Andrew's Bio

I’ve been a HUGE advocate of Facebook Connect from early on and am surprised at how slow it is catching on. If you don’t know about Facebook Connect, here is a short description. Facebook Connect allows visitors to login to a website using their Facebook username and password. An obvious advantage of Facebook Connect for the user is that they don’t have to register for each individual website and remember hundreds of usernames and passwords. Essentially, Facebook is trying to become a universal login system. I don’t want to talk about Facebook Connect from a user prospective, but rather discuss the advantages of websites integrating it.

Built-in Social Network

A lot of start-ups are shooting themselves in the foot because they are trying to reinvent the wheel. There are hundreds of start-ups out there right now who have a great product, but are trying to build their own social networks around the product. In 2010, this is going to be the kiss of death for new start-ups. It is hard enough to build an outstanding and differentiating product, and bring it to market. It is suicidal if you then try to build a social network around the product. It takes a lot of time and effort to build the infrastructure of a social network. These are resources (time and money) that are being taken away from revenue driving activities like marketing and innovation. So what is the solution? It is obvious, bring in the power and size of Facebook’s network of 300+ million users with Facebook Connect. …Continue Reading >>>

Andrew's Bio

I was at the last MITX event of the year today. It was held at Microsoft in Cambridge, MA. The topic of the event was “Digital Predictions for 2010″, and we had some interesting discussions about trends in online marketing, technology, and the online advertising industry. The panel consisted of the following speakers:

The panel discussion was kicked off with a demonstration of Microsoft’s new Bing Maps application. The application is currently in beta and requires that you download Microsoft SilverLight, but this new map application is super cool. Think Google Maps on steroids. The app is also what the speaker called a “mash-in” where it uses new Twitter’s geo location API to display people’s tweets on the map depending on where they are. Hopefully this gets your brain spinning about all the possibilities for us marketers, which leads me into one of the big predictions of 2010: Location Based Social Networking. …Continue Reading >>>