You might have heard about Google’s announcement to purchase Motorola Mobility Holdings for $12.5 billion. On the surface this would seem to be a move to solidify the Android ecosystem and cult by starting to build and distribute their own mobile hardware (cell phones and tablets).

That’s part of it. Apple has demonstrated the market power and profitability that a proper cult following can generate and continues to demonstrate this commitment by practically giving away their newest operating system, Lion ($29), and actually giving away their upcoming iCloud service to all Lion users. Not a bad way to get people to buy the latest and greatest.

Not too far beneath Google’s surface brews a tempest that has significant implications for all mobile technology innovation in the years to come. Google’s main interest in Motorola is 17,000-plus patents that allow them to enter the patent wars currently underway. In this war, patents are conglomerated legal cards to be played as part of an ongoing legal strategy for each company vying for market share.

Patents were designed to fuel innovation by rewarding someone’s original idea, allowing him or her a specific period of time to capitalize monetarily on that idea. Technology moves much faster than the law, and we’re quickly seeing the limitations of copyright, trademark, and patent law as they currently stand.

On the heels of reports saying Android phones occupy nearly half the market, one might wonder how such a deal could get through anti-trust court. To Google’s credit, this does represent a new business sector for them as they wisely licensed the Android OS (classic Microsoft strategy) rather than building hardware (Apple). Now how do you think those dozens of hardware manufactures feel about competing directly with a company owned by their licensor?

While Larry Page states that the deal will “enhance competition and offer consumers accelerating innovation, greater choice, and wonderful user experiences,” I’m not convinced. The little guy doesn’t have the legal muscle to enter the patent wars, and is often only brought in unknowingly after he’s had some success.

Certainly Google has offered much innovation to the world, and some see as a defensive move. I have a limited amount of trust for any large corporation, and these days that includes Google and even Apple. If you’ve been watching this game awhile, it may seem somewhat ironic to see Apple and Microsoft banding together to sue Google. The enemy of my enemy and all that.

This situation makes me squirm the way much of our stock market does. What was created as an institution to allow anyone to invest in a company, hitching his or her star to the success and failure of that company, has become an abstraction that allows people to place bets on the success or failure of anything or nothing. We’ve seen how well that played out in recent years.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Gadget, Technology

Social media was created by individuals for individuals. Let’s make that clear up front. As far as businesses are concerned, they have done some fantastic things with social media to connect with their client base via customer service, engagement, charity, or just seeming “cool”. The businesses who have done this well are looked upon as models to other businesses to the point of some saying, “We need to do what they did and we’ll be successful!” I hate to burst your bubble, but that’s not necessarily true.

If you are a business and say, “We need to be social.” I ask you this: “Why?” Granted, social media is fun. I would tweet all day if I wanted to! But so many businesses start with feeling they need to get on specific platforms – mainly Facebook and Twitter. However, as a business, you may not be appropriate for social media. In the financial sector, most companies only allow their personnel to be on LinkedIn. You may run a manufacturing facility – not sure if Facebook is really the best platform for you.

So before you get all platform-crazy and want to be on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Hulu, YouTube, Vimeo, Quora, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Google+…. take a step back and answer the question, why do you want to be on social media? What is the business goal here? Most of the time, it’s to gain more clients and increase business. Or it’s to engage with existing clients and maintain them. Or it’s to just know everything that’s being said about you and your competitors to gauge where the market is going so you can model marketing plans around the consumer voice. Whatever it is, figure it out. Then we can talk about platforms.

Now, the next huge debacle – do you have the resources to manage these presences? If you want to create a presence on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, you better make sure you have a plan on who is going to be creating that content and when. And whoever is responsible, make sure that person or group of people is knowledgeable on appropriate community management skills.

Does the person running your social media communication know that there should be a generic company Facebook profile (i.e. mine is Rachel at Astek) to manage your company Facebook page so his/her personal profile is kept personal? Does he/she know that the you should always have more people following you on Twitter than you following – and that you actually need to engage on Twitter at least 12-15 times a day (and those are in conversations, not just status updates)? And finally, whoever is managing your social media presence, does he/she call him/herself an expert? If so, find someone else!

The term “expert” in social media land is almost the equivalent of a four-letter word. Those of us who make our careers off of social media and innovative technologies know that whatever we do know, there is twice as much stuff that we don’t know. Pride is not a good feature in a community manager. Make sure this person is innovative, creative, and always reading and trying to learn on what’s going out there in that scary land many call a “cloud”. For example, Google+ brand pages are just around the corner. Do you have a plan in place for when that happens – whether that plan includes engaging in that platform or focusing on something else?

Now we enter into that precarious zone of agency management. Many businesses stat that they want to be active on social media but don’t have the time. So they want someone to do it for them. And no, don’t hire an intern to manage your social media. Going back the qualifications of a community manger, you need to make sure that a certain skill set is present in this individual – plus you need to make sure he/she knows your brand, is trustworthy in protecting and representing it, and if he/she leaves, you’re not left going, “Now what?”

Therefore, if you do hire an agency or someone externally to help you launch a social media presence, fantastic! Have at it! But I would strongly suggest that messaging and content creation come from someone internally, and just have the agency train you on appropriate messaging and to set expectation on what level of engagement is realist for the company to maintain. Because if the agency can send out 15 tweets a day, that’s great, but if your internal bandwidth is only 5 per day, then you have a problem. It is perfectly reasonable to hire an agency to take over social discussions on a one-off basis such as for an event, conference, Twitter chat, etc. But full-time ownership should be created internally unless that agency is almost grandfathered into your business or if they give you a clear exit strategy so you know how to keep up with the presence they created for you after they’ve left to go to the next client.

Social media is not a buzzword, and it is and will continue to grow into being vital for business successes. You should not ignore it, but just like any other business decision, make sure you have a plan on how to use it and why you are using it in the first place. Have questions? Do you have good examples/case studies? Please share as we easily could’ve missed it on our Twitter feed!

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Rachel Yeomans Categories: Entrepreneurship, How To, Marketing, Social Media, Technology, Web

Check out this blog showing five awesome and even slightly practical modes of transportation. Ever wanted a flying car, batmobile, or just to ride more safely on your bike? Now you can!

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Fun, Gadget, Technology

If you’re like me, you can’t have enough digital desktop space. However, if you’re like me, you switched to a laptop many years ago, and had to take a step back from desktop computers that could easily run as many monitors as you could fit on your desk. Macs have always had an advantage here, running dual monitors since the late 80’s. This was one of the reasons they gained popularity for desktop publishing.

While most laptops natively support one external monitor in addition to the built-in screen, I’ve found myself at times wanting two big displays since I usually don’t have my laptop open on my desk. I find it cumbersome and recently downgraded to a 13“ MacBook Pro since I typically use the laptop as a laptop on planes and in coffee shops where it’s cramped. I may even go AirBook next.

Low and behold, about a year ago the geniuses at DisplayLink invented a microchip (let’s call it a magic box) that allows you to run a monitor off nothing more than a USB connection. How does it work? It compresses the video signal to fit into the 480 Mb/s data stream that USB can handle. Back in the day you had to have a separate video card for every monitor or pair of monitors, which used far more power and generate more heat. No more.

So now they’ve licensed the chip and there are all varieties of magic boxes out there. I highly recommend this USB display adapter from Diamond Multimedia, which works on Mac and PC and also has a built in 3-port USB hub since you’d be losing a USB port otherwise:

Installation is a snap. Install one DisplayLink driver, which you can find here for free, then plug it in and go! The box has a DVI monitor port, so you may need an adapter for VGA, etc.

The only drawback is that the refresh speed is a little sluggish. You’ll notice this when you drag windows around or play a video. It can support HD resolution on up to six additional screens (one monitor per box), which is great, but I would not recommend it for watching movies or gaming. That’s what your main monitor is for!

At Astek, we’re completely laptop-based, which is great for a flexible work environment. And now the only significant limitation has been removed. I tested it out first on one workstation, and then bought them for the whole office. It’s $60 for the box, so around $300 total investment including a monitor for a significant increase in productivity. Here’s my current setup:

What would you do with two monitors?

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Fun, Gadget, How To, Technology

We’re big fans of the Specialized Information Publishing Association (SIPA), an organization focused on the ever-changing needs of niche publishers, typically in the B2B space. As members and speakers, we’ve enjoyed getting to know the diverse groups involved, and I often learn as much as I teach at their seminars, since publishers are in the middle of a bone fide revolution.

Tom Lynch and I attended the national conference in Washington D.C. this month, and added “exhibitor” to our list of credentials. Astek’s growth has always been fueled by word of mouth from our happy customers (thanks!), but we felt it was important for us to add another layer of support for SIPA, as well as to get some extra exposure for Astek by having a booth that stood out and quickly became known as “Astek Lounge.”

I’m thrilled with how well our booth turned out, thanks largely to Vin at Vin Design, who is an expert in experiential design.

First things first. Tom and I headed over to IKEA to pick up some essentials. We were creating something very different from the blue table we were provided — a space that would invite people to come in and stay awhile. And it worked!

While we were giving away real apples (on the right), we decided to have a contest and give away another Apple in the form of a new iPad 2. People entered by scanning our QR code (on the left) to register for our ePiphany newsletter. This gave us an opportunity personally to help several SIPA members get their QR code readers installed and working on their smart phones, which proved most painful on Blackberries.

Check out Astek iPad winner Brad Forrister, of M. Lee Smith Publishers/Business & Legal Resources, basking in his new toy (green cover of course):

We had fun experimenting with colorizing QR codes, and used them on the table tents strewn throughout the lounge to make it easy to learn more about Webany CMS, ePiphany, and the people at Astek:

I gave a talk on mobile publishing to a standing room-only crowd. Every couple of years publishers are thrown for a new loop in technology: SEO, CMS, social media, and now mobile. We’re helping many publishers figure out how to go mobile, which is the fastest growing content consumption market.

SIPA is a very progressively-minded organization, and hired Astek to run Twitter for the whole conference. Rachel was putting in 12-hour days back in Chicago, but it was a raging success. Several members participated, both those at the show and ones who could not make it. We had two Twitter walls (one shown below with Kati and Anne), and hashtags for the conference and each seminar to facilitate macro and micro topical real-time conversations.

I tweeted the awards ceremony in real-time and Rachel picked up the broadcast to retweet through @sipaonline. It was a blast and really demonstrated the power of Twitter to the attendees. We’re racing with it, offering this service to all kinds of conference organizers. Twitter has come a long way since I first wrote about it in 2008, and the conference aspect has become the clearest way for me to explain its true potential to people.

We had a tiny bit of downtime in the booth, which Tom used to show me how to juggle apples:

At the end, we donated the IKEA furniture to the local Boys & Girls Club of America, who were as thrilled to get it as we were not to ship it home. Now that’s a win-win.

See you in Miami!

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, ePiphany Featured Story, Fun, How To, Marketing, Technology

It’s funny, I started writing this a week ago when this was just a rumor, but now that’s it’s official I can use facts.

On Tuesday, Apple announced a variety of things around the corner. The most notable is iCloud, which is a set of fully integrated apps that tie all your Apple devices together. This replaces the MobileMe service and makes it free, which is a welcome change as I was never thrilled with the performance of that service versus the promise.

Check out Gizmodo’s great 8-minute version of the keynote if you don’t want to spend two hours of your life watching the whole thing.

The word “cloud” has been tossed around a lot in the past couple of years. If you’re not sure exactly what that means, here’s how I see it:

Technically, a cloud is a bunch of computers linked together to distribute the workload they’re given. Much in the same way that a single computer may have two or more processors to distribute the task load, you can think of a cloud as any number of computers working in harmony to get the job done.

Philosophically, a cloud allows you to store any amount of data or serve any number of applications. Most importantly, it allows you to access data and applications from any device or location. Anytime, anywhere, anyhow. The goal is true ubiquity of personal data for you.

Competition exists with companies wanting you to use their cloud versus the cloud next door. Ideally, all devices would work with all clouds and we’d all just be able to access our information from any terminal, regardless or brand or creed.

Apple is making a significant play here to unify their tight ecosystem of devices and software. They are in the best position to do this, as they have the most control over their ecosystem, delivering software, hardware, and networks that tie together.

Similar things exist on Android and other platforms, but like many things in the “Wild Wild West,” they may offer more or different capabilities but they’ll likely take more tinkering to get going. Apple tends to “just work.”

I recently presented at the SIPA 2011 Publishing Conference in D.C. on mobile (about 4 hours after this announcement) and one of the hot topics on people’s mind was the huge gap between how great the iPad is and how limited it seems to be when it comes to full-on productivity.

The iPad is here to stay through 2015 at least, as the following chart clearly indicates. Android tablet growth will be much slower than the phones since Google’s decided to license its Honeycomb tablet OS. This will be good for quality and consistency of apps, but creates a barrier for developers that will slow growth.

While Microsoft is late to this game (again), their advantage is the embedded standardization of MS Office products (Word, Excel, PowerPoint). Getting these staple apps fully useable on the iPad and other tablets is essential for sales teams and other professionals, giving Microsoft a shot at this volatile market.

I’ve heard creative approaches such as running MS apps on a server and using the iPad as a thin client or dumb terminal. In this usage, the iPad is just used as a remote screen for a computer somewhere in the cloud. This grants full software capability, but the dependence on a constant Internet connection is a deal breaker for some.

This led me to Documents to Go, which is a native iPhone/iPad app that allows me to edit MS Office files directly on the device. I’m still getting used to it, and formatting retention isn’t 100%, but it seems to solve the issue of office productivity for many issues. Perhaps some day apps like this will exist in the cloud, but no matter how good the server infrastructure is, full adoption will always depend on local bandwidth for the user, which is far from perfect.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Technology

As business people we seem to swim in a culture that abruptly labels unmet expectations as failures rather than lessons learned. This could be labeled as black and white, carrot and stick — take your pick. To me it places an unnecessarily negative and narrowly reviewed label on lessons that could otherwise bear real fruit for future interactions.

In the wake of countless huge companies being rewarded for failures that rarely seem to produce lessons or better results, this could be seen as the wrong message to send. But I’m talking about the little guys — those of us who have the gumption and power to do it better next time.

We had a project a few months ago that delivered less-than-hoped-for results. It happens. We learned a ton and the client acknowledged that the information and research was well worth the price.

The owner said something valuable to me, which was that success is unmistakable. You can smell it, taste it, and see it from a great distance. No one argues with it. No one makes excuses for it. It speaks for itself and everyone celebrates.

I agree with that philosophy. I’m not saying we should all pat ourselves on the back for not meeting expectations, whether they are from clients, employees, family, or anyone in between. But certainly there are constructive ways to evaluate those failures as lessons, which elevates our responsibility and chances to do better next time.

Make a point of scheduling time to review what went wrong and what went right. At Astek we call them postmortems. They are project reviews, or whatever you want to call them. The point is that you assign a focused amount of team energy and time to the evaluation, reach some reasonable and measurable conclusions (which requires knowing what you were measuring when you started), and then move on!

This last part is essential to make sure it’s a lesson and not a cloud of failure that can quickly turn to poison in an otherwise constructive work environment. Learn and move forward. After all, if you learn your lessons wisely pretty soon you’ll smell that unmistakable smell of success.

I place a real dollar value on these lessons, because they have real quantifiable value that is often thrown out with the bathwater. As a society we have no trouble spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on formalized education, so why are the street lessons so different? Both types of leaning require perseverance and a dedication to the end result.

Thomas Edison really said it best: “I didn’t fail ten thousand times. I successfully eliminated, ten thousand times, materials and combinations which wouldn’t work.”

A business partner once said it like this: “In life you have only accomplishments and excuses.” A lesson learned is an accomplishment in its own right, but a failure with no lesson is nothing but an excuse and waste.

Another business partner once told me: “If you don’t learn something every day, your life sucks.” That one really stuck with me to this day. No one expects you to know everything or be perfect. Just do the best you can.

So go learn some lessons and let me know what you find!

This post was featured in ePiphany, Astek’s Monthly Newsletter |  Other ePiphany Articles

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, ePiphany Featured Story, How To

It’s one thing when a company and its users, or anyone for that matter, declares their own holiday. In this case, Foursquare decided that April 16 (4/16) would be the perfect nerd-derived day to support their brand (4/(4 squared). The genesis of the idea can be traced back to an optometrist in Tampa in 2010.

You can hear thanks from all of the Foursquare crew here:

What’s remarkable is when the Mayor of New York City extends Foursquare’s self-proclamation into an official holiday for the city, a first for any social media brand. Is this a sign of things to come when digital startups like Foursquare base so much of their value on connecting people and businesses in the real world? The real world has responded in a way that’s anything but square.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Fun

While I’m a frequent traveler to Austin, TX, for music events and family, this was my first time at South By Southwest Interactive (#SXSWi). SXSW is divided into Interactive, Film, and Music festivals, each world-renowned for the quality of talent, content, and fun.

SXSWi is the height of Tech geekery, mostly focused around Web and mobile apps related to social media, such as Foursquare or Twitter. This is my crowd, for sure, and our social media guru Rachel Yeomans was even more plugged in than me due to her incessant and productive use of Twitter.

I dusted off my Twitter account just for the occasion. While I was one of the first people on it three years ago, I’ve found it difficult to keep up, which is a common issue for our clients to which I can relate! I’m glad I brought it out, though, as much of SXSW takes place on Twitter. This isn’t a surprise considering that Twitter essentially launched at SXSW years ago, but what did surprise me was the advanced and consistent use of hash tags to create interactive audience feedback for every session. Moderators would monitor the Twitter traffic for that session and involve the audience as they could.

Most of the big tech brands were present, as were most of the geek celebrities. A highlight for me was getting to meet a childhood geek hero, Guy Kawasaki, who was there supporting his new book, Enchantment. I fondly remember reading Guy’s column in MacUser magazine in the early 90s. As Chief Evangelist for the Mac when it was first released in 1984, he was there right at the beginning. Now he turns much of his attention to helping entrepreneurs, writing, speaking, and VC’ing. I got to meet him at his book signing, pictured below!

The learning, networking, funning, eating, and yes… drinking, all made for a dense and highly worthwhile experience, starting with legos. When we first arrived at the conference center, I found three huge tables full of legos, which immediately put me in a five-year-old state of mind. Perfect! No, we didn’t spend the whole time there, but it was a good way to get the juices flowing.

Me and my amazing creation…

And our friend Miguel Cano, from JSH&A, working on his own…

Presenter highlights included Chicago friend Jenni Prokopy (ChronicBabe) talking about building better health communities. An interview with publisher Tim O’Reilly gave us a glimpse into the future of digital. I learned about everything from social media metrics to text donations for nonprofits to web typography to mobile optimization to user experience process and more. I did make it one film event — a panel with Rainn Wilson for his new movie, Super. And somewhere in there we even made it to a couple of parties!

The food trucks are a highlight of Austin, particularly in the downtown area. Rachel, Miguel, and I walked until we found one with a short line — Turf N’ Surf Poboys. Yum…

Major sponsor and Foursquare competitor Gowalla was heavily represented, though I stuck to Foursquare personally. And vowel-challenged startup SCVNGR had everyone running around finding things for various types of rewards. All this served as real world preview of what is being largely hailed as the “next big thing” — the gamification of pretty much everything. What’s that? Well, it basically means that technologies with built-in game mechanics are more successful at getting people to actually use the technology. The best app in the world is useless if nobody uses it.

Foursquare, in my opinion, is the most successful example of merging game motivation with real-world advertising. While I’ve been using the mobile app for nearly two years, I’ve never seen such an intense concentration as I did at SXSW. People were checking in to everything, everywhere. Every room, event, party, and sometimes cars. I hit a new week record of 403 points! They released a big update to the app for SXSW, so it now tells you lots of good tidbits related to your own data, such as how long it’s been since you were at that location. This intrigues me since I purposefully choose not to broadcast my location to very many people.

The Foursquare people were everywhere as well. Forty of them came to SXSW, including co-founder Dennis Crowley, who I saw interviewed by Mashable SEO Pete Cashmore. In a particularly humbling moment for Dennis, an enormous print of his GAP ad was brought on stage and offered up to the audience member with the best question.

Dennis spoke about the future of Foursquare, and his vision to help you remember and find that coffee shop your friends were telling you to visit when you go to San Francisco, for instance. I also had a nice chat with Foursquare General Manager Evan Cohen after a smaller discussion he led with Lisa Bradner of Geomentum about the future of geo-related marketing and advertising.

Saving one of the most amazing moments for last, Rachel suggested we check out a live recording of The Nerdist with Chris Hardwick podcast at Esther’s Follies, a really fun local venue with lots of history. Fifteen minutes into the recording, Chris said it was time to bring out their special guest, who was none other than John Oliver from The Daily Show! Rach and I just about fell out of our chairs, as we’re both HUGE fans. We were treated to more than an hour of John hamming it up with the guys.

We’re looking forward to next year! Hope to see you there, too.

 This post was featured in ePiphany, Astek’s Monthly Newsletter |  Other ePiphany Articles 

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, ePiphany Featured Story, Fun, Gadget, Marketing, Social Media, Technology, Web

We’ve reached the end of a significant phase with eMainstay, a client with whom Astek has spent the last three years building the My25 web-based meal-planning software to improve health and reduce management costs for communities housing people with developmental disabilities.

In order to broaden the market for the software, which has proven highly successful in numerous USDA-funded studies, eMainstay approached Astek to develop a robust new My25 prototype for the software and online community development. We chose video as the form to convey our vision for the future of our software and a truly innovative approach to household-oriented meal planning.

The videos below say it better than words. Bon Appetit!

My25 Business Overview

My25 Online Toolkit Intro

Extra special thanks to Vin Design, Kathleen Ermitage, and Sedgwick Productions for their multiple contributions to the ongoing success of this project.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Fun, Marketing, Technology, Web