michael quoc — Uncategorized

Ironman training this year

Here, now its official (and harder for me to back out!): I’m signed up and training for a full Ironman race this year. Its an odd time I know to be undertaking such an adventure, given that I’m a new dad and starting a new business venture, but they always say that what doesn’t kill you can almost kill you, even if you survive. Really though its my wife Liz who is making this possible – she has been extremely supportive and I owe to her my ability to prepare for this race (she has been doing the endurance event called taking care of a newborn baby for months now!). The race I’m doing is Vineman on July 30, 2011 up in Sonoma County. I did the Full Aquabike version of this race to see how the distances felt (which is 2.4 miles of swimming followed by 112 miles of biking), I felt pretty exhausted, but survived – so now all we gotta do is tack on a marathon at the end and we’re done.

OK – I also gotta show off my new ride – I finally ditched my K-Mart special bike to get a real triathlon machine, check it out:

Pretty sweet huh? Look fast, be fast (I heard this). Well, it gives me extra motivation now to actually ride fast and not get passed by masses from subsequent waves (but we know this will happen anyways). OK enough on this – I know a lot of people will be racing this event this year, so I look forward to seeing many of you there. Looking forward to a great summer of training and an awesome race day!

Frictionless friends

Social Media’s recent launch of Social Banners is a great step forward in the world of advertising and social technology. In a nutshell, social banners are ad banners that have knowledge of who your friends are, and can track actions they take. So if your friend Sarah see a banner ad asking her whether she wants to go see Wall-E this weekend, and Sarah clicks “yes,” you may see a banner telling you that Sarah wants to see that movie this weekend, and can respond likewise, etc. It’s a totally new angle on banner advertising, and it got me thinking, what do

have in common? They’re all trying to make it easier to access your friends. Access to your friends should be frictionless – you should not need to be on facebook.com to connect with the people you know, your friends should be available to you in whatever context you happen to be in when an interaction with them would be useful or meaningful. To see an advertising technology that endeavors to meet this goal is exciting, and should be illuminating for brand marketers. It’s a fundamental shift in thinking that advertising must be what consumers want, not what brands want to feed them.