On a recent business trip to Shanghai, I met up a with a friend, Sandy, in the ad industry, during dinner we chatted about some of the cool things brands in china were doing online. She was telling me of a campaign North Face, an outdoor clothing brand, launched, to encourage people to get out and explore new places in any weather.

They came up with an integrated campaign- both online and mobile- asking people to “plant a red flag” in each and every new place they explored over the course of 18 days. Through the power of the word of mouth and social media, they were able to get over half a million flags planted online, by users in just 18 days.

The key to the whole campaign was good use of a mash-up of social media, mobile technology and a viral element. Participants were able to easily use SMS to send in their location, which was then published on the mini-site. From there visitors could share and track others via social networks.

As North Face can attest to, used in the right context, you can generate a lot of traction and really get your target audience involved in a great brand experience.

So the next time you are looking for good ideas, take a page from North face, look at making your campaign more interactive by including elements of mobile technology – SMS, location based services, mobile apps – as part of your integrated campaign..

“You can’t beat the Experience” Jimi Henrdrix; Are you Experienced?

As a young company we are always competing for great talent. Instead of the perks, brand, level of salaries a large multinational offers, we provide commitment, sense of achievement and most importantly the ability to impact change. It sometimes can resemble an emotional roller coaster, but that’s all part of a young company and it takes the type to embrace it. We look for that type!

Talent at Exicon ranges from young, energetic, driven and passionate team members who love the fast pace of the technology industry, the clients we work with and the sense of achievement we offer.

At the same time we complement these skills with a team of slightly more senior (hey I’m still young! and wouldn’t accept otherwise anyway…) experienced and still extremely driven, savvy and connected industry players. We each clock more than the 10,000 hours in our field of expertise (hint Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping point). We love what we do supporting clients with innovation whilst incubating and developing our own products.

Therefore we are always excited when the commitment of a new team member injects additional energy.

After having worked together with the team over the last 4 months Simon Smith joined Exicon this month as our Commercial Director. (Check out his bio on Linkedin.com. Our site is being updated)

As we begin to demand more commercial, governance and financial expertise Simon will be enhancing our financial, legal and performance management systems across our corporate activities. Like every young company we continue to grow and are looking to expand. Simon’s Corporate Development experience and management skills will support Exicon’s expanding client base whilst continuing to support attracting the best talent across every area of our business.

At the same time we want to congratulate Patrick who will be joining Lightsquared as VP of Eco-system Development. This just proves we continue to develop great talent and have solid expertise in areas the industry is demanding. We just can’t always compete against the offers of big Multinationals and Hedge Funds .

It’s good to see our alumni expanding and landing at influential places. We are working on building our “endowment”

I just read an interesting interview with Vice President of Engineering at Facebook Mike Schroepfer on Venturebeat and with Sheryl Sandberg, COO on Techcrunch

- 300M active users a month
Pretty large population….

- People spend 8 billion minutes online on Facebook every day.
Hence Facebook next to Youtube/Google being the top 2 destinations on the Internet

- There are 2 billion photos uploaded each month and 20 billion total.
Consumers want to share Images and Videos to stimulate conversation and interaction

- There are 15,000 other partners accessing Facebook data through its Connect service.
Identity is proving an important element. Facebook connect is now available for mobile sites too.

- Yesterday, the company serviced over 5 billion API calls. Facebook Platform is growing at a much faster rate than the web site.

The impact of Facebook opening their API’s in 2007 is still underestimated. Twitter for that matter too. This changed the economics of the web and is the “dawn of the application economy” to quote Mark Pincus, CEO of Zynga. (more…)

The buzzword you hear a lot in the software and internet industry is Real-time…. everything needs to be real-time, from real-time conferences to real-time servers to real-time search engines etc etc…

The real-time web is often described as the latest iteration, the new Web 2.0 or the next evolution of the internet largely due to the adoption of internet across PC’s, mobile and net books.

To get a better understanding of real time web we just need to step back and put things into perspective. New or Non users of Facebook/Twitter or other social media site commonly dismiss status updates like, “About to have a coffee” “Going to see a movie.” “Getting ready for my 3K swim”. However when someone says he’s going to see a movie in the office pantry this is not seen as trivial or a waste of time. They separate the real-time experience of conversation from the indexed, archived Internet.

And that’s exactly it. The value of the real-time web is valuable only in the moment it’s being experienced. The real-time web compliments your existing traditional internet experience. We are already using the internet in 2 different ways but the lines are “blurred”. (more…)

3 days ago Intuit announced their acquisition of mint for USD 170M. If you haven’t used Mint yet, it’s a brilliant service supporting consumers based on spending habits and methods with alternatives on how to make that dollar stretch further. Making it easy to use was a critical element to their success http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/10/23/mint-vs-quicken-patzer-points-importance-ui

Last year we met with a number of consumer and retail banks on the shift on the internet and offered some options on how this might effect their online customer propositions. Below is an extract from those presentations.

We sort of stopped pitching this after the financial crisis broke out in full swing, but with this acquisition it sort of makes me want to bring it out again and see if we can find some takers . (more…)