It was definitely a strange show for a company like mobileStorm to attend. The show is mostly about hardware; however we just announced our deal with American Idol producer Freemantle Entertainment, and since CES always has a ton press there our PR company set up a bunch of interviews with reporters and analysts. Make sure to check our News section for articles that came out of my meetings at the show.

I have to say CES is HUGE. I walked the 3 main halls and still only saw about 50% of the exhibitors. Yet, there were few software or web-based application companies there. Most of them were in partner pavilions showcasing their application on a platform like Nokia or Qualcomm.

The thing that really stood out for me at the show is amazing picture quality and size of the latest televisions and merger of the Internet with such top-of -the line monitors. All the networks are being forced to go to HiDef by 2009, which will force consumers to throw away that 800lbs TV they bought for $4,000 five years ago. All of the new televisions can easily be hooked up to a computer.

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SMS spam has a long, long way to go before catching up with email spam. Ferris, a research firm, estimated that in 2007 1.1 million spam messages were sent via SMS. They also said that this is up 38% from 2006. Sure, that is a big jump, and we will continue to see these numbers climb. But note that there are billions of email spam messages sent on a daily basis; there is no comparison. Also think about the ratio of cell phone users to number of spam messages. There are currently 250 million Americans with cell phones, so Ferris’ figure is considerably less than one spam message per cell phone. Below are the reasons why SMS spam will never reach the heights we see with email:

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In the first part of this post we discussed the need for SEO, SEM and online marketing. The most important thing you need to do is start now, not in a few days, not tomorrow, but today. The reason for this is simple; it can take months to see any results from your optimizations. Below I have laid out strategies for a short, mid and long term plan.

Short Term Plan: If you want quick traffic to turn leads into prospects than SEM is a great short term plan for you. Create an account with Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing, purchase some keywords, create some ads and off you go. Even though it really is that easy to get started, as you grow you will notice that PPC is a science. You can spend a hell of a lot of money on PPC and never see a return if you don’t maintain things properly. You might be bidding $50 for someone to click your ad, but when they get to your site never purchase anything. This could be for a number of reasons such as, your ad wasn’t relevant enough to the keywords you were bidding on, the copy on your landing page isn’t catchy, or people don’t trust your buying process. You really need test and optimize, re-test and optimize again and this is where the hard work comes in. But don’t freak out just yet, there are some cool programs out there like speedppc.com that can help with the optimization and landing page testing. There are also lots of blogs and books out there dedicated to showing you how to manage your search engine marketing. all else fails you can always hire a company like ymarketing.com to manage it for you.

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The world continues (at an astonishing rate) to become more connected. Every year more and more people move their spending online. These are very exciting times if you sell goods or services. Before the Internet if you owned a clothing store, how would you drive traffic to your store? Local newspaper ads, maybe some radio or television and possibly that dude on the corner with the funny arrow going up and down? How many people could fit in your store, 50, 60? The Internet not only gives you more ways to drive traffic than ever before, but gives your store an unlimited capacity.

In the eighties before the Web, you still had a lot of work to do to get people in your store; this hasn’t changed. The arrow guy might have gone away but the hard work is still necessary, although now it’s about learning a whole new skill set.

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