microblogging phenomenon Twitter. And Basecamp, 37signals' Rails-powered, easy-to-use online collaboration software, boasts more than 2 million account holders. Signal vs. Noise, the 37signals blog, pulls in 75,000 readers a day. Hansson and 37signals cofounder Jason Fried are "revered," says business author Seth Godin. "They are as close as we get to demigods online." As "revered" "demigods," ? come on Seth, we're blushing! ? we're definitely pleased with the article and think it's a thoughtful, evenhanded story....

RockStartUp - a web reality tv show on web 2.0 startups
2008-02-25 14:27:00
http://rockstartup.com/about/index.html
More About: Reality , Show , Startups

Do not anger the Internet gods or you will suffer their wrath!
2008-02-25 13:28:00
I cannot let the irony pass with out commenting. A religious state, Pakistan, identifies a content provider, YouTube, as the source of blasphemous, seditious content and orders, King Canute style, that the Internet tides be stopped. A zealous ISP ignorantly decides the best way to comply with the decree is to re-route all of YouTube's IP addresses to whatever site they thought was more appropriate. The first repercussion was that YouTube disappeared from the Internet for almost an hour. The second repercussion was that Pakistan's Internet access crawled to a halt as all of a sudden they were handling IP requests for one of the busiest sites in the world.So, while working on a fix that will filter out the spurious route announcements, PCCW has found it necessary to shut down Pakistan's Internet access. The leadership of Pakistan just created a massive Denial of Service on their own country. I could say: "be careful what you wish for" to those elements that object to free and open ...
More About: Anger , The Internet , Wrath , Gods

Digg, Wikipedia, and the myth of Web 2.0 democracy.
2008-02-25 12:16:00
It's getting harder to be a Wikipedia -hater. The user-generated and -edited online encyclopedia?which doesn't even require contributors to register?somehow holds its own against the Encyclopedia Britannica in accuracy, a Nature study concluded, and has many times more entries. But even though people are catching up to the idea that Wikipedia is a force for good, there are still huge misconceptions about what makes the encyclopedia tick. While Wikipedia does show the creative potential of online communities, it's a mistake to assume the site owes its success to the wisdom of the online crowd.Social-media sites like Wikipedia and Digg are celebrated as shining examples of Web democracy, places built by millions of Web users who all act as writers, editors, and voters. In reality, a small number of people are running the show. According to researchers in Palo Alto, 1 percent of Wikipedia users are responsible for about half of the site's edits. The site also deploys bot...
More About: Democracy , Myth

90 Hours A Week And Loving It!
2008-02-25 12:14:00
A pic from the apple macintosh team in 1983
More About: Week , Loving , Hours

Ten Rules for Web Startups
2008-02-25 11:50:00
Source: evhead#1: Be NarrowFocus on the smallest possible problem you could solve that would potentially be useful. Most companies start out trying to do too many things, which makes life difficult and turns you into a me-too. Focusing on a small niche has so many advantages: With much less work, you can be the best at what you do. Small things, like a microscopic world, almost always turn out to be bigger than you think when you zoom in. You can much more easily position and market yourself when more focused. And when it comes to partnering, or being acquired, there's less chance for conflict. This is all so logical and, yet, there's a resistance to focusing. I think it comes from a fear of being trivial. Just remember: If you get to be #1 in your category, but your category is too small, then you can broaden your scope?and you can do so with leverage.#2: Be DifferentIdeas are in the air. There are lots of people thinking about?and probably working on?the same thing you are...
More About: Rules , Startups

Social Media Will Change Your Business (BusinessWeek)
2008-02-25 01:48:00
Look past the yakkers, hobbyists, and political mobs. Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our advice: Catch up?or catch you laterGo ahead and bellyache about blogs. But you cannot afford to close your eyes to them, because they're simply the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself. And they're going to shake up just about every business?including yours. It doesn't matter whether you're shipping paper clips, pork bellies, or videos of Britney in a bikini, blogs are a phenomenon that you cannot ignore, postpone, or delegate. Given the changes barreling down upon us, blogs are not a business elective. They're a prerequisite. (And yes, that goes for us, too.)Read the full article at Business Week.com
More About: Social , Media , Change

TV advertising to drop by 12 percent in 2008?
2008-02-24 12:33:00
Marketers and advertisers are hot to find new alternatives to TV advertising, says a new report from Association of National Advertisers and Forrester Research Inc. , which is a sign of good things to come for Web Marketing world. Dissatisfaction with TV ad performance is leading advertisers to experiment with new marketing channels, formats and video platforms to take advantage of new technologies. As far as DVRs go, more than half the advertisers surveyed said that when more than 50 percent of TV households use DVRs, they will cut spending on TV advertising by 12 percent. Where's the money going to go? Online, most likely. Eighty-seven percent of respondents said they intend to do more advertising on the Internet this year. At the same time, NBC Universal and Fox Broadcasting Co. are pounding their chests about what new programs and schedules they'll bring to advertisers for the remaining 2008 (and 2009 schedule). The research was conducted last month...
More About: Advertising , Drop

1 percent of Wikipedia users are responsible for about half of the site's e
2008-02-23 03:09:00
According to ASC-PARC  "1 percent of Wikipedia users are responsible for about half of the site's edits."
More About: Users , Half

Sydney Marketing Agency
2008-02-21 12:44:00
If you have come aross our blog, you might know that Shifted Pixels is a Full Service Digital Agency in Sydney . We are a Sydney Marketing Agency, Video Production, Web Development and Search Marketing company.We ProvideMarketing Strategy & ConsultingMarketing Planning and ImplementationOnline Marketing and PR 2.0 ServicesWeb Design and Graphic DesignWeb Useability and AccessibilityMarketing Business Blogs, Podcasts, RSSSearch Marketing and Social Media OptimisationMarketing Reputation ManagementIf you are interested in the opportunities in Online Marketing and internet influence, feel free to give us a buzz for a quick chat.

Japanese Street Fashion
2008-02-21 12:30:00
Video from the most awesome Fashion social website - 2Threads.com
More About: Japanese , Street , Street Fashion

Einstein Says: Check Your Intellect at the Door
2008-02-21 12:25:00
I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious," Albert Einstein once said. False modesty? Perhaps. But Einstein actually placed a premium on curiosity ? not intellect. Why? Because, he pointed out, "we can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." In fact, he added, "the intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it intuition or what you will, and the solution comes to you and you don't know how or why." And so this is why, when it comes to problem-solving and innovation: "Imagination is more important than knowledge." Knowledge is limited. Imagination is boundless. So next time you sit down to it, check your intellect at the door! But you should still expect to be wrong, a lot: "I think and think for months and years. Ninety-nine times, the conclusion is false. The hundredth time I am right." ? Albert Einstein
More About: Intellect , Check , Door

How to get PR for Startup Businesses?
2008-02-21 12:18:00
How do you get press to write about your new startup, your new product or your feature launch? Here are ten tips to attracting press attention and dealing with the conversations that follow.http://david.weebly.com/1/post/200 8/02/press-for-startups-10-tips.html
More About: Startup , Businesses

Free Internet Advertising with Indiego
2008-02-21 11:24:00
Indiego is a brand new advertising network for creative souls On Indiego, you can advertise your stuff for free, with the only requirement that you also advertise other people. The way this works is that everybody inserts an "ad rotation" on their site, which will display a random ad coming from one of our members. In return, your ad will be shown across those sites as well!http://www.theindiego.com/
More About: Internet , Advertising , Free

Internet advertising - The ultimate marketing machine (Economist.com)
2008-02-21 11:21:00
Thanks to the power of the internet, advertising is becoming less wasteful and its value more measurableIN TERMS of efficiency, if not size, the advertising industry is only now starting to grow out of its century-long infancy, which might be called "the Wanamaker era". It was John Wanamaker, a devoutly Christian merchant from Philadelphia, who in the 1870s not only invented department stores and price tags (to eliminate haggling, since everybody should be equal before God and price), but also became the first modern advertiser when he bought space in newspapers to promote his stores. He went about it in a Christian way, neither advertising on Sundays nor fibbing (thus minting the concept of "truth in advertising"). And, with his precise business mind, he expounded a witticism that has ever since seemed like an economic law: "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted," he said. "The trouble is, I don't know which half." Wanamaker's wasted half is not entirely proverbia...
More About: Marketing , Economist , Internet , Advertising , Machine

measuring visitors to websites
2008-02-21 02:36:00
 CNET on the challenge of measuring visitors to websites and the impact it can have on online advertising revenue: "In 2004, new kid on the block MySpace was watching its user traffic rise fast. But executives were having a tough time luring new advertisers to the social network because it didn't show up in the lists of top Web sites compiled by Internet audience trackers ComScore and Nielsen Online. "We had a hard case telling people how big we were and how many unique visitors we had. They didn't believe us. We didn't show up on people's radars," said Jason Feffer, former vice president of operations at MySpace who is now president and chief executive at opinion-forums site SodaHead.com. "It was frustrating that advertisers wanting to advertise to that demographic would go to Friendster when we were 10 times bigger than them."
More About: Websites , Visitors