I’m pleased with how much opportunity for personal development and professional networking there is in Utah. Yes, I do want to see it grow even more, but it’s nice have more good options than I could possibly attend.
Tonight for example, the Utah Tech Events and Utah Business Events calendars show four events in which I have genuine interested, all occurring at the same time. At 7:30 tonight I would be perfectly content to be at any of these four events:
- Twelve Horses: Brand Evolution
- Ignite Salt Lake
- BYU Web Startup Group
- Utah Python Users Group
Incidentally, I’d also enjoy being at home with my family, but this abundance of events centered around professional networking and personal development shows that Utah really does have a great (albeit budding) tech and business ecosystem. These mostly non-profit knowledge-sharing groups constitute, I believe, some crucial intangibles that are important underpinnings to a vibrant economy. I’m glad to see them, and I’d love to see them grow.
Anyway, there’s no excuse to not be developing your personal and professional skills at some of these events. Just don’t try to substitute them for hard and diligent work. :)
If you’d like to be a contributor to out local tech and business calendars, please ping me or any of the other calendar admins. Especially if you’ve got a utah-based business or tech group and would like a channel to attract more people, we’d love to hear from you.
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I just added the BYU Web Startup Group to my comprehensive list of Utah Tech Groups.
From their website:
The Web Startup group was founded to bring together people interested in creating new sites and services online. Group members include web developers (programmers and designers), marketing and business-minded individuals, creative idea people, and others with technology related skills. The group meets regularly to discuss and make Web Startups come to life. If you are interested in making a difference online then join us!
Their next meeting will be this Thursday and will cover Android and “Jump Starting your Website”.
I also added one of the founders, Adam Chavez, to Utah’s Business Blog Aggregator and invited him to contribute his events to the Utah Tech Events Calendar. If you or anyone you know should be added to these Utah business community sites, please contact me.
BTW, there’s also a Utah Business Events Calendar which hasn’t caught on nearly as much. Let me know if you’d like to contribute. Maybe I’ll merge the two calendars in the future; we’ll see.
Anyway, checkout the Web Startup Group. I think they could end up being a really valuable resource to the Utah business and technology communities.
Tags: Adam Chavez, BYU, Community Building, Community Events, ConnectBlogs, Entrepreneurship, Utah Tech Events, Utah Tech Groups, Web Starting Group
Business, Not For Profits, Technology, Utah | Jordy | 
November 10, 2008 12:29 pm | 
Comments (1)
Universal Wishlist Review
I’m not a big shopper, especially when it comes to traditional brick-and-morter stores, but the internet marketer in me loves new features that make online shopping more pleasant. Such is Amazon’s new Universal Wishlist feature. (OK, it’s not that new, but it’s still awesome.)
I love Amazon’s Universal Wishlist because it allows me to save items from other online stores right to my Amazon wishlist. Being able to store all of the products I want in one place has made Amazon my de facto shopping site for filing away stuff that I want now, but can only afford to buy someday. It’s my new virtual den of covetousness.
Other similar services exist as well. TheThingsIWant also looks kind of cool, and it has basically the same core functionality. I haven’t tried it, but they supposedly have a feature that allows you to syndicate your wishlist to your blog. Very cool, and surely they’re getting some affiliate commission from that. I’m not sure that I would ever use wishlist syndication, but I can definitely see it being an interesting component of a personal or family blog.
It occurred to me that Google Product Search must have some similar feature, and sure enough, they do. Google shopping list lets you save products you want and compare prices across tons of online stores. It also lets you save notes and publish products in either a public or private list. Very cool. The biggest feature that it’s missing (for me, anyway) is the ability to make your own wishlist submissions for items from smaller stores (like the Mises.org store) that don’t show up on Google’s radar. Too bad. Still, it’s great if you only buy from big retailers.
Anyway, if you’re online shopping experience has been bound to one retailer, I now pronounce it unbound.
Lessons in Open Marketing
But, you might be asking yourself: “Why would Amazon extend it’s functionality to to other sites? Isn’t that giving away some of its secret sauce, let alone revenue?”
Answers:
- Amazon uses the Universal Wishlists to make the “long tail” even longer, meaning it allows for even more product to be saved on it’s site. This is not necessarily to their direct benefit (since they don’t get the direct sale) but it does help build a shopping community around their site, and that’s as good as gold.
- I’m sure Amazon also gets a bit of a traffic boost from this. When else would I ever go from Mises.org directly to Amazon? Having a “Click to add” to my Amazon wishlist right in my browser makes Amazon one click away from any retailer on the net. Now that’s smart. (This is somewhat analogous to building a brick-and-morter store in the mall. Why build right next to your competition? Because you can both benefit from the increased traffic that being in the the place for shopping will bring. If it’s sybmiotic, it works for everyone.)
- Another win for Amazon: data mining. Suddenly Amazon knows what products I’m “eyeing” from other sites, often their direct competition. That’s great data to have when for making pricing, merchandising, and marketing decisions. That kind of competitive data is priceless, especially to an online store that process and act on that data quickly. Interested in a lawnchair from so-and-so? well here are our lawnchairs. X customer added Y watch from Z store? Why don’t we sell Y watch? You get the picture.
Overall I think implementing the Universal Wishlist a great, although somewhat unintuitive, strategic move for Amazon. It’s gutsy to encourage and facilitate increasing sales for other retailers; but it also builds community, increases site traffic, and provides meaningful (and actionable) data for competive analysis. Plus it builds goodwill –or at least it did for me. I appreciate being able to use Amazon’s wishlist feature wherever I find good products. That’s just good marketing.
Tags: Affliate Marketing, Amazon, Blog Widgets, Branding, Community Building, Comparison Shopping Engines, Competitive Analysis, Data Mining, Google Products, Google Shopping List, Internet Retail, Long Tail, Marketing, Merchandising, Online Marketing, TheThingsIWant, Universal Wishlist, Walled Gardens, Web Traffic, Wishlists
Business, Technology | Jordy | November 7, 2008 12:26 pm | Comments (0)
The aforementioned new version of ConnectBlogs.com rolled into production last night. It will be a process of ongoing improvement, but I’m really happy with what we have now. I think a lot of people will find it to be a valuable resource, and I personally hope it makes the Utah business and tech communities a little smarter and a little tighter. Check it out and let me know what you think.
Note: I’ll soon be posting some guidelines for people that want to be (or remain) syndicated there. It’s basic stuff: a clean and relevant feed, no ads, no offensive content, try to stay mostly on topic, etc.
Note 2: I’ve already started syndicating a very non-comprehensive list of Utah business bloggers that I personally like to read. If you are one of them and for some reason don’t want to be syndicated, just drop me a line and I can remove you right away. I’ll be personally contacting each one to make sure it’s OK.
Note 3: Some of the people that were posting on ConnectBlogs.com won’t have their old posts show up for a day or so while I work out some glitches. Nothing to be worried about here. :)
I apologize that I haven’t posted in a while; I’ve been pretty busy with a number of things: my day job as website manager at Overstock, a lot of website contracting and consulting work in the evenings, my usual slew of volunteer projects, and most recently (and notably) setting up the new version of ConnectBlogs –which is not live yet, but should be very soon.
ConnectBlogs will be moving to more of a syndication model, which I believe is more in line with what the Utah blogging community (myself particularly) expected. So in addition to the current “resident writers”, the upcoming version of ConnectBlogs will encourage Utah bloggers to post on their own blogs and have their content aggregated based on how they tag (or categorize) it. ConnectBlogs will be an ad-free gesture to the Utah business and tech communities. We’ll get your content in front of a lot of people, and we’ll also provide plenty of backlinks.
So if you’re a Utah business or technology blogger and would like be included in ConnectBlogs, drop me a line with your name, URL, and feed URL (if you know it). There are some basic (and yet unpublished) rules on what and who can be syndicated, but I think most people who read this will qualify.
