San Francisco Auto Show marketing highlights

Yesterday I attended the San Francisco auto show to geek out over the latest cars. A few companies stood out in their marketing efforts to connect their brands with passive customers.

  1. Chrysler had special photo zones around popular cars such as the Dodge Viper, a Chrysler 300 Dubs Edition with gull-wing doors, and the Chrysler Phaeton concept car. The company setup special floor mats as photo zones and attendees lined up to have their picture taken. Chrysler representatives handed special cards to everyone they photographed with a URL and access code to retrieve their digital photograph the next day.
  2. Subaru highlighted their Impreza WRX with a special immersive gaming experience playing Gran Turismo 3. Children got into a special pod with a motion simulator and 3 LCD displays. They raced around a virtual track in a WRX, stepped down from the ride, and jumped into a real WRX STI next to the game pod. Mom and Dad followed behind, learning about the car.
  3. Volkswagen brought Stanley, winner of the $2 million DARPA Grand Challenge autonomous robot race covering 132 miles in 6 hours and 54 minutes. Stanley was created by Stanford students based on a VW Touareg R5 with contributions from VW’s electronics research lab. Kids love robots, and they were being lifted high by their parents to check out the range finders and cameras on the front of the vehicle. Showing off Stanley increased the technology cool for Bay Area geeks.

It was interesting to listen to what the average shopper was looking for on the floor of the auto show.

  • Comfort of the back seat in a sporty car.
  • Fuel economy.
  • Center console configuration. Navigation systems should be featured on any display model to drive interest.

Honda’s line of hybrids seems to be popular among shoppers wanting a hybrid that feels like a car. If customers can think of a hybrid as a $3000 option on any model and not just a special buy the technology will really take off.

XM Satellite Radio was highlighted at multiple booths as a factory installed option but I did not see any promotion of Sirius. XM was cleverly marketed as a dealer-installed option providing both audio content as well as data such as real-time traffic data updated every 3 minutes.

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San Francisco municipal WiFi is live

First node of San Francisco municipal WiFi

MetroFi announced today the deployment of wireless mesh networks at San Francisco’s Civic Center, Ferry Building and Portsmouth Square. I visited all three locations this evening and SF TechConnect, San Francisco’s wireless access grid, is definitely alive and broadcasting. Using the network supposedly currently requires visiting a splash screen and accepting a terms of service document, but I could not establish a connection to any of the nodes.

(pictured above are the three network locations plotted on a Google Map. Please open this post in a web browser if you do not see a map)

Macworld reports the system uses both 802.11b and 802.11g protocols and a mesh between nodes is created using 802.11a. These access points are connected via a 36 Mbps wireless line-of-sight connection to Mount Davidson (about two miles south) and city-owned fiber.

The city now has open wireless connections covering its major events venues: Civic Center plaza, Union Square, SBC Park, and the Ferry Building. Sweet!

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Brightcove receives $16.2 million Series B

Brightcove logo

Brightcove just closed a $16.2 million Series B funding round led by AOL. Other investors include IAC, Hearst, and Allen & Co. Barry Diller of IAC will join Brightcove’s board. Series A was led by Jim Breyer of Accel Partners and David Orfao of General Catalyst Partners.

Brightcove was founded by Jeremy Allaire, formerly chief technical officer at Macromedia where he helped develop the Flash format. Brightcove makes heavy use of Flash throughout its site to deliver video direct to customers over the web for free, subscription, and individual purchases.

Brightcove also signed a deal with AOL allowing publishers submitting their video content to Brightcove to have the option to extend their reach to the AOL network.

Brightcove is pitching the idea that video content production is cheaper and soon there will be an explosion in video content online. They want to host and monetize that content and today’s announcement seems to give them the resources they need to step to the head of an emerging pack of video services.

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Simple Sharing Extensions for NetNewsWire

I created a Simple Sharing Extensions exporter for NetNewsWire followed links as a proof of concept. The OPML SSE exporter is written in AppleScript. It iterates through each subscription feed and its items, outputting every feed and the descriptive data about the items you have opened in a browser.

If you are a Mac user with NetNewsWire installed you can download the AppleScript or view some of the outputted OPML.

Example output


<outline type="feed" text="Greg Reinacker" htmlUrl="http://www.rassoc.com/gregr/weblog"
  description="Greg Reinacker: Greg Reinacker's Weblog"
  xmlUrl="http://www.rassoc.com/gregr/weblog/rss.aspx">
  <outline type="item" text="NewsGator acquires NetNewsWire" 
  htmlUrl="http://www.rassoc.com/gregr/weblog/archive.aspx?post=783"
  created="Tue, 4 Oct 2005 01:27:16 GMT" />
  <sx:sync id="http://www.rassoc.com/gregr/weblog/archive.aspx?post=783" version="1">
    <sx:history when="Tue, 4 Oct 2005 01:34:52 GMT" by="NetNewsWire" />
  </sx:sync>
</outline>

The uncompressed AppleScript should be placed in Library –> Application Support –> NetNewsWire –> Scripts. Restart NetNewsWire and you can access “sse” from the AppleScript menu.

I only have access to the most recent copy of the item through AppleScript. I am sure there is a lot more work to be done but I want to get some aggregator-specific code out in the wild.

Known bugs:

  • Dates are not formatted as RFC 822. I am still figuring out date format manipulation in AppleScript

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Mobile technologies PodSession

Om Malik and I sat down tonight to talk about mobile technologies, the latest developments in networks, and mobile phone hardware. We discussed the recent changes at Cingular, the benefits of each major mobile carrier, wireless data networks, MVNOs, and the phones we recommend for the holiday season as well as early 2006 corporate budgets.

Om and Niall PodSessions are now available as a weekly feature on their own domain: ONPodSessions.com.

Google searches local store inventories

Google’s shopping comparison service Froogle will now contain inventory information from local brick-and-mortar retailers like Best Buy, Circuit City, Home Depot, Bombay and CompUSA. Google will also populate the database with local merchant information from Google Base in addition to Google’s existing merchant feeds.

Users searching for a product will be shown a map with local an overlay of local stores carrying the item. Google is in a unique position to offer the service because unlike traditional shopping comparison engines that make most of their money when a user leaves the site, local search does not provide easy lead and purchase tracking. Google will make money by serving text advertisements on its search result pages.

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Microsoft announces Simple Sharing Extensions

Ray Ozzie announced Simple Sharing Extensions for RSS and OPML this morning. Ray explains on his weblog the need to synchronize data such as contacts, calendaring, and read status on a wide range of devices across multiple profiles such as personal, family, and professional. The new namespace is the first extension of OPML I know of. Ray mentions there “nothing to announce right now in terms of which [Microsoft] products will support the spec, when, and for what purpose, but people are experimenting with it and are intrigued.”

The acronym “SSE” makes me think of Intel’s Streaming SIMD Extensions processor instruction set but I suppose that can be overcome.

I think developers will wait and see what implementations of Simple Sharing Extensions take hold within Microsoft before coding against the developing specification. Having access to Microsoft’s large customer base will be enough motivation to drive adoption across each industry vertical the company touches. Dave Winer will continue to evangelize the idea throughout the industry as he has been for years. I think Atom can also be easily added as a supported format as the specification moves towards version 1.0.

I started writing an exporter for NetNewsWire that I hope to finish tonight. If any feed aggregator developers would like to brainstorm about an ideal output format for feeds and individual items please contact me and we can have some working code tonight.

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FeedBurner State of RSS report

RSS uses

FeedBurner just published a report on the current state of RSS and Atom syndication formats across a variety of publisher types with varying goals. The graphic above helps illustrate the difference between feed search and blog search. While the two used to be almost one and the same, blog search focuses on just blogs and podcasts and not commercial publishers, web services, watchlists, and other peer-produced content.

I think the report was a bit light on monetizing subscribers, so I hope FeedBurner addresses advertising in syndication feeds as its next market report topic.

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Google Base blog import instructions

Google Base logo

Google Base launched last Tuesday as a new repository of information for distribution across Google’s network of sites including Google search, Froogle, and Google Local. You can add your existing content to the Google Base for broad distribution with only a few easy steps. I’ll show you how.

  1. You need a Google account associated with Google Base to submit items. Sign-in to Google Base to get started.
  2. Complete your extended profile. Market yourself with your full name or the name of your site, a description up to 400 characters in length, your URL, location and contact information.
  3. Create a new feed containing additional elements from the “news and articles” information type. These additional elements include author name, tags and categories (label), and a publication date. I set the number of pages to 1 because all my posts exist on their own individual web page. I used the Atom template because both Google and Atom require dates in ISO 8601 format.
    • Do you use Movable Type or TypePad Pro advanced templates? You can use my Movable Type Google Base template to easily output your last 1000 blog posts. You may output up to 100,000 items but the resulting file must be under 10 MB in size.
  4. If the resulting feed is under 195 KB you can use the Feed Validator to test your markup.
  5. Download the resulting file.
  6. Register your bulk upload. Your item type should be Reference Articles until there is a better pre-defined category for distributing your content.
  7. Upload your file via the Google Base dashboard bulk upload.
  8. Wait a long while for Google to consume all of your content. They claim 20-60 minutes but in my experience the process takes hours.
  9. Search Google Base to see your newly created content.

I created my own Google Base template for Movable Type to make the process a lot easier. I think Google should index Dublin Core elements and other information in the feed other than its own namespaced creation, so I left some extra items in the feed that currently serve no purpose.

You can submit an image link (image_link) for each item to stand out in the search results. Logo images are not acceptable but Google does not seem to be enforcing the rule: I have seen many logos throughout their result pages.

Once your blog posts are successfully updated you can edit each post, view the description, and add additional labels and attributes by clicking “edit” next to the item title on your dashboard.

I also recommend creating a separate People Profile entry for yourself. Your entry will expire in 31 days but you will drive new traffic to your site for keywords and topics of interest.

Why should you go to the trouble of submitting your information to Google Base? You will be completely sure that Google has all your latest content complete with the appropriate link back to your site. Feeding the content directly to Google may help your posts place better in Google search results.

Napster UK advertisement

Napster Music Ad

Napster UK has a sexy new commercial online to promote its music subscription service (NSFW). The commercial shows a 30 second peep show that abruptly ends as the stripper is about to remove her bra. The ad ends with “Leave you wanting more?” and links to a free trial subscription. Clever.

A link to a free download for the commercial’s musical track would have been a perfect ending.

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