Every day there is more competition for share of mind. More billboards, more radio ads, more TV ads, more blogs, better search capabilities… on and on it goes. In this chaos of brand noise how do you get your own personal brand noticed? There are some very simple steps that can be taken. Its amazing [...]
I’ve been at a conference on the Gold Coast of Queensland for the last two days on the commercialization of Intellectual Property. Last night I got talking to a young PhD student who is trying to figure out what to do with his life. He registered for the conference because he is looking for a [...]
How important in the development of ideas into commercial reality is talent? And how important is persistence, determination and hard work? They used to say: “1% inspiration and 99% determination”. The thing is that there are a lot of steps along the way to launching a business, launching a product, or launching a company. At [...]
I came across an interview with Michael Chugg earlier today, via a posting in Facebook. (Amazing that Facebook now appears to spread news in the long tail better than any other technology). He was talking about the lack of support for new and emerging musicians by commercial radio in Australia. Obviously a comment of this [...]
I'm off to Japan today for a week at NanoTech 2011. Its been a couple of years since I was in Japan. Its a country I love. A few westerners that I know find it frustrating to do business in Japan. I relish it. Japan, they say is the one country in the world where [...]
I first met Leon Kane Maquire in 2009 when I was asked to write a commercialization strategy for the Australian Centre of Research Excellence for Electromaterials (ACES). When I start work on a project that requires strategy I normally start with the people, and ask them to tell me why they are doing what they [...]
People invariably don't understand how marketing works. Even marketers don't understand. They think that if they buy more spots on TV, make a harder hitting ad, they will sell more product. They think that if they shout louder, they will get their ideas across more effectively. The reality is that they marketers are generally like [...]
Most people who know me, or who have read this blog for a long time, would know that I love to cook. In fact I would have to say that it is a passion. So much so that I have started writing a recipe book… It's not for mainstream publication. It is actually for friends [...]
I meet a lot of people who want to achieve things that need some sort of outside involvement. Because of my past in the music industry, I meet people who want to get signed to major labels relatively often. Because I have been involved in raising money for businesses, I seem to bump into people [...]
In 1993, I wrote a paper entitled, How Ubiquitous Free Communication will Alter the Status Quo. I noted that because of electronic chat rooms [Prodigy, AOL and Compuserve] as more women became enamoured of the connectivity options available to them via a ubiquitous global network, that the divorce rate would rise dramatically. I [...]