Chink in the Open Source Armor? I discovered something by accident yesterday about Firefox (which I love) that is giving me a little pause around the beauty of open source. Maybe I’m missing something – if I am, please comment. I went to download some new extensions into Firefox, and the Mozilla site said I had to upgrade to the new version of Firefox (1.0.4) in order to access any extensions. Before I did the upgrade on my machine, I upgraded my colleague Lisa’s (I was about to show her what extensions were, so I figured it would be best to make a clean start there with 1.0.4). But once I upgraded her, I discovered that none of the extensions…
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It’s Easy to Feel Like a Luddite These Days
It’s Easy to Feel Like a Luddite These Days You know, I feel like I’m a pretty progressive, early adapter kind of guy. I’m a technology entrepreneur. We got the iPod for Windows the minute it came out. TiVo Series I. One of the very first wireless hubs to create our own wireless LAN at home. I blog. I have an RSS feed. But it’s hard to stand still these days, even for a few months. So here’s my big admission — I still don’t entirely “get” tagging or podcasting. But I’m making a big push to try them out over the next couple of weeks and see where it goes. I’ll try tagging first, using, of course, del.icio.us. Fred…
Who Said VCs Don't Add Value?
Who Said VCs Don’t Add Value? In case there’s anyone out there who reads my blog but not Brad Feld’s — if you’re a Firefox user, you have to read this posting about pipelining and take the two minutes to implement it. It’s phenomenal. Thanks, Brad!
Counter Cliche: Who’s The Dog in this Scenario?
Counter Cliche: Who’s The Dog in this Scenario? Fred’s VC cliche of the week is a good one — “If you lie down with dogs, you’ll come up with fleas.” His point is a good and simple one, that VCs shouldn’t take people risks in deals and shouldn’t try to back management teams they have serious concerns about (ethical or otherwise) in the hopes of trying to change the team or change management. The obvious counter cliche is that entrepreneurs run that same risk in accepting capital from less-than-savory venture investors. An ethically-challenged investor can wreak havoc on a young company, potentially tying the company up with peripheral legal problems or even damaging the company’s attempts at raising future rounds…
The (Email) Elephant in the Room
The (Email) Elephant in the Room Email marketing continues to be under attack by some members of the media who are looking to stir up melodrama and controversy and seem to be uninterested in or unwilling to look at real metrics from real companies who are enjoying unparalleled success with email. I can’t say this any better than Bill McCloskey from Email Data Source, who writes in MediaPost: The Elephant in the Room that no one is willing to talk about is that Spam is not the problem. The problem is the OVERREACTION to Spam. This overreaction is not something that is hurting e-mail marketing communications–it is hurting all communications. Read the full column here. It’s great. UPDATE: Apparently, the…
Just Say No
Just Say No A recent study by AOL (published here in CNET) says that on average, people in America check email five times per day and can’t go without it for more than three days at a time. And six out of ten respondents said they check email on vacation. While I’m as guilty as anyone of perpetuating these statistics, I am a big fan of taking regular time off from email. Whether it’s a day each week, or a whole weekend here or there, or at least one week vacation per year, it’s important to Just Say No every once in a while. Even Fred took an email holiday recently, to great success, I believe. The great thing about…
Email Articles This Week
Email Articles This Week I know, not a real inspired headline. There are two interesting articles floating around about email marketing this week. I have a few thoughts on both. First, David Daniels from Jupiter writes in ClickZ about Assigning a Value to Email Addresses. David’s numbers show that 71% of marketers don’t put a value on their email addresses. I think that may be an understatement, but it’s a telling figure nonetheless. David’s article is right on and gives marketers some good direction on how to think about valuing email addresses. The one thing he doesn’t address explicitly, though, is how to think about the value of an email address in the context of a multi-channel customer relationship. Customer…
Book Short: More on Email Marketing
Book Short: More on Email Marketing My friend Bill Nussey’s The Quiet Revolution in Email Marketing is a good read for those in the industry. It’s a little different in focus than our recently published book, Sign Me Up!, and in many ways is a good complement. Bill develops a good framework for Customer Communication Management (CCM) based on his experience as CEO of SilverPop, one of the leading email marketing companies. He builds on Seth Godin’s permission framework and applies it directly to email marketing, point by point. He addresses head on every email marketer’s nightmare, when you tell someone what you do for a living, and the person replies “oh, you’re a spammer.” The book also has a…
Gmail, I Don’t Get It, Part III
Gmail, I Don’t Get It, Part III This is the third in a somewhat drawn-out series of postings on Gmail featuring some interesting data from Return Path’s Email Change of Address service, which captures self-reported address change data from nearly 1 million consumers every month. The first posting, back when Gmail launched nearly a year ago, was that I didn’t understand the fuss. This is even more true now that Yahoo is in a “free storage” war with Google. The second, in November, had some change of address stats reporting that the numbers of people joining Gmail was tiny relative to other ISPs…and also that Gmail was starting to have people switch away from it, but only at the rate…
You Heard It Here First, Part II
You Heard It Here First, Part II Tomorrow, Return Path is going to announce that we have acquired the Bonded Sender Program from IronPort Systems (the release is here). As usual, I’m happy to pre-announce M&A activity on my blog in exchange for a moment of self-promotion. Bonded Sender is the industry’s oldest, best known, and most effective whitelist/accreditation program. In a nutshell, it’s a bitch for mailers to qualify for it — they have to demonstrate that they’re a super high quality mailer and get certified by our partner TrustE — but once they do, they have relatively guaranteed safe passage and default images into the inbox at Microsoft (Hotmail and MSN), Roadrunner, and a number of smaller ISPs…
But Hopefully More Fun Than Insurance
But Hopefully More Fun Than Insurance Return Path’s Chief Privacy Officer, Tom Bartel, has a great posting about the importance of focusing on privacy and data security within your organization, however large or small. The lessons of the past quarter — ChoicePoint, B of A, etc., certainly lend a lot of credence to his argument.