Startable – Healy Jones’ & Prasad Thammineni’s Blog

As the marketing person at Boundless, I connect with a ton of college students. Not surprisingly, they are really concerned about the state of the hiring market for grads and students. Boundless put out this helpful infographic on ways college students can help improve their resumes. Check it out!

IDC is showing some interesting stats on the number of tablets shipped in Q1 – in particular, for every 3 PCs shipped there were 2 tablets shipped.

Since PCs seem to be on a downward trajectory, and the tablet market grew 142% y/o/y, it won’t be long until tablets are just bigger than PCs. Probably this year. Reminds me of my “tablet time” post from last year…

Microsoft seems to be failing in their attempt to get into the tablet market. As this article on extremetech points out, ”Just so you have some idea of how poorly Microsoft’s combination of big-and-expensive tablets are doing, get this: After shipping some 900,000 Surface RT units in Q4 2012, IDC estimates that just 200,000 Windows RT tablets in total — including OEMs! — were sold in Q1 2013. Despite a huge amount of publicity, IDC estimates that the Surface Pro sold around 700,000 units in its first quarter. For comparison, the first iPad sold more than three million units in its first quarter — and the tablet market was a lot smaller back then.”

If I was MSFT, I’d buy share at this point. The whole HP webOS exit from last year, when HP sold tablets for super cheap, clearly showed that the market wants cheap tablets. If Microsoft wants share they should drop the price, lose money and get share. I don’t see any other way.

Boundless is looking for on campus marketing managers. These are positions for undergraduate students who want to get marketing and management experience while they are in school. We are looking at many, many campuses across the country, and there is a good chance that your university is one of them. You can visit Boundless’s On Campus Marketing Program to apply for one of these jobs.

We need you to:

• Hire and manage hourly reps to execute on-campus marketing strategies,
• Approach classes, clubs and events to spread the word about Boundless,
• Design and execute marketing campaigns to acquire new users.
• The role is fun, fast-paced and varied: you should laugh in the face of adversity & show us how you can dominate your campus!

Requirements
You should be:

• Involved on-campus & extremely outgoing,
• Exude energy, fun & a passion for ‘getting stuff done’,
• A Sophomore, Junior or Senior, please!
• Prior marketing & management experience is a plus.

There have been some problems with my WordPress blog, but hopefully we’re back in action!

One of the big perks of my new marketing position with Boundless is that I get to work with amazing undergraduate students across the nation. These students are charged with letting people on their campuses know about Boundless and free textbooks. We recently had a great on campus competition, where we motivated our on campus student managers to hit aggressive sign up goals – and a lot of them really did an amazing job! Below is a cool post on the “campus battle” with some great pictures of the action.

http://storify.com/GoBoundless/how-campus-battle-started-a-textbook-revolution

Some of you may already have heard – Boundless has a new VP of Marketing, and I’m happy to say it’s me, Healy Jones! I came on board earlier in January, and am really I’m excited to help advance the Boundless mission – making textbooks and education more affordable and better.

Prior to joining I spoke with college students, who universally expressed frustration at the cost of textbooks, the poor quality of the traditional publishers’ ebook offerings and endless cycle of “new” editions created by publishers for the sake of making used books worthless.

The traditional textbook publishing industry is staring at a huge tidal wave of change, just as the encyclopedia industry did a few years ago. Textbooks must evolve into something that better suits students’ learning habits and pocketbooks. Boundless is really exciting since I get to be part of the solution.

Since I’ve officially joined we’ve released free textbooks in 18 subjects. And Boundless was covered in TechCrunch and USA Today, and had great blog posts about the  Boundless open textbooks on the Creative Commons blog and Semantic Web. AND, our semester is off to a great start with thousands upon thousands of college students electing to try Boundless free versions of popular books like Campbell’s Biology, Meyer’s Psychology and Principles of Microeconomics. If this is what changing the world feels like, I’m loving it.

I’m excited to be part of the Boundless revolution and look forward to helping students save some money!!

I came across some great tips on crafting the best email subject lines on the Litmus blog here. Of course, testing testing testing is the best way to get good results with any email campaign, but starting with these ideas is a good way to begin the tests from a good place.

And I’m always struggling with subject line length, and found the open rate vs. email subject line length to be cool:

“Subject line lengths and their corresponding open and click rates:

• 4–15 characters: 15.2% open; 3.1% click
• 16–27 characters: 11.6% open; 3.8% click
• 28–39 characters: 12.2% open; 4% click
• 40–50 characters: 11.9% open; 2.8% click
• 51+ characters: 10.4% open; 1.8% click”

OK, well, in case you were living under a mobile rock and didn’t know that the iPad was HUGE here is a chart from Chitika.

Android is still a ways away… and MSFT is just so far behind it’s hard to imagine how they catch up at this point. Poor MSFT.

by: Healy Jones

Happy New Years! I hope everyone has a good 2013.