Let’s jump to today. We all know what’s happening to the print Yellow Pages. They are floundering. This is old news. Technology has paved the way to more dynamic methods for search. People use the Internet as their main source to discover information and print media has become, for the most part, passe.  We refer to “The Google” (As I once heard it called) when we need to find something. The Yellow Pages have taken their game online as well. For some time now they have been a big player in IYP (Internet Yellow Pages) listings. They are a destination website that functions similarly to their print predecessor. The real issue here is that technology evolves, very rapidly, and to keep up you need to be nimble and lean. The Yellow Pages are not. The print Yellow Pages began in 1886 and it ran on a similar model for almost 100 years before the Internet was born. Today it seems as if they took a digital snapshot of their print version and put it online. With all the moves in social media and innovative technology the Yellow Pages are surprisingly mimicking their old ways. Other IYP’s are doing the same (Yellow Book and Super Pages). Neither are evolving and because of this I feel the IYP days are numbered now as well. What’s compelling about YellowPages.com? Nothing. For sh%ts and giggles I did the same search for sporting goods in Concord, MA like the one I did when I was a kid. Here are my results.

The first three are national retailers that have online stores. They obviously paid the most money for those spots. The problem is I am in Concord and want to find a sporting goods store locally. The results after the first three are more advertisers (Including four more Sports Authority links!) and the listings that are in nearby towns are not relevant. One being a country club and the other being a filtration pump company. The one sporting goods store that I do know of in Concord is Brine’s but their Belmont, MA location was the one listed, not the one in Concord. This example along with the various others I experimented with go to show the lack of accuracy and neglect that Yellow Pages have toward their consumers. Yellow Pages and other IYP’s need to shift their focus fast. Hyper local and social media mixed together will create new technology that will drive users. New products and apps will revolutionize a market that has the potential to be a 20 billion dollar marketplace by 2012. It’s not just local business information either. It’s events, news, classifieds, community and any other relevant information about a locale. It’s creating a place for users to interact with their neighbors and know everything that’s going on in and about their city, town or neighborhood. Most of this information is disaggregated with some players doing well in each vertical but not one being able to tie it together. With API’s, partnerships and open source this is very possible with the right plan of attack and approach. I see this as being the aggregation of local, social and IYPs. The ability for advertisers to target consumers on a geographic, demographic and psychographic scale while consumers can actually do the same with their lifestyles through businesses, communities, events, news, what have you. LSP’s (Local Social Pages) Are somewhere in the future and I think they are needed.

My company decided to go to a local bar, JJ Foleys, in the South End to watch the inauguration. Ben, my business partner, thought it would be a good idea to watch it on a big screen so at 11am we bundled up and took the journey to Foleys. The “It’s 5 o’clock somewhere” mentality immediately kicked in while I ordered a Guinness at 11:30am and plunked myself down in front of the TV. I looked around as the bar quickly filled up. I mean the place was packed. People were walking in as if they were zombies gravitating towards brain. It was a borderline spectacle. Everyone was in awe, chatting, smiling, cheering. I felt like I was in Sheffield, England watching a Premier League match. That’s when it dawned on me. This whole ‘Change’ thing isn’t just marketing, it’s for real. I don’t remember anything like this for Bush or Clinton. People are truly expecting him to wiggle his nose like Samantha from Bewitched and have all their pains go away. I am excited but also realistic about what its going to take to actually get things back to normal in our country. Obama sent that message along with dozens of other poignant thoughts. His speech was impressive. His pause and forgetting a line during taking his oath was funny. People actually thought it was cute. Cute? Imagine if McCain was elected and that happened? He would have been sniped by one of the soldiers protecting him.

During the entire ceremony there were cheers, applause and optimism from the bar goers as Obama took his duties as the 44th President of the United States. The only time there wasn’t was when Bush’s mug flashed on the screen. Every time he was on TV the entire bar booed or made jokes. I mean, it was really sad (I made jokes). The only time Bush got applause? When he made his way to the Air Force helicopter that took him home to Texas.

So we all waved goodbye to Dubya. Rumor has it he just bought a beautiful home in Texas. Maybe he will become President of the local PTA and have Sarah Palin as his VP. Then they can go to war with New Mexico because according to her that’s a country.

PM to GWB: George, I’m serious. I have never seen anyone dodge a shoe like that, let alone two. Email me. I need a wingman stat.

I recently found out that Hostess retired good ol’ FPTM from their wrappers and marketing efforts in 2006. I have to admit it might be a bit premature especially with all the crappy tasting novelty snack foods currently out there and all the hokey advertising that pushes them. You want to hear about good marketing? I swear for about 2 years my mom thought there was real fruit in Fruit Pies. Now that’s good marketing! It was genius. Kid’s were getting their sugar doses while parents thought they were good for them. If we can get back to those days at least we won’t think or know we are getting fat. As my mom always said, “what you don’t know wont hurt you”. She is a smart lady.

So here’s to you FPTM. I hope you enjoy your twilight years and if you bump into Twinkie the Kid make sure to tell him I think he is a pr#ck and nobody liked him.

Over the years I have become a type junkie. From my first purchase of Adobe’s Font Folio to browsing font foundries and free font sites to keep up with what is in and what is not. Much of it is personal preference so what I find sexy and trendy in typography someone may not and that’s good. If we all had the same thought on what worked in typography there would be parity in design and everything would look the same. The beauty is that no one is right or wrong. Unless you use Comic Sans, then I will just write you off and most likely never speak to you again.

Let’s put the importance of typography in perspective. Can you imagine the difficulty of creating innovative and unique logos if we didn’t have a strategy for typography and its impact in our designs? Let’s take a look at Ray Ban and create an example assuming they weren’t worried about typography and its presentation for their product.

Which one do you like better?

Would you spend $100 for a pair of sunglasses if the logo looked like the one on the right? I would maybe spend $5.99 and make sure I accompany them with a neon green wife beater that has a glitter iron-on that says “Keep On Truckin”. A company’s logo has such a large impact on a buyers trust that businesses will charge more money for a product. They know that a well designed logo is an integral part of a relevant branding initiative and will entice buyers to remove the psychological price impact when making a purchase. If you are a business looking for a new logo to refresh your brand or a designer looking to help these businesses think of typography as one of the pillars needed to build a proper brand identity.

It began with an ending. It was 2001and I ran a marginally successful web design company that I started in ‘97. The reason I call it marginally successful is because I had a decent dot com client base and was able to charge an abnormal amount of money for a service that is now commoditized by template engines and cut rate service providers. Back in the mid to late nineties websites were a new and unknown territory for businesses who typically relied on print advertising for getting their message out. Newspapers and magazines were how people kept up with news, pop culture and niche verticals that were specific to their tastes. The idea of digital media was foreign. I will go into more detail about “the web design fad of the ’90s” on another post but wanted to give you an idea of the shift in business marketing initiatives due to the advent of the WWW. This led to web design companies being able to manipulate the market and charge huge amounts of money for a service where “the experts” had two years of experience.

I did pretty well back then, actually very well for what its worth but the “crash” liquidated over 80% of my client base. When I say liquidated it wasn’t like I was let go due to cuts, it was more like my clients were gone, out of business. It was surreal to say the least but I guess businesses that had more recreation equipment (Pool tables, foosball tables, etc) in their offices than actual work stations were doomed from the beginning. I closed my shop, didn’t eat my shirt too badly (O.k. it was pretty bad), took a breath, tried to reflect a bit and moved on. I looked back at the first wave of the consumer based Internet and came to the realization that I ran a business that enabled entrepreneurs to build their goals and dreams. The goals and dreams of these startup entrepreneurs were gluttonous compared to what I had in mind as a mid-twenty something business owner. They were startups with creative ideas on how to solve a problem and many of them succeeded in achieving great wealth and prosperity for themselves while others failed to do so. It seemed like gambling with intellect. Even in failure, there was still an adventure and an experience to be had. I think that’s when it hit me. It was at this moment I caught on fire to become an entrepreneur.

Stay tuned for Part II

Being an entrepreneur and living in the clichéd Web 2.0 space I have experienced enough to justify that I have some valuable insight, enough in fact to start sharing my adventures using this blog as an avenue. This is not to say that my words will have any wisdom but I do feel that by not blogging I am actually hindering my growth as a professional. I have seen blogging evolve from personal diaries and soap boxes into a sophisticated network of vertically driven information vessels. It just seems like it’s about time to jump aboard and see where it takes me.

What am I going to blog about?  Well the foundation will be about business, product development and design/UI/UX. The rest will come as I see fit or wherever it takes me. I have an affinity for B movies, pop culture and schwab beer so as much as I will be working on more serious topics you will see me segue into the fluff stuff as well. Wish me luck.