Episode 4 - Alan Jones of Doing Words

Interview with Alan Jones of Doing Words Sydney 2010

Alan-jones-doing-words-podcast-mix by Odge

I recently had an opportunity to speak with Alan Jones of Sydney based Doing Words http://doingwords.com/.

Alan talks about Doing Word and how it was born from the early days of the Web in 1995, through working with Microsoft and Yahoo before the dotcom crash. He discusses his evolution from public relations through product manager to communications consultant copywriting for web, email and social media and his role helping Geeks explain their cool new products to target customers, advising venture capitalists and investors about the potential of new web startups.

Alan describes some of the phases we’ve gone through in the last 6-8 years and the emergence of social networking platforms Orkut, Bebo, MySpace and Facebook and how these have streamlined communication with friends, family and colleagues networks has created grown into the current marketing phenomena. The opening up of these platforms to third party developers and the implications of privacy and advertising and how that is affecting their relationship with their customer base.

Alan also looks into his crystal ball for us and gives his views on the future of mobile devices, adaptations the social networking applications are making to work on the varying screen real estate on the 30+ device operating systems including J2ME, Symbian, iPhone, iPad and Android.

I also ask Alan for his take on the convergence of internet and television consumer products starting to hit the market and where he sees service providers, content publishers and hardware manufacturers battle it out for market share.