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This week, we discuss why everyone is envious of Google's Internal Dev Tools, examine the state of Git, speculate about how 37 Signals plans to reinvent software licensing with ONCE, and share a few thoughts on the Salesforce CEO's recent comments about work from home. Watch the YouTube Live Recording of Episode (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaX-PgF86bY) 433 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaX-PgF86bY) Runner-up Titles Lost in an acquisition hole. Headless Robot Dog. It's not better enough. GoogHub Why are you on the sad path Once version 2 is a paid upgrade You win interesting bingo Rundown The Full Circle on Developer Productivity with Steve Yegge (https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/steve-yegge) Git is awful. GitHub isn't good enough. It's killing us! (Steve Yegge) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EReooAZoMO0) Introducing ONCE (https://once.com/) Salesforce CEO takes a bold stand on remote work (https://www.thestreet.com/investing/salesforce-ceo-bold-stand-on-remote-work) Salesforce to Hire 3,300 People After Layoffs Earlier This Year (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-09-14/salesforce-to-hire-3-300-in-sales-engineering-data-after-earlier-job-cuts#xj4y7vzkg) Relevant to your Interests David Sacks has a new SaaS startup for other SaaS startups (https://www.axios.com/2023/09/06/david-sacks-has-a-new-saas-startup-for-other-saas-startups) Results of Major Technical Investigations for Storm-0558 Key Acquisition (https://msrc.microsoft.com/blog/2023/09/results-of-major-technical-investigations-for-storm-0558-key-acquisition/) Now it's PostgreSQL's turn to have a bogus CVE (https://opensourcewatch.beehiiv.com/p/now-postgresqls-turn-bogus-cve) HashiCorp Retools Licenses And Software To Grow Its Business - The Next Platform (https://www.nextplatform.com/2023/09/05/hashicorp-retools-licenses-and-software-to-grow-its-business/) Clouded Judgement 9.8.23 (https://cloudedjudgement.substack.com/p/clouded-judgement-9823?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=56878&post_id=136822157&isFreemail=true&r=2l9&utm_medium=email) Inside Hollywood's SBF Mad Scramble (https://theankler.com/p/inside-hollywoods-sbf-mad-scramble-c04?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axiosprorata&stream=top) Tubi The Free Streaming Service, Hits 74 Million Monthly Active Users & Almost 250 Free Live Channels As Cord Cutting Grows | Cord Cutters News (https://cordcuttersnews.com/tubi-the-free-streaming-service-hits-74-million-monthly-active-users-almost-250-free-live-channels-as-cord-cutting-grows/) IBM Software mandates return to office for those within 80km (https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/11/ibm_software_tells_workers_to/) Cloud is here to stay, but at what cost, ask customers (https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/11/cloud_costs_feature/) Disney and Charter reach deal to end cable blackout in time for 'Monday Night Football' (https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/11/disney-charter-near-carriage-deal-that-would-end-cable-blackout-sources-say.html) Microsoft to kill off third-party printer drivers in Windows (https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/11/go_native_or_go_home/) Oracle revenue misses estimates as tough economy hurts cloud spending (https://www.reuters.com/technology/oracle-reports-quarterly-revenue-narrowly-below-estimates-2023-09-11/) No privacy in cars (https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/articles/its-official-cars-are-the-worst-product-category-we-have-ever-reviewed-for-privacy/) Former CEO of China's Alibaba quits cloud business in surprise move during its leadership reshuffle (https://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/former-ceo-chinas-alibaba-quits-cloud-business-surprise-103078368) A Look Back at Q2 '23 Public Cloud Software Earnings (https://cloudedjudgement.substack.com/p/a-look-back-at-q2-23-public-cloud?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=56878&post_id=136950716&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=2l9&utm_medium=email) 1 big thing: A long-term plan to secure open-source software (https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-codebook-8200e5c5-aed7-4f42-a40e-117a390b57e3.html?chunk=0&utm_term=emshare#story0) MGM takes systems offline after cyberattack (https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-codebook-8200e5c5-aed7-4f42-a40e-117a390b57e3.html?chunk=1&utm_term=emshare#story1) Disney-Charter deal represents new era for TV bundles (https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-media-trends-fe1295c8-9b83-4403-bae2-06de14fede11.html?chunk=2&utm_term=emshare#story2) Salesforce introduces Einstein Copilot Studio to help customers customize their AI | TechCrunch (https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/12/salesforce-introduces-einstein-copilot-studio-to-customers-customize-their-ai/) Arm prices IPO at $51 per share, valuing company at over $54 billion (https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/13/arm-prices-ipo-at-51-per-share.html) Tim Gurner's spray about ‘arrogant' workers lays bare the economic sadism of our time (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/14/tim-gurner-ceo-comments-more-unemployment-millionaire-property-developer-workers-neoliberals) Cisco discontinues Hyperflex hyperconverged infrastructure (https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/14/cisco_discontinues_hyperflex_hci/) CloudBees Announces New Cloud Native DevSecOps Platform (https://www.cloudbees.com/newsroom/cloudbees-announces-new-cloud-native-devsecops-platform) Jet: Prepare For Liftoff (https://www.jetporch.com/) Artifact's new Links feature makes it much more than a news app (https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/13/23871561/artifact-links-news-reading-app-tiktok) TriggerMesh, RIP (https://triggermesh-community.slack.com/archives/C02GHUAQDCH/p1695048539668859) Clorox says last month's cyberattack is still disrupting production (https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/18/clorox-says-last-months-cyberattack-is-still-disrupting-production.html) Excel clone built for Uber China exposed Microsoft mistake (https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/19/matt_uber_china_excel_clone/) Seattle startup MotherDuck raises $52.5M at a $400M valuation to fuel DuckDB analytics platform (https://www.geekwire.com/2023/seattle-startup-motherduck-raises-52-5m-at-a-400m-valuation-to-fuel-duckdb-analytics-platform/) Google's Bard chatbot can now find answers in your Gmail, Docs, Drive (https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/19/23878999/google-bard-ai-chatbot-gmail-docs-drive-extensions) Elon Musk says X may go behind a paywall for everyone so he can 'combat vast armies of bots' (https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-x-twitter-paywall-for-everyone-2023-9) Restricted Source Licensing Is Here (https://www.forrester.com/blogs/restricted-source-licensing-is-here/) OpenTofu (https://opentofu.org/) RoboFab is ready to build 10,000 humanoid robots per year | TechCrunch (https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/18/the-robots-are-coming/) Unified Acceleration Foundation Forms to Drive Open Accelerated Compute and Cross-Platform Performance (https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/announcing-unified-acceleration-foundation-uxl) Google gets its way, bakes a user-tracking ad platform directly into Chrome (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/googles-widely-opposed-ad-platform-the-privacy-sandbox-launches-in-chrome/) What is a service mesh? Why do you need a service mesh? And which is the best service mesh? (https://newsletter.cote.io/p/what-is-a-service-mesh-why-do-you) Did I Make a Mistake Selling My Social-Media Darling to Yahoo? (https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/did-i-make-a-mistake-selling-del-icio-us-to-yahoo.html?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email) A new way of thinking about open source sustainability (https://www.infoworld.com/article/3706508/a-new-way-of-thinking-about-open-source-sustainability.html) Elon Musk moving servers himself shows his 'maniacal sense of urgency' at X, formerly Twitter (https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/11/elon-musk-moved-twitter-servers-himself-in-the-night-new-biography-details-his-maniacal-sense-of-urgency.html) Cable TV Is on Life Support, but a New Bundle Is Coming Alive (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/14/business/media/cable-tv-bundle-streaming.html) Nonsense McDonald's is getting rid of self-serve soda machines | CNN Business (https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/12/business/mcdonalds-self-serve-soda-machines/index.html) Delta SkyMiles changes: Delta overhauls how you earn Medallion status in biggest change yet (https://thepointsguy.com/news/delta-skymiles-changes/) Australian baby named Methamphetamine Rules (https://www.1news.co.nz/2023/09/20/australian-baby-named-methamphetamine-rules/) ‘Take the Money and Run' Artist Must Repay Danish Museum (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/19/arts/design/jens-haaning-take-the-money-and-run.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare) Listener Feedback Jan recommends this Rich Roll interview: Mindset SECRETS From The World's Best Ultrarunner: Courtney Dauwalter (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOtSvYSnzNk) Conferences October 6, 2023, KCD Texas 2023 (https://community.cncf.io/events/details/cncf-kcd-texas-presents-kcd-texas-2023/), CFP Closes: August 30, 2023 November 6-9, 2023, KubeCon NA (https://events.linuxfoundation.org/kubecon-cloudnativecon-north-america/), SDT's a sponsor, Matt's there November 6-9, 2023 VMware Explore Barcelona (https://www.vmware.com/explore/eu.html), Coté's attending Jan 29, 2024 to Feb 1, 2024 That Conference Texas (https://that.us/events/tx/2024/schedule/) If you want your conference mentioned, let's talk media sponsorships. SDT news & hype Join us in Slack (http://www.softwaredefinedtalk.com/slack). Get a SDT Sticker! Send your postal address to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com (mailto:stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com) and we will send you free laptop stickers! Follow us: Twitch (https://www.twitch.tv/sdtpodcast), Twitter (https://twitter.com/softwaredeftalk), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/softwaredefinedtalk/), Mastodon (https://hachyderm.io/@softwaredefinedtalk), BlueSky (https://bsky.app/profile/softwaredefinedtalk.com), LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/software-defined-talk/), TikTok (https://www.tiktok.com/@softwaredefinedtalk), Threads (https://www.threads.net/@softwaredefinedtalk) and YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCi3OJPV6h9tp-hbsGBLGsDQ/featured). Use the code SDT to get $20 off Coté's book, Digital WTF (https://leanpub.com/digitalwtf/c/sdt), so $5 total. Become a sponsor of Software Defined Talk (https://www.softwaredefinedtalk.com/ads)! Recommendations Brandon: YouTube TV (https://tv.youtube.com/welcome/) and NFL Sunday Ticket (https://tv.youtube.com/learn/nflsundayticket/) An Endgame for YouTube TV, Big Disney Decisions (And Whether Bob Iger Should Make Them), The Era Beyond Peak TV (https://sharptech.fm/member/episode/an-endgame-for-you-tube-tv-big-disney-decisions-and-whether-bob-iger-should-make-them-the-era-beyond-peak-tv) Matt: Airline wifi chat with Support Coté: Do Interesting (https://thedobook.co/products/do-interesting-notice-collect-share) book by Russel Davis. Photo Credits Header (https://unsplash.com/photos/m-Yot4dUd6s) Artwork (https://unsplash.com/photos/I7iJOE4fsYo)
On this episode of the #CSSpodcast, we're diving into how to deal with glitchy animations in your code base! Links: MDN transform-style - https://goo.gle/45YFu8B MDN backface-visibility - https://goo.gle/46mPvfE Una Kravets (co-host) Twitter | Instagram | YouTube Making the web more colorful ✨
We're back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10's Chief Brand Evangelist, Bradley Sutton. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, interview someone you need to hear from and provide a training tip for the week. Amazon Sales Trends / Sales Estimates New Feature https://www.helium10.com/blog/amazon-sales-trends-sales-estimates/ TikTok Shop to rival Amazon with early Black Friday deals https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/tiktok-shop-to-rival-amazon-with-early-black-friday-deals-2302091/ Amazon brings generative AI to Alexa https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/20/amazon-brings-generative-ai-to-alexa/ Amazon is hiring 250,000 employees for the holidays, and making its largest ever annual investment in U.S. hourly wages https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/workplace/amazon-hiring-seasonal-holiday-employees Amazon drops planned merchant fee as FTC lawsuit looms https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-drops-planned-merchant-fee-202022592.html Lastly, Carrie Miller shares the training tip of the week on how you can use the BlackBox Product Targeting tab to get new keywords and PPC. Listen in as we share these crucial news, updates, and training that will surely impact your Amazon-selling and E-commerce journey. In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Bradley talks about: 00:50 - Amazon Sales Trends Tool 02:48 - Prime Big Deal Days 03:48 - TikTok Shop Black Friday 04:32 - Alexa Generative AI 05:51 - Amazon Hiring 250K 07:00 - 2% Fee Cancelled 08:48 - Listing Attributes 09:30 - Helium 10 On Twitch And Twitter 10:10 - Pro Training Tip: BlackBox Product Targeting Tab 12:27 - Catch Bradley On These Conferences ► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos Transcript Bradley Sutton: New Amazon tool for sales estimates makes Helium 10 Chrome extension unnecessary. Prime big deal days is coming. Tiktok shop is starting Black Friday early. A 2% fee going away at Amazon. These new stories and much more on this edition of the Helium 10 Weekly Buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the series sellers podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our Helium 10 Weekly Buzz. We give you a rundown of the new stories that are going on the Amazon, wall art and e-commerce world and we give you training tips the week that will give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing this week. All right, we got a lot of new stories. Let's go ahead and hop right into it. Bradley Sutton: To the first one here that is actually from seller central. You might have seen it in your seller central news section and it's entitled. Customers will now see sales trend For your eligible listings, as product listings for certain categories, including health and personal care, home and sports, will display a sales trend and Basically it's kind of like in the format of 10k plus bought in the last month. In case you guys haven't seen it. You know it's been. They've been doing tests on this a lot. You'll see right here It'll say like 50 plus bought in the past month or a hundred plus. You know the bigger listings will say 10,000 plus and there's been different tests going on Amazon where you might have seen it was weekly. Sometimes it'll show views. But this is now official. This is no longer a test. Amazon is rolling this out. Does that make the helium-tent chrome extension unnecessary for sales estimates? No, it's interesting to note that this is not even a sales estimate. What it is the number of customers that have purchased this product in the last 30 days. So that's just interesting itself. Bradley Sutton: If you want a, if you're a mathematical person or you just want to dive a little bit more into All of the frequently asked questions like is it at a child level? Is it at a variation level? Is it the last 30 days? Is it the last calendar month? You know what does this mean for customers? How come my listing doesn't see it? I do a super deep dive. That's like six in the morning right now when I'm recording this. Bradley Sutton: I stayed up the whole night actually doing this blog. I haven't even slept yet, but if you guys please reward me for my hard work. The data science team did a good job. You know getting me some data and I put together this blog. Go to helium10.com/blog and it should be probably at the top of the search results there, helium10.com/blog. Click on the one about the search or sales trend data and You'll get everything you needed to know and a whole bunch of stuff. You didn't even want to know about this new thing, but it's actually very interesting. I think it could be cool for customers, could be cool for sellers as well. Bradley Sutton: All right, the next news article today is you know, we talked about this a little bit earlier this week, uh, on our Tuesday podcast. By the way, guys make sure to check out that Tuesday podcast. It was a breakdown of the entirety of Amazon Accelerate. Uh, you can catch that episode at h10.me forward slash 493, uh, where we talk about Amazon Accelerate. But anyways, in that podcast I said, hey, prime big deal days is coming. It's going to be October 10th to 11th. It's kind of like you know different kind of prime day. Amazon, you know, says here in the news that you know the, the, the FBA inventory date for prime big deal days has passed. So if you try and get some inventory and now it might not make it, but you can still participate in prime exclusive discounts, uh, coupons. Obviously you know sponsored ads. So I'm just curious what? What are you guys going to be doing for, uh, prime big deal days? Uh, are you doing any lightning deals? You just doing some coupons, heavy PPC. You know it's kind of something newish. You know it's not the regular prime day, so a little bit of uncharted territories, but probably similar to that second prime day that we had last year. All right, uh. Bradley Sutton: Next article up here is from dexterto.com, I don't think I've ever quoted this uh news source before, but their article was entitled tick tock shop to rival Amazon with early black Friday day deals, all right. So this is interesting because they're actually going to be starting a black Friday deals as early as October 27 and they're trying to move $20 billion. Uh, it said this holiday season. You know, the tick tock shop debuted in the U? S earlier this September. We kind of talked about that on this show and, uh, be interesting to see what's going to happen. You know how many, how many of you are selling on tick tock uh shop out there and are you guys doing anything special for Black Friday? Bradley Sutton: Another uh, there's a lot of Amazon announcements going on um, at some kind of like release event and, anyways, this news article is from tech crunch and it's entitled Amazon brings generative AI to Alexa. Now, this article has nothing to do with Amazon. You know FBA or prime or anything. So you might be wondering why in the world am I linking to this article? Well, this is something I've been talking about for I don't know maybe a year or so, where my, my theory has been that once. I mean that's not my theory, I mean it was Amazon said they're bringing generative AI to Alexa. The part that was my theory was that, hey, once that starts happening, as it starts developing, the shopping experience is going to become exponentially more robust on Alexa. Like, the shopping experience for me right now in my Lexus is like sucks, like it's impossible to buy stuff, and so I don't think a lot of Amazon sellers are optimizing enough for Alexa. Like you probably should, but if you're not, you're probably okay, all right Cause, not that many sales are coming from Alexa. But now, with generative AI perhaps giving Alexa a boost, I would say that you know, this year we are going to start seeing some, some, some more people shop on Alexa and you're going to have to start thinking about, you know, optimizing your listings a little bit more for the Alexa experience, all right. Bradley Sutton: Next article up here is actually from Amazon and it says Amazon is hiring 250,000 employees for the holidays, making it the largest annual investment in US hourly wages. Now it's interesting this is not the most they've hired, right? They say the largest annual investment in hourly wages. That's because minimum wage is ridiculous these days. I think this article talks about how they are actually the average hourly pay for these seasonal workers $20.50. That's crazy. $20 used to be like you've got a really good job and can support your family, like 10 years ago. Now $20 is like the grunt work in a warehouse kind of insane. But anyways, I always like looking at how many employees Amazon hires for the winter because it kind of like shows what their projects and are going to be Like when they don't hire hardly anybody. It's like uh-oh, there might be seen some signals where sales aren't going to be that much during the holiday. $250,000 is a pretty robust, hefty number there, so it'd be a good sign. All right. Bradley Sutton: Next article is from Yahoo Finance and it's like it's kind of like fake news If you can hear in my voice, guys, if you're listening to this on your car or something, if you're watching this, you obviously can see my face. This is ridiculous. This irritates me about news. It says Amazon drops planned merchant fee as FTC lawsuit looms. So right off the bat. The title is like trying to paint this as something like Amazon is running away with their tail between its legs because of this FTC thing. But it has, in my opinion, literally nothing to do with each other. Right, and it's not even that big of a deal, that whole FTC thing. But that's a side topic. We've already talked a lot about that. But in this article listen to this, guys it says effective October 1st, amazon was planning to impose a 2% fee on every sale by third party sellers that ship their products themselves. Guys, that is 100% incorrect. Yahoo, you know you're not some blogger. I mean, get your stuff together. This is not right. This 2% fee was only for those sellers opting into seller fulfilled prime. Seller fulfilled prime is where you get the prime badge on your listing. As long as you're able to deliver to a customer within a few hours or within a day, or within two days and hit the the certain metrics, all right. This was not for all people doing fulfilled by merchant, like this stupid article is saying. And the rest of the article goes in this tie in the FTC thing like it has anything to do with that. So it doesn't. But the bottom line is that if you were planning to enroll in seller fulfilled prime, you don't have to pay the 2% fee, as Amazon had announced. And Amazon did announce that the reason why they're taking away the fee had nothing to do with FTC. But they're like hey, you know, we want this program to succeed, so we want to go ahead and take away that fee to get some more people involved in the program. Our next article is from seller central, or actually the last article of the day, and this is just something simple. We've been talking about this for a couple of months now. How? October 3rd, there's going to be new listing attributes, so this, this go around, has a 213 product types are going to require it. So if you just if you want to check if this is going to affect you, just going to your seller central dashboard, there will be a link to this article in your seller central dashboard and then you'll be able to see which product types you might have to take care of. So that's it for the news today. Bradley Sutton: You guys have been asking for us to get on different platforms that we weren't on with some of our videos and lives and content. So one thing just keep in mind, guys we are now on Twitch, all right. So if you guys have Twitch, we're going to stream our first training next week on twitch.tv. But you know, you guys probably use Twitch on some kind of app. I just look for @helium10software on Twitch. @helium10software. Bradley Sutton: We're doing a live broadcast next week about a new tool, new features that that helium 10 is coming out with. And also, if you guys are on Twitter we're not doing too much on Twitter, but right now I'm going to start, you know, maybe tweeting a little bit more. Find us at @H10Software all right, @H10Software on Twitter. We're also going to be doing live broadcast from there as well. All right, now for our training tip of the week. If you're wondering how to do product line extensions or perhaps find new ASINs that you can target in your product targeting ads, there's a certain tool that you can use in Helium 10. Carrie's going to show you how to use it in 60 seconds. Carrie Miller: Today I want to share with you a little strategy on how to find some good products to target with your pay-per-click advertising. It's actually using our BlackBox tool, which is kind of the last tool that you probably would think about, but I'm going to show you how to do this. The first thing you want to do is you want to log into your Helium 10 account and go to black box and then, under black box, you're going to click on product targeting okay. So once you're in product targeting, then you're going to take whatever ascent it is that you are going to try to, you know, boost your PPC. So this is your product I'm putting in our coffin shelf right here, and what we're going to do is we're going to click on search, okay, and this is going to actually come up with a bunch of similar products, and the idea behind this is that once you find a lot of these similar products, kind of in the same niche, you could potentially advertise on these and they could be kind of compatible products. Carrie Miller: So, if we look, we've got, you know, like a web floating shelf, which would be a great way to, you know, advertise on that. We have a bat shelf, we've got some mirrors that you know could potentially be a good target audience. So there's a lot of options in here that you can utilize to test this out and, you know, see which one of these is a really good idea for product targeting. In addition, as you can see, there's a lot of really cool product ideas. So if you did actually want to take your ascent and put it into BlackBox, under Product Targeting you can actually see similar items so that you can actually expand your brand and, you know, reach your the same customers that you have within your own brand. So basically, for our coffin shelf, something like a you know 3D large school ice cubes is definitely the same target market. So it's in a really simple tool, the product targeting, but it's so great for optimizing your pay per click advertising when you're doing the ascent targeting and you can also find some new products that you could potentially start selling on Amazon. So check out product targeting in BlackBox and let us know what you think. Bradley Sutton: All right, thank you very much, Carrie, for that tip. How many of you guys out there are using the product targeting tab in black box? I hope you are and if you haven't been, hopefully you start using it today going forward. One last thing I'm going to be doing a lot of traveling. Probably, as this is airing, I'm about to take off to go to Istanbul for Friday. We might do a little mini meetup Friday night. So reply to this If you are in the Istanbul area. Bradley Sutton: I'll be in Maldives this weekend recording episode 500 of the podcast. On October 17th and 19th I'll be in Vietnam, both in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, at an Amazon conference. Just go to h10.me/vietnam If you're interested in tickets there, and then directly from there. On the 19th to the 23rd I'll be in Seoul, Korea, Amazon Seller Kingdom Conference. You can find more information on that h10.me/kconference for that one, and then I'm flying directly from there to New York, amazon unbox. It is now officially sold out for in person tickets, but if you just search for Amazon unboxed New York, you'll be able to get virtual tickets to that event. And if you're in the area on the 23rd we will be doing a Helium 10 Elite workshop for Elite members, but if there's not enough Elite members who go, I might open up some scholarship spots for some of you out there. Anyways, guys, that's it for this week. Hope you enjoyed the news. We'll see you next week to see what's buzzing.
The painful side of making video games, Grinder's big problems, and Google's sneakiest trojan horse.
The JBP kicks off this episode discussing their weekends (11:57) which featured celebrating a number of birthday parties before the room turns their attention to the new music released last week as Ish addresses the Diddy & Cleo Sol projects (27:33). Drake has pushed back the release date for his album ‘For All The Dogs' (37:22) while also receiving pushback from Halle Berry for using her photo to promote the ‘Slime You Out' single (41:25). HBO has canceled ‘Winning Time' after two seasons (59:06), Russell Brand has sexual assault allegations brought against him (1:06:10), and the gang recaps Colorado beating Colorado State (1:26:20). Coach Roy Johnson of Bishop Sycamore joins to talk about the HBO documentary ‘BS High' (1:32:42), the ESPN game vs. IMG Academy (1:51:28), mistakes he made and whether he profited (2:20:20), and his future as a coach (2:29:43). Also, Geechi Gotti vs. Eazy The Block Captain took place on Chrome 23 over the weekend (2:50:20), Joe explains the interview process with certain guests after receiving some backlash on X (2:58:52), + MORE! Become a Patron of The Joe Budden Podcast for additional bonus episodes and visual content for all things JBP! Join our Patreon here: www.patreon.com/JoeBudden Sleeper Picks: Joe | Diddy (feat. Swae Lee) - “Tough Love” Ice | Fabolous - “Ain't Nuthin Ta F*ck Wit” Parks | Little Brother - “Wish Me Well” Ish | Tone Stith - “Lonely” Melyssa | Lola Consuelos - “Divine Timing”
Le terme “webinar” vient de l'association des mots “web” et “seminar”. Quelque soit votre secteur, ces "séminaires en ligne" sont un moyen efficace (& économe) de se faire connaître, générer de précieux leads, obtenir des rendez-vous. Patrice Barbesier, Startup Advisor et ancien CMO, nous livre ses secrets pour organiser un webinaire réussi. Qui doit faire un webinar ? [00:02:25] Stratégie et organisation du webinar [00:04:25] Le format idéal pour un webinar [00:06:02] La fréquence des webinars [00:06:40] La préparation d'un webinar [00:08:51] Gestion des séquences de communication [00:10:32] Préparation et promotion du webinar [00:11:16] Les call to action dans les webinars [00:16:14] Préqualification des participants [00:17:44] Actions à prendre après le webinar [00:18:50] J'espère que cet épisode vous plaira ❤️
Show Notes: Neil Hendin, a graduate of Harvard, has a diverse career history, including being an undergrad, grad student, teaching assistant, teaching fellow, and staff member. Neil has worked in various engineering departments, including physics, electronics, and computer systems. He has also been involved in campus radio and radio engineering. Neil also completed his master's degree at Harvard. His first job as an engineer was at Maxim Integrated Products, a semiconductor company headquartered in Portland, Oregon. He moved to Hewlett Packard, where he worked in radio engineering. He has been in Silicon Valley since working at Maxim and has also worked at HP, Nvidia, Palm, and Google. Neil currently leads the ChromeOS hardware team at Google and has moved up the engineering management ladder over the past 12 years. Neil started his career at WHRB after helping a woman set up a stereo for her college. He joined the radio station as a technical staff member and later became chief engineer. He was responsible for maintaining the hardware, including transmitter repair and maintenance. Neil's interest in radio engineering was sparked by the analog nature of circuit building and the ability to analyze and simulate the engineering tools available today. He believes that the field of radio engineering is considered one of the "black magic" fields in electronics, as it requires a lot of skill and experimentation. Radio Engineering Explained Radio engineering is the process of transmitting signals over long distances using electromagnetic radiation, such as electromagnetic waves or Morse code. It involves modulation, which involves sending data that is decoded to transmit multiple messages. Radio engineers deal with high frequency circuits, typically ranging from 100 megahertz to 70 gigahertz. The frequency range of these signals depends on the language and technology evolution, with the term "micro" being higher than UHF. Antenna engineering is another subspecialty, involving the antennas that launch signals into free space. Modern smartphones have at least six or eight antennas, which can be divided into lower, mid-range, and high bands. Some phones combine these bands, while others have a pair of antennas for each set of bands. Bluetooth is often combined with Wi-Fi, as they are in the same frequency range and are often done by the same chip in the phone. Radio engineers often gravitate towards the cell phone business due to the challenges of fitting all of this in their pocket and the challenges of running the phone off of batteries. They also worry about the potential interference with aircraft sensors and the plane's avionics. While there were initial fears of interference, radio engineers do not turn off their phones during takeoff or landing to ensure aircraft safety.. From Palm OS Architecture to Chromebooks Neil talks about the birth of the modern smartphone as a significant milestone in the history of technology. Palm and handspring invented the Palm OS, which was popular among 30 million people. They spun off from Palm and started cellular phones, adding cellular modems into the Palm Pilot type architecture. The Palm Pilot was the first modern smartphone with an app store, replacing paper calendars and address books. Neil talks about the evolution of the Palm Free and how it led to the accelerated development of the iPhone. Neil left Palm and joined the Chrome team, where they piloted a test of Chromebooks. Managing a Group of Engineers at Google Neil transitioned from being an individual contributor to managing a group of engineers. He realized that team dynamics, collaboration, communication quality, and trust were crucial for everyone's individual abilities. He realized that having a diverse mix of backgrounds and experience levels made teams more productive. At Google he noticed how well-run teams were, even if not everyone was equally experienced. He decided to manage a small team of engineers, allowing him to have more impact. He asked people if they wanted to try new roles and gave them organizational flexibility. He managed a group of 75 engineers, which is currently in the low 40s due to a recent layoff. Managing a group of engineers is different depending on the type of roles they have in their organization. His current team size is around 44 engineers. Neil shares stories of engineering challenges that may bubble up to managers, such as the down economy and the decline in the personal computer market. The Process of Designing and Interacting with Manufacturers Neil discusses the process of designing and interacting with manufacturers, such as OEMs like Dells, HP, Lenovo, Acer, Samsung, and LG. These OEMs, often based in Taiwan, have access to China's resources for high-volume manufacturing and have factories in various parts of China. Neil has a team of around 28 to 22 people, based in the Taipei office and two engineers in Sydney, Australia. They work with manufacturing companies (ODMs) to design a reference design and tweak it to ensure it stays agile and cost-effective in the current landscape. The team works closely with OEMs to build prototypes, and a lead OEM, such as Dell or HP or Lenovo, implements a lead product on one at the same ODM. The learnings from this build are then shared with another OEM. Influential Courses and Professors at Harvard Neil shares his experiences at Harvard, mentioning two professors who have influenced his career, his electrical engineering professor, Al Pandiscio, was a mentor, friend, and instructor, while Victor Jones, a professor of electromagnetics, taught the electromagnetics class and cellular communications. Timestamps: 07:57 How Neil got into radio engineering 25:16 Leaving Palm and joining ChromeBook 27:30 Testing ChromeBook 27:52 Transition from individual contributor to managing a small team 35:10 Managing as an engineer 39:28 Managing a team of new managers 45:51 How Neil works with manufacturers? CONTACT: LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/nhendin Email: Neil.Hendin@gmail.com
It's an all new That Real Blind Tech show where the entire gang is back together to discuss the Apple Wanderlust event, the products we have already ordered, and much more. We start off discussing why we recorded this episode later than usual. Hey, like we have said before, we got busy lives. Apple kicked off its Wanderlust event with a video of how Apple products have saved lives. Well let's just say this gentleman did not make the video as his butt dial triggered the S.O.S. alert. No, Mexico did not discover alien life! And in the in you can't make this shit up corner, a woman mistakenly swallowed an AirPod thinking it was a vitamin. One of us picked the wrong week to join BetMGM. We then discuss some disturbing trends going on with the tremendous Be My Eyes Virtual Volunteer. Thank you very little ChatGPT. After we recorded, Be My Eyes released the following statement about what has been going on with ChatGPT and photos with people in them. We then discuss the chaos of what was Apple new product launch day. Then one of us does a total about face about an Apple product they said they had no interest in. Hmm, wonder who the flip flopper could be? We then dive in to the Apple event. Not to worry as we assume you have most of the details elsewhere so we go through everything only as That Real Blind Tech show can. We start off discussing all the new iPhone 15's that were announced. We discuss the new action button coming to the Pro lineup and what its capabilities will be. We discuss the switch from lighting to USBc and how the port will be standard USBc. Relax everyone, it has been confirmed that the Apple cloth will work with all iPhone 15 models! The iPhone 15's USBc will be capable of reverse charging for your other Apple USBc devices, and possibly non-Apple USBc devices. Apple in iOS 17 has introduced 20 new ringtones. We then get to iOS 17 and the bugs we have been having. Since iOS 17 launched today, you may have already updated, but if you did a backup, you can probably still roll back to iOS 16 until Apple stops signing it which could be the end of the week. Remember, not everyone will have the same bugs. We discuss being able to invoke Siri without the Hey and using back to back commands. Apple announced the new Apple Watch 9 and Ultra 2. The sighted community went all gaga over the new hand gesture feature announced, but is it really a new feature? On device Siri processing also comes to the new Apple Watches. Apple introduced new Air Pods with a USBc case. Bad news if you only want the new case. Mac OS Sonoma will drop on September 26th. Chrome on the Mac will soon get access to iCloud keychain. While none of us have this product yet, it sounded to cool not to mention. The Flic Twist Button for all your smart home products. And it's more of Watcha Streaming, Watcha Reading. To contact That Real Blind Tech Show, you can email us at ThatRealBlindTechShow@gmail.com, join our Facebook Group That Real Blind Tech Show, join us on the Twitter @BlindTechShow , or leave us an old school phone message at 929-367-1005, and make sure to visit our website where you can listen to any of our past episodes.
Serious Sellers Podcast en Español: Aprende a Vender en Amazon
En este episodio Regina Garza y Adriana Rangel platican sobre cómo podemos maximizar el potencial de nuestro negocio a través del comercio en línea. Hablamos de la importancia del contacto directo en la categoría de alimentos y sobre la evolución de la adopción de tecnología en las marcas. ¡No te pierdas este episodio! En el episodio #93 de Serious Sellers Podcast en Español, platicamos de: 00:00 - Comercio en Línea Y Crecimiento Empresarial 10:55 - Evolución De Marcas en Ferias 20:27- Aprovechando Eventos Y Contenido Visual Transcripción Adriana Rangel O nos acompaña Regina Garza desde México. Regina vende en la categoría de alimentos y desde hace ya varios años posicionó su producto en Amazon. O nos cuenta cómo ella ve que las marcas tanto grandes como las pequeñas en este sector se apoyan del comercio en línea y de todo lo digital para crecer sus negocios? Estás listo para aprender y sacar le provecho esta oportunidad? Si es así, bienvenidos a Sur's Air Podcast en español. Bienvenidos a todos a este episodio de Sur's Air Podcast en español. Mi nombre es Adriana Rangel y yo estoy aquí para platicar sobre las mejores estrategias de crear y crecer tu innovación Amazon, walmart y ToyCommerce en general para venderes de todos los niveles. Regina: Comenzamos, hola, regina ¿cómo estás, Hola Adriana? muy bien y tú muy contenta estar contigo nuevamente. Adriana Rangel Gracias, regina, pues te agradezco mucho que me has tomado la invitación. Platicamos hace 12 meses, pero yo sé que has hecho. Bueno, te veo, bueno, yo, porque te sigo en tu redes, ¿verdad, entonces? veo que estás en todas partes del mundo participando en estas ferias. Yo sé que en tu categoría, tú que vendes en la categoría de alimentos, es muy importante el como face to face, ¿verdad? O sea el ver al cliente en persona, en ir a estas ferias que se ven increíbles, o sea. Creo que estuviste en una en Chicago hace poquito y, oye, yo no sé ni cómo le hacen para, para recorrer todos los stands, ¿verdad, porque son en estos como centros enormes. Entonces, bueno, obviamente te va a preguntar sobre eso, ahorita, Regina, obviamente, en contexto al tema online, ¿verdad, Porque yo sé que, ahorita, todas las marcas, desde las grandes hasta las pequeñas y las medianas, obviamente también se están apoyando, obviamente de lo digital para crecer. ¿verdad, entonces? pero bueno, para la gente que no conocía a Regina por ahí, hace, en el episodio número 40, o sea, hace un año platicamos con ella y ella nos compartió su historia. ¿verdad, regina, para la gente que no te conoce, ¿nos quieres dar un breve, breve, breve ahora sí, que resumen de cómo empezaste en este mundo. ¿por qué? Porque yo sé que tú ya estabas en el negocio, creciéndolo. Regina: Realmente el tema de ventas, por llamarlo de la manera tradicional, antigua, que se de cómo se ha hecho. Hasta hace 20 años, realmente era muy personal, de cara a cara, platicamos así vendieras un sartén, así vendieras unos zapatos o cosméticos de puerta, viendo la persona. Ahora llega este mundo digital en el que todo el mundo tiene acceso. Es una cancha, pues, es un piso parejo, vamos a decirlo, y ya depende del presupuesto, esfuerzo y tiempo que cada quien le pueda dedicar. Es que es exitoso o no un negocio digital. Entonces, pues, nosotros teníamos la manera de ventas, como te comentó, tradicional y dije ¿por qué no empezar a explorar esta parte digital? Ahora todo mundo tenemos nuestro teléfono en la mano, que tiene la tarjeta de crédito conectada, y los alimentos. Pues, es la única industria en la que tienes a 7 billones de personas todos los días necesitando tu producto, porque todo el mundo tiene que comer. Entonces, ¿por qué no llevar esto a lo digital? Ya ven que uno se acaba enamorando de la comida por las fotos. ¿cuántas veces no vamos a ir a un restaurante con alguna amiga o amigo o lo que sea, y te dice mira, te gusta, y te manda su perfil en alguna red social para ver si se te antoja algún platillo o no? Creo que le hemos hecho esto entonces, bueno, pues fue una idea que tuvimos a bien implementar como prueba y realmente pues nos gustó mucho y se quedó. Claro que cada vez que conozco un poco más del mundo de Amazon, pues me voy dando cuenta que no es nada más. Una plataforma de ventas ya acaba siendo un search engine, una comparativa entre competencias, digo entre diferentes productos, y pues genera competencia que, al final de cuentas, por quien se acaba beneficiando es el consumidor. Entonces, obviamente un marketing powerhouse entonces es mucho más que un marketplace. Entonces realmente sí, es una gran herramienta. A nosotros nos ha servido muchísimo y nada. Pues ya me invito a que todo mundo la use. Adriana Rangel Claro, claro. Oye, regina, por ahí me estabas contando, antes de comenzar a grabar, que te has estado apalancando por ahí un poquito, de una manera poco tradicional, del tema de la logística de Amazon, dfa para mandarle samples o pruebas a clientes potenciales, porque obviamente la gente tiene que probar el producto antes de comprarlo. Especialmente estos son clientes que generalmente compran, y compran en cantidades grandes, ¿verdad? Y luego son compras recurrentes. Entonces cuéntame cómo tú, desde acá, desde México, cómo te apoyas de la logística de Amazon para mandarle el paquete, el producto, hasta no sé igual hay un cliente que esté en Ohio o en Seattle o algo así. Regina: Claro, claro, muchas veces pasa con estos. Bueno, primero que nada, un poco de contexto. De México, estados Unidos, aunque tienen el tratado de libre comercio T-MEC ahora México, estados Unidos y Canadá, perdón, si alguien manda un alimento de México a Estados Unidos por una paquetería comercial común, el producto llega. A veces llega, pasa que en la aduana, por ser alimento lo abren y lo revisan. Entonces pues no puedes correr ese riesgo de que, por ejemplo, si mandaste una bolsa de imagínate papitas y llega abierta, pues pueden llegar ya con humedad y hasta aguadas, claro sí, es un riesgo que pues no puedes correr. Sobre todo si lo que quieres es mandarle muestras a un cliente potencial, tienen que quedar como que mandar solamente lo mejor y evitar este tipo de riesgos. Entonces, cuando hay muchas, muchas ferias o trade shows de alimentos en todo el mundo y a las que he ido, por ejemplo, en Estados Unidos hay una grande, hay varias grandes en Chicago, en centros de convenciones que hacen enormes en el McCormick Place, hay otra muy, muy grande en Anaheim, cerquita de Los Ángeles, ahí en Filadélfano, new York, hay en muchos lugares. Entonces lo que yo me apalanco en este tipo de ferias, en este tipo de ferias, pues las personas y las empresas que van, obviamente están pues todo el día caminando, a veces traen, no sé, van dos o tres días, medio express a una feria y no se pueden llevar muestras de todos los productos que quisieran. Entonces sí, porque igual trae el peso restringido en el avión, verdad? entonces a lo mejor una muestra de 500 gramos, pues es mucho. Entonces lo que yo hago ahí mismo es, cuando estoy con ellos y les interesa una muestra, ahí mismo me meto a Amazon desde mi celular, les pido su dirección, les así como si les mandara un regalito, como que senda gifts por medio de Amazon, y es ahí como les hago llegar la muestra. Entonces gracias al Envio Prime, pues ellos llegan a su oficina y ya tienen la muestra ahí. no tengo que esperar a mandárselas, a que les llegue, no, ahí mismo. Entonces ya, en lo que yo estoy buscando a otros clientes, esas muestras ya están en camino. Entonces le vas ahorrando tiempo y en mi caso, muy particular, pues yo tendría que regresar a México y luego hacer una exportación formal para cruzar Estados Unidos y de Estados Unidos ir a mandar las muestras. Entonces de esta manera, como ya se hizo esa exportación formal en Amazon digo más bien para para surtirle a Amazon el producto ya se cuenta que tienes una bodega personalizada y le va a llegar muy, muy rápido a tu cliente a hacer llegar esas muestras. Entonces realmente es pues creo que es una manera no, no tan convencional, pero a mí me ha servido, me ha servido muchísimo porque pues, el producto llega bien, llega empacado, llega a tiempo, entonces no, y llega rápido que en en negocios, antes de que se pierde el interés o se enfrían las cosas pues a veces no es, no es lo mejor, no, entonces es una manera muy, muy como novedosa de apalancarte de Amazon, en mi opinión. Adriana Rangel Sí, sí, no, cómo no? y aparte, bueno, o sea, si pensamos en los costos de hacer eso a escala, especialmente porque, pues, a eso vas, verdad, a conocer a mucha gente Me imagino que conoces docenas, verdad, de personas, al menos en ese tipo de de faires, porque van miles de personas en ocasiones, verdad? Entonces, oye, mandar, como dices tú, desde acá, desde México, el envío te va a salir obviamente muchísimo más caro que, inclusive aún cuando tuvieras una bodega, tu verdad, de tu propia marca, tu propia empresa en Estados Unidos y esto, quisieras enviar un producto por UPS o por Fedex o algo así, el precio, el costo de las guías de Amazon, fba son muchísimo más bajas, son las más bajas en el mercado, verdad? Entonces, este aún cuando dijiste yo no, pero yo vivo en Estados Unidos, o yo tengo alguien que me lo mande de Estados Unidos, pues sí, pero como quiera te va a salir, o sea, es lo más probable, verdad, que te va a salir más costoso ese envío Y como es esto el tema del del tiempo y que realmente son unos cuantos clicks, verdad? O sea, si tú quisieras mandar un, un sámpolo o un regalito o algo así, desde tu bodega en Estados Unidos, desde tu casa, si quieres, en Estados Unidos, como quiera Enrique, oye, que esperara que ya sea dejarlo, verdad, en las, en las oficinas de UPS o Fedex, o que pase por él, etcétera. Acá, como es esto? simplemente te metes ahí al listado, te creas una fulfillment order, verdad, es algo así que este es el tipo de orden que este que le pides a Amazon que haga, y simplemente pone la dirección y ya o sea. Fueron unos cuantos clicks, en dos minutos te encargaste de hacer ese envío, verdad? Y como dices tú, oye, si no llegas o sea, si dejas que las cosas se enfríen, igual, si dejas que pasen cinco días o una semana, ya, no es lo mismo o sea. En cualquier tipo de negociación y de este de relación de negocios, tienes que moverte rápido, verdad? Regina: Y y también, por ejemplo las personas que van a las verias, pues también ellos traen en su cabeza ellos van a muchísimas tarjetas de presentación y muestras, y claro entonces el hecho de que ellos lleguen a la oficina y la tuya ya esté ahí, en lugar de que tengan que esperar a que las demás personas que les iban a mandar muestras lleguen, se sienten en su computadora, pidan direcciones y demás. La tuya ya está ahí, o sea llegó primero que las de los demás. Entonces este te puede empezar a llegar primero. Exactamente como que atender primero y ya ocupar su atención en, en, en ti, en tu producto y todo. Entonces, la verdad, si no se ha servido muchísimo esta herramienta. Adriana Rangel Sí, qué bien, Regina. Oye, y regresando al tema de las verias, a mí me encanta porque yo veo que subes este stories a Instagram y todo y yo digo oye, bueno, yo he notado que llevas ya varios años yendo a estas ferias, y quien mejor que tú para que nos cuentes un poquito sobre oye, cuáles son o sea, cómo has visto la evolución, verdad, en la adoptación de tecnología en las marcas, porque tú ya llevas vendiendo en Amazon ya varios años, pero me imagino que, pues, ese no es el caso para todas las marcas, especialmente las marcas más pequeñas. Entonces, como has notado que oye, igual y no sea, hace cinco años serán muy poquitos los que tenían una presencia en Amazon, en línea en general, y ahora me imagino que ya son más. Y también como, que, como han cambiado los hábitos de la gente, de la gente que va a visitar esos, esos boots, verdad, esos stands, este que es lo que ellos ya están esperando que estas marcas tengan en cuanto a presencia en línea, etcétera. Cuéntanos qué es lo que han notado. Regina: Pues, lo que, lo que he notado es bueno, muchas más marcas latinas, hispanas, internacionales. Y entonces para estas, para estas marcas, pues, vender en Amazon es este, como que para para las marcas que van empezando, sean latinas o sean lativas de Estados Unidos, como que el primer lugar donde venden es Amazon, como ya saben que el tráfico está ahí. Entonces ya, nada más con, pues, con mis propias redes sociales, empezará a mandar a los clientes como a ese canal. No, entonces, como que Amazon es como el primer retailer donde empiezan a trabajar, luego a veces acaban Amazon y sus páginas de internet de la empresa normal y y también ya después empiezan a ir a este tipo de ferias y empiezan a conectar con clientes, con distribuidores, con supermercados, tiendas, gourmet, etcétera, y ya empiezan como que por ahí. Pero ya, amazon es como el, como el primer paso de que ya estoy vendiendo en algún lugar y al y al cliente, o sea al retailer, al que le van a vender al supermercado, dice ah bueno, ya venden en Amazon, como que no soy yo la única persona que está como apostándole algo nuevo que a lo mejor no funciona y quita espacio de vender otros productos que sí. Entonces, como que se va dando como legitimidad en el mercado. Adriana Rangel Claro, claro, claro, cómo no? cómo es tu, oye, si yo voy a hacer, porque me imagino que esos contratos, este, pues, son contratos de mucho dinero y también son compromisos, en ocasiones a largo plazo, verdad? Entonces, yo lo que he notado, no únicamente cuando se trata de este tipo de productos, pero realmente, oí, es, realmente puedes ir a una tienda, este física, verdad, y estás buscando un producto y todo y como, ya lo buscas en Amazon, así como que, a ver, déjame ver, a ver este, a ver cuáles son las reseñas de este, de este tipo de producto, a ver, haber sido otra gente ya validó ese producto, verdad? es lo que estamos buscando. Regina: Claro, las reseñas de Amazon son una gran herramienta y creo que es uno de sus activos más importantes, además de lo que ya mencioné. Pero como consumidores, claro que es una gran, gran, gran herramienta. Yo, por ejemplo, tengo que me ha tocado ir a estas ferias y veo alguna marca que me interesa, o que es nueva, o que, digo yo, podría hacer un prospecto de cliente para mí. Déjame ver qué onda, por así decirlo. Vamos a ver qué pasó, digo su página de internet. Pues claro que van a hablar siempre bien de ellos, los procesos normal de todas las empresas y de todo mundo. Pero entonces sí me meto a ver ahí este, las reseñas que tienen sus productos en Amazon y ya empiezo a ver oye, es que a mí sí me gustó el empaque, está muy, muy bien, el producto sabe rico, bla, bla y sobre todo en tema de alimentos, es la venta como que personal, es muy importante por el tema de que pruebas el producto ahí. Entonces no es como algún otro tipo de venta que pues todo es igual acá, pues cada producto es diferente, o sea una no sé sparkling water de sabor frambuesa. Si hay siete marcas, pues a lo mejor vas a ver diferente en cada una de las siete marcas. No explico, claro sí, sí El hecho de que a veces en el mismo reseña alguien diga ay, es que sabía muy dulce, pero si alguien está buscando una un sabor un poco más dulce, pues sabe que esa puede hacer una opción. Me explico, o sea como, que es una manera, tanto para el cliente final como para un comprador de una cadena, saber qué es lo que la gente está diciendo de este producto. Adriana Rangel Sí, sí, como que escuchar todas las diferentes opiniones de las personas, porque si tú tienes no sé, una cadena de tiendas, sabemos que en México existen ese tipo de tiendas más pequeñas, de conveniencia, por así decirlo, aparte de las cadenas grandes, como quises saber. Déjame, quiero trabajar con esta persona. A mí me gusta, como sabes este, como dices tú, esta agua de frambuesa, lo que sea, pero déjame ver qué es lo que la gente está diciendo, a ver si a todos les gusta, o a ver si a la mayoría les gusta. También, cuando estoy comprando algo, independientemente o sea, muy probablemente lo va a comprar ahí en la tienda, pero digo a ver, déjame ver, a ver qué es lo que la gente está diciendo del producto. Regina: Entonces creo que es definitivamente una herramienta, como decimos en México, como para tantear, claro, y también al revés porque, por ejemplo y yo no te comentará quizá a mí no me gusta la papaya, por así decirlo, ¿no? Y hay alguien que vende papaya con gomitas de papaya? pues, a mí no me gustan. Aunque las pruebe y el empaque esté precioso, a mí es un producto que no me va a gustar. Porque no me gusta, ¿verdad? Entonces, el hecho de leer las reseñas y que alguien diga o bien ni sabían la papaya, o tiene un ligero sabor, pues dices ah bueno, entonces al mejor sí, me animaría a probarlas, porque no sabe tanto, por decirlo, o o sea como que es para los lados, si a ti te gusta, o si no te gusta, y dice hombre, casi ni sabe, o, por ejemplo, pasa mucho con los enchilados, es que esperaba que picara más, o de que hay pica muchísimo, entonces pues tienes que ir midiendo ahí. ¿cómo? qué cuantas? sí, qué tipo de comentarios hacen? Adriana Rangel Claro, y a mí se me viene de inmediato a la mente pero bueno, yo, porque siempre pienso así, como que el no sé, así mi cerebro funciona, que luego luego me vuelvo a los analíticos, digo a ver, bueno, primero que nada, ajá, si yo quiero distribuir el producto en mi tienda, en mi país, en mi ciudad, digo a ver, déjenme ver cuánto está vendiendo este producto. Y qué mejor manera de ver las ventas utilizando herramientas, podemos utilizar, no sé que si xray o reviewing sites, todas estas herramientas que tenemos disponibles dentro de la extensión de Chrome, de helium 10, por ahí podemos ver oye, cuánto ha vendido este producto, verdad? oye, hay demanda al final del día, por eso nos queremos enterar de las ventas, porque queremos ver hay demanda o sea, claro, nos podemos ya meter más a fondo y ver oye, que cuántas palabras clave hay, con cuántas búsquedas mensuales, verdad? el tema de las reseñas sí, podemos leer cada reseña una por una. Así es que así lo queremos. Pero también podemos ver esto resumen dentro de reviewing sites, como para ver qué es lo que la gente está diciendo, como dices tú, verdad? oye, no es que pica mucho este producto, o pica muy poquito, o sabe mucho a papaya, o sabe poco, etcétera. Dices bueno, al final del día, qué importa si a mí me gusta la papaya o no. Quiero ver cuánto está vendiendo este producto, verdad? y qué es lo que la gente está diciendo mediante estas herramientas que en ocasiones te dan más bien, la mayoría de las veces, verdad? te da esta información en cuestión de segundos. Entonces, qué interesante, ¿verdad? ¿Cómo podemos apalancarnos de la tecnología? Regina: o sea de los marketplaces, todo esto. Adriana Rangel Sí, en la vida, este in real life, como dicen en inglés, ¿verdad En persona, en estas experiencias, este en este tipo de eventos que me imagino también, regina, que oye, hace o sea. bueno, yo me pongo a pensar y digo oye, todas estas fotos que puedo tomar, imágenes, ¿verdad De gente probando el producto de, inclusive videos? ¿verdad De gente ahí mismo en el evento. todo este contenido, igual, y lo puedes postear en tu listado, verdad, los videos, las imágenes? cuéntame, regina o sea, si aprovechas este, todo este, pues, todo este contenido visual para ponerlo en tu listado, en tus redes sociales, o qué haces con esas imágenes? Regina: Sí, por supuesto, si me gusta bueno aprovechar este tipo de eventos, estas ferias y trade shows y expos, si sirve para apalancarte, porque realmente hay unos stands que parecen una verdadera obra de arte. En serio, En serio, sí, ya está la infraestructura hecha y pues ya, nada más. ya sé que lleves tu cámara o tu teléfono y ahí puedes tomar fotos y vídeos y lo usarlas tú en tus redes sociales, como en tu listado también. De hecho, por ejemplo, hace no me acuerdo, hace varias semanas vi un vídeo tuyo, adriana, precisamente de tu sí bueno, no sé si se ven y no, pero Adriana tiene un canal que publica cada jueves. Son muy buenos vídeos para los que quieran vender en Amazon y hay un vídeo muy, muy bueno, muy interesante, de optimización del listado. Habla precisamente de utilizar imágenes y vídeos para optimizar. Entonces, sí, sí, me gusta aprovecharme, no aprovecharme, ¿verdad? Tomar imágenes durante ese tipo de eventos, porque te digo que, pues, sí, tienen, están muy bonitos los backgrounds, puedes ver a gente, probando, escuchando sus comentarios, lo que te dicen. Entonces, sí, realmente es llevar lo del mundo real a lo digital y lo digital al mundo real, o sea, ya llegó este punto donde hay como una fusión entre ambos y es una excelente herramienta para que las marcas aprovechen y puedan palancarse de ambas y crecer en varios canales, no, nada más en uno. Adriana Rangel Claro, claro que loco, verdad, regina o sea. En qué momento llegamos a este punto? ¿verdad, donde, como es tú, oye, la gente que está en persona en un evento, como quieras, se palanca. Oye, saca el celular, como para ver, oye a ver cuáles son las reseñas, qué es lo que están diciendo esta página. Te metes ahí de esta marca, perdón, te metes ahí a la página. Ves entonces, como que hay, haces eso, verdad, haces este, ese palancamiento en lo digital, verdad, como tú, verdad que mandas los samples mediante utilizando Amazon, en este caso el envío de FBA, para que llegue de manera rápida y más económica allá a tus clientes potenciales, verdad? y también, viceversa, la verdad que dices oye a ver ahora, cómo crees con lo digital, oye, pues, me apalancó, aprovecho que estoy en este tipo de eventos que, como dices tú, oye, también lo inviertes, porque me imagino que es una inversión grande el participar en este tipo de eventos. Me imagino que, desde lo que te cobran, verdad, por el stand también, me imagino que tienes que, por ahí este, llenar una aplicación y que ellos evaluen si, si, si, verdad, si quieren tener tu marca ahí en su, en su evento, etcétera entonces, ya, tanto esfuerzo, igual, igual, y en ocasiones también llevas a oye, tienes que viajar tú, verdad, en ocasiones también gente de tu equipo. Entonces, oye, pagar hotel, vuelo, todo eso. Entonces, como que dices oye, ¿sabes qué, le voy a sacar todo el jugo a este evento y déjame, me pongo a tomar fotos, este de tomar video, de entrevistar a gente a ver qué es lo que opina de mi producto, etcétera, y todo eso lo subo al, al listado o a las redes, etcétera. Qué curioso, regina, verdad que ahora tenemos que estar pensando en estos dos como aspectos si queremos crecer nuestro negocio realmente. Entonces, bueno, regina, ya sabes que no te puedo dejar ir sin pedirte el tip especial, un tip cortito para la gente que nos está escuchando, para crecer su negocio, verdad, en general, que nos puedes compartir. Regina: Gracias Adriana. Pues sí, lo que yo me gustaría compartir es que realmente no hay nadie mejor que tú para ser tu embajador de marca. Tenemos esta idea de que, de que hay que contratar a influencers de redes sociales o de ciertos temas, que claro que no estuve en contra de eso jamás. Pero primero tienes que ser tú quien hable de tu marca. Entonces plátícale a la gente cuando sea el momento, por supuesto, de tu producto y luego eventualmente ya más gente se va a empezar a sumar. Pero tú tienes que ser el principal promotor y bueno, en las empresas pequeñas o que van empezando, pues el que empieza esto luego es la imagen, empieza a ser de operaciones, empieza a ser el de finanzas en la contabilidad, entonces es un poco abrumante, pero conforme. La empresa va creciendo, pues se van creando y necesitándonos puestos de trabajo y ya el dueño puede como irse dedicando específicamente a así o a exacto, exacto, o hacer la imagen y a seguir hablando del producto y demás. Adriana Rangel Sí, sí, sí, y es un proceso, verdad o sea. Toma años, años en ocasiones, ese proceso de pasar de ser el todólogo a ir un poquito delegando, y especialmente porque al inicio, la primera persona o la segunda persona que contrates, igual y no es la persona que se va a quedar, verdad, igual no es la persona indicada para el puesto, entonces es como hay una frustración porque, pues, a empezar de nuevo otra vez, a buscar otro diseñado, o a buscar a alguien que te vive con el tema de las operaciones, que sé yo, verdad, entonces, pero sí, invitaría a la gente a que tomara este ejemplo, verdad, el de Regina y su empresa y su negocio, como un poquito de inspiración, este de cómo pueden crecer su marca, más allá de este, pues sí, de las ventas que están obteniendo y del negocio que tienen en su país, en su ciudad. Verdad, regina, pues, de México, verdad, y ahorita ella está vendiendo en Estados Unidos y eso le abre la puerta, verdad, el, precisamente en que la gente vea que tiene presencia en línea y que está creciendo, etcétera, para poder participar en estas ferias que luego le estará más negocio, verdad, y más oportunidades, más crecimiento a su negocio, regina. Pues, te agradezco mucho tu tiempo. Seguramente por ahí te voy a volver a contactar en unos 12 meses para que nos cuentes que es lo que has visto, verdad? que novedades para, para darnos ideas de cómo crecernos a nosotros, nuestro negocio. Verdad, independientemente de en qué categoría vendamos, la verdad es que este muchas de estas ideas aplican, verdad, aplican para para todo tipo de negocios. Entonces, de nuevo, muchas gracias, regina, y espero este que te vaya muy bien este año. Seguramente te vaya muy bien y espero tenerte regreso pronto. Regina: Gracias, adriana, por la invitación, por tus buenos deseos, y ojalá que sea lo mismo para ti, tus negocios. Adriana Rangel Gracias, regina, hasta pronto. Regina: Hasta luego, bye, bye, bye, bye.
In this episode, we've got all the inside scoop on Amazon Accelerate 2023 that you might have missed! Our host, Bradley Sutton, dives deep into the exciting announcements and their implications for Amazon FBA sellers. From the eagerly awaited dates for the next Prime Deal Days to cutting-edge AI features like Generative AI for building your listings inside Amazon and the AI-backed Seller Messaging Assistant, we've got you covered. Plus, we explore game-changing updates, new tools, and features like the Amazon Shipping ground package delivery service, Amazon Supply Chain updates with inventory management, customer loyalty analytics dashboard, and sustainability solutions that are set to reshape the Amazon seller landscape. We also talked about the Buy with Prime integration inside Shopify and shared relevant numbers on how D2C E-commerce businesses are crushing it with this new feature. Tune in to discover how these developments could impact your Amazon business and stay ahead of your competitors. It's a must-listen episode for anyone in the world of Amazon selling and don't forget to let us know what you think of these announcements! Also, don't forget to catch Bradley, Helium 10, and Pacvue in the Amazon unBoxed Event in New York this October 24th to up-level and up-skill your Amazon advertising knowledge. In episode 493 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley talks about: 02:05 - Dates For The Next Prime Deal Days Released! 02:40 - Featuring A Seller Success Story From A Helium 10 User 03:45 - Enterprise Solutions Integrated In Partner Seller App 04:09 - Emerald Notifications 05:23 - AI-backed Seller Messaging Assistant 06:35 - Generative AI For Listing Building 07:54 - Bradley's Feedback On This AI Feature After Tests 13:22 - A New Seller Homepage 13:40 - One Page Listing Management Page 14:23 - Buyer Abuse Protection 16:05 - Veeqo Multi-Channel Shipping 17:01 - Amazon Shipping Ground Package Delivery Service 18:44 - Supply Chain By Amazon (More Than Amazon Global Logistics) 20:54 - Automatic Inventory Replenishment with FBA 23:48 - Let's Get Into Day 2 Announcements 24:43 - Customer Loyalty Analytics Dashboard 26:26 - Fit Insights Tool 28:45 - Voice Of The Customer Dashboard 30:16 - Two-Tap Ratings 31:50 - New Seller Wallets 32:10 - Buy with Prime with Shopify 33:28 - Interesting Stats From Buy with Prime integration with Shopify 35:18 - Potential Sales Lift 37:16 - View In Your Room Feature Improvements 38:42 - Ships On Product Packaging Program 40:46 - Sustainability Solutions Hub 41:24 - What Do You Think Of All These Announcements? 42:29 - Catch Bradley, Helium 10, and Pacvue In The Amazon Unboxed Event ► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos Transcript Bradley Sutton: Did you miss Amazon Accelerate? Don't worry. In this episode I'm giving you guys everything that you missed out on all the announcements and how it affects US sellers. How cool is that? Pretty cool. I think. We know that getting to page one on keyword search results is one of the most important goals that an Amazon seller might have. So track your progress on the way to page one and even get historical keyword ranking information and even see sponsored ad rank placement with keyword tracker by Helium 10. For more information, go to h10.me forward slash keyword tracker. Bradley Sutton: Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I am Your host Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world, and I'm going to be going over everything that happened at Amazon Accelerate. Well, maybe not everything, but all the key points. There might be a couple things I missed, but there's a lot of interesting things that were announced at Amazon Accelerate. I'm going to keep it real. Like I say, this is BS free. No, there might be a couple things I think is not that exciting. I'm going to keep it real. Let you guys know, it's just my opinions here. So I wanted to give you guys kind of like a rundown of all the like I don't know Like 25 different announcements or 30, or even more than that. As you notice, I'm wearing my old school Helium 10 shirt here and the reason is because back when Helium 10 used to use this logo, you never would have gotten me to say, like in a million years, that Amazon would be announcing the kind of things that they have been at Amazon Accelerate the last couple years. I mean like the things that they're dropping, that I'm going to talk about today, and the things that they talked about last year. It was, you know, I would have bet a million dollars if I was a betting person that no, the Amazon would never give this kind of analytics or Amazon would never do this or that. But, man, you know, hats off to Amazon because they're really trying to come through for the sellers. Bradley Sutton: So before I get started here, real quick kind of breaking news. If you didn't, you know here last week it's not Amazon Prime Day, but what is it called like? Prime Deal, that Prime Deal days prime something or other? Anyways, the second Prime Day, what a lot of people are calling the second Prime Day. They dropped the dates, for it's actually going to be October 10th and 11th. So mark your calendars. If you guys were preparing for deals or things like that, October 10th and 11th is, I think it's called deal day, something like that. So you know, normally I drop that in the weekly buzz, but I'll give you guys that information a couple days early. Bradley Sutton: Alright, let's go ahead and hop into Amazon Accelerate. I was there. It was my first time at Amazon Accelerate and it was actually cool. They actually started off with like the whole entire event was started off with a Helium 10 customer. Alright, so Hemlock Park is a customer that you know we've talked about. He's actually been on the podcast Mikey from there and they did this like full profile in front of everybody about how his business is and you know how he makes these candles and you know, really, really cool to see you know Helium 10 customer front and center, like that. But you know, let me know what do you guys think? Like what if Amazon would ask you to, like you know, show your brand, you know, would you be down to do that? You know, so many sellers, I think, are afraid of showing their brand to the whole entire world, literally like now, everybody knows what, what Mikey's products are, right. So just something to think about. You know what? Would you take the publicity that you know coming on full stage from Amazon, or would you be like now, I'm good, amazon, you go pick somebody else, alright? Bradley Sutton: First, couple of announcements you know wanted to talk about for Accelerate nothing that exciting. One of them is was Enterprise Solutions. They announced that they had 15 more software companies and solutions that are integrated into their seller partner App Store. That the seller partner App Store is like what Helium 10 and other tools like it are connected to you, but now they're connecting with like enterprise level, you know once, like QuickBooks even so, if you use QuickBooks for accounting, that's actually now integrated into the seller partner App Store. Another announcement was Emerald Notifications. Alright, so Emerald is this beta program that are doing, where some of these seller apps like you know Helium 10 can deliver notifications about things that are happening in our software in your seller central dashboard. Some of you guys might have gotten an email about that a little while ago and you guys thought it was spam or something like that. So it's real. You know Helium 10 is part of that program amongst many others. Bradley Sutton: That's what they announced at Amazon Accelerate, and basically the way that they described is they said hey, we're trying to make it easier for you to manage and act on key business updates from your third party apps. That was word for word, verbatim from their announcement. Now, if you're wondering how do you activate it in your account, let me just show you how. Go to your seller central account and then you are going to want to go to apps and services and then manage your apps. Alright, once you do that, you're going to get to the other page here and it'll have all your you know software that you're connected with, and you're going to have to find Helium 10 and hit reauthorize alright. So you're going to want to hit reauthorize after doing that or whatever other apps that you have that you can connect to, and then what's going to happen is you'll now start being eligible for those notifications, alright. Bradley Sutton: The next announcement was an AI back seller messaging assistant, and what this is is for customer service. Basically, you know how customers, if they have a question about their shipping or a question about the product you know those kind of questions go directly to Amazon. That's not anything new. That's always been the case, one of the advantages of Amazon. You don't have to take care of a lot of your customer service, like hey, where's my shipment? Like I don't know, amazon's one who shipped it right, you don't have to worry about those kind of things. But anyways, amazon is integrating AI into there in order to save even more of the questions and so, like now, it's going to be almost instantaneous, like somebody says, hey, where's my shipment? And AI is instantly answering them, saying, hey, here's the shipping and here's where it's going to go, or here's, you know, if you're eligible for a refund, all kinds of generic questions they are. Now have an AI that powers, instead of having to wait for a person you know might take some time to answer the questions and you know, theoretically speaking, this might help because you know, maybe in that time that a buyer is having to wait for the answer. Maybe they just decided to cancel their order or like it right. So hopefully, hopefully, this will, you know, kind of lessen those. Bradley Sutton: Now, the first big announcement of the day that got, you know, people kind of excited was about AI and listing billing. It was kind of funny when they first were announcing that they were going to announce that they were bringing it on the stage. And I won't forget, like they had the like the product manager for there. It's like this Amazonian, like his 50s and 60s, and he's like running out there like he's you saying, bolt to the stage. And he was like super excited. Like I was sitting there in the front row, I thought he was going to do like a crowd dive or something he was running so fast, but hey, he was excited. The crowd got excited because they really hyped up this AI tool that you know we talked about on the weekly buzz a while back. Bradley Sutton: So what does this consist of? This announcement of their AI listing builder tool? Well, they announced a press release also. It says Amazon launches generative AI to help sellers write product descriptions. And so, basically, it's going to, you know, very similar to what, you know, helium 10 has has had for a while in listing builder. Basically, what they're saying is hey, right here, word for word, says to get started, sellers only need to provide a brief description of their product, in a few words or sentences, and then Amazon will generate high quality content for the review. Sellers can refine these if they want to, or they can directly submit the automatically generated content to the Amazon catalog. Bradley Sutton: Now you know, I'm going to raise my Bradley Sutton flag, my BS flag, a little bit here, especially when they say you know, really high quality. I don't think it's there yet. I'm not trying to throw Amazon under the bus. I have very strong faith that it's going to get there. You know, remember, this is not Amazon like creating their own. You know their own. You know magic system here they're probably using. You know AI tools out there, just like you know helium 10 uses. You know chat, gpt. Bradley Sutton: But they tried to make it seem like, you know, for example, they gave a, an example here where you can just enter mouse pad with gel wrist right and then you'd be able to get like this, full, full listing. No, that's not the case Now. I tested it like we had this custom or this, this kind of case study I'm doing where I've made at least coffin shaped bath tray and I actually just, you know, actually threw in, you know, a description that was not just like five or six words, you know, just about four or five sentences and the output that it gave me. It just copied the input that I said in the description and that was the product description and then it copied it again and that was the bullet point number one and there was only one more bullet point and then there was no more bullet points in the title. Let me see if I could show it to you guys here. In the title it called it 32 inch black plastic coffin bathtub tray. All right, now the cool thing is hey, it adds spooky decor. I actually know that that is one of the main keywords here, spooky decor, but it called it plastic. I didn't say it was plastic. And then, even though that was the title, when you go to the description, the second bullet point or the first bullet point somewhere here it says hey, this is made with wood, so you got it right once. But in the title. Bradley Sutton: So, guys, this is not, do not expect this yet yet to be. You know some all encompassing thing that's going to. You know, allow you to just snap your fingers and create listings. It obviously needs a lot of work If you're interested in using AI. For now I would stick with listing builder. You know that exact same listing of a test for the coffin tray. I actually created it in listing builder and I put that. You know, very similar, prompt. But obviously the difference is, you know, in listing builder I can add all of my keywords that I had found from Cerebro you know that are relevant to that niche, and then you know, listing builders try to incorporate those keywords, which is still very important. You know, for the Amazon algorithm that you, so you can get searchable. So I'm curious, you know, maybe the reason why it made such a terrible listing is because there's not that much data, you know, on coffin bath trays, and so it was kind of struggling. But maybe if I tried to do like collagen peptides, who knows, maybe I could just write collagen powder and it would make this amazing, amazing listing for me. Now, that being said, that tool might not be at its peak yet. Bradley Sutton: However, they were giving a sneak peek at some pretty exciting announcements. They said coming soon, sellers are going to be able to submit a URL or a photo of a product and then the AI can generate reviews somehow. So you know, in my mind they were kind of saying, without really saying it maybe you have a dot com business and you've got this Shopify listing or maybe even, who knows, maybe a listing on another website like Walmart. You enter that in and then it could create an actual Amazon listing. You know that'd be pretty cool If that happened, even just like an image of a product and it would create a listing. That is pretty cool. And another thing that they said is is it's going to be available for existing listings to edit it. You know, right now it's if you want to test this out. It's only available to be done with a brand new listing if you're going to start it. But they do say that it's going to come in the future. Bradley Sutton: Now this is something that had me a little bit worried. All right, let me read this next announcement that they said. They said hey, we'll also enrich your existing listings to ensure your products have all the details that customers want to help you drive more sales. We'll use AI to automatically generate missing attributes. First of all, that's excellent. I'm not worried about that at all. You know like that would be great for those attributes. You know, sometimes we don't know all the attributes that are needed in the back end and then we have the missing and we could be suppressed and stuff. So if Amazon AI can do that, beautiful, we'd love. We'd love to see that. But here, check this out. Bradley Sutton: The second part We'll also use AI to automatically generate and improve titles, bullet points and descriptions based on data in Amazon's catalog. You'll be able to review any changes and make edits if desired. Now, that part has me worried because we all know that. You know, sometimes when Amazon kind of changes your title, it's not always great and you got you know like what if, all of a sudden, for my product, amazon use that AI thing that I just showed you guys and it wants to call my coffin bath tray, which is made of wood, a plastic coffin tray? And just terrible listing. So hopefully these things are not going to happen until their AI is a little bit more robust, which I'm sure it is, you know. But the second part is I definitely want to be able to click a button that says no, I do not want to implement those changes because you know all you helium 10 users out there, 99% of you are going to be better at making the listing than any AI. I'll just tell you that right now, ai, as far as if you're talking about optimizing your listing, for you know the algorithm and things like that All right, like, like you know, you've got all the data. You know even more data than the AI is going to have. You know, I know that sounds kind of like a audacious thing to say, but you know, those of you guys who know, know, know what's up. You know, like you guys can, can, you know, look across different categories of different keywords? And I think the technology for AI to do that is still too far off yet. But anyways, hopefully they're not going to be automatically just changing our listings without letting us know. I don't think they're going to do that. Bradley Sutton: Another minor announcement that they did was about the seller homepage. You know most of you guys were opted into that new seller homepage and one of the benefits they said of this new homepage is that you can take away those widgets. You know, sometimes the seller central homepage had all kinds of like little things that you know just cluttered the screen. But now you can, you can hide those. So they talked about that in case you guys didn't know. Another thing that kind of teased it's not ready yet they talked about how you know we have all kinds of different listing dashboards in order to. You know, there's one for fixing inactive listings, there's one for managing listings. There's a dashboard to improve your listing. So what they're working on is a new one page, you know, catch all everything that has to do with your listings in seller central and it's going to have the actions that you need to take and everything's basically beyond that page. And I guess they have the beta program going right now and it said that, you know, with this beta group, sellers are being able to take actions 40% faster than the current way of having to go to all these different listing management pages. Bradley Sutton: Another announcement they made was buyer abuse protections. You know we definitely like that. We know, although we always know that there's there's some bad players out there on the customer side and so they're implementing AI and other things in order to help kind of detect that. They quote seller selling partners can leverage Amazon's machine learning based buyer risk evaluations and specialized abuse risk investigations to protect your business. All right, so that's a bunch of fancy. You know press release kind of words there. But in a nutshell, the way they explained it is this is gonna help protect you against fraudulent orders, fraudulent claims. It says it's gonna potentially save millions of dollars on refunds and actually probably the point that I think got some applause from people, that says they announced that to address the issue of reviews, amazon has worked to automate and sanitize the sanitize I love that word, that's literally their word, that they said on stage to sanitize the process of suppressing reviews for abusive accounts in real time. All right, so we don't know exactly in the past how the Amazon kind of policed reviews, but you could see it happening, like, if you're using the Helium 10 Chrome extension, you ever look at the review history of a product and then you'll notice that all of a sudden 3,000 reviews got lost and then 2,000 reviews got added back. You probably seen that and were thinking that was a Helium 10 mistake or something. No, what was happening was Amazon would just like quarantine thousands of reviews or hundreds of reviews at a time and I guess, like you know, do some kind of audit on it and then just put back the ones that were okay. So if this, if I'm understanding this correctly, that process in the future might be now in kind of like a real time. Bradley Sutton: Another announcement that you know may not affect a lot of you guys there's this Amazon company called I think it's called VCO, v-e-e-q-o and it's like a multi-channel shipping software. So kind of like you know me, I don't use that, I use like Snapscom, but it's very similar to that where it integrates with your seller central and then you could, you know, print shipping labels and things like that. And so they made an announcement that you know they've negotiated the cheapest shipping rates in the business and usually you can only get like the same price, no matter, you know, if I use Snapscom or if I'm using I don't know like ShipStation or something like that. Right, it's almost always the same exact price, like even my Snapscom price is the same as if I buy postage or UPS ground from Amazon. But if you use VCO, you can actually save an additional 5% off by getting credit. So that's like another announcement that they made. So if you use VCO or if you're interested in that, make sure to check that out. Bradley Sutton: Now the next big announcement was a launch of Amazon shipping. All right, so Amazon shipping is basically a new program where they're kind of gonna be be, you know, competing with FedEx and UPS. Now this I found very interesting because you know it's been, it's been rumored to happen for a long time and now it is happening. You know, in some cities there's only like 15 cities and basically this is gonna be just just what you think is a UPS and FedEx. You know like it's a package delivery service to to fulfill not only just your Amazon like fulfilled by merchant orders, but you can technically fulfill anything. You know like you've got a dot com website and you wanna have Amazon actually pick up the shipment and then deliver it in like two to five days, including Saturdays and Sundays, at a low cost and then no extra fees for residential or weekend delivery. You wanna be able to track the packages in real time, get photo on delivery when the order is delivered. This is now coming. You know you're gonna be able to do that. So again, you don't even have to like be a you know Amazon Prime seller, fba seller to take advantage of this. Bradley Sutton: Now a couple of things I'm wondering about is you know how you can't do like drop shipping or shipping from Amazon for Walmart? You know I used to. I used to make oh my goodness, I made hundreds of thousands of dollars drop shipping like Walmart to Amazon and vice versa. I mean it's curious, like would you be able to use Amazon shipping as a shipper and fulfill stuff you're selling Walmart? I would assume. No, I would assume Walmart would not want that. But anyways, you know if you sell on other platforms. You know this could be something that you can use. Bradley Sutton: Another big announcement was Amazon supply chain, or they called it supply chain by Amazon, and automated solution to help so it was quickly and reliably ship products around the world. So this is kind of like they were talked about this as being an end to end system of shipping where it goes all the way from your you know factory you know picking up at the factory, you know getting it out of the country wherever it's gonna be importing through customs, you know all the way to Amazon and it takes it to another level. This is like more. We're talking about more than just through what Amazon global logistics was. Some of the things that they talked about in their press release was that these new prices for this new system are gonna reflect this counts of up to 25% on cross-border transportation that it said. You're also gonna have a streamlined domestic inbound transportation to AWD. All right. Bradley Sutton: Awd is the Amazon warehousing they're through with their partnered carrier program. All right, so you can be able to save 25% on the already lower cost that you might have been having. So you're gonna have an expanded AWD offering with reduced prices. Those of you who are already using it, the AWD rates are gonna be now 80% lower than FBA storage fee, so that AWD is kind of like using Amazon as a 3PL, if I were to try and oversimplify it. But if you're doing AWD, compared to maybe you were just storing things in FBA and getting long-term fees, you're gonna save 80%, which is kind of a pretty impressive right. Bradley Sutton: They're gonna have new multi-channel distribution capability and what that means is that Amazon selling partners will sell across multiple who sell across multiple sales channels, including online and brick and mortar. Keeping everything in stock is a challenge, so this is going to be able to move your inventory in bulk from AWD Amazon's warehousing to any sales channel so that you can replenish across the board, not just Amazon. So that's gonna be something coming. And something that I found interesting was automatic inventory replenishment with FBA all right. So if you're using this whole supply chain system, they're gonna be like replenishing inventory into the fulfillment centers, like from AWD, without you having to forecast. Bradley Sutton: So, again, color me skeptical at first, just because I'm like, hey, I've seen some of Amazon's inventory forecasting recommendations and in the past it's been kind of trash in my opinion. Sorry, you know Amazon, but Amazon's definitely improving in that and so. But this would be interesting. Like I'd be curious as to what the algorithm that they're gonna use, how it's gonna work. But imagine a world where you don't even have to like worry about sending your inventory to Amazon Prime. You used to have like, hey, I'm ordering 10,000 units from my factory in China. It's going to Amazon's warehouses and I can just gonna trust Amazon to put them into FBA. You don't fulfill your orders from. You don't fulfill your orders directly from AWD to the customer. It has to go to FBA warehouses first. But imagine a world where you're not going to have to worry about that anymore. So that would be kind of interesting as well. Bradley Sutton: So there's another you know interesting announcement that happened on day one. I mean, I can't believe we're still on day one here. Couple other things from day one. There was escalate. My case was something that was in beta where you know there's gonna be like a button in seller essential where you can like escalate if you're having trouble with support. That's coming soon and that includes talking to a live support agent. It's something funny. Bradley Sutton: Seller poll you guys ever see those seller polls in your seller essential dashboard? Well, you know, they ask it. Hey, guys, please keep providing feedback. Now I'll keep it real here. Most of those polls have been pretty, pretty good lately, but sometimes we get a kick out of the ones Like I actually saved one of my all time favorites. Bradley Sutton: This was, you know, a while back. It says my account is safe from being suspended unexpectedly. Strongly agree, agree, neither agree or disagree. So, like you know, we all made fun of some of these polls like this that people would get back in a day because I don't think any of us thought that we were safe from being suspended. But you know, honestly, if I were to be honest, I have been suspended unexpectedly. That was like a good four or five years ago. I think was the last time that happened. You know, if I were to get my sentiment here, you know I put probably strongly disagree. You know three years ago when I took this screenshot, but maybe now I'd be like I neither agree or disagree, like I still see. You know horror stories out there, but you know I haven't been suspended in a while and now Amazon has new systems in place that actually, where they would call you before they suspend you. So that didn't exist three or four years ago. So you know they're getting better. But anyways, the point being, don't just laugh at these polls. These are important. Most of them are important for you to get some to give Amazon your feedback. Bradley Sutton: All right now, going to day two, a couple again minor announcements that I'm not sure affect much of you. One was called flexible customer financing, aka FCF program. You're gonna be able to enable your customers to purchase your eligible product's interest fee using installment options. So, like you know, maybe like you got a $200 product or $300 product, you can. It sounds like you're gonna be able to activate this like, hey, buy now, pay later, kind of thing sounds like. But the important part of this is that if customers opt into that, they don't have to pay right away. But guess what? You get the funds right away, if I understand this correctly. So that would be pretty cool, you know, because that would kind of suck if, yeah, let people buy this $1,000 thing and paid off over six months and you're getting, like, payments for it over six months. That would not fly right. So that would be kind of cool if this can help your sales. Bradley Sutton: Another announcement is that there's now a customer loyalty analytics, or there's going to be a customer loyalty analytics dashboard, so it allows you to segment customers based on loyalty and analyze, segment purchase patterns and perform targeted engagement to increase your overall lifetime customer value. So they put out a press release on this and it's pretty interesting because it says, hey, new features will give sellers a comprehensive understanding of the customer sentiment for existing products from reviews and also returns. And it gave an example like hey, there's an outdoor recreation brand, they're trying to design a new tent. They'll easily be able to understand what drives customer complaints and satisfaction with the tents today. Like so it might give you like a niche kind of analysis. And it says upcoming enhancement to the tool will provide the ability to select different time periods, analyze trends over time, benchmark customer sentiment against best sellers in the category. You know that benchmarking thing sounds pretty cool and so this is something to look out for that's going to be available later this year in the US, uk, germany, france, italy and Spain, and then Japan to follow, and, instead of localized insights, will also provide a deeper understanding of customer preferences in the country. So it's not just like looking at, you know a category across all of Amazon, but you're looking at a country basis. So again, something interesting, cool announcement to look forward to. Bradley Sutton: Another thing that Amazon release is something called fit insights tool. It's going to be backed by AI and this is for those of you who are mainly like in the apparel category, you know, which is historically one of the, you know, the one that has the most returns and issues and with reviews and things like that. But it's going to be analyzing the reviews and the size charts and kind of like how people identify themselves as what size they are and then compare it to like what size you're saying the product is, or, yeah, your shirt or socks or whatever, and then it's going to give you like suggestions, like you know what you know you probably should move your size tier up a little bit, because people who say that they're waist 38, you know they're complaining about your product because they say it's too big. So you might want to, you know, put it, call this a size 36 instead of a 38 or whatever the case may be. So you know I don't sell in the apparel, so this doesn't affect me at all. But what about you? You know you guys who are selling leggings or shirts or pants or things like that. You know, I'm sure you guys have all kinds of crazy horror stories about return. So if AI can help with that process you know it's called again, it's called fit insights. It's going to be available a beginning in October. Look out for more announcement on that. We'll probably have that in the weekly buzz. Bradley Sutton: Another minor announcement that has to do with Amazon warehouses, called computer vision based detection. All right, so they gave this demo where they're showing like vision technology where things are going on the conveyor belts, going to you know orders and stuff, and then this AI is going to like see if there's a problem with, like, an expiration date, somehow, like on the package, or maybe the box is damaged, right, and then it's going to stop it from going to the customer. So I have, you know, face value seems okay. I'm just not fully convinced this is going to make a huge impact. I think the thing that all of us are more concerned about is when products go back to Amazon. You know it's like can we please take a look at these boxes and obviously realize that the customer didn't put the pack back in the box or it's used or things like that. Please don't put it back in inventory. This is a start. This is a start, though, you know, because you know, sometimes maybe like a forklift runs over a package, but it's still somehow it gets on the conveyor belt and then gets to the customer and they get upset because they get a super damaged box and then they return it. So in that situation, this will probably kind of like help, help with that, with that kind of stuff, and then, starting in 2024, you'll actually get a report on all the packages that Amazon kind of like stopped, you know, thanks to this new robotic vision thing that it has. Bradley Sutton: Voice of the customer dashboard was their next announcement. That's actually something that exists now, but it talked about what is coming to this dashboard. Basically, they said they're going to launch three new, improved features that will give you more insights into what's going on to help you build customer loyalty, and these include key phrases from customer feedback. I'm not sure if that means reviews, because you know customer feedback is something different than reviews, so I'm not completely sure about that. Number two, category benchmarking and trend analysis to give you the tools to compare your performance against similar products. And then, number three, deeper key performance metrics broken down by customer feedback score. Quote unquote was part of their announcement for that. So if you're using that VOC, or voice of the customer dashboard. Look out for those three enhancements soon. Bradley Sutton: Add to cart seller profile pages. That was another announcement. You guys know what the seller profile page is. That's where you click on the storefront, you know from a listing, and then it takes you to the page where the feedback is and the address of the seller and stuff. Well, there's nothing that allow you to necessarily buy the product before, but now, as you can see, they have an add to cart button Now for the product that maybe they were clicking on. So that's something that's already new. And then they talked about potentially, you know, maybe even having some other cross-selling where it has other products right there on this page that somebody could add to cart. Bradley Sutton: Another announcement I really didn't understand. I wish I could have followed up on this, but it was called two tap ratings and in this session or not session, but in this announcement they were talking about how two tap ratings simplifies the seller rating process and customers have indicated that seller ratings are a critical data point in their shopping journey. So two tap ratings eliminates the written feedback requirement, simplifying the end to end review experience. So that's what the announcement was, but I'm like, wait a minute. Hasn't there just been this two tap rating for like a couple of years now, which is why the number of ratings is so much higher than the number of written reviews? Bradley Sutton: So I'm not exactly sure what this announcement was. Maybe it's about from the actual write a customer review button on orders, like if you were to open up your mobile app right now, your Amazon buyer app, and then you know, hit an order and says write a review, you kind of do there have to leave a written review, I think. So maybe that part is gonna be changed. But I know there's like a page where you can go where Amazon just gives you these messages like hey, rate this product, you don't have to write nothing, you just like click the rating right there and that's it. So I'm not exactly sure what this announcement is, but my speculation is that from the write a review button there, you can just start leaving ratings there, but this might increase the number of ratings you know you get, which is, you know, for some customers or for some of you guys. You guys would love that. Some others were like man, this kind of sucks, I barely get any written reviews now and I really want written reviews. So maybe some of you think that's a negative. Another day. Bradley Sutton: Two announcement was that a seller wallet where it's this is coming, where you can take your funds you know, your before you get, actually get dispersed and then you can use it to, like you know, make a wire transfer to your, to your vendors or your suppliers, things like that. You know we've had that with a group Alta, helium, 10, alta for a while, but now it's coming to a seller central. Next announcement was a little bit bigger, so it was kind of like there's a little bit of thunder being stolen because they announced it, the, you know, a couple of weeks ago about the Shopify and buy with Prime. But they talked a lot about buy with Prime. The thing that was like shock, shocking was they actually brought out the VP, or a VP of Shopify to the Amazon accelerate stage. So he actually came right on stage and even the, even the Amazonian who introduced him, was like hey, you know, a year ago I wouldn't probably not have imagined bringing this person on stage. And that was because, as we've talked about in the weekly buzz before, they had all kinds of beef. You know, in the old days, you know, shopify wanted all that smoke. They were. They were like saying, hey, if you use buy with prime on Shopify, you're against our terms of service and this and that. So, yeah, that's kind of like nobody would have ever guessed that a VP of Shopify would be on stage at Amazon accelerate, but they were talking about buy with prime. And so, in general, you know, regardless of it was Shopify or not, buy with prime has been out, you know, for a year now. They talked about how some of the stats for buy with prime, you know what kind of stats it's had for for sellers. For example, one brand said that nine out of every 10 buy with prime orders were from customers new to their brand. A newer feature was buy with prime cart is starting to see early success. So before it was kind of like if you had buy with prime, it was just for one product. But now they're rolling this out where you can, like you know, have multiple Amazon or, you know, fba supplied products and then you can actually add them to the cart and then the customer on Shopify or whatever, woocommerce or whatever, can go ahead and check out instead of just having to buy them one by one and the this, this, this feature the merchants who use it say that they increased a 15% increase in buy with prime units per order. Another announcement from the buy with prime is that they introduced you know, or they talked how they introduced reviews from Amazon so that you can display your Amazon reviews on your website at no additional costs, and they said that early results show that merchants who who added the Amazon reviews to their website have 38% increase in shopper conversion. So this is especially probably for those who are newer, have new websites and have zero reviews on there. And then another thing that they announced was buy with prime assist, which gives merchants the option to offer 24, seven cost post order customer service through Amazon at no additional costs, using a real time chat feature. So, yeah, this was definitely interesting to see. Bradley Sutton: You know, I've never used by with prime and never even had a my own. I mean like not in like 20 years I haven't had my own website as far as my Amazon, my Amazon products go. So what about the rest of you? Has anybody of you guys out there use by with primer ready for, like, maybe WooCommerce or another website? Be curious to see. You know what you guys, you know how that's worked out for you. Bradley Sutton: Another couple announcements, just really quick. Let me just speed through these last few ones here. There's the potential sales lift. You guys ever seen that from the dashboard? It's like where, where Amazon will tell you hey, you know, if you use a plus content, you know you can make a gazillion dollars. You know, I kind of like make light of that. But yeah, I think a lot of us were like this is such nonsense. You know, like I remember one time it was something yeah, put a plus content in your pink coffin shelf and you'll increase sales by $2,000 a month. I'm like, what are you talking about, bro? Like there's, there's not even $2,000 of pink coffin shelves sold in a year. That's like wrong. So that's probably why a lot of us wanted to even hide some of those widgets on the seller central dashboard back in the day, which is what they you know they we talked about earlier today. Bradley Sutton: But let me tell you guys it's improved. You know I'm not. I'm not again, I'm not trying to throw Amazon on the bus. I just want to show you guys that Amazon actually gets better. I actually haven't looked at those in a long time and I'm looking at it live right now where it says under growth opportunities. Hey, this coffin egg tray says if you increase improved conversion by create, creating a plus content, you could have an $88 sales lift over 90 days. That sounds reasonable. That's like four egg trays. You know, if I put a plus content could I increase sales by four, eight trays. That sounds very reasonable, but then again it's not fully completely working. That coffin bath tray test I said if I put a plus content I'm going to get an $8 and 66 cents sales lift. I'm like this is a $4 product. How am I going to get an $8 sales lift? It's not perfect, but, guys, it is getting better. Don't just overlook it. If you're like me, who are just like, oh, I'm just going to ignore all of those because they're so far off, I think their algorithms that they have working on it is definitely a lot better. So so make sure to check that out. And anyways, the announcement that they had was this potential sales lift is going to be available for a lot other kind of things like manager experiments and 20 other catalog attributes. So 20 other things they're going to be. They're going to give you a little thing that says, hey, if you do this to each of those 20 things, you could get this kind of sales lift. Bradley Sutton: Another cool feature they talked about was view in your room table top. So you guys ever seen the helium 10 coffin shelf or other products like furniture? And then it has a button where it says view in your room, but it puts it on the floor right, like it's mainly for like chairs and tables and stuff, and then you can kind of it's using augmented reality for your product and then you can just kind of like with your mobile app see how that product looks in the room. Well, now they said, hey, this is going to, we're rolling out the room table top feature. So instead of just looking how it would look on the floor, you're like who's going to put a coffin shelf on the floor? You know it's going to be like hey, put it on this countertop or this egg tray, how does it look in your kitchen island, and things like that. So this is coming soon. Bradley Sutton: So in the past it wasn't something you opted into or or could ask Amazon to give you, like the helium 10 coffin shelf. We didn't do anything special. It just all of a sudden started showing up with that augmented reality. So I have a feeling based on what they were saying at Accelerate that there's now going to be some kind of controllability you're going to have where you can potentially opt into the program or send them like 3D images or something and get into there. So we actually have some follow up meetings with that department to try and see, you know, how maybe helium 10 can can help in this. But that would be pretty cool for those of you who have products that go on table tops or counter tops or things like that, being able to integrate augmented reality for your customers who have the mobile app. Bradley Sutton: Another thing honestly I was not excited about it all, it's actually kind of scared a little bit was ships in product packaging program. All right, so it's allowing you the opportunity, it says, to ship customer orders in your own custom branded packaging without additional Amazon boxes. All right, now this could go both ways. Already, this happens sometimes and actually, you know, some of us are kind of upset when it might happen, like if you guys have like some super fancy gift box or like some nice, really nice packaging, you don't want Amazon just taking that and then slapping all their logos and and or their logos, but they're they're, you know, slapping their shipping labels and stuff on it and then having that really nice package getting all scuffed up and then it's like all torn up by the time it gets the customer. And so you know like right now I'm actually doing a brand new coffin shelf package where it's like a box, shape like a coffin and it's going to be like a super nice giftable thing. But if Amazon ships in that box, you know that kind of sucks. Now, where this is better is you know Amazon might be charging you extra shipping because it has to use extra packaging. Bradley Sutton: So this, this article or this announcement where they talk about how, because of the ability now to ship in your own packaging in the future, maybe it's going to save you in the fulfillment costs. But I don't know for me. I most of my products. I don't want that. There's a couple of products I have that that I don't really care about the packaging much, and you know they could go ahead and slap a shipping label on there. I don't care, especially if it's safe. Saves me some money. But I'm I'm curious what you, which boat are you guys in? You know would you say, yes, I want to save, you know, a few cents on packaging and you know it also saves the environment too, you know, because you're not having to to have all this cardboard you know around, or are you like, do you have fancy packaging and you and you want that put into an outside box? Anyways, this new feature is going to have enrollment in January of 2024. So you got a couple of months to think about which which boat you would be in. They also announced the sustainability solutions hub. You can look up there. You know, on seller central, if you want more news I'm running out of time here and the last one that they announced, again that you can check in seller central, was a climate some new climate pledge friendly badges that are coming, and it's interesting. Their data shows that if you have that climate pledge friendly badge, it actually drives 10% more page views than if you didn't have it. So it might be something you might want to get onto your listing, and they're going to have three new ways in order to, you know, to have that. So there you have it, guys. Bradley Sutton: I'm sure I missed a couple of things here, but but that was probably the majority of what they talked about that this year's Amazon Accelerate it was my first time there had a blast. I couldn't even go to all the parties because I was working in the nights. I had a whole bunch of like webinars I was doing in China and things like that. So I got I missed all the parties but I heard it was really great. There was like two, 3000 people, you know, really high quality. They had the DJ from the Beastie Boys was like the DJ for the events and and they had Tracy Ross there as a celebrity, you know speaker. Really really cool event, really well organized. You know what, what you would expect from Amazon. So, guys, next year I'm sure it's going to be back again Highly, highly, highly recommend going there because you know Amazon, there's nothing like it, you know where. I mean, I didn't even do all of it and I probably would drop 30 different news items there that they launched. So it's a one set, once a year event and definitely go. Bradley Sutton: It's not the only event that Amazon does. Amazon does a little bit higher end kind of more advertising. So it's really the event that's happening in October, october 20, I want to say 25th and 26th or 24th to 26th in New York City. It's called Amazon Unboxed. So you want a similar event but more focused maybe on on advertising and if you're you know bigger sellers, make sure to register for that one. Amazon Unboxed, ilium 10 and Pacview definitely will have teams there, so be great to to meet you guys in person at that one. I hope you enjoyed this recap. If you guys want follow-ups for me to talk about any of these announcements a little bit more in depth, make sure to reach out. Don't forget to follow on Instagram Sirius Sellers podcast. See you guys in the next episode.
France & Vlad Recap Chrome 23's I Do What I want event. (2:00) Pulling up to Chrome 23 (in the building)(10:00) First Lady Flamez & C3 Recap & Mic Issues (19:00) Chayna Ashley's Stellar performance vs Rosenberg Raw(33:00) Charlie Clips vs A.Ward Recap(50:00) Eazy vs Geechi Recap 1st Round breakdown(66:00) 2nd round breakdown of Eazy vs Geechi (85:00) The impact of Geechi's 3rd round(95:00) Where does this win rank in Geechi Gotti's Career? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Welcome to Episode 183 of SC Utd. On this edition: keeping it tight! You can get in touch on Twitter @SoccerCardsUtd, follow us on Instagram @SoccerCardsUnited, or email us soccercardsunited@gmail.com. Your questions, comments and suggestions could and probably will be featured on the show if you reach out to us! Please rate and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts or out loud on the street to passers-by. The music for the show is: Modern Jazz Samba by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4063-modern-jazz-samba License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses
If you don't know who Marc Scott is, you should. The VOpreneur is helping Voice Artists around the world navigate the nightmare that is marketing your Voice! This week, we have him on the show to talk about everything from emailing leads to the Red Socks... Find out more about him and his great services here: https://www.vopreneur.com/ A big shout out to our sponsors, Austrian Audio and Tri Booth. Both these companies are providers of QUALITY Audio Gear (we wouldn't partner with them unless they were), so please, if you're in the market for some new kit, do us a solid and check out their products, and be sure to tell em "Robbo, George, Robert, and AP sent you"... As a part of their generous support of our show, Tri Booth is offering $200 off a brand-new booth when you use the code TRIPAP200. So get onto their website now and secure your new booth... https://tribooth.com/ And if you're in the market for a new Mic or killer pair of headphones, check out Austrian Audio. They've got a great range of top-shelf gear.. https://austrian.audio/ We have launched a Patreon page in the hopes of being able to pay someone to help us get the show to more people and in turn help them with the same info we're sharing with you. If you aren't familiar with Patreon, it's an easy way for those interested in our show to get exclusive content and updates before anyone else, along with a whole bunch of other "perks" just by contributing as little as $1 per month. Find out more here.. https://www.patreon.com/proaudiosuite George has created a page strictly for Pro Audio Suite listeners, so check it out for the latest discounts and offers for TPAS listeners. https://georgethe.tech/tpas If you haven't filled out our survey on what you'd like to hear on the show, you can do it here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/ZWT5BTD Join our Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/proaudiopodcast And the FB Group here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/357898255543203 For everything else (including joining our mailing list for exclusive previews and other goodies), check out our website https://www.theproaudiosuite.com/ “When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional.” Hunter S Thompson Summary On this episode of Pro Audio Suite, voiceover and marketing coach Mark Scott is featured. Mark shares how he started his career in marketing out of necessity to make it in the voiceover industry. Now, he helps other voiceover artists navigate their own marketing journey. Covering a range of topics from social media strategy, dealing with rejection, the power of micro habits, and avoiding distractions, Mark provides valuable insights on how to set yourself apart in a saturated market. He also emphasizes the importance of continually bringing in new prospects to maintain success. The episode also dives into his experimentation with affiliate marketing and his innovative use of national days for promotional sales. He shares his approach to gifting clients, stressing the importance of showing appreciation. The discussion also touches on techniques for enhancing creativity, a crucial skill for both voiceover work and marketing. #VoiceoverMarketingGuru #ProAudioSuitePodcast #MarketingInAudioIndustry Timestamps [00:00:00] Pro Audio Suite Introduction [00:00:39] Guest Introduction - Marketing Guru Mark Scott [00:01:27] Mark Scott's Journey to Voiceover Marketing [00:03:21] The Challenge of Offline Marketing for Voiceover Artists [00:08:49] Pros and Cons of Social Media in Marketing [00:10:37] Cultural Influences in Marketing Strategies [00:11:42] The Power of 'No' in Building Relationships [00:13:55] The Impact of Micro Habits on Growth [00:17:05] Distraction - The Enemy of Marketing [00:20:56] Tailored Marketing Advice for Voiceover Artist Andrew [00:28:49] Mark's Recent Marketing Endeavors [00:31:48] The Danger of Complacency in Successful Businesses [00:33:04] The Art of Gifting in Business Relationships [00:34:27] Capitalizing on Unconventional Sales Opportunities [00:36:36] Sparking Creativity for Social Media Content [00:42:30] Pro Audio Suite Closing Remarks Transcript Speaker A: Y'all ready be history.,Speaker B: Get started.,Speaker C: Welcome.,Speaker B: Hi. Hi.,: Hello, everyone, to the Pro Audio Suite. These guys are professional. They're motivated with tech.,Speaker C: To the Vo stars George Wittam, founder of Source Elements Robert Marshall, international audio engineer Darren Robbo Robertson and global voice Andrew Peters. Thanks to Triboo Austrian audio making passion heard. Source elements. George the tech. Wittam and robbo and AP's. International demo. To find out more about us, check thepro audiosuite.com line up.,Speaker B: Learner. Here we go.,Speaker C: And don't forget the code. Trip a P 200 to get $200 off your tribooth. This week we have a guest. He hasn't as many kids as Robbo, not as cute as Robert, not as smart as George, but he's one of us, and that counts for something. Would you please welcome the marketing guru, Mark Scott. How you doing?,Speaker B: Mark, I see what you did there. I totally caught what you did. Somebody's been listening to my podcast and playing off my opener.,Speaker A: Who would do that?,Speaker C: Exactly.,Speaker A: Really?,: Cheeky monkey.,Speaker B: Look at you guys doing your research.,Speaker A: I appreciate know we go out of our way. We do work hard.,Speaker C: We do indeed.,: Don't speak for yourself. I just show up.,Speaker C: Actually, I was lying before. I'm the same. Yeah. So the question I have to get the ball rolling. How did you sort of end up being like the voiceover marketing guru?,Speaker B: Because I needed to make money in voiceover, and I had to figure out how to do it. I'm one of those voice actors, show of hands, who's been ceremoniously, dumped from their radio career, right. And defaulted into voiceover. And I wasn't making any money when I first started in Voiceover, and I was like, I know I can do this. I know there's a way to make money. Casting sites will only take me so far. And so I started figuring out, at first by accident and then with a little bit greater intention, how to actually market myself. And I remember I read a book that Gary Vee wrote. Everybody knows Gary Vee in the marketing space and in that book, Gary Vee said, you should write a blog. And so I thought, all right, well, if Gary Vee says I should write a blog, I should write a blog. But I didn't know what to blog about. So I just started blogging about all of the marketing stuff that I was learning while I was on this journey. And I guess the end result of that was people thought that I was a marketing guru. And so I just roll with it.,Speaker A: Is that how you see yourself?,Speaker B: I mean, now I do see myself as a voice actor and a marketing coach for voice actors. And even though that was never the original intention, voiceover was obviously the original intention. The coaching thing was just one of those things where I guess you get to a point where the market kind of dictates it when you start getting a lot of people emailing you saying, can you help me with this? Or do you offer coaching? Or I got invited to speak at a couple of conferences and I was like, man, maybe there's something to this, maybe I should roll with this. And I think the best part of it is that it helps to keep me sharp. I can't get complacent because I'm helping other people and having to stay on top of what's going on and having to pay attention. And so that keeps me sharp too.,Speaker A: Because marketing yourself is a hell of a job, isn't it? It takes a lot of time.,Speaker B: It is.,Speaker A: Is that something that you sort of, as part of your coaching, you're teaching people, is how to best use their time as well, to fit all this stuff in, to run a database and to do prospecting and to send emails and are you sort of helping them with their time on that as well?,Speaker B: Well, I mean, the thing that I always joke about is people ask me, how many marketing emails should I be sending? And my response is what you're really asking me is what is the minimum amount of marketing that I can do and still get away with it? Because this is not what voice actors want to do. Right. They sign up to be in the booth and do the recording, but the reality is, if you're not in the booth and you're not doing the recording, it's probably because you're not doing the marketing. So it takes time. Yes, but for me, it's like, what else am I going to do if I'm not recording? I might as well be spending my day making new connections, getting in front of new people, so that I can open the door to do more recording down the road. Right?,: It's probably better than obsessing on whether you have the best microphone for voiceover.,Speaker B: Yeah, I think so.,: It's much better use of your time, I can tell you.,Speaker A: Yeah, because marketing is something that I mean, I'm basing my assumptions here on the Australian market, but 20 years ago, a voiceover artist marketing themselves was unheard of because you had an agent and they pretty much did all that for you. So it's only a sort of recent thing. Do you find that maybe that's part of the issue is that voiceover artists in general have only just recently been thrown into this situation and they're madly trying to figure it out without really anyone to sort of base their marketing strategy on or whatever. Do you find that maybe we're all a bit new to this?,Speaker B: It might be an oversimplification, but I think looking out at the macro level, I think there's probably three different classes of voice actors. There's the voiceover veterans who were around in the glory days of voiceover when it was all agents and in studio, and your agents did everything for you and they brought you in studio and obviously the industry still exists like that in certain areas, but not in a lot of areas anymore. Then there was a group of voice actors who kind of came in during what I call the glory days of online casting. And so for them it meant signing up for a Pay to Play membership, submitting auditions on Pay to Play and maybe they had an agent or two as well. And for voice actors that have come in, we'll say the COVID era voice actors, the glory days of online casting are over. It's not really a sustainable way to build a full time business. Obviously the agent model has shifted a ton and so I think those voice actors are more in tune with the fact that marketing is how this gets done. And I think that voice, like, I came in the glory days of online casting and I was in denial for a while, but when I started seeing things change on the Pay to Play, I knew, okay, I got to figure out a better way. And I don't happen to live in a New York or in La or a Chicago where the full agent model may still work for some people. And so I do think that for a lot of voice actors, they're creatives. They operate from the creative side of their brain. They want to be in the booth doing creative things. And marketing, I think, comes from the other side of the brain and so it's not a natural fit and that's why they don't think about it initially, it's why they don't necessarily want to do it. Can't blame them for that either. But it opened up the door for somebody like me to be able to come in and help them with it because I'm actually not a creative. So I operate from the business side of my brain first.,Speaker C: Yeah, it's interesting though, because winding the clock back, I remember when I like, you finished my radio career and moved to Melbourne 25 years ago. I got into voiceover, got an agent and I was sort of started working, but it was a slow thing. And I walked into a studio one day and I remember sitting and waiting to go in. They had no idea who I was, they just had a name on a piece of paper that I was coming in to do a voice. But I watched the way they communicated with the talent that was leaving and it was like, hey, see you Matt, blah, blah, blah, whatever. It was all like face to face. They knew each other, so I thought there's got to be a way of shortcutting this so I can actually become visible to them as opposed to just being a name on a piece of paper. So I went out and found a photographer and I got a whole bunch of shots taken. And the brief was there were certain colors that I wanted to do, but I wanted to make it look like I was releasing an album on a CD. And I was the singer, so I was the artist on the front cover, which I did. And so I produced all these videos, which in those days was VHS for on camera stuff. I did a bunch of CDs with this picture on it and it was an immediate shortcut because I just did every studio, went to every studio, dropped these kits off with my demo and all that kind of stuff, and it was amazing. When I walked in, they knew who I was because on their desk was my photograph on the CD and everybody else just had their name and a contact number.,Speaker B: Yeah, I was going to say at that point in time, probably nobody else was doing that. So it makes it so much easier for you to stand out. Right. That's how you get noticed.,Speaker C: Yeah. And it worked. It was like, it was an immediate shortcut. I probably saved about six months of traipsing around the studios.,Speaker B: Yeah, for sure.,Speaker A: Is there an online equivalent of that today, do you reckon, Mark, or is it just a slow slog?,Speaker B: I mean, social media is I wouldn't call it a shortcut. Can you get lucky on social media if you find the right audience or hit the right niche or do the right thing? Of course, I've seen many voice actors who have gone viral on TikTok or on YouTube or on Instagram, and that has led to opportunities. I wouldn't say that it's necessarily the norm for it to happen quickly, but I do think that if you use some of those tools consistently, over time, you start to build a following, you start to get recognition and people start to notice who you are and pay a little bit more attention.,: Yeah. I can tell you from someone who's started his business at the beginning of social media, it's been a very long slog because you do just spend time building up the brand and the name recognition and establishing yourself as an authority on the subject of something. So, yeah, it's a way to do it. It's definitely not the fastest, I would say.,Speaker B: Yeah, I would say now, I don't know that I would release the VHS, but I would say that there's a full circle coming around. Like I've had some success doing things like postcards because everybody else is doing email and inbox and social media and nobody's sending anything through the mail anymore. And so that's one of the ways that you stand out. So walking into a studio today and dropping off a package, nobody's doing that again now because everybody's doing email and social media, so there might be a full circle opportunity to kind of jump the line a little bit in that regard.,Speaker A: Will that be the next episode of your podcast, Mark?,Speaker B: Yeah, maybe I'll bring you guys on the show and we'll talk through that one.,Speaker C: As far as countries are concerned, do you find the attitude towards marketing changes depending on which country you're marketing yourself into?,Speaker B: I don't know if the attitude changes as much. I think maybe the platforms change a little bit. Like for example, I've got some clients in South America who don't do email at all. Everything happens on WhatsApp. And so if you're emailing them and they're not responding to you, that's why. Because they don't actually operate on their inbox, they operate out of WhatsApp. And so that's a little bit different. I think the whole North American 24/7 hustle culture, I don't think that necessarily plays the same way in certain European markets where they actually take time off and leave the office and end their workday. And so if you're dropping marketing emails in their inbox at eight or 09:00 at night or whatever, I don't know that that necessarily lands. So I think there's little things, little nuances maybe from country to country, region to region. But at the end of the day, we're all trying to accomplish the same thing. We want people to hear our voice and if our demos are great, then hopefully that does the selling for us.,Speaker A: Yeah, well, talking about email, I've heard you mention a couple of times that no hearing no is actually a good thing. Do you want to explain that to people who maybe haven't heard you talk about this before?,Speaker B: I think that when we're sending out our marketing emails, obviously we want everybody to say yes and we want everybody to hire us and we want every email that we send to be a potential opportunity. And so when we get that rejection, our natural instinct is to take it as know, I might not be any good or maybe my demos aren't good enough or maybe my studio stinks, I need to call George. Whatever. Right. We start to go into all of this negative spiral of everything that's wrong with us when the reality is maybe they don't use voice actors or maybe they've already got a full roster or maybe there's just nothing that fits your voice or whatever. Right. There's 1000 reasons why they don't need you. Only one of those reasons is they didn't like you. But by them just telling you no straight up now, you know, so you don't have to put any more effort into building a relationship with that person going forward. And so much of marketing is building relationships. I would rather devote my time, my effort, my energy to building relationships with people who are potentially going to hire me than spending it on somebody who was never going to hire me in the first place. So the sooner they tell me no, I'm not interested, the better it is for me in that regard because I can devote more time to better prospects.,: Yeah, kind of the same thing as like unsubscribes. Like whenever I send out an email campaign, there's a certain percentages of unsubscribes, maybe a half a percent, but I used to be like, oh man, people don't want to hear it. And it's like, no, that's good. Now you've weeded it down. Now the ones that are left are the ones that really do want to hear from you. And that lets you know people that's true from you, because they're telling you they don't want to hear from you. It's not a bad thing.,Speaker B: When I started building my email list, I took it so personal. Like, I wanted to call up every person who unsubscribed and be like, did I say something wrong? I'm so sorry. Right? You don't want that rejection, right? But now the unsubscribe is a gift in that sense, because now you know that's somebody who was never going to work with you anyway, so focus your attention somewhere else.,Speaker A: I want to take a bit of an off ramp here and head in a different direction, just for a second, because you and I have one thing in common that I know of and we're a bit of a fan of a book called Atomic Habits from a gentleman who I've been lucky enough to interview for an hour or so. A guy called James clear. And his book talks about how micro habits can actually change our lives. Just little things that we do every day that become a habit, can actually change our business, our family life, anything that you want to change, really. And I was wondering if you, in your time of reading James's book and sort of thinking about the things that he's spoken about, if you might have like three habits or so that a voiceover artist should get into in terms of their marketing if they want to become more successful.,Speaker B: One of the things that I talk about all the time with email marketing is send ten emails a day, which is not a big number when you break it down. Ten emails a day, that's not a big number. That's something that realistically, you could probably do in about an hour. It doesn't seem like a lot ultimately, but if you do that five days a week, you just sent 50 emails. And if you do that consistently for a year, that's 2500 emails. And if you get a ten or 15% response rate, that's 200 and 5275 prospects that are now in your database. After a year of just sending ten emails a day, like just focusing on one simple, small task that's an hour out of your day at most, but can create an exponential growth opportunity for you if you do it consistently for a year. And so I think the same applies to social media, though, too, right? Like if you post once a week or twice a week, but you just do it consistently, you get into that habit of doing it consistently, not sharing an update when you've got an update and then falling off for 30 days and then coming back. And now you got to start all over again with the algorithm, and you've got to retrain the algorithm, right? I think some of those simple little things that you can break down into daily tasks that you can accomplish in 10 minutes, 15 minutes, an hour to send those emails or whatever, it does make a big difference, and it's important. I work with voice actors. There's a group of voice actors that I coach for an entire year. Every year, I build out a mastermind group, and in December, we meet. I meet with each of one of them one on one, and we set the big goals for the entire year. Like, when I get to the end of the next year, these are the things that I want to accomplish. And then the next step from that is breaking it down into, okay, what does that look like over individual quarters? What does that look like over a month to month basis? And then, what does that look like on a day to day basis? So that you don't just focus on the great big overarching goal for the entire year, but you're breaking that down into more bite sized pieces, right? It's the whole idea of eating the elephant one bite at a time. And I think that's the concept, basically, of the micro habits. And that's why I love that book. I think everybody should read that book.,Speaker A: It's a ripper, isn't it?,Speaker B: It really is.,Speaker A: What do you think's the biggest enemy of doing? Easy to for me, it's so easy. If I'm getting on to do my socials, it's so easily to get distracted and go, oh, look what my mate Sean posted last week. And look at this, look at that. Do you reckon distraction is an enemy of our marketing?,Speaker B: 100%. There was a study that came out, and I know I'm going to get the numbers wrong, but it was something like, for every time that we allow ourselves to get taken off focus, it takes, like, 26 minutes to get back on track or something like that, right? And so one of the things that I say with social media, and I teach this to voice actors, like, okay, you're going to use LinkedIn because you think that that's a really good platform for you based on the type of work that you want to get. One of the things that you got to do on LinkedIn, if you really want to gain traction, is you've got to be consistent. Okay, what does that look like? And I say set a ten minute block in your calendar every morning and use an alarm. And when that alarm goes off after 10 minutes, get off. Because social media is designed for the endless scroll, right? Like, they've literally engineered these sites to keep us there as long as humanly possible. And so you have to be intentional about getting off and moving on to the next task. Otherwise it is 2 hours later and you're still flipping through reels on Instagram or whatever. And so I think you've got to be very careful about stuff like that.,: Yeah, I had to come up with a hack for me, I am one of those keep many tabs open in Chrome, people, all the things I use to run my business, all the different software websites, everything is like tabs, right? So what I do now is I check Facebook and then I close the just that one little thing keeps it from looking at me and taunting me to click on it because it's just not there. And that's my little hack.,Speaker A: James Clee would be proud of you mate. That's an atomic habit.,Speaker B: So often during the day my phone is not in my office because it's too easy, right? It's too easy. Apple lets you set up the custom focuses in the operating system and so I can set a custom focus that the only people that can text me or get a call through to me during certain times of the day. When I'm in that focus is like my wife and my kids, right? Everybody else can wait at that point because I don't want one ping on your phone. One notification is never just let me just check that one text or let me just answer that one email. It's always 25 minutes later and checked the weather and checked the stock market and went on Twitter and had to look at Instagram or whatever, right? And so it's too easy to lose the time.,Speaker A: Is that a thing for you if you've got that set up on your phone? Does that mean that there's a time of the day, I guess given outside of voiceover sessions and stuff but is there a particular time of the day that you do this sort of work?,Speaker B: When it is available in my schedule because my days are very unpredictable but I try to leave certain parts. Like you can't schedule a session with me before 11:00 a.m. So the first couple of hours of the morning, that's time when I can really just focus on my business and you can't schedule a session with me after 04:00 in the afternoon and so there might be an hour or two after 04:00 where I'm focused and that's where I'm going to do my things. But then if I have spare time in a day where somebody hasn't booked me for whatever reason, phone goes into the focus and it lets me settle in to do whatever the task is that I need to do. 30 minutes of deep focused work is so much more productive than 2 hours of periodic distracted work in between checking socials and text messages and getting yourself into a.,Speaker A: So let's let's, let's get a little bit micro on know, let's take Andrew as an example. Andrew's got an agent here in Australia. He's got an agent in the States. He does work that he drums up himself out of Singapore and Dubai. What should a media strategy for someone like Andrew, and I'm not asking you to give him a freebie here, but in general terms, what sort of things should Andrew be thinking about if he's going to go out there now and market himself and drum up some more work?,Speaker B: What kind of work is Andrew looking for?,Speaker C: That's a very good question.,Speaker B: Probably particular genre.,Speaker C: I'm just kind of thinking the things that I probably do mainly, which is promo work, TV promos, radio imaging.,Speaker B: Then.,Speaker C: I do quite a lot of mainly commercials, long form stuff. So I do like everything really. But I guess the main thing is what I'm booked for is the imaging or promo and also the soft sell sort of luxury product kind of voice.,Speaker B: So one of the things that I think you could be doing is looking at you got a great voice, you got that you sound like a TV promo documentary.,Speaker A: God, don't strike his ego anymore, please.,Speaker C: Oh, come on, someone's got two.,Speaker B: You have the kind of voice that people will sit and listen to on TikTok. You do. And I think there's one of two things that you could do. I think that you could either just do it straight and record yourself reading promos imaging, stuff like that, make some videos in the studio of you doing that as just a way to demonstrate, but also give people the opportunity to hear your voice. Or I think there's an opportunity to go in a completely different direction. The person I'm thinking of in particular is Christopher Tester. He's a voice actor out of the UK who is a classically trained British RP theater actor. And he goes on TikTok and reads monologues know, plays and historic books, different things like that, right? And he's created this whole niche with videos that constantly are going viral, but then people are also constantly writing him and saying, hey, do this one next, or do this one next, which keeps the audience coming back, keeps them watching, keeps the videos going viral. But it was a demonstration of his acting ability and so people end up booking him for voiceover work specifically because of that, because they're seeing his acting abilities. So I think if you could come up with a fun way to do some social media content that highlights your voice but demonstrates your skill, I think that's one of the things that could be done in a relatively short amount of time every day, dedicate 30 minutes to it. Making videos for social media doesn't need to be a complex task anymore. If you've got an iPhone or whatever, you've already got a superior camera and you've got a studio, so you've got great audio, so that's really easy. And I think that would be one thing that I would be looking at. And then the other thing is, I would set a target for myself of I'm going to connect with whatever it is, five radio station program directors every day. And maybe that's going to be through LinkedIn, or maybe that's going to be through email, but it's just getting yourself in front of a few new people every day, and that number is going to change. Right. For a successful working, six figure talent who doesn't have a lot of time, right? They can contact 2025 people a week and just keep some new, fresh people in the pipeline. For the voice actor who doesn't have a whole lot of work right now and is still trying to build their business, you're going to contact ten or 20 people a day and work at filling up and creating that pipeline. But those are two things that I think that you could do to open up some opportunities for yourself. And that one's okay. That's okay. It's on the house.,Speaker A: There you go. And I'll be expecting to see the first video tomorrow. Andrew? Yes.,Speaker C: I wonder what I'll do on TikTok. I dread to think we're going to.,Speaker B: Premier it with the podcast episode.,Speaker A: So you know what's interesting in hearing you talk about that, Mark, is that how niched our marketing needs to get. Then? If we're aiming for a TikTok audience, do we really need to niche it down to, okay, I'm going to do it about acting, or I'm going to do it, or is there any scope anymore for just that I'm a voiceover actor and I can pretty much do everything? Or do we need to niche all our marketing down?,Speaker B: I think that it's possible to do a niche that has absolutely nothing to do with voiceover whatsoever. If it is a niche that you have a skill in or a passion in, and you can connect with an audience in. The best example of that is Stefan Johnson. So he's an American voice actor who does food reviews on TikTok, and they're hilarious, irreverent, fun. And the guy's got I don't even know at this point, he's probably got ten or 11 million followers on TikTok. Every video he does, I think, goes viral. That pretty much is the way it works. Now, he is not talking about voiceover. He's just talking about food and snacks and fast food and doing his reviews, who's got the best burger, who's got the best pizza, whatever. But because he reaches such a broad audience, so many people are watching his videos, it's inevitable that somewhere in that audience of millions of people are people who make buying decisions about voiceover for whatever, from the local video production company to the executive producer at a cable network or whatever. And so that has opened up a door for him for tons of voiceover opportunity. And so I think sometimes we limit ourselves by getting too focused on the voiceover box and thinking we have to. Be in the voiceover box. And so is there something that you can talk about, that you are passionate about, that you love, that you have a skill for, that you have an education for? Whatever? Is there a way that you could create content around that that highlights your voice still or highlights your narration skill or your acting skill or whatever? Doesn't specifically have to do with voiceover, but I think the two tie themselves together eventually.,Speaker A: Now people out there are going to go, it's all right for you, Mark, you've been doing this for a while now, you've got it down pat. I'm just a lowly little voiceover artist sitting in my home studio. I have no idea where to start. Would your advice be just bite the bullet and start?,Speaker B: Yeah. Because your first video is not going to be your best video. The first email that you send is not going to be the best email that you send. The first social media, a post that you create is not going to be the best, but you've got to get the first one out of the way to get to the next one, which is going to be a little better. And the one after that, it's going to be a little better. Honestly, if I go back to, let's say, 2008 910, somewhere in there, when I first started doing a little bit of email marketing, it is honestly an act of God that I ever booked a voiceover at all because I can go back and look at some of those early emails and be like, what the heck? I didn't have a clue what I.,Speaker C: Was doing, but I was just exactly.,Speaker B: Doing it and then learning as I went, getting incrementally better. And that's what opens up the door to more opportunity down the road. And so, yeah, I think it's really easy to get perfection paralysis, right? I've got to have everything lined up before I got to have the perfect camera, the perfect audio, the perfect studio, the perfect backdrop before I can make my first video. Or I've got to have the exact formula worked out for the ultimate marketing email before I can ever send the first marketing email. And we let that become a crutch or an excuse that keeps us from just doing the thing when the reality is it's just like voiceover. My guess is, and you guys could probably attest to this your first time in the booth and your hundredth time in the booth, I'm hoping on the hundredth time you were better, you get in your reps and you get better over time.,Speaker A: Yeah. So, George, I know you're deep in marketing. George, the tech at the moment, is there anything you reckon Mark could I'm.,: Writing virtual postcards on a website right now.,Speaker A: You're deeply engrossed in this interview then, George, I can see.,Speaker C: Yeah. But I'm thinking that that postcard idea is an absolute cracker.,: Yeah. I mean, I just received a postcard from a consultant who's doing some financial consulting for me, like a financial planner type person. And I was like, oh, I haven't gotten a handwritten thank you card in the mail in a really long time. In this case, it looks legitimately. Like, she legitimately handwrote this card and sent it to me.,Speaker B: Yes.,: And I thought, man, if she's got time to do that, I mean, we have time to do that now. My handwriting sucks. It just does. And I could pay my assistant to write these cards, which I might consider doing. And there's also these websites where you can do, quote unquote, handwritten postcards and send them out and they mail them for you and they print them and they do all that stuff. So it's something I'm considering trying in those postcards, having a little coupon code for a please come back. But I have been in absolute, hardcore, full court press marketing mode for the last three months. For George, the tech, you say when you're not working, you need to be marketing. And sales really slumped in the summer this year for us. And I was like, okay, I can either get really frustrated and figure out ways to just start cutting costs and slowing things down or really just go for it hardcore. With in my case, the thing I've been really ramping up is affiliate marketing. And that's been where I've been focusing my energy. And I've got some great advisors around me. I talk to my own marketing and strategist person almost every single week. And I need that accountability, someone to follow up with me, someone to tell me, hey, we had that meeting and I told you to do all this stuff, so go do it. Because it's an insane undertaking to run this business, keep everything functional still, keep my clients happy and on time and keep all the marketing and the biz dev all going. And that's what I've been doing the last few months, actually. I started to realize I'm actually kind of enjoying doing more biz dev. And the shift of my time, of my day is it's legitimately shifted. I don't do as much billable time as I used to, but we have other people doing more billable time and that's awesome.,Speaker B: It brings up a whole other point, though, that I think is important to consider, and that is there comes a point when you've been doing your marketing and it has paid off and business is going really well and you're busy and you're in the booth consistently or you're doing studio builds consistently, or whatever it is that your thing is that you're doing consistently. And what's the very first thing that often gets cut from the schedule? It's the marketing.,: Yeah, the marketing.,Speaker B: And then complacency sets in, right, complacency sets in because you've built a successful business. I've got a successful business, everything's running, firing on all cylinders. But one thing that this industry will teach you over and over again is that clients don't last forever. And so if you are not constantly bringing new people into the mix, then you don't have anyone to replace those clients that ultimately fall away. And so complacency is one of the most dangerous things for any voice actor or business owner for that matter, who's built a successful business. Because it's really easy to work to get there and then when you get there, to relax and enjoy it. And that doesn't mean that you can't relax and enjoy it. Obviously, I don't market the same way now that I did when I was building a full time business, but it's important that I never just stop, that there's always something new coming into the pipeline.,: Yeah, well, the thing that always happens at the end of the year is everybody wants to get out their holiday cards and all that stuff, right? And holiday gifts. And the problem with the holidays is it's too damn busy to do all that stuff, right. Like by the time you're thinking about it's time to be doing my holiday stuff. Now work is like firing all cylinders. You're really cooking. And that seems to happen almost every year for me. And how do you decide and again, not expecting extremely specific answer, but how do you decide about gifting? Because I know some folks and actors and myself included, some of your clients spent more with you than others this year or over the last five years. Is it a very simple mathematics? You just look and say, okay, someone spent more than X, I'm going to give them X? Is that kind of how you look at it?,Speaker B: Honestly, it's something that I don't do a ton of. And one of the reasons why is because there are so many potential pitfalls. And I mean, I guess it depends on where you're working. I do a lot of work for corporate, right? It's a lot of corporate and Elearning and stuff. So it's a lot of corporations. There's a lot of rules around gifting and you can actually get yourself into trouble doing that. And so it's not something that I do a lot of, but I do always make sure I make a point of sending thank you cards or letting them know that I appreciate them and all of that sort of stuff. I do think that there's something to be said for that. I was going to mention too, you got me thinking because you mentioned about the holidays and it's such a busy time and everybody's doing marketing over Christmas and New Year's or Cyber Monday, Black Friday, blah, blah, blah. One of the most successful sales that I ever ran for my coaching was on Groundhogs Day. I ran a Groundhogs Day sale because who the heck runs a Groundhogs Day sale? And so when every other voiceover organization is running a July 4 sale or a Labor Day sale or a Black Friday sale or whatever, I was like, I'm going to do a Groundhog Day sale and see how that goes. And I had no competition on that day. And so that's a little bit outside of the box when you're thinking about so can you look? There's a national day for everything. George and Uncle Roy post them every day. There's a national day for everything. You need to find a national day for something that is related to audio, sound, studio, microphone, whatever. And let that be your big marketing push day when nobody else is thinking about it or nobody else is doing it. Own that day instead of trying to compete with all the noise on a Black Friday or a Cyber Monday or whatever.,Speaker A: Don't talk about Uncle Roy around. AP. He's got huge marketing issues with Uncle Roy.,: But yeah, I mean that whole top of mind, that Uncle Roy thing, that whole top of mind thing that Uncle Roy does with that finding literally a reason to every single day post something, it's a smart idea, it's top of mind.,Speaker B: And now he's associated with it, right?,Speaker A: Yeah, he's that guy.,Speaker B: So you got to find your thing that you get associated with by default. Find that holiday, find that thing and make that the George the Tech day, the George the Tech event.,Speaker A: So we're sort of making our own Black Friday, is that the deal?,Speaker B: Yeah, I think that there's something to be said for that and it doesn't mean you ignore all of those other opportunities. But doing something special on a day that has some sort of relevance or significance but nobody else is doing it, it is one of the ways that you can potentially stand out.,: Love it.,Speaker A: So just quickly, just to sort of wind this up. Creativity is a big part of what we do in our work, obviously being voiceover artists and audio engineers and George doing what he does and that obviously needs to be reflected in our marketing. Is there any rituals or any sort of thing you do around creativity to sort of spark ideas in terms of what you might post on social media or what you might say in an email? Or do you just open up a blank email and hope the words come out?,Speaker B: Yeah, I spend ungodly amounts of time staring at a blank iPad pro with an Apple pencil in my hand waiting for the idea to hit so that I can write it down because it doesn't come. Believe it or not, that creative side doesn't always come naturally to me. But one of the things that I have gotten so much better at over the years and George, this could specifically apply to what you're doing. I am paying so much more attention to what my audience is talking about. So I have a Facebook group with 6000 plus voice actors in it. And the questions that they're asking in that group, the things that they're complaining about, the pain points that they're very obviously struggling with, every single one of those becomes a seed for a video, a podcast topic, a social media post, a course that I might eventually create. And so I've gotten to a point now and this is one of the perks of building that kind of network and that kind of following is that they don't realize it maybe necessarily, but they are feeding me my content ideas. And George, I know you could do the same thing. All you have to do is spend 5 minutes in a Facebook group and see there's a dozen people a day complaining about tech this, tech that, this problem that problem, whatever. Every one of those is a potential piece of content that you could create, whether it's a video, an audio piece of content, a Facebook post, a blog article, whatever. It's all content that is right there being handed to you specifically addressing the things that your audience is struggling with. And so that's one of the things that I do is just I survey my network a lot. What are you struggling with? Or if you could have one podcast interview that you would absolutely love to hear that would change your business, who would the guest be or what would the topic be? And I throw out surveys like that and that helps me to come up with ideas. And then when all else fails, I go sit in the backyard by the fire and enjoy the peace and quiet and hope that if I can clear my head enough and quiet myself enough, a brilliant idea will strike.,Speaker A: They do eventually though, don't they? That's the thing. It's true. I know there's some science behind this, but it actually is those moments when your brain's not actively thinking about the next email or the next social post that the ideas actually come.,Speaker B: Long walk always have a way to.,: Write things down or do a voice memo in the shower. In fact, I have an Amazon Echo Dot.,Speaker A: There's no camera in there that hangs.,: On the wall right over the doorway. And if I'm like in the shower, I can say hey yo Jimbo, remind me to do this while I'm in the middle of the shower because I.,Speaker B: Don'T want to miss. That so true.,Speaker A: Yep, yep, that's right. Well, I think it was AP will probably correct me on this, but I think it was either Start Me Up or Brown Sugar that Keith Richards wrote literally in his sleep. Keith Richards sleeps with a cassette deck next to his bed. And in the middle of the night, if he has an idea, he wakes up and he sings it into his tape recorder. But whichever song it was, it was one of their massive hits anyway, he woke up the next morning and he didn't remember waking up during the night, but he looked at this cassette deck and the cassette had been obviously played. It was halfway through the cassette and he played it back and it was Start Me Up, Brown Sugar. Whichever one it was, it was there. And so he literally wrote it in his sleep.,Speaker C: Yeah, I do remember the stories. I think it was a reel to reel and the tape running out woke him up.,Speaker A: Was it something like that?,Speaker C: Spooled off? Yeah. And he's sort of like, what the hell was that running for? I don't remember starting played it back.,Speaker A: And there was the song Crazy.,Speaker C: Just crazy.,Speaker A: Our brain is an amazing thing.,Speaker B: It's one of the reasons why I have so many issues with sleep, because, honestly, that is one of the few times in the day where my brain is completely quiet when I'm in bed at night. And so a lot of my best ideas hit about three or 330 in the morning, and I can't be upset about it because they're my best ideas, but at the same time, it's like.,: I wish this would come during the day.,Speaker A: Well, I've had a similar thing because AP and I have just started doing demos together and writing scripts for those falls to me. And, yeah, I'm sort of finding that I'll sort of jump into bed and I'll start dozing off to sleep, and then I'm awake and dashing out of the room with my iPhone and dictating a script idea that's just comes into my head, into the phone. So, yeah, I think we're all the same.,: Absolutely.,Speaker B: Yes.,Speaker A: Well, mate, this has been a whole lot of fun. Thank you so much for your time.,Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. It's been fun. Thank you.,Speaker A: If people want to find out more about you, and you've got some amazing courses and bits and pieces up for offer, and obviously the podcast as well, what's the best place for people to go? To find out more about the Mark Scott Experience, shall we call it?,Speaker B: Funnily enough, that was actually the name of an old radio show. Now it is Vopreneur.com. That old Mark Scott experience facebook page might still exist somewhere. I'm not sure if that ever came offline, but, yeah, the website is Vopepreneur.com.,Speaker A: As soon as we're done here, I'm going to Google that.,Speaker B: Shit.,Speaker A: I was going to say something and now it's gone out of my head.,Speaker C: It'll come to you at three in the morning?,Speaker A: Yeah, it'll come to me in the morning. I'll give you a call, let you know.,Speaker B: All right.,Speaker A: Best of luck with the Red Sox. I hope they get better for you, mate.,Speaker B: Well, I mean, there's nowhere to go when you're at the bottom but up, right?,Speaker C: This is true.,Speaker B: Well, that was fun. Is it over?,Speaker C: The Pro audio suite with thanks to Tribut and Austrian audio recorded using Source Connect, edited by Andrew Peters and mixed by Robbo Got your own audio issues? Just askrovo.com with tech support from George the tech Wittam. Don't forget to subscribe to the show and join in the conversation on our Facebook group. To leave a comment, suggest a topic or just say G'day. Drop us a note at our websiteproaudiosuite.com.
With Gareth Myles and Ted Salmon Join us on Mewe RSS Link: https://techaddicts.libsyn.com/rss iTunes | Google Podcasts | Stitcher | Tunein | Spotify Amazon | Pocket Casts | Castbox | PodHubUK Feedback, Fallout and Contributions Geekom IT8 StarfieldE Hardline on the hardware Huawei Mate 60 Pro draws public closer to China's space communication satellite system Remember the venerable tape from the VHS era? It's back with a vengeance and a 50TB capacity HarmonyOS to launch for PC, Windows might be in trouble MediaTek develops first 3nm chip using TSMC process technology UK comes to its senses, will not push iMessage and WhatsApp to exit country EU spares Apple from mandatory RCS, for now Radiative Cooling: The Pioneering Approach to Climate Control Anker SOLIX F3800 Polaroid I-2 instant camera has pro snappers in its sights - £599 MagRail trains can levitate on existing tracks ClockworkPi uConsole Linux handheld PC from $139 $5000 17-Inch Foldable Windows Tablet HP Spectre Foldable 17 Announced With OLED Screen Logitech's Reach camera has an articulating arm that lets you point it just about anywhere New Electric Motor Tech Spins With No Magnets Phone Zone Xiaomi is the latest Android brand to beat Google Pixel's update timeline Xiaomi sneaks adware onto its phones in the latest update It's official: The Leica-branded Xiaomi 13T series launches this month Motorola Edge 40 Neo arrives with Dimensity 7030 SoC, 50MP camera, and 144Hz screen Oppo's rumoured battery replacement initiative is something all phone makers should adopt The Name of the Game Long awaited PS5 update is available now, adding support for Dolby Atmos and 8TB SSDs Nintendo is bringing Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door to the Switch in 2024 All the delisted 3DS Picross games are coming to the Nintendo Switch Flap your trap about an App TikTok opens datacentre in Dublin in bid to combat European privacy concerns Facebook may offer paid ad-free plans in Europe Paint for Windows 11 is getting background removal Google Gallows & Chrome Coroner Google brings back the Reading Mode toolbar in Chrome's Side Panel after heavy criticism Chromebooks will get 10 years of automatic updates Gboard's Emoji Kitchen is now integrated into Google Search for web, iPhone, etc Google Photos Locked Folder sync starts rolling out Hark Back Dragon 32/64 - The Welsh 8-bit - Info resource Bargain Basement: Best UK deals and tech on sale we have spotted Razer Leviathan V2 X - PC Gaming Soundbar £79.99 from £99.99, so £20 off + £16 x 5 months for me PreSonus Eris E3.5 - 3.5 Inch, 2-way, High-Definition Multimedia Studio Monitors (Pair) Now: £69.00 RRP: £97.00 UGREEN Nexode 100W USB-C GaN £47.99 from £69.99 - less £6 Voucher = £41.99 (lowest ever) AMD Ryzen 9 5900X Processor - Now £255.13 RRP: £509.99 UGREEN Nexode 300W USB-C GaN PD Desktop Power Adapter with 240W USB C Cable - just released £269.99 - £70 Voucher = £199 NJSJ USB Microphone for PC - Was £26.39 RRP: £36.98 (Lifetime warranty) Nokia X30 256GB/8GB £299 from £439 - Specs Main Show URL: http://www.techaddicts.uk | PodHubUK Contact:: gareth@techaddicts.uk | @techaddictsuk Gareth - @garethmyles | Mastodon | garethmyles.com | Gareth's Ko-Fi Ted - tedsalmon.com | Ted's PayPal | Mastodon | Ted's Amazon YouTube: Tech Addicts
In this episode, A.V. rips a few packs of 2023 Topps Chrome and searches for some refractors! This set is full of them! Check it out and email or Facebook message us with your comments. email: rippingwaxpacks@gmail.comFacebook: Ripping Wax PacksYouTube: A.V.'s Ripping Wax PacksClick on the the link below and sign up for a paid Buzzsprout plan and get a $20 Amazon gift card! https://www.buzzsprout.com/?referrer_id=1660801
MetaMask just released MetaMask Snaps at Permissionless II. Why is this such a big deal? Is this crypto's “Chrome extension” moment? Is this how we onboard crypto's next billion users? We welcome creator and Co-Founder of MetaMask, Dan Finlay on the show to help us explore all of these questions and much more. ------
We all use plugins in order to facilitate our work this is my favorite picks.
Google pays more than $10 billion per year for these privileged positions Trademark Genericide And One Big Way The DOJ Admits That Its Antitrust Lawsuit Against Google Is Utter Garbage YouTube under no obligation to host anti-vaccine advocate's videos, court says Google's cookie-replacing Privacy Sandbox reaches major milestone Google teaser previews Pixel Watch 2 and both Pixel 8 phones NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube is a hit, with more subscribers than when it was on DirecTV Google will soon require disclaimers for AI-generated political ads Coke Y3000 made with AI Casey Newton reads the Musk bio so we don't have to Book Review: 'Elon Musk,' by Walter Isaacson Elon Musk's X is suing California over its online moderation reporting bill UK backs off breaking encryption Google pledges $20 million for responsible AI fund Jeff comment to Copyright Office on AI OpenAI CEO (and prepper) Sam Altman Said A.I. Won't Save Him in a Real-World Crisis AI learns to smell Amazon rolls out generative AI tool to help sellers write product listings Adobe launches generative AI for Creative Cloud users and raises plan prices GOOGLE CHANGELOG Google adds Prime Video and bunch of other stuff to cars with native Android software Find My Device 3.0 rolling out with new Android app icon Chrome is about to look a bit different You're invited to the new Google Visitor Experience Chromecast with Google TV adds official support for streaming your PS5 YouTube starts making the 'Subscribe' button glow when creators ask you to subscribe PICKS OF THE WEEK Visit Rockport Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection Adobe Video Fall Updates 2023: Premiere Pro, After Effects, FrameIO Ant on "Friends Like Us" With Marina Franklin and Von Decarlo The Original Pixel Buds Hosts: Jason Howell, Jeff Jarvis, and Ant Pruitt Guest: Cathy Gellis Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsor: Miro.com/podcast
Last week in security news: Corey reported an over-scoped role to AWS security, The bad LastPass breach got even worse, How to enforce DNS name constraints in AWS Private CA, and more!Links: I reported an over-scoped role to AWS security; the response from the SageMaker Canvas team was that it's working as intended. The bad LastPass breach that continues to get worse once again somehow got worse. Microsoft has published a rather thorough postmortem about how their signing key was leaked. A security newsletter features a scam that I reported via Twitter. Google has gone from paragon of security to apparently now sharing aspects of your browsing history with websites in Chrome, Establishing a data perimeter on AWS: Allow access to company data only from expected networks How to enforce DNS name constraints in AWS Private CA Tool of the week: ThreatMapper hunts for threats in your production platforms, and ranks these threats based on their risk-of-exploit.
This week, Apple introduced new Apple Watch and iPhone models. We look at all the new features, and we discuss recent Apple security updates to older operating systems, new Mac malware, and patches to Chrome and Firefox for serious vulnerabilities. Show Notes: Apple patches 2 actively exploited vulns in macOS Ventura, iOS 16, watchOS 9 A plethora of Pegasus patches: Chrome, old Apple OSes get updates New 'MetaStealer' malware targets Intel-based macOS systems Everything Apple announced at its “Wonderlust” event: iPhone 15, Watch Series 9, and more Intego Mac Premium Bundle X9 is the ultimate protection and utility suite for your Mac. Download a free trial now at intego.com, and use this link for a special discount when you're ready to buy.
Google pays more than $10 billion per year for these privileged positions Trademark Genericide And One Big Way The DOJ Admits That Its Antitrust Lawsuit Against Google Is Utter Garbage YouTube under no obligation to host anti-vaccine advocate's videos, court says Google's cookie-replacing Privacy Sandbox reaches major milestone Google teaser previews Pixel Watch 2 and both Pixel 8 phones NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube is a hit, with more subscribers than when it was on DirecTV Google will soon require disclaimers for AI-generated political ads Coke Y3000 made with AI Casey Newton reads the Musk bio so we don't have to Book Review: 'Elon Musk,' by Walter Isaacson Elon Musk's X is suing California over its online moderation reporting bill UK backs off breaking encryption Google pledges $20 million for responsible AI fund Jeff comment to Copyright Office on AI OpenAI CEO (and prepper) Sam Altman Said A.I. Won't Save Him in a Real-World Crisis AI learns to smell Amazon rolls out generative AI tool to help sellers write product listings Adobe launches generative AI for Creative Cloud users and raises plan prices GOOGLE CHANGELOG Google adds Prime Video and bunch of other stuff to cars with native Android software Find My Device 3.0 rolling out with new Android app icon Chrome is about to look a bit different You're invited to the new Google Visitor Experience Chromecast with Google TV adds official support for streaming your PS5 YouTube starts making the 'Subscribe' button glow when creators ask you to subscribe PICKS OF THE WEEK Visit Rockport Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection Adobe Video Fall Updates 2023: Premiere Pro, After Effects, FrameIO Ant on "Friends Like Us" With Marina Franklin and Von Decarlo The Original Pixel Buds Hosts: Jason Howell, Jeff Jarvis, and Ant Pruitt Guest: Cathy Gellis Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsor: Miro.com/podcast
Google pays more than $10 billion per year for these privileged positions Trademark Genericide And One Big Way The DOJ Admits That Its Antitrust Lawsuit Against Google Is Utter Garbage YouTube under no obligation to host anti-vaccine advocate's videos, court says Google's cookie-replacing Privacy Sandbox reaches major milestone Google teaser previews Pixel Watch 2 and both Pixel 8 phones NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube is a hit, with more subscribers than when it was on DirecTV Google will soon require disclaimers for AI-generated political ads Coke Y3000 made with AI Casey Newton reads the Musk bio so we don't have to Book Review: 'Elon Musk,' by Walter Isaacson Elon Musk's X is suing California over its online moderation reporting bill UK backs off breaking encryption Google pledges $20 million for responsible AI fund Jeff comment to Copyright Office on AI OpenAI CEO (and prepper) Sam Altman Said A.I. Won't Save Him in a Real-World Crisis AI learns to smell Amazon rolls out generative AI tool to help sellers write product listings Adobe launches generative AI for Creative Cloud users and raises plan prices GOOGLE CHANGELOG Google adds Prime Video and bunch of other stuff to cars with native Android software Find My Device 3.0 rolling out with new Android app icon Chrome is about to look a bit different You're invited to the new Google Visitor Experience Chromecast with Google TV adds official support for streaming your PS5 YouTube starts making the 'Subscribe' button glow when creators ask you to subscribe PICKS OF THE WEEK Visit Rockport Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection Adobe Video Fall Updates 2023: Premiere Pro, After Effects, FrameIO Ant on "Friends Like Us" With Marina Franklin and Von Decarlo The Original Pixel Buds Hosts: Jason Howell, Jeff Jarvis, and Ant Pruitt Guest: Cathy Gellis Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsor: Miro.com/podcast
Lots in the Security News this week. Stay tuned! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/psw-798
Google pays more than $10 billion per year for these privileged positions Trademark Genericide And One Big Way The DOJ Admits That Its Antitrust Lawsuit Against Google Is Utter Garbage YouTube under no obligation to host anti-vaccine advocate's videos, court says Google's cookie-replacing Privacy Sandbox reaches major milestone Google teaser previews Pixel Watch 2 and both Pixel 8 phones NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube is a hit, with more subscribers than when it was on DirecTV Google will soon require disclaimers for AI-generated political ads Coke Y3000 made with AI Casey Newton reads the Musk bio so we don't have to Book Review: 'Elon Musk,' by Walter Isaacson Elon Musk's X is suing California over its online moderation reporting bill UK backs off breaking encryption Google pledges $20 million for responsible AI fund Jeff comment to Copyright Office on AI OpenAI CEO (and prepper) Sam Altman Said A.I. Won't Save Him in a Real-World Crisis AI learns to smell Amazon rolls out generative AI tool to help sellers write product listings Adobe launches generative AI for Creative Cloud users and raises plan prices GOOGLE CHANGELOG Google adds Prime Video and bunch of other stuff to cars with native Android software Find My Device 3.0 rolling out with new Android app icon Chrome is about to look a bit different You're invited to the new Google Visitor Experience Chromecast with Google TV adds official support for streaming your PS5 YouTube starts making the 'Subscribe' button glow when creators ask you to subscribe PICKS OF THE WEEK Visit Rockport Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection Adobe Video Fall Updates 2023: Premiere Pro, After Effects, FrameIO Ant on "Friends Like Us" With Marina Franklin and Von Decarlo The Original Pixel Buds Hosts: Jason Howell, Jeff Jarvis, and Ant Pruitt Guest: Cathy Gellis Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsor: Miro.com/podcast
An access broker's phishing facilitates ransomware. 3AM is fallback malware. Cross-site-scripting vulnerabilities are reported in Apache services. US agencies warn organizations to be alert for deepfakes. The US Department of Defense publishes its 2023 Cyber Strategy. Ann Johnson from the Afternoon Cyber Tea podcast speaks with with Jenny Radcliffe about the rise in social engineering. Deepen Desai from Zscaler shares a technical analysis of Bandit Stealer. And a quick reminder: yesterday was Patch Tuesday. For links to all of today's stories check out our CyberWire daily news briefing: https://thecyberwire.com/newsletters/daily-briefing/12/175 Selected reading. Malware distributor Storm-0324 facilitates ransomware access (Microsoft Security) 3AM: New Ransomware Family Used As Fallback in Failed LockBit Attack (Symantec) Azure HDInsight Riddled With XSS Vulnerabilities via Apache Services (Orca Security) Contextualizing Deepfake Threats to Organizations (US Department of Defense) Bipartisan push to ban deceptive AI-generated ads in US elections (Reuters) DOD Releases 2023 Cyber Strategy Summary (U.S. Department of Defense) New Pentagon cyber strategy: Building new capabilities, expanding allied info-sharing (Breaking Defense) New DOD cyber strategy notes limits of digital deterrence (DefenseScoop) New Pentagon cyber strategy: Building new capabilities, expanding allied info-sharing (Breaking Defense) CISA Releases Three Industrial Control Systems Advisories (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA) September 2023 Security Updates (Microsoft Security Response Center) Microsoft Releases September 2023 Updates (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA) Zero Day Summer: Microsoft Warns of Fresh New Software Exploits (SecurityWeek) Microsoft Patch Tuesday: Two zero-days addressed in September update (Computing) Adobe Releases Security Updates for Multiple Products (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA) Microsoft, Adobe fix zero-days exploited by attackers (CVE-2023-26369, CVE-2023-36761, CVE-2023-36802) (Help Net Security) Adobe fixed actively exploited zero-day in Acrobat and Reader (Security Affairs) Adobe warns of critical Acrobat and Reader zero-day exploited in attacks (BleepingComputer) Apple Releases Security Updates for iOS and macOS (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA) SAP Security Patch Day for September 2023 (Onapsis) Google Rushes to Patch Critical Chrome Vulnerability Exploited in the Wild - Update Now (The Hacker News) Critical Google Chrome Zero-Day Bug Exploited in the Wild (Dark Reading) Zero-day affecting Chrome, Firefox and Thunderbird patched (Computer) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Mopria, Cisco, Seimens and Schneider, Word, AP Stylebook, DarkGate, GitHub, Chrome, More News, and Jason Wood on the Security Weekly News. Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/swn-324
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT A lot of technology companies have bolted digital signage capabilities on to their core software platform. Often, that means the end-products don't do a whole lot beyond playing out some files on a screen. I'm a bit guilty of making that assumption about Ditto, a wireless screen sharing platform that also works as a digital signage CMS. In chatting with the company that develops and markets Ditto, and now in this podcast with co-founder Andrew Gould, I've learned Ditto is much more than an add-on. Some customers get Ditto licenses for the signage functions, and then don't even use the screen mirroring. Based in Ohio, the company spent its first dozen or so years selling screen sharing into the education and workplace verticals. But it started getting a lot of requests from end-users about adding functionality that made screens useful during downtimes. They wanted to get more bang from their hardware buck. So the parent company, Squirrels, spun up the digital signage component in 2020, and Ditto is now a tandem offer. Gould concedes there are maybe some things a pure-play, enterprise-grade digital signage CMS can offer that Ditto can't, but there's an awfully big user base out there that's never going to need or use a lot of those more exotic and elaborate functions. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Andrew, thank you for joining me. Can you give me a rundown of the company? Is it Squirrels, the company, or is Ditto the company or is Ditto the product? Andrew Gould: Ditto is the product. Squirrels is the company. We founded the company in 2008, and we've been mainly focused on wireless collaboration in classrooms, and huddle spaces in higher education and then, in 2020, we expanded our Ditto offering to include digital signage and emergency alerts, which is something a lot of our K-12 customers were requesting. So when you started the company back in 2008, was digital signage on the roadmap way back then, or is it purely one of these situations where you had the K12 people asking you about it and eventually realized okay, we should do this? Andrew Gould: Yeah, it was a situation where we were focused on the collaboration, and then in the feedback channels we had with the customers, they started asking or suggesting, It'd be really great if we could show things when we really weren't showing things. When the teachers weren't mirroring their screens and sharing things, it'd be nice if we could say, here's what today's homework is, or here's what's going on at the school or for higher ed, here's upcoming events, things like that. So we saw it as a natural evolution of, “We're already on that screen. It makes sense to allow users to utilize that screen when it's not being used for the primary function of collaboration.” That primary function, could you walk through how that would work in a typical scenario? Andrew Gould: Yeah, so we have an application that runs on a device connected to the screen or TV in the front of a room. Be it a projector, a flat screen, doesn't really matter. It runs on Apple TVs as well as Windows devices so there's some flexibility there of whatever device they wanna have connected to that main screen. There's just a piece of software called Ditto Receiver and that handles all of the functionality of showing what's being shared by students and teachers in the classroom. It handles displaying the digital signage and it also handles displaying critical emergency alerts, if they're fired and all of those things connect back to the cloud. The IT staff manages that from a central cloud portal, and then it periodically checks for updated settings, digital signage, configurations, et cetera, pulls those down, and caches them locally, so if you do have a little blip in the network or the internet goes down temporarily that functionality can continue to run even if it's not connected to the internet for a moment. So, in essence, whether it's a teacher or a student or in a working environment, whether it's the person leading the meeting or somebody who's a participant, they could pull up their phone, their tablet, whatever it may be, and if they have the Ditto app, they can push their screen to the main screen in that room? Andrew Gould: Exactly, and our big focus with the collaboration part of Ditto is that device agnostic approach. So we want any kind of device that's coming into a space to be able to share, not just if you have an Apple device, it'll work to this Apple TV, or if you have a Google device that'll work to this Chromecast. We really push hard to make sure that each device that comes in, whether it's from a browser or from a native app on a platform, can connect and quickly share. And that's important in a number of ways. A, it doesn't slow down the meeting, but it removes a lot of IT support and AV/IT support within an organization, whether it's a school or a business. Because I've been in those meetings where somebody says here, I'll just share my screen, and then 15 minutes later, it's still being sorted out. Andrew Gould: Yes, and we've all gone into those rooms that have the laminated sheet of instructions of, “If you're using this device, it's these seven steps, and if you're using this device, you have to be on this network. Then you have to do these three steps, et cetera, et cetera.” All of that goes away with Ditto which means far fewer support calls for the IT staff, and just a more pleasant experience is that we have people come into our offices, accountants, lawyers, just general non-technical people, and they're blown away at how easy and fast it is to get their content up on the screen, which is all anybody wants. We don't care about how fast or how crisp it is or how cool it looks once it's up there if it takes you 10 minutes to get it connected. So quick, fast, easy is always our guiding light as we mature the product and move it along. On the digital signage side of this, the way it's marketed from what I can see is, it's a tandem product, as opposed to, we are a collaboration product that, oh, by the way, we can also do this. You seem to be saying, “It's a full-fledged product on its own. If you wanted, you could just use it for digital signage.” Is that a fair statement? Andrew Gould: Oh yeah, for sure. We have customers that turn off the mirroring capabilities and they just use it for digital signage. Menus in the fast dining have TVs over the counter where people order. We have customers that are just using it for that, that don't even care about what the original purpose of Ditto was, which was the screen mirroring stuff, and then we have customers that only use it for screen mirroring and we haven't got them up and running on digital signage ye. They haven't realized what the value add is. But there are more customers doing both. They are mirroring, and then when it's not mirroring, they are showing important information to the users. Whether it's connection information, things going on at the organization, stocks, or just the kind of stuff to keep it feeling more fresh, utilizing those screens. But yeah, it's definitely a product that can just be utilized as a standalone digital signage solution. I'm guessing that you and particularly your customer-facing folks fight a perception problem in that there are other products out in the marketplace that were started as one thing and added digital signage on, and generally speaking, the perception I have and the feedback I've somewhat heard is that, “Yeah, it can do digital signage too, but we're not talking about robust digital signage. We're talking like we can run a set of files on a screen in an order and that's about where it begins and ends.” Andrew Gould: We are not an industry-leading digital signage solution when it comes to features. There are incumbents that are far more feature-heavy than we are, but what we've tried to focus on are the things that the customers truly need to have a good digital signage experience. So it's being able to create signage lists, as we call them, which are basically playlists of media, ease of use of setting all of that up in the configuration portal, so that it doesn't feel like an add-on or a thing etucked into a corner. A lot of time and energy is spent on the part that actually the end user never sees, which is configuration managing of all the media files and also providing templates for people who don't want to or don't have the resources to create their own digital signage assets. Providing some really easy turnkey solutions as well to say, hey, if you just need to get some basic information shown and you don't want to have to pay a designer or something like that to create something, here are some really cool templates that we've put together for you and they're just WYSIWYG, change this line, change the subject, change the body, upload an image, add a video, and you're ready to go with really nice looking digital signage. So I wouldn't say we are innovating digital signage by any means, but we're trying to create a package that doesn't feel like we just bolted something onto the side of it. That really feels like a first-class digital signage solution. In a lot of cases, while there are certainly feature-rich software options out there, I suspect a hell of a lot of end users don't ever use more than 15% of what's available to them with those platforms. Andrew Gould: Yeah, absolutely. We poll our users frequently about, “Hey, what do you like about the product? What don't you like about the product?” That's the most important part. We wanna make that better, and we ask, “Hey, here's a whole list of different things. How much would you use this?” The feedback nears that there is 10-15% of features we don't have that people say they might use, and most of the people say that they probably would never use synchronized digital signage across eight different screens or things that kind of fall into the more high-end solutions for digital signage. They just want ease of use, things that look nice and reliable. Those are what they care about the most. Yeah. So if somebody comes to you and says, “We're putting a huge LED video wall in the lobby. Can you drive that?” You might say, I suppose we could maybe do that, but that's not what we're here for. Andrew Gould: We've certainly had those requests and we've said, “Hey, here's how you would do that if you are ready to do it. But, to be honest, there are better solutions for that problem.” Digital signage is not a one-size-fits-all problem. There is very high-end hardware that drives large billboards and there's our end where we're just trying to drive it on a 70'' screen in a room. So we don't have to solve everyone's problems. We're fine saying, that sounds really cool. We wished Ditto was designed to do things like that. You might be better served with something that's from the ground up built to power stuff like that. You can stay in your lane, and it's a pretty decent-sized lane. Andrew Gould: Correct. Yeah, it's a huge market. So there's plenty of room for lots of people to all be swimming, doing different things, and not really stepping on each other. One of the problems I find with some entry-level, and I'm not saying yours is, but just in broad strokes, entry-level platforms don't have much in the way if they have anything at all in terms of device management, and I gather that your device management is done through third-party device management modules, like the Jamf and so on. Andrew Gould: Yeah. So early on, we explored building Ditto with MDM capabilities. But what we experienced in talking with our customers is that most of them already had a solution to do those sorts of things. So we would have to convince them to switch to our device management platform and 90% of what MDM does has nothing to do with what we would need to do with it. So we'd be buildin