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Luckily, I’ve been pretty free on this opening weekend of March Madness.  I’ve gotten to watch Northern Iowa’s big upset of Kansas and most of the other games throughout the weekend.  I’ve switched to my computer several times when there was a close game going on outside of the one that CBS was showing in my area.

I’m pretty excited though, that next year I may be able to watch March madness live on my phone.  I know he quality won’t be perfect, but having that option available on my phone (over 3G network) will be pretty awesome.  I know there are other options available right now (if you’ve been watching the tournament you can’t miss the commercials with everyone in exotic locations yelling when their team wins at the buzzer) but this would now be possible directly from within your mobile brower using Adobe’s Flash 10.1 for mobile.  Flash on phones has always been a source of frustration because mobile broswers have never been able to handle it.  A large percentage of online video, including YouTube (altough YouTube videos are encoded in 2 separate formats to allow the iPhone and Android phones to view the other format that doesn’t include Flash) are shown through Flash.

This kind of functionality makes me question Apple’s strategy of refusing to support Flash.  Without Flash, the iPad can’t access Hulu video and other video that’s common on so many other sites.  How can you expect the iPad to replace your laptop when it can’t access such a huge portion of the web?  I realize HTML5 is supposed to start allowing video to be embedded directly within the HTML of a page without any additional encoding like Flash.  But that’s an entirely different format that you have to count on content producers to migrate towards.  It just doesn’t happen that easily.  That’s a big reason why I have on real interest in getting and iPad, and why I thought Wired’s cover story this month on the iPad and the future of tablets was pretty weak.  All it offered was some philosophical fluff from prominent tech figures without any real substance.

Recently I found a couple of fascinating blog posts on how to mashup data from anywhere on the web with Google spreadsheets and Yahoo pipes.  To see the exact steps on how to do this please refer to those 2 articles.  It’s explained there much better than what I can recreate, but I wanted to get into the possibilities of what you can do with these kinds of tools.

You’re probably at least somewhat familiar with Google Docs.  If not you can check out a few of my previous posts on Using Google Docs for Wedding Invitations or Using Google Docs at Work.  One of the great things about Google Docs is that it lives online, whereas an Excel document is static and saved on your local computer.  With Google Docs you can specify a specific URL to take data from, and your spreadsheet will update whenever that web page is updated.  The function you use is the “importHTML” function in Google Docs.

So let’s say you want to do some data analysis for your fantasy football league.  You want to see what players on your team are underperforming and see if there are any replacement players that you’d like to trade for.  ESPN.com has all the stats you would need available on their site.  Once you find a page that has the exact data you want you can use the “importHTML” function to throw it into a Google spreadsheet.  Now you can run any custom formulas in your spreadsheet to see how different players are performing to the standards you set.  Every week that page on ESPN.com is going to be updated with new data.  Instead of having to download that again (like you would in Excel) your data will automatically update in your spreadsheet.

Yahoo Pipes is a web application that might not be as well known.  It’s essentially a tool that allows you to take information from any web service, slice it any way you want if you have the technical know-how, and then create custom RSS or XML feeds that can be used with other services.  One of the applications that is quite useful is taking location data from a website and putting that into a map on Google maps.

So, say you have a list of cities on a concert tour, and you’d like to see these laid out visually on a map.  One option would be to use a service like BatchGeo if you have all of the address data already formatted nicely in a spreadsheet.  However, what if that data is stored on a Wikipedia page.  Here’s how you could create the map.

1. Use the “importHTML” function to pull data from that table into a Google spreadsheet.

2. Use Yahoo Pipes to pull the data from your spreadsheet into the KML format that is needed for Google Maps.  Within the Yahoo Pipes interface you can sort by date so that you can number the concert stops according to the dates they occur.

3. Export the data in the KML format and paste the new URL into Google Maps.  The tour locations will be displayed with date labels on your new map.

There are a lot of cool applications that I can see with this type functionality.

• Create maps of sales targets for a business to give to their sales associates to use when they’re out in the field

• Manage your fantasy team with custom metrics that you build in a spreadsheet

• Track all your interactions on social networks and pull them into a spreadsheet to use as a CRM database so you can set reminders on when to contact someone again

I’m excited to play around with these tools and see what else is possible.

I have a pretty big interest in education.  My fiance, Marie, is a 6th grade english teacher, and my mom is a 4th grade teacher so fairly prevalent in my family.  Clearly, the US education system could use some work.  The data shows that the US is falling behind many other developed countries in standardized testing scores.  Something needs to be done and there are a lot of differing opinions on what the best solution is.

Now I’m not an educator personally so I can’t speak from experience, nor do I have any real data to back up my point.  I do believe though that the education world would be wise to pick up on some of the major social media trends right now and incorporate games into the classroom.

Take Foursquare, Gowalla, and Farmville into consideration – 3 services that are all the rage in social media right now.  They are all games that involve rewards, interaction, and engagement.  Aren’t interaction and engagement 2 of the most important ingredients to improving a classroom.  If students are actively involved in their learning and striving to reach specific goals they have a much better chance of learning the material than if it’s simply lectured in a boring manner.

One concept that I definitely think deserves some major attention is that of IU Telecommunications Professor and professional game designer Lee Sheldon.  He has formatted his class like a “massively multi-player game” (like World of Warcraft) and assignments do not receive grades, but rather “experience points.”  There are different types of assignments that are either done solo, with a partner that the students choose, or with a “guild” chosen by the professor.  This allows for students to work in different formats so that everyone has a chance to work in their preferred setting at some point.  The students are motivated to be engaged because they can gain experience points at unexpected times.  Check out Edward Castronova’s blog for an excellent overview of “Sheldon’s Syllabus” and using games in the classroom curriculum.

Are K-12 teachers experimenting with this type of game learning?  I definitely think they should be.

In just a little more than a month I’ll be moving into my new house.  I’ve been thinking quite a bit about whether or not we’ll pay for a cable TV subscription.  Here is my current TV consumption:

• Sportscenter (Cable)
• Basketball and football games and other major sporting events (Mostly on Network TV and ESPN which is Cable)
• The Office (Network TV)

I will occasionally watch another program if I’m flipping through channels during dinner or something like that, but nothing that I would mind missing.  I’ve decided that I’d like to cut down on the amount of sports I watch because there are really only a handful of games in each major sport that matter throughout the year so watching Sportscenter on an almost everyday basis probably is not necessary.  However, not being able to watch the College Basketball National Championship game when my Tar Heels are playing would be pretty discouraging.

With March Madness starting today I’m amazed at the high quality, yet fast and responsive video that CBSsports.com is able to deliver on all of the tournament games.  I know Hulu and other sites have great video and ESPN has video on demand that you can pay for, but the value that CBS provides by streaming every single game online is unprecendented.  The NCAA tournament is perfect for internet consumption because it allows you to switch between multiple games at once at your own discretion.  You don’t have to let the TV network decide what game is best for your area to watch because you’re in control.  It’s clear that this type of video streaming is entirely possible, and it makes me wonder why ESPN or other networks don’t provide more of their content this way. My thought was that more of this kid of content would become available online and I could catch most of the shows that I wanted online.  The hurdle clearly comes down to money and the fact that monetization online is much more difficult.

I got a tip on Twitter that I should check out some of Mark Cuban’s thought on this issue.  He’s pretty knowledgeable in this area considering he founded Broadcast.com and had a big part in HD TV.  It turns out that he has several blog posts on TV content on his blog that were extremely informative.  I’d suggest you read what we has to say (rather than my quick summary) in these posts – Don’t Waste the Internet on TV – Protect the Future of the Internet and Senator Al Franken is Requesting User Caps on Internet Bandwidth?

Basically, Cuban is saying that there are a lot of bandwidth costs that go along with putting more and more video on the internet.  It’s not a simple question of whether networks can generate ad revenue off of the content, but the physical infrastructure of the networks of internet service providers would have to be significantly upgraded if everyone just started watching all of their regular TV content online.  Then monthly internet subscription rates would have to increase considerably, and then there’s not really much of an advantage of watching TV on your computer anymore.  Cuban is fairly pessimistic about TV content online because the internet is simply not designed to handle it well.

To switch gears for a minute, I’m also taking into consideration the words of wisdom on watching TV from marketing guru Seth Godin.  His recent post on TV was pretty eye-opening.  Seth argues that there are an infinite number of things that you could be spending your time on that’s better than TV.  Some of his ideas were:

• Write a daily blog
• Start an online community about your favorite passion
• Go to meetups in your town
• Volunteer to tutor a kid, in person or online
• Produce small films and publish them online
• Read a book or two every evening
• Play a game of Scrabble with your family

I had trouble trimming this list down because all of Godin’s ideas are superb, and clearly all much better than watching 3 hours of TV.  By giving up TV I’d be freeing up my time for more of the things that I’d really like to be doing, but sometimes end up on the backburner because I don’t always have enough time.  Seth’s ideas are pretty inspiring because he says the things you know are 100% true, but sometimes you can’t quite motivate yourself to do them.

Ultimately, I think I’m going to wait on getting a cable subscription at least for a little while when I move into my new house.  Internet is non-negotiable so that will definitely be installed soon (although I can get by for a few days with just my Droid).  If we realize we really want TV then we’ll go ahead with it, but it’s not going to be a given.

What do you think?  Could you do without a cable subscription?

If you’ve read many of my previous posts you probably already know I’m a big fan of Google Docs. I’ve written about being hooked on Google Docs and also using Google Docs for wedding invitations.  I’ve also been trying to push Google Docs at work so that our marketing team can collaborate on spreadsheets without having to do the extra work of copy and pasting them all back together.

We’re trying to get a direct mail piece out to some of our prospects, and we needed to refine our list of potential customers.  We have leads from quite a few different sources, and not all of them have complete information.  Some might be missing an email address, others a city and state, and some might be missing annual revenue which we need to qualify them as a prospect.  We exported all of this information from Salesforce and got it into an Excel document so we could clearly see where the missing pieces were.  To get this completed as quickly as possible I thought the best solution would be to open up a Google spreadsheet so the 5 of us on the marketing team could all work on it at the same time.  We couldn’t do that with Excel because we would need to first break the spreadsheet down into 5 equal parts, send it out to each person via email, and then copy and paste their information into a master sheet once they completed it.  With Google Docs everything can happen at once and there’s no need to have separate versions of the spreadsheet.

I’d love to get a chance to try out applications like SmartSheet that distribute repetitive tasks like list management to services like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and they’re completed for you through crowdsourcing.  Anyone using the Mechanical Turk can complete tasks for a set price.  Using a spreadsheet with incomplete leads as an example, you could put the document on Smartsheet and agree to pay 10 cents per completed record and very likely find someone that’s willing and able to complete it.

As I was browsing through information on the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas I came across two new services that I think have a lot of potential.  I think consumers will be able to get a lot of use out of these apps because they’re designed to be extremely simple to use.

Buildor

Buildor is a web-based site builder, but instead of focusing on creating websites from scratch (like, say Weebly) it allows you to pull an existing web page from anywhere on the web and edit it just like you would a Word document or Photoshop file.



So you can see the interface from this screenshot, but the way it works is that Buildor grabs the HTML of a page from the page source that you can see when you click that option in your browser.  Now it has a saved copy of your site displayed on your application and you can make changes to images, text, layout, etc.  Then you can take that saved version of your HTML and upload it back into your site.  This is a pretty simple way for non-technical people to edit their website.

PlaceThings

I’m even more excited about the new social mapping application Placethings.  This new app allows you to apply any kind of media (text, audio, video, etc) onto a particular point on a map.  You can create interactive trips or document a vacation that you’re already on.

I see two awesome applications of this technology.  One is to plan a trip for someone else.  So you could create a scavenger hunt with different clues throughout the map, or plan an agenda for someone in a new location that’s unfamiliar with the local hotspots.  The other way to use it would be to document a trip that you’re currently on.  So you can take photos and video of the different stops on your cruise or vacation and then save them to your map to show all your friends when you get back.  I hope these guys can get an Android app out because I would definitely be willing to pay to use this on my Droid.  I think the iPhone app is already out and they will soon be rolling out a web version.

I was reading a great post from Mashable on 9 Killer Tips for Location-Based Marketing, and it got me thinking about how many local businesses actually use some kind of online marketing.  My gut feeling (and I’m new to this space so I’m by no means an expert) is that beyond a basic website local businesses are missing out in online marketing completely.

Here’s the disconnect that I see.  Take a look at this picture.

The phone companies like to put big piles of Yellow books outside of apartment buildings because they want to get them in the hands of as many people as possible.  The printing costs and distribution of these books has to be quie costly.  But every single local business is willing to buy an ad so it’s still a profitable business.  The problem is that most people do not use a phone book anymore – especially the younger generation.  I know a huge pile of books sat outside my apartment complex for weeks because no one took them.  It’s so much easier to simply type in a search query on Google and instantly get 10 relevent results than leafing through the Yellow Pages hoping to find what you’re looking for.  Combine this with the fact that smartphones are becoming ubiquitous, and it’s pretty clear to see that online advertising is going to be 100 times more effective than buying a Yellow Pages ad in the future.

So what kind of online advertising can local businesses engage in?  There are a lot of different ways you could go, and it’s probably best to experiement to determine what’s most effective.  Here are my suggestions on where to start:

1. Search

Search advertising should be the foundation of any kind of online marketing initiative because it is exactly what’s replacing the Yellow Pages.  When someone wants to find a local business it’s so much easier now to just type it into Google and get to exactly what you want.  Even if the company doesn’t have a website Google will find relevant locations on a map and on online business listings such as Yelp and Citysearch.  If you do have a website be sure to optimize your pages for local searches.  Instead of your page title reading “Dr. Smith – Dentist” it should read something like “Indianapolis Dentist and Orthodontics – Dr. Smith.”  You have a much better chance of showing up when searches are done for your most popular keywords.  Another avenue in search advertising is pay-per-click.  The nice thing about pay-per-click marketing is that you can be extremely specific in who you target.  You can target searches from a specific geographic area (so you could have you ad show on all searches for within the Indianapolis area for “dentist”) or you can target geographically based terms (like Carmel Dentist).  Your ad will automatically show up at the top of the sponsored results if you’re willing to pay enough rather than having to build up your rankings over time for organic search results.

2. Social Media

Your business should have a presence on sites like Twitter or Facebook if you’re catering to consumers because those are the services that people are actively using.  On Twitter you can actively engage with customers if they’re writing comments about your business.  On Facebook you can create a Fan Page and see who your most loyal customers truly are.  There are countless ways to use these services with different promotions, and it’s best to find someone knowledgeable in this space to help.

3. Maps

Make sure that your business claims it’s local listing on services like Google Maps.  As a proud Droid owner I can definitely say that I use my Google Maps app more than almost any other app on my phone and it’s constantly getting me to where I need to go.  If I’m looking for a quick bite to eat and your restaurant isn’t on the map then you’re not going to get my business simply because I couldn’t find you.

4. Location-Based Services

There are quite a few location-based networks that can be extremely effective for local businesses. Services like Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Google Latitude, Yelp and others are gaining steam quickly and becoming mainstream.  The general concept is that users can check-in at their location and then broadcast that to their friends.  These services are set up perfectly for promotions at restaurants and coffee shops so it’s definitely important that you look into taking advantage of them while they’re still in their infancy and smartphone use is starting to grow rapidly.

As a local business you can’t afford to miss out on the amazing online marketing opportunities that are now available.

We’re getting read to send out our wedding invitations within the next month.  We have a few of the addresses that we need, but most of them we’ll need to get from our guests via phone or email.

We’ll be putting the addresses into a spreadsheet so we have everything in one place.  So I decided to simply link a Google Spreadsheet to the email so that everyone could input their information directly into the spreadsheet.  This eliminates all of the copy and pasting we would have to do maually.  Now when our friends get our email they can open the spreadsheet and follow the format that’s already set up for name and address.

Here’s how to set this up:

1. Create a new spreadsheet in Google Docs and type in your column headings based on the information you want to gather

2. Save the spreadsheet with a unique ame

3. Click on “Share” in the top right, and then check the boxes for “Allow all others to view” and “Also allow them to edit.”  Now you can copy and paste that link into an email or anywhere you’d like to share it with your friends.  All the data that is entered will be updated automatically.

I laughed pretty hard at this one…his reaction is priceless