Meeting Up
Brooklyn 2.0 is a MeetUp group I recently joined. We gathered at Mooney's Pub on Flatbush Avenue, Weds., Feb 13. Nice crowd. The organizer Eric Rochow is an amiable sort. Then, of course the draft beer had everyone mellow and sociable. Rochow does podcasting about easy green practices for people. Check out
Real World Green.
My personal agenda was hunting for tech stories and learning to blog more effectively. I was ecstatic with my finds. There are many developers living in Brooklyn. Of the plus 10 who showed that night, I was the only nondeveloper. Yuri Niyazov described an app to rival Google Reader. Another man tipped me
Bar Camp, a developers conference held at Polytechnical U. This conference is free and requires that all attendees present an application or assist in a presentation of a new app.
People encouraged me to use other 'Net browsers like Firefox and Safari because of the great add-ons. Then, what I couldn't get from Deli.cio.us FAQ: how to get authority. You've got to submit your blog entry's URL with tags so that it can be read by others.
Meeting Up is great because life is all about experiences. What's better than a face-to-face experience?
Labels: PR, social networking, society, technology
Space Is The Place
‘Ever said to yourself, “If I could get a hold of $10 million, I’d solve world hunger, the energy crisis, or a disease?” What about $15 million dollars to provide safe and affordable outer space travel? The
X Prize Foundation is doing just that. Teaming with
Google Corp, the X Prize Foundation offers a $30 million cash award to the first two privately funded teams to land and rove a robotic craft on the moon’s surface. This competition is the Google Lunar X Prize. Private firms, nonprofits, and schools around the globe are encouraged to apply through the
Google Lunar X Prize Web site. The prize was announced September 13, 2007. On December 7, 2007, Odyssey Moon became the first team to register for the competition.
Santa Monica-based X Prize Foundation was formed in 1995 with the belief that individuals and private entities can solve major issues affecting humankind without government involvement. Though necessary, bureaucracy tends to slow progress. Rather, the foundation advances “revolution through competition’ to find solutions to accessing space, solving health compromises, transportation, education and energy sources and generation. The foundation is a kind of think tank with bank. Its board of trustees, major donors and management team analyze major global quality-of-life issues that are caught up in bureaucratic quagmires, misperception or lack of attention. People like MIT’s
Jeffrey Shames, Google’s
Larry Page and movie producer
Robert Weiss populate the board.
Google Lunar X Prize follows a 2004 space travel competition called
Ansari X Prize. The Ansari competition resulted in advancement in personal space flight where price and risk are lowered but speed improved. Google Lunar X promises travel to and industrial development of the moon. By industrial development it’s meant getting the moon’s natural resources and using them to generate energy—solar power collectors made from lunar material—or drive space missions throughout our solar system and beyond. The Google Lunar X competition runs through December 31, 2014.
The world will watch the launch, landing and roving of the future competition winners through the Web site www.googlelunarxprize.org. The Web site is fascinating. Go online to watch the Moon 2.0 video; register a team; get competition guidelines; and join online forums. Teams may connect with preferred partners like Universal Space Network, Seti Institute and SpaceX who offer significant discounts on communication and vehicles.
Did you know there’s Lunar Legacy promotion attached to this X Prize? People upload their digital photos and messages to a gallery. Much later, these items will be on the rover that travels on the moon to be left on the moon. Is this legacy or waste? What do you think of space travel or excavating the moon for its natural resources?
Labels: Google, Google Lunar X Prize, moon, PR, private spacecraft, society, solar system, technology, X Prize Foundation
Organic, Auction or Guerrilla?
After reading a few articles by Dave Pasternak, Kevin Lee and Mark Simon--all executives with Did-It--it sounds as if search engine marketing is over the heads of the average business professional. After all it is advertising on search engines. If search engines have particular algorithms that guide them that must mean you need to know programming or statistics to make intelligent moves.
Kevin Lee writes in "It's 10 PM Do You Know Where Your Brand Is?", "...advertisers don't want to find their advertising on a site that's espousing a point of view that doesn't fit the mainstream..."
Dave Pasternak says, "The field is highly competitive and [there's] difficulty in succeeding with search," in his December 26, 2007 DMNews article.
Could it be that an advertiser has to follow the
Chinese Restaurant Model of Advertising? This model was used by America Online a 15 years ago and now is called guerilla and virile marketing. Chinese restaurants--without PC or Mac--know that their menus have to be distributed thickly within the territory they're willing to deliver. Shouldn't new and existing merchandisers do the same but cyber powered?
Of course, they should.
Pasternak recommends hiring a good agency and cautions that campaign automation tools to do it in-house are the diluted versions of what an agency uses in house (That's similar to the beef about hair care products used in salons vs. the same brand sold through retailers). Use them in good faith and know distributing postcards with your website prominently displayed by email, snail mail and P2P have to be in the mix.
Labels: cashless society, PR, search engine advertising, SEM, SEO, technology, virile marketing
