"Make stuff people like. It's in the rulebook."

Mortar client Antenna just bought out Vaultus Mobile Technologies, the people who designed the eTrade app for iPhone and Droid – and gave the world the power to invest using the trusted knowledge of golf-playing talking babies.  Putting our well-documented antipathy toward The Talking Baby Gimmick aside for a moment, we think this purchase says something interesting.

Gene Signorini, vice president of market watcher Yankee Group’s Anywhere Enterprise Research division, says: “With this acquisition, Antenna has positioned itself to tap directly into…mobile market dynamics.”

To which we say, “Get to the interesting part, Gene.”

At which point Gene says, “Employees are demanding that mobile applications for business deliver the same type of user experiences that they are accustomed to getting from their personal life."

Thank you, Gene. That’s what we were looking for.

It’s like this, y'all: Somebody (Antenna) is building really cool apps that people use at work. The guy who fixes your Xerox machine. The guy who delivers Murphy’s Stout.  Instead of the clipboards they used to carry around, folks like that now have smartphones. Which do smart stuff.  So naturally, those folks – and the people who got them the technology in the first place – demand that level of functionality in their personal lives. Vaultus delivered that. And Antenna wisely snapped them up. See need, address need. Smart. 

This is a test of the emergency Facebook Blog link. This is only a test.

Yep. Mortar's very own Jigsaw.com has been purchased by Salesforce.com.

That's the third Mortar client to get snapped up since we started the agency, and the second to do so after completing our brand development process (Jigsaw join Rydex Investments in that honor).

Its big news for sales managers everywhere as the combination of Jigsaw's crowd sourcing genius and SalesForce's dominance of CRM come together in, dare I say it, a cloud of gloriously fresh leads.  

Salesforce.com's shares jumped several % on the news.

Intelligent coverage here.

In between writing screenplays for Rambo and prehistoric grizzlies bursting from refrigerators in the woods of Maine (FreezerBurn), our buddy Richard Smith produced these shorts for the History Channel.

Using chalk and audio he recorded over the phone.

Click through for some awesome chalk shorts.