Design

It seems to me that the only thing better than being a toy maker might be being a toy marketer. For this podcast, I decided to test this theory by chatting with an expert in toy marketing, Ted Mininni, the President of Design Force Inc, a branding and design agency that specializes in the toy/entertainment industry.

Most blogs have a fairly small readership, usually a handful of friends, peers or family members. But there are the occasional standouts that achieve 1,000s of readers through some combination of hard work, luck and the right niche. TechCrunch's 300,000 plus is the common example. Recently, I was lucky enough to interview a sharp entrepreneur named Collis Ta'eed who took his new blog/community (FreelanceSwitch) from 0 to 4,000 RSS subscribers in under 30 days.

If you're like me, you're drowning in a sea of data. From Google Analytics/Adsense/Adwords to Excel to SPSS to Powerpoint, I spend my days trying to make sense of data and then present the essential insight visually. So, for my next podcast, I connected with Clint Ivy to talk about data visualization and how to do it better.

For this Jenerous podcast interview, I connected with the resident WOM guru, Geno Church, of Brains on Fire, a leading identity agency from Greenville, SC. Geno Church was nice enough to chat with me about how BoF views branding and identity, the current state of WOM, the biggest misconceptions companies have about word of mouth marketing and more.

Great stuff!

Enjoy:

Geno Church

Few of my interviewees have come to me more highly recommended than Luke Wroblewski. A multitude of my web design and user interface friends told me that I absolutely had to do an interview with him. Why, you might ask?

With some research predicting that half the planet will be using a cell phone by 2009, the design of applications for them will be a huge focus over the next decade. For my 101st interview, I set down with one of the few veterans of mobile web design in existence, Brian Fling of Blue Flavor.

Website and interaction design is on my mind and in my podcasts a lot lately. For my 95th podcast, I continued my search for insight into this field by interviewing David Malouf of Intralinks.

David and I talked about rich websites, his design philosophy, the mistakes companies make, and more.

Enjoy!

For my 87th podcast, I tracked down Paul Adams of Flow Interactive. Paul is a user experience consultant in the UK and brings years of experience from Dyson, Faurecia and Perfix to the design table.

Everyday we all deal with a multitude of user interfaces on our computers, cell phones, TVs, PDAs and MP3 players. Some suck, some rock. Most are somewhere in between.

For my 71st podcast interview, I talked with Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering about why most user interfaces suck and how to make them better.

Too often we forget that the road to success is rarely easy nor a straight line.

Ian White of Urban Mapping is a chronic entrepreneur and an amazing example of perseverance.

In the podcast, we chat about his unique background, his innovative business and more.

Enjoy!