Real World Partners with Virtual

We took a briefing by Dave Sanguinetti, CEO of RealGifts, one of the 20 technology start-ups invited to present at Pepsico10. This start-up recognition early in their lifecycle by delivering real world version of Facebook virtual wall gifts. Their solution created quite a buzz at Facebook’s F8 conference and later when they entered and won the second-round FB-Fund award. This exposure paved the path to what was their most prized reward: a relationship with Facebook powering their gift area.

There are many changes in the Facebook strategy and socialgraph populating activites, and there an equal volume of broken links to the storefront and other pages on Facebook related to RealGifts. Hard to say what the future holds for them. Their challenge, it seems, is to continue to grow their value outside of Facebook while hoping to continue leveraging their strategic relationships at the SocialNet to grow and provide proof of  adoption.

Our interview follows:

Barriers to entry? Real-Gifts has a network of developers, partners and complexity of building out the equivalent of a mini-amazon ecommerce site. They solved some of the problems around not having a physical address by offering a proxy system that allows the recipient to direct the gift to the address of their choosing without revealing it to a broader socialgraph.

How do brands get involved? (4:30) Mrs. Fields Cookies, FTD, Fandango, etc.—found people really like the real world versions of gifts.

Pepsico10 impressions? (6:45) Comparable with Facebook FB Fund Competition. Unique for a big brand like Pepsi to engage start-ups in this way. Sense of excitement and camaraderie with participating start-ups as well.

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A VCs Take on Pepsico10

We spoke with Michael Gaiss, Sr Vice President out of Boston for Highland Capital Partners, July 28 at Pepsico10 about HCP’s role in the event, some impressions and themes. We also did a quick follow-on interview to see how HCP qualifies investments for emerging technology companies and how that can align with how marketers make bets in new spaces. We’ll present the follow-up in a future post.

Here’s our video interview with summary notes below:

On A Mission with Blogher

During Pepsico10 we caught up with Gina Garrubbo, Exec Vice President of Blogher. Our chat spanned blogger engagement, blogging principles and a little about Blogher, the company and her impressions of the event. Thought it was interesting that Gina described Blogher as a “mission-based company.”  When you see more about their company below it may be more apparent why it’s ingenious that they position their solution this way. That notion sparked some thinking for me which will be presented in a future post. In the meantime, here’s a few minutes with Gina Garrubbo.

We Lose Mobile in 10-years

Had an opportunity to catch up with Michael Becker, Managing Director, MMA North America–you can find him on Twitter @Mobiledirect–during the Pepsico10 conference on July 28th. This is one of a series of post from that event. In our interview we covered a variety of marketing areas for Mobile including statistics, growth, case studies and check-ins/geo-local. In response to a question about if we’ll be talking “Mobile” in 10 years, Michael believes that the term goes away and it just becomes a core piece of marketing.

Change the game with a big event

Pepsi held an event at their corporate headquarters in Purchase, New York on July 27-28. It wasn’t just an “innovation” or “emerging media” event. IMO, it was a game changer other markers should consider.