Stories by Tom Kaneshige

Every summer, people head to the grocery store in droves to pick up cartons of cold, creamy ice cream. It's a great way to stay cool. But shoppers will go elsewhere if the frozen dairy treat is crusted with yucky ice crystals--the result of freezing, thawing and refreezing.

Most enterprise technology eventually converges into a suite, as it did with ERP. Integration hassles, management headaches and training challenges arising from a mishmash of best-of-breed solutions drive frustrated enterprise software buyers to the suite life -- but not in marketing tech, at least not yet.

If you've spent time Google searching and window shopping online, say, on an outdoor retailer's website, dreaming about a $400 graphite fly fishing rod, maybe even putting the fly rod in a shopping cart to keep the fantasy going only to click away when reality bites, you might see the fly rod following you around the Interwebs, your Facebook feed or a banner ad.

Marketers trying to win customers in the world of mobility face a daunting challenge: gaining their trust. And the Game of Trust can be just as unsettling as anything seen on HBO's hit series "Game of Thrones," only more so because this isn't fiction. After all, you don't want your followers losing trust in you and accusing you of treason. That would be a bloody mess.

The road to Contently Summit is lined with the homeless who live in the shadow of City Hall's towering dome. Along Market Street, the sour stench of urine and feces and unwashed bodies closes in. I turn west on Mission Street making sure to avoid eye contact with the forsaken outliers cursing at the world. Two giant, yellow construction cranes stain the skyline, and I feel a sense of dread at tech gentrification's Second Coming. Skirting iron-barred liquor stores and smoke shops, I finally arrive at Contently Summit, which I recognize by the "private party" sign out front. It is like an island resort serving free drinks and selling timeshares in the midst of a polluted, roiling sea of poverty.

Mobility is marching forward in the enterprise in all sorts of ways, say some 430 companies at MobileIron's user conference in San Francisco this week. Yet they're facing the same stiff hurdle -- namely, security. These were the key highlights of the keynote session, which included a special guest appearance by an Uber executive.

When Nima Asrar Haghighi, director of digital marketing and analytics at MuleSoft, looked around for a predictive lead scoring, he reached back to his technical roots.

Marketers and advertisers shudder when they think about the great consumer rush to mobile. With a smartphone's tiny screen and a mobile consumer's fleeting attention span, marketers face an enormous challenge capitalizing on mobility.

Among marketers, the drum beat to "personalize" messages and offers to customers is growing louder and faster. Personalization sounds nice, but truth is, it's really a long ways off.

People not in the branding business don't see much difference between advertising and marketing. As new-age advertising technology, or adtech, and marketing technology, or martech, logically merge, what's the problem? For advertising agencies, which have been on the frontline of branding since the late 18th century, a lot is at stake.

The word "innovation" gets bandied about at virtually every tech event. It's the magic key to unlocking great competitive advantage and disrupting entire markets. CIOs are supposed to be masters of innovation.

Are you feeling overworked, overwhelmed, on the edge of a mental breakdown? You're probably a content marketer.

Marketers lean on their enterprise marketing software suites to deliver on lofty promises: cross-channel campaign management, analytics, automation, personalization, customer journey mapping, testing and optimization, customer insights and the list goes on. Marketers need this powerful engine to be well-integrated with other systems and data in order to complete these Herculean tasks.

In rapid-fire speech and hands waving erratically, Rachel Weiss, vice president of digital innovation, content and new ventures at L'Oreal, says nothing is more personal than what you put on your body, such as makeup. She talked up awesome new digital services, such as a virtual beauty advisor, that really tap into human emotions.

In Las Vegas, if you're not new and fresh, you're old and boring. Casinos thrive on youthful energy and young executives flush with cash. Nightclubs buzz into the wee hours, chock full of hard-partying millennials, not stodgy Gen-Xers in desperate need of their beauty sleep.