Tag Archives: Best Buy

You might have missed it, but last night, one commercial aired during the Super Bowl that had a direct tie to the Silicon Valley. It was the Best Buy “phone innovator” commercial and aired featuring Philippe Kahn, the inventor of the camera phone, Ray Kurzweil, the inventor of text-to-speech synthesis, the founders of Shazam, Jim McKelvey, co-founder of Square, Kevin Systrom, co-founder of Instagram, and the creators of Words with Friends (with a great hat-tip to Alec Baldwin). It was a great spot that featured some of the tech world’s biggest, brightest, and legendary inventors and mobile pioneers. It kind of is a backhanded compliment to have it be associated with Best Buy though, in my opinion, but it still is a great commercial. Nice of them to also focus on some of the people you didn’t know were part of the startups – like with Square, the only founder most people know is Jack Dorsey.

Anyways, what did you think of this Best Buy commercial? You can watch the whole thing here.

If you’re at the South By Southwest (SXSW) interactive festival this year and you haven’t had a chance to swing by the Circus Mashimus lounge, I suggest you do. It was a smash hit at last year’s SXSWi and I’m happy to see Mashery CEO Oren Michels and team are back at this year’s SXSWi.

The Circus Mashimus lounge is not only a great place to grab free coffee in the morning while you check your email, and then beer and popcorn in the afternoon; but it’s the place to be to talk mashups and visit with the Mashery team and its customers and sponsors to learn how to get more from your data by opening it up to developers.

Mashery offers customers a flexible, secure and effective way to manage their application programming interface (API) programs. Offering developers open APIs is an ongoing process from performance and security to registration and provisioning, so having a way to manage it all is critical to the success of an API developer program. And nowadays it’s all about the apps and giving information to customers in new and creative ways, and in the manner and places that they want it, so having an efficient API management platform, such as Mashery, can greatly contribute to the success of an API developer program.

Mashery has an impressive list of customers from Best Buy, Netflix and Etsy to CafePress, among many others. Best Buy, with its Best Buy Remix, and CafePress are sponsors of this year’s Circus Mashimus lounge, so swing by and grab a coffee or beer (depending on time of day) and check out the cool mashups being created by developers and how it’s all managed easily through Mashery.

The Circus Mashimus lounge is open from 9:30AM-6:00PM through tomorrow and is located on the first floor in room three near the Screenburn Arcade in the Austin Convention Center where SXSW is being held.

And check out Bubblicious Reporter Alison McNeill interviews with Oren Michels and Best Buy’s Michele Azar from last year’s Circus Mashimus at SXSWi 2009.

SXSW: Interview with Best Buy’s Michele Azar

SXSW: Interview with Mashery CEO Oren Michels

Best Buy and TiVo are two companies that are looking to change their image, according to a recent article in The New York Times. So the two companies are teaming up in orer to collectively achieve this goal. The partnership details that Best Buy will be heavily promoting TiVo and its products, with TiVo working to integrate with more products sold at Best Buy. It’s a sensible cooperation from a high level, and I can’t help but notice how both companies have also begun to turn to online and social media tactics to individually reach similar goals as well.

So could a deeper dive into social media be fitting now that Best Buy and TiVo have joined forces? Let’s take a quick look at what we’ve seen so far. TiVo has begun to offer direct access to web-based media sites such as YouTube through its settop box. Best Buy has released an API that enables web developers to integrate product information with their own applications.

Looks like these companies are on the right track as far as social media integration goes, though TiVo has faced competition on several fronts from big brands, cable companies, and even newcomers such as Boxee. But seeing as TiVo has already instilled itself in a social media strategy of sorts, Best Buy may already be able to leverage this stance going forward in the partnership. So what could some next steps be?

As far as social media integration goes, Best Buy and TiVo already have seemingly different motives and junctions. TiVo would benefit largely from the actual media integration, offering its service as an extended point of distribution for existing social media products. Best Buy on the other hand would likely benefit more from product recommendations through social media sites, along with consumer data that can relate directly back to their products for metrics, price points, etc. All of this can be localized and parsed differently according to various demographics.

Combine all of these options and you may have an interesting point of entry for Best buy to access a wider range of consumer data, which can be heavily tied in with product recommendations across the web. As Best Buy already has an API, the downside to this is that it still must rely on developers for implementation purposes. This could use up an entire set of resources for outreach and retainment alone. While I still think the API approach is great, Best Buy’s partnership with TiVo in this regard could be largely supplemental.