Seth Godin: Sliced bread and other marketing delights

In a world of too many options and too little time, our obvious choice is to ignore the ordinary stuff. Marketing guru Seth Godin spells out why, when it comes getting our attention, bad or bizarre ideas are more successful than boring ones. And early adopters, not the mainstream’s bell curve, are the new sweet spot of the market.

“Seth Godin may be the ultimate entrepreneur for the Information Age,” Mary Kuntz wrote in Business Week nearly a decade ago. “Instead of widgets or car parts, he specializes in ideas—usually, but not always, his own.” In fact, he’s as focused on spreading ideas as he is on the ideas themselves.

After working as a software brand manager in the mid-1980s, Godin started Yoyodyne, one of the first Internet-based direct-marketing firms, with the notion that companies needed to rethink how they reached customers. His efforts caught the attention of Yahoo!, which bought the company in 1998 and kept Godin on as a vice president of permission marketing. Godin has produced several critically acclaimed and attention-grabbing books, including Permission Marketing, All Marketers Are Liars, and Purple Cow (which was distributed in a milk carton). In 2005, Godin founded Squidoo.com, a Web site where users can share links and information about an idea or topic important to them.

David Ippolito and ‘Talk Louder – The Cell Phone Song’is courtesy of music.podshow.com.

VOIP Panel: Quality, Ease of Use, Security

Stuart Chesire and Benjamin Kowarsch discuss Zeroconf and Bonjour, which make Asterisk clusters work without asking users to perform complex configuration. Installations of these server clusters could make wifi VOIP in hotels many times easier to deploy.

VOIP has only recently become practical, with the comprehensive rollout of broadband to consumers. Wireless roaming is still a challenge. Matthew Gast examines why VOIP is so hard in 802.11 networks. The trick is making VOIP devices act more like cell phones, making load balancing and roaming easier.

Whenever potentially sensitive conversations are broadcast over the air, encryption is critical. Philip Zimmermann, the creator of PGP encryption, takes a look at the history of public key infrastructures and concludes that the industry needs to move away from centrally managed key servers. He presents his solution to VOIP encryption, including the ability to detect eavesdropping.

In Episode 19, The talk of two Malcolms, Malcolm Gladwell spoke of the genius of Howard Moskowitz and his ability to fundamentally grasp the nature of consumer taste. In this episode we continue the thread of Product Design and Consumer Behavior with an interview with Howard.

How do companies figure out what consumers want? For example, when you look at all the different types of spaghetti sauce in the grocery store, do you wonder how the endless varieties were developed? In many cases, the companies may have just guessed, but they also may have used methods developed by Howard Moskowitz, an expert in the field of psychophysics, and author of the upcoming book Selling Blue Elephants. Howard Moskowitz is the CEO of i-Novation Inc as well as President of Moskowitz Jacobs Inc., a firm he founded in 1981. He is both a well-known experimental psychologist in the field of psychophysics and an inventor of world-class market research technology.

We also reach back into the archives for a 1954 General Motors Chevrolet sponsored short film entitled “What Mr Bell had in mind”. This features DON AMECHE recreating his famous movie role as Alexander Graham Bell. Mr Bell discusses proper telephone etiquette.

The music features Robin Tymm and “Telephone Line” courtesy of music.podshow.com

This week is from the floor of Voicecon Spring Conference 2007, March 5th through 8th at the Gaylord Palms Hotel in Orlando Florida. We talk about Voip Trainer, a unique interactive traning tool for IPT Telephony and the founder of 4What Interactive, Jim Cossetta. We then talk about Open Telephony and the challenges of identity for VoIP Systems. All of this is broadcast from the floor of Voicecon.

This weeks episode is about the intersection between telephony and Web 2.0. We have two talks, one from a carrier perspective and one from a software developer.

Norman Lewis is the director of Technology Research for the Home Division of France Telecom.

David Beckemeyer is CEO of TelEvolution.

This weeks Gtone is all about Application Driven Telephony and what people are doing from a hosted perspective as well as what is happening on the Mac. We have interviews with John Philips, Editorial Directory of Maclife Magazine, Jonathan Taylor, CEO of Voxeo and Kevin Ford CEO of Parliant.