iZack.com

For those of you looking for something to do on New Years Eve this year in Raleigh, I wanted to point you to two things.

The first is to the No Cover Charge New Years party at my bar, Isaac Hunter’s Oak City Tavern. We’re located at 112 Fayetteville Street, which is just a couple blocks from City Plaza. For those of you who don’t know, they’ve actually made plans to drop that giant Acorn in City Plaza this year, along with plenty of live music and lots of good times. Isaac Hunter’s Tavern is only in it’s 5th week of existence, so New Years is a great time to come check out the capital’s newest watering hole! Think about it this way: We’ve got $10 bottles of champagne and $2 pints of PBR. We’ll even let you cater your own private dinner party if you’d want– New Years doesn’t GET more affordable than that! (Check out this link for a few more details)

The second is a great new site that just came to life today. In case you’re looking to compare a few other options before settling on the tavern, I can recommend no better source than RaleighNYE.com. My good friend Lisa Jeffries put the site together with a friend after a couple conversations about just what there was to do around Raleigh on NYE. It’s an awesome resource because it not only lists events, but organizes them by location, and price as well. (Note to Lisa: I’m gonna need you to take it a couple of steps further and make a nightly event website that helps me find dollar slices of pizza and twenty-five cent wings every single night of the week!)

So long story short, I hope you check out your Raleigh New Years Eve options at RaleighNYE.com and then ultimately make the right decision to spend New Years Eve at Isaac Hunter’s Tavern.

- Zack

Facebook has can beat twitter, but first they need to find ways to filter out the noise.

Just like many of you, I made fun of Twitter constantly for months. I assumed it was just a place for 12 year olds and Ashton Kutcher to post meaningless updates about their boring lives. Finally, after months of media hype and pressure from a few tech savvy friends I decided to give it a try. I installed ‘Friendbar’ on my Firefox browser and signed into both my Facebook and Twitter names. Friendbar works like the CNN news ticker, only it lists status updates instead of news stories. At first the constant updates distracted me but soon I learned to tune them out until I needed a break.

I picked Friendbar because I felt like the fact it could pull Facebook information as well as Twitter meant it wouldn’t be a complete waste of time. I use Facebook all the time so having access to the updates might be a nice way to keep in touch with my friends. The nice thing about Friendbar is that you can shut off the Twitter or Facebook streams independently of each other.

I shut off the Facebook feed by day two. On Facebook, people are very focused on putting up silly statuses, quotes, and meaningless “I’m bored” messages. I was quickly annoyed with reading the Facebook noise– it was a waste of time usually. But I was incredibly surprised that my Twitter feed was far more interesting– people use it in a completely different way.

Regardless of what Twitter says, it’s not as much about ‘what are you doing this instant’ as it is about sharing information you think others can benefit from. It’s perfect for ultra-local news (following local restaurants, TV stations, and blogs is a great way to keep your finger on the pulse of your town). It’s great for learning about new ideas (follow users like @mashable and @wired and you’ll learn something new every day). Don’t follow Ashton Kutcher.

Twitter’s biggest problem (besides being centralized and thus vulnerable to cyber-attack) is that it’s very spam-prone. Every day 2-3 people follow me that turn out to be spammers who post random updates between links to their products. There’s no real way to determine whether or not someone is Spammer or not by the email Twitter sends you (who cares how many followers/updates they’ve posted? WHO ARE THEY?). Instead you have to click through the email to their profile, and spend time trying to figure out if this user is actually providing information that is useful to me.

Facebook provides a much richer experience– if someone random adds me as a friend, I’m given their name immediately plus it’s easy to figure out if we have friends in common. The added depth to the profiles on Facebook makes it easy to determine who’s trying to spam me and who’s not.

Facebook needs to find a way to help funnel people away from posting garbage — “ohh I wish it was sunny”, and more towards useful– “Free ice-cream at Ben & Jerry’s today!”. First, Facebook should allow me to build my own feeds, selecting which friends updates I want included in each feed. That way if I wanted to see tech news, I could just check out ‘Tech News Friend Feed’.

Next, Facebook should find away to encourage people to tag their status updates as either personal/news/info (or whatever buckets they want to use). Give me the ability to easily follow only ‘news’ updates, or whatever I feel like at the time. Give me the ability to quickly change my newsfeed option for different posters so I can choose which of their activities I want to see in my feed. Give me the ability to use external programs (like Friendbar) to make those changes as well.

Some gyms offer Smoothie bars, why not do them one better and offer a full restaurant?

My friend Kate the other day mentioned an idea to me that I loved. How about combining a health club and a salad bar?

We both go to Planet Fitness to work out occasionally– and by ‘both go’ I mean that she goes to Planet Fitness to work out regularly while I just pay my bill each month and haven’t stepped foot in the gym in over a year. Planet Fitness likes to show that they’re not your typical gym by discouraging meat-heads from banging weights, focusing more on the cardio side of fitness, and even bringing in boxes of free pizza on the first Monday of every month.

The pizza idea seems a little silly- I mean I get it, they’re relating to us normal people instead of making us feel out of our league when it comes to working out. But maybe they should consider something a little healthier to pull clients in.

Some gyms offer Smoothie bars which have been very popular in the last decade. Often they’ll offer powdered additives like creatine or acacia berries that are supposed to increase the benefits you see from your workouts.

I think it’d be an awesome idea to focus on the health and lifestyle aspects of a gym and combine both nutritional and cardiovascular aspects. I say we create a health club with a relatively nice and affordable restaurant built in that is available only to members. Focus the menu around healthy options– it could be as simple as a salad bar that costs a couple of bucks or as complex as a full scale health restaurant.

You could offer menu choices that serve as supplements– protein powder packets next to the milk machine, acacia berries s to top your salad with, etc. Each option could have a few sentences that explain the health benefits of the item, and a one word label like “Power”, “Recovery”, or “Muscle-Mass”.

Healthy options and nutrition-centric menus are one of the hottest trends in the restaurant industry today. If you pay careful attention to quality and cost controls on the food end, and make sure you offer a solid range of fitness equipment on the gym side then you’ll be able to hook customers on their way in and their way out. Suddenly you could make me feel guilty not just about skipping my workout but also for skipping out on a healthy meal. If nothing else, it’d keep me paying that monthly membership fee!

Coming up next week, 27 homes in the Triangle area will be auctioned off by the auction company Hudson & Marshall. The auction is going to be held on June 27 at 1 pm so head over to the Hilton North Raleigh (3415 Wake Forest Road) and bring your certified deposit check for $2,500

Thanks to Triangle Business Journal for the info, check out the link for more!

Lucky likes that idea!

I was walking Lucky down to Hillsborough Street today and I realized that there aren’t that many Dog Friendly restaurants around Raleigh right now. Off the top of my head, only Raleigh Times and East Village come to mind when I think of places I can take her around here. I’m sure there are probably plenty of others, but I still think there is a lot of opportunity out there to cater to dog owners.

If I had a restaurant with a really nice outdoor seating area, I’d add a Dog Menu. I’m not talking about just having a few stale milkbones to pull out when a customer/canine combo stroll up to the bar. I am talking about the real deal. It’d be a great idea to have a menu with various dog entrees on it for the customer.

When someone walks up to your deck with their dog, bring them the Dog Menu in addition to the Wine List.  Have a variety of dishes on there, from rawhide chews to luxury-brand Dog Food. If I heard a restaurant was not just pet friendly but actually ENCOURAGED me to bring Lucky, I’d definitely be stopping by at least once to check out the place. And who could say no to some reasonably priced doggie tapas?

In the end, it’s a simple way to cater to your customers, and make a couple of extra bucks in the process!

Thumbs up wine

So, like many trendy twenty-somethings, I have been known to sample a range of wines and cheeses on a regular basis. I often find myself cruising down the aisle at Harris Teeter looking for the perfect bottle of wine to complement my evening, or the ideal block of cheese to snack on before my dinner. The problem is that the wide variety of wine and cheese on the market make it tough for me to keep track of what I like.

Me: “Hey, we had that one with the blue label a few months ago!”

Her: “Do you remember if we liked it?”

Me: “… no.”

(30 minutes later, after buying and sampling the wine)

Me: “Oh yeah, that one tasted like feet.”

How about a mobile application that combines the functions of recommendations with personal reviews?

Lets make an application that will help me track the wine/cheese/ANYTHING I’ve tried, my own personal review of that delicacy, and maybe make some recommendations for my next purchase. That way I can try a new wine when I’m feeling adventurous but pick up an old favorite I’d almost forgotten about when I’m having company over.

Lets add some more features besides just reviews and recommendations. Maybe the application will tweet about my purchase for me so I can spread the love and the review. How about I take a picture of the bar code on my wine and the application loads the facts for me into my personal review database. You could even link in a little mini-social network through the applications website.

Me: “Hey, you hated that foot wine too?”
Online friend: “Yeah I did. We took it back and got a nice Chateau de Medford instead. 10x better! You can only find it at Trader Joe’s”
Me: “Nice, that’s my last name! I’ll pick up a bottle of it next time I’m out”

If I actually had started (and finished) taking those Web Application Development courses I’ve been talking about for the last year, maybe I’d write the application myself.

Zack

Here’s one for Jeff Jarvis, author of “What Would Google Do“.

I go to Redbox once a week or so to rent movies for a dollar and I love it. The price is so cheap, I wouldn’t really even notice I paid it, which is why half the time I wind up keeping them for 3 or 4 days longer than I meant to. Redbox knows that it’s human nature to avoid going out of one’s way to return the movie on time if all it’s going to cost is another dollar for one more day. They make money off me, and I don’t feel cheated at all. It’s a win-win.

Last night as I returned my DVD to my local Redbox at Harris Teeter in Cameron Village, a thought occured to me. Why doesn’t Redbox take a cue from Google, Amazon, and NetFlix?

My biggest problem with Redbox is that there are pages and pages of movies I’ve never heard of before. When I get done renting the new releases I wanted to see, I have no choice but to wait a few weeks for the next set of releases. I’ve tried to rent a few of the movies I’d never heard of before, but there was no real way for me to know ahead of time that they were crap. The only time I’ve felt cheated by Redbox was that dollar I spent on ‘Surfer Dude’.

So here’s a suggestion Redbox: when I turn in my movie, how about displaying 5 stars on the touchscreen display and asking me to rate the movie? I wouldn’t mind giving you the information free and just think of how you can use it to grow your sales!

If Redbox had everyone who turned in a movie review it, they can do a lot of things. They can put star ratings below each movie to help guide people to some great movies that they’ve never heard of  before. They can help me avoid renting a movie like Surfer Dude and get it out of their rotation as quickly as possible once they see that people hate it. They can even take my reviews, compare them to people with similar opinions and help point me to some recommendations!

If Redbox offered me a little guidance each time I came to rent another movie, I can GUARANTEE I’d wind up renting more often each month. They already track our email addresses, why not put that information into play!

Welcome to iZack.com, home of the Zack Medford brand. It took me a long time to figure out just what I want the Zack Medford brand to be, but I think I have finally settled on it.

iZack.com is about innovation, new ways of thinking, and a focus on being intricately connected to the community.

It’s tricky to try to limit to scope of your online presence when you’re interested in a lot of things. I could probably write hundreds of articles each about the latest cell phone craze, how hard it is to find healthy food these days, or how frustrating it is to deal with stupid people. But if you really want to brand yourself, you need to have a little more focus than that.

I realized that I love finding new ways to address the problems we face every day. I love new ideas, whether they’re my own or someone a lot smarter than me. I think the internet is moving our society along at lightspeed (having a hard time remembering what it was like not to have a cell phone? I can barely believe I managed to keep in touch with the world around without an internet surfing blackberry only 2 years ago)

The thing that I am most passionate about is being an active part of my community here in Raleigh, NC. The internet makes this easier and easier every day, and I am a true believer in social media, social networking, and engaging in my local community both in real world but also online.

So this is my blog, thanks for reading it! I’ll try to keep shining my small spotlight on the big ideas and creative innovations I come across going forward.

I hope you come back from time to time and see what I’ve got for you!

- Zack

RALEIGH, NC

ZACK MEDFORD, author and blogger at iZack.com, writes about innovation, and new ways of thinking with a focus on being intricately connected to the community. He is an Account Executive at Bandwidth.com and director of social media for Goonight’s Comedy Club in Raleigh, NC.  He has a background in sales and technology, and has strong ties to the restaurant & hospitality industry. He has written many articles that have appeared in various publications including Washington Week, UWire.com, and the North Carolina State Technician . He consults for local start-ups and established restaurants. He attended North Carolina State University from 2001 to 2005.

This is a personal website and not associated with any of the above organizations.