David Pitlyuk

I was going through some old designs on the Wayback Machine of my old company l that I had sold back in 2002. I happened to find some interesting content, including an interview with one of my favorite bloggers and somebody I’ve known for a long time, John Chow. John Chow is what you would consider a “dot com mogul” (at least according to him ). At the time that I had met John, we both owned computer hardware review websites, he is still running his. One of the articles I had written for my site was an interview with John, but it hasn’t been online for a long time. I happened to stumble across it on my computer, and figured there would be a good amount of people, including himself, that would get a kick out of some of the responses (TTZ is John):

SL: Tell us a little bit about yourself (Age, Location, etc.)

TTZ: John Chow. Nick name “Moto”. 34 from Vancouver BC Canada. Born in China, came to Vancouver, Canada with my parents at age 7. Been here ever since. I guess I would be considered a grand dad to most of the young techies. I have a daughter name Ashley who is 8 years old. My background is in finance. I graduated from the British Columbia Institute of Technology with a degree in Financial Management. Computers are a hobby. Always been interested in them.

SL: What exactly got you started working on The Tech Zone?

TTZ: The Tech Zone started out as Moto’s Project 504. It was a personal home page about the first computer that I built myself. Never dream it would become what it is now. Back then, the whole site was just 6 pages long.

SL: How long do you spend working on your site a week?

TTZ: I normally spend 2 to 4 hours a day updating it. I use to have to find the news. It’s much better now that most sites send me their news to post. Most of my time is spent testing products and writing articles.

SL: How many people do you have working on the site?

TTZ: No one really “works” for me. The Tech Zone is still run like a personal site. I don’t want to get too commercial with it. Most of the articles and reviews are done by myself. I do have others write for me from time to time. Right now the site is run by me acting as Editor-In-Chief and Kahthan “Kat” Deane will be the new webmaster and CGI guy. Kat also runs SavageXtreme.com and was a webmaster at the Review Zone. I also have people working behind the scene to help make the site run smoothly. Pauline Taylor is the most important. She puts in long hours to help me out with the site. Then there’s Mick®, Mudzy® and Kincaid®. I always seem to be using their computers as guinea pigs. I also have a few Tech Babes who model products for me.

SL: What do you like to review and how often?

TTZ: I would have to say video cards and CPU. Let’s face it, there isn’t much different between one 7200 RPM drive to another.

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Viral marketing is a great way to get some major promotion to your product or service for cheap. The hard part is coming up with a clever campaign, especially if you want it to generate a lot of buzz. An interesting one I was just reading about was done by Nissan, where they created 200,000 sets of fake keys that they are putting in places like bars, clubs, concerts, etc. The keys feature a tag that promotes their intelligent key with push ignition, so it would no longer need a regular set of keys. This is a great concept for marketing the technology, and is definitely creating a buzz (hence this blog post). People that find the keys can go to AltimaKeys.com where they can enter some sort of code and they will win a prize.

Nissan spent $100,000 on this campaign. It may seem like a lot, but when you compare it to one TV commercial, it’s much cheaper when you factor in the budget to produce the commercials and the air time.

Have you done any viral marketing for your site/blog? If so, what did you do, and how did it work out for you?

The but not John Chow aka “root of all evil” is giving away a Nintendo Wii courtesy of a company that makes promotional pens. Need proof? Here are the guys with the Wii they are giving away:

I was able to pick up a Wii a couple months back for the 20 minutes that CircuitCity.com had it available before it sold out. The console is like nothing else, and although the graphics are not as good as its competitors, the fun factor makes up for it and then some. From what I’ve read, Wii’s are still pretty impossible to find on shelves, and I know that my last few trips to stores that carry them haven’t had them.

From a blogging promotion perspective, this an excellent idea for both the advertiser and the blogger (John Chow in this case). If you look at the requirements that are needed to win, it’s an ingenious way which will boost the Google ranking for both parties.

If you are interested in winning the Wii yourself, you will have to create a blog post with certain guidelines. If you end up winning, make sure to let us know! If I end up winning, I’ll more than likely give it away through this blog since I already have one.

I caught this over at Digg, an artist by the name of Yaya Chou created a chandelier made out of gummi bears.

Here’s a closeup so you can see all the Gummi goodness:

I found some more information on YaYa is one half of this so called Gummi Bear art:

Or in the case of YaYa Chou, who is one half of a two-woman show titled “Consumerism and Product #1,” to Gummi Bear art. Chou’s most noteworthy object to date has been a chandelier made entirely of the chewy kid’s treat. The other works in the show are a great deal more traditional, to the point of almost being Victorian. They consist of various types of appliqué work on small canvases. A representative work, “Rosie,” is an 18-inch tondo, painted tea rose pink and embellished with painted roses and flowers whose petals are false fingernails. In the center, there is a fabric appliqué of a baby bear examining its paws. The whole thing has the exquisiteness of a keepsake. If there’s irony intended, it is subtle to the point of invisibility.