Sheryl Sandberg: ‘Until Women Are As Ambitious As Men, They’re Not Going To Achieve As Much’ | TechCrunch

Check out Sheryl Sandberg talking about gender gap at the top. There are a couple of good points mentioned. My favourite was actually voiced in the comments section by Seth Eheart about women needing to show much more interest in a field such as technology, that is increasingly taking share of economy. Totally agree. Read more at:

Sheryl Sandberg: ‘Until Women Are As Ambitious As Men, They’re Not Going To Achieve As Much’ | TechCrunch:

'via Blog this'

The IPO season

With this post I am taking a small break from my trials and errors with sorting through mobile related technicalities (in my learning process of mobile marketing), as I happened to stumble upon a very interesting article on IPO stipulations in the start-up, tech and online sector, Groupon Vs. Zynga: Which Company Will Be More Valuable Post-IPO?, appearing on TechCrunch. It just happened that today, while savouring business icon, Alan Sugar`s biographical book "Alan Sugar: What you see is what you get. My aoutobiography", I happened to turn the page on the chapter about how his company, Amstrad, went public. What a coincidence and what an interesting perspective over the IPO process now and some 30 years ago!


Anyway, I think this article should be bookmarked as my personal view is that we might be experiencing the second dotcom bubble in its making. In case I am wrong, than virtual is really worth investing in and it will become the business model of the future decades to come. I guess we are talking about a trial and error approach here as well haha. 


An excerpt from the article published by TechCrunch: "This is the season of the IPO. So far, 2011 has seen companies like LinkedIn, Pandora, Yandex, Zillow, and RenRen come to market. As you’ve heard, Groupon and Zynga are next up in the IPO pipeline, with both companies arriving on public markets within weeks of each other. Groupon, barring some catastrophic event, will begin trading publicly on NASDAQ November 4th, with shares set at $20 a pop at a valuation of $12.7 billion."( Amstrad was valued at £8m in 1980) 


Read more at Groupon Vs. Zynga: Which Company Will Be More Valuable Post-IPO? | TechCrunch

Introducing...The Startup Crowd, Ideation camp, Nov12, London, Be there!

The BREW stew

Mobile industry specialist Tomi T. Ahonen has done a good job with his books on the state of mobile and its great potential to the extent that I seriously thought of focusing on mobile marketing in my career path. This blog was as well started as a result of my interest and enthusiasm in the aforementioned field.

So, after doing some search, I end up on the website of the Mobile Marketing Association, thinking to myself what a nice place to start learning how to use the mobile device in your marketing techniques.  I dig through their white papers and resources and quickly make up my mind on starting off with terminology or glossary to then move to best practices down to spicier stuff like mobile sweepstakes and so on. Surfing through, I took notice of their certification program as well, so in my mind I had already fixed a date in the future to take it and proceed on my way to a wonderful career in such a cool sector. All pumped up, I was already imagining myself as the mobile marketing expert.

Ha ha ha, it is so easy to imagine it in your head. If it had been as easy in real life, the world would indeed have been a better place.
So, down to the glossary: I download the pdf, sit down with a cup of coffee, cosying myself in my chair ready to do some mental work. I start with the beginning ... "alert tone", sounds pretty self explanatory, "alerts", "alternative method of entry", so far so good...until I stumble into hard tech nomenclature like binary runtime environment for wireless that sounds as interesting as reading a gadget manual: it sounds logical and important but you have no idea where to start from and the info is just not sticking. Zero associations, really, try  and figure it out.

First thought: Ok, Rodica, this is not for you. But then common, how hard should it be. Am I totally mutually exclusive with technicalities? I got so excited at the beginning, so overenthusiastic with learning about this new marketing field, I want to keep it up.

Always be closer: I guess the question is this - how do you stay enthusiastic and motivated once you hit tough times or ...binary runtime environments for wireless for that matter?

The acronym sounds a bit more fun: BREW


My brain is BREWing
While all my thoughts`re stewing 

On the other hand, I am faced with a some glossary, imagine managers having to keep up the morale of their teams up when the business is not running that well.  How is that for fun?

Lesson numero 2: I will go back to my initial source of inspiration...and keep the end in my mind.

Reconsidering Moboline's strategy, part 2

How can one write  an entertaining, useful and interesting blog about mobile and the new digital age if one has almost none experience to it except the usual, online social chat? More than that, how can one sound like an expert on mobile strategies, when, although eager and evangelistic about it, one doesn't even have a decent mobile phone ha ha. 
Coming clean: I am very enthusiastic about all the mobilization going on around and I want to be a part of it, and for the past few weeks I have been considering and reconsidering how to use this blog to which I happened to find such a cute name, to bring me closer to all the digital and mobile hype in the industry. 
Any suggestions?
Then I thought to myself that I should just embrace my status quo, accept and make friends with it, and just share my learning experience with much more experienced readers in hope of advice and consideration; let them be the experts, and who knows, maybe one day, some other uninitiated apprentice (young, ambitious female to give it a profile ha ha)  will stumble upon this blog and find it a useful learning resource.


...so Lesson Nr1: If it doesn't work, don't push it ... go around it. 

Mobile retail app that increased revenues by 55%? WOW,Retailers, GET it!

Read the full text at gigaom:
http://gigaom.com/2011/11/01/verifone-buys-global-bay-to-expand-beyond-point-of-sale/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+jkOnTheRun+%28GigaOM%3A+Mobile%29

The latest BUS model selling hot

Businesses seem to have embraced the idea of mobile, mobility and social connectedness;past lessons learned, turning a profit in the cloud is quickly becoming the new normal yet again ; but if the ''why’’ has already been answered by piles of statistical data, many unknowns seem to hover over the ‘’how’’ in this equation. 

With Foursquare being valued at 600m dollars and growing, location based services are earning more and more ground against traditional models, but  have yet to proof their financial potential in a scope and scale scenario.


Having already gathered a crowd of 10 million users worldwide (more than 3 times the population of my native country haha), Foursquare is one of the leaders of the constantly enlarging flock of on-line start-ups, each aiming to re-write traditional rules of doing business with every post, `Like` or check-in.

Adopting an in-store give-away model, another player, PunchTab, wants to shows how the local grandpa shop cannot and should not escape the digital wave if it wants to stay in the game.The social loyalty platform company offers a free mobile application, PunchBowl, that allows consumers to participate in local business give-aways by being socially active.The idea is to reward customers who are involved with the businesses by ‘’Like’’ing their page on Facebook or helping promote a discount or campaign. The rewards are then translated into free meals, etc. The app is free for both parties, and it looks like that by giving away one or two croissants a day, the local merchant may earn higher foot traffic or word of mouth, provided it sells to a technology oriented crowd eager to engage.


While location based model keeps the local neighbourhood in check, it is the daily deal discount formula that sells big. Financial Times`April Dembosky reports how big US brands are tapping into the online discount sector, striking deals with Groupon (with more than 140m subscribers) and LivingSocial. He writes that the established online deals sites ``are increasingly being recognized [...] as a marketing channel and customer tracking system that warrant exploration``. 

He also tracks a change of dynamics occurring within the discount sector. Usually, daily deal companies were incurring the expenses in exchange for customer acquisition but now things are changing towards marketers eager to pay for the eyeballs amassed by the likes of Groupon and LivingSocial. 


Of course, one should ask how those traditional daily deal players will adjust to these trends.

Moboline says: While venture capital keeps flowing in, it is the profit margin that counts at the end of the day. Stay tuned to new updates on the latest success business formulas in today's digital age. You can check my previous post on a very innovative BUS model in the telecommunications industry.