In an email to current usersthe Holler Co-Founder and CEO wrote, “…While we’re still interested in pursuing something in this space, we’d like to take a completely different approach to the process. As such, we’re shuttering the system effective today. I’ve learned from my previous experiences that it’s good to fail quickly so that’s what we’re doing.”

What Holler tried to do was to provide a platform, based off of your iOS device, that allowed users to connect with people around them for events and various other activities. Sort of a GPS crowd-sourced coordinator app (that’s how I’m describing it…)

The couple of times I used it, the app was cool, honestly I never really got into it just because that usage space is so crowded, which probably explains the pivot.

But instead of my rambling, why not hear directly from Nick on the good, the bad, and the future of his entrepreneurship endeavors.

I wish Nick and team nothing but the best and I’m certain the next thing from his lab will be even cooler!!

James Hicks

James is the Founder and Chief Technologist of HicksNewMedia, a technology consulting and digital publishing firm providing effective and relevant solutions to individuals and businesses looking to utilize all things on the interweb. Follow him on Twitter | about.me | Facebook | Google+

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That was definitely old school compared to what’s going on these days in classrooms across the globe. Now students have wireless networking, smart devices, tablets and transcribing apps.

Check out this great infographic showing some examples of some of the cool tools our students have at their disposal.

Via: Online Colleges Guide

James Hicks

James is the Founder and Chief Technologist of HicksNewMedia, a technology consulting and digital publishing firm providing effective and relevant solutions to individuals and businesses looking to utilize all things on the interweb. Follow him on Twitter | about.me | Facebook | Google+

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I love how this great infographic puts our reliance on technology into perspective.

Created by: Online Schools

James Hicks

James is the Founder and Chief Technologist of HicksNewMedia, a technology consulting and digital publishing firm providing effective and relevant solutions to individuals and businesses looking to utilize all things on the interweb. Follow him on Twitter | about.me | Facebook | Google+

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Chicago Radio has changed significantly within the last year, most particularly within the last six weeks. The major change started back in December of 2010 when 103.5 (WKSC) did not renew their contract with one of the most popular Morning show hosts, Drex. I even wrote a post titled “Death of Chicago Radio”. Oh, how true that has become.

I know for a fact that I have stopped listening to 103.5 and so has my fiancé. Within the last month we have learned that both 105.9, Q101 (101.1), and 97.9 were all changing formats. This is not a new trend within Chicago Radio. Over the past decade 92.5, 107.9 and others have all changed formats.

Since 2000, the following stations have changed formats: 95.9, going from oldies to 1970′s and 80′s rock, 107.9 went from oldies to Spanish language format. 92.5 also went from Current hits to Spanish language. Most recently though, 105.9 is Changing to an all-talk station, and 101.1 has already changed to talk-radio.

The loss of Q101 is not just a loss of an 18-year veteran, James VanOsdol, but also the loss of the show Loveline. Loveline has been a staple for those between the ages of 25 and 40 in the Chicago area mostly because it was on Q101 for a long time, removed, and returned in November of 2008, only to be removed again. There is a movement on Facebook to get LoveLine back in Chicago. I am surprised that the new ’101.1 NewsFM’ has not picked up Loveline since it is a talk-radio station. Honestly, if Loveline were to come back to AM-Radio in Chicago, I am sure it would have a significant listernship.

The loss of James VanOsdol and Loveline is not nearly as great as the loss of ANY alternative-rock station in the Chicagoland area. You may get to hear an onal Alternative-Rock song on 101.9 (WTMX), but it is more along the lines of pop titles and increasingly country.

Now, what does any of this have to do with Technology. I am not 100% sure if this is merely a cause of or a by-product, but people are not listening to the radio. The users who would have previously been the target audience for radio are now re-focusing their attention on other areas. Areas like Facebook, Console gaming, Netflix, YouTube, and even mobile gaming. All of these activities have surpassed the need or desire to listen to terrestrial radio.

The choices for radio stations has become increasingly less diverse. In Chicago you can listen to five different genres of music. They are, country, classic rock, pop, and Hip-hop, and classical. That is it. There are no other choices. Talk Radio in Chicago is a joke. Since radio is not a very good option, I have turned to podcasts to hear what I want. Don’t get me wrong, my favorite music genre is Country. But I also listen to other music. The biggest problem with Radio in Chicago is that it is all becoming one in the same. If I flip from 98.3 (WCCQ) (Country) to 101.9 (WTMX) ‘The Mix’ I could conceivably hear the EXACT SAME SONG. Most of the time when this occurs it is either Lady Antebellum or Taylor Swift. More recently though, it has become Uncle Kracker. Can somebody please explain to me what Lady Antebellum is doing on ‘The Mix’? No, you cannot; so don’t even try.

At the moment I subscribe to 19 different podcasts. Of these 19 there are 13 that I make sure that I always listen to. Two of these 19 are daily shows. One of these averages around 15 minutes and the other is around 45 minutes long. Along with this, the other 11 range between an hour and two hours, averaging around 90 minutes. So total, that is averages to 1290 minutes, or 21.5 hours, of podcasts, per week. I consume these podcasts whenever I can. Sometimes I listen to the the shows live, while other times I listen after the fact. Regardless, I listen to at least 21.5 hours of podcasts per week. These is time that I could be listening to the radio, but why would I want to listen to the radio when I choose the facets of society, and mostly technology, that I want to focus on.

I know I am not alone in contributing to the trend of not listening to the radio. It seems to me that many users are opting to use their mp3 player or phone instead of having to listen to the music between the commercials. It may eventually be that we can get merge the FM and AM stations into one band and free up the other for wireless spectrum. Maybe I am not the target market anymore, but honestly I should be. Media needs to make it more enjoyable to listen to the radio if they expect to keep the medium around for the next couple generations.

Ultimately, I am not blaming technology for the death of Chicago Radio. On the Contrary actually. I blame media for not listening to what their constituents wanted from their stations. Sure, listenership is down among terrestrial radio. It may never recover. But, unfortunately, when it comes to technology it is either adapt and survive or get out. It’s that simple.

Wayne Dixon

I'm into anything technology related. I do some HTML/CSS/PHP development. I like to follow things that most people would find annoying or not worthwhile. I follow Apple, Microsoft, Google, The Cloud, cell phones and even programming. By Day I'm a Systems Administrator for a Library, which has it's own set of issues. Follow me on Twitter.

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In an ever-increasing extent, every company must become an “app provider”—using websites and cloud applications to support, enhance, and in some cases become drivers of its traditional marketing offers.

Very few chief marketing officers (CMOs) have thought through the capabilities they will need to drive these new marketing activi­ties. And very few are ready to lead their organizations into this new world. Over time, marketers were able to learn from each marketing cycle what kinds of value propositions would work with each customer segment, and what kinds wouldn’t, allowing them to deploy their marketing resources as effectively and efficiently as pos­sible.

There were exceptions: Some cutting-edge marketers succeeded in devising ways to collect timely data about customer responses, allowing them to create ever more precise, targeted, and dynamic marketing campaigns.

Then came the Internet. Marketers, and particularly business-to-consumer (B2C) marketers, have developed a variety of dynamic, real-time marketing tools and concepts that allow them to track customer behavior on the Internet in great detail, improving their understanding of and relationships with customers and vastly increasing the efficiency of their marketing efforts.

The “digital” part of their marketing efforts is for the most part restricted to the campaign and consideration funnel rather than integrated across the full value chain of marketing activities, from strategy and offer design through service and loyalty.

Now, however, new technologies associated with the advent of cloud computing are extending the depth and reach of connected, real-time marketing well beyond simple Internet portals and siloed digital marketing efforts and campaigns.

It is just these continuous, tight connec­tions companies can make with their customers that will enable the true promise of marketing in the cloud—a new and higher level of continuous contact along the entire marketing value chain, increasing the level of insight among marketers and boost­ing relevance and loyalty.

Ultimately, the marketing cycle itself will shorten, becoming virtually instantaneous, as it is in Internet marketing. But it will become much wider in scope, all the way from upstream marketing strategy and product design to downstream sales, service, and loyalty.

The shift to the cloud offers CMOs an opportunity to completely rethink how they organize and lead their marketing operations, and to put in place the tools, processes, structures, skills, and resources needed—indeed, an entirely new marketing value chain—to take advantage of connectivity and the cloud.

The traditional marketing value chain begins with the effort to gain insight into customers and develop and test new products in light of those insights. Where the connected, cloud-enabled world will have the greatest impact on marketing will be in the opportunity to deepen relations with customers at every point across the value chain, and ultimately to integrate the value chain completely, blurring the distinctions between up-, mid-, and downstream efforts.

Upstream

At the upstream end of the chain, where marketers traditionally sought to gain insight into their customers and markets, they will now be able to gather much more frequent feedback from customers and massive amounts of real-time data on how customers use their products.

Cutting across the traditional marketing value chain, these capabilities will ultimately promote a far greater level of integration among all aspects of the marketing function -even extending beyond the marketing organization itself, as CMOs work with product teams to promote customer-centric innovation by embedding marketing functionality into everything they sell.

Midstream

Traditionally limited to the development and execution of channel, pricing, and communications strategies, midstream efforts can now be integrated with upstream efforts, enabling marketers to increase the frequency of product releases, including real-time updates for existing customers.

Moreover, the insights gained about how customers use cloud-enabled products and services will allow marketers to reach out to them in new, more targeted ways. Over time, companies will need to rethink their strategy for their sales channels and channel partners.

Companies that already have experience in offering on-demand SaaS, as well as social media firms, retailers, and anyone who delivers services through the cloud, are likely to find themselves on an easier path to effective connected, cloud-enabled marketing.

Downstream

Companies well established in the connected cloud are already trying out different approaches to digital campaigns. In marketing Google Apps, on the other hand, Google automates the process completely.

Companies looking for a competitive advantage as business computing shifts into the cloud and devices become connected must develop new ways to capture and analyze all that data, and ultimately to integrate it throughout the marketing value chain.

Internet Marketers – If you are the CMO of an Internet-only company, then the marketing capabilities you and your team have today will be almost exactly those needed to win in the new world—but not quite.

Hybrid Marketers – If you are the CMO of a traditional company that nevertheless has a component of its marketing function focused on Internet marketing, or you are moving your products into the cloud—and you have access to a dedicated online division with Internet marketing expertise—then your challenge is more complex.

Traditional Marketers – If you are the CMO of that rare B2C company with no Internet marketing activities—are there any left today?—or one of the many B2B companies that have managed to ignore most of the innovations the Internet marketers have been making, then you have a lot of work ahead of you.

Achieving success in connected, cloud-enabled marketing will be an ongoing process that requires com­panies to be agile and innovative in a fast-changing marketing environ­ment. Under these conditions, CMOs will be forced to become experts in all aspects of real-time marketing and “big data” analytics, and will need to transform their market­ing organizations into real-time dynamic execution engines.

As CMOs begin making plans to build the capabilities that will be needed, they should enlist the aid of the Internet marketers on their teams with the most relevant, developed capabilities to take the following steps:

Assess where your company stands now.
Identify who has the requisite skills and experience.
Define the future state of your marketing organization.
Make a comprehensive plan to create a true continuous marketing capability.
Start now. There is not a moment to lose.

This article is an excerpt from “Standing Up a Cloud-Enabled Marketing Capability” by Booz & Company. Booz & Company is a leading global management consulting firm, helping the world’s top businesses, governments, and organizations. Visit booz.com to learn more about Booz & Company.

Related Research from the CloudTimes Research Library

EMA: Monitoring Performance in Private Cloud Ecosystems

Cloud computing has vastly accelerated the process of reshaping IT’s role more as a broker of services, with a wide range of choices on how services are created and provisioned. The combination of options across public, private and community Cloud, as well as hybrid non-Cloud environments, are increasingly revitalizing larger IT/business ecosystems. Hear EMA’s perspective on how Keynote Systems addresses the performance monitoring challenges of this new IT management reality.

[via cloudtimes.org]

Guest

Contributing authors on the cutting edge of technology reporting.

In basic format and definition, an internet server hosting is a portal used which allows for any consumer or business based website the ability to transmit data and provide any sort of email based systems or other popular types of website services commonly used. Truly, this service is most often used from businesses that are growing in profitability and able to afford such services. Thus, there truly is a growing appeal behind this type of service for website consumption overall.

Basically, as businesses expand their internet presence and want their site to offer more products and services, a web server host is required for this level of expansion. Thus, there are often incredible amounts of smaller business website owners using this type of service. As this form of business sales and operations continues to grow, there are more and more server providers in existence today to keep up with this growing demand.

There is an incredible marketplace and need for this type of hosting provider which has opened the door for numerous service providers to choose from. In some cases, this is incredible while in other cases, it could be a very large source of confusion overall. Thus, making the proper and efficient determination into which one to use is often a crucial element of appeal. Fortunately, there are a few steps to follow to make the overall process much easier in the end.

The security offered form a server hosting provider is crucial for any given type of product offering. The internet is filled with online predators and allows for an incredible overall appeal. Thus, one should ensure there is an incredible security and encryption service offered.

Customer support is also something that should be looked for in this process. Basically, this allows for a more robust and dynamic appeal to providing top notch service and support. At any time, there are countless things that could go wrong which should be addressed immediately.

A dedicated server hosting could also be incredibly expensive to acquire. Of course, cost is always a factor but should truly be considered when dealing with such services. Ensure that with any cost being spent, there is a fair service offered with that price.

The server hosting provider should also offer an ease of use. As any business grows, the hosting service should be able to grow with it. Thus, there should be a very comprehensive training and ease of use.

A managed host should also allow for business expansion. Any business on the internet should allow for growth and everyday changes. Thus, there should be incredible expansion overall.

Are you looking for dedicated servers? Check out cost effective services for all your server hosting needs.

[image via: lrmoilpollutioncontrol.co.uk]

Guest

Contributing authors on the cutting edge of technology reporting.