Randy Weber

My friend Ian runs Urban Mapping. It’s a great little company that provides neighborhood and public transit data to be overlaid on top of maps and to better refine local search queries. We used his data while I was at SuperPages.com. Ian just completed a deal to provide Yahoo with neighborhood data. I think that’s great. It will definitely improve the results you get back on local searches in urban areas.

The deal was announced on Search Engine Watch.

Yes, Yahoo lost out on search and PPC advertising to Google, but they’re beating everyone else. I’ve always been told that there’s room in the market for 2 dominant players. Yahoo is number 2.

But more to the point, there’s more going on at Yahoo than just search and PPC advertising. Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land has written a great piece on where Yahoo stands as a whole.

Kick-Ass Properties: Yahoo has fantastic properties. Time magazine this week awarded Yahoo two of the 10 picks for its “10 Essential Sites” special feature. Yahoo Finance and Flickr both got nods. No other company got recognized more than once (for the record, the others were Wikipedia, Craigslist, ESPN, Yelp, Facebook, Digg, Google, and TMZ. And yeah, I know, some of those hardly seem essential. And hey Time, next time give me one frakking page listing everyone. Geez!).

Let me add to Time’s picks a few more properties that do well for Yahoo. Delicious. Yahoo Answers. Yahoo Mail. Yahoo News. Oh, Yahoo Search. All of these are either the leaders or strong players in their categories.

There’s more, so click over to the article to see what else Yahoo has going for it.

This is the worst customer service move I’ve seen this year. Netflix has eliminated the ability to have multiple queues and reviewers per account. Here’s the details for Ars Technica:

According to an e-mail sent out to subscribers last night, Netflix is eliminating the convenient feature and removing all additional account profiles in September. And to add insult to injury, the additional profiles cannot be migrated to a new account. So all the effort you may have put in to rating hundreds, if not thousands, of movies and carefully crafting the perfect queue will be obliterated. The rental history will be merged with the main account owner, so your recommendations could suddenly change to reflect other profile users’ tastes.

I’d be really pissed if I had to recreate my queue. Maybe they want people to go back to Blockbuster.

Jay Parkhill on GigaOM wrote a nice explanation of licensing agreement. It explains nicely all the obscure legalese that marketing people like to avoid. It’s worth a read.

Dare Obasanjo posted a great article on how “Early Adopters are not the Mass Market”.

If you work in the technology industry it pays to be familiar with the ideas from Geoffrey Moore’s insightful book Crossing the Chasm. In the book he takes a look at the classic marketing bell curve that segments customers into Early Adopters, Pragmatists, Conservatives and Laggards then points out that there is a large chasm to cross when it comes to becoming popular beyond an initial set of early adopters.

Folks out on the West Coast seem to have a real hard time with this concept. Every little company that I’ve ever tried to do business with that had gotten a little press from TechCrunch or one of the other A-List bloggers seem to think that they’ve hit the big time and expect you to bend over backwards to do business with them. Then 12 months later, they’re no where to be seen.

The Kelsey Group wrote about something that was best left dead: the CueCat. In Quick Response Bar Codes Invade Yellow Pages the concept is that small bar codes can be inserted into print ads and scanned by mobile phones to link users to information over the Internet. The problem is that this has been tried and failed. I still have an old CueCat lying around the house. My former employer, Verizon Directories, actually participated in the CueCat debacle.

Slow Leadership discusses research out of Wharton about how treating partners fairly matters. No kidding. Any good business development person can tell you this. Yet many executives don’t get it. So here’s how it works: if your partner feels like you screwed them, then they won’t put any effort into the relationship and both parties end up losing. So the lesson for today is DON’T SCREW YOUR PARTNERS!

John Mariotti posted a guest article on Small Business Trends on Ten Reasons I Won’t Use Social Media Sites. In it he comes off as a stubborn, grumpy old man. Note to John - not everyone gets to spend all their time going from conference to conference shaking hands.

While I’ve founds sites like MySpace and FaceBook to be useless for business networking purposes, Linkedin has proven to be very useful. I’ve gotten many interviews through invitations to link up and through introductions. In my past role at Match.com, I reached multiple leads via Linkedin that I otherwise would not have been able to locate. So my experience is that social networking can be very effective both in finding a job and in finding a lead.

Bernard Lunn on ReadWriteWeb gave a list of 11 Biz Dev 1.0 Tips. Of particular interest are items number 3 and 4:

3. Wait until you hear the screams. If you have a fire engine, you are not needed until the house is on fire. The best sales people wait until they see a real need before applying a lot of effort…

4. Two ears, one mouth. …People don’t buy products, they buy solutions to problems. Find the problem and show a solution based on your product…

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been sent after people to get a deal when there was no reason for them to want to work with us. It never works. We had nothing to offer. I can’t sell ice to an Eskimo. Nor can I tell you how many times I’ve been contacted by people with nothing to offer us but still wanting to do a deal. They either talk about the technology or, even worse, they expect me to come up with a way to work with them. My first question to everyone that calls is always - “What did you have in mind?” If they don’t have an answer, then we’re done.

Alex Iskold on ReadWriteWeb posted “A Guide to Business Development 2.0.” Of course I have a complaint or I wouldn’t be writing this. Alex thinks that “cold calling is dead.” He discusses Linkedin, APIs, and Twitter as alternatives.

Yep, Linkedin is great. APIs are nice if you have them, but biz dev folks aren’t in charge of such things. And outside of the early adopters and tech saavy folks of the Bay Area, not everyone uses Twitter.

Sometimes you have to cold call. No one ever answers their phone, so you’ve got 30 seconds to make your pitch. Most folks get far fewer voicemails than e-mails, so the likelihood that your message will be received is much higher. Even if you’re using Linkedin, you still have to rely on e-mail. In reality I almost always end up calling and e-mailing and that’s what most folks do to me. If their e-mail doesn’t interest me, then I don’t respond. I always return voicemail. If my employers took away the phone, I wouldn’t be able to do my job using nothing but Web 2.0 technology.