As a former Google employee, I always took the “Don’t Be Evil” mantra as a sincere gesture to be taken with a grain of salt.  The slogan was a reminder of the company’s humble and idealistic beginnings, but not an iron-clad indication of its post-IPO mindset.  After all, a corporation open to accommodating censorship in China is willing to put practical limits on principles that hit the bottom line too hard.

Many long-time Google advocates were surprised and disappointed with last week’s Google/Verizon net neutrality proposal, and I was among them.  While the company defends the move as a necessary practical decision given political realities, it in many ways marks the completion of Google’s gradual transition from wunderkind start-up to new-millennium corporate superpower.   Read More »

Want to override your iPhone’s system controls? Now there’s an app for that. Thanks to Monday’s Library of Congress ruling allowing the “jailbreaking” of iPhones, users can now legally override Apple’s operating system to allow third party applications. In weighing certain exceptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the LOC gave four basic “fair use” arguments for siding with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and against Apple:

1. Jailbreakers are modifying a device they own for private, noncommercial purposes
2. Operating systems customarily enable third party programs and doing so on the iPhone doesn’t infringe on exclusive Apple copyrights
3. The amount of recoding performed during a jailbreak is negligible– 50 bytes of code out of a total of over 8 million
4. Jailbreaking doesn’t devalue Apple’s firmware or iPhones in the marketplace and might even help it by allowing users a wider variety of app choices

The Library of Congress’ explanations confirm what is apparent to most– that Apple’s real reason for exerting absolute control over it’s iPhones and App Store is to strengthen it’s bottom line without regard for what consumers want. Despite a respectful tone, the LOC’s message to Apple is clear: there is no legal basis for this kind of exclusivity, and we won’t do your dirty work by agreeing to this logic. Read More »

Recently, the Chinese government renewed Google’s license to operate its search engine business in China. Although uncertainties over Google’s future prospects in the Chinese internet market still remain, Google has expanded its presence in the emerging Chinese mobile internet market by ambitiously pushing its Android mobile operating system in the past half year. China, the world’s largest online market and also one of the fastest-growing mobile web markets, is becoming a competitive arena for Google and many other foreign companies who have set their eyes on the tantalizing growth of the mobile Internet around the world.

Early birds in the Chinese mobile web space, like Google and Apple, have faced challenges from a unique cultural market and have adapted their businesses to the local environment accordingly. And despite some early stumbles, they have also secured some small victories worth noting. In fact, these experiences can serve as useful lessons for marketers looking to tap into new opportunities to extend their branding efforts in China. Read More »

Few things are as unnerving as an organization publicly improvising a PR strategy in the face of unexpected calamity. With BP, it took weeks to strike a sincere apologetic tone and admit wrongdoing. During the 2008 election when the Bristol Palin pregnancy story broke, it took the McCain camp a few days to refine the story of how the vetting process unfolded.

By most standards the Apple Gripgate saga that has Silicon Valley buzzing since the iPhone 4 launch is a mild calamity, but it looks to be getting worse. Consumer Reports unleashed an in-depth scientific test this week indicating the iPhone 4’s antenna is flawed in a way no other previous iPhone antenna has been, and is prone to dropping calls when the phone is gripped in the lower left corner. The reviewer would not recommend the phone and openly calls for Apple to provide consumers with free phone coverings (which does fix the problem) or some alternate solution.

Perhaps most alarmingly, the report calls Apple’s credibility and honesty into question. Read More »

After 48 days of courting teens with a device built for social networking, Microsoft killed the Kin mobile phone this week due to poor sales.  The product included an innovative feature which aggregates content from various social networks in one hub, but received complaints from some users for lacking instant messaging, easy access to apps, or the ability to upload photo and video to Twitter.

Although the online and television campaigns for the Kin captured the youthful energy of the demographic it pursued, there were bumps along the road.  Microsoft got flack from conservatives for a lighthearted scene in one of its Kin commercials, a clip of a male teen taking a photo under his shirt and sending it to a female who laughs when she receives it.  Although seemingly benign, the scene was deemed by some as an endorsement of teen sexting. Read More »

Steve Jobs officially announced the new iPhone 4 yesterday morning at Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference in San Francisco. The basic design of the iPhone 4 (read a full review of the iPhone4 handset) was hardly novel due to a leak by technology blog Gizmodo several months ago, but the slick appearance of the iPhone 4 and some steady improvements earned it a round of applause from technology media and blogs at the conference.

While the iPhone 4 still leads the smart phone market in some ways, there was hardly any single killer feature that significantly sets it apart in this fast-paced and rapidly evolving smart phone market. Instead, the iPhone 4 is entering a more homogenous and competitive smart phone market full of competitors eager to challenge its supremacy, an indicator of a new phase of overall growth for the mobile industry. Here are the three things you need to know about the iPhone 4 and its impact on the mobile space:
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Despite the growing rivalry between Google and Apple, the FTC approval of Google’s AdMob purchase proves the tech giants are indispensable to each other on at least one effort– circumventing antitrust scrutiny. Despite tough talk from members of the FTC in recent months, the commission cited Apple’s recent purchase of Quattro Wireless as proof that Google’s purchase will not harm competition in the growing online ad marketplace.

With mobile phones outnumbering computers by more than 4 to 1 and smart phones upping their IQ and prevalence by the day, mobile marketing is poised to hold huge financial rewards in the coming years. The Admob platform, which was launched in 2006, operates much like’s Google’s existing Content Network– allowing companies to syndicate ads to a large network of mobile publishers. AdMob has already served a host of major clients including Ford, Coca-Cola and Procter & Gamble and fits seamlessly into the Google world, giving existing clients another major weapon to utilize in ad campaigns. Read More »

Propelled by location based technology, mobile advertising is taking leaps forward right now. Projections from Juniper Research anticipate location based mobile marketing will jump to a whopping $12 billion dollars by 2014. Meanwhile, in the past four months the number of location based campaigns pushing the bounds of mobile advertising has grown exponentially. With Facebook’s anticipated release of a place-based functionality and the near hysteria surrounding Foursquare, opportunities continue to grow. Scale is the primary qualifier when it comes to mobile, but it’s not an excuse to avoid experimenting with the channel. Now is the time to gain learnings–from relevant ways to reach a highly targeted audience, to gathering insights and data on your customers.

Here are five promising executions:

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From Ad Age’s Digital Marketing Guide to Mobile

I haven’t been doing any mobile marketing so far. How hard will it be to catch up?

The mobile landscape is at a tipping point right now, switching from a very old approach to an edgy new one. The difference between newer smartphones vs. feature (or non-smart) phones, or even older smartphones, is dramatic. Consumer behavior is transitioning from mostly using the phone for voice and text communication to using it as a secondary or even primary computing device. For this subset of wireless subscribers, their pocket-size computer is used for browsing the web, watching videos, reading e-mails, listening to personalized radio stations, downloading eBooks — heck, even filing taxes.

Just as the behaviors on the devices are vastly different, the marketing tactics and strategies are night and day between feature phones and newer smartphones. Where promotions and light engagement were the status quo for older phones, the cutting edge is all about features and utility. In most cases, these consumers care most about how useful it will be to engage, rather than just how entertaining. Read More »

Things are getting downright ugly. Apple and Google, once the best of friends, seem to have devolved into the bitterest of enemies. The tactics have become dirty. The blows are getting dangerously close to the belt. And I couldn’t be happier.

Unlike real wars, when corporations battle it’s often the common person that prospers. We’re seeing honest-to-goodness tooth-and-nail competition take place, and it’s the consumer and marketers that will come out on top regardless of which behemoth wins the fight.

The blows toward the end of 2009 were focused mostly on mobile. Google Voice was blocked from the App Store, and the FCC started poking into the matter – specifically Apple’s Control of the app economy. In short order, Eric Schmidt resigned from Apple’s board. Then the Motorola Droid came, and the marketing that placed Android’s features directly in competition with Apple’s iPhone OS. Apple then acquired Lala, a streaming music service, near immediately after Google started using the streams in their search results. Following this, Google announced they were moving acquire AdMob (still pending FTC approval), an advertising network that served ads into iPhone apps and a company Apple had been trying to acquire prior to Google outbidding them. In turn, Apple bought up ad network Quattro Wireless. As 2009 came to a close, rumors of both an Apple tablet device and a Google built phone competed for headlines. Read More »