Our next mobile guest blog is by Tom Wilde, CEO of Ramp. Tom writes a great post that discusses the second screen and the impact it is having on television and in turn marketing and advertising. If you are interested in being a guest blogger please contact me at taylor [at] mitx [dot] org.

Tom Wilde is a widely recognized leader in the field of Internet search and online advertising, and prior to becoming RAMP’s CEO has held numerous leadership roles in the field including SVP/GM of the Consumer Division at domain portfolio company NameMedia, senior vice president and general manager of MIVA Inc.’s North American division, responsible for both MIVA’s U.S. online advertising network as well as the company’s consumer business, and senior operating roles managing Terra Lycos’ global search & publishing divisions. Tom has also served on the IAB Search Engine Committee and holds an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Twitter Handle: @RAMPinc

At the events RAMP has been attending this year, there has been a constant buzz around the term “second screen”. Second screen refers to the use of another device while watching television. It seems when we are watching TV, we also want to use our smartphones, laptops or tablets to use social media to react to what we’re watching, surf the web for related – and unrelated – topics, check email, and make purchases. As television viewers’ attention is pulled away from the first screen to the second screen in this age of multitasking, it follows that advertisers and marketers would want to use the second screen as a promotional tool. Second screen provides marketers a gateway to transform their advertising from interruption-driven to a contextually-relevant, engaging return on investment. Here is how second screen is providing value to advertisers:

In less than 2 weeks on Monday, June 3rd, we are celebrating everything that is great and inspiring about innovation in this region and it’s promising to be an exceptional night! Our 10th Annual Innovation Awards Ceremony is going to be one you won't want to miss.

This year we have the great honor of inducting Dr. Tom Leighton, CEO of Akamai Technologies, Inc., into the MITX Innovation Hall of Fame – an accomplished technologist, a true innovator, and a person who continues to shape and contribute to the New England innovation community. Dr. Leighton is Akamai's technology visionary and leads the senior management team in setting the company's strategic direction. His achievements earned him recognition as one of the Top 10 Technology Innovators in U.S. News & World Report. Yesterday Debi Kleiman, President of MITX, had the chance to sit down with Tom and get some insight into his views on innovation.

Debi: “Do you have advice for innovators?”
Tom: “Thinking out of the box, don’t be afraid to make mistakes, because you will make them. What matters is the idea not who said it (good ideas can come from anywhere...).”

Debi: “What inspires you?”
Tom: “Working hard on solving a difficult problem, especially if no one thinks it can be done. I love it when teams come together to work collaboratively and don’t feel constrained by traditional boundaries.”

Debi: “What do you think of innovation in Boston?”
Tom: “There is so much going on in Boston right now in tech. We have great talent, amazing universities, dedicated support organizations to provide resources, VCs and innovative entrepreneurs … you can do anything you want here!”

We couldn't be more excited to honor Tom at this year's ceremony and hope you join us on the 3rd for an exciting night. We have lots more in store as well. We will be announcing the winners of our 15 categories, as well as live on-site demos from our 45 finalists, all hosted by the wonderful Jodi Beggs.

Early Bird Registration Now Open

FutureM, the annual event showcasing the future of Marketing, unveiled its first round of sessions for the 2013 national gathering of brand innovators, business leaders, investors and influencers. This year’s theme, “Innovation at Intersections,” will explore how digital technology and media are colliding with new industries and ideas to reshape the modern marketing landscape. Early bird registration for FutureM, taking place in Boston October 16-18, 2013 at the Hynes Convention Center, is now open at: FutureM.org.

Our May Mobile guest blog series continues with George White, Principal Consultant, Technical Architect at Cantina. George gives some great insight into the many contexts in which we need to look at mobile and the many factors which now come into play as the technology develops. If you are interested in being a guest blogger please contact me at taylor [at] mitx [dot] org.

George set out to be a zoologist and now he is a fifteen year veteran with broad experience in software development and architecture. He has worked in many domains, including Web applications, mobile platforms, content management, internet-connected desktop applications, multimedia, video, networking and systems architecture. George developed a strong understanding of the technology needs of publishing companies during his time at McGraw-Hill and Thomson and consulting with Elsevier and Jones & Bartlett. George is proud of the fact that systems he designed and developed ten years ago are still going strong. Twitter handle: @stonehippo

It’s Not Mobile, Its a Sequential Connected Experience
Engagement requires balancing optimization and parity while considering contexts

It is becoming hard to talk about mobile as something separate from other digital experiences, and the numbers bear this out.

Continuing on with our mobile guest blog series for this month we had a great post from Tim Dunn, Director of Mobile, at Roundarch Isobar. Tim takes a look into the past and future and provides great insight into where mobile is headed. If you are interested in being a guest blogger please contact me at taylor [at] mitx [dot] org.

Tim Dunn is the Director of Mobile at Roundarch Isobar. Roundarch Isobar, ranked the 15th largest digital agency in the world by AdAge, creates applications and digitally-centered marketing campaigns for the web, mobile devices and social media. With a focus on experience design, Roundarch Isobar conceives, designs and develops marketing campaigns as well as digital solutions like wearable computing, data visualization and mobile applications. Clients include adidas, General Motors and Coca-Cola.  While Tim has specialized in mobile for over 13 years, he now works across broad digital marketing strategy, and is interested in interactions, UX, media and marketing theory and innovation of almost any description. Twitter handles: @timmcdunn, @roundarchisobar

A few years ago, I was commissioned by the UK Government to write an extensive paper on the ‘Future of Mobile’. The piece was targeted at three areas of e-Government – NHS Choices, Directgov and Business Link, each of whom had at that point begun to progress services to mobile users.

Kicking off our May guest blog series, we have a great post from Isaac Mosquera, the Director of Mobile at ShareThis. Isaac talks about what makes an app successful and that download numbers aren't always the most important metric. Big thank you again to ShareThis for sponsoring yesterday's Mobile Summit!

Isaac is currently the Director of Mobile at ShareThis, Inc. ShareThis powers the social web, touching the lives of 95% of U.S. Internet users across more than 2.3 million publisher sites and 120+ social media channels. Most recently, Isaac was the co-founder of Socialize, Inc which was acquired by ShareThis in March 2013. Prior to Socialize, Isaac co-founded PointAbout, a mobile development consultancy which built apps for companies like Disney, Cars.com and Washington Post. PointAbout was acquired in May 2011. Previously he lead efforts to bring XM Radio's satellite content to the web.

We all know it but choose to ignore it.  App downloads are a bad way to measure success of a mobile app. In the recent past as brands scramble to put together a mobile strategy they had no other way to measure their own success and downloads was the easiest metric to understand and communicate. But only measuring downloads is unsustainable.

We wrap up our April guest blog series on Big Data with a great post from John Stauffer, CTO of True Fit. John discusses the great point of how to properly use big data to target customers but not spook them with the data collected about them. As a reminder, our next guest blog series starts in May and the topic is Mobile, if you are interested in contributing please e-mail me at taylor [at] MITX [dot] org.

John is a pragmatic software development leader with a 20+ year track record of developing successful product and architecture strategies and leading teams to execute on them. Prior to True Fit, John was Chief Architect at 170 Systems where he led the transformation of the company’s existing product architecture to a modern, scalable, and maintainable java-based architecture, leading to an acquisition by Kofax. Prior to 170 Systems, John was Chief Architect for Oracle’s Retail Business Unit after its acquisition of ProfitLogic. As Chief Architect for ProfitLogic, John was responsible for the creation of products for Retail Markdown, Pre-season Planning, Allocation and Promotion Forecasting and Optimization that are used by the world’s largest retailers.

The catalog sitting on my counter was the single creepiest piece of mail I had ever received. It was full of dog-oriented chotskies aimed at overzealous dog owners. 

As the owner of a pair of English Bulldogs filling out our nearly-empty nest, my wife and I are certainly the target market. I have a Bulldog statue proudly sitting on my desk, and I've given up the fight against the Halloween costumes that my wife insists on buying each year for our bulldogs (Knight and Princess last year, Greaser and Poodle Skirt before that).

As April is coming to an end we are starting to wrap up our Big Data theme, but we still have a little more awesome content to share. Beth Logan PhD, Director of Optimization at DataXu writes a great post about the benefits of sharing big data and how it has been beneficial in other industries. As a reminder, our next guest blog series starts in May and the topic is Mobile, if you are interested in contributing please e-mail me at taylor [at] MITX [dot] org.

Beth Logan holds a PhD in Speech Recognition from the University of Cambridge, UK.  She has worked in many fields including speech, music indexing, computational biology, medical informatics and activity monitoring, and has over 30 publications and 11 issued patents.  Since joining DataXu (http://www.dataxu.com/) in 2009 she has turned her talents to online advertising, relishing the vast amounts of data available and the many interesting problems to be solved.

I started working in "Big Data" before it had a name.  My roots are in speech recognition where at the time - and likely still - it was hard to publish at a respectable conference unless you could demonstrate a significant improvement on a large dataset. “Large” meant 100s of hours of speech, which took many hours to process on a cluster.  Fortunately, the community was quite mature and many such large datasets were readily available with excellent labels and tools to get started (e.g. see http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/).

The availability of such public datasets combined with cheap and powerful computing resources was the breakthrough speech recognition needed to become ubiquitous.  These datasets allowed accurate benchmarking of results across teams, facilitating innovation.  However, they cost tens of thousands of dollars for non-academic institutions, reflecting the high cost and labor intensity of labeling.  Yet the value generated by commercial speech recognition algorithms no doubt outweighs this cost.  This raises the obvious question of what other communities would benefit from large, shared datasets.

Continuing on with our April Big Data guest blogging series we have a great post from Chris Sheehan, COO of TrueLens. Chris gives great insight into how companies can take advantage of Big Data to create meaningful customer experiences and improve consumer-brand relationships. As a reminder, our next guest blog series starts in May and the topic is Mobile, if you are interested in contributing please e-mail me at taylor [at] MITX [dot] org.

Chris Sheehan is the COO of TrueLens, a customer intelligence company that sources deep insights from social data.  Prior to joining TrueLens, he was venture capitalist at CommonAngels Funds actively investing in marketing and advertising companies including OwnerIQ, Offerpop, Yieldbot, Linkable Networks, Promoboxx, and Xconomy.

Last week I signed up for a flash sale website. The registration process was effortless. I entered my email address and was instantly browsing sales on the site. After ten minutes, I decided not to purchase anything and left. Since signing up, I’ve received a daily email with a selection of products that don’t interest me, and I’m starting to find these emails annoying.

Sound familiar? It should. Millions of consumers provide their email addresses to businesses of all kinds: retailers, hotels, entertainment brands, restaurants and airlines—to name just a few. As a result, marketers at those businesses face important questions such as “How do I start a conversation to build a long term relationship?” or “How do I provide immediate value?”

We are very excited to share our next Big Data guest blog from Jeff Winsper of Winsper and Black Ink. Jeff gives some great insight about using big data to improve your ROI and spark growth. As a reminder, our next guest blog series starts in May and the topic is Mobile, if you are interested in contributing please e-mail me at taylor [at] MITX [dot] org.

Jeff Winsper is President of Winsper and its business unit Black Ink, which develops innovative technology solutions and provides deep analytical services for today’s marketing leaders. Winsper is a charter member of the Marketing Accountability Standards Board. For more information visit www.winsper.com/blackink. On Twitter @winsperthinks

Everything feels and looks good. You are in the black. And compared to your competitors, you’re a darling. But are you sure there isn’t room for improvement? Do you really know what being your best would look and feel like?