Marketing Pilgrim

Today’s post title is going to be a joint effort.

I need your help to fill in the blank, because, quite frankly, no one appears to know what it was Agnilux did, before it was snapped up by Google.

The best we can tell is that it was started by former Apple and Cisco employees, it might have had something to do with servers, and that they were keeping tight lipped until they were ready to “make a splash.”

Well, they’ll never get their chance, because they’ve apparently decided to sell to Google for an undisclosed sum. Maybe Google will reveal what it was that interested them about Agnilux or maybe they’ll lock its founders in a room in the Googleplex and have them conduct dark (fiber?) experiments.

As usual, Google is taking flak from both sides lately. They reported yesterday that of the 100 countries they offer products and services in, 25 countries block or filter one or more services. Search, Blogger, YouTube and even Google Docs are blocked in some countries, sometimes based on political or social filtering.

Meanwhile, ten more countries are complaining about Google allowing access to information in a different way—not protecting users’ privacy sufficiently with Buzz. Of course, this is nothing new, since Buzz has prompted privacy concerns since the day it rolled out.

We’ve already seen what Google is capable of in working against censorship, although they’ll continue to comply with democratic governments’ demands (such as removing pro-Nazi content from google.de and google.fr).

Tax day has come and gone and whether you filed months ago or scrambled to the post office seconds before closing on April 15th, for you the tax season is over. So too is the season over for software maker Intuit and their famous tax software TurboTax. By all accounts it’s been a good year.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Intuit announced that it had “distributed 10% more units of its popular TurboTax software than last year”.

This works out to over 20 million copies of TurboTax.

What’s their secret? They promote the free part.

TurboTax’s ad campaign focused on the free service offered to customers filing 1040EZ & simple returns. Of course everyone else has to pay and are quickly directed to one of the many paid TurboTax products.

Social media is expanding the power of word of mouth marketing. But as always, WOM is hard to measure. Forrester is attempting to rectify that with their latest measure, Peer Influence Analysis.

In keeping with traditional WOMM thought, Forrester says that Mass Influencers, who make up just 16 percent of all online Americans, are responsible for 80 percent of the brand impressions in online social settings.

But the big winner is Facebook:

Of all the social influence impressions, Forrester found that 256B were on social networks, and another 1.64B were on other forms of social media (including blogs).

It looks like the flow of Internet marketing news is shifting towards Facebook. It is, of course, the eve of the f8 conference in San Francisco where developers and other folks gather to discuss Facebook and the future of the social media world.

So what would a gathering be without a little data (with pictures!) to make you either say “Sure, I can see that”, or “You’re kidding, right?”. So how do you feel about the numbers from comScore that shows Facebook’s growing dominance in social media traffic. Mashable shared this info

One day you’re up, the next day you’re down.

Just yesterday, we were gushing over the rapid rise of online coupon provider Groupon. Frank pointed out that Groupon had managed to achieve a $1 billion valuation, despite the many copycats in the marketplace.

Well, one of those copycats is not prepared to go quietly into the night.

According to GigaOm, Tippr picked up a boatload of patents that could put a serious dampener on Groupon’s capital raising efforts.

[Tippr CEO Martin Tobias] saw the rise of Groupon. He happened to know that Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who’d invested something like $90 million in the failed Groupon of the late ’90s, Mercata, still owned that company’s patents.