Insights&Inspiration

The current wave of new project management tools entering the market is a refreshing trend to discover, but at the same time, one that makes deciding which system is right for you exponentially difficult because of the wealth of apparently comparable choices – fledgling as many of them may be.

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Tag Cloud from my event notes, created using Wordle.net

I had the honor of attending the first ever AppNation conference at Moscone Center in San Francisco this past Monday and Tuesday, September 13th and 14th, and wow!  This is the first industry conference that I went into not having a great deal of specialized knowledge on the topic and boy did I learn a lot!

My only disappointment was the large percentage of attendees that were developers and investors versus agency folk, but I suppose in hindsight, when an industry is still so fledgling it makes sense for an event like this to also serve as a matchmaking opportunity for investors and developers to find one another to help spark further innovation.  Just would have been nice for there to be a little more of an agency perspective represented.  But overall a great conference, and I expect that it will be one that grows significantly more each year.

After reviewing my 30 pages of notes in an attempt to extract the most poignant information, here is the quick summary I came up with.

Where are the Real Opportunities in the App World? (more…)

I owe the inspiration of this post to the following quotes:

“To leverage Twitter to its strengths for maintaining more personal dialogs, well-educated personnel need not just monitor the Twitter presence, but actively engage. Getting value out of the free Twitter service is an investment in itself.” from Bryce Marshall at imediaconnection.com:

And “How many participants you have on your social media properties is far less important than how you interact with them.” from Larry Weintraub at imediaconnection.com. (more…)

“As an industry, digital marketing has historically had a bias toward thinking about execution first — to such an extent that much of what passes for advertising and marketing online has no idea in it whatsoever.” Quote from Jim Nichols @ IMediaConnection.com.

“Focusing on platforms versus execution could cause you to miss the entire opportunity in front of you” Quote from Michael Burke @ IMediaConnection.com.

Strategy First, Technology Last: This has become a bit of a mantra here at JStokes in the digital back office. (more…)

Lately I have had a lot of discussions with friends and family members about developing websites and what they will need to be able to do so.  When explaining the programs they will need to be able to produce and update their own websites, I often get this response: “Ok, so I need to get a Mac right?”. (more…)