When I started The A Group more than 12 years ago, I had no idea I was giving life to a new type of business: martech. We developed in-house technology to make sure our marketing efforts worked and were simple to use. We knew marketing could not live without technology. It was true a decade…
Last week I attended the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. It’s the industry’s biggest event, drawing over 72,000 attendees from over 200 different countries. The event was massive in both size and scope: booths, the size of city blocks, from the likes of Samsung and Sony to small software developers for mobile devices. Everything…
Facebook is facing trouble ahead. IPO issues aside, Facebook seems to be losing one of its primary and most indicative of all demographics: teenagers. According to an article on USAtoday.com, teens are making a slow exit from the giant social network that claims over 900 million users. Think about it. It makes a lot of…
I have been saying for a while now that technology and communication have fused into one discipline. I don’t think you can communicate effectively in our culture without using digital media. I was reminded of that Saturday night during my late dinner in a tiny Armenian restaurant in Madrid. Restaurant Vartan has been in business…
“We have a technology problem.” Words I often hear from a client or potential client. While that might be a valid concern, most of the time it’s not the technology problem that’s causing the issue, but a communication one. My company, The A Group, has a technology division where we have developed a sophisticated platform…
How far into the future should your technology plan look? That’s a question I am asked often these days. Technology can be a capital expenditure for businesses and not-for-profits. It seems like yesterday I was sitting in board meetings considering investing in technology, websites, servers, and productivity tools that we expected to be useful for…
Google and search engines are ruining our lives. I’m convinced of it. Sure, we can now find everything we want to know about any given subject by typing a word and hitting search. Now wait. We don’t even have to finish typing the word. Magical internet search engine elves anticipate our search criteria and fill…
Every Christian has a story of redemption to tell. One would be hard-pressed to find a better story-teller than author Max Lucado. Max has been a best-selling author for over two and a half decades. I remember reading my first Lucado book during my graduate school days. Chances are that if you’re a Christian, you…
Yesterday Apple laid out a new subscription service and broad rules for digital content sold through the iPhone and iPad. Apple wants to make sure all app purchases and subscriptions, such as content from Amazon’s Kindle or Nextflix streaming, only happen inside the Apple Store, it also wants to make sure publishers’ subscriptions outside the…
The social media revolution has forced traditional journalism to rethink its most basic premise: a well researched, well developed and thoroughly checked news story. We don’t want to wait for weeks or even days for a news story. We want it within hours of it breaking, minutes would be best. Journalists have even coined a…