Archive for July 22nd, 2008

Jones Soda

Sometimes you just have to float an interesting idea out there and worry later about whether it’s good for the bottom line.

That’s the thinking behind a new Web site for Jones Soda, the alt-beverage company that has made its reputation on pure cane sugar, offbeat flavors like Blue Bubble Gum and Fufu Berry, and a staunch nonconformism. more

This summer seems to be offering highly anticipated blockbuster events for every taste. If you’re a comic-book fan, there’s the new Batman movie. If you’ve been waiting since 1991 for new music from Guns N’ Roses, we learn that a track from a long-delayed album will be on the “Rock Band 2” video game. And if you’re a gadget geek, you were standing in line on July 15 for first crack at the new Apple iPhone 3G, cheaper, faster and maybe more Web-enabled than its original touch-screen counterpart.

But fans of the iPhone, and other smartphones able to access the Web, are growing less geeky and more mainstream all the time, and marketers who are waiting for the mobile Internet to go big should stop waiting. Those are the key takeaways of a new report compiled by Nielsen Mobile from diverse research sources within the company, giving new hope to marketers who would like to start pushing content and brand messaging to users who aren’t at their laptop or home PC. more

If you’re looking for a demographic that needs reliable answers fast to tough questions, and doesn’t necessarily mind if they come equipped with some trustworthy product recommendations, then you could do a lot worse than to cater to parents, particularly new ones.

And that’s the thinking behind the new social community that has been layered on long-standing parenting content site BabyCenter.com, which has been around since before social networks existed on the Web. more