Pandora Co-founder Tim Westergren gave a great talk today at Sloan.  Some of the highlights included his description of founding the company two weeks before the dotcom crash, the Music Genome Project, and the future of the music business. 

If you haven’t tried Pandora it will change the way you discover music.  Pandora rates songs on 400 characteristics.  When you add artists or songs to your playlist the system will play similar music.  This is dramatically different from other systems that primarily rely on ratings from other users.  The site is free so give it a try. 

 Tim will also be speaking tonight at a Town Hall meeting on BU campus.  Check out the Pandora blog for more info.

I am curious to know if anyone else has had positive experiences with tools to help for online marketing products and services. There are a ton of web 2.0 sites related to keywords, search engine rankings, analytics, leads, and other features useful in any modern marketing role. However, it seems that there are not many companies that have effectively tied these related services together. Please fill your recommendation in the comments and let me know what your experience has been.
(disclaimer - I am currently employed by HubSpot, an internet marketing company with a system that I think does a great job at tying together these different features for marketers, but I am curious to see what else is out there.)

Also, if anyone is interested in competing in the Google Online Marketing Challenge, let me know.

Thanks!

- Joseph

Google has recently announced their first marketing competition for undergraduate and graduate students.  Teams will receive $200 in ad credits and compete to drive traffic to a website of their choice.  Check out the website for more information: www.google.com/onlinechallenge

Case Question:

MIT-Sloan has a world-renowned entrepreneurship program, and as Sloan students, you probably know people who are a) thinking about starting their own company, b) ready to join a startup or c) trying to figure out how to spend the cash they made when they sold their company before school.

With this emphasis on entrepreneurship in hand, your team is responsible for creating key messaging and a marketing campaign to increase the use of Apple technologies in start-up businesses. You can focus on specific Apple hardware/software products, or create a solution suite-the choice is yours. Consider only existing Apple products and services and 3rd party products, please justify your choices.

Guidelines:

1. First round, due 10/10 Noon EST: 10 slide Keynote or Powerpoint presentation (send your entries to collegejobs AT apple dot com). Please include names/ program/year of each member with the first round submission. Teams of 3 maximum. Finalists will be announced 10/17.


2. Second round for finalists, 11/05: 15 minute live presentation to a panel of judges – can be slides, video, marketing materials, etc. In addition, please prepare at least (1) piece of collateral that demonstrates your marketing plan (could be a draft of a website, an advertisement, a video, an audio podcast, etc).


3. Please avoid discussing the case with other teams or members of the MBA community.


4. All case competition members must be current Sloan students and must submit an intellectual property agreement for submission to be considered.

Good luck, everyone!

The MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge Presents:
The Next Wave of the Robot Revolution
Featuring: Rod BrooksWhen:
Wednesday, October 10
5:30 p.m. Walk-in Registration & Networking
6:15 - 8:00 p.m. : Program
8:00 - 9:00 p.m. : Networking Cocktail Reception upstairs at the R&D Pub

Where:
Stata Center
Kirsch Auditorium, 1st fl.
32 Vassar Street
Cambridge, MA 02139

Cost:
Members: $20
Non-Members: $30.
The MIT Community and Students from all universities are FREE with valid ID.

Registration:
Available on line and encouraged
www.mitforumcambridge.org

Speakers:
- Chris Hofmeister - CTO of Brooks Automation
- Tom Fuhlbrigge - Mechatronics and Robotics Automation, ABB Robotics
- Mick Mountz - CEO of Kiva Systems
- Tom Ryden - CEO of North End Technologies
- Debbie Theobald - CEO of Vecna Technologies 

O’Reilly has opened up their site for submissions to their 2008 Emerging Technology Conference.  Check out the link to submit a proposal.   

O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference
March 3-6, 2008
San Diego, CA
http://conferences.oreilly.com/etech

The Financial Times is hosting an innovation conference on November 12th & 13th in London.  It looks like they have a pretty good line up of speakers including people from IDEO, AIG, Intel, Philips, and others.  Innovation Club members are eligible for discounted registration fee. 

Check out the website for more information.

 

Now you can subscribe to MIT’s Technology Review using your iPod and listen to the articles for free. Click here to download MP3s from TechnologyReview.com or search for “AudioDizer” in iTunes to subscribe.  

20 members of the MIT Sloan Innovation Club each recently received a Samsung NV3 device as a part of the current I-Club testbed.  The multi-purpose devices serve primarily as point-and-shoot digital cameras, but are also capable of playing MP3 and MPEG-4 files, recording spoken comments and verbal notes, and displaying simple text documents.  One of the camera’s cooler features is the integration of moderate-quality external speakers and a headphone jack that allows playback of videos shot using the camera, as well as playback of other videos placed on the phone’s SD card from your hard drive.  The lack of integration with a convenient desktop application for managing MP3s and MPEG4s is the only conspicuous omission, but this omissions is compensated for in excellent image quality, convenient features and appealing form factor.  See the Flickr image, taken at a temple in Japan last week, for an sample of the camera’s handiwork.