Omniture was acquired by Adobe last September for $1.8b so it’s not surprising to see their brand fading into the backdrop, but it is interesting to see it spelled out so clearly.

So, I bid farewell to the Omniture brand — you are quickly disappearing into the bowels of your acquiring company, like the many brands of compelling technology companies that came before you. I am sure a little bit of Omniture CEO Josh James died tonight and I suspect that, if the story plays out as expected, it won’t be too long until he moves on to other things as well.

Here are a couple branding examples from before and after the acquisition:

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All is well though. Through the magic of the Internet and my credit card, Joeism is back online through Slicehost — a hosted website provider that is a step above most of the stuff out there. Slicehost is geared more for developers so I had to brush off some rusty Linux and MySQL admin skills to get it going. Still got it and so far so good.

I will now resume my previous schedule of posting an entry every couple months. Stay tuned!

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• Intuit is focused on small businesses with a financial bent (think TurboTax, Quicken).
• Constant Contact is focused on micro/small businesses but from the marketing side.
• Constant Contact is dipping into the SMB payment side with their event marketing / registration product. This is a good intersecting product for the two companies.
• Intuit has a history of doing acquisitions, although this would be much bigger than most. Think Mint, Homestead, MyCorporation, …
• Intuit has a history of running their acquisitions as distinct sub-brands versus rolling them into a uber-platform. This would be very important in realizing value of something like CTCT (or like competitor) given the fickle nature of their customer base. Someone one described to me that the micro-business customers that make up the bulk of CTCT’s customer base have almost a symbiotic relationship with the product. Alter it a lot, like what would happen if it were redesigned to fit into someone else’s platform, then there would be significant churn.

Here are thoughts on the valuation:

• Intuit (INTU) has a market cap of $9b. Constant Contact (CTCT) has a market cap of $500mm.
• I put a 40% premium on the deal from their public market cap. Omniture had a 45% premium, which is rich but not unrealistic.
• The revenue multiples make sense. CTCT did about $130mm last year. They have about $50mm in cash. So, 700 – 50 is 650. Divided by 130 makes it 5. A valuation at a 5x revenue multiple would be consistent with other acquisitions.

Of course, Intuit could buy a smaller competitor like iContact or Vertical Response, but my gut tells me that they would step up to the plate with a good mix of cash and stock (Intuit has about $1b in the bank) to make a solid stake in this area versus opt for something less.

You heard it here first. If it ends up happening then the investment bankers can send me some of that multi-million dollar fee. Thanks.

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Big thanks go to Brandon (the demo guru) and John (the video maestro) for putting together this Friday afternoon special. Also, thanks to Justin for his wizardry in getting this on the ‘net for the rest of the world to enjoy. So without further adieu, I present a “Tour of Bronto”:

You can also watch this on blip.tv or download the video (74MB MPEG)

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• Facebook. We recently soft launched a fan page on Facebook called Bronto Nation. The purpose of this page is to connect with anyone that has an interest in Bronto. It tends to be more brand focused and contains blog posts, photos, and videos. Go to Bronto on Facebook.
• Twitter. We’ve been on Twitter for a little while here but DJ Waldow, our Director of Best Practices and Deliverability, has recently stepped up our efforts in this area. The “tweets” center around email marketing best practices from Bronto and other leaders in the email marketing community. Kudos to DJ for already increasing our network by over 50% in less than a month. Also, special thanks to our product manager Adam Covati for getting us the bronto twitter name – it had been previously cybersquatted by someone else. Follow Bronto on Twitter.
• Flickr. At Bronto, we’ve had a very long tradition of documenting the travels of a small inflatable Brontos around the world. We also have a number of pictures from our various social and community events. All the pictures are interesting (if not bizarre in places) and well worth a good browsing. View Bronto photos on Flickr.
• YouTube. Last year, the account managers started an online video series called BrontoFire. BrontoFire is a 5-minute video magazine of sorts that looks at the good, bad, and ugly of various email marketing campaigns while passing on general best practices along the way. You can see these videos and other short clips of social antics around the office on YouTube. View videos on YouTube.
• LinkedIn. We created a group for current and past employees of Bronto on LinkedIn. It is called the Bronto Network. If you are current or past employee and haven’t already joined, I encourage you to do so. Once a Bronto, Always a Bronto! Connect with Bronto on LinkedIn.

As if that wasn’t enough, we have brontonation.com. Bronto Nation is the launching pad for these social marketing efforts. It’s still in its early stages so expect some interesting developments there. And, finally, there is the Bronto Blog covering email marketing best practices. We are currently revamping it and will have an exciting new version of it to show soon.

Have any suggestions on how we can improve our social marketing initiatives? Let me know.

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Old bronto server resting in the telecom rack at Bronto Headquarters.

Things often have a way of coming full circle. Back in May 2002, Bronto purchased its first server to host its email marketing application. The server, originally named bronto, was built by Blake Watters, a freshman at UNC Chapel Hill, for about $1000. It was a big purchase back in the day.

What a long strange trip its been. Now, we are many servers, people and sophistication away from those early days. But, sometimes it’s valuable to dust off the old, and make it new. Just like Seabiscuit,  the old server found a new life — hosting this blog.

Before our domain bronto.com, there was brontomail.com. And, little known, prior to brontomail.com, there was joeism.com. Now, the first domain and first server back together again. All is well in world!

Thanks Doug for setting the server up and Blake for building it originally (where ever you are!)

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My experiences watching the popular television show Lost maps nicely to some of the new ways of watching video. Here is how it played out over the last few seasons:

• Season 1. I watched the first season on DVDs from NetFlix. This is my favorite way to watch television since you get multiple episodes at once, the quality is great, and it is convenient.
• Season 2. I subscribed to iTunes and the week’s latest episodes downloaded right to my desktop. It was automatic and very convenient. I paid thirty some dollars for the season and it worked out to be $2 an episode. Unlike most people, I don’t have a television to watch this on and, even if I did, I would have to tape/tivo it because I’m often still putting my kids to sleep when it comes on.
• Season 3. This year I went to a neighbor’s house for the first two episodes. But, for the other day, I wasn’t able to do so I had to get the episode some other way.

With my test, I downloaded the episode through iTunes and through Bittorrent. Here are my thoughts on the pros and cons of each:

• iTunes. Cost me $2. Extremely easy since billing already setup through iTunes. Good quality. Took 25 minutes to download.
• Bittorrent. Cost me nothing. More involved but getting easier with rise of rss bittorrent services. Good quality but some risk of it being not quite right. Took 3 hours to download.

In the end, iTunes was better. $2 is a small price to pay for a better experience and piece of mind that the content was obtained and the relevant parties are being fairly compensated. However, iTunes works best in this case because the content is readily available. This isn’t always the case. Take one look at the movie selection from iTunes of Netflix’s on-demand offering and you’ll see what I mean. This is what makes downloading illegal content tempting for so many. Although it is still more challenging and not quite as easy as Napster used to be, it is getting easier and only a few steps away from being easy enough for regular people.

Thus the challenge — the longer that the movie houses struggle over the right solution for distributing video online the more time that illicit services have to rise and improve. Take a quick peek at my searches for Lost on YouTorrent and tvRSS and you’ll see what I mean. It is getting more and more approachable.

As for me, next week I’ll probably be back to watching to Lost at my neighbor’s house with a bowl of popcorn but perhaps by the time season 4 rolls around I’ll buy a real TV and hook it up to a new fangled Apple TV or Netflix appliance. We’ll see!

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I started simple. I used the Live Bookmark feature with Firefox. It worked well but ultimately limited me to following just a few news sources.

About a year ago, I purchased NetNewsWire for the Mac. It is a standalone desktop application and was an easy way to read many blogs and news sources. I still use it periodically. I tried to use Google Reader on my computer but never was  too impressed. NetNewsWire was simply easier and quicker as a desktop application.

Google Reader on the iPhone changed everything. The interface is extremely clean and it is a extremely quick way to catch up on my favorite news sites and blogs anywhere.

It is my new killer app and I highly recommend if you haven’t tried it already.

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Today my feed world changed in two ways:

* I installed NetNewsWire. It is a program for the Mac designed for reading and aggregating a whole mess of feeds. I tried the free Lite version but it was too limiting. Most likely, I’ll fork over $30 after my 30-day trial for the full version. These type of feed readers remind of the newsgroup readers of yearyear. I never got into those so we’ll see if this one sticks.

* I added FeedBurner to this blog. I host this blog through Typepad and there was a fairly seamless tie-in. From what I understand, FeedBurner layers on top of any feed and provides an easy way to do basic tracking on visitors among other things. FeedBurner seems to be in vogue these days so at the very least I’ll be on the cool side of the blogsphere.

If you have any thoughts on the merits of either product, let me know. I’d love to know.

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The yellow pin on this screenshot of Google Earth is where I used to teach in the Seychelles — 8826.02 miles away. Although this screenshot doesn’t do it justice, the visuals are amazingly detailed and interactive.

Download it. It is very cool.

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