Appreciating Tech in Waterloo

I appreciated getting invited to Deloitte's Tech Appreciation dinner last night at 20 King in Kitchener/Waterloo. Waterloo is the home of RIM, Open Text and Bill Gates favourite university - the University of Waterloo. UW has an awesome reputation for maths and computer science. Deloitte are the accounting rock stars of the Waterloo tech space having figured how to stay close to entrepreneurial techies moving out of the unviversity - and how to keep young companies alive through SR&ED tax credits.

The Waterloo tech crowd is - a typical tech crowd - bright and interesting. I was fortunate enough to sit beside an ex-client and good friend Flavio Gomes of Logisense Corporation. Flav is turning Logisense into a serious player in the IP billing space.

Hot off Pubcon last week, I was pretty clear that if there's a threat to the internet as we know it - it's from Google's overwhelming dominance.

Flav disagrees and his perspective makes a lot of sense - the real, and serious threat is from the carriers, and the ISP's - the guys who've layed the road, own the road and control the toll booths - and have stood by to watch Google and others create billions of dollars of value while the highway business has been turned into a commodity. From Flav's perspective the road owners and the tool booth guys aren't going to stand around forever - they're going to claim their share of the action. The technology exists to do it - including categorizing all the different types of traffic, and charging a fee for each. If he's right - and the logic seems compelling - the wild west days of the current internet business boom could be in serious jeopardy - or not, providing you're in the business of helping collect tolls, like Logisense is.

Other interesting conversation was with Tobi Jenkins - banker, VC and wife of Open Text CEO Tom Jenkins. Tobi has gone into property development - setting up a cool spot called TechTown near UW's incubator center. Tech town is high tech offices, day care, banking and a state of the art health club all in one spot. A consumate business person and marketer, Tobi had brochures at hand for anyone and everyone. If I heard her correctly, TechTown is scheduled to open in May 2007. Get your runners ready.

All in all an outstanding evening put on by the Deloitte group in Waterloo for their technology clients.

The Internet Advantage - Intent vs Content

Thanks to Google, 'search' has fundamentally changed how products and services are marketed and purchase decisions are made.

In his keynote address at WebMasterWorld last week, John Battelle, Chairman of Federated Media articulated simply what many of us have been struggling for years to get across.

What Battelle nailed is that traditional marketing is all about content - putting your product or service in front of your target audience and hoping that their next purchase decision will be influenced by your message. Advertising on Oprah is expensive, but it works to some degree.

What makes search marketing so powerful, and why more corporations need to pay more attention to their internet positioning is that search influences the buyer at the point of intent - when a purchase decision is being made. At this point, conversion rates are high, and thanks to Google especially, the search advertising models are efficient.

For corporations, successful 'intent' marketing means learning how get good rankings in Google and the other search engines and spending a few dollars - nothing close to what 'content' marketing costs - on pay per click and other internet advertising.

As a result, the world of SEO - search engine optimization - is exploding and corporations are being forced to adjust traditional IT vs Marketing organization design. Too many companies have turned execution of their internet strategy over to IT departments - when successful intent marketing requires a new set of highly refined technical skills - SEO - and strong collaboration with Marketing on goals, strategies and site design.

While search and intent marketing clearly drive sales, it's too early to see how they can be used exclusively to build brand. However, there appear to be tremendous opportunities right now for organizations who learn to put the right balance on both.

Pubcon 2006

Spent the past week in Las Vegas attending a convention called Pubcon. Pubcon is for web publishers - and suppliers to the web publising industry. Web publishers own websites. For me, a very interesting and exciting conference. Some general - and not very deep observations:

1. VERY entrerpreneurial crowd - this is still early days for making serious $ on the internet - the business models are many and varied
2. serious $ being made by web publishers who have found ways to 'monetize' their traffic - in many cases from advertising - whether through Google or through successful affiliate and/or referral programs
3. the heart of this crowd is programmers - entrepreunerial geeks who have shunned corporate jobs and bosses to do it on their own - and have found making serious $ is a realistic goal
4. corporations need to figure this stuff out and tap into these geeks - there's some serious marketing and advertising implications to what these people are doing - when forward thinking corporations tap into this crowd, they will create a lucrative competitive advantage
5. the crowd is limited - I foresee attracting and retaining people with internet advertising skills as a serious growth business
6. the high traffic web site mantra: content, links, links, links
7. most forward thinking and (at this point scary) web notion - destination sites - those sites you get to by typing in the url - will decline in importance with the advent of tools (called widgets) that will move site content easily to other community, personal and aggregator sites like Diggit and My Space
8. second most scary notion - success will be all about technologial innovation - new tools for making access to web content simpler, more usable, more accessible - where would YouTube be without the viewer??

All in all, very exciting space. Some key links to check out if this stuff interests you - and if you're a CEO - you should be interested:

• Webmaster World
• Digg Business
• John Battelle
• Danny Sullivan
• Matt Cutts
• Lawrence Coburn