OrionX Blog
The 10th CryptoSuper500 Report
Today my colleague Stephen Perrenod published the tenth edition of his biannual CryptoSuper500 report. We issued the following press release. (PR site link is here.) Bitcoin Mining Capacity Reaches 350 Exahashes/second The Tenth Edition of the CryptoSuper500 Report Shows Growing Dominance of Bitcoin MENLO PARK, Calif. – May 25, 2023 – OrionX Research today released […]
30% Tax on Bitcoin’s Electricity Input is Proposed
An in-depth look into the proposed tax on Bitcoin’s electricity input. This article was featured on Medium’s ILLUMINATION.
-By Stephen Perrenod
Black Holes* as a possible source of Universal Dark Energy
A look into whether it is dark energy, not dark matter, that black holes explain.
-By Stephen Perrenod
The 9th CryptoSuper500 Report
Today my colleague Stephen Perrenod published the ninth edition of his biannual CryptoSuper500 report. We issued the following press release. (PR site link is here.) Bitcoin in Unique Leadership Position with Ethereum’s Abandonment of Proof of Work* The Ninth Edition of the CryptoSuper500 Report Evaluates Crypto Winter as Annual Economic Value of Proof of […]
Mentorship and 4 Dimensions of Personal Growth
Being a mentee requires great self-awareness, willingness to grow, actual growth, recognition of that growth, and practice to be the ultimate leader. Mentors accelerate such a transformation and arguably make it possible.
Regulating the Gig Economy, The PRO Act as an Example
Rapidly changing technologies make it complex to set policy or write laws that reflect their intent. A case in point is regulating the gig economy and the PRO Act.
The Sixth Edition of the CryptoSuper500 List Shows Cryptocurrency Mining Nears $40 Billion Annual Value
Inspired by the TOP500 list, biannual list of the most powerful cryptocurrency mining pools tracks compute power and economic value
Bitcoin and Ethereum Portfolio Allocation
Bitcoin and Ethereum Portfolio Allocation
-By Stephen Perrenod
Flash Hash Crash: have we peaked?
Flash hash crash: have we peaked? And is Bitcoin a Ponzi scheme?
-By Stephen Perrenod
Bank of America’s Hit Piece on Bitcoin
Is Bitcoin dirty? This month Bank of America Global Research issued a 49-page report on Bitcoin titled “Bitcoin’s Dirty Little Secrets” that comes across as a hit piece.
-By Stephen Perrenod
Bitcoin’s Long Term Value
It is well known that technology adoption approximates an S-Curve or logistic function. It took half a century for electricity to be widely adopted in the US, a quarter of a century for half the population to get TVs, but mobile phone adoption took only half that time.
-By Stephen Perrenod
Axions in Pulsars
Has Dark Matter been converted to X-rays in Neutron Star magnetic fields? Many people have heard of neutrinos (little ‘neutral ones’). But there is another dark matter candidate, never observed in the laboratory, which would have a mass much less than even the three known neutrinos. And is less well known than neutrinos.
-By Stephen Perrenod
Bitcoin: A New Asset Class
A new asset class has been born. Sift through the posts on your social media and you will find that just a few years ago, it was big news that Bitcoin had broken $1000. That was a big deal because it was the third time Bitcoin was priced more than $1k. Digital money was starting […]
Fifth Edition of CryptoSuper500 List Shows Annual Economic Value Hits New High
Menlo Park, Calif. – Nov. 13, 2020 — OrionX Research today unveiled the fifth edition of the CryptoSuper500 list. The report highlights the rapidly growing hashrate among the top six coins mined with Proof of Work consensus algorithms. In crypto mining, hashes are the metric that parallels floating point operations (flops) in the supercomputing world. Cryptocurrencies have reached Exascale class supercomputing, with a hash rate of around 115 ExaHashes per second just for Bitcoin.
Bitcoin’s Uniqueness as a Store of Value
Money is a universal intermediate good used as a form of wealth. People use it as the connector between other goods and services, and as a way to resolve debts. The first well-documented money was accounted for in Babylonian temples in the form of barley. You see already from this, that money has aspects of virtuality, and it has a definition as an accounting unit as well as serving as a medium of exchange and a store of value for delayed usage.
-By Stephen Perrenod
Building Successful Online Communities with Celia Chase
Online communities provide insights into customers’ preferences, increase customer retention, and decrease support costs. How do organizations build, grow and engage effective online communities in this time of physical distancing? Celia Chase of OrionX and Linda Crowe of IBM share best practices for creating and growing a thriving online community.
5 Ways to Grow Your Online Community
Learn more about creating and growing your online community, and participate in a group discussion at the Bay Area Content Marketing Meetup, “Building Successful Online Communities” to on October 8 with Linda Crowe from IBM and Celia Chase of OrionX. Register here
What is 5G and Why is it a Big Deal?
We are trying something new, posting the transcript of a podcast. We start with one of the more popular OrionX Download podcasts on 5G. It was described as “probably one of the best discussions anywhere about 5G” and I obviously agree! 5G is a big deal as a technology and as a matter of geopolitical importance.
Bitcoin is Anti-Fragile: 20 Reasons
Bitcoin has survived many errors, shocks, and even splits from the main branch of its evolutionary tree. It has been declared dead by journalists and fiat economy wise men and women some 380 times. But these events, concerns, or self-interested attacks have not stopped Bitcoin. It keeps getting stronger, and every 10 minutes the security of all prior transactions is enhanced. Bitcoin is now functionally eternal, certainly positioned to survive beyond the year 2100.
-By Stephen Perrenod
Fourth CryptoSuper 500 List: First After Bitcoin Halving
China has most of the top 50 cryptocurrency supercomputer-class mining pools. In many ways, CryptoSuper 500 and similar lists are a barometer of important national capabilities. As we look more deeply at the impact of technology on policy decisions at the national and global levels, we will incorporate the lessons from all such capability lists.
Fourth Edition of CryptoSuper500 List Shows Effects of Bitcoin Halving
Menlo Park, CA – June 23, 2020 – OrionX Research today released the fourth edition of the CryptoSuper500 list, the first after the “Bitcoin Halving” that took place in May 2020. The list tracks supercomputers used for cryptocurrency mining, a computationally intensive decentralized consensus process that allows cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or Ethereum to operate without the need for a central trusted authority. The CryptoSuper500 list was inspired by the well-known TOP500 list of the most powerful supercomputers in the world.
The Top-5 Technologies All Organizations Must Understand
30 minutes to cover the basics and high level issues related to the technologies that will drive the digital infrastructure of the future enterprise. These include IoT, 5G, HPC, AI, Blockchain (including cryptocurrencies and smart contracts), and Quantum Computing.
Science Must Drive Policy Decisions to Re-open the Economy
Policy decisions to re-open the economy will be complex. They will also be politically influenced at a time when there is little room for error and decisions must be based on science and accurate data. This is not to say that we must ignore the unpredictabilities of our time. To the contrary, this is about preparedness and the ability to not just anticipate, but to respond to changes.
Blockchain, IoT, and the Future of Payment Systems
You need new transaction systems to make it possible for smart connected Things to do their thing: deliver services efficiently to people and to each other, verify delivery, and receive payment.
Truth, Trust, and Deepfakes
Looking at one of the most important topics of our time, and especially relevant in an election year, we outline the challenges and technologies that you can use towards trusted data. This is a summary of research and a conversation with our insightful guest, Dave Maher, CTO of Intertrust.
Digital Transformation (DX): Opportunity or Threat?
Digital Transformation (DX) is not just another slogan or IT upgrade, but a profound shift in what your customers want or will want, and what you have to do to deliver. It is a shift in your business model. Read about the many dimensions of DX and how OrionX can help you make it actionable.
Living on Satoshi Time: What Block is it?
Today is Block Year 12, and within the year it is Block Month 5, Block Day 137 Bitcoin Generates Its Own Calendar Our Gregorian calendar is based on the Solar year, the Lunar month, and the Terrene (Earthly) day. Bitcoin has its own natural calendar that can be constructed to approximate our human calendar of […]
HPC and AI on Wall Street: Panel Discussion on Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies
HPC and AI on Wall Street Conference At the recent HPC and AI on Wall Street conference, I moderated a panel on Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain. Panelists included Ryan Quick of Providentia Worldwide, Asha Dakshi of AlphaPoint, Eric Simone of ClearBlade, and Dan Simerman of the IOTA Foundation. Thanks to Jem Pagan of BluSky Consulting who […]
Top 50 of Crypto Mining – June 2019
Today, June 14, 2019, we released the second biannual list of Top 50 cryptocurrency mining pools. We do this in conjunction with the Top 500 supercomputing list that is released twice a year, in June and November. That list has been a matter of national pride for the US, Japan, China, and many other countries. […]
CryptoSuper500, 2nd Edition
What is new with the most powerful crypto mining pools? Thanks to the efforts of my colleague Dr. Stephen Perrenod, OrionX launched a new CryptoSuper500 list last November, coinciding with the eagerly awaited TOP500 list of most powerful supercomputers. The TOP500 has spawned variations that look at different workloads and attributes, for example, the Green500, […]
Did JPMorgan Just Kill the Bitcoin Dream?
An article in Barron’s written by Ben Walsh on Valentine’s Day is titled “JPMorgan Just Killed the Bitcoin Dream”. JPMorgan Chase has announced an altcoin, a stable coin, for use by institutional customers. It will be tethered to the US dollar. This development is the first such stable coin issued by a US bank. So […]
Will Lightning Electrify Bitcoin?
Why: Scaling for bandwidth and efficiency Suppose Bitcoin could scale. Many altcoins were created in the promise of handling more transactions, and with lower fees. But Bitcoin can scale, and it will, thanks to the Lightning Network which went live in 2018. While small, it is growing rapidly. Bitcoin is often criticized for lack of […]
Is Central Bank Digital Currency Cryptocurrency?
Recently the International Monetary Fund produced a research report on Central Bank Digital Currencies, titled “Casting Light on Central Bank Digital Currency”, and available here: https://www.imf.org/~/media/Files/Publications/SDN/2018/SDN1808.ashx Even the title is interesting in its omission of the terms cryptocurrency and blockchain. The basic concept they were evaluating was that of central bank controlled digital currency issued […]
CryptoSuper500: the most powerful cryptocurrency mining pools
Cryptocurrency mining pools have become larger. A new list, CryptoSuper500 tracks them according to economical value, computational power, and by extension, energy use. If you are following my colleague Dr. Stephen Perrenod‘s blogs and reports, you know that he, and the rest of us at OrionX, aim to keep on top of business, technology, and […]
Will Bitcoin Consume All Electricity?
The idea that bitcoin will consume an enormous fraction of the world’s electricity is hysteria. In a recent article in the Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, June 2018 issue, Nicholas Weaver (a lecturer in computer science at UC Berkeley) raised this issue, in what was otherwise a good article on the security issues […]
Is Bitcoin on your Computer? Money in the Internet
No, not asking if you own any Bitcoin. Or the IP address. This blog is prompted by the Nicholas Weaver article “Risks of Cryptocurrencies” in the June 2018 Communications of the ACM. He writes, rather misleadingly in our opinion: “This was not because our Bitcoin was stolen from a honeypot, rather the graduate student who created […]
National Security and Blockchain Technology
National Security considerations are often intimately intertwined with the adoption of new technologies. Last year Tokyo hosted a meeting of the International Standards Organization, including a session on blockchain technology to examine ideas around standards for blockchain and distributed ledgers. A member of the Russian delegation, who is part of their intelligence apparatus at the […]
Is Blockchain the Key to Web 3.0?
Web 3.0 has been around as a meme since early in the century. This writer was formerly with the Sun Microsystems Education business and recalls meetings we sponsored over a decade ago, that were attended by academic computer scientists promoting the concept. And yet it has been slow to take off, and it remains a […]
Information Economy 2.0
Bitcoin is a Trillion $ Economy We often hear that we live in an Information Economy. We have an information-based economy, but we don’t have a pure form of “money as information”. Instead we have a hybrid of digital money and paper money with encoded information such as denomination and serial numbers and engraving details. […]
OrionX Releases New Blockchain Constellation™ Research Paper
I am very pleased and excited to announce the release of the newest paper in our Constellation™ series about blockchain/cryptocurrency technologies: “Cryptocurrency Outlook: More Chasm Crossing.” This is a comprehensive look at this emerging and important technology, written by my colleague Dr. Stephen Perrenod who has been working with cryptocurrencies for several years and has focused […]
Bitcoin Forks are So 2017
“Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom” Mao Tse Tung 百花齐放 Well there are 20 flowers in the Bitcoin ecosystem. And over 1400 in the cryptocurrency ecosystem at present. Salad forks, dinner forks, shrimp forks, dessert forks, tuning forks, pitchforks… so many kinds of forks.. Image credit: Ellen Levy Finch, CC BY-SA 4.0 Why fork a new […]
Bitcoin: Like Gold or Like a Currency?
Valuing the various bitcoin forks Recent News: Segwit2x fork has been postponed indefinitely Some say bitcoin acts more as digital gold then as a currency, more as a store of value than as a medium of exchange. It is very interesting to look at the various bitcoin forks with this question in mind. Everything in […]
Evolutionary Forks and Dividends
What is a fork? It is early days in evolutionary terms for cryptocurrency. Bitcoin has not been around even a decade. Ethereum has only been here for a few years. The respective economies of these and other cryptocurrencies have been growing at triple digit percentage rates. A given blockchain can be thought of as a […]
Ethereum: Smarter than a Fifth Grader?
Ethereum is described in Wikipedia as an “an open-source, public, blockchain-based distributed computing platform featuring smart contract functionality“. How does it differ from Bitcoin? Well Bitcoin is open-source, public, distributed, and block-chain based. The difference is principally found in the terms “computing platform” and “smart contract functionality”. And there are other differences as well. Ethereum […]
Why Buffet Doesn’t “Get” Bitcoin
Warren Buffett is the most famous name in stock investing, the second richest person in the world, and a leading expert in valuing companies and securities. He also is a big investor in banks, including Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America. So he has a lot of vested interest in the current monetary […]
Cryptocurrency a Bridge to the Future
Bitcoin, and cryptocurrencies more generally, can be a bridge to a better monetary future for the globe. In almost every nation today, fiat currency managed by a central bank is the norm. This is money that is inherently inflationary by design. Since central banks are controlled by national governments, and governments routinely run substantial deficits, […]
J-Coin Prediction: it will be a Bonsai among alt-coins
One of the largest banks in Japan, Mizuho, along with other Japanese banks, is looking to get into the blockchain game. CNBC reports “Japanese banks are thinking of making their own cryptocurrency”. Except they are not, based on the information released so far. This will be mobile Yen, a use of blockchain to allow mobile […]
Jamie Dimon is Afraid
First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, goes the saying. JP Morgan (not Jamie Dimon) Jamie Dimon is CEO of JP Morgan Chase, arguably the most important money center bank. He recently called Bitcoin a “fraud”, heaping ridicule upon, and fighting with Bitcoin as well, with a single phrase. Because he […]
Money 3.0: Cryptocurrencies
Why are cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum Money 3.0? And what are Money 1.0 and Money 2.0? Recently, Jamie Dimon called Bitcoin a ‘fraud’. This coming from the CEO of JP Morgan, the bank that has been fined more than any other, save one, for financial crimes since the Great Recession of 2008. His statement […]
Secure IoT is the superset trend in tech, the ultimate hashtag soup, here’s why
There are more Things than anything else! And they’re going online in droves, adding capability but also vulnerability, and making the Secure Internet of Things (IoT), the super set of the technology trends. Secure IoT is the place with the most interdisciplinary, and therefore, the most difficult challenges. If you believe, as you should, that […]
Epic AI Survey Completed: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Deep Learning
We are very pleased to announce the completion of our “epic” AI survey. Here is the press release that we issued this morning: ORIONX RESEARCH ANNOUNCES SURVEY RESULTS REVEALING CUSTOMERS’ ADOPTION OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI), MACHINE LEARNING (ML) AND DEEP LEARNING (DL) MENLO PARK, Calif., August 30, 2017 – OrionX Research today announced the availability […]
Data Loss, A Big Problem in Digital Transformation
Data loss is a subject whose time has come! Digital Transformation is upon us and with it the beginnings of a vibrant data economy. Extracting, manipulating, and making sense of the information content from physical assets and business processes is the essence of this new era. With it, come two growing problems: downtime, and data […]
For Enterprise Cloud, Oracle is the Only Choice Grounded in Reality
Snapshot of Cloud Computing for Enterprise IT There is a loudly expressed opinion that ‘the cloud’ is the future of computing and that companies such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft will dominate the market, replacing established hardware and software vendors such as IBM, Dell, HPE, and Oracle. In some ways, this is true especially for […]
New podcast for big ideas in tech
Here at OrionX.net, our research agenda is driven by the latest developments in technology. We are also fortunate to work with many tech leaders in nearly every part of the “stack”, from chips to apps, who are driving the development of such technologies. In recent years, we have had projects in Cryptocurrencies, IoT, AI, Cybersecurity, […]
The rise of AI marks an end to CPU dominated computing
Just as Intel, the king of CPUs and the very bloodstream of computing announced that it is ending its Intel Developer Forum (IDF) annual event, this week in San Jose, NVIDIA, the king of GPUs and the fuel of Artificial Intelligence is holding its biggest GPU Technology Conference (GTC) annual event yet. Coincidence? Hardly. With […]
Top-10 Data Center Predictions for 2017
A variation of this article was originally published in The Register, “Wow, what an incredible 12 months: 2017’s data center year in review”, Feb 6, 2017. The data center market is hot, especially now that we are getting a raft of new stuff, from promising non-Intel chips and system architectures to power and cooling optimizations […]
Deep Learning & Pieces of Eight
What does a Spanish silver dollar have to do with Deep Learning? It’s a question of standards and required precision.The widely used Spanish coin was introduced at the end of the 16th century as Spain exploited the vast riches of New World silver. It was denominated as 8 Reales. Because of its standard characteristics it […]
The Return of Vector Processing
Vector processing was an unexpected topic to emerge from the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC)held last week. On the Monday of the conference, a new leader on the TOP500 list was announced. The Sunway TaihuLight system uses a new processor architecture that is Single-Instruction-Multiple-Data (SIMD) with a pipeline that can do eight 64-bit floating-point calculations per […]
Research from OrionX
Today, we are announcing the OrionX Constellation™ research framework as part of our strategy services. Paraphrasing what I wrote in my last blog when we launched 8 packaged solutions: One way to see OrionX is as a partner that can help you with content, context, and dissemination. OrionX Strategy can create the right content because […]
Competitive Analysis: Developing a Competitive Culture
Competitive analysis (competitive intelligence) is critically important for strategy, planning, and sales support. But it should also permeate an organization’s DNA, preserve high ethical standards, and deliver high quality content. Competitive awareness is like security awareness or commitment to quality – it’s the duty of everyone in the organization. This is what we call a […]
Market Sizing
“Just how big a market is this?” If you are an entrepreneur raising money or a seasoned product manager, or a CEO planning on an IPO, someone is going to ask you that question and you need to be well prepared with the answer. Market sizing is an important and common requirement. It is an […]
Packaged Solutions from OrionX
We are excited to announce 8 new packaged solutions designed to address several common requirements. Here’s a link to the press release we issued today. One way to see OrionX is as a partner that can help you with content, context, and dissemination. OrionX Strategy can create the right content because it conducts deep analysis […]
What is the use of quantum computing without pictures or conversations?
The world of quantum computing frequently seems as bizarre as the alternate realities created in Lewis Carroll’s masterpieces “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking-Glass”. Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) was a well-respected mathematician and logician in addition to being a photographer and enigmatic author. Has quantum computing’s time actually come or are we just […]
Dan Olds Joins OrionX
Dan Olds, who founded Gabriel Consulting Group more than a decade ago, has joined OrionX. An important part of the OrionX magic is the ability to understand technologies, the competitive landscape, and customer needs. We put a lot of effort into that. That is what clients need to connect products to customers, and to meet […]
IoT: The Ultimate Convergence
The Internet of Things (IoT) marketplace is expected to run into the trillions of dollars during the next 5 years. Gartner estimates 6.4 billion devices will be part of the Internet of Things this year. And they project $3 trillion of endpoint spending by the year 2020. [updated link] Gartner estimates 5.8 billion IoT endpoints […]
OrionX 2016 Technology Issues and Predictions
Here at OrionX.net, we are fortunate to work with tech leaders across several industries and geographies, serving markets in Mobile, Social, Cloud, and Big Data (including Analytics, Cognitive Computing, IoT, Machine Learning, Semantic Web, etc.), and focused on pretty much every part of the “stack”, from chips to apps and everything in between. Doing this […]
The Big Rules of Big Data
Data is good. Big Data is big, but what does it take to make it good? All else being equal, it’s better to have data and dismiss it than not have it and miss out. No data, and you’re driving blind. But too much data, and you might as well be driving blind. Sensory overload! […]
Benchmarks, Schmenchmarks: Big Iron Data and the November 2015 TOP500
There has been much discussion in recent years as to the continued relevance of the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark as a valid measure of the performance of the world’s most capable machines, with some supercomputing sites opting out of the TOP500 completely such as National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois […]
Big Data and HPC: Convergence? (Part 2 of 2)
Last week, in Part 1 of this two-part blog, we looked at trends in Big Data and analytics, and started to touch on the relationship with HPC (High Performance Computing). In this week’s blog we take a look at the usage of Big Data in HPC and what commercial and HPC Big Data environments have in […]
Big Data meets HPC: Convergence? (Part 1 of 2)
Data volumes, velocity, and variety are increasing as consumer devices become more powerful. PCs, smart phones and tablets are the instrumentation, along with the business applications that continually capture user input, usage patterns and transactions. As devices become more powerful each year (each few months!) the generated volumes of data and the speed of data […]
OpenStack Cloud: “And then there were five!”
The IT industry is arguably going through its biggest transformation since the introduction of the IBM PC in the early 1980s, and a cloud service based approach is the likely destination for most enterprise workloads. On August 26th and 27th Mirantis hosted the “second annual” OpenStack Silicon Valley event at the Computer History Museum in […]
Peter ffoulkes Joins OrionX
Today, OrionX is celebrating another great milestone as we welcome a new partner to our team! Peter ffoulkes, who was most recently Research Director at 451 Research is joining OrionX. Thanks to the support of all of you, our clients, our colleagues, our community, OrionX is poised to continue to raise the bar for Strategy, […]
Top 4 Marketing Lessons from Mad Men
The TV series Mad Men was a smashing success, and it offered many teachable moments in marketing. If you have not seen it, here is a quick intro: Mad Men (as in, Madison Ave men) is the story of an ad exec in the 50s-60s. The lead character is Don Draper who is a partner […]
Long-Term Planning: The Next Hundred Years!
Long-term planning is an art. But it might take a real scientist to tackle a hundred-year planning horizon! Frank Wilczek is a Nobel Prize winner in theoretical physics, awarded for his work in quantum chromodynamics (quarks, to you and me). He is currently the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at M.I.T. Professor Wilczek was invited […]
Is In-Memory Computing the Holy Grail for Big Data Analytics?
The industry is awash with articles on big data. Big data news is not confined to the technical webpages anymore. You can read about big data on Forbes and The Economist for example. Each week the technical media reports on break through, startups, funding and customer use cases. No matter your source for information on […]
OrionX: a New Model for Strategy, Marketing, PR
Welcome to Orion and OrionX.net! When we formed Orion Marketing more than 6 years ago, our vision was to offer a technology marketing capability that would cover the entire spectrum from the board room to customer programs. We anticipated that marketing as a function would be transformed in significant ways: more technology, more data, more […]
One Chart to Rule them all – Infographic Shootout Part 2
As some of you know, I’m a visual learner. Point being, I LOVE infographics! A few years ago, my colleague wrote a short blog about Infographics for Beginners. But a lot has changed online and I’d like to give a walkthrough of all the cool new tools available if you need to convey lots of […]
“Big Rules of Marketing” Presentation on SlideShare
As you set your marketing strategies, take a look at the full slide deck that covers 14 of our “Big Rules of Marketing”, available on SlideShare. Some of our clients have used this in their off-site/planning/leadership meetings. We’d be available to present it at such meetings and tell the stories that go with each one. […]
Best Time to Launch an Online Survey?
When do you think people are most likely to fill out an online survey? Weekdays or weekends? Early morning or late afternoon? Knowing when people are most likely to take the time to fill out a survey can help you determine when to launch your survey. Here’s what SurveyMonkey discovered in terms of best day […]
Dictionary of Numbers: Nifty Tool to Make Numbers Meaningful
Large, abstract numbers have always mystified me. For example, $25 billion sounds like a lot, but it’s beyond my range of comprehension. Now you can use Dictionary of Numbers, a new Google Chrome extension to make sense of numbers. This can be really helpful for marketeers! I typed in $25 billion and got these results: […]
Get Your Website Analytics via Weekly Infographic!
There are many tools that help you easily create infographics (easel.ly, piktochart, venngage, among others). One of the tools we use, visual.ly, recently introduced its Google Analytics report which sends you a custom infographic of your website’s performance each week, including change in page views, time spent per visit, new vs. returning visitors and more! […]
Infographic: When is the Best Time to Send Email?
When is the best time of day to send an email blast? Check out this infographic from GetResponse. Here’s the bottom-line, per GetResponse: Emails have the best results within the 1st hour after delivery. This is when 23.63% of all emails are opened. But 24 hours after delivery, the average open rate is close to […]
Has Your Facebook Fan Reach Declined?
If you’re a Page Admin for a Facebook brand page, have you noticed lower reach and engagement numbers lately? Facebook changed its Edgerank algorithm on September 20, and Edgerank Checker published a blog and calculated that pages lost approximately 6.5% of their reach after the 20th. We’ve seen a slight decline in Reach with the […]
Cheat Sheet for Sizing Social Media Images
I just attended another seminar by Mari Smith and was reminded of this helpful cheat sheet for social media images from Luna Metrics. If you’ve experimented with trying to correctly size Facebook Cover images, for example, this guide will save you time by giving exact dimensions. For example, for Facebook: Cover: 851 x 315 Apps: […]
Should Businesses Still Use Wire Services? (If so, which one?)
Whether it’s Twitter or YouTube, social media tools allow businesses to instantly publish to the world and share information broadly. So do we still need to use wire services to distribute our news? The short answer is yes, since distributing press releases over the wire will index your news on major search engines like Google, […]
How to Stand Out in a Crowd
A simple trip to the grocery store will show us the overwhelming choices we face each day. When I enter the supermarket, there are more than 38,000 different items to choose from. I can choose from 10 different kinds of oatmeal alone! In most industries, brands have grown in number to mind-boggling complexity. So how […]
Infographics for Beginners
I’m a visual person, so I appreciate when information is conveyed via pictures. Infographics are very popular these days and I wanted to create an infographic for one of our clients: Curriki, an educational non-profit that provides free K-12 classroom resources for teachers, parents and students. There are several free tools to create infographics like […]
Avoid “Sterile” Communications
Anyone who knows me knows that I’m obsessed with food. A while back, I was listening to a weekend radio show that featured Food Maven Joyce Goldstein. She was describing a celebrated pastry chef who spent hours and hours making an elaborate dessert that used all sorts of gadgets – a huge slicer, a dehydrator, gellan […]
Think Hollywood for an Effective Technology Pitch
If you’re a screenwriter, you need to successfully pitch your idea for a new film or TV show to Hollywood producers. Likewise, if you’re a start-up, you need to sell your idea using an original and compelling pitch. “Good in a room” is a Hollywood term referring to creative people who are experts at pitching […]
Growing in the Asia-Pacific Marketplace (Part 3)
This is the final entry of a three-part blog series on Growing in the the Asia-Pacific (APAC) marketplace. In the first entry we discussed the market dynamics for 14 major countries, and presented statistics that indicate that the major share, over 60%, of American exports are sent to developed countries such as Japan, Australia and […]
Growing in the Asia-Pacific Marketplace (Part 2)
In the first entry of this 3-part series we discussed a Go Big strategy versus a Go Smart strategy, and looked at some rather surprising statistics on imports from the U.S. into various countries in the region. Yes, China and India have impressive growth rates and great potential, but if we look at 2009 import […]
Tales From the Trenches
Marketing without strategy is like throwing mud against a wall and seeing what sticks. Strategy brings focus and focus drives execution and execution delivers results with improved marketing ROI. We have all worked on marketing programs without a clear strategy or vision consequently the results have been poor and the fix has frequently been to […]
Growing in the Asia-Pacific Marketplace
We are all aware that China and India are the two most populous nations on the planet, and that their economies boast impressive growth rates in the range of 8 to 10% per year. In the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region these two nations alone have about 2/3 of the area’s population. Most of us are also […]
The Power of Stories in Business
We’re all familiar with stories – they’re the tales you tell upon returning from a trek in Costa Rica, or the chilling story you tell your teenager about the perils of drinking and driving. But how do you tell a business story? Even in business, we tend to understand things better when they’re presented in […]
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