JohnDeMayo.com: Internet Advertising Insight

My new gig: Vandelay Industries / CellWare.com / Guessnow.com

     I'm most pleased to announce I will be starting work with John Ferber and his team at Vandelay Industries!  I'll be splitting my time between there offices (in the west palm area) and my other usual haunts (mostly tahoe, some time in NY and SF).  If you have wireless content or content that would be suited to be distributed wirelessly (ringtones, wallpapers, videos, apps, games, etc.) please do drop me a line.

Congrats to Sean and team at Doublepositive

Doublepositive, a company I have done some work with and have a lot of respect for, finally publicly announced their latest round of funding.  I like the product, and their entry into other markets makes a ton of sense to me.  While they were successful in adding value in the mortgage vertical, other verticals where call center staffs are often not as well trained or where companies do not normally have a separate initial call team make tons of sense to me for their product.

Lost a few voicemail's, but I'm back now

After wrestling with a cell phone account that was not in my name, and porting a number over to a new carrier, I am finally back to a state of cell-phone normalcy.  If you have tried to get a hold of me recently and haven't been able to get a hold of me, please give another ring.  Thanks!

The president, the dollar, and the price of oil.

"But I blame President Bush for the shape of the U.S dollar. And it follows that if I blame him for the shape of the dollar, I blame him for the price of oil."

http://www.chinaventurenews.com/50226711/the_dollar_the_yuan_the_president_and_the_price_of_oil_a_rant_i_suppose.php

The article above does a good job of simplifying some of the issues, IMO.  We absolutely can not have it all - you can't spend more, lower taxes, try to force growth, and expect there will not be unfortunate results.....you just can't "squeeze all areas of the balloon at once" and not expect something to expand or the whole thing to pop.  I would like a plan that predicts and plans for negative consequences in the economy, not an administration that thinks it can trick the system and have it all, and then is surprised when that doesn't work out. 

Social networks, widgets, apps, and open-ness. A game of layers.

As social networks open up, who will sit inside of which platform?  Or could potentially any site, app, widget, or software sit inside of any other site, app, widget, or software?

With Facebook and Myspace racing to "out-open" each other, allowing developers to place applications and widgets "inside" of their site, I am reminded of the myriad of custom start/home/bookmark pages like netvibes and pageflakes, that were some of the first to allow a number of sites and developers to embed something within their site.  As a matter of fact, I have myspace and facebook "apps" or "widgets" inside of my netvibes page.  And I suppose soon I may be able to have a netvibes widget within my mspace or facebook page.  So I guess I could log onto netvibes, see a myspace widget, which has a netvibes widget inside of it, which could have a tiny myspace app isnide of that.  They could go on indefinitely.

There really is no reason to believe that social networks need to be the "base" application.  And I guess they aren't.  Most of first tap an operating system, which then taps into a browser, which then taps into a website, and this website then has apps or widgets embedded in it, which can have apps or widgets inside of them.  But the social network doesn't need to be the first real site in the chain.  There's no reason some other web site couldn't "hold" social networking apps inside of it, while holding other applications as well.  As companies race to open up their sites to developers, and as developers race to build apps to fit inside of their sites, I think we will see more and more cases where an application or widget is itself open to embedding something inside of it, and the nesting will continue.

It will be interesting to see at the end of the day if social networks are the first piece of the nest of applications, or if in the end, they are just a piece inside of a site or piece of software with a more general purpose.  I guess they already are a subset of that....the browser.

You'll have to excuse the horrible ASCII image below, I don't have any image tools with my while I'm at the road here at Ad-Tech.

Ad-tech autodialer

Argh.  Just woke me up, calling at ten minutes before midnight, letting me know what time registration starts on Monday, blah, blah.  Really, if I didn't ask to be called, please don't call me.  And if I did, do it at a more sensible hour?