This March I’ll be taking graduate/undergraduate students to SxSWi for the third year. (Last year I had 46 students, with zero arrests!) If you’ve been to SxSW before, you understand how intense the event can be. If you haven’t been, it’s like a rapid dive into the deep end of the pool that has you feeling like you know very little about what’s going on in the world...
For the past 7 years, I’ve had real-world clients in my digital marketing classes. Clients include Skratch Labs, Illegal Pete’s, Ralph Schomp BMW, Wheat Ridge Cyclery, Crunchyroll, Sphero, Comedy Works and Red Rocks. (These are some of the larger names and we do projects for startups/small businesses.) This is an incredible experience for my students and the clients. The students get...
Last year, I was on a flight from Austin to Denver, frustrated that I was unable to attend more sessions at SxSWi. It was my first year and I was overwhelmed by the quantity/quality of information. I had attended 4 days of sessions from 9am to 5pm and still only scratched the surface. As I sipped yet another Coke, I thought to myself; “I need an army.” Then one of the many voices...
I have been teaching a course called Gateway to Business at the Daniels College of Business for the past three years. This course is for Freshmen and I copiloted the course back in 2012 with Dr. Stephen Haag. The course is an attempt to remove the mind numbing joy of business 101 concepts by having students apply those concepts to a mobile application-based business model. They are tasked with...
It has been an amazing class/trip to Japan. I learned a lot about mobile consumer behavior and the cultural characteristics that drive some of the behavioral differences. In the end, if you boil the trip down to its base element(s), it all comes down to culture.  When I started this class, the equation I came up with for mobile consumer behavior was Psychology + Culture + Capability =...
Today is our last day in Japan and I got up early, ate and headed out to the Fushimi Inari Shrine. This is a place I’ve always wanted to go and it did not disappoint. It’s about 1/2 hour from our hotel and it was easy to find. There are roughly 1 million photo opportunities and the repetition and process of getting from shrine to shrine was hypnotic. Truly something to be...
We had two full days left in Japan and my students needed to take everything they’d seen/heard/learned (also known as data) and use it to write the create the final project. The final project was a paper and is outlined here. I met with each student team – primary and secondary – to review their area of focus. Â I was very happy with what I saw and was excited to see the final...
After a brief stop at the Edo-Tokyo Museum. It was brief because the top three floors were closed! We then went back to Kyoto on the bullet train. Once we arrived we settled into the hotel (same rooms!) and then headed out to the Ginkaku-ji. After that we took a look at Heian Shrine. This is the shrine that Scarlett Johansson visited in Lost in Translation. The thing that’s amazing about...
So . . . tonight my students and I had the very good fortune of having dinner with Mr. Norio Murakami, the former president of Google Japan. We had a great time and he’s an amazing man. (I was introduced by one of my students.) We talked about privacy, AI (no matter what Elon says), the Internet of things and Japanese mobile culture. Mr. Murakami also happens to know some very famous people...
This morning we went to the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. This sounds like something that’s riddled with history but in fact, it isn’t. The palace is the working residence of the Emperor of Japan. (Yes. Japan has an Emperor and he’s much like the Queen of England in regards to power and responsibility.) This is going to sound stupid but the palace wasn’t much to see. After...