Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Bill Seibel, Founder and CEO of Mobiquity (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let me make an observation based on the two examples you’ve given so far, and we can go into other examples. Just on the two that you’ve cited, these are two large companies. In the first case, they are actually transacting business on the mobile device, right, based on the application that you’ve

Read Full Article »

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Bill Seibel, Founder and CEO of Mobiquity (Part 1)

The convenience of mobile devices cannot be denied. People shop, work, and interact with friends through iPhones, BlackBerrys, or Androids, anywhere, at any time – hence the name of the company I’ll be discussing in this interview. Mobiquity has taken that idea of using mobile for business and run with it. The company, which has offices

Read Full Article »

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Jim Ackerman, Founder of Ackermania Creative (Part 7)

SM: That’s exactly why I’m probing. How do you seed it? You have made a very, very clear case of how Orabrush has done a systematic job of creating content, building a channel, episode by episode, and then driving traffic into that channel through PPC advertising and driving subscriptions and so forth. JA: If you

Read Full Article »

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Jim Ackerman, Founder of Ackermania Creative (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: In principle I agree with you. But the point that you’re making is true, assuming that the people who come in through pay-per-click into the YouTube channel subscribe to the channel. If they don’t subscribe to the channel, then you have to bring them back over and over again. Jim Ackerman: Correct. And

Read Full Article »

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Jim Ackerman, Founder of Ackermania Creative (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Based on what you’ve studied of YouTube marketing, aside from PPC advertising, which is a very expensive form of advertising, what other types of marketing mechanisms are working when it comes to seeding the YouTube channel?

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Jim Ackerman, Founder of Ackermania Creative (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: And that’s a classic consumer product situation. So, let’s continue. I think we’re in sync. The net of all this discussion is that there’s a certain barrier to entry based on the quality of the videos. The reason I probed a bit is because funny is not the only vector by which you

Read Full Article »

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Jim Ackerman, Founder of Ackermania Creative (Part 2)

SM: What is the barrier? JA: There are actually two barriers to entry in doing YouTube and doing it well. Number one is you must be creative enough to come up with something that will have an entertainment element to it. It’s not guaranteed that you always have to have that, but the likelihood is

Read Full Article »

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: David Stone, CEO of CashStar (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: This has been an interesting conversation. Do you want to give me a range of how large a company you’ve built with CashStar and probing into the unmet needs of the gift card industry? David Stone: We raised $28 million to date, which in the state of Maine is incredible. Most of the

Read Full Article »