This app has solved a major problem for me because my ideas were always scattered everywhere. A few in notepad app, on napkins in drawer, or in a voice memo recording. I hated having my ideas scattered everywhere. This caused me to lose so many ideas. Idea Pad has been the best solution ever for collecting all my ideas.

Why do I like it?

1. Super clean and simple interface.
2. No extra features – capture an idea and that’s it!
3. My phone is always with me.
4. The ideas are digitized in words and can be emailed.
5. Most of all because I use it multiple times each day.

If you have an iPhone I highly recommend getting and using this app. It fricken rocks!

NOTE: this is not a “reminder” app, it’s an idea app. I am an idea guy, hence my love for a simple way to quickly capture my next give idea no matter where I am, or when inspiration strikes!

What’s your favorite iPhone app??

Did you like this post? Please click the TWEET button at the top of this post and SIGN-UP below to automatically receive my future blog posts by email. Thanks for stopping by! ~ Devin Day

Now they are offering HD video streaming  capabilities for your wordpress blog or site via VideoPress.
They also have VideoPress available as an open source framework for large WordPress MU installs (check it out here). This will allow entrepreneurial publishers an own end to end HD video solution. There have been other solutions available for Wordpress for a while, but I am excited to see a powerful video solution coming from the creators of Wordpress.

The Revenue that can be created as a publishing platform with VideoPress and Wordpress MU is huge for those big thinking entrepreneurs. Wordpress is such a powerful platform with NO COSTS.

Now for a prediction…

With all the goodness coming from Wordpress and the newspaper industry in the toilette, I believe that it’s only a matter of time that some young savvy entrepreneur will use the WPMU platform to create “Newspaper 2.0″ (a type of community news company for a digital generation) with the potential of rivaling a Ginette or McClatchy. Ultimately driving newspapers further into the grave.

Why do I believe Wordpress will start replacing the traditional newspaper companies?

1. Scalability – you can deploy infinite sites from one install (i.e. – sf.new-site.com, ny.news-site.com, etc.).
2. Cost – Their are no costs for the technology, except for hosting or you hire designers/devs to do major customization (with all the amazing premium themes these days major customization can be greatly reduced).
3. Automation – you can automate the author process and hire contributors from any city or country in the world.
4. Features – It up to date with tech trends of our digital generation and almost any kind of plugin can be found for sms, twitter, digg, video, social this and that and so on…
5. Time to market – with such a huge open source community of contributors you can deploy sites with all the features you could want within hours to days.
6. Overall mindset – Those who would work with wordpress and develop savvy ideas with the technology tend to be young connected individuals vs. current conglomerate news companies who tend to be old school thinkers who struggle to understand todays pace of trends.
7. I could continue with more examples, but thats all the time for today.

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Thanks for stopping by! ~ Devin Day

All the disappointment and talk lately that display advertising needs to change to become more effective only paves the way for marketer acceptance to go from experimental to mainstream. As marketers transition to social apps (and other social media), it will become one of the more dominant forms of online marketing. Everything from display, search, and even our current social app/media advertising will undergo a social innovation transformation. The need for better ad effectiveness is one of the very reasons that Yahoo’s revenue is down nearly 80 percent as of the writing of the post.

The first half of this year was spent with ad companies reeling from economy shock and the next half, now that the economy shock is wearing off will be focused on new, more effective and engaging forms of advertising. The economy was just the spark needed to light the innovation fuse. One of the biggest reasons for the social app explosion will be an accountability shift. Social apps will move from a time and material model to a pay-for-performance model (similar to cokes recent request for agencies to innovate to pay-for-performance).

Other reasons that social apps will become a dominant advertising model is because 1) they can tell you (if you build them correctly) a ton about the users life-stage and lifestyle, 2) They can be made fun and engaging, 3) the are inherently social 4) they allow for a truly authentic consumer/brand experience and 5) they can help drive real results and revenue rather than a focus only on a brand message.

About a year ago I put a video together from a collection of speeches given by Eric Schmidt, CEO @ Google. His speeches are from as far back (seems like ages ago when looking at it from a speed of technology perspective) as 2006. Mr. Schmidt is giving his perspectives on the rise of web 2.0 and the massive impact, change, opportunity, and questions that it has presented from an advertising perspective.

The message in the video is how web 2.0 (has anyone noticed web 2.0 is seldom used now and has been replaced with “social” this and “social” that!?) is changing the Internet advertising arena and how with the continued growth of web 2.0, our advertising will become very personal and targeted. Most people know the Internet presents the ultimate platform for perfecting targeted/unobtrusive advertising (the holy grail), but the key question most people are still wondering is a) what is the solution to extract that data to better target users? and b) what is the “vehicle” that will make this possible? I believe that social apps for many of the reasons I listed above will explode and play a key role of the ad personalization Eric Schmidt discusses in the video.

See this post on PerformApps™ for performance-based social app solution.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwXU22b3zvY

The question that I want to address in this post is “how can a brand utilize the viral and entertainment aspects of social apps to achieve authentic product engagement that influences consumer purchase intent, rather than settling for surface-level brand engagement?”

Last year my company, Jellybarn, participated in Nike’s FY09 marketing event at the invitation of Avenue A | Razorfish (Great Agency – Be sure to check out Jeremy Lockhorn’s articles on Click Z. He’s spot on when it comes to social media). At the event, Mike Reeder, a brilliant Account Director at Razorfish, gave a presentation on brand marketing authenticity. It was this presentation that really prompted me to start thinking beyond surface-level marketing.

What does this authenticity look like? How does a brand connect with online consumers in a true, authentic fashion in which a dialog or relationship can grow? These questions are often hard to answer, and I think it is the reason that we as a social marketing community have not moved very far beyond surface-level brand engagement. We still tend to broadcast a brand’s inner-app messaging with a simple logo or an embedded banner ad within the application. In my view, social marketing apps will reach a tipping point by the end of 2009 and become not only a staple for brands, but one of the most important ways in which marketers engage AND SELL products to consumers. But first we must become truly authentic!

Let’s look at a Jellybarn app that I feel is a first step on our journey beyond surface-level brand engagement and closer to authentic interaction with the brand’s actual products that engages and drives purchase intent. Screen shots of the app follow below.

The concept was a casual game for Nike designed to interact with customers, compel them to shop, and ultimately sell them shoes. The idea incorporated actual Nike products within the game, as well as a virtual shoe “micro-store” so that, after users interacted with the shoes authentically, they could shop for and even purchase the product. The user chose which pair they wanted their character to use. To encourage users to interact with multiple styles, we gave each shoe different abilities and incorporated many of the benefits from the real shoes into the game.

The result was that users interacted with both the brand and the product in a way that was not broadcast, pushy or “selly.” Users do not want to be “sold,” and with this approach they enjoyed engaging with the brand and product. With this type of authentic approach, users are more inclined and even eager to share the application via the social web. Assuming the application is a viral success and includes some simple XML capabilities, the product lineup can be continually updated throughout the application’s life cycle. Lastly, with the incorporation of the micro-store there are now thousands of purchase point locations across the web where users can keep the product on top-of-mind purchase intent.

One final point worth mentioning is that the apps themselves are simply the vehicles by which these authentic interactions happen. Making money is the goal of marketing, yet much of the industry still tends to look at social apps (from a brand standpoint) as a way to “engage” consumers and build brand recognition. I think it’s time we as an industry became more accountable (brands let’s make this a New Years resolution) to tapping the real power of social apps to actually make money for the brand rather than limiting ourselves to brand recognition. Social applications hold so much more opportunity for driving purchase intent through authentic interactions than we have yet to utilize.

Last week my company held it’s kick-off meeting for the 2009 season and one of our big topics was innovating our capabilities. Processes, standardization, skills, tools, etc. are necessary if we are to outpace our competition. A few days after our meeting I came across an article from Strategy+Business that discussed the topic in depth (see article here or click here for PDF). To me there are so many reasons that focusing on your capabilities-driven strategy is far more important than focusing on better improving your product to the nth degree (most companies that are built and run by “technician minded” people tend to focus on continually improving the product vs. delivering the product, thus their companies tend to remain a “ma and pa” shop.)

Let me give you an example of capabilities-driven strategy from a great book (E-myth Revisited) that sums it up so well. “Most of us could build a better hamburger than McDonalds, but few (if any) of us could build a better system for delivering those hamburgers than McDonald’s.”

McDonald’s capabilities and skills in process, marketing, standardization and so forth are what makes it such an efficient company. A better capabilities strategy is also why so many companies thrive and others don’t. If a company can outpace its competition through greater understanding and clarity of their capabilities-driven strategies then they are likely to be able to thrive even in a tough economy!

Have a peak at the article, it’s a great resource for learning and improving your capabilities-driven strategies and getting a jump on outpacing your competition in 2009.