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[Originally posted on ClickZ January 13th 2011]

Everything is starting to get “connected” these days, from TVs to home appliances to car electronics to tables! The true benefit for marketers is solving problems for consumers through these new smart devices while promoting their brand. Last year, I covered “Five Application Marketing Trends,” and this year, my column will cover the latest developments in connected devices.

Connected TVs

Samsung created a software developer kit to allow third-party software programmers to create new apps for connected TVs – Internet-based apps that work seamlessly with Samsung’s TV or Blu-ray players. Early app partners include Blockbuster, Vudu, Travel Channel, and Netflix. Having launched the world’s first HDTV-based app store last year, it now has more than 200 TV apps and has installed more than 1 million apps.

Connected Kitchens

Kenmore recently announced that its appliances can modify energy use during peak-demand periods by communicating with local utilities. Other uses were remote diagnostics and touch screen controls. But it is more exciting to think about the opportunities for marketers. What if the touch screen now being embedded on a consumer’s refrigerator could showcase a grocery list app? The consumer could key in the products she needs to purchase, and the items could be synced to her mobile phone along with branded promotions for those items. The consumer could take the “app list” to her local grocer and purchase all the recommended items, connecting the marketer at point of “intent to buy.” Or take it one step further – what if the app could transmit to the grocer and everything on the “list” would be automatically replenished?

The food management ability of LG’s Thinq will track expiration dates so you know what to toss, and will allow you to check out what is inside the fridge from the store. What a safety feature for moms who don’t have the time to monitor food expiration dates or convenience to know what to buy when they are in the supermarket! What if the smart refrigerator could say what food should be eaten for a balanced diet? Or what a mom could cook for dinner with the ingredients at hand?

Connected Laundry Rooms

LG demonstrated its washing machine with Thinq technology allowing the user to select whether to do the laundry right now or let the machine decide what the most energy-efficient time was. What if an app could sense how dirty the clothes were, and only run the machine for the appropriate time to get them clean? Or could sense just how much laundry detergent or fabric softener was needed, and dispense the exact amount? What a cost savings that would be for the family. What a great branded app that would be for Tide.

Dryers can sense when clothes are dry, but what if there was an app that determined if there were items in the dryer that could get damaged – possibly sensing a code on the “care tag.”

Connected Cars

Ford has been showing off its new MyTouch technology, featuring apps in your dashboard. The new interface allows users to access smartphone apps through the voice command features of Sync, in-car software. Three apps are now available – Pandora for streaming music, Twitter to hear your tweets, and Stitcher, a news and audio service. The apps can be controlled through buttons on the dashboard.

Ford is also solving a problem with electric cars – determining whether you can reach your destination with the charge available in your car. An Android app, “My Ford Mobile,” can do this. Ford also showcased an app that it produced with Microsoft called “Value Charging,” which lets people in the U.S. know where to charge up their cars where electricity is the cheapest. Now the drivers can leave their car and stay connected through an app.

Now for the what-ifs. What if your car relayed its vital signs on an app so you knew just what maintenance needed to be done or when the air pump might be about to go out? And then Napa could promote its parts just in time. Now you’re getting it.

Viper has an iPhone Car Starter App where you can start your car, turn on the heat, unlock the doors and the trunk, and manage the alarm – all with your smartphone. The app is free but the device needed for your car installs is approximately $400. Living in Minnesota, this app would deliver major benefits in my life.

Connected Tables?

Samsung and Microsoft unveiled PixelSense technology in their Surface 2.0, which gives LCD panels the power to see without the use of cameras, making it possible for people to share, collaborate, and explore using a large, thin display that recognizes fingers, hands, and other objects placed on the screen. The Royal Bank of Canada is using Microsoft’s Surface technology in its banks. It sends out fliers to thousands of customers. When the user brings the flyer back into the bank, Surface recognizes the flier using vision-based interaction and can determine if that consumer wins, then demonstrating other applications available for its services. For example, the bank has an application that calculates saving rates for the customer. This application was showcased in Steve Ballmer’s keynote address at CES.

Summed up by Boo-Keun Yoon, president of Samsung’s visual display business and chief design officer, “…the long-lasting successes will be technology that makes us smarter and happier by using it, not the technology that requires us to be smarter to use it.” Do you have any problems that need to be solved using smart devices? If so, leave a comment.

[Originally posted on W3i’s Blog on October 8th 2010. Written by Ryan Ruud]

Where are the top three places you spend your time, I imagine your list looks like this:  work, in bed and in the car.

Regardless of which one of those three locations you’re at, applications are a touch, flick or wipe away.

With the killer success of App Stores, apps for handheld devices clearly are on fire. But what does the future look like for apps in cars coupled with car electronics and who’s in the game?

Who better to get the answers from then the CEO behind one of the most successful auto apps in the Apple AppStore, Pete Tenereillo. Pete is the CEO of Trapster, an auto app that is consistently in the top two spots in “Navigation” for the App Store.

Rob Weber, the co-founder and Vice President of Business Development for W3i got a chance to chat with Pete at the iPhone/iPad DevCon 2010 in San Diego to discuss app distribution to cars.

Pete says there are three key players in the game of in car apps. OEM systems who build navs and try to sell them as a “part” for your Mercedes, Chevy etc.–like OnStar, AcDelco and Uniden. Think back to the OnStar campaign, “standard on every new Chevy.” The app came as is on the Chevy.

Car manufacturers are also in the game doing their own thing, but for them they just want access to the app to rebrand and repackage it. Finally you have aftermarket folks like Pioneer where  consumers buy them after they own the car to be installed on their car.

“Most of the next generation OEM and aftermarket supplier nav systems seem to be based on Android, while many car manufacturers are building proprietary connected nav systems based on either standard or proprietary technology,” says Tenereillo.

Tenereillo still contends that users will only want to download apps to one device, a phone or tablet, which can then be docked in a vehicle. The apps would run from the device, rather than be stored in the vehicle.  This seems to be the way Samsung also thinks the market for in car apps will go, their new tablet will also feature in car docking accessories.

“There is another whole school of thought in connected nav systems, where the car simply becomes a UI for what’s already on the phone, clearly voice commands, and maybe even heads-up display at some point,” Tenereillo says.

In the end, all of the players are facing competition from apps like Google Nav on the Droid

Ford seems to be muscling their way into the game after their announcement at CTIA 2010, that they’re inviting more development for car apps.  Where will the auto/app world move to next? Having apps on one device is important, but cost is the biggest factor, sound off below.

This past Saturday, I had the opportunity to spend a couple of hours with the folks participating in the Twin Cities Startup Weekend at CoCo MSP. The Startup Weekend event organized by Shane Reiser had over 100 participants, which formed into 12 different teams with the task of creating a start-up in a weekend.

I arrived while the teams were eating lunch, and caught Jeff Pesek’s discussion on the future of Minnesota’s startup community. Next I had the opportunity to hear Kim Garretson of Ovative Group say a few words, including my favorite quote of the day on how local startups get “Minnesota niced” by top Minnesota corporations who take their meetings, but never buy whatever the start-ups are selling. To end the lunch presentations, I then provided my remarks on the topic of innovation, and its role in tech start-ups.

Thanks to Jeremy Mooney for snapping this photo of me presenting.

After lunch, I had the opportunity to meet with a few of the startup teams-

• FlightCrowd- W3i’s own Jeff Bollinger was in the team that built FlightCrowd, a social application that connects you to interesting people already on your flight.
• LocateMyDeal – My friend and very talented iOS app developer Aaron Kardell was in the LocateMyDeal start-up team.
• Qonqr- There was a little buzz building about the new start-up called Qonqr,  so I asked Shane Reiser to introduce me to the team just before I had to leave. I’m thankful Shane provided the intro, because this location-based mobile game  ended up being the winner of Startup Weekend. Qonqr is a location-based, Risk-like, mobile game played out over the face of the earth! Players are operatives who must capture geographic zones by deploying nanobots to help their army defeat the opposing armies and qonquer the world. Successful deployments, recruiting, and squadron coordination result in experience points that, over time, promote the operative through higher and higher ranks, providing more powerful nanobot options. Monetization opportunities include player purchased virtual armament upgrades and local businesses paying for the opportunity to be a featured battleground. Game interface for field operatives will be mobile devices, and the Command Center will be accessible from the web.
• Polywiks- Polywiks is a social gaming app utilizing real-time voting records, so you can follow every politician’s actual decisions in office, similar to daily status updates, and vote on whether or not you would do the same thing.
• Speed Watch– Speed Watch is an iPhone and iPad app that clearly tells you the speed limit of the road you are currently on, and notifies you when the speed limit changes.

Although I was initially a bit skeptical about the whole format of Startup Weekend, I would highly recommend you participate the next time they are in your city.

IPTV is at the forefront for many top consumer tech companies. At the CES show in January, Samsung announced the launch of Samsung Apps, a multi-device application store which would make apps available for a range of devices, including HDTV’s. As part of their announcement, Samsung named several content partners which were already on-board, including Blockbuster, USA Today and others. Yahoo is also one of the big players in the web TV app space with their TV widgets (http://connectedtv.yahoo.com/services/tv-widgets). Yahoo has apps like YouTube, Amazon Video on Demand, Blockbuster, Twitter and TV Guide.

So, just what will be the killer apps for IPTV? I will explore some obvious, and not so obvious, killer apps for IPTV.

For the rest of the post, go here.

Consumer apps were everywhere at the 2010 CES show. Here are five of the application trends for online application marketers that I noted from my attendance at CES:

1) Optimism rules at 2010 CES show. Gary Shapiro, Chief Executive of CES, said the CES show “seemed more upbeat than a year ago, reflecting a return to optimism for the industry,” reports Dean Takahashi, lead writer for GamesBeat by VentureBeat. Attendance at the 2010 International Consumer Electronics Show reportedly reached 120,000 visitors this year, an increase of about 6 percent from last year. Participants were reverberating with the latest device and the latest apps to go with it.

2) Apps will be everywhere. Thanks to Apple, apps are now sexy and offer the consumer more value from their device, and the marketer the ability to enhance their device with little effort, as well as a potential new source of revenue.

• Apps in television set-top boxes: Samsung announced the launch of Samsung Apps, a multi-device application store with content partners, including Blockbuster, USA Today, and others. Samsung plans to make apps available for a range of devices from mobile phones to HDTVs.
• Apps in car electronics: Ford recognizes that users want information on demand. Ford’s Sync feature uses an 8” touch-screen in the dashboard as well as voice commands. You can catch up on Twitter, listen to Internet radio, check movie times and get free online maps with turn-by-turn directions.
• App Store for Netbooks – Intel launched a beta version of its app store, called the Intel AppUp center for netbooks. Currently offering about 100 apps.

3) Integrated, multi-platform app strategies are being considered. Brands should create apps that are integrated across multiple devices: mobile, desktop, social, browser, and other emerging platforms like television set-top boxes and car electronics. Cooliris bases its success on building its app for both mobile and desktop platforms. They were recently selected to develop Media Gallery for the Nexus One Device.

4) There will be a mobile app for almost everything, but adoption outside of iPhone is still low. With the phenomenal growth of the Apple AppStore fueling over 2 billion downloads from some 100,000 plus apps, the race is on from other mobile device companies to woo app developers. (Living in Minnesota, one of my favorites announced at CES is the SmartStart app by Directed for remote starting a car from a smartphone.)

5) Top app marketers will start focusing on improving their key operating metrics. Most app marketers are doing a poor job of developing key operating metrics and reporting surrounding their app marketing initiatives and campaigns. There is a lot of emotional decision making rather than data driven decision making. This appears to be starting to change, as better analytical thinking and tools are starting to take root with top app marketers.

If you identified other app trends, share your thoughts by submitting a comment.

This evening I went online to BestBuy.com to pick up a new monitor for my home office PC. My old monitor crapped out a few days ago, and I’ve been meaning to get around to purchasing a new one. I tend to avoid brick and mortar stores for consumer electronic purchases, and BestBuy.com is usually the first website I start with when shopping for consumer electronics. (Apparently, I am like most other online shoppers… I read a recent analyst report that ranked BestBuy.com as number one in total online consumer electronic sales.)

After using BestBuy.com’s user ratings to sort through and find the best-rated 23-inch monitor, I settled on an Acer H233Hbmid 23 inch Widescreen HD LCD Monitor listed at $209.99.

Thankfully for me, I use a couple of different browser add-ons which provide me with timely shopping related information while I am browsing the web. For this purchase, I followed through a relevant message that came up from PriceGong, which I had installed through W3i’s Install IQ process a few months back. PriceGong alerted me that CompUSA.com had the exact same monitor for $199.99 with no shipping and handling, and no sales tax.

Later on, I proceeded through the checkout on BestBuy.com just to see what my final total would have been had I purchased this monitor through BestBuy.com. With $14.99 for shipping and handling, and $16.37 sales tax, my total would have come to $241.35. I saved $41.36 because my installed application, PriceGong, recommended CompUSA.com while shopping at BestBuy.com!

Most tech bloggers talk down about any application that requires an install, such as Windows applications and hybrid applications, like the PriceGong browser add-on. Most tech bloggers are so caught up in the cloud these days that they fail to remember why operating system integration can be so useful. How can the cloud compete with the kind of timely information an installed application can provide?

Just this week, local Minnesota-based Digital River lost its largest client, Symantec, which represented approximately 30% of their revenue. Based on the public reaction from senior management, it appears that Digital River was blindsided by Symantec’s announcement. The negative 38% impact on Digital River’s stock price was not too pretty. I had been hearing gossip and rumors for months that one of Digital River’s largest customers would likely walk from them, but the general sentiment was that it would be Microsoft and not Symantec.

According to a report Merrill Lynch put out, Symantec might not have been such a great account for Digital River after all. Apparently that portion of Digital River’s business had slowly been declining for a while now, whereas the rest of Digital River’s business had a higher growth rate. My prediction is that Digital River will bounce back. I have always been impressed by their resiliency as a company, having watched them from the sidelines for a number of years and hearing stories from former employees, such as Lisa Nistler, who works with me at W3i and who was recently promoted to VP of Marketing at W3i (congratulations again Lisa!).

Do you have a good customer concentration story or perspective on Digital River’s future? If so, please post in the comments of this blog post.

I’ll give you a customer concentration story of my own… The risk of heavy customer concentration is one of the core weaknesses of W3i’s closest competitors, the toolbar players. W3i’s competitors that are dedicated to toolbar solutions that are monetized exclusively through search feeds run a very high risk tied to the search market. When these competitors have any kind of hiccup with their search feeds, whether it be from a reduction in rates from their search partner, a change in toolbar usage behavior driven by a new browser release, or any other possible factor, application publishers who use these competitors to provide revenue within their installers can see a sharp decline in revenue very quickly. I am so thankful that our business model is centered on a marketplace approach, where we provide a wide range of application offers, including toolbars and other high-revenue-generating Windows applications, versus the toolbar-only model.

Recently I was interviewed by Britt Johnsen for the latest quarterly issue of ROI Magazine.
UPDATE 11/13/09- The article is no longer available online

I thought Britt did an excellent job summarizing the best practices of Central Minnesota sales leaders in her cover story “The Secrets of a Successful Sales Team”.

The following are the “Top 10 Ways to Build a Sales Team” as summarized by Britt-
1) Hire the right sales people
2) Hire the right sales manager
3) Maintain relationships
4) Check your motivations
5) Standardize approach
6) Develop metrics
7) Make a plan and a strategy to follow it
8) Keep an organized system
9) What makes a great sales team makes any great business
10) Continue learning

For both 5 and 8, Britt cites specific examples I shared with her about W3i’s very talented sales team.

This post is in response to Ad Age’s How Brands Can Build a Successful App Strategy-
12 Lessons From Benjamin Moore, Bank of America, Kraft and Others article.

Is it about creating a niche application (see mickeylonchar’s comment), or is it about having an application distribution strategy?

Social media and existing assets can certainly provide a spark to your application distribution strategy, but what do you do if you don’t have many fans to begin with? For the #13th lesson learned, consider “Get other popular applications to recommend your application.”

I’ve been looking at vendors which might be worth considering to drive application recommendations. Here are a few I have come across-
AppsFire
PurpleTalk
MobClix
Pinch Media
Medialets

Mobile applications are a great tool for advertisers to increase engagement with their fans if advertisers can successfully generate wide distribution, but what about other application types? Other large media and e-commerce players are quietly getting very significant results from Windows applications and hybrid applications like Adobe AIR and Firefox add-ons. See white paper

I just started reading Donna Fenn’s new book, Upstarts. I first heard about the book when Donna contacted me as part of her research. Donna has a great perspective on what drives today’s young entrepreneurs. Her perspective on GenY reminds me of a book I read on vacation a couple of months ago called Growing Up Digital.

Two entrepreneurial stories in the book really hit home for me. The two stories were Nick Thomley’s Pinnacle Services and Matt Brezina’s Xobni.

Now 29, Nick created Pinnacle Services in 2000 to provide employment, housing, and in-home services to seniors and people with disabilities in Minnesota. Nick and I actually went to school together for a couple of years when we were very young. I bumped into him a number of years later through my sister-in-law Jennifer Castillo who does program planning for Hennepin County. More recently, Nick and I were honored as young entrepreneurs of the year by the Minneapolis St. Paul Business Journal. Although I am not at all involved in the type of work Pinnacle does, I have a great sense of admiration for the risk Nick took to build a great socially needed business, and now topping $9 million in annual revenue, no one can argue with his success.

Matt Brezina co-founded Xobni in his late twenties. Xobni is a plug-in that brings Outlook to the Web 2.0 era. I have been a big fan of Xobni since I started using their application in March of 2009, and we became business partners in April 2009. The company I co-founded, W3i helps distribute Xobni to massive amounts of new Outlook users. As Donna describes in her book, when it came to Outlook, would we have expected this kind of new innovation to come from software executives in their 40’s? Hardly…

Congratulations on a very interesting, well researched book Donna! I look forward to reading through the rest and sharing it with other young entrepreneurs.