In Praise of Demo.com

Demo.com's big annual event, Demo Days, is coming up. I've blogged about how business, art and entertainment are becoming one. Demo Days, something I desperately wish I could afford to attend, sounds like all three. As Steve Jobs proved, there is nothing more exciting than seeing a founder demonstrate his product. Live demonstration of high tech stuff is the closest thing to bull fighting most of us will ever experience. Attend if you can:

Demo Days

When: September 12 - 14
Where: Silicone Valley
Who: Reid Hoffman is speaking and Derick Thompson and DailyDigital (among others) are demonstrating cool new technology.

Beyond Demo Days, Demo.com is an invaluable startup resource from a smart group of content marketers. I follow Demo on Twitter, Facebook and have bookmarked their site. These guys create great, relevant, timely startup and Internet marketing content. I hope NeoGoGo is ready to demo next year. Wish I could go this year just to learn how it works and write about Demo Days. If you go, please blog about the experience, be sure to share your link and Good Luck.

Martin
@ScentTrail

Steve Jobs Monomyth

Ironic skeptical fast times create desires for powerful archetypes even as they destroy them. And yes this exhausting tail chasing is ironic. We search for heroes even while disdaining belief in their powers. We trick ourselves. Our skepticism of “them” is seemingly focused outward toward conveniently trapped fish in small barrels. We fire rapidly, violently sure to kill the enemy.

Then a hero emerges from a forest. We too quickly suspend disbelief accepting our hero’s hard won self-knowledge, her gift. We live vicariously and richly along a road of trials. Our hero faces challenges with uncertain outcomes. We bite nails, shed tears and offer the assistance humanity affords. Along for the ride we open a window and fly our hand in the breeze.

At the very moment decisive victory seems impossible and far away a wizard’s magic redirects attention. A cape twirls, a girl points, a sudden puff of smoke and a loud bang makes things mysterious and strange again. We grope for balance. We try to understand.

We sense something small, round and unknown. For a moment we steal fire like Prometheus, know ourselves like Buddha, part water like Moses and give as good as Christ. In this dream we fly above the forest watching our hero’s journey along the road of trials. We help the hero survive willing it to be so. For a time life is restored. We sigh recognizing life’s principle mirage – that green trees and birds mean water in the desert, an oasis of hope.

Then finally and irrevocably hope is dashed. Our oasis floats away on shimmering waves of heat. Flying close to the sun melts false wings. Falling faster and faster we are enlightened. We know all of life is in every moment. Giving ourselves over fully and completely we accept the hero within. Suddenly we know the true enemy and she is us and that is right, as it is and has always been.

Thank you Steve Jobs.

Thank You Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs resigned from Apple yesterday. Instead of being sad I decided to re-watch my favorite design show the Smithsonian's Genius of Design in honor America's greatest designer. As Steve said to John Scully when pitching him to work for Apple, "John, do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugar water or do you want to come with me and change the world." In others such a statement would be hubris and arrogance, but not for Steve Jobs. Steve made good on such a courageous promise. Those of us who've struggled to design anything (product, website, whatever) know how hard it is to create one cool, revolutionary thing. Steve created at least six (Apple II, Mac, iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad). "Life is always either a Beatles or a Bob Dylan song," is another favorite Jobsian quote.




Thanks for changing our world Steve. We love you. Your fellow cancer survivors are thinking of you.

Martin Smith
Durham, NC

Here is another favorite Jobs moment, his 2005 Stanford University Commencement speech.



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NeoGoGo Logo Survey

I'm creating a new company called NeoGoGo. NeoGoGo's mission is to create tools such as the Cure Cancer Store to help not-for-profits tap power of social networks and search engines. Our tag line is (tentatively) "Shop To Save The Word". Please review these three logo designs and let me know your favorite in comments or send an email to MartinSellingZoe(at)aol.

Thanks, Martin

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Shopping To Cure Cancer With Loyalese

Loyalese
"What is up with the Loyalese thing," was how a good friend and regular ScentTrail Marketing reader and contributor asked me to explain the Loyalese banner above Google Adwords on ScentTrail. Here is how I explained Loyalese:

You've heard me blah, blah, blah about how I think shopping can help cure cancer (BTW thanks for your help on the Cure Cancer Store we are getting close and will be launching soon). I had lunch with Loyalese founder Bill Bing a couple of months ago. He told me about his years at Upromise and how he and his team created a better mousetrap. A mousetrap that didn't require a customer to GO SOMEPLACE different or do anything different to earn cash back from affiliate marketers we know and love like Walmart, Target and Barnes and Noble. I understood a few things instantly:

• Loyalese is a cool Robin Hood idea redirecting affiliate marketing money away from content arbitrage networks to shoppers (BTW I've already saved $12 on two GoDaddy visits buying URLs I would have bought anyway).
  
• Anyone can join for Loyalese, its FREE since they get paid with affiliate cash from the Walmarts and Targets of the world.
• I can hit up friends like you since you save the same amount (from 2% to 20%) even though I get a piece if you sign up via my link (and you know where I'm going to send my share :). My piece comes out of Loyalese's money.
  
• Cure Cancer Store + Loyalese's browser button is more powerful than the store by itself no matter how great the product copy we write.

Yes, in answer to your other question, I've been helping create a marketing plan for Loyalese. Today I'm writing a marketing white paper on how Loyalese helps align not-for-profit with the ecommerce rules we know and love so well (lol). I know you care a lot about PETA stuff (when do I need to send another check BTW, won't be so big this time I'm afraid). I won't be offended if you create your own account and pitch your circles (to use Google+ lingo). All good in the end. BTW, did you see my late night post the other night - Thoughts On Curing Cancer. Remember that time we played LAX at UPenn and I got so scuffed up on the AstroTurf? All is forgiven now :).
Later - Marty

I know the friend I wrote to well enough to know there is NO WAY he is going to join Loyalese through my link. He is going to join, grab the code for his custom link and start earning money for his pet project (sorry anonymous I couldn't resist :). I can't be too mad since this particular friend was a large and early contributor to Martin's Ride To Cure Cancer and his regular butt kicking kept me going when I wanted to curl up into a ball and go home (many, many times). I've returned the favor and helped animals in places I've never heard of :). I would slap a link to my friend's pet projects but that would let all my other friends know exactly who I'm talking about. Let's let them keep wondering and I will wait to advocate my friend's Loyalese link that will probably have a big dog on it LOL.

Helping Bill, Mitesh, Paul and Joe at Loyalese so they can help me and my squad use our ecommerce skills to create a million bucks a year for cancer research at the Duke Cancer Institute. If you are reading this, have some serious Internet marketing, SEO, SEM or web design skills and would like to help please contact me at....

Best email: MartinSellingZoe(at)aol (and for my snobby friends laughing as they read this don't)
LinkedIn: Martin Marty Smith
Twitter: ScentTrail

T

Cancer Survivors Store

How to get through cancer? Buy at least 2 things on this list:

PopShops™ affiliate stores

Thoughts On Curing Cancer

My mother called me on the phone. “Martin,” she said in an accent that seems to drawl just a little bit more each year, “they cured your cancer.” No, I remember thinking, that isn’t possible. “I saw it on TeeVee,” my mother finished confirming my worst suspicions. This must be some kind of odd “mother dream”.

Skeptically I started searching quickly finding my mother was more than right, as mothers usually are. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania created “serial killer” T cells whose voracious appetite was only satisfied by destroying “pounds” of cancer tumors in some very sick Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia (CLL) patients.

"Within three weeks, the tumors had been blown away, in a way that was much more violent than we ever expected," said senior author Carl June, MD, director of Translational Research and a professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine in the Abramson Cancer Center, who led the work. "It worked much better than we thought it would."

Cancer isn’t all bad. It forces you to get on with it, to tell the truth and express the previously unshared. My roots are southern Gothic with enough tough bark to be able to take some hard things head on while picking certain emotional low hanging fruit is left for the next time. When cancer took away the next time fruit got picked, emotions shared, bicycle trips across America accomplished and love gained and lost. Cancer isn’t all bad.

Strange how we never really know anything. We think we do. We assert, analyze and conjecture as if the tiny gnat wings we flap will change the earth’s rotation or even direct our stumbling progress. Because our illusion is shared it takes hold and grows. We write our life’s play in our heads trying to make life match what we see. We think in Pollack's twirling lines of rhythm, jazz and paint and try to live with Teddy Roosevelt in John Singer Sargent’s immaculate salon.

On rare occasions we stare at life’s all too often hidden friction. We want to know the unknowable. We determine a path and will stay on it even when the path doesn’t end at a gingerbread house. We create a fixed idea. We have cancer. We are dying. The desire to hurry can hardly be stifled, the palpable regret lives like a lost brother tapping our shoulders for attention. Then, suddenly and once again, we understand. Life isn’t a fixed destination. All ideas are malleable at any moment and by people and forces we can’t know. This is the It’s A Wonderful Life paradox. We touch more than we know or directly experience.

I saw a tiny bit inside life’s paradox on Martin’s Ride. Riding a bicycle across America teaches many lessons. How much of life is lived through friends of friends, through people we will never meet. Strangers, I began to understand somewhere around Utah, always save our lives. Is a stranger working to save your life really a stranger? When we were in Savannah Tennessee, Ouray Colorado, Lake Mead Utah or Mount Baldy in California’s high Sierras one thing was forcefully clear – we are more connected than we know or can fully imagine.

Yesterday several doctors at the University of Pennsylvania proved our unknown but tight connection. I don’t know these cancer researchers but they’ve immediately been added to the top of my Christmas card list. Anyone who spends twenty years trying to save my life receives my gratitude and a holiday card. I thank them for their intelligence, creativity and perseverance. I thank Dr. Diehl, Billy, Karen, Kim, Barbara, David (both of them), Dr. van Deventer, Brooke, Dr. Makovic-Plese and everyone at the Duke Cancer Institute and the University of North Carolina who will wake up on Monday and proceed to save some other stranger’s life.

Their lives make mine possible. I gave up being ungrateful right about the time I heard “cancer” and my name in the same sentence. I’m a stubborn fool who hardly deserves such gifts, but I’m also an old dog who will spend the rest of his days remembering this day, knowing nothing in life is fixed or exactly as it seems and working hard to help in whatever limited way my gnat's wings can manage.

I pledge to spend some of each day remembering how much it means that strangers always save our lives, that selfless valor and courage is the only fixed point worth knowing. That fixed point is why we cured cancer yesterday, will cure it again today and obliterate it finally tomorrow.

Thank you and goodnight you princes of Pennsylvania and kings of New England.

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Curing cancer doesn't mean much if no one can afford it. Money remains an important and valuable gift. Want to help cure cancer by doing stuff you already do? Can you shop to cure cancer? Click on the link below and Join Loyalese (its Free) to earn cash back, easily find the best deals at favorite online stores such as Walmart and Target and I will send referral cash I earn when you sign up to finish this fight. Still working on the Cure Cancer Store too for much the same reason, but I will be glad to be unemployed when cancer is gone baby gone :).

Have Doctors at UPenn Cured Cancer?

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have "cured" three patients with Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia generating sustain remissions among some very sick trial subjects for over a year. They created "serial killer" T Cells capable of eliminating "pounds" of cancer tumors. Click Here to read the article. Watch the amazing video: