Author Sandro Groganz

Ingridient Branding in Open Source Communities – Interview with Eclipse's Ian Skerrett

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Back at Eclipse Summit 2010, I had the chance to interview Ian Skerrett, Director, Marketing at Eclipse Foundation on all things marketing Eclipse.

He very nicely describes how he utilizes ingridient branding to leverage the marketing resources of Eclipse members to not only push their own solutions, but to also raise the visibility of the Eclipse brand:

I keep on coming back to ingredient branding. The most famous would be the “Intel Inside”, and Intel certainly paid a lot of money to create that, but they also used their partners to take Intel out to the end-users. [At Eclipse] it is really about working with the projects to make sure that they are good communicators, and they’re communicating a solution. To me the interesting thing is how do you get the wider community to understand that Eclipse is a place for doing collaboration.

Watch the video or read the transcript of the Interview with Ian Skerrett about Marketing Eclipse at Initmarketing.tv.

Video Interview with Matt Aslett

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http://blip.tv/play/gu9HgoX7GQA%2Em4v

The wait is over! Finally, I found some time to revitalize Initmarketing.tv and a new video after a long time is up.

It’s a great video interview with Matt Aslett, one of the best analysts regarding Open Source.

There are more video interviews in the pipeline, ready to be published, and I’ll record new ones at upcoming events I’ll attend. As you can see, I found a way how to squeeze out some time again besides having a growing business and 2 little kids. Yes, it’s possible – it only takes 18 months and someone who helps with editing the videos 🙂

Session at Open World Forum: Does Open Source Need Marketing?

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Open World Forum 2010 In case you’ll attend the Open World Forum in Paris next week, make sure you join me and my team mate Rory MacDonald for our session Does Open Source Need Marketing?.

During this 1h session, we’ll testify some of the common misconceptions of marketing open-source software. We’ll also discuss major trends in marketing communications for open source vendors.

For example, one slide we prepared shares the mantra “It’s not about the code, it’s about conversations, stupid”. Furthermore, we’ll provide some recommendations regarding Marketing 1.0 vs. Marketing 2.0 and how your brand will work for customers and the community alike.

The session is part of a full-day Think Tank on open source marketing entitled “All Change Please”, which features one more workshop presented by Simon Phipps, Carlo Piana, Charles H. Schultz. Patrice Bertrand, CEO of SMILE, will also take part in the Think Tank.

‘Nough said: Learn more about the bleeding edge of open source marketing and join our session October 1st, 14:00-15:00.

BTW: I’ll attend the 2010 Paris Open Source Think Tank as well, which takes place prior to OWF.

Terri Molini, Former Open Source PR Manager at Sun, Joins Initmarketing

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I am extremely happy to welcome Terri Molini on board of the Initmarketing team. She can certainly add a lot of value to Initmarketing’s Open Source corporate communications services, given her vast experience. Most notably, Terri was 13 years with Sun Microsystems where she lead all world-wide PR efforts related to Open Source. In July 2009, Terri launched the Open Source for America coalition. Good to have you on board Terri, this will be fun!

LinuxTag 2010 With Many More and Great Talks

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I am honestly proud of what the LinuxTag Program Committee achieved. The soon-to-be-announced program for this year’s event will have 25% more talks and even very interesting ones as well.

Keynote speakers such as Larry Augustin (CEO SugarCRM, Angel Investor) and Dirk Riehle (Germany’s first professor of Open Source Software) have already been announced. There are some more who have just confirmed their attendance, but I am not allowed to name them yet (surprise, surprise).

The committee has invested a lot of time pro-bono in directly contacting OSS projects and speakers and in evaluating talk proposals. Our goal was to make sure the program will feature some of the key projects and persons, providing a mix of introductory as well as advanced topics, technical as well as business-related talks. I am sure you will appreciate the program once it has been published at www.linuxtag.org within the next couple of days.

Kudos to my fellows at the program committee and thanks for bringing me in, it’s just so much fun! Many thanks also to everyone who proposed a talk!

Initmarketing Expands in France: Annie Blandel Joins Our Team

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Annie BlandelI am very happy to welcome Annie Blandel on board. She lives in Southern France and is a senior-level marketing manager with a bunch of experience and expertise.

Entrepreneurship, recognizing and driving forward innovative new products and services, and powering international expansion, have been the cornerstones of Annie’s 25 year career in technology marketing. She has successfully delivered international marketing and business development campaigns for numerous established leaders in their fields, including Nortel, Intel, Cisco, HP.

She is furthermore a professor in Marketing for Master’s in IT & Project Management at the University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis (France).

Read more about Annie on the Initmarkteing team page.

Bienvenue Annie!

LinuxTag 2010: Call for Papers Ends Today

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LinuxTag is the most important place for Linux and open source software in Europe. Last year, LinuxTag had over ten thousand attendees, and over 300 speakers. This year, the 16th LinuxTag will be June 9-12, 2010 at the Berlin Fairgrounds in Germany.

LinuxTag seeks exciting and suitable proposals for presentations in the conference tracks. The Call for Papers ends today.

I am proud to be a member of the LinuxTag Program Committee. Although a lot of proposals have already been submitted, there are some topics missing that I’d personally like to see covered. So, if you’re up for a last minute submission, get your inspiration from the following list:

  • Is/was the recent economic crisis an opportunity for Open Source?
  • More real-life case studies on how OSS is being used in mission-critical scenarios.
  • A European or global perspective on Open Source in Public Administration.
  • How to make use of Amazon EC2 or Google AppEngine with Open Source apps?
  • Technical tutorials for beginners, especially for building Web apps (e.g. PHP/Ruby/Java/etc. for beginners).
  • High performance Web environments with Open Source tools
  • Security in the Cloud
  • What’s the status of some of the regional Linux distributions?

I can’t promise that your talk will be accepted if it covered one of the above topics. The review process is of course a joint effort of the whole Program Committee. Anyway, it’s definitely worth a try. Of course, any other topic I did not think of is also highly welcome.

Go here to submit your LinuxTag proposal.