Last week, I wrote about the basic materials that, when combined with your media kit, will provide the media with all of the components that they need in order to cover your company, with or without your input. In addition to having these materials at the ready, in the hands of your agency, it’s best to house all of these components along with your media kit in an online newsroom on your web site. Here are our recommendations to a best practices approach for building and maintaining your online newsroom:
- a clear link to it from the front page of the corporate web site (and clear navigation back to the home page once you’re in the newsroom);
- a one-paragraph corporate overview on the landing page, full contact information and further links to:
- corporate backgrounder, executive biographies, product descriptions and other support materials (essentially the contents of a media kit). This section can also include good quality jpegs of the company logo, and head shots of executives;
- current and archived news releases;
- media coverage published on other sites or for which you have obtained a license to post on your own site. In the former, the link should open in a new window; in the latter, it should open a PDF page within the site.
We have recently launched several clients that have done a great job of following these guidelines on their own web sites: Essential Life Data and Singletouch. Visit their sites and see if there are any improvements that you could make to your company’s site, based on the guidelines above.
By Francis Moran
Ottawa technology entrepreneurs were reminded again this morning that India is the world’s second-fastest growing market encompassing 1.1 billion consumers, 300 million of them middle class and about 500 million of them under 25, and that with a confluence of manpower, money and a can-d0 attitude, it’s a market most technology companies will want to consider.
At the same time, Peter Sommerer, a veteran of Ottawa’s telecom sector who now advises companies on how to do business on the sub-continent, warned that there are still many challenges associated with chasing that opportunity. Quoting his former boss and current investment partner Terry Matthews, Sommerer said, “If it wasn’t easy, everyone would be doing it.”
Sommerer, who heads up consulting firm Erlauf Holding, was speaking to the regular Dollars and Sense CFO’s forum along with Raj Narula, co-founder of TaraSpan Group, which also helps companies explore business opportunities in India. The two also presented what they called a platform that has been developed by TaraSpan and Matthews’s private investment company, Wesley Clover, that technology companies can use to expedite their entry into the Indian market.
By Francis Moran
There’s an ongoing debate in my household, where both adults work in technology marketing, about whether I’m a geek or not. I maintain that since I don’t build technology, I merely enthusiastically embrace it, this makes me an early adopter rather than a geek. (In fact, I recently ordered the vanity license plate RLYDOPTR to trumpet my self-proclaimed reputation.) Also, I don’t play video games, I’ve never had a Second Life and I own less than a handful of little plastic figurines, all of them Tintin characters that are more souvenir of a trip to Paris than symbol of any kind of protracted adolescence.
But even as an early adopter, I embrace only the technology that I believe constitutes a genuine advance over what I’m using now. So it was that when my wife and I were in New York last October, she nearly had to physically restrain me from buying an iPhone when we visited the Apple store in Soho. At the time, there was no way I could use the phone here in Canada, but I so badly wanted one of the sleek, multipurpose devices that were taking the market by storm.
In mid-January, I got my way. I bought a hacked iPhone on eBay and was so delighted by its performance that several weeks ago, I decided to make it the standard mobile device for all inmedianauts. We’re a cool and forward-looking technology PR agency, right? So we should have some of the coolest toys. Last week, everyone else in the agency received their iPhones.
And productivity immediately plummeted.
Actually, I’m mainly joking about that. But there is so much that can be done with an iPhone, and so much fun to be had, what with Apple’s web-apps and countless third-party applications already available notwithstanding the software development kit was released only recently, that hours could be idled away enjoying it all.
A few observations, then, from our early experience.
First, and most important, being a Canadian wireless telephony customer sucks. Big time. Not only is Canada lagging nearly every other western market in having this new device available on a domestic network and so forcing us to pay a premium for a hacked one, the cost of deploying a data-intensive device here in Canada is obscene. Danny, our Glasgow-based colleague, blithely walked into an O2 store and picked up his phone for about half what we paid for ours. More to the point, though, he signed up for a monthly plan that gives him 500 minutes of talk, 600 text messages and unlimited data for a mere £35. That’s less than C$70 at today’s exchange rate. Meanwhile, we Canadian members of the inmedia team share a monthly wireless bill that usually runs well north of $400, and often tops $600.
Perhaps the current auction of new wireless spectrum in Canada will inject some badly needed competition into this disgrace. I can’t wait.
My second observation has to do with the device itself. The iPhone, simply put, is a joy to use, with an incredible user interface. It is not, however, business ready. Although key applications like voice, email and web work wonderfully, the device does not allow me to manipulate documents. I can download and clearly read any type of attachment, including documents, spreadsheets and PDFs, but I can’t work on them. I loved my Treo, which I had loaded with enterprise-grade software that meant I could travel and often leave my laptop behind, confident in the knowledge that I could do any quick job on the Treo that might be required of me.
Interestingly, on the same day last week, Apple announced more robust security so the iPhone would appeal more to corporate users while RIM, makers of that ultimate corporate tool the Blackberry, announced a partnership with a hip hop site to polish its street cred.
I fully expect the release of the iPhone’s SDK will soon usher in third-party, enterprise-grade applications, like Desktop To Go that I used on my Treo, that will fulfill my business needs.
In the meantime, productivity around here has mostly recovered. But the fun continues.
By inmedia
Under the banner “The Death of Print,” Gawker today reported the filing by Ziff Davis Media for bankruptcy protection. Ziff Davis is responsible for PC Magazine, among other gaming and technology titles. Upon reviewing the filing and the coverage this news has received so far, we’re relieved to see that not all the titles under the Ziff Davis Media banner, including those under the Ziff Davis Enterprise label like eWeek, Baseline and CIO Insight, are in jeopardy. A post on the Ziff Davis Enterprise web site by its CEO highlights in bold that “Ziff Davis Enterprise and Ziff Davis Media are not the same company.” Still, this leaves even fewer outlets in an ever-shrinking media universe through which our clients can communicate to their markets.
And this development is a continuation of the sad state of affairs for the struggling print industry that seems to produce a fresh corpse almost every day. As Gawker pointed out, “Print revenue for ZD fell from $215 million in 2001 to $40 million in 07. Now they owe creditors about $200 million more than they have.” The bursting of the tech bubble had repercussions from which a lot of companies, including media outlets, are still reeling.
By Peter Kemball
In its 2008 budget released last week, Canada’s Conservative government proposed beneficial changes for entrepreneurs, angel investors and venture capitalists seeking to create wealth by building businesses from the foundations upward.
When laying the foundations of a business, Canada’s Scientific Research and Experimental Development Program (SR&ED) tax refunds earned by early-stage technology firms are a vital source of cash. By allowing for 10% of all wages and salaries paid to Canadian residents for work performed outside Canada to be claimed, Budget 2008 will help improve cash flow. This change eliminates the ludicrous anti-marketing result of not allowing those expenses when experimental development work is conducted on export customer premises.
Budget 2008 also raised the limit of qualified expenditures for Canadian-controlled private corporations from $2 million to $3 million. However, the budget continued the anti-growth-rate policy of reducing the qualified expenditures amount for companies with taxable income of $400,000 or more, and phasing it out for those with taxable income of $700,000 or more.
Another addition to Budget 2008 was the introduction of tax-free savings accounts (TFSA). In brief, starting next calendar year, individuals can contribute up to $5,000 annually from after-tax income to a TFSA. Funds can be withdrawn, tax-free, at any time, positioning this new savings vehicle at the opposite end of the spectrum from registered retirement savings plans. The latter lets money to be put aside to invest before taxes are paid but requires taxes to be paid upon withdrawing funds.
This new initiative has potentially eliminated the capital gains tax for entrepreneurs and angel investors. Was introduction of the TFSA brilliantly accidental, or a sound implementation in support of the role assigned to entrepreneurs in the government’s science and technology strategy? Used in this way amongst other possible purposes, it would put the returns from investing in early-stage ventures on the same footing as winning the lottery. As a U.S. ambassador once observed, a country that valued entrepreneurship would not tax capital gains while leaving lottery winnings tax-free. Introduction of the TFSA meets the National Angel Organization’s request for support, albeit in a way akin to the relationship between the RRSP and the TFSA.
Finally, Budget 2008 appeared to remove a long-standing barrier to investment in Canada by U.S. venture capitalists, the infamous Sec 116 requirement that each investor provide Canada Revenue Agency a certificate that taxes are not due. This effectively prevented them from being rewarded for success and beating the odds against creating significant wealth.
What could Budget 2008 have done to really reinforce its hidden subtext of rewarding entrepreneurial success? You be the judge. Go to http://www.fin.gc.ca/activty/consult/sred_e.html where submissions provided to the consultation on the SR&ED Program before November 30, 2007 are being posted. When the government meets its commitment to posting all public submissions, review them and decide for yourself whether or not the SR & ED changes are a big “Eh” or a D. Given the Tory promises in respect of the capital gains tax, would an accountability review grade the budget as an Eh!+, a gentlemen’s C, or a D from the perspective of supporting implementation of the commercialization goals of the S&T policy?
Of course all of this would not be necessary if we were to enact the Tax Lawyers, Accountants and Economists Unemployment Act. Its key provisions would be a 15% tax rate on income, coupled with a capital gains exemption on a continuously declining daily basis, reaching zero at the end of a decade. Then the only questions for debate would be the amount of the basic exemption and the GST percentage. This won’t work, of course, except it is already available in competing countries.
Peter Kemball is CEO and founder at Acorn Partners, an innovative firm that helps B2B SMEs finance their success.
