Normally, any marketing agency will try to dazzle the client with their social media know-how.
It's about as elementary as hysterciall shouting 360! 360! all the time.

Touchatag was one of the more blue chip start-ups presenting at the tenth betagroup session. Not surprising as they are an Alcatel Lucent venture.

Mesh-box, a leading blog on marketing cooperations, is conducting a survey on marketing cooperations and their impact in this economic downturn.

The study is mainly aimed at German firms, yet still relevant for non-german firms as well.

I'm willing to be the outcome of the study will show a strong increase in marketing cooperation interest. But then again, I'm a believer.

After all, one of the first things in a downturn to get slashed is your marketing budget.
A marketing cooperation can provide a quantum of solace here.

There are quite a lot of definitions of brand alliances around. Some brand alliance definitions are presented in order to both distil the commonalities and highlight some differences in point of view:

I went to see the Betagroup.be pitches last Tuesday. Here goes:

My price for the most pragmatic start-up goes to the first Brussels sandwich 2.0 delivery service: Clicknlunch.  Lots of companies on business parks need to have sandwiches & food delivered. This company takes the hassle out of the ordering. Simple, clean & well executed project claiming already 10.000 orders processed.  Nice!

Even geeks are not above herd mentality. Everybody loves Twitter, Apple & Google. 
Everybody likes to bash Microsoft. Microsoft is always too late, too monopolistic, too expensive, too square...Yaddie yaddie da....

Anyway, because I now manage the Microsoft Belgium account at McCann Erickson,
I thought it to be a good idea for McCann to check out the latest Microsoft products.
And we found out it's hip to be square.

Given that we're almost halfwhere through 2009, it's a bit late for our predictions for this year.

But I don't want to be a bad sport, standing at the sidelines when everybody else makes predictions, so here goes:

After having attended several entrepreneur events in Belgium, like the Open Coffee and BetaGroup gatherings in Brussels, the 8th edition of the Le Web Conference is comparatively huge. I was amazed by the scale of the event and the clout of its attendees.

Except from several big wigs from Microsoft, Google, FaceBook and MySpace, the larger part of the audience consisted of mainly high profile bloggers, VC scouts and French entrepreneurs. I met people from quite a lot of interesting initiatives, like the SilverLight guys from Eeple with their digital picture board, the Three Melons advertising game development company, Yoowalk's nice looking 3D web village, SPARKEO, Weblin, Realmee, BloggersBase, dismoiou, NetVibes, and last but not lease our Belgian friends from Radionomy.

On a less positive note: I wasn't really convinced of the startup contestants. The people's choice Silentale not being among the three winners is an indicator of the lack of a clear winner. No wonder because a lot were uninspirational, lacked a good business model or couldn't really be classified as a startup anymore (5 years old, funded with $25 million, ...).

Many thanks to Robin Wauters, Clopin, Clo, Jonathan and Roland for grabbing a le Big Mac on Tuesday, you guys are hilarious. Also thanks to Kris Hoet and company from Microsoft for the cool GapingVoid drawing and for showing me the LiveServices, SilverLight and the BizSpark program. As mainly an Apple and open source geek I have to confess: Microsoft was probably showing some of the most impressive stuff at Le Web.

Well, I've had enough of Frenglish for quite some time, but as my namecard book shows: it was definitely worth it!

 Ok, I know, this is already more than a year old. But a little recycling doesn't hurt right?

This is a TV commercial from Toyota that starts with what looks like some normal World of Warcraft in-game action. Suddenly one of the characters summons up a Toyota SUV and starts trashing monsters. Great video, especially because it looks so real.

Since several years, the collaboration tools from 37Signals have been enjoying quite a lot of attention. It probably has a lot to do with the popularity of the Ruby on Rails framework, which is a by-product of the development.