Mail Fusion For 8 or 9 years now, we haven’t received a single bill by U.S. mail. We use PayTrust (originally PayMyBills.com) for “online” bill pay. We have a P.O. Box somewhere in South Dakota that we’ve redirected all our bills to. The bills get opened, scanned, we get an email, we enter in a payment amount and date. No fuss, no muss. PayTrust even figures out which bills can be electronically delivered and provides an easy interface to set that up directly into the PayTrust account as well. I haven’t received a bill or written a check in years. I think we pay something like $9/month for the service. I just ran across a new service this week called…
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Great Exchange on Newspapers’ Future
Great Exchange on Newspapers’ Future Dave Morgan and Jeff Jarvis trade excellent thoughts here on the future of newspapers. Read the posts in this order: Jarvis: Why newspapers aren’t making it in the new world (and what they can do about it) Morgan: What they can do about it (disaggregate their vertically integrated business models) Jarvis: Disaggregate even further! The exchange is really thought-provoking about other forms of traditional media whose businesses are being turned upside down by the Internet. Yellow Pages. Music. Movies. The current Hollywood writers’ strike may actually be unsolvable with the Movie and TV industry’s current structure.
An Unusual Christmas Present?
An Unusual Christmas Present? Has anyone else noticed a precipitous drop in spam volumes this week? Perhaps the Internet Axis of Evil is taking a few days off to sharpen their horns…or maybe they’re just giving the world an unusual Christmas present!
Facebook and Privacy
I hate just doing linkblogs, but Fred’s thoughts this morning on Facebook and privacy around the beacon issue are spot on. Two highlights I couldn’t agree with more: When the internet knows who you are, what you do, who your friends are, and what they do, it goes from the random bar you wander into to your favorite pub where your friends congregate and the bartender knows your drink and pours it for you when you walk in the door and These privacy backlashes do some good though. They keep big companies like Google and Facebook sensitized to the issue. And so we hope that they ‘do no evil’ with this data they are collecting Read the full post here.
The Facebook Fad
The Facebook Fad I’m sure someone will shoot me for saying this, but I don’t get Facebook. I mean, I get it, but I don’t see what all the fuss is about. I made similar comments before about Gmail (here, here), and people told me I was an idiot at the time. Three years later, Gmail is certainly a popular webmail service, but it’s hardly changed the world. In fact, it’s a distant fourth behind Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL. So I don’t feel so bad about not oohing and ahhing and slobbering all over the place about Facebook. Facebook reminds me of AOL back in the day. AOL was the most simple, elegant, general purpose entree for people who wanted…
In Search of Automated Relevance
In Search of Automated Relevance A bunch of us had a free form meeting last week that started out as an Email Summit focused on protocols and ended up, as Brad put it, with us rolling around in the mud of a much broader and amorphous Messaging Summit. The participants (and some of their posts on the subject) in addition to me were Fred Wilson (pre, post), Brad Feld, Phil Hollows, Tom Evslin (pre, post), and Jeff Pulver (pre, post). And the discussion to some extent was inspired by and commented on Saul Hansell’s article in the New York Times about “Inbox 2.0” and how Yahoo, Google, and others are trying to make email a more relevant application in today’s…
It's The Little Things
It’s The Little Things My credit card expires at the end of this month, so Citibank just sent me a new one. I’d guess that about 50 web sites, maybe 75, have my credit card on file and know that it’s about to expire. Only two of them — that’s right, only two — Typepad (my blogging software from company Six Apart) and Mobil Speedpass sent me reminders to come back and update my account. And at that, Mobil sent its reminder via snail mail. Typepad’s was an easy one-click right to my account’s profile page on the web site. How is it that only one or two companies got it right? This is one of those little opportunities to…
In Defense of Email, Part 9,732
In Defense of Email, Part 9,732 I commented today on our partner Blue Sky Factory’s CEO, Greg Cangialosi’s excellent posting in defense of email as a marketing channel called Email’s Role and Future Thoughts. Since the comment grew longer than I anticipated, I thought I’d re-run parts of it here. A couple quick stats from Forrester’s recent 5-year US Interactive forecast back up Greg’s points con gusto: – 94% of consumers use email; 16% use social networking sites (and I assume they mean USE them – not just get solicitations from their friends to join). That doesn’t mean that social networking sites aren’t growing rapidly in popularity, at least in some segments of the population, and it doesn’t mean that…
New Daily Read
New Daily Read If you haven’t seen it or heard about it yet, run – don’t walk – to sign up for either the RSS feed or daily email digest from Silicon Alley Insider, a new publication that’s a sort of NYC based version of ValleyWag. SAI is run by famed analyst Henry Blodget and was started by former DoubleClick CEO and CTO Kevin Ryan and Dwight Merriman, now serial Silicon Alley entrepreneurs (at an epic pace, no less). The writing is easy and has a bit of that tabloid feel to it, but that’s a nice change. The fact that the publication fills a void that’s been open for years since the disappearance of Jason Calacanis’ Silicon Alley Reporter…
New Media’s Influence on the Traditional
New Media’s Influence on the Traditional Last week, DMNews unveiled its new look and feel and format (of the print publication) at the DMA’s annual convention in Chicago. Hats off to Publisher Julia Hood and Editor-in-Chief Elly Trickett for diving in and coming up with some great improvements to the publication so quickly after taking the reigns. What I find particularly interesting about the new format is that its design and even content structure seem to borrow heavily from the world of online media, such as: A top-of-page “navigation bar” that tells you at a glance what articles are on the page (email, circulation, multichannel, legislation, lists, etc.) so you can flip pages and figure out quickly where to stop…
People are People, Part II
People are People, Part II In Part I, I talked about the diminishing distinction between B2B marketing and B2C marketing, and how getting the right message to the right person at the right time blurs those traditional boundaries. I have a different thought on the same theme today, spurred on by Elly Trickett, who is DMNews‘ fantastic new Editor-in-Chief. Elly wrote a great editorial in the October 1 print edition of the publication that I just caught today entitled “Don’t Forget Your Consumer Side,” in which she recounted a speech she made to an audience of marketers where she asked them to come up with examples of trigger-based digital marketing they had received, and one member of the audience replied…