3 Lessons We Can Learn from the Resurrection of Palm
Palm Lives After All
If you follow the tech industry, it was hard to miss HP’s recent acquisition of Palm, Inc.
The Sunnyvale based smartphone maker was in serious trouble after its seemingly meteoric rise from a very similar grave in January of last year. Palm was on the ropes, its wonderful webOS platform overshadowed by ineffective marketing and distribution. The company’s audacious reentry into a space dominated by Google, RIM, and Apple seemed to be a lost cause.
Then HP, probably the most bland hardware manufacturer in the world, came to the rescue. The marriage of the two seems like the perfect solution, Palm will invigorate the stale HP brand with a fresh new mobile operating system that is light years ahead of HP’s own offerings, and HP provides the firm with the financial footing and market share to take some serious – and expensive – risks.
So what can small online businesses learn from this soap opera? Here are a few things that stuck out for me.
The Living Room of Rock & Roll: A look Inside Swing House Studios
Editors Note: This is part of our ongoing series of customer profiles right here on the ServInt Source. Want to take part? Tell us your story!
Knowing the Keys to Happiness
At first glance, there don’t seem to be many parallels between sound recording and webhosting. Indeed, we thought the same thing before we visited Swing House Studios in Hollywood, CA earlier this year. But by the end of our visit, we walked away convinced that Swing House and ServInt were natural partners and we’re ecstatic to have them aboard.
For music recording studios like Swing House, and for webhosting companies like ServInt, relationships are the most critical part of our business. As Swing House founder and President Phil Jauriqui is fond of saying, “If Hollywood is the home of Rock & Roll, then Swing House is it’s living room.” It’s that sense of intimacy that makes them so compelling.
The studio is unpretentious and nonchalant, it knows it’s there to simply facilitate the creation of great music. Each rehearsal room looks and feels lived in. Littered with equipment and style, the facility feels like you’ve stepped into a copy of Rolling Stone Magazine.
With that being said, it’s not surprising that Swing House has recorded some of the biggest names in the business for over 16 years. Despite their esteemed clients like Nine Inch Nails, Ziggy Marley, and Ross Rubin, Swing House also welcomes artists just starting out. Artists from all over the world and from all walks of life have laid tracks there and the studio shows no signs of letting up. As we said in the profile on our homepage, Swing House is a company that lives, breathes, and bleeds rock and roll.
They don’t just confine themselves to the studio either. Whether they’re throwing amazing parties at South By Southwest or diving first hand into the Sunset Strip Music Festival in Hollywood, Swing House is first and foremost about music.
Anyway, the most striking thing about their facility is just how amazing it looks. Descriptions don’t do it justice so we snapped a few photos of their rehearsal rooms, sound stage, equipment, and even their intimidatingly cool entranceway!
Check out the gallery below, and take a look at their site, hosted by ServInt, here!
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- Knowing the Keys to Happiness
Sales. Evolved: Georator On Becoming a Web Retailer
Editors Note: This is part of our ongoing series of customer profiles right here on the ServInt Source. Want to take part? Tell us your story!
Handle With care
Here’s a quick lesson in electrical engineering that you should never attempt.
Take an old hair dryer from the U.S., preferably something pre-1985, and plug it into a Chinese power outlet. After a small explosion, you’ll have experienced the difference in international power grids first-hand.
While there are many reasons for this, one of the primary causes of these issues is related to the different voltage and frequency standards all over the world. In North America and Japan, 60hz is the norm, while in much of the rest of the world 50hz is the standard. Large ships such as naval vessels and cruise liners, commercial and military airplanes, and even some small research facilities use the 400hz frequency.
While that might not mean a lot to us end-users, it means a lot to the countries with different electrical frequencies that often produce electrical equipment for export. For example, how many of our consumer electronic products are made in China? Devices that convert one frequency into another are an important tool in the manufacturing process, helping manufacturers ensure the products they are making are safe to use and fully functional when they arrive at your friendly neighborhood electronics store.
Does Online Advertising Work?
Where does your message best get seen?
Just about every company worth its salt has some sort of online advertising component as part of its marketing budget. With the ubiquity and ease of use of platforms such as Google’s Adwords and Facebook ads, online marketing has truly become an accessible avenue for a lot of novice advertisers.
But there’s another question that has nagged advertisers in all mediums for as long as there has been marketing, does it work?
Online advertising, whether it’s in the form of a banner ad or text ad, seems inherently impersonal. You’re creating and placing ads that are viewed by nameless, faceless people who could literally be anywhere in the world…the task to reach them seems daunting doesn’t it?
What a lot of people forget is that this is exactly the same with all advertising, regardless of the medium. You don’t really know who’s looking at an ad on a billboard, or who is listening to the radio, or who is watching your commercial on television. Sure, there are demographic studies you could perform that could help you make intelligent guesses, but the truth is that data is useless if your product has a narrow or hyper-competitive market. In this respect webhosting is an excellent example, as costs per click (CPC’s) for popular keywords in our industry regularly hit the $25 mark in Google Adwords, the most popular ad network online by far.
comScore, a tech marketing analytics firm and a great source of genuinely interesting internet marketing info has performed a spate of studies recently that bring up some great points on this very topic.
In August, the firm released the findings of a study it conducted with dunnhumbyUSA that focused on the difference between television and online advertising. You can checkout a detailed press release about the study here, but I’ll do my best to summarize the findings.
The two firms used the example of consumer packaged goods, things such as food and snacks, to test whether online advertising actually worked. By tracking the buying habits of thousands of shoppers using their supermarket discount cards the firm was able to obtain fascinating, and to some extent unexpected results.
The study found that, in a sample size of roughly 200,000 shoppers, the brands who were exposed to consumers via ads on the web saw a 9% sales lift over a three month period with 80% of the campaigns showing a statistical increase. Those exposed through television ads saw an 8% sales lift over twelve months with only 36% of the campaigns showing a statistical increase. This is staggering data, it means nearly 1 in 10 consumers will change their buying habits in the affirmative after being exposed to an ad online and in a very short amount of time as well.
Of course, there are plenty of things to take issue with, the study doesn’t comment on the frequency of ad delivery or what percentage of ads were static vs flash, but it does at least validate the concerns of many advertisers out there.
What’s your take on the status quo in online advertising? Let us know in the comments, on our Facebook page, and on Twitter.
Photo by kevindooley.
Data Centers and Your Hosting Business
Free Tip: Invest in cable management.
The data center is the most important tool in a web host’s arsenal.
That might sound painfully obvious, and it is, but for those looking to get into this industry it’s an important item to remember. Competitors brag about which bits of software they use to push product out the door but they often forget to mention the necessity of maintaining a powerful, scaleable, stay-in-business-able data center to actually store that information.
After our most recent expansion into ServInt LA, I thought I’d share a few insights into the choices we had to make when building our infrastructure to give folks a better understanding of our corporate goals as well as offer advice to those looking to get into the hosting biz.
Here goes.
More after the jump…
Yup, We’ll Pay for Your Hosting…
I have had the opportunity over the past two weeks to carry the news of ServInt’s LA launch to several well known tradeshows that are popular with our clients. Last week I attended both the PubCon and DevConnections conferences in Las Vegas. This week I’ll be at both Interop and Web 2.0 Expo in New York City. I’ve already got to meet a number of clients face to face, which is always fun. I’m going to meet more this week and I can’t wait! I love to hear how our products are being used to build new companies, and I like to hear feedback of all kinds directly from our customers. It’s the way we grow and improve.
I was surprised to have one particular conversation with multiple people, on something I thought was fairly common knowledge. It made me want to get a blog post out as quickly as possible.
More after the jump…
Why America isn’t the bad guy on the Internet
The grass isn't always greener on the other side.
If you use the internet for leisure, do business on the internet for profit, or count on the internet to spread your message, you are at a disadvantage if you are not doing so in America.
There, I said it.
That wasn’t meant as a slight to our friends and colleagues abroad. I don’t mean this as an attack on any one country or continent. Rather, I’m simply challenging the assertion that the United States is somehow the bad guy when it comes to freedom of speech on the web. I read countless stories that argue that sites that are critical of the government, large corporations, industries, political figures, etc., should host offshore in Canada or Europe because their sites are simply unsafe in the U.S.
This is little more than classic FUD.
Among bloggers, particularly in the tech world, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) is loathed for its supposed coziness with the recording industry and the MPAA, among other content organizations. As a consumer, and as a geek, I personally share a lot of the same concerns and frustrations other users do when it comes to the principles of fair use. Believe me when I say I find DRM as annoying and intrusive as everybody else does. I also can see plainly that the “anti-circumvention” aspects of the DMCA are genuinely bad for consumers.
But the bigger picture here is that significant portions of this law, particularly Article II as it pertains to our industry, are actually well written. The DMCA isn’t perfect, it does a lot of annoying things but it also does a lot to protect the rights of ISP’s, online services, publishers, and users alike.
More after the jump.
Part 5. Be Open
This is the final entry in a 5 part series: Big Picture Ideas for Small Businesses.
Transparency Is Important
My previous post was on buzzwords, those groan-inducing terms that often do little more than spread hype without actually describing substance. The argument I tried to make was that buzzwords were, in some limited cases and when taken with extreme grains of salt, could actually be utilized as thermometers for how to craft a marketing message.
However, I know that doesn’t make them any less annoying. The irony of ending this series with a post on “openness” is not lost on me because as far as technology goes the concept is almost as cliché as the term “multimedia” was in the 90′s.
With that being said, being open truly is an incredible asset to any organization, and while it may not make sense in the literal concept for every business out there, it’s principles are universal and should be installed where possible.
Part 3. Find Feedback Before It Finds You
This is part 3 in a 5 part series: Big Picture Ideas for Small Businesses.
Just because it's unpleasant does not make it unnecessary.
In Part 1 of this series, we talked about how important it was to keep an eye on and maintain your reputation online. Keeping an eye on what is said about you on the internet is not particularly elegant, but it’s a frank necessity in a world of ubiquitous real time news.
With that in mind, ignoring negativity is no solution either, gathering feedback is as important to running your business as any other business intelligence. The question is, how do you gather useful feedback without annoying your customers?
Part 2. Don’t Cheapen Your Product
This is part 2 in a 5 part series: Big Picture Ideas for Small Businesses.
Perceived Value
Pricing is a touchy subject. It dictates your marketing strategy, your target demographics, payroll, staffing, and day-to-day expenses. It’s what brings revenue into your company and what crafts an image outside of it.
Whatever you’re asking the customer to spend, there is one particular rule of thumb that every business should abide by; Don’t Cheapen Your Product. I’m not necessarily talking about price, which can and probably will fluctuate over time. More accurately, I’m talking about perceived value or how much a customer thinks your product is actually worth, irrespective of price.
Omega watches have a high perceived value because there is an expectation surrounding their craftsmanship that precedes their name. The price is set accordingly, and the brand being around for 150 years is a testament to that. Another example is Linux, the free and open-source operating system whose kernel was created by Linus Torvalds in 1991. Despite being completely free, Linux has a tremendously high perceived value; so much so that corporations ranging from IBM to Novell have embraced it as a cornerstone of their respective business models.
So, how do you avoid a low perceived value? Here are two general cues to help you streamline and communicate the value of your product or service in an age where competition can come from anywhere.
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