Matt Silk

Company: Waterfall Mobile

msilk@waterfallmobile.com

As Senior Vice President for Waterfall Mobile, Matthew Silk leads the company’s sales, marketing and corporate development initiatives, and spearheads formation of all strategic partnership agreements. He is also responsible for Waterfall’s expansion efforts, including the establishment of offices in Los Angeles and Austin. Prior to joining Waterfall Mobile, Silk held a number of senior positions with E*TRADE Financial. As Director, Retail Product Management, he was responsible for all web brokerage and core user experience products. He also integrated and led the product steering committee, which, under his direction, delivered one of the largest trading initiatives in the company's history. During his tenure at E*TRADE, he led several site re-designs, launched an in-house charting system and re-engineered the company’s content architecture and aggregation strategies. Before joining E*TRADE, Silk was a Business Analyst at Xircom, Inc., a networking company subsequently acquired by Intel, where he managed all primary and secondary research for product planning and industry tracking purposes. He began his career as a business consultant for the Wharton Small Business Development Center, where he provided one-on-one management consulting services to a portfolio of entrepreneurial clients in the Philadelphia region. Silk received a B.S. in Economics from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and currently resides in Austin.

I’m guessing you’ve heard the news, given that the deal has garnered a ton of hype in the press and social media world, but LivingSocial subscribers can sign up to receive $20 worth of Whole Foods groceries for $10. Sound familiar? Possibly because LivingSocial pulled a similar move earlier with financial backer Amazon. And just like 1.4 million people flocked to A...

Mobile experts have been touting, “This year is the year of mobile,” for the past five years.  And then every year as December rolls around, we start hearing, “Next year is truly the year of mobile.” Well, this year, I wouldn’t count on a getting a “2012 is the year of mobile.” Because 2011 seems to be the real- deal for the mobile industry. A recent Forrester Report...

To interact with its riders, the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District – or as Bay Area residents know it, BART – launched “Try BART Week” with the goal of increasing ridership. As part of the promotion, Waterfall Mobile powered a mobile sweepstakes during the kick-off event and a word of the day sweepstakes each day of “Try BART Week.”  The sweeps gave rider...

We all already know texting is big – really big – even more so with younger generations.  There were 173.2 billion texts sent just in June this year, up from 7.2 billion five years earlier, according to CTIA. So, it came as no surprise when I recently read a Bloomberg story on how wireless operators see great opportunity in the over-50 age demographic and plan to tar...

We caught Brenna Hanly’s QR code experiment last month, where she crafted a marketing campaign for the Boston Book Festival, placing over 150 signs with QR codes around campus. While the campaign was partially designed to promote the festival itself, Hanly was more interested in gauging QR acceptance in the “real world,” as opposed to the advertising world where QR c...

With SMS reaching 5 billion mobile phones around the world, marketers can no longer ignore the significance of this marketing channel.  Applications may be making a lot of noise in the mobile space right now, but the truth is only 17% of mobile users are capable of accessing the Internet from their mobile devices. Texting, however, is almost universal. Although many ...

InsightExpress, a leading digital marketing research firm, recently released its second quarter 2010 Digital Consumer Portrait, a quarterly study of 1,000-1,500 consumers. The study found mobile couponing to be an increasingly effective way to drive foot traffic into retail locations, and increase sales. In fact, the researchers found that 10 percent of consumers sai...

Most of us in the mobile space saw the humorous Windows Phone 7 commercial that recently debuted.  In the video, mobile users young and old are shown texting while jogging, in the shower, in bed ignoring their spouses, and just about every other stereotyped scenario involving the hyper-connected. Windows's position in the ad is that the user should run his or her pho...

I thought sharing an article I recently wrote for "Mobile Marketer" on tips for holiday mobile marketing planning would be a great way to kick-off the Thanksgiving/shopping holiday weekend. Here it is: Mobile Marketer recently reported that companies’ holiday mobile marketing budgets are expected to be around $50,000 to $250,000 this year. And with Labor Day behin...

We recently saw a political campaign that said “text JOBS to BLUNT,” reminiscent of the 2008 presidential campaign’s “text HOPE to OBAMA.” What we were keying in on was the use of the vanity short codes – “BLUNT” and “OBAMA.” Before your company goes mimicking this strategy of adopting a vanity short code for its next campaign, you might want to ask yourself what dem...