magnify360 Blog

Definitely off topic for my usual online marketing rants, but this post by Dave Caolo on “Kitchen Computing” really caught my attention.

I can remember going to countless past CES shows touting the internet enabled refrigerator… And it looks like its still coming back over and over again.

Am I the only one who has looked at these things and said “WTF?”. I really don’t want to make the decision on which fridge I buy based on whether it has a substandard computer installed in it. Do I care if it can see that I’m out of milk? I can probably just as easily hit the “OUT OF MILK” button that into on my computer that is sitting 4 feet away, put it in my iphone, or maybe, just maybe we could “Bluetooth Enable” all the milk cartons…. Are we really that lazy?

What I really want is a simple table, maybe even small laptop (13″ is fine) that sits on the kitchen counter, where I can look up recipes for “Jills-World-Famous-Coffee-Liqueur-Brownies”, catch the google news update, watch anderson cooper on AC360, and maybe even, just maybe, remember the milk.

Dave’s post http://bit.ly/1zO6W2 reminded me that there have been lots of attempts to do this right, but none so far that has come even close to the mark. My trusty ibook G4 is sitting on the kitchen counter right now, doing exactly this.

What’s your kitchen computing solution? Post a comment or drop me an email.

Great article by Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch….

Bureaucracy, checks and balances, and all the rest. Its the fear of mistakes and taking risks that kills innovation more than anything else.

http://bit.ly/m3X9

Coming from the question of how are people born with innovation and entrepreneurship, Joe Costello, CoFounder and CEO of Cadence Design Systems, once said that he thought every country has the same number at birth, but that most countries / cultures beat it out of their children before they ever have a chance.

How much does conformity cost a company or our whole country? Its huge. I’ve seen the difference when our team members feel empowered to take risks, and the output it both great and scary at the same time.

Imagine if everyone had to ask for permission before taking action on their best ideas.. How much would get done? Nothing. And in this economy we’re seeing way too many people slowing down their pace, making sure they have *sses covered by getting their bosses approval, and not taking risks. “You couldn’t get fired for buying IBM.”

But what will turn around this economy? A huge change back to an irrational but measured risk taking…

More on that in a future post…

Your comments, thoughts on this? Is innovation nature or nurture? Are governments and company over-reactions causing more harm that good?

Olivier
CEO & Founder, magnify360

Without a doubt, Google has changed the way we live our lives. Whether searching for information, shopping for shoes or comparing deals on your next vacation, there is hardly a time when we don’t just Google it.

While this cultural transformation came on fast, it didn’t come by accident. Since its inception, Google has strived towards one goal and one goal only (and no, it’s not refraining from being evil) and that goal is informational relevance.

It’s this relevance that has made Google the world wide hub for information, shopping, email and all things online. However, this dominance brings with it some pretty unique challenges. How do you stay one step ahead of the marketers looking to game the system to win a lion’s share of traffic for their site? How do you prevent spammers? In general, how do they stay one step ahead and keep everyone pursuing Google’s Holy Grail of informational relevance and premium user experience?

The answer is both simple and quite complex.

Google’s constant optimization and an obsessive commitment to user experience are simple. However, the way that this is executed upon is quite complex.

At the heart of this complexity is Google’s algorithm or the way that they measure relevance. It is a semi – black box mix of information rankings, taking many items into consideration. Keyword density in relation to the search query, URL naming conventions, overall performance and too many other factors to name here, all play into how pages are served when the user queries a search.

It’s this constant pursuit of the perfect experience that has kept Google modifying this algorithm and kept marketers, almost obsessively, asking what is the next step in the progression?

In a recent release, Google is saying that now, their quality score will be calculated in real time, dynamically every time a query is made.

So, it appears that the answer would not only be HOW the quality score is calculated, but HOW OFTEN. I guess it’s only logical. As technology continues to increase, and marketers continue to increase their savvy, this is another way for Google to raise the bar.

This new shift in the process is huge. As marketers scramble to figure out Google’s newest riddle, the firms providing real-time landing page optimization and behavioral targeting will become a marketing necessity.

If you’re landing pages are not providing relevance in real-time, your quality score will decline, along with your ranking and ROI, not to mentioned that your CPC will increase.

So, while real-time optimization is definitely “web 2.0” it may soon be the standard. When looking back at how fast Google went from being a new, boutique search engine to a business and cultural cornerstone, it is easy to envision these real-time optimizers as being another mandatory tool in the web marketers arsenal.

Wow! It just keeps getting better and better. Today, magnify360 was named Best-in-Show by VentureNet.

magnify360 was one of thirteen companies carefully scrutinized and invited to present to VentureNet’s audience of over 400 Southern California VC’s, angel investors and fellow technologists. And in spite of the very stiff competition, we won!!

Big congratulations to our ceo, founder and presenter, Olivier Chaine., and the whole team here. Very very well deserved. More updates on this to come.

From the VentureNet Site:

“VentureNet is your one chance to see the most innovative emerging technology companies and entrepreneurs in the Southern California region strut their stuff for venture capital and angel investors.”

What a great week for all of us at magnify360! Last Tuesday we announced that magnify360 closed its first round of financing from MHS Capital as well as from some of the original investors behind successes, like BlueLithium (Yahoo!), Right Media and BetterPPC. Read the press release.

Congrats to the team!

A little history on magnify360. The Company was founded in 2004 by  Olivier Chaine. With the dedication of few of the original team members here, he bootstrapped the company to profitability within two short year, opened another office in Shanghai, China and attracted the likes of clients, including Citrix Systems, Intuit, Service Magic (IAC), HSBC Bank, Packet8, Continental Warranty and other industry leaders. Might I add, our very first clients are still with us today.

The financing will predominantly focus on recruiting—we are growing fast-fast-fast. All of our available positions are here. Take a look, polish your resume and send it on in.  We’re on the hunt for bright, creative and quick minds.

The media coverage of our announcement was tremendous. magnify360 was featured in:

DowJones VentureWire

VentureBeat (BIG thank you to Matt Marshall)

SoCalTech

The blog of Ben Kuo, voice of SoCalTech (Thank you Ben!)

The Smart Show (contributed by Fransisco Dao of the FastCompany blog)

TechCrunchIT (What an honor! Thank you Cameron!)

PaidContent

Pulse2.0

…and many many other fantastic & well-respected outlets. Thanks to everyone, who covered the announcement. All can be viewed on the News section of www.magnify360.com.

While all of this was going on, Olivier was flying around the country delivering speeches at the Online Marketing Summit Summer Tour…Seattle, Denver, Atlanta…not to mention meetings in San Fransisco and back here in LA and our exhibit this week at San Jose’s Search Engine Strategies conference.

In between flights on layovers and in between meetings in the car, he was on the phone taking interviews. You see…Olivier doesn’t sleep. He’s an optimization machine.

Today, magnify360 was featured on the website, JumpIntoTomorrow.com—don’t forget to give us your vote as the featured Technology of the Day.

If there’s a site for die-hard techies, this one is it. It covers wayyy more than your run-of-the-mill online and consumer products technology site.

Here, you can find the most innovative technologies across industries that include medicine, architecture, cooking, sports, art, auto, fashion, environment, videogames, business and more.

We’re honored to have made it through their rigorous screening process to join the ranks of Compulsion, a technology that enables every element in a video to be clickable, The Soft House, a company that produces solar powered curtains that provide half the energy an average household needs in a day, and ReWalk, a semi-robotic suit that enables wheelchair users to stand, walk and climb. Amazing!

magnify360 is one of the sponsors of the current Online Marketing Summit’s Summer Tour.  The events runs through September at various cities across the country.  Here is an update from the Boston stop on the tour.

Aaron Kahlow, the founder of OMS kicked things off with a presentation geared to wake us up, literally!  He mentioned that organizations continue to hit the “snooze button” on the alarms going off around online marketing and do not continue to invest or reinvent themselves on the web.

Throughout the day, the sessions centered on topics such as search engine marketing, analytics and user experience, email marketing, social media strategies, demand generation, multi-channel metrics as well as behavioral targeting and technology.  Each session contained valuable insights for both the novice and experienced online marketers attending.

A highlight of the day was the keynote panel, when the attendees got to ask their industry peers direct questions about the state of online marketing. The topic this time was how big brands were driving success through social media, SEO, SEM, websites and testing.  A recurring theme for the panelists was the need to increasingly personalize and humanize the online experience.  They also enforced the need for analytics, and suggested that organizations use existing social networks to their benefit, instead of recreating the wheel with their own brands.

Be sure to check out the OMS website for more information or to register for one of the upcoming tour stops.

magnify360’s ceo and founder, Olivier Chaine, has been invited to participate as a panel member at the upcoming Online Market World (OMW) conference in San Francisco, this coming October 1-3.

He’ll be on two panels, one of which is entitled The Seven Deadly Sins of Website Design. Working with the producer, Lisa Morgan, we were asked to provide a few of the top line sins we’d like covered during the discussion.

Even to our own surprise, our primary suggestion had very little do with this business’ core functions: personalization, behavioral targeting, multivariate testing, analytics, lead scoring, pURLs or predictive modeling—none of it. Instead, our main contribution focused on marketing culture.

The biggest sin of website design is the idea that a website is a project with a beginning, middle and end. Instead, a website should be perceived as a living entity, requiring continual nurturing. At magnify360, we refer to this as Continual Marketing, and we practice this by updating our own website and those of our clients each and every day.

Sometimes, this is the roll-out of a big flashy update but most days, it’s just a small test and improvement to a button color, a brief re-write to a paragraph or a small tweak to how website resources are managed—baby steps to overall progress. Generally, these updates take only a few minutes but added together produce enormous results.

This idea is based on the Japanese practice of Kaizen or Continual Improvement, which dictates that large-scale pre-planned project scheduling should be replaced by smaller experiments, which can be rapidly adapted to produce large-scale results. It’s also a focus on the method, rather than the goal.

Borrowing from Kaizen, because there is no such thing as the perfect website, there is no end goal, just a continuous series of small improvements, implemented every day for overall improvement. The benefits of adopting this type of approach include:

-  Time & Resource Efficiency

-  Far Less Risk in Launches

-  Ability to Measure Results in an Uncluttered Environment

-  Encouragement of Creative, Out-of-the-Box Ideas & Experiments

-  A Company Culture in Which No One Fears Failure

We had very big day here at magnify360.  This morning we launched a project with Citrix Systems that we’ve been working on in stealth mode for a very long time.  The project is a website, called OneGreatPartner.com, and it’s a site dedicated to fostering the long-standing alliance between Citrix and Microsoft.  Not coincidentally, the site launched on Monday, the first day of Microsoft’s World Wide Partner Conference in Houston, Texas, where every year Microsoft crowns its favorite partner.

The site includes some social networking functionality, private product access and information on current and upcoming Citrix-Microsoft initiatives and is primarily geared towards sales and tech executives at both organizations.

We integrated the magnify360 Platform to improve visitor engagement and return visits.  Essentially, our platform profiles or analyzes the implicit and explicit behaviors of each user to the site and in real-time serves the most relevant on-site experience to each accordingly.  In the case of OneGreatPartner, the explicit information can include a Microsoft or Citrix exec’s self-published information, like title, group, age and department and implicit data, such IP geo-location, click speed, how long they take to move from one page to the next, etc.

Real-time customization of the on-site experience includes varying messaging, graphics, media, layout, page flow–you name it.  For Citrix, the greatest bi-product of our solution is the data on what information the Microsoft executives are gravitating towards, to indicate areas of strength, improvement or even to spark new ideas for product and marketing.

SoCalTech was nice enough to write up a brief article about it too: magnify360 Gets Win at Citrix

Read the press release we issued.

magnify360 is a Silver Sponsor at TwiistUp 4, a highly anticipated LA tech & media event, taking place at the posh Santa Monica Viceroy Hotel.  As a sponsor, we’ll have a tabletop exhibit where we’ll be providing demos of the magnify360 Platform, in additional to meeting, mingling and giving away fabulous prizes.  If you’re going and would like to connect, please feel free to get in touch: marketing@magnify360.com

According to the TwiistUp FaceBook page, there are 600+ vc’s, entrepreneurs and techies planning to attend the sold-out event–that’s twice as big as TwiistUp 3.   In addition, TwiistUp put out a release yesterday, announcing some of the fun new activities slated for this year’s party, including a classic 80’s era arcade, featuring Steve Wiebe from the documentary, ‘King of Kong, Fistful of Quarters.’

As always, the crux of the event focuses on the “ShowOffs,” a handful of promising start-ups presenting their products, technologies and ideas to the audience.  Should be a lot of fun…