eROI Days Email Agency

Haiku Monday is back like a hurricaine, like a Super Bowl ad that had you laughing and crying in the same 30-second spot.  I was in the backcountry skiing at Mt. Hood this past Saturday and my skiing buddy informed me that he just made the switch from his Blackberry (avid evangelist for 9+ years) to an iPhone a month ago.  Here’s a very technical guy who travels domestically and internationally a whole lot and has a love affair with Blackberry – he survives on his mobile device.  If he made the switch to an iPhone and several others in my office have made the switch, then what’s going to happen to RIM (Blackberry manufacturer).  Well, they’ve got the most powerful man on Earth publicly admitting his addiction to his Blackberry and most lawmakers haven’t switched.  The best thing to do to settle this debate is begin a haiku dialogue.  So, let it begin:

I still love email
on my Blackberry, but the
web + apps on iPhone are crazy sexy

The above haiku did not follow the haiku rules, I apologize.  Don’t use that as an example for your own haiku, but you must express yourself in the comments below.

Met with a young entrepreneur, Noah Glass, 26 yrs old, who founded a super innovative startup called GoMobo, where mobile phone users (basically 1/2 of the world) can purchase food at a restaurant from their car, cab, train, or on foot and then go pick it up without waiting in line. It’s the perfect solution for Manhattan where waits can be long and everyone is on a mobile device. In the past couple years, Noah and GoMobo have been covered on ABC News, Good Morning America, Business Week, Wall Street Journal, and Inc. magazine. They’ve got 5,000 active users/consumers in their network and the company is really taking off.

On the Inc. magazine topic, I met an Inc. reporter, Athena, at the Inc. 500 Conference in 2007 in Chicago, and reconnected with her at the new Inc. office at 7 World Trade Center. Wow – the views from their office were unbelievable – and very cool to watch Ground Zero start to come back to life with some major developments happening quickly. I’m a huge fan of Inc. magazine and their annual Inc. 500 conference is really helpful for connecting entrepreneurs and giving some new perspective on growing your business the right way. Athena asked a lot of great questions about some of the innovative Oregon companies that I mentioned to her – Plas2Fuel and a network of entrepreneurs in a group we started called Starve Ups.

A friend sent me this awesome video on the “best prank ever done” at Grand Central Station:

Email Service Providers (ESPs) will specialize in optimizing the content rendering on mobile devices. You’ve received email newsletters on your Blackberry that have image links and website links that are 4-5 lines long per link. It’s a usability nightmare to attempt to read a long newsletter with a complex layout. The Email Experience Council ran a poll in May’07 where they found that 61% online marketers thought email should be optimized for mobile devices, yet less than 5% of ESPs offered it. ESPs will adapt and fill this customer need in ‘08.

Part of me is distressed by this news and part of me is happy. Why? Because I’m eROI’s Emerging Technologies Manager; guess what I do! According to this survey, 90% of 4000 people state their leading activity on the internet is sending and receiving email. Booooooooring (shhh don’t tell my boss I said that)!!

While eROI is firmly embedded as a leader in the email marketing industry, I’m on the lookout for next thing, and enjoying every minute of it. And in the spirit of being completely honest, everything I am loving right now will probably never be as useful as email -or- maybe it’s just too similar to notice.

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My Dad sent me this email while I was away on vacation a week ago. It got me thinking about the global perspective and how wrapped up we get in technology, computers, email, etc. But, I also started thinking about the accuracy and validity of the statistics below. For example – 30% of the world’s population (nearly 2 billion people) own and use cell phones. There are over 1 billion connected computers in the world. I’m sure I can come up with some other statistics off the top of my head, but it begs the question – how much has technology enriched your personal relationships with friends and family?

“WORLD VIEW

If we shrink the earth’s population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all the existing human ratios remaining the same, it would look something like the following.

There would be

57 Asians
21 Europeans
14 from The Western Hemisphere, both North and South America
8 Africans
52 would be female
48 would be male
70 would be nonwhite
30 would be white
70 would be non-Christian
80 would live in substandard housing
6 people would possess 59% of the entire world’s wealth and all 6 would be from the United States
70 would be unable to read
50 would suffer from malnutrition
1 would be near death
1 should be near birth
1 (yes, only 1) would have a college education
1 would own a computer
When one considers our world from such a compressed perspective, the need for both acceptance, understanding and education become glaringly apparent.”