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by David MullingsA friend of mine brought this new Scotiabank promotion to my attention to find out if it is something we would advertise (I pointed out that we didn’t get enough traffic from the Caribbean to really be beneficial).This promotion is brilliant - If a company wants to reach the 18 - 30 demographic, this is certainly a good way to reach the most connected ones, and those make up the highest quality target market for sure. Tech-savvy Gen-Y and Gen-X that fall into the group should gravitate towards this contest because many of us are guilty of feeling that we can run companies better than the current management. Read more
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Jamaica- It’s just that there has been so much hype and talk plus news of a litany of aborted and on hold projects; with the few success stories linked to Jamaicans living overseas or a few others with strong links to the local Financial sector.
Back in 2001, Minister in charge of Technology Philip Paulwell, promised the coming of the electronic transactions act that will herald Jamaica being the ecommerce hub of the region. That eTransactions Act finally came in early 2007. It’s October 2007 and a new government and a new Minister Clive Mullings are in charge of educating and exciting the Jamaicans about the lifestyle and business opportunities that the law now supports. This act is of course late, especially since Bermuda managed to pass from 1999.
So where are we now?
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Jamaica- Yep, I had an encounter with a guy today in a store where I was buying my Blackberry Curve, yes I finally gave in to join the fast growing Kingston Chapter of the Crackberry Club. This dude told me that yeah he cracks the iPHone to be used on the GSM network here for US$100 per phone. Why so much, well, he said they literally cried over it trying to figure stuff out and had to totally rewrite a bunch of code to get everything on it to work here in Jamaica. I asked him so does EVERYTHING on it work? He said, yes as long as they don’t do certain things and they show their customers how to navigate and fully use their freshly cracked iPhone.
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by David Mullings
I recently completed an amazing book, The New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott and it is a book that readers of SiliconCaribe will certainly find useful. The book sets out to educate the reader about “how to use news releases, blogs, podcasting, viral marketing and online media to reach buyers directly” and it succeeds in doing so.Many business books tend to spend too much time on ideas and leave the reader with few actionable items. This is not one of those books at all - the entire third section is devoted to an action plan and walking you through the steps that will truly turn the words on the page into real results. His story of how is book got started, a free e-book on his blog, serves as a great case study alongside the many other case studies, including how McDonalds has been using blogging to connect with consumers. Read more
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Jamaica-This was one of the themes that I touched on in my presentation at the Caribbean Media Conference and Expo. It simply means that content is going to be cut up, mixed and remixed by someone, so why not you?
Consumers have largely grown accustomed to finding content all over the place - including on the web. Channels like Comedy Central have taken their experience with Youtube and learnt that people don’t just want to watch on television anymore. These traditional companies have expanded their content delivery channels to include their own video websites, other video platforms like Joost and we can expect even more. Take a look at the new Daily Show website that was recently launched: www.thedailyshow.com Read more
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Jamaica-The national dailies seem to be taking the internet more seriously. The Jamaica Gleaner, which I had always given the edge because of it’s first to sell ads so aggressively online, its move to build out local content parish by parish, its foray into live streaming via Power 106 fm, they welcomed online community in chatrooms and message boards and also simply because they got more traffic too than the Jamaica Observer. Read more
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Israel- Someone pinch me. Now you know there has been a lot of design tools that promises “no need to have programming skills” but they all have some shortcoming-most glaring three are 1. you’ll see all sorts of ads on your websites and that’s just not cute; 2. you’ll be asked to pay some monthly fee; and 3 you’ll have some long domain that made you wonder why did I bother to sign up.
Well Israel-based, yeah you read that right, Israel-based Wix.com have thrown their hat into the ring. They are in private beta(sign up and hope they send you an invite) but claimes to allow uers that ability to create flash-based websites without programming skills and publish those sites anywhere on the web. The output can also be widgetized and published on social networks.
We signed up to be selected to test drive this baby, so when (we are projecting major confidence here) we get our invite and do the test drive, we’ll post our review.
Previou story: Web Development Industry in Jamaica heading for a shake up
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SiliconCaribe.com – SiliconCaribe.com the trendwatching site covering Caribbean and Latin American news, reviews and trends celebrates its milestones: 6 weeks old, 110 posts, 126 comments, 191 quality backlinks, just over 2,500 unique readers who spend at average of 3 minutes reading and a repeat visitor rate of over 40%. Additionally, the site has seen visitors from every continent with the top visiting countries being United States, United Kingdom, Jamaica, Canada, Barbados, Trinidad, Sweden, New Zealand, Cayman Islands and Singapore.
We’re six weeks old and soaring with so much more to come.
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Jamaica-We’ve heard it from friends and read the press releases of all of these Jamaican and Caribbean IPTV companies that have launched, offering authentic Jamaican and Caribbean content online. Great that we now have oodles of distributors, channels to choose from, with only one issue…where’s the content?
The fact is that most Caribbean radio,tv,cable carry a steady diet of Americana. As a region we don’t create, package professionally and distribute enough origial content to feed the content needs of the many online distributors that are popping up now. In fact our biggest content creating industry is music and even so we stretching it. The biggest creator and distributor of original content is TEMPO, they learnt from their predecessor who waited for Godot, waited on the music industry to produce that content. It didn’t happen, they died.
The winners in the IPTV, Caribbean radio and tv online will be those who create their own content consistently or form partners with the myriad of original content creators in the region and in the Caribbean Diaspora. That said, it’s a great opportunity for idea gods with a sense of what is great content and make an impact. The technology is cheaper, digital cameras, iMacs or laptops with editing software are cheaper and more accessible to everyone, just comes down to the better ideas. He who was the best and most consistent content wins. Content is still King baby!
Check out: www.cbtv1.com, jam247.tv,realvibez.com, www.kariblinktv.com
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Richard Powell when he lived in Jamaica was a player and a big fan of football. While living in the US, he saw a huge unmet need in the market and filled it with the site fuxito.com. The site was described and hailed as “the online destination where soccer aficionados gather for the latest news, recruiting information, expert analysis and interaction. Positioned as a key vehicle to experience the total soccer culture, community and lifestyle, Fuxito.com provides soccer enthusiasts of all levels a springboard into the soccer experience.”
SC: Where were you born?
RP: St. Andrew, Jamaica.
SC: What schools did you go to?
RP: St. Andrew Prep, Campion High School, Andover (MA), and Harvard (MA)
SC: How old were you when you started Fuxito?
RP: I was 18 years old
SC: What led you to start Fuxito and describe the naming of that site?
RP: I identified a huge market need. Then created the name and brand for the site by combining Futbol (football in Spanish) and exito (success in Spanish).
SC: Describe your start up environment-where was your office, staff numbers, money status before funding?
RP: Office was a house between Harvard and MIT on Mass Ave. Staff was 7, on a budget of US$150k before raising US$1mm in VC money.
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