Zuneguy survey… go vote.

Zuneguy has a poll up and running. The choices are based on a request for nominees from his blog’s readership. The graphic here is of the results as they stood the moment I submitted my vote . I won’t tell you who I voted for, but let’s just say I wasn’t out in left field. The poll is in the early days, so go help him get a decent sample size.

I encourage you to cast your vote to help encourage Zuneguy’s worhty efforts. He’s making a solid attempt to listen to the market as he works to aggressively build out the Zune device ecosystem. Hats off to him for that.

Showing-and-telling… a marketing artform

Creating Passionate Users, fast becoming one of my favorite blogs, shares some practical thoughts in this article about demonstrating new products or technology. “Don’t Make the Demo Look Done” applies directly to software, but the ideas are applicable to selling hardware, just as much.

For semiconductor companies, the concept of example designs, or functional mock-ups, goes a long way to help selling a silicon solution. Of course, fitting the prototypes’ forms and functions to suit the state of the products’ development is a bit of an art… and not all the competitors completely understand this… or so say customers who get a real kick out of seeing something more than powerpoint vapor-ware, or gnarly-looking circuit boards… (depending on the audience of course — the geeks love the circuits!)

In selling processes and business development discussions, one of the most effective ways to communicate a solution’s values are demos that are simple to understand, clear to grasp value, and non-distracting from the key message. The closer you approach a familiar end-product-esque form factor, the better, but not critical the earlier you are in development. The closer one gets into production-readiness, demo platforms evolve in sophistication as well. They look far more “ready.” Maybe this is pretty intuitive, but it’s suprising how easy it is to mess up, or more innocently, overlook.

Hopefully, I’ll get to put up some shots demo products soon…

Stay tuned…

Kaboom… in Beaverton, Oregon

There’s been enough stories about the power outages in Washington and Oregon related to our recent winter weather.  An explosion occurred at a switching station in Beaverton last night to, literally, add fuel to the fire.  Repercussions from the disruption led to power outages stretching from surrounding areas, all the way to downtown’s Pearl District.

This picture, taken by a coworker was a view of the aftermath from our office’s parking lot.  About as dramatic a sight for suburban Portland as you’ll find.

DRM = Lame

Mats put me off on a mild rant last week regarding DRM.  The brewing debate and distaste for the current state of DRM is shared by folks with plenty of other more important things on their mind.

Stick it in… and enjoy.

With respect to music and digital rights management (DRM), Mats makes a vital point. In attempting to protect (i.e. feed) the artist, the recording industry and music marketers are damaging the end-user experience. As such, DRM hurts the consumer, and so ultimately, hurts the artist.

Is this permanent? Probably not. But what it means is that during this period of non-transparent copy protection, and alphabet soup (WMA, AAC, MP3, Playsforsure), people will want to try something different, devious, or altogether abandon the technology to give consumers what they want.

Doesn’t the world understand??? People just want to…

1. Buy their music

2. “Stick” it in a player

3. And enjoy!!!

Until then, the consumers (and hackers) will demand a better way, and the only people who should apologize are the supply-side technologists and business-types who stand between the artist and their audience. Stay tuned…