A Proven Daily Diversion

Marketing has become so relentlessly and fundamentally digital in recent years, and that means the smart and timely application of a veritable blizzard of emerging new technologies, the most formidable and important ones these days being related to social media and smart mobility.  These include social analytics, business intelligence, large scale customer experiences, and so on.

Engaging customers today requires commitment from the entire company—and a redefined marketing organization.

To truly engage customers for whom “push” advertising is increasingly irrelevant, companies must do more outside the confines of the traditional marketing organization. At the end of the day, customers no longer separate marketing from the product—it is the product. They don’t separate marketing from their in-store or online experience—it is the experience. In the era of engagement, marketing is the company.

July 29^th is the day to honor the most vital, yet least appreciated member of any modern organization: the “sys admin.”  A System Administrator, or ‘sysadmin’is a technology professional, who plans, hacks, fixes, protects and creates computer networks to so you can leverage the awesome power computing.

With the IPv4 address space about to become exhausted, it has become a priority for web properties to move to IPv6 addresses.  For Internet and hosting providers, such as PEAK Internet, it then becomes increasingly important to equip its networks to provide and support those IPv6 addresses.

Peak Engineer Alan Batie has long been a fan of EVs (Electic Vehicles). In fact, he bought his first EV in 2000, a used Sparrow, and for the last several years has been driving a Solectria Force.  Something like the Nissan Leaf has, however, been on his wishlist for decades, and Wednesday, April 13, 2011, that wish came true with the delivery of Leaf #887. He lucked out, and it shipped out from Japan the very day before the recent earthquake that devastated the country.

The term “marketing technologist” is sometimes broadly interpreted as anyone who wields technology in the marketing domain. However, since everyone in marketing should be doing that to some degree these days, it makes sense to distinguish what a marketing technologist does above and beyond that.

When the Internet and its underlying protocols were devised, no one ever imagined it would become as mammoth, successful, or as widely-utilized as it is today. However now it is simple to envision a scenario quite to the contrary, with an explosion of Internet-enabled devices beyond PC’s and cell phones that includes home appliances and even automobiles.

All this integration of technology and Internet presents a brave new frontier, but it has one crucial caveat — each device needs its own IP address to connect and identify itself to the network. As a result, there will soon not be enough addresses to go around as the Internet’s current network protocol, “Internet Protocol version 4 (or IPv4)”, is on pace to exhaust its available addresses early in 2011.  When that happens, all of the addresses will have been allocated to the ISPs of the world, and they will no longer be able to get additional addresses to hand out to new users. Eventually (over the next few years) the ISPs will themselves run out, and no longer be able to fulfill their own customer requests for new addresses.

A good, but slightly mislead and controversial primer about the state of broadband in the US.  Also, how it affects the US in the knowledge economy and the race for innovation.