One on One Interviews

Usually my co-host for doing the Watching Amazon video podcast is my buddy John “ColderIce” Lawson, but with him out of the country, I was lucky to have my friend Jeff Brathwaite – web guru and Google Home/Assistant expert – join me. And it was perfect timing, as last week it was reported that Google outsold Amazon smart speaker device category for the first time ever in the first quarter of 2018…something I did not think would happen anytime soon let alone last quarter.

We talk about how Google is catching up to Amazon in the race for our homes, how a new way to measure the race might help Amazon stay in front for a while longer, and how Alexa’s recording (and emailing) of a private recording could be a game changer – for Amazon and the entire smart speaker category.

We caught up with Anand Thaker, who led the data research for this year’s landscape through his company IntelliPhi

Anand shares with us some of his takeaways from this year’s landscape, including certain categories went away, and why some were added. And with the big news of the week being Adobe’s acquisition of ecommerce platform Magento, we had to ask him what that means for the whole marketing technology category. And does this mean that HubSpot should go after Shopify.

Earlier this week I attended Oracle Media Day, an event the company puts on for press and independent analysts to give them a glimpse at what the company is focused on currently. And as part of the day, live demos with hot technologies like augmented reality, drones and blockchain showcased new customer experiences that are right around the corner. But the one that caught my attention the most was a demo showing how an employee can use an Amazon Echo device integrated with Oracle’s HR application to ask Alexa how many vacation hours they have available, to request time off on a certain day, or even find out why there was extra money in their paycheck this period.

I caught up to the 2012 Olympic gold winner in the Women’s 100 meter Carmelita Jeter at BPM’Online’s user conference, Accelerate, in Boston. And her being the fastest woman alive having run the second fastest 100 meters ever in women’s history, that’s the only way I would’ve ever caught up to her…

After her conference keynote, I had the great pleasure of asking her a few questions about some of the obstacles she overcame in becoming the fastest woman alive, how the lessons of teamwork she learned as captain of the Olympic gold winning US women’s relay team apply to the business world, and how she was able to win a bronze medal while running on a leg with a torn quad muscle.

From time to time I include my Watching Amazon conversations with ecommerce expert John Lawson here when we touch on something that may hit home with the Small Business Trends community. And in the midst of Amazon’s recent killer quarter – being driven in part by its Amazon Web Services (AWS) division and the Echo device line with Alexa inside – people are adopting modern technology in more aspects of their personal and professional lives. But is this technology driving us to be lazy, or is it fueling our inherent laziness? And what role should modern tech play in how small businesses operate?

These are a few topics that grew out of our latest Watching Amazon episode. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation. To see the full conversation check out the video below, or click on the embedded SoundCloud player. And leave a comment below to tell us if you think technology is making us lazy or exposing our laziness – and how we should use it in our businesses.

The interest in blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies is growing rapidly. And Amazon’s announcement earlier this week of a new patent that may allow them to sell the identities of cryptocurrency users added even more fuel to the fire of interest. And this high level of interest was obvious at last week’s CRM Evolution conference, as Never Stop Marketing founder and blockchain expert Jeremy Epstein’s session - 'Blockchain and the CMO: The Next Era of Marketing' – was a real crowd pleaser.

For those who weren’t able to attend Jeremy’s session you really missed out. Fortunately, me and my conference co-chair Paul Greenberg were able to record a conversation with Jeremy to get a taste for a few things he talked about during his session. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation. And while it’s worth reading the transcript, watching the video definitely adds important perspective because of Jeremy’s passion for the subject. I mean the guy paces and lifts weights during our conversation because he’s so jacked about the subject. So do yourself a favor and check out the video if you can to not only be educated and informed, but also get a glimpse as to why we dubbed him The Blockchain Gangsta.

Before founding MKTG Insight, Ginger was editor-in-chief at publications like CRM and Direct Marketing News. And with her wealth of knowledge and experience, I wanted to get a preview of what she’ll be discussing at the conference. And I asked my co-chair, Paul Greenberg, to help me ask Ginger about one of the myths surrounding digital transformation, and also an example of a company doing digital transformation the right way, from a marketing perspective.

While I was there as an industry analyst to hear more about how the Salesforce platform is progressing and how they’re providing tools to make it easier for coders and non-coders to leverage the toolset, it was great to see a diverse group of people demonstrating and teaching the ten thousand registered attendees how to build all different kinds of apps. And even the inspirational stories were diverse, with my favorite being a fireside chat between Salesforce’s Chief Equality Officer Tony Prophey, and the extraordinary Betty Reid Soskin, the nation’s oldest park ranger at 96 years young!

With equality being so central to culture of Salesforce, I was glad to spend a few minutes talking with Molly Q. Ford, Senior Director of Global Equality for Salesforce. Molly shared with me why Salesforce has placed equality at the heart of the organization, the business impact it is already having on the company, and why it is important to the future of the organization when it comes to attracting millennials to the company.

A great deal of conversations about artificial intelligence (AI) focus on exciting, eye-catching aspects of the technology. But some of the most important and prevalent uses of it are the more mundane examples that are overlooked but helping millions of people everyday do routine tasks more effectively and efficiently.

David Parmenter, Director of Data and Engineering for Adobe Document Cloud, shares with me how AI’s more practical applications provide a number of helpful examples of its growing impact on both our personal and professional lives. David also offers up a few ideas of how small businesses can leverage the power of AI to add efficiencies and insights to their efforts.

Last year at Nextiva’s NextCon event, one of the featured presentation was from Lawrence Cole, the Head of Mid-Market, U.S. West for Google. It was such a good session that I’ve been wanting to have him join me for a conversation for this series ever since. And this week I was able to talk with him and get his take on a number themes around search, seo, conversation rate optimization and how machine learning is democratizing the availability of insights in all these areas.