the webthinking blog

I’m happy to report that I’ve already met one of my goals for this year, getting the only Google certification existing out there: the Advertising Professional. Interesting experience, about 120 questions in 90 minutes. Not to mention I had to wake up at 7AM on a Sunday morning because Prometric had a scheduled maintenance at 10AM. It was well worth it at the end of the day! :)

A new Forrester report divides the U.S. online population into six groups according to their social participation on the Web:

• Creators – those who blog, publish web sites, upload videos, or participate in other content creation activities – 21 percent own Macs, while only 12 percent own Dell computers;
• Spectators – they read blogs, watch videos, and listen to podcasts – 55 percent own Macs;
• The majority of Inactives – they don’t participate online – 55 percent own Dells.

Social Participation on the Web:

Source: Forrester. Via: Macworld.

This week I had the privilege of attending the Google Financial Services Conference here in Toronto and meet cool people like Chantal Rossi, Sabrina Geremia, Paul Botto or Chris O’Neill of Google.

There are five themes re-shaping Marketing today:

• Integration: consumers are hard to find and harder to influence!
• Innovation: today’s buzz word is “video” – online video; “click to play” geo targeted video ads can be delivered depending on your location
• Inclusive: advertise all your assets, not only what you think is popular
• Interactivity: consumers like to get involved; how does it feel to have an extra 10,000 brand managers out there?
• Informed: make the most by measuring your data intelligence!

There you go, the five “I”s of today’s Marketing.

Hey – my blog is one year old! I really enjoy this social media experience.

What’s next though? I have moved my blog under a new domain – mircea.net, trying to add a more personal note to it. More exciting though, I’m ready to move to the next stage – music podcasting. More details about iSPINIT.com soon!

Gmail for your domain is now available for Blackberry. Point your wireless browser to m.google.com/a to download the latest version on your device. Great for small business or if you want to take control of email for your own domain name! The whole Google Apps package costs $50 per account per year.

Got the venerable squishy cows from Ken. Here’s what came out. The “picture” doesn’t seem to show up in the Flickr search because it’s not a “real picture” anymore.

I wrote a while ago about accessing your Gmail account using Opera Mini on a mobile device. Well, Google came out with their our java Gmail application, which is great! I downloaded it OTA on my Blackberry, about 160Kb.

The application loads faster than the browser and it has built-in most of the Gmail menu functions:

• Starred
• Search
• Compose Mail
• Open
• Refresh
• Archive
• Mark as read
• Add star
• Report spam
• Delete

You don’t have to load a web page for each of the actions above, as they are part of the actual application. Really neat!

Note that if you’re using it on a Blackberry, you need to explicitly quit the program by going to Menu > Exit Gmail in order to ensure that Gmail is not running in the background. If you go to your Application or Main Menu without explicitly exiting, the Gmail application will run in the background, periodically checking for new email and using data.

At this point, Google does not support Apps for Your Domain mail accounts.

See the list of supported mobile devices. BTW, the Palm Treo is not a supported device. More Gmail mobile FAQs.

This might be old news to some of you or it can come just as a surprise: ever look-up for the latest Nissan SUV at www.nissan.com? You won’t find the Murano here, but you might wanna stay away from it, as well.

So this lucky guy, Uzi Nissan, who seems to be an entrepreneur, started his small shop computer business back in 1991 in North Carolina. Later on in 1994 he registers nissan.com and two years later nissan.net. Just to make sure he’s got all domain name variations. All good until 1999, when the former Datsun car company, more recently known as Nissan Motor sues him, seeking $10,000,000 in damages.

Watch this CNBC video, dated December 2005: “They’ve ruined every aspect of my life” says Uzi Nissan, who claims to have spent $2.2 million fighting the lawsuit. Did he have any chance to negotiate? Did Nissan Motor Co. make him an offer? Hard to guess, but sever years later Nissan Motor Co. still uses the lousy nissanusa.com and the little guy is broke :(

Question is: how much for a domain name or how far would you go in keeping yours, if you’re a small biz and somebody knocks at your door?

As for Nissan Motor Co., yes they missed the boat and now they shifted directly to 2.0. Anybody else wants to try their luck? nissan20.com it’s up for grabs!