Michael Dell has had a very busy month. He has been snarfing up top executives fromthe consumer electronics industry and hitting the consumer feedback loop to fix his ailing company that was recently over taken in PC sales by notoriously scandalous HP.

Brain Drain

Dell has been on a hiring and firing blitzkrieg this month. He’s nabbed Ron Garriques, a famous Motorola, can-do insider that was largely responsible for many of the good things that have managed to come out of Motorola in past years. Garriques will report directly to Michael Dell as the head of consumer goods.

Stock Tip - After Mike Zafirovsky lost out to Ed Zandr’s for the CEO role and left, it looks like the company has suffered another insider punch with the loss of Ron Garriques indicating an inability to keep the top brains in a company once famous for employee loyalty. I wouldn’t pick up Motorola as a bargain stock today if I were you.

Dell had also recently picked up Michael Cannon the former CEO of Solectron a major service provider of electronics repairs and refurbished units that has contracts with Motorola and many carriers and retailers. Cannon will head operations.

Meanwhile Dell has been doing some house cleaning. The company has seen its SV of Human Resources, SVP of Worldwide Operations, CFO, SP of Consumer Products, SVP of America, and SVP of Marketing that have either already left or anounced their departure to take place within the next two months.

Open Source Offering

Dell has not sat back doing interviews for new brains. He’s also been engaged in gathering valuable focus group data that is now being used to offer up Linux pre-installed on Dell machines to provide computers running the OS and Open Office platform at prices hundreds of dollars lower than Microsoft Operating Systems and Microsoft Office Products.

The consumer demand for these products is growing and the premium for office products is rapidly losing its luster to even staunch Business consumers, especially small business. When the price is right, the price is right and its possible that Dell will also be able to leverage this offering to its large corporate base of customers that may not be eager to go through another 6 years of Microsoft OS image problems issues and more. This could prove to be the time for those corporate customers to vote with their IT resource pocket books and go for cheaper OS’s and push those remaining funds to more useful server side tools and business intelligence systems.

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BitTorrent long known as a P2P illegal file down load haven announced last year that it would go legit and is delivering on that promise today.  Starting on the day that the Academy Award Winners will be announced BitTorrent will start to provide movie and television downloads as it hopes to compete with the likes of Wal-mart, Amazon, Microsoft and smaller companies like MovieLink.

BitTorrent became very popular as the Movie version of Napster and is hoping to capitalize on its recent signature movie studio deals.  It also hopes to provide free ad support television downloads soon.  It is not going to be a simple transition as there are some big names with bigger wallets competing against BitTorrent, but like YouTube, BitTorrent has a massive following already and has the potential to expose its mass of ‘customers’ into paying ‘customers.’

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PayPerPost has been working to add more value to its marketing campaign opportunities over the last few weeks. They have begun to apply segmentation to the blogs of bloggers.

This segmentation comes in the form of blog rank and blog category. The blog rank is determined via PageRank as provided by URL Trends and the category is self assigned by the bloggers and currently reviewed by PayPerPost.

This is an entirely new process for PayPerPost and they have had to work through a number of bugs in the first few days on the rank side that seem mostly solved at this point. The categorical review of blogs is proving a little trickier, but they are working on it.

The Goal

Ultimately they hope to be able to offer their advertisers to be more precise in the targeting of their campaigns to individual types of blogs. The obvious next step in categories is to find an objective technology capable of reviewing and indexing blogs by category up front.

I have found that technology and forwarded a summary of the capability to PayPerPost. The end result could allow PayPerPost to not only put blogs into categories, but it could enable PayPerPost to track in real time the metrics of the blogs performance and content characterization.

Selling Price Spike

PayPerPost has seen a spike in the upper selling price of ad reviews and placements taking the price from a previous high of around $20 up into three and four digit prices for a couple hundred words. The image on the right shows some current opportunity prices and their word counts.

Some Advertisers are willing to pay a premium for the laser precision option of hitting the right audience.

Still Lowest Commission rate in Industry

PayPerPost does charge a much lower service fee for blog marketing as opposed to competitors such as ReviewMe or Blogitive which can charge fees of 100 - 500% more than the amount that goes to the blogger. PayPerPost charges a rate of 35% for their portion allowing SEO and SEM specialists the pricing differential to come in and walk less experienced advertisers through a Buzz Marketing Campaign through the blogosphere. Even after an SEM markup the rates are still lower than their nearest competitor and the options that advertisers can require are infinitely more flexible and scalable to large and small campaigns.

PayPerPost’s biggest challenge will hinge largely on their ability to get solid metrics back to their customers as mentioned above, but providing the ability to launch campaigns of this nature will initially create something worth measuring.

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I have been floundering around with the new direction of Maven Mapper’s Information the last couple months. We started to transition away from our blog on Blogger at http://mavenmapper.blogspot.com and then I received some feedback that made me pause. It turns out that our Blogger blog is valuable.

Who would of thought???

Well I have been planning to start a few other blogs to keep things focused and as I received some feedback about the value of the old Maven Mapper’s Information, I thought I would recycle it.

So here is where we are going . . .

This site will become Maven Mapper’s Information - The Light

It will focus on the technology and software that makes our lives better or easier.

The old site will become Maven Mapper’s Information - The Dark

It will focus on the technology that is failing or broken.

Both of these themes are derived from our Broken Technology Series and our Improving Technology Series.

In addition, I am launching two other websites that will compliment and assume some of the stories that are written here.

• One of these is Top10Tech.com. Its primary purpose is to review technology related products and provide readers a means of voting on the products and the reviews. The reviews will not be entirely written by yours truly, but by bloggers and forum writers all over the web.
• Separately, I will be launching CafeMicrosoft.com. The scope of this site is still under review, but in general it will cover Microsoft products and technology and useful ways to employ them.

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SalesForce.com may have made the model of moving great software capabilities to the web but they were not the end all solution. Today I would like to cover an excellent example of an improving technology that has improved primarily because it has moved to the Web.

I am reviewing services provided by a sponsor MerchantOS. This is a sponsored review but it is an excellent application and example of the right way build a web based tool for mass adoption.

In this case we’re talking about point of sale software (POS software) services moved from the cash register in a store to a computer in the store connected to the internet. Up front my first and primary concern centered around internet connectivity, what happens when the internet goes down?

MerchantOS provides a system that allows transactions to continue even while the internet is down, caching the transactions for a resynchronization once service is brought back up, so the issue is greatly reduced.

Now in the case of this product web based POS has been very aptly covered by Merchant OS. They have done an excellent job of describing the benefits of their offering. I think that the words are excellent, but would also like to provide a map of those details to help you see the big picture a little more rapidly.

Above is our MindMap of the MerchantOS Web Based POS Systems

Technorati tags: MerchantOS, Benefits of Online POS System

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