"Every customer who buys an iPhone 4S at an Apple retail store will be offered free Personal Setup service, helping them customize their iPhone 4S by setting up email, showing them new apps from the App Store™ and more, so they’ll be up and running with their new iPhone before they leave the store."
They don't need to be new owners. Imagine a sale team that will sit down with millions of your users (existing or new), showing them what new apps are out there, reminding them to buy from your store and walking them through on purchasing your product again. This will sure generate a big spike overall.
I blieve the idea behind this is not to push a subliminal message into the view's mind but to create a "stunt" that'll get people talking about their brand (and in a positive way).
Result I see so far from this commercial
1.) Wire has an article talking about BMW (and we're reading it)
2.) This is on HN already and will probably be on reddit/FB and other social site by tomorrow
3.) People will be talking about how innovative BMW's marketing is and associate that with their product
4.) Got me to sit here and watch the commercial with my full attention (last time I did that was checking out superbowl commercial the day after on youtube, and those cost them millions for the airtime) and want to experience the "real thing" afterward
Achieving any single one of these will make it a good marketing campaign, getting all 4 make this a GREAT marketing campaign.
In fact, BMW can't show the commercial in regular cinemas because they don't have the equipment to produce the flash. They can't reach mass audience in this way. So the end product is in fact this viral video.
Most virus scan software could be configured to report back to a central location. All you need to do is set it up so the client VM only detect and report but do not remove/clean. Then write a software to scan the monitoring log of the main station every 5 minutes for entry. The software will then do a lookup on either McAfee or Norton's virus library on everything that was detected and depending on the item's "threat level" it'll be visually represented differently.
Maybe each VM could be a tree and each spam email will be a leaf... each virus will be a fruit... any exploit will be a bug and something that's bad enough to kill it will be a snake... :D
I'm in the same boat... I'm a technical person (read sys admin type) but not a hacker... I've even built my own company from the ground up (a trading company so it's nothing technical) and was able to make a living...
I've a bunch of (software/service) startup ideas but no idea where to begin... Most ppl I know are not hackers so I've considered just learning how to code myself, but I don't know how long it'll take... at this point I'm just wondering what I should do...
I've even considered applying for that entry level support job xobni posted here last week (btw are you guys still hiring... ? haha... ) just so I can get some experience in an YC startup environment... since most software startup only hires hackers...
What they're trying to do sounds great... but I wonder how well they really know their user base...
Scheduling: Without basic feature like scheduling, I CAN'T even test them out. Most "power seller" sell the same items over and over, so it doesn't matter how much I love the interface, if I have to sit there manually launching the listings myself, it's just not going to work...
Inventory management: The idea is nice, but guess what... I'd say 80% of the successful eBay seller will branch out to other platform like amazon & their own site. If you're only monitoring my eBay inventory, it's pretty much pointless... because the idea behind monitoring inventory level for eBay seller is so they don't over list and piss off their buyers, but unless it's synced up with my other selling platform, it's not going to do me any good...
Scheduling - yes we totally agree scheduling is a critical feature and it's at the top of http://features.auctomatic.com and we'll be working on it asap. We've found that powersellers are still happy to test out the beta and give us really useful feedback without it - that was the purpose of the first beta launch so it's not been a problem.
Inventory management - there's nothing tying inventory in the app to eBay specifically. It just happens that eBay is the first platform we're supporting but we'll be offering multiple channel support as soon as the core ebay product is ready. We'll also be tying the inventory into a backend accounts package like Quickbooks to provide a one-stop shop system for complete inventory control.
Please let me know if there's any other feedback you have - it's exactly to hear this that we launched the beta so it's much appreciated. If you have specific feature requests please feel free to submit and/or vote at http://features.auctomatic.com
tried it during the beta phase, didn't find it to do anything special. i have about 10 items to sell so i tried them again, and again, i find this site kind of pointless.
As someone that's a professional seller on eBay, the URL will be the last thing I'm going to worry about (bookmark it, done!). What matters to me is how are you going to help me increase my sales and margin while lowering my eBay fee.
btw... what is the different between your service and something like Auctiva? As far as i can tell, they're already doing everything that you offer and they're FREE! (they take a cut from my insurance sales instead of 1% of total sale)
1) we plan to differentiate in the future by working with other platforms (Amazon, Google etc).
2) a Gold level powerseller told us: "I have found that Auctiva has very little "value-added" over the plain vanilla eBay tools. My hope is that your final product will be an improvement both in ease of use and cost over eBay/Auctiva", which also hints at our goals. There is a lot we can do to help sellers optimize, and more than that, introduce some real "ease-of use" into this market.
All the initial feedback we have had suggests we are on track with both. I'd be happy to discuss any insights you may have to help us improve, drop me a line at kul at auctomatic.com.
