Memiliki aturan sendiri dan tidak terkait negara manapun.
http://www.tempointeraktif.com/hg/iptek/2011/08/29/brk,20110829-354047,id.html
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Monday, August 29, 2011
Facebook Ads: 5 Tips for Success
This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.
Facebook Ads have emerged as a popular and cost-effective way to promote a small business online. According to recent research from MerchantCircle, 22% of small businesses have used Facebook Ads, and 65% say they would use Facebook Ads again, citing ease and flexibility as the top reasons to run another campaign. But not everyone enjoys success with Facebook Ads among the one-third of users who say they wouldn't run another campaign, nearly 70% say that it didn't work to acquire new customers.
With this in mind, here are five tips to ensure you're set up for success with Facebook Ads:
---------------
1. Set Goals and Plan Your Approach Accordingly
---------------
The first step is understanding what you want to achieve with your ad. Are you looking to building awareness for your company, drive traffic to your web site, promote a specific event or generate sales?
Facebook offers a number of different ad options that work to achieve different objectives. If you're looking to build awareness and grow your fan base, you might want to start with standard marketplace ads. These ads point to your Facebook Page and allow users to "like" your page directly within the ad unit. If you already have a sizable fan base, you might also try a "Page Like" sponsored story, in which the ad shows friends who have liked your Page.
"Targeting with Facebook Ads allows you to advertise to the right people based on their real interests. You can even target people who are friends with people who already "like" your Page. This social context will show up around the ad," says Grady Burnett, VP of global marketing solutions at Facebook. "A study from Nielsen shows that on average, people are 68% more likely to remember seeing an ad with social context than without, twice as likely to remember the ad's message and four times as likely to purchase."
When you want to promote a particular post from your page, such as a special offer or important news, you can also use "Page Post" sponsored stories to convert your post into a News Feed item.
But this approach isn't limited to your own posts; Burnett also notes that "you can use Sponsored Stories Facebook's newest marketing tool to help surface the word-of-mouth recommendations about your business that are already happening in the News Feed. For example, you can sponsor stories about people checking in to your business or "liking" your Page."
Whatever your goals and approach, make sure that you are set up to measure success. While click-through rate (CTR) is an important metric to track, it's not the only one, and according to Webtrends, the average CTR for Facebook ads is only about 0.05%, which is half the industry standard of 0.1%. Clint Fralick, VP of client services at social media agency Pandemic Labs, recommends that you aim instead for increases in comments, Likes, impressions and active users.
"If you pick up 500 new fans, but all those other numbers stay the same, you haven't gotten them engaged and you probably won't make any money off them," says Fralick.
---------------
2. Get Creative with Targeting
---------------
The Facebook ad interface makes it very easy to select the demographic profile of an audience you want to target, including age, sex, location, education level and interests, but it is also unique in its ability to micro-target very specific audiences.
Sheila Hibbard, founder of small business marketing firm The Marketing Bit, notes that while most advertisers come to Facebook with the traditional advertising mindset that says "more is better," that isn't the case with Facebook.
"It's better to have a couple thousand very targeted people than tens of thousands of disinterested folks," says Hibbard. She suggests that you zero in on a very specific target audience with your ads, even if it means reducing the size of your audience. For example, if you're using Facebook Ads to promote an event or a seasonal sale, you might want to only target your existing fans, who may be more likely to respond to an immediate offer.
When targeting local audiences, Fralick also recommends that you look beyond self-reported location and "use every possible angle to find those locals," since not everyone lists their city in their profiles. "Put the names of popular local businesses, colleges and clubs into the ad manager to find the people that city and zip code doesn't," Fralick says.
Another creative idea is to develop and target birthday ads, says Anthony Nitz, founder of Facebook marketing firm PageonFacebook.com.
"One of the most fun targeting methods is sending an ad that shows up the week before your fan's birthday," says Nitz. "I tell business owners to create an ad that links to video of them wearing a birthday hat or throwing confetti while delivering a birthday message, or their staff singing Happy Birthday' that ends with a special offer and a link to where they can download their special birthday-only coupon. I can assure you that when someone sees an ad in their sidebar that says Happy Birthday,' and they click on it and the guy from the local deli is singing Happy Birthday to them, it gets huge mileage."
---------------
3. Choose Text and Images That Pop
---------------
When designing your ad, Facebook recommends that you write clear, targeted ads with concise text that speaks directly to the audience you will reach. Be sure to highlight any special offers or unique features that differentiate you from the competition. If your goal is brand and company name recognition, Facebook also suggests using your company name in the ad title or somewhere in the body of the ad.
While your ad can include up to 135 characters, Ben Nesvig of Fuzed Marketing cautions businesses "not to feel like you have to fill the entire ad. Sometimes a simple line does the trick." For example, some experts recommend asking a question or making a bold statement rather than touting your features.
Either way, remember to include a call-to-action that encourages users to click on your ad and explains to the user exactly what you expect them to do when they reach your landing page.
The pictures you choose for your ad are also critical, since this is what will catch people's eye, and you should think beyond your logo.
"Typically the best photos for conversion are close face shots of people smiling women tend to generate a high click rate," says Harley Rivet of Deep Dish Digital. Rivet recommends that you avoid typical stock photos and instead try use more natural photos with colors that contrast with the blue color scheme of Facebook, such as red, yellow and orange.
---------------
4. Create and Test Multiple Ads
---------------
"One of the biggest mistakes I see business owners making is creating and running only one ad within each campaign," says Caroline Melberg, founder of Small Business Mavericks. "Even the smallest change in the words you choose or the graphic you use can have a large impact on the click-through rate for your ad, so it's best to create multiple versions of your ad and test them to see which ad gets the best response."
Facebook makes this process easy: Once an ad has been created, you have the option to "Create a Similar Ad" and simply swap in a new picture or text.
Melberg suggests creating four different ads for the same campaign, running them for a day or so and then viewing your ad statistics on Facebook to discover which ad performed the best. You can then create a new ad that is similar to your best-performing ad, but tweak it just a bit to see if you can beat the previous performance.
And, don't forget to swap out ads after a short period to reduce fatigue. According to WebTrends, social ads have a very short shelf life, with interest waning after three to five days.
---------------
5. Be Ready To Capitalize on the Traffic
---------------
According to Nesvig, a common mistake small businesses make with Facebook Ads is focusing on their ad while neglecting fresh content on their Facebook Page. "They might spend a $100 on ads, but the last update on their fan page was a month ago," says Nesvig.
Fralick agrees. "Your ads are only as good as your Wall. Remember that most people don't click through to your Facebook page; they click like' right in the ad. Have status updates or special offers planned that follow up on the messages in your ads, and get people to connect more than once."
In fact, Fralick urges clients to think of a click as the beginning of the campaign, not the end. "When someone likes your page, they're giving you permission to talk to them over and over again," says Fralick. "That's just as valuable as an outright sale."
Have you run ads on Facebook? What was your experience? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.
---------------
More Small Business Resources From OPEN Forum:
---------------
- 15 Keyboard Shortcuts To Enhance Your PC Productivity
- 5 Services For Building Websites On A Budget
- 10 Accessories To Boost Office Morale
- Top 5 Foursquare Mistakes Committed By Small Businesses
- How To Use Social Media For Recruiting
More About: facebook, facebook ads, small business
For more Business & Marketing coverage:
Follow Mashable Business & Marketing on Twitter
Become a Fan on Facebook
Subscribe to the Business & Marketing channel
Download our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad
Facebook Ads have emerged as a popular and cost-effective way to promote a small business online. According to recent research from MerchantCircle, 22% of small businesses have used Facebook Ads, and 65% say they would use Facebook Ads again, citing ease and flexibility as the top reasons to run another campaign. But not everyone enjoys success with Facebook Ads among the one-third of users who say they wouldn't run another campaign, nearly 70% say that it didn't work to acquire new customers.
With this in mind, here are five tips to ensure you're set up for success with Facebook Ads:
---------------
1. Set Goals and Plan Your Approach Accordingly
---------------
The first step is understanding what you want to achieve with your ad. Are you looking to building awareness for your company, drive traffic to your web site, promote a specific event or generate sales?
Facebook offers a number of different ad options that work to achieve different objectives. If you're looking to build awareness and grow your fan base, you might want to start with standard marketplace ads. These ads point to your Facebook Page and allow users to "like" your page directly within the ad unit. If you already have a sizable fan base, you might also try a "Page Like" sponsored story, in which the ad shows friends who have liked your Page.
"Targeting with Facebook Ads allows you to advertise to the right people based on their real interests. You can even target people who are friends with people who already "like" your Page. This social context will show up around the ad," says Grady Burnett, VP of global marketing solutions at Facebook. "A study from Nielsen shows that on average, people are 68% more likely to remember seeing an ad with social context than without, twice as likely to remember the ad's message and four times as likely to purchase."
When you want to promote a particular post from your page, such as a special offer or important news, you can also use "Page Post" sponsored stories to convert your post into a News Feed item.
But this approach isn't limited to your own posts; Burnett also notes that "you can use Sponsored Stories Facebook's newest marketing tool to help surface the word-of-mouth recommendations about your business that are already happening in the News Feed. For example, you can sponsor stories about people checking in to your business or "liking" your Page."
Whatever your goals and approach, make sure that you are set up to measure success. While click-through rate (CTR) is an important metric to track, it's not the only one, and according to Webtrends, the average CTR for Facebook ads is only about 0.05%, which is half the industry standard of 0.1%. Clint Fralick, VP of client services at social media agency Pandemic Labs, recommends that you aim instead for increases in comments, Likes, impressions and active users.
"If you pick up 500 new fans, but all those other numbers stay the same, you haven't gotten them engaged and you probably won't make any money off them," says Fralick.
---------------
2. Get Creative with Targeting
---------------
The Facebook ad interface makes it very easy to select the demographic profile of an audience you want to target, including age, sex, location, education level and interests, but it is also unique in its ability to micro-target very specific audiences.
Sheila Hibbard, founder of small business marketing firm The Marketing Bit, notes that while most advertisers come to Facebook with the traditional advertising mindset that says "more is better," that isn't the case with Facebook.
"It's better to have a couple thousand very targeted people than tens of thousands of disinterested folks," says Hibbard. She suggests that you zero in on a very specific target audience with your ads, even if it means reducing the size of your audience. For example, if you're using Facebook Ads to promote an event or a seasonal sale, you might want to only target your existing fans, who may be more likely to respond to an immediate offer.
When targeting local audiences, Fralick also recommends that you look beyond self-reported location and "use every possible angle to find those locals," since not everyone lists their city in their profiles. "Put the names of popular local businesses, colleges and clubs into the ad manager to find the people that city and zip code doesn't," Fralick says.
Another creative idea is to develop and target birthday ads, says Anthony Nitz, founder of Facebook marketing firm PageonFacebook.com.
"One of the most fun targeting methods is sending an ad that shows up the week before your fan's birthday," says Nitz. "I tell business owners to create an ad that links to video of them wearing a birthday hat or throwing confetti while delivering a birthday message, or their staff singing Happy Birthday' that ends with a special offer and a link to where they can download their special birthday-only coupon. I can assure you that when someone sees an ad in their sidebar that says Happy Birthday,' and they click on it and the guy from the local deli is singing Happy Birthday to them, it gets huge mileage."
---------------
3. Choose Text and Images That Pop
---------------
When designing your ad, Facebook recommends that you write clear, targeted ads with concise text that speaks directly to the audience you will reach. Be sure to highlight any special offers or unique features that differentiate you from the competition. If your goal is brand and company name recognition, Facebook also suggests using your company name in the ad title or somewhere in the body of the ad.
While your ad can include up to 135 characters, Ben Nesvig of Fuzed Marketing cautions businesses "not to feel like you have to fill the entire ad. Sometimes a simple line does the trick." For example, some experts recommend asking a question or making a bold statement rather than touting your features.
Either way, remember to include a call-to-action that encourages users to click on your ad and explains to the user exactly what you expect them to do when they reach your landing page.
The pictures you choose for your ad are also critical, since this is what will catch people's eye, and you should think beyond your logo.
"Typically the best photos for conversion are close face shots of people smiling women tend to generate a high click rate," says Harley Rivet of Deep Dish Digital. Rivet recommends that you avoid typical stock photos and instead try use more natural photos with colors that contrast with the blue color scheme of Facebook, such as red, yellow and orange.
---------------
4. Create and Test Multiple Ads
---------------
"One of the biggest mistakes I see business owners making is creating and running only one ad within each campaign," says Caroline Melberg, founder of Small Business Mavericks. "Even the smallest change in the words you choose or the graphic you use can have a large impact on the click-through rate for your ad, so it's best to create multiple versions of your ad and test them to see which ad gets the best response."
Facebook makes this process easy: Once an ad has been created, you have the option to "Create a Similar Ad" and simply swap in a new picture or text.
Melberg suggests creating four different ads for the same campaign, running them for a day or so and then viewing your ad statistics on Facebook to discover which ad performed the best. You can then create a new ad that is similar to your best-performing ad, but tweak it just a bit to see if you can beat the previous performance.
And, don't forget to swap out ads after a short period to reduce fatigue. According to WebTrends, social ads have a very short shelf life, with interest waning after three to five days.
---------------
5. Be Ready To Capitalize on the Traffic
---------------
According to Nesvig, a common mistake small businesses make with Facebook Ads is focusing on their ad while neglecting fresh content on their Facebook Page. "They might spend a $100 on ads, but the last update on their fan page was a month ago," says Nesvig.
Fralick agrees. "Your ads are only as good as your Wall. Remember that most people don't click through to your Facebook page; they click like' right in the ad. Have status updates or special offers planned that follow up on the messages in your ads, and get people to connect more than once."
In fact, Fralick urges clients to think of a click as the beginning of the campaign, not the end. "When someone likes your page, they're giving you permission to talk to them over and over again," says Fralick. "That's just as valuable as an outright sale."
Have you run ads on Facebook? What was your experience? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.
---------------
More Small Business Resources From OPEN Forum:
---------------
- 15 Keyboard Shortcuts To Enhance Your PC Productivity
- 5 Services For Building Websites On A Budget
- 10 Accessories To Boost Office Morale
- Top 5 Foursquare Mistakes Committed By Small Businesses
- How To Use Social Media For Recruiting
More About: facebook, facebook ads, small business
For more Business & Marketing coverage:
Follow Mashable Business & Marketing on Twitter
Become a Fan on Facebook
Subscribe to the Business & Marketing channel
Download our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Mashable/~3/6Y1_5mn0e-M/
--
This article was sent using my Viigo.
For a free download, go to http://getviigo.com
Sent from Ismawan E. Chamdani's BlackBerry®
Square Is On A Massive Roll (JPM)
Square, the credit cards dongle company, is on a massive roll, The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal reports.
Concerned that, for all the hype, Square was still a Silicon Valley/coastal phenomenon, Madrigal asked the company for data on where people use it, and called up people who use the system.
A Cincinnati cabbie told him that Square was more convenient and felt safer than alternatives, and that his entire fleet had switched. And a nursery in central California switched to Square after their regular card reader broke down and they saw Square in operation at a local farmer's market.
People in general love Square. The only problem is that if you get more than $1,000 a week in payments, Square will hold the money for fraud prevention purposes, though if you use it regularly Square will let you cash in more regular amounts. Still, for small businesses who typically have tough working capital requirements, that's a pain in the ass.
More broadly, and importantly for the company long term, it does seem that people all across the United States are using it.
Here are some pretty sweet visualizations of Square usage, provided by Mike Bostock, Visualisation Scientist at Square. How awesome is it that Square has a "Visualisation Scientist"?
Don't Miss: Square Is One Of The Top 5 Tech Startups People Want To Work For
Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.
Join the conversation about this story
See Also:
The Collapse Of The Commodities Bubble
IRENE KNOCKS OUT POWER FOR MILLIONS, NYC SUBWAY TO REOPEN
Apple Will Continue To Make Big Bets Under Tim Cook, And They'll Pay Off
Concerned that, for all the hype, Square was still a Silicon Valley/coastal phenomenon, Madrigal asked the company for data on where people use it, and called up people who use the system.
A Cincinnati cabbie told him that Square was more convenient and felt safer than alternatives, and that his entire fleet had switched. And a nursery in central California switched to Square after their regular card reader broke down and they saw Square in operation at a local farmer's market.
People in general love Square. The only problem is that if you get more than $1,000 a week in payments, Square will hold the money for fraud prevention purposes, though if you use it regularly Square will let you cash in more regular amounts. Still, for small businesses who typically have tough working capital requirements, that's a pain in the ass.
More broadly, and importantly for the company long term, it does seem that people all across the United States are using it.
Here are some pretty sweet visualizations of Square usage, provided by Mike Bostock, Visualisation Scientist at Square. How awesome is it that Square has a "Visualisation Scientist"?
Don't Miss: Square Is One Of The Top 5 Tech Startups People Want To Work For
Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.
Join the conversation about this story
See Also:
The Collapse Of The Commodities Bubble
IRENE KNOCKS OUT POWER FOR MILLIONS, NYC SUBWAY TO REOPEN
Apple Will Continue To Make Big Bets Under Tim Cook, And They'll Pay Off
http://www.businessinsider.com/square-is-on-a-massive-roll-2011-8
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This article was sent using my Viigo.
For a free download, go to http://getviigo.com
Sent from Ismawan E. Chamdani's BlackBerry®
App Showcase: 10 Inspiring iPhone Panoramas [PICS]
One of the best things about the many iPhotography apps available is that they increase the capabilities of the iPhone's camera. One great example is panoramic photography. Pano is one such app featured in the App Store's Hall of Fame. It is available for both iPhone and Android devices and helps create stunning panoramic images.
We got in touch with Debacle Software, the developer of Pano, to find out more about the app's history and showcase 10 extraordinary panoramas created with the app.
"When we created Pano in 2008, our aim was to develop a photography tool that would allow users to capture things that they wouldn't otherwise be able to capture with their cameras," says Julian Lepinski, Pano's co-creator.
Take a look through the photo gallery for examples of flawless skies, amazing scenery and more. And let us know in the comments if you've created your own iPhone or Android panoramas.
1. Eric Akaoka
"Taken by Debacle Software's own Eric Akaoka, this pano really captures that hot, dusty summer feeling. I love the big blue sky and the golden grass stretching from edge-to-edge through the photo," says Lepinski.
2. Julian Lepinski
"I was in China this spring, and shot this [panoramic photo] looking out from the great wall (a portion of which is visible in the right region of the photo). The great wall was breathtaking, and the views from the wall are one of those things that are hard to capture with a normal photograph."
3. PhotoPoinky
"This photo of Bow Lake in Banff, Alberta, is wonderful not only for the beautiful scenery and colors but for the incredible reflection of the mountains captured in the lake."
4. Julian Lepinski
"South of Korea there's an island called Jeju which has a peak at its easternmost point called Sunrise Peak. I shot this pano immediately after sunrise, looking west over the island. This shot made the 5 a.m. hike to the top worthwhile!"
5. Lassi Kurkijarvi
"Shot at Lake Geneva ... this photo does a great job of capturing a person as well as their surroundings. With such a wide angle, the photographer has managed to capture a beautiful sunset, the glassy lake and their subject all at once."
6. Julian Lepinski
"I shot this myself looking out over Stanford University, in Palo Alto, California. Stanford's campus has these wonderful red-tiled roofs (as you can see) and is ringed by foothills, which was a perfect opportunity for a beautiful [panoramic]."
7. Uvbirke
"I can't look at this picture without catching my breath. Taken in the Swiss Alps, this photo takes in such a wide expanse that you can see the light and dark of the cloud cover playing across the mountains. The small cabin in the foreground adds something amazing to this photo."
8. Shengamillo
"This is a really unconventional shot and I love it. I don't know [how] the photographer got this shot and had everything turn out so perfectly, but this really feels like a bug's-eye-view of this field ... I love this one because it takes you somewhere that is new and familiar at the same time."
9. Brandon Beers
"Add another bias to our list: sunrises and sunsets! This is the type of photo that a single frame simply doesn't capture. This one was shot in Miami with the sun going down, and the city looks absolutely gorgeous!"
10. Taiyo Fujii
"When we developed Pano ... we never even thought about taking vertical panos. That was not an issue, however, as our users quickly adapted it to take innumerable [panoramic photos] that we would have never imagined. This gorgeous vertical pano captures the sunset in a way that no normal photo could do justice to."
More About: gallery, iphone, iphone apps, iphotography, Lists, photography, photography apps
For more Mobile coverage:
Follow Mashable Mobile on Twitter
Become a Fan on Facebook
Subscribe to the Mobile channel
Download our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad
We got in touch with Debacle Software, the developer of Pano, to find out more about the app's history and showcase 10 extraordinary panoramas created with the app.
"When we created Pano in 2008, our aim was to develop a photography tool that would allow users to capture things that they wouldn't otherwise be able to capture with their cameras," says Julian Lepinski, Pano's co-creator.
Take a look through the photo gallery for examples of flawless skies, amazing scenery and more. And let us know in the comments if you've created your own iPhone or Android panoramas.
1. Eric Akaoka
"Taken by Debacle Software's own Eric Akaoka, this pano really captures that hot, dusty summer feeling. I love the big blue sky and the golden grass stretching from edge-to-edge through the photo," says Lepinski.
2. Julian Lepinski
"I was in China this spring, and shot this [panoramic photo] looking out from the great wall (a portion of which is visible in the right region of the photo). The great wall was breathtaking, and the views from the wall are one of those things that are hard to capture with a normal photograph."
3. PhotoPoinky
"This photo of Bow Lake in Banff, Alberta, is wonderful not only for the beautiful scenery and colors but for the incredible reflection of the mountains captured in the lake."
4. Julian Lepinski
"South of Korea there's an island called Jeju which has a peak at its easternmost point called Sunrise Peak. I shot this pano immediately after sunrise, looking west over the island. This shot made the 5 a.m. hike to the top worthwhile!"
5. Lassi Kurkijarvi
"Shot at Lake Geneva ... this photo does a great job of capturing a person as well as their surroundings. With such a wide angle, the photographer has managed to capture a beautiful sunset, the glassy lake and their subject all at once."
6. Julian Lepinski
"I shot this myself looking out over Stanford University, in Palo Alto, California. Stanford's campus has these wonderful red-tiled roofs (as you can see) and is ringed by foothills, which was a perfect opportunity for a beautiful [panoramic]."
7. Uvbirke
"I can't look at this picture without catching my breath. Taken in the Swiss Alps, this photo takes in such a wide expanse that you can see the light and dark of the cloud cover playing across the mountains. The small cabin in the foreground adds something amazing to this photo."
8. Shengamillo
"This is a really unconventional shot and I love it. I don't know [how] the photographer got this shot and had everything turn out so perfectly, but this really feels like a bug's-eye-view of this field ... I love this one because it takes you somewhere that is new and familiar at the same time."
9. Brandon Beers
"Add another bias to our list: sunrises and sunsets! This is the type of photo that a single frame simply doesn't capture. This one was shot in Miami with the sun going down, and the city looks absolutely gorgeous!"
10. Taiyo Fujii
"When we developed Pano ... we never even thought about taking vertical panos. That was not an issue, however, as our users quickly adapted it to take innumerable [panoramic photos] that we would have never imagined. This gorgeous vertical pano captures the sunset in a way that no normal photo could do justice to."
More About: gallery, iphone, iphone apps, iphotography, Lists, photography, photography apps
For more Mobile coverage:
Follow Mashable Mobile on Twitter
Become a Fan on Facebook
Subscribe to the Mobile channel
Download our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Mashable/~3/z7ikl-HmnfY/
--
This article was sent using my Viigo.
For a free download, go to http://getviigo.com
Sent from Ismawan E. Chamdani's BlackBerry®
Saturday, August 27, 2011
Mobile Ad Network Millennial Media Saw Nearly $50 Million In Revenue In 2010
We've known that mobile ad network Millennial Media more than tripled revenue in 2010 from 2009 and achieved profitability. But we didn't know how much the mobile ad network brought in, until now. In the recent 2011 Inc 500 list, Millennial revealed that it saw $47.8 million in 2010 revenue, up over 3,000 percent from 2007 revenue of $1.5 million. And while we don't know what Millennial's net income is, we know the company is profitable.
Millennial is one of the largest remaining independent ad networks after AdMob was bought by Google and Apple acquired Quattro. There's no doubt that many technology companies have eyed Millennial as an acquisition target, but the company has managed to remain independent despite the increased consolidation taking place in the mobile ad space.
In addition to Millennial's independent ad network, the company also operates and manages private mobile ad networks for large media companies and conglomerates that have multiple apps and sites, essentially powering a self-service ad network for these companies. And Millennial has a deal with a "prominent internet media company" (but declines to name the company) that has completely outsourced its mobile advertising to Millennial.
For basis of comparison, AdMob reportedly had a $100 million revenue run rate when it was acquired in 2009, which could have put its actual revenue at $40 million (AdMob split its revenues 60/40 with publishers). It's unclear if Millennial's $47.8 million in 2010 revenue is post-split.
Hopefully we'll see more details of Millennial's financials when the company files its S-1 for a public offering in the coming months. CEO and founder Paul Palmieri has had ambitions of taking the company public, and the timing may be right considering this seems to be the year of the tech company IPO. In May, Bloomberg reported that Millennial was talking to bankers about an IPO, which could come in the Fall or in early 2012 and would value the company at a whopping $700 million to $1 billion (AdMob was sold to Google for $750 million).
Considering how most companies refuse to reveal exact financials when they are private, it's always interesting to see revenue numbers pre-IPO.
Crunchbase
MILLENNIAL MEDIA
Company:
MILLENNIAL MEDIA
Website:
http://millennialmedia.com
Launch Date:
5/2006
Funding:
$64.8M
Millennial Media is the leading independent mobile advertising and data company. Millennial Media commands an impressive share of the mobile display advertising market. The company's technology, tools and services...
Learn more
Millennial is one of the largest remaining independent ad networks after AdMob was bought by Google and Apple acquired Quattro. There's no doubt that many technology companies have eyed Millennial as an acquisition target, but the company has managed to remain independent despite the increased consolidation taking place in the mobile ad space.
In addition to Millennial's independent ad network, the company also operates and manages private mobile ad networks for large media companies and conglomerates that have multiple apps and sites, essentially powering a self-service ad network for these companies. And Millennial has a deal with a "prominent internet media company" (but declines to name the company) that has completely outsourced its mobile advertising to Millennial.
For basis of comparison, AdMob reportedly had a $100 million revenue run rate when it was acquired in 2009, which could have put its actual revenue at $40 million (AdMob split its revenues 60/40 with publishers). It's unclear if Millennial's $47.8 million in 2010 revenue is post-split.
Hopefully we'll see more details of Millennial's financials when the company files its S-1 for a public offering in the coming months. CEO and founder Paul Palmieri has had ambitions of taking the company public, and the timing may be right considering this seems to be the year of the tech company IPO. In May, Bloomberg reported that Millennial was talking to bankers about an IPO, which could come in the Fall or in early 2012 and would value the company at a whopping $700 million to $1 billion (AdMob was sold to Google for $750 million).
Considering how most companies refuse to reveal exact financials when they are private, it's always interesting to see revenue numbers pre-IPO.
Crunchbase
MILLENNIAL MEDIA
Company:
MILLENNIAL MEDIA
Website:
http://millennialmedia.com
Launch Date:
5/2006
Funding:
$64.8M
Millennial Media is the leading independent mobile advertising and data company. Millennial Media commands an impressive share of the mobile display advertising market. The company's technology, tools and services...
Learn more
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/lBTnjvOYWXY/
--
This article was sent using my Viigo.
For a free download, go to http://getviigo.com
Sent from Ismawan E. Chamdani's BlackBerry®
Connor Zamary, Pengembang iPhone Berusia 7 Tahun
Connor Zamary (7 tahun) telah menjadi seorang pengembang aplikasi game untuk smartphone terlaris sedunia, iPhone.
http://tekno.kompas.com/read/2011/08/24/1550590/Connor.Zamary..Pengembang.iPhone.Berusia.7.Tahun
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BBM Music, Magnet Baru di BlackBerry
RIM mengumumkan layanan baru BBM Music yang akan memudahkan sesama pengguna BlackBerry berbagi musik kesayangan.
http://tekno.kompas.com/read/2011/08/26/08393620/BBM.Music..Magnet.Baru.di.BlackBerry
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Tuesday, August 23, 2011
What Corporate Structure Is Best for Startups Considering VC Funding?
Nellie Akalp is CEO of CorpNet.com. Since forming more than 100,000 corporations and LLCs across the U.S, she has built a strong passion to assist small business owners and entrepreneurs in starting and protecting their business the right way. LIKE the CorpNet.com Facebook page for exclusive discounts and giveaways! To learn more about Nellie and see how she can help your business get off the ground quickly and affordably, please visit here.
Starting a new business involves a seemingly endless line of important decisions, from company name, to logo, to even the product or service you'll be offering. Among these decisions, one of the most important (and often overlooked) is business structure.
The business structure is the legal form of your company. The three most common structures in the U.S. are the C Corporation, S Corporation, and LLC. As an entrepreneur, you need to carefully consider which is right for you. Do you need to avoid personal liability if your company is sued? Will you have a partner and/or investors? Do you want the business to pay its own taxes or carry the profit/loss over to your personal returns? And lastly, are you planning on VC funding?
When it comes to VC funding, the answer is relatively simple: The C Corporation is the best option for anyone seeking funding from an angel investor or venture capitalist for several reasons.
---------------
Benefits of a C Corporation
---------------
A C Corporation lets you manage multiple classes of stock (i.e. common and preferred). This flexibility is necessary if you plan on raising multiple funding rounds. If you plan on offering stock options down the road, you'll also be able to issue different classes of stock.
The other two corporations, LLC and S Corporation, have a tricky pass-through tax treatment for VCs, since it results in UBTI (unrelated business taxable income) for them. Meanwhile, only the C Corporation lets you easily transfer stock (another big requirement for VCs).
Some VCs actually have specific conditions written that prevent them from investing in any entity besides a C Corporation. That alone would seem to make the decision pretty simple. If you're considering angel or VC funding, the C Corp is the way to go.
But, of course, like anything in business, things aren't always so simple. C Corporations can be overkill for small businesses. The amount of paperwork involved with the C Corp is significant, and there is also something known as "double taxation." Unlike the LLC or S Corporation, the C Corporation is taxed separately and must file its own taxes. In some cases, the owners of a C Corporation can end up with a pretty hefty tax burden as they need to pay taxes on both the corporation's profits as well as whatever income or dividends they personally collected.
---------------
Two Routes to Creating a C Corporation
---------------
Considering all those factors, there are two routes for the new business:
Create a C Corp from the start: You may have more paperwork and you may have to pay more in taxes in the beginning, but if you definitely plan on seeking VC funding (and within a relatively short time frame), you might as well start as a C Corp and save yourself the hassle.
Create an LLC then convert to a C Corp later: This option should be pursued only if you truly aren't sure you'll ever look for VC funding or if your plans are many years down the road. The LLC gives you a low-frills way to protect your personal assets and track ownership.
The specific steps for converting from an LLC to a corporation will depend on the corporate laws in whatever state your LLC is registered. In many cases, you'll be creating a new C Corp and then making the original LLC a subsidiary of it. This is a relatively standard process and your attorney or online legal filing service will be quite familiar with the steps required.
---------------
Looking Ahead
---------------
Too often, in the flurry of startup chaos, many entrepreneurs fail to properly consider their business structure options. If you're just starting out, you should review the pros and cons of each in light of your situation today, as well as what may be down the road.
Image courtesy of Flickr, borman818
More About: business, funding, startup, venture capitalist
For more Startups coverage:
Follow Mashable Startups on Twitter
Become a Fan on Facebook
Subscribe to the Startups channel
Download our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad
Starting a new business involves a seemingly endless line of important decisions, from company name, to logo, to even the product or service you'll be offering. Among these decisions, one of the most important (and often overlooked) is business structure.
The business structure is the legal form of your company. The three most common structures in the U.S. are the C Corporation, S Corporation, and LLC. As an entrepreneur, you need to carefully consider which is right for you. Do you need to avoid personal liability if your company is sued? Will you have a partner and/or investors? Do you want the business to pay its own taxes or carry the profit/loss over to your personal returns? And lastly, are you planning on VC funding?
When it comes to VC funding, the answer is relatively simple: The C Corporation is the best option for anyone seeking funding from an angel investor or venture capitalist for several reasons.
---------------
Benefits of a C Corporation
---------------
A C Corporation lets you manage multiple classes of stock (i.e. common and preferred). This flexibility is necessary if you plan on raising multiple funding rounds. If you plan on offering stock options down the road, you'll also be able to issue different classes of stock.
The other two corporations, LLC and S Corporation, have a tricky pass-through tax treatment for VCs, since it results in UBTI (unrelated business taxable income) for them. Meanwhile, only the C Corporation lets you easily transfer stock (another big requirement for VCs).
Some VCs actually have specific conditions written that prevent them from investing in any entity besides a C Corporation. That alone would seem to make the decision pretty simple. If you're considering angel or VC funding, the C Corp is the way to go.
But, of course, like anything in business, things aren't always so simple. C Corporations can be overkill for small businesses. The amount of paperwork involved with the C Corp is significant, and there is also something known as "double taxation." Unlike the LLC or S Corporation, the C Corporation is taxed separately and must file its own taxes. In some cases, the owners of a C Corporation can end up with a pretty hefty tax burden as they need to pay taxes on both the corporation's profits as well as whatever income or dividends they personally collected.
---------------
Two Routes to Creating a C Corporation
---------------
Considering all those factors, there are two routes for the new business:
Create a C Corp from the start: You may have more paperwork and you may have to pay more in taxes in the beginning, but if you definitely plan on seeking VC funding (and within a relatively short time frame), you might as well start as a C Corp and save yourself the hassle.
Create an LLC then convert to a C Corp later: This option should be pursued only if you truly aren't sure you'll ever look for VC funding or if your plans are many years down the road. The LLC gives you a low-frills way to protect your personal assets and track ownership.
The specific steps for converting from an LLC to a corporation will depend on the corporate laws in whatever state your LLC is registered. In many cases, you'll be creating a new C Corp and then making the original LLC a subsidiary of it. This is a relatively standard process and your attorney or online legal filing service will be quite familiar with the steps required.
---------------
Looking Ahead
---------------
Too often, in the flurry of startup chaos, many entrepreneurs fail to properly consider their business structure options. If you're just starting out, you should review the pros and cons of each in light of your situation today, as well as what may be down the road.
Image courtesy of Flickr, borman818
More About: business, funding, startup, venture capitalist
For more Startups coverage:
Follow Mashable Startups on Twitter
Become a Fan on Facebook
Subscribe to the Startups channel
Download our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Mashable/~3/J_mpzc-x9kU/
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Monday, August 22, 2011
10 Brilliant Interactive Billboards [VIDEOS]
Advertising billboards are just part of the background of modern, urban living. The challenge for marketers is to get us to notice something we are used to passing by without a second glance.
One way to achieve this is by making a billboard interactive, giving consumers a good reason to stop and engage with the medium, rather than just walk on past.
We've found 10 excellent examples of interactive advertising. Take a look through the video gallery and let us know in the comments which ones you find the most engaging.
1. Big in Japan Interactive Billboard
A promotion for a reality TV show gives passers-by a taste of fame.
2. JCDecaux Innovate for Cadbury
What better way to kill time at the bus stop than splatting some chocolate eggs?
3. Honda Interactive Billboard
As well as the ability to "start" the car by texting to an SMS shortcode, this Honda ad also offered more info via Bluetooth.
4. McDonald's Interactive Billboard
By making its billboard a game and giving consumers free food, McDonald's guarantees engagement.
5. JCDecaux Innovate for Yell
This outdoor touchscreen ad offers consumers useful local info.
6. Live Interactive Billboard
This high-impact concept confronts the public with their inactivity in the face of a green-screened scene of aggression toward public service workers.
7. Xerox - Airport Interactive Billboard
Airport travellers are a captive audience. Xerox made the most of this fact with an enticing touchscreen tease.
8. JCDecaux Innovate for Skunk Anansie
Passers-by were encouraged to do their best Skunk Anansie impression in this clever campaign. While the loudest could enter a draw to win free tickets, everyone who had a go got sent their performance as a video clip to their mobile phones.
9. IBM Ad Changes Color To Match Your Outfit
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery then this IBM billboard, which changed color to match your clothes, was a clever stunt.
10. Google Video Outdoor Campaign
Google gives tourists a great photo opportunity with this outdoor campaign.
More About: advertising, billboards, Lists, MARKETING, video
For more Video coverage:
Follow Mashable Video on Twitter
Become a Fan on Facebook
Subscribe to the Video channel
Download our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad
One way to achieve this is by making a billboard interactive, giving consumers a good reason to stop and engage with the medium, rather than just walk on past.
We've found 10 excellent examples of interactive advertising. Take a look through the video gallery and let us know in the comments which ones you find the most engaging.
1. Big in Japan Interactive Billboard
A promotion for a reality TV show gives passers-by a taste of fame.
2. JCDecaux Innovate for Cadbury
What better way to kill time at the bus stop than splatting some chocolate eggs?
3. Honda Interactive Billboard
As well as the ability to "start" the car by texting to an SMS shortcode, this Honda ad also offered more info via Bluetooth.
4. McDonald's Interactive Billboard
By making its billboard a game and giving consumers free food, McDonald's guarantees engagement.
5. JCDecaux Innovate for Yell
This outdoor touchscreen ad offers consumers useful local info.
6. Live Interactive Billboard
This high-impact concept confronts the public with their inactivity in the face of a green-screened scene of aggression toward public service workers.
7. Xerox - Airport Interactive Billboard
Airport travellers are a captive audience. Xerox made the most of this fact with an enticing touchscreen tease.
8. JCDecaux Innovate for Skunk Anansie
Passers-by were encouraged to do their best Skunk Anansie impression in this clever campaign. While the loudest could enter a draw to win free tickets, everyone who had a go got sent their performance as a video clip to their mobile phones.
9. IBM Ad Changes Color To Match Your Outfit
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery then this IBM billboard, which changed color to match your clothes, was a clever stunt.
10. Google Video Outdoor Campaign
Google gives tourists a great photo opportunity with this outdoor campaign.
More About: advertising, billboards, Lists, MARKETING, video
For more Video coverage:
Follow Mashable Video on Twitter
Become a Fan on Facebook
Subscribe to the Video channel
Download our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Mashable/~3/Tf6P7BS40YQ/
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HP ran its webOS SDK on iPad 2, hopes to license it as mobile web app tool
After HP's webOS hardware unit was scuttled by upper management, the webOS software team has hopes of bringing their work to the mainstream, leveraging Apple's open web platform to do so.
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Sunday, August 21, 2011
Why HP needs to merge with SAP
HP has had to face tough realities this week. Fortunately, there is a way for it to survive: Embrace the inevitable trend favoring "vertical" companies.
In the first part of the 2000s, IBM and HP went in two vastly different directions: HP acquired Compaq to bolster a horizontally-integrated PC business, while IBM sold its PC division to Lenovo and focused on creating a vertical stack of enterprise products.
In the early 2010s, HP's decision to attempt to dominate PCs has come back to haunt it. Even though HP is the number one PC seller, the low-margin business doesn't pay, so the company is exiting both the desktop and mobile consumer computer business.
Now HP needs to act fast to remain competitive in the enterprise.
Rule of three
Earlier I described how the consumer computing business is consolidating based on the "rule of three" economic theory and that three big players would dominate the industry: Apple, Google and Microsoft. To play in this market requires a full vertical stack, offering customers everything they need from hardware to applications. Competitive companies will need the ability to extract efficiencies between and from each layer: mobile operating systems, mobile devices, desktop operating systems, personal computers, web browsers, productivity applications, content distribution and cloud services.
Given the vertical integration required to play in the consumer computing business, it is no surprise that HP decided to exit. In order to compete, HP would need to build out cloud services, a desktop operating system, and more. Microsoft, with its domination of the desktop PC and productivity applications businesses, has already spent years and billions of dollars filling its gaps, and will continue to spend billions until it wins the number three spot. HP, and in particular its raucous shareholders, have neither the financial gumption nor a base of technology for an attempt to be the number three in the consumer market.
So it is a wise move for HP to exit the consumer computing business and focus on its enterprise business. However, HP is jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire, as IBM, Oracle and Microsoft have been aggressively building integrated enterprise stacks over the past decade. The rule of three is applying itself to the enterprise space as well, and HP is getting left behind.
Owning the stack
The importance of owning every piece of the stack is increasingly critical. When Oracle decided to end support for the Itanium processor, HP had no database of its own to fall back on and resorted to suing Oracle to support its platform. Both IBM and Oracle are optimizing their databases and middleware to run super efficiently on their respective operating systems, processors and storage. IBM started the verticalized enterprise trend in the early 2000s by widening the memory bus to its PowerPC machines in order to extract more performance out of its DB2 database, forcing Oracle to acquire Sun in order to match database performance.
IBM and Oracle verticalizing enterprise software and hardware is much like the consumer verticalization. Apple's ability to create efficiencies by building its own iPhones and iPads is a big part of what forced Google to acquire Motorola Mobility. HP board member Marc Andreesen may be right that software is king in his new cloud investments like Facebook and Zynga, but in the hardscrabble world of enterprise and consumer computing, IBM and Apple have verticalized software and hardware and clobbered HP in both the enterprise and consumer markets.
So how will HP build a complete enterprise stack? HP's acquisition of Autonomy is a great start and fills the gap in enterprise search to compete with IBM's OmniSearch, Oracle's Secure Enterprise Search and Microsoft's FAST. However, HP still has huge gaps compared to its competitors, including collaboration software, business applications, analytics, middleware, and database.
HP's gaps are perfectly filled by SAP. And SAP's gaps in services, enterprise search, operating system, processor, storage and management are all filled by HP. A merger of SAP (valued at $60 billion) and HP (valued at $49 billion) would create a $109 billion behemoth capable of competing with IBM ($188 billion), Oracle ($125 billion) and Microsoft ($201 billion). Large mergers like this can be a disaster, but HP's CEO Léo Apatheker used to be the CEO of SAP and worked there for twenty years, so there is one person who actually knows both organizations.
HP needs to move fast. HP should dump its printer business along with its other low margin hardware businesses, merge with SAP to get a full stack, and then go on a shopping spree to shore up the weaker parts of the combined HP-SAP stack such as EAServer, StreamWork and HP-UX.
We are about to see a scrum amongst all of the larger enterprise players to acquire companies at every layer, such as TIBCO, Teradata, Jive, Salesforce, Red Hat, and likely even my own company, analytics vendor Webtrends. Microsoft may even take another try at Intuit now that it is no longer a monopolist.
Otherwise both HP and SAP risk losing the third place in the rule of three to Microsoft. It should be noted that despite its detractors, Microsoft has actually had amazing execution over the past decade and is the only contender to hold its own in both the consumer and enterprise computing stacks.
HP and SAP need to stave off Microsoft as the small- and medium-sized business enterprise player, or they will both wind up being carved up and bought by IBM and Oracle.
Top photo by Lee Torens/Shutterstock.
Peter Yared is the VP/GM of Social at Webtrends. He has founded four e-commerce and marketing infrastructure companies that were acquired by Sun, VMware, TigerLogic and Webtrends. You can follow him at @peteryared.
Filed under: enterprise
In the first part of the 2000s, IBM and HP went in two vastly different directions: HP acquired Compaq to bolster a horizontally-integrated PC business, while IBM sold its PC division to Lenovo and focused on creating a vertical stack of enterprise products.
In the early 2010s, HP's decision to attempt to dominate PCs has come back to haunt it. Even though HP is the number one PC seller, the low-margin business doesn't pay, so the company is exiting both the desktop and mobile consumer computer business.
Now HP needs to act fast to remain competitive in the enterprise.
Rule of three
Earlier I described how the consumer computing business is consolidating based on the "rule of three" economic theory and that three big players would dominate the industry: Apple, Google and Microsoft. To play in this market requires a full vertical stack, offering customers everything they need from hardware to applications. Competitive companies will need the ability to extract efficiencies between and from each layer: mobile operating systems, mobile devices, desktop operating systems, personal computers, web browsers, productivity applications, content distribution and cloud services.
Given the vertical integration required to play in the consumer computing business, it is no surprise that HP decided to exit. In order to compete, HP would need to build out cloud services, a desktop operating system, and more. Microsoft, with its domination of the desktop PC and productivity applications businesses, has already spent years and billions of dollars filling its gaps, and will continue to spend billions until it wins the number three spot. HP, and in particular its raucous shareholders, have neither the financial gumption nor a base of technology for an attempt to be the number three in the consumer market.
So it is a wise move for HP to exit the consumer computing business and focus on its enterprise business. However, HP is jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire, as IBM, Oracle and Microsoft have been aggressively building integrated enterprise stacks over the past decade. The rule of three is applying itself to the enterprise space as well, and HP is getting left behind.
Owning the stack
The importance of owning every piece of the stack is increasingly critical. When Oracle decided to end support for the Itanium processor, HP had no database of its own to fall back on and resorted to suing Oracle to support its platform. Both IBM and Oracle are optimizing their databases and middleware to run super efficiently on their respective operating systems, processors and storage. IBM started the verticalized enterprise trend in the early 2000s by widening the memory bus to its PowerPC machines in order to extract more performance out of its DB2 database, forcing Oracle to acquire Sun in order to match database performance.
IBM and Oracle verticalizing enterprise software and hardware is much like the consumer verticalization. Apple's ability to create efficiencies by building its own iPhones and iPads is a big part of what forced Google to acquire Motorola Mobility. HP board member Marc Andreesen may be right that software is king in his new cloud investments like Facebook and Zynga, but in the hardscrabble world of enterprise and consumer computing, IBM and Apple have verticalized software and hardware and clobbered HP in both the enterprise and consumer markets.
So how will HP build a complete enterprise stack? HP's acquisition of Autonomy is a great start and fills the gap in enterprise search to compete with IBM's OmniSearch, Oracle's Secure Enterprise Search and Microsoft's FAST. However, HP still has huge gaps compared to its competitors, including collaboration software, business applications, analytics, middleware, and database.
HP's gaps are perfectly filled by SAP. And SAP's gaps in services, enterprise search, operating system, processor, storage and management are all filled by HP. A merger of SAP (valued at $60 billion) and HP (valued at $49 billion) would create a $109 billion behemoth capable of competing with IBM ($188 billion), Oracle ($125 billion) and Microsoft ($201 billion). Large mergers like this can be a disaster, but HP's CEO Léo Apatheker used to be the CEO of SAP and worked there for twenty years, so there is one person who actually knows both organizations.
HP needs to move fast. HP should dump its printer business along with its other low margin hardware businesses, merge with SAP to get a full stack, and then go on a shopping spree to shore up the weaker parts of the combined HP-SAP stack such as EAServer, StreamWork and HP-UX.
We are about to see a scrum amongst all of the larger enterprise players to acquire companies at every layer, such as TIBCO, Teradata, Jive, Salesforce, Red Hat, and likely even my own company, analytics vendor Webtrends. Microsoft may even take another try at Intuit now that it is no longer a monopolist.
Otherwise both HP and SAP risk losing the third place in the rule of three to Microsoft. It should be noted that despite its detractors, Microsoft has actually had amazing execution over the past decade and is the only contender to hold its own in both the consumer and enterprise computing stacks.
HP and SAP need to stave off Microsoft as the small- and medium-sized business enterprise player, or they will both wind up being carved up and bought by IBM and Oracle.
Top photo by Lee Torens/Shutterstock.
Peter Yared is the VP/GM of Social at Webtrends. He has founded four e-commerce and marketing infrastructure companies that were acquired by Sun, VMware, TigerLogic and Webtrends. You can follow him at @peteryared.
Filed under: enterprise
http://venturebeat.com/?p=322600
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Skype To Acquire Year-old Group Messaging Service GroupMe
Skype will acquire group messaging service GroupMe, a service that was born at a hackathon at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York in 2010. GroupMe was founded by Jared Hecht and Steve Martocci.
The terms of the deal, including price, aren't being disclosed.
Just a couple of months after TechCrunch Disrupt the company closed a $850,000 round of financing from Betaworks, SV Angel, First Round Capital, Lerer Ventures and a number of prominent angels. Early this year the company raised $10.6 million more from Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst and previous investors.
GroupMe allows you to create on the fly private phone groups with others, and then send text messages throughout the group and set up free conference calls.
Skype CEO Tony Bates says that he's been talking to the company for a few months, at about the same time Skype was in negotiations to be acquired by Microsoft.
The Microsoft transaction is still pending.
They'll keep GroupMe as a standalone brand, Bates says, and look for integration points over time. "The group messaging space in general is one of the most important markets for Skype," he told me via a Skype video call earlier today. He added: "GroupMe creates a very sticky instant feeling. Like Skype, it is an everyday interactive form of communication. Skype's goal is to get to 1 billion users. Mobile is the place to do that."
GroupMe, which has twenty employees, will remain in New York.
---------------
Crunchbase
SKYPE
Company:
SKYPE
Website:
http://www.skype.com
Launch Date:
1/8/2003
Funding:
$68.8M
Skype is a software application that allows users to make voice and video calls and chats over the Internet. Calls to other users within the Skype service are free,...
Learn more
Crunchbase
GROUPME
Company:
GROUPME
Website:
http://groupme.com/
Launch Date:
5/2010
Funding:
$11.5M
GroupMe is a group messaging and conference calling service that lets you stay in touch with groups of people via mobile phones. It's a free service that allows users...
Learn more
Crunchbase
MICROSOFT
Company:
MICROSOFT
Website:
http://www.microsoft.com
Launch Date:
4/4/1974
IPO:
13/3/1986, NASDAQ:MSFT
Microsoft, founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, is a veteran software company, best known for its Microsoft Windows operating system and the Microsoft Office suite of...
Learn more
The terms of the deal, including price, aren't being disclosed.
Just a couple of months after TechCrunch Disrupt the company closed a $850,000 round of financing from Betaworks, SV Angel, First Round Capital, Lerer Ventures and a number of prominent angels. Early this year the company raised $10.6 million more from Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst and previous investors.
GroupMe allows you to create on the fly private phone groups with others, and then send text messages throughout the group and set up free conference calls.
Skype CEO Tony Bates says that he's been talking to the company for a few months, at about the same time Skype was in negotiations to be acquired by Microsoft.
The Microsoft transaction is still pending.
They'll keep GroupMe as a standalone brand, Bates says, and look for integration points over time. "The group messaging space in general is one of the most important markets for Skype," he told me via a Skype video call earlier today. He added: "GroupMe creates a very sticky instant feeling. Like Skype, it is an everyday interactive form of communication. Skype's goal is to get to 1 billion users. Mobile is the place to do that."
GroupMe, which has twenty employees, will remain in New York.
---------------
Crunchbase
SKYPE
Company:
SKYPE
Website:
http://www.skype.com
Launch Date:
1/8/2003
Funding:
$68.8M
Skype is a software application that allows users to make voice and video calls and chats over the Internet. Calls to other users within the Skype service are free,...
Learn more
Crunchbase
GROUPME
Company:
GROUPME
Website:
http://groupme.com/
Launch Date:
5/2010
Funding:
$11.5M
GroupMe is a group messaging and conference calling service that lets you stay in touch with groups of people via mobile phones. It's a free service that allows users...
Learn more
Crunchbase
MICROSOFT
Company:
MICROSOFT
Website:
http://www.microsoft.com
Launch Date:
4/4/1974
IPO:
13/3/1986, NASDAQ:MSFT
Microsoft, founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, is a veteran software company, best known for its Microsoft Windows operating system and the Microsoft Office suite of...
Learn more
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/X0KZRcgGPLA/
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For a free download, go to http://getviigo.com
Sent from Ismawan E. Chamdani's BlackBerry®
Software Is Eating All the Jobs Too
A few months ago I was giving a talk in my hometown of Memphis, TN, and someone asked what the city could do to ignite more entrepreneurship in among inner city kids. My immediate answer was teach coding- even basic app building skills- along with English and Math in every public school. I was surprised that my brother- an engineer who worked for many years in Silicon Valley before relocating to the Midwest- didn't necessarily agree. "That depends on whether there are still enough coding jobs for them, or they've all gone overseas," he said.
It was then that the great American panic of a few years came rushing back to me. Somehow I'd forgotten all those business school reports and magazine covers warning the US that it wasn't just the factory jobs going overseas; the white collar engineering jobs were all leaving Silicon Valley too and going to Eastern Europe, India and other pockets of the emerging world. These reports screamed that kids lulled into computer science degrees by the great late 1990s were graduating into the work world out of luck. Just like the Detroit factory worker, there was just no way for them to compete with the thousands of engineers graduating annually in India and China.
It's amazing just how wrong so many people could be. Just a few years later, one of the only bright spots of employment in the entire country is for coders. In California, the latest numbers show unemployment at a staggering 12%. Yet if you are a coder in Silicon Valley, the world is your oyster.
You can apply for Y-Combinator, you can raise money from hundreds of angels and VCs, you an bootstrap a simple Web or mobile app off of your credit cards, you can work at Google, Facebook, Zynga, Groupon, or one of the thousands of other startups desperate for coding talent. Every entrepreneur tells us hiring is the single hardest challenge they face right now.
Those wacky offices you see Jason Kincaid parading around in on TC Cribs are getting wackier as companies like DropBox and Airbnb want their companies to stand out even more to in-demand recruits. Why do you think everyone wants to their company on Cribs? COME LOOK AT HOW FUN IT IS TO WORK HERE!
Recently I asked Dustin Moskovitz- the Facebook and Asana co-founder and the world's youngest billionaire- to come be a judge at San Francisco Disrupt. He joked that he was going to tell the smartest entrepreneurs their startups were doomed so they'd give up and enter the workforce instead. At least I think he was joking. (By the way, he'll give you a $10,000 allowance to pimp your desk if you come work for him.)
As someone who used to work for one of those magazines, let me apologize if you decided not to learn to write software because of all of those covers. But you probably shouldn't rely on the media to tell you want to do for a living anymore than you should listen to CNBC for investing advice. Either could have gotten you screwed out of a goldmine in recent years.
The idea that all the software jobs would leave the Valley was the second great lie of the early press and excitement around globalization. The first was that America would always stay the "brain" of the global workforce, while everyone else in emerging markets just did our grunt work, leaving us all the innovative, high-paying jobs. I wrote an entire book refuting the implicit navite-mixed-with-raciscm of that view, so I won't argue it again here.
At first blush, it's strange that both of these myths so fervently believed a few years ago both appear to be false, because they seem at odds. Either you believe people in the rest of the world are smart enough to do the higher level work and freak out about white collar jobs leaving the US as the rest of the world's worker base gets more sophisticated OR you believe the rest of the world will forever just do the grunt work and more sophisticated US jobs are safe.
But as it turns out there was a fundamental flaw with that either/or dynamic that Marc Andreessen articulated perfectly in his recent Wall Street Journal oped: Software is eating the world. (Ironically, Andreessen became a coder because he read in US News & World Report it was a good way to make money. Lucky for him, he wasn't born a decade or so later.)
What that means is software jobs are not the zero sum game we anticipated back in the early 2000s when many companies were sending them overseas. Instead, they've expanded exponentially as more industries have become fundamentally about virtual delivery. And the trend isn't just about a company like Pandora, Zynga or Amazon pushing music, gaming and books to be software-only products, rather than physical things packaged on shelves. Nor is it just about the new globally exploding market of social media. We're also seeing the biggest resurgence in companies disrupting the real world since the early days of the Internet, with Airbnb, Uber, Groupon, GetTaxi, and a host of other names taking on long-neglected, fragmented industries in new digital ways. Andreessen and his partners are betting that healthcare and education are next. Accel, too, has been placing some big bets on education.
Not only have software jobs expanded dramatically by industry, they're expanding dramatically within industries too. You can't overstate the impact of two billion people being online, and estimates that five billion will have smartphones within the next ten years. Even today, more people have basic mobile phones than have toilets, and those phones can provide a staggering array of digital services from banking to education to news and information.
Because digital companies reach so many more people than the days when we were fretting about the demise of software jobs, the handful of companies that dominate a category like social media are building massive organizations. And, unlike the dot com days, most are doing so profitably.
Silicon Valley isn't the only place benefitting. Ask entrepreneurs in China how hard it is to recruit and keep video game developers. Or ask me how hard it has been to recruit Chinese bloggers over the last few months. It's no longer an age when a Web company launches in the US, and years later the rest of the world is ready for those products and features. It's an age when a Web company launches in the US, and a version of it launches in Berlin, Russia, India, China and a host of other countries within days, creating a smaller amount of jobs than we have in Silicon Valley but certainly more than those countries had ten years ago. More important: Those jobs are working for local companies, not doing low-level engineering for big US multinationals. That's a much more meaningful way to break the poverty cycle in the long term, as multinational jobs will only employ so many people with limited upside potential.
Will all of those software jobs be safe? In both the Valley and overseas, the answer is most definitely not. The bulk are being created by startups, and the nature of startups is to IPO, sell or go out of business. They are supposed to be risky, and everyone going to work for one should remember that. The two latter categories could easily result in a huge wave of layoffs in coming years. That's a far bigger risk for emerging markets just building their startup ecosystems than it is for the Valley.
There will be the regular commenters wringing their hands about a "job bubble"- and while we're clearly not in a financial or psychological bubble right now, we may well be in a job bubble. It's way too easy to start a company now, and the gulf between winners who get big enough to go public and everyone else is wider than it has ever been in Silicon Valley. (That's one reason we're not in a financial bubble.)
Still, if you are a recipient of that job bubble would you trade places with any the tens of millions of people out of work in the United States right now? I doubt it. Benefitting from a job bubble is not only a first world problem, it's an upper-class-educated-lucky-to-be-in-the-right-industry-at-the-right-time kind of first world problem. The entire city of Detroit has the right to punch you in the face if you believe that's the biggest macroeconomic problem the US faces right now.
If you're worried, save some of that cash you're raking in for the potential rainy day, and thank God you work in software. In a market like this, better to be the eater than the eaten.
---------------
It was then that the great American panic of a few years came rushing back to me. Somehow I'd forgotten all those business school reports and magazine covers warning the US that it wasn't just the factory jobs going overseas; the white collar engineering jobs were all leaving Silicon Valley too and going to Eastern Europe, India and other pockets of the emerging world. These reports screamed that kids lulled into computer science degrees by the great late 1990s were graduating into the work world out of luck. Just like the Detroit factory worker, there was just no way for them to compete with the thousands of engineers graduating annually in India and China.
It's amazing just how wrong so many people could be. Just a few years later, one of the only bright spots of employment in the entire country is for coders. In California, the latest numbers show unemployment at a staggering 12%. Yet if you are a coder in Silicon Valley, the world is your oyster.
You can apply for Y-Combinator, you can raise money from hundreds of angels and VCs, you an bootstrap a simple Web or mobile app off of your credit cards, you can work at Google, Facebook, Zynga, Groupon, or one of the thousands of other startups desperate for coding talent. Every entrepreneur tells us hiring is the single hardest challenge they face right now.
Those wacky offices you see Jason Kincaid parading around in on TC Cribs are getting wackier as companies like DropBox and Airbnb want their companies to stand out even more to in-demand recruits. Why do you think everyone wants to their company on Cribs? COME LOOK AT HOW FUN IT IS TO WORK HERE!
Recently I asked Dustin Moskovitz- the Facebook and Asana co-founder and the world's youngest billionaire- to come be a judge at San Francisco Disrupt. He joked that he was going to tell the smartest entrepreneurs their startups were doomed so they'd give up and enter the workforce instead. At least I think he was joking. (By the way, he'll give you a $10,000 allowance to pimp your desk if you come work for him.)
As someone who used to work for one of those magazines, let me apologize if you decided not to learn to write software because of all of those covers. But you probably shouldn't rely on the media to tell you want to do for a living anymore than you should listen to CNBC for investing advice. Either could have gotten you screwed out of a goldmine in recent years.
The idea that all the software jobs would leave the Valley was the second great lie of the early press and excitement around globalization. The first was that America would always stay the "brain" of the global workforce, while everyone else in emerging markets just did our grunt work, leaving us all the innovative, high-paying jobs. I wrote an entire book refuting the implicit navite-mixed-with-raciscm of that view, so I won't argue it again here.
At first blush, it's strange that both of these myths so fervently believed a few years ago both appear to be false, because they seem at odds. Either you believe people in the rest of the world are smart enough to do the higher level work and freak out about white collar jobs leaving the US as the rest of the world's worker base gets more sophisticated OR you believe the rest of the world will forever just do the grunt work and more sophisticated US jobs are safe.
But as it turns out there was a fundamental flaw with that either/or dynamic that Marc Andreessen articulated perfectly in his recent Wall Street Journal oped: Software is eating the world. (Ironically, Andreessen became a coder because he read in US News & World Report it was a good way to make money. Lucky for him, he wasn't born a decade or so later.)
What that means is software jobs are not the zero sum game we anticipated back in the early 2000s when many companies were sending them overseas. Instead, they've expanded exponentially as more industries have become fundamentally about virtual delivery. And the trend isn't just about a company like Pandora, Zynga or Amazon pushing music, gaming and books to be software-only products, rather than physical things packaged on shelves. Nor is it just about the new globally exploding market of social media. We're also seeing the biggest resurgence in companies disrupting the real world since the early days of the Internet, with Airbnb, Uber, Groupon, GetTaxi, and a host of other names taking on long-neglected, fragmented industries in new digital ways. Andreessen and his partners are betting that healthcare and education are next. Accel, too, has been placing some big bets on education.
Not only have software jobs expanded dramatically by industry, they're expanding dramatically within industries too. You can't overstate the impact of two billion people being online, and estimates that five billion will have smartphones within the next ten years. Even today, more people have basic mobile phones than have toilets, and those phones can provide a staggering array of digital services from banking to education to news and information.
Because digital companies reach so many more people than the days when we were fretting about the demise of software jobs, the handful of companies that dominate a category like social media are building massive organizations. And, unlike the dot com days, most are doing so profitably.
Silicon Valley isn't the only place benefitting. Ask entrepreneurs in China how hard it is to recruit and keep video game developers. Or ask me how hard it has been to recruit Chinese bloggers over the last few months. It's no longer an age when a Web company launches in the US, and years later the rest of the world is ready for those products and features. It's an age when a Web company launches in the US, and a version of it launches in Berlin, Russia, India, China and a host of other countries within days, creating a smaller amount of jobs than we have in Silicon Valley but certainly more than those countries had ten years ago. More important: Those jobs are working for local companies, not doing low-level engineering for big US multinationals. That's a much more meaningful way to break the poverty cycle in the long term, as multinational jobs will only employ so many people with limited upside potential.
Will all of those software jobs be safe? In both the Valley and overseas, the answer is most definitely not. The bulk are being created by startups, and the nature of startups is to IPO, sell or go out of business. They are supposed to be risky, and everyone going to work for one should remember that. The two latter categories could easily result in a huge wave of layoffs in coming years. That's a far bigger risk for emerging markets just building their startup ecosystems than it is for the Valley.
There will be the regular commenters wringing their hands about a "job bubble"- and while we're clearly not in a financial or psychological bubble right now, we may well be in a job bubble. It's way too easy to start a company now, and the gulf between winners who get big enough to go public and everyone else is wider than it has ever been in Silicon Valley. (That's one reason we're not in a financial bubble.)
Still, if you are a recipient of that job bubble would you trade places with any the tens of millions of people out of work in the United States right now? I doubt it. Benefitting from a job bubble is not only a first world problem, it's an upper-class-educated-lucky-to-be-in-the-right-industry-at-the-right-time kind of first world problem. The entire city of Detroit has the right to punch you in the face if you believe that's the biggest macroeconomic problem the US faces right now.
If you're worried, save some of that cash you're raking in for the potential rainy day, and thank God you work in software. In a market like this, better to be the eater than the eaten.
---------------
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/ZVIpm9VQYVQ/
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3 New Startup Tools For Shopping, Selling and Running
The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.
Each weekend, Mashable hand-picks startups we think are building interesting, unique or niche products.
This week we've rounded up startups that are making new tools to help you shop, sell and run more efficiently.
Dibsie is a deal shopping site that learns your preferences, Lockboxer helps with pricing, inventory and sales, and Smashrun motivates runners with rankings and badges.
---------------
Dibsie
---------------
Quick Pitch: Dibsie is a visually pleasant shopping deals site that learns what you like.
Genius Idea: A new take on marketing discounts.
Mashable's Take: Dibsie catalogs discounts across industries into one image-based browsing experience. As users hover, click and like items, it learns what they like and adjusts its recommendations accordingly. Users can also follow a particular business.
Many of the deals are non-exclusive sales, but it is nice to be alerted to them all in one place.
"Unlike unwanted ads in the margin of other sites, our visitors actually opt in and want us to use their interactions on the site to make better recommendations," explains CEO Garren Givens. "The products which are essentially ads become more like content (like a constantly evolving shopping catalog)."
Businesses can easily add their own deals with a self-serve dashboard (deals are reviewed by Dibsie before they are posted). It's free for them to post up to 100 credits of deals while Dibsie is in beta, but eventually the site will charge companies either on a per-deal basis or for an unlimited membership.
---------------
Lockboxer
---------------
Quick Pitch: Lockboxer tells you how much your stuff is worth and helps you sell or donate it.
Genius Idea: Creating a log of possessions for insurance or moving purposes.
Mashable's Take: At its core, Lockboxer is a price search engine. Users type in an item and the site returns both the prices it is selling for online. This functionality isn't particularly handy, however, as the same can be easily accomplished on a site like Google Shopping, Amazon or eBay.
Lockboxer is aiming to take the process further by becoming an inventory management site for your stuff. As you look up prices, you can automatically add items to a master list. From here, you can select what you want to sell and post it directly to eBay or your social media accounts. You can also select items to donate and retain an estimate of their values for tax purposes.
Probably the most useful function of the site is a home inventory tool that encourages users to snap photos of each room in their houses and document their contents. This is something that can be done without Lockboxer's aide, but the free site provides a template, cloud storage and prices for the items. Listing everything you own might seem low on the to-do list, but can become much more important if you need to use your homeowners insurance.
---------------
Smashrun
---------------
Quick Pitch: Smashrun is analytics for your running.
Genius Idea: Motivating runners with badges and rankings.
Mashable's Take: For a relatively simple sport, running can involve a lot of data. Smashrun helps track distance, speed and duration of your runs by either connecting with a Nike+ product or inputting details about each run.
While other businesses like Runkeeper are already safely settled in a similar niche, Smashrun's free service takes a different tone by rewarding runners with badges for milestone runs and showing them how they stack up against all other users in the database by distance, speed and frequency.
It also ranks individual runs against the user's own history so that she knows, for instance, when she's just run farther than ever before. Other fun data points include what day of the week and time of day a user most frequently runs and the longest break between runs.
It's a fun way for casual runners to keep a log of their progress and share milestones.
Image courtesy of Flickr, Ed Yourdon
More About: bizspark, dibsie, lockboxer, smashrun, Startup Weekend Roundup
For more Startups coverage:
Follow Mashable Startups on Twitter
Become a Fan on Facebook
Subscribe to the Startups channel
Download our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad
Each weekend, Mashable hand-picks startups we think are building interesting, unique or niche products.
This week we've rounded up startups that are making new tools to help you shop, sell and run more efficiently.
Dibsie is a deal shopping site that learns your preferences, Lockboxer helps with pricing, inventory and sales, and Smashrun motivates runners with rankings and badges.
---------------
Dibsie
---------------
Quick Pitch: Dibsie is a visually pleasant shopping deals site that learns what you like.
Genius Idea: A new take on marketing discounts.
Mashable's Take: Dibsie catalogs discounts across industries into one image-based browsing experience. As users hover, click and like items, it learns what they like and adjusts its recommendations accordingly. Users can also follow a particular business.
Many of the deals are non-exclusive sales, but it is nice to be alerted to them all in one place.
"Unlike unwanted ads in the margin of other sites, our visitors actually opt in and want us to use their interactions on the site to make better recommendations," explains CEO Garren Givens. "The products which are essentially ads become more like content (like a constantly evolving shopping catalog)."
Businesses can easily add their own deals with a self-serve dashboard (deals are reviewed by Dibsie before they are posted). It's free for them to post up to 100 credits of deals while Dibsie is in beta, but eventually the site will charge companies either on a per-deal basis or for an unlimited membership.
---------------
Lockboxer
---------------
Quick Pitch: Lockboxer tells you how much your stuff is worth and helps you sell or donate it.
Genius Idea: Creating a log of possessions for insurance or moving purposes.
Mashable's Take: At its core, Lockboxer is a price search engine. Users type in an item and the site returns both the prices it is selling for online. This functionality isn't particularly handy, however, as the same can be easily accomplished on a site like Google Shopping, Amazon or eBay.
Lockboxer is aiming to take the process further by becoming an inventory management site for your stuff. As you look up prices, you can automatically add items to a master list. From here, you can select what you want to sell and post it directly to eBay or your social media accounts. You can also select items to donate and retain an estimate of their values for tax purposes.
Probably the most useful function of the site is a home inventory tool that encourages users to snap photos of each room in their houses and document their contents. This is something that can be done without Lockboxer's aide, but the free site provides a template, cloud storage and prices for the items. Listing everything you own might seem low on the to-do list, but can become much more important if you need to use your homeowners insurance.
---------------
Smashrun
---------------
Quick Pitch: Smashrun is analytics for your running.
Genius Idea: Motivating runners with badges and rankings.
Mashable's Take: For a relatively simple sport, running can involve a lot of data. Smashrun helps track distance, speed and duration of your runs by either connecting with a Nike+ product or inputting details about each run.
While other businesses like Runkeeper are already safely settled in a similar niche, Smashrun's free service takes a different tone by rewarding runners with badges for milestone runs and showing them how they stack up against all other users in the database by distance, speed and frequency.
It also ranks individual runs against the user's own history so that she knows, for instance, when she's just run farther than ever before. Other fun data points include what day of the week and time of day a user most frequently runs and the longest break between runs.
It's a fun way for casual runners to keep a log of their progress and share milestones.
Image courtesy of Flickr, Ed Yourdon
More About: bizspark, dibsie, lockboxer, smashrun, Startup Weekend Roundup
For more Startups coverage:
Follow Mashable Startups on Twitter
Become a Fan on Facebook
Subscribe to the Startups channel
Download our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Mashable/~3/0R933pmx4XA/
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Entrepreneur Corner: Marketing truths and a primer on networking
Here's the latest from VentureBeat's Entrepreneur Corner.
VC Roundtable: What makes a great founder? - OpenView Partners surveyed several venture capitalists, asking them to share their vision on what qualities make for a good founder – and to weigh in on whether those founders should extract equity upon receiving funding.. Hear thoughts from Phin Barnes, Brad Feld, Rob Go and Alex Taussig in this roundtable discussion.
6 social marketing truths executives must understand – The emergence of Google+ has put social networks back on the front burner of marketing executives. Reggie Bradford, CEO of Vitrue and a 20-year vet of the tech and marketing industries, gives executives a no-nonsense look at the field.
For good entrepreneurs, there's always a Plan B – The difference between an operating executive and an entrepreneur is the ability to quickly adapt to change. Serial entrepreneur Steve Blank discusses the need to always be prepared for the unforeseeable if your startup is to survive.
5 things you should know before starting a company – High pre-money valuations and big IPOs are leading a lot of people to explore the entrepreneurial world. But before you jump in, there are some things you need to know. Stuart Wall, co-founder and CEO of Signpost, runs down some of the most important lessons he has learned as he has ventured into the startup world.
Shotgun networking is no way to make contacts – As critical as networking is in the entrepreneurial world, there are a lot of people who are really, really bad at it. PerfectBusiness founder Mark Verge talks about ways to improve your mingling skills and turn those chance encounters into something that can help your company.
Filed under: Entrepreneur Corner
VC Roundtable: What makes a great founder? - OpenView Partners surveyed several venture capitalists, asking them to share their vision on what qualities make for a good founder – and to weigh in on whether those founders should extract equity upon receiving funding.. Hear thoughts from Phin Barnes, Brad Feld, Rob Go and Alex Taussig in this roundtable discussion.
6 social marketing truths executives must understand – The emergence of Google+ has put social networks back on the front burner of marketing executives. Reggie Bradford, CEO of Vitrue and a 20-year vet of the tech and marketing industries, gives executives a no-nonsense look at the field.
For good entrepreneurs, there's always a Plan B – The difference between an operating executive and an entrepreneur is the ability to quickly adapt to change. Serial entrepreneur Steve Blank discusses the need to always be prepared for the unforeseeable if your startup is to survive.
5 things you should know before starting a company – High pre-money valuations and big IPOs are leading a lot of people to explore the entrepreneurial world. But before you jump in, there are some things you need to know. Stuart Wall, co-founder and CEO of Signpost, runs down some of the most important lessons he has learned as he has ventured into the startup world.
Shotgun networking is no way to make contacts – As critical as networking is in the entrepreneurial world, there are a lot of people who are really, really bad at it. PerfectBusiness founder Mark Verge talks about ways to improve your mingling skills and turn those chance encounters into something that can help your company.
Filed under: Entrepreneur Corner
http://venturebeat.com/?p=321652
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Friday, August 19, 2011
Evernote acquires Mac drawing app Skitch
The online note-taking service is adding new abilities to crop, annotate, and otherwise modify images through the acquisition. Also: Skitch for Android debuts.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20094175-264/evernote-acquires-mac-drawing-app-skitch/?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
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http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20094175-264/evernote-acquires-mac-drawing-app-skitch/?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
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Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Inilah Robot Berkaki Dua Tercepat
Butuh tiga tahun bagi peneliti untuk mendapatkan MABEL dan mencapai kecepatan saat ini.
http://www.tempointeraktif.com/hg/iptek/2011/08/17/brk,20110817-352269,id.html
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Griffin Releases iPhone-Controlled Toy Helicopter
For a mere $50 you, too, can own a small, iPhone-controlled helicopter made by a company that has been traditionally known for selling phone cases.
Like Parrot before them, Griffin is branching out from its traditional product line and offering this small dual-rotor helicopter that is, in general, controlled via IR commands sent using a special dongle attached to the iPhone. There is full tilt-to-steer control as well as on-screen power buttons.
The kit allows you to create three pre-recorded flight plans ("Go north, enter bedroom while wife is sleeping, drop peeled grape on her head" would be one of my favorites) and it charges via USB.
I've had horrible luck with IR-controlled helicopters lately - the last one I tried flew off onto a roof because it apparently mistook sunlight as a command to, well, fly away - but hopefully this inexpensive little flyer will work a bit better. Available now.
Product Page
---------------
Like Parrot before them, Griffin is branching out from its traditional product line and offering this small dual-rotor helicopter that is, in general, controlled via IR commands sent using a special dongle attached to the iPhone. There is full tilt-to-steer control as well as on-screen power buttons.
The kit allows you to create three pre-recorded flight plans ("Go north, enter bedroom while wife is sleeping, drop peeled grape on her head" would be one of my favorites) and it charges via USB.
I've had horrible luck with IR-controlled helicopters lately - the last one I tried flew off onto a roof because it apparently mistook sunlight as a command to, well, fly away - but hopefully this inexpensive little flyer will work a bit better. Available now.
Product Page
---------------
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/z3jCWEZQM4Y/
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Panasonic Pocket Server Streams Video And Music To Your iPhone/iPod touch
If you like consuming media on your iPhone or iPod touch that's stored elsewhere, you might want to take a look at what Panasonic has announced [JP] for the Japanese market recently. The so-called DY-PS10 is a "pocket server" that wirelessly streams videos, music and pictures from an SD/SDHC/SDXC card to these devices.
The mini server uses IEEE 802.11b/g Wi-FI, comes with a USB port and is sized at just 66.8×117×13mm (weight: 82g). It supports video in MP4 format, MP3 files and JPEGs. Panasonic specifically targets users of DIGA hardware, for example TVs (who can take the SD card out of those devices to use it in the DY-PS10).
The company says a 64GB SDXC card stores around 88 hours of video in standard resolution, with the pocket server itself offering 10 hours of battery life.
Panasonic plans to start selling the device in their Japanese online store only on September 15 (price: $195). No international sales plans have been announced so far (but the Airstash look like a good alternative).
---------------
The mini server uses IEEE 802.11b/g Wi-FI, comes with a USB port and is sized at just 66.8×117×13mm (weight: 82g). It supports video in MP4 format, MP3 files and JPEGs. Panasonic specifically targets users of DIGA hardware, for example TVs (who can take the SD card out of those devices to use it in the DY-PS10).
The company says a 64GB SDXC card stores around 88 hours of video in standard resolution, with the pocket server itself offering 10 hours of battery life.
Panasonic plans to start selling the device in their Japanese online store only on September 15 (price: $195). No international sales plans have been announced so far (but the Airstash look like a good alternative).
---------------
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/n7vJVxeQfoQ/
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Sunday, August 14, 2011
Industri Kreatif di Mata Ridwan Kamil
Ridwan Kamil adalah praktisi industri kreatif Indonesia yang telah mendunia lewat karya arsitekturnya. Apa pandangannya mengenai industri kreatif?
http://tekno.kompas.com/read/2011/08/12/07235911/Industri.Kreatif.di.Mata.Ridwan.Kamil
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http://tekno.kompas.com/read/2011/08/12/07235911/Industri.Kreatif.di.Mata.Ridwan.Kamil
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Saturday, August 13, 2011
Retail Site Leverages Video To Sell High-End Goods
The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.
Name: Joyus
Quick Pitch: A women's retail site built around video.
Genius Idea: Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, former president of Google's Asia Pacific and Latin American operations, and Diana Williams, former director of product management in eBay's fashion division, are kicking video and ecommerce integration up a notch with Joyus, a women's retail site centered around video that launched in public beta this month.
Video's role in ecommerce is growing, particularly in the fashion and beauty categories. Brands such as Burberry are live streaming fashion shows and distributing tightly edited short films across their respective digital properties, while retailers including Saks Fifth Avenue and Net-a-Porter now let shoppers view videos of clothes on moving models before users make a purchase, among other developments.
The site is organized much like high-end flash sales site Gilt, with limited-time sales on a range of luxury apparel, beauty and home goods. Each sale is accompanied by a short infomercial typically two to four minutes in which a guest contributor gives an overview of the product and its uses.
The infomercials are great for marketing merchandise that most shoppers aren't inherently familiar with like, say, TATCHA beauty papers, which claim to remove excess oil and prevent breakouts. Joyus brought in professional makeup artist Matthew VanLeeuwen to demonstrate the papers to visitors who weren't necessarily sure they needed to have this product in their cosmetics bags.
The videos are instrumental in both product discovery and sales, as well as developing customer loyalty, says Theresia Gouw Ranzetta, a partner at venture capital firm Accel Partners. Accel and Harrison Metal were the lead investors in Joyus's initial, $7.9 million round of funding, announced earlier this month.
Co-founder Cassidy added that early data suggests sales are most likely to occur when viewers watch between two-and-a-half to three-and-a-half minutes of a video on the site, suggesting that video can increase direct sales as well as engagement.
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Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark
---------------
The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.
More About: fashion, joyus, spark of genius series
For more Startups coverage:
Follow Mashable Startups on Twitter
Become a Fan on Facebook
Subscribe to the Startups channel
Download our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad
Name: Joyus
Quick Pitch: A women's retail site built around video.
Genius Idea: Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, former president of Google's Asia Pacific and Latin American operations, and Diana Williams, former director of product management in eBay's fashion division, are kicking video and ecommerce integration up a notch with Joyus, a women's retail site centered around video that launched in public beta this month.
Video's role in ecommerce is growing, particularly in the fashion and beauty categories. Brands such as Burberry are live streaming fashion shows and distributing tightly edited short films across their respective digital properties, while retailers including Saks Fifth Avenue and Net-a-Porter now let shoppers view videos of clothes on moving models before users make a purchase, among other developments.
The site is organized much like high-end flash sales site Gilt, with limited-time sales on a range of luxury apparel, beauty and home goods. Each sale is accompanied by a short infomercial typically two to four minutes in which a guest contributor gives an overview of the product and its uses.
The infomercials are great for marketing merchandise that most shoppers aren't inherently familiar with like, say, TATCHA beauty papers, which claim to remove excess oil and prevent breakouts. Joyus brought in professional makeup artist Matthew VanLeeuwen to demonstrate the papers to visitors who weren't necessarily sure they needed to have this product in their cosmetics bags.
The videos are instrumental in both product discovery and sales, as well as developing customer loyalty, says Theresia Gouw Ranzetta, a partner at venture capital firm Accel Partners. Accel and Harrison Metal were the lead investors in Joyus's initial, $7.9 million round of funding, announced earlier this month.
Co-founder Cassidy added that early data suggests sales are most likely to occur when viewers watch between two-and-a-half to three-and-a-half minutes of a video on the site, suggesting that video can increase direct sales as well as engagement.
---------------
Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark
---------------
The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.
More About: fashion, joyus, spark of genius series
For more Startups coverage:
Follow Mashable Startups on Twitter
Become a Fan on Facebook
Subscribe to the Startups channel
Download our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Mashable/~3/eRLWsynhAxo/
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For a free download, go to http://getviigo.com
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5 Reasons Your Product Documentation Is a Marketing Asset
Mike Puterbaugh is the VP of marketing at MindTouch, the leader in social knowledge bases, product help and enterprise collaboration. You can follow him on Twitter at @mputerbaugh23.
As a CMO, it's important to understand what clever technology developers and open source leaders have known for years: Great product documentation isn't loathsome it's marketing, and darn good marketing at that.
Today, the smartest apps and campaigns dominate headlines and boardrooms. Meanwhile, documentation has become marketing's secret weapon.
Documentation is the language that accompanies a product, often outlining its development, design, technical language and marketing strategy in clear, definitive terms.
Ultimately, good documentation won't comprise a cost, but rather, a profit. Furthermore, it's an SEO godsend. Documentation can indicate how to evolve products and spark cross-functional communication. It can reveal holes in the sales funnel that otherwise would have eluded you.
In marketing terms, documentation can put you into contact with prospective investors and customers alike. And while much of marketing can be asynchronous and speculative, documentation remains reliable and predictable.
Here's why you need to start thinking about strategic documentation.
---------------
1. Credible Language vs. Marketing Lingo
---------------
Documentation can be your best bet as a source of leads.
Integrate documentation into your marketing automation system (Omniture, Eloqua or Marketo, for example) to enhance communication about your product's features and benefits. Unfortunately, many marketers forget or disregard this step, despite the minimum work involved.
On the other hand, should your documentation look or read like marketing copy? Of course not. Documentation is decidedly not marketing copy. It should be credible, and absent the jargon and salesmanship that customers and prospects have come to expect from the marketing kind. Understandable, your documentation should still be able to demonstrate how well your company understands its market and target customers.
Furthermore, you can discover much about a company based on its documentation. It allows investors and participants a peek behind the company curtain. Savvy buyers and even users of free products use documentation as a gauge for company seriousness and dependability. Again, developers have known this since the dawn of the web.
At one time or another, you've probably assumed that documentation contains highly technical language. That may be the case, but not exclusively. Documentation should be granular, but also social and searchable. The best documentation contains both generalist and specialist material, designed to engage each intended audience.
---------------
2. Search Engine Optimization
---------------
Documentation should be keyword-rich, densely linked and expertly structured. Importantly, it doesn't raise the red flags that other types of content might.
Keep in mind that fresh, social, collaborative and, therefore frequently updated documentation makes it more Google-friendly. Making documentation social from the beginning will ensure steady traffic and save unnecessary stress and upkeep.
Scatter keywords through your documentation, link deliberately, and apply filters and tags. Most importantly, update every now and then to make sure your documentation remains current.
Documentation is an incredible SEO asset, but too often it doesn't get treated as such. Sometimes marketing won't have a hand in the construction process. Other times documentation is left unrevised, and thus, outdated.
---------------
3. Cross-Functionality
---------------
Company documentation makes for better cross-department communication and collaboration. It forges connections among product, marketing, services and support. Therefore, it's strategic for everyone.
First and foremost, documentation responsibilities should probably fall within the CMO's duties because that's where its effect starts and stops. But regardless of ownership or flow charts, documentation can get your SEO and your product team talking in ways they never have before. The same goes for support, PR, services and tech teams.
---------------
4. Community Building
---------------
Documentation is also a wonderful way to create a community around your product or service.
Although documentation has a bad rap for being wonky, realize that it can actually present an opportunity for community and customer congregation. Why not give them more to do, allow them a seat at the table, and let them find themselves in the product?
There is a profound ladder of engagement that begins with documentation. Documentation sits at the bottom, forming the foundation of interaction. From it, all further engagement flows interactions can span over social media, to more monolithic, top-down content, and eventually evolve into emails and phone conversations.
Documentation is a company's lifeblood, seldom seen but crucial to function and health.
---------------
5. Identifying Needs
---------------
Finally, documentation is a very effective way of identifying unmet customer needs.
It holds a wealth of information that your product team will drool over, and yet that feedback loop is seldom taken advantage of. What are the most commented-upon items, for example? The most viewed? The most cited?
Furthermore, your documentation should contain analytics there is no greater company intelligence. Ideally, analytics consist of correct, statistically significant signals that reveal cause and effect, with which you can reliably make decisions.
Used correctly, documentation can make your company a better informed, intuitive operation.
---------------
Conclusion
---------------
Previously, documentation was thought of as a necessary evil. Or worse even a black hole that consumed budgets and brain function. But two major things have since changed:
First, we invested in social software. And documentation can be inherently social. For many companies, it's a collaborative tool a link between internal departments and external audiences. Collaboratively creating documentation content drives down costs and makes the task less daunting.
Secondly, documentation can inform other functions and services. Tie-ins, integrations and all manner of APIs mean more automation, and therefore less long-term work. Ultimately, documentation should leverage and gather all of the great work your company is performing elsewhere.
As a CMO, there is no more strategic, high-margin initiative you can undertake than optimal documentation.
It's not a sexy undertaking, but it will earn you the respect of your peers, more effective company management and a more collaborative team. Because it's not about this quarter or this year, but rather, it's about affecting competitive advantage and long-term growth.
Images courtesy of iStockphoto, AK2, and Flickr, marciookabe, Nearsoft
More About: business, MARKETING, SEO, Web Development
For more Business & Marketing coverage:
Follow Mashable Business & Marketing on Twitter
Become a Fan on Facebook
Subscribe to the Business & Marketing channel
Download our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad
As a CMO, it's important to understand what clever technology developers and open source leaders have known for years: Great product documentation isn't loathsome it's marketing, and darn good marketing at that.
Today, the smartest apps and campaigns dominate headlines and boardrooms. Meanwhile, documentation has become marketing's secret weapon.
Documentation is the language that accompanies a product, often outlining its development, design, technical language and marketing strategy in clear, definitive terms.
Ultimately, good documentation won't comprise a cost, but rather, a profit. Furthermore, it's an SEO godsend. Documentation can indicate how to evolve products and spark cross-functional communication. It can reveal holes in the sales funnel that otherwise would have eluded you.
In marketing terms, documentation can put you into contact with prospective investors and customers alike. And while much of marketing can be asynchronous and speculative, documentation remains reliable and predictable.
Here's why you need to start thinking about strategic documentation.
---------------
1. Credible Language vs. Marketing Lingo
---------------
Documentation can be your best bet as a source of leads.
Integrate documentation into your marketing automation system (Omniture, Eloqua or Marketo, for example) to enhance communication about your product's features and benefits. Unfortunately, many marketers forget or disregard this step, despite the minimum work involved.
On the other hand, should your documentation look or read like marketing copy? Of course not. Documentation is decidedly not marketing copy. It should be credible, and absent the jargon and salesmanship that customers and prospects have come to expect from the marketing kind. Understandable, your documentation should still be able to demonstrate how well your company understands its market and target customers.
Furthermore, you can discover much about a company based on its documentation. It allows investors and participants a peek behind the company curtain. Savvy buyers and even users of free products use documentation as a gauge for company seriousness and dependability. Again, developers have known this since the dawn of the web.
At one time or another, you've probably assumed that documentation contains highly technical language. That may be the case, but not exclusively. Documentation should be granular, but also social and searchable. The best documentation contains both generalist and specialist material, designed to engage each intended audience.
---------------
2. Search Engine Optimization
---------------
Documentation should be keyword-rich, densely linked and expertly structured. Importantly, it doesn't raise the red flags that other types of content might.
Keep in mind that fresh, social, collaborative and, therefore frequently updated documentation makes it more Google-friendly. Making documentation social from the beginning will ensure steady traffic and save unnecessary stress and upkeep.
Scatter keywords through your documentation, link deliberately, and apply filters and tags. Most importantly, update every now and then to make sure your documentation remains current.
Documentation is an incredible SEO asset, but too often it doesn't get treated as such. Sometimes marketing won't have a hand in the construction process. Other times documentation is left unrevised, and thus, outdated.
---------------
3. Cross-Functionality
---------------
Company documentation makes for better cross-department communication and collaboration. It forges connections among product, marketing, services and support. Therefore, it's strategic for everyone.
First and foremost, documentation responsibilities should probably fall within the CMO's duties because that's where its effect starts and stops. But regardless of ownership or flow charts, documentation can get your SEO and your product team talking in ways they never have before. The same goes for support, PR, services and tech teams.
---------------
4. Community Building
---------------
Documentation is also a wonderful way to create a community around your product or service.
Although documentation has a bad rap for being wonky, realize that it can actually present an opportunity for community and customer congregation. Why not give them more to do, allow them a seat at the table, and let them find themselves in the product?
There is a profound ladder of engagement that begins with documentation. Documentation sits at the bottom, forming the foundation of interaction. From it, all further engagement flows interactions can span over social media, to more monolithic, top-down content, and eventually evolve into emails and phone conversations.
Documentation is a company's lifeblood, seldom seen but crucial to function and health.
---------------
5. Identifying Needs
---------------
Finally, documentation is a very effective way of identifying unmet customer needs.
It holds a wealth of information that your product team will drool over, and yet that feedback loop is seldom taken advantage of. What are the most commented-upon items, for example? The most viewed? The most cited?
Furthermore, your documentation should contain analytics there is no greater company intelligence. Ideally, analytics consist of correct, statistically significant signals that reveal cause and effect, with which you can reliably make decisions.
Used correctly, documentation can make your company a better informed, intuitive operation.
---------------
Conclusion
---------------
Previously, documentation was thought of as a necessary evil. Or worse even a black hole that consumed budgets and brain function. But two major things have since changed:
First, we invested in social software. And documentation can be inherently social. For many companies, it's a collaborative tool a link between internal departments and external audiences. Collaboratively creating documentation content drives down costs and makes the task less daunting.
Secondly, documentation can inform other functions and services. Tie-ins, integrations and all manner of APIs mean more automation, and therefore less long-term work. Ultimately, documentation should leverage and gather all of the great work your company is performing elsewhere.
As a CMO, there is no more strategic, high-margin initiative you can undertake than optimal documentation.
It's not a sexy undertaking, but it will earn you the respect of your peers, more effective company management and a more collaborative team. Because it's not about this quarter or this year, but rather, it's about affecting competitive advantage and long-term growth.
Images courtesy of iStockphoto, AK2, and Flickr, marciookabe, Nearsoft
More About: business, MARKETING, SEO, Web Development
For more Business & Marketing coverage:
Follow Mashable Business & Marketing on Twitter
Become a Fan on Facebook
Subscribe to the Business & Marketing channel
Download our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Mashable/~3/VKao6m9unWg/
--
This article was sent using my Viigo.
For a free download, go to http://getviigo.com
Sent from Ismawan E. Chamdani's BlackBerry®
Friday, August 12, 2011
Startups, Avoid 10 Common Million-Dollar Mistakes
It's a well-accepted axiom in the investor community that entrepreneurs learn more from their failures than their successes. Thus a well-explained startup failure often can actually improve your odds of funding in the next go-round. Yet, there is no doubt that the best strategy is to learn from someone else's mistakes, so you can enjoy the millions that someone else lost in learning.
Certainly there are innumerable possible mistakes to be made, but there is a thread of common ones that I see across the range of all startups. Ryan Blair, a serial entrepreneur who admits to his share of million dollar mistakes, as well as some multi-million dollar successes, sums these up nicely in his current bestseller "Nothing to Lose, Everything to Gain:"
Don't make wildly optimistic sales forecasts. Test and adjust your projections, based on experienced advisor input and industry norms, rather than the Google high exception. Excel spreadsheets can easily project dramatic growth, with no connection to reality.
Don't hire people who like your ideas all the time. Flattery feels good, but it doesn't pay the bills. Look for the thoughtful challenge to your ideas, and practice active listening, when you are selling your vision. High three-digit intelligence has value.
Don't focus too much on the competition. It's always more productive to focus on making your offering successful, rather than killing your competitors. Doing things like dismantling their leadership team, or highlighting their shortcomings is lose-lose.
Don't waste time caring what others think. No matter how hard you try, you won't make everyone happy. Don't be afraid to follow your vision, learn from your mistakes, and pivot the business, just because someone will see the change as a disappointment.
Don't mix business with pleasure. This is especially true of relationships. Do not fraternize with your employees, and choose your partners wisely. Thou shall not "do your business" where you do business.
Be quick to fire and slow to hire. Pull the trigger fast when a new hire isn't working, but don't forget to be human and follow all the steps. On the other side, hiring after one interview is like hopping a red-eye to Vegas to get married after one date.
Don't put your company before your people. A company is an entity that can be pivoted at will. Your team of people has a collective passion and intelligence with a real worth that's hard to manipulate. Make the company fit the people, rather than vice versa.
Don't under-forecast cash needs. When you have people and their families depending on you for their paychecks, and you are out of money, that's another lose-lose situation. Even if you can find someone willing to help, it's a very, very expensive proposition.
Don't try to do too much all at once. You hear about all the parallel entrepreneurs, like Steve Jobs running Apple and Pixar at the same time. Make sure you have the aptitude to run one business well, with one product line, before you start a couple more.
Never write something you wouldn't want to come back to you. Every one of us has sent a sensitive email to the wrong party, or had it misinterpreted by the receiver. Save the hard and easily misinterpreted messages for face-to-face calm discussions.
There are more, but I think you get the idea. Of course, the biggest mistake is failing to learn from the mistakes of others, or even from your mistakes. You can only learn from your mistake after you admit you've made it. Wise people admit their mistakes easily, and move the focus away from blame management and towards learning. Wise people can become great entrepreneurs. Where are you along this spectrum?
Marty Zwilling
Read more posts on Startup Professionals Musings »
Please follow War Room on Twitter and Facebook.
Join the conversation about this story
Certainly there are innumerable possible mistakes to be made, but there is a thread of common ones that I see across the range of all startups. Ryan Blair, a serial entrepreneur who admits to his share of million dollar mistakes, as well as some multi-million dollar successes, sums these up nicely in his current bestseller "Nothing to Lose, Everything to Gain:"
Don't make wildly optimistic sales forecasts. Test and adjust your projections, based on experienced advisor input and industry norms, rather than the Google high exception. Excel spreadsheets can easily project dramatic growth, with no connection to reality.
Don't hire people who like your ideas all the time. Flattery feels good, but it doesn't pay the bills. Look for the thoughtful challenge to your ideas, and practice active listening, when you are selling your vision. High three-digit intelligence has value.
Don't focus too much on the competition. It's always more productive to focus on making your offering successful, rather than killing your competitors. Doing things like dismantling their leadership team, or highlighting their shortcomings is lose-lose.
Don't waste time caring what others think. No matter how hard you try, you won't make everyone happy. Don't be afraid to follow your vision, learn from your mistakes, and pivot the business, just because someone will see the change as a disappointment.
Don't mix business with pleasure. This is especially true of relationships. Do not fraternize with your employees, and choose your partners wisely. Thou shall not "do your business" where you do business.
Be quick to fire and slow to hire. Pull the trigger fast when a new hire isn't working, but don't forget to be human and follow all the steps. On the other side, hiring after one interview is like hopping a red-eye to Vegas to get married after one date.
Don't put your company before your people. A company is an entity that can be pivoted at will. Your team of people has a collective passion and intelligence with a real worth that's hard to manipulate. Make the company fit the people, rather than vice versa.
Don't under-forecast cash needs. When you have people and their families depending on you for their paychecks, and you are out of money, that's another lose-lose situation. Even if you can find someone willing to help, it's a very, very expensive proposition.
Don't try to do too much all at once. You hear about all the parallel entrepreneurs, like Steve Jobs running Apple and Pixar at the same time. Make sure you have the aptitude to run one business well, with one product line, before you start a couple more.
Never write something you wouldn't want to come back to you. Every one of us has sent a sensitive email to the wrong party, or had it misinterpreted by the receiver. Save the hard and easily misinterpreted messages for face-to-face calm discussions.
There are more, but I think you get the idea. Of course, the biggest mistake is failing to learn from the mistakes of others, or even from your mistakes. You can only learn from your mistake after you admit you've made it. Wise people admit their mistakes easily, and move the focus away from blame management and towards learning. Wise people can become great entrepreneurs. Where are you along this spectrum?
Marty Zwilling
Read more posts on Startup Professionals Musings »
Please follow War Room on Twitter and Facebook.
Join the conversation about this story
http://www.businessinsider.com/startups-avoid-10-common-million-dollar-mistakes-2011-8
--
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For a free download, go to http://getviigo.com
Sent from Ismawan E. Chamdani's BlackBerry®
'Smart skin' biomedical breakthough - Financial Times
Brisbane Times
Smart skin biomedical breakthough
Financial Times
Smart skin, an ultra-thin electronic platform that sticks on the human body like a temporary tattoo, has been developed by a US-based engineering collaboration. The "epidermal electronic system", whose development was funded ...
Electronic Skin Grafts Gadgets to BodyScience AAAS
Tattoo-like patch may be future of health monitoringCNET
Electronic skin could be used to heal woundsTelegraph.co.uk
BBC News -Los Angeles Times -Plastics & Rubber Weekly
all 459 news articles
Smart skin biomedical breakthough
Financial Times
Smart skin, an ultra-thin electronic platform that sticks on the human body like a temporary tattoo, has been developed by a US-based engineering collaboration. The "epidermal electronic system", whose development was funded ...
Electronic Skin Grafts Gadgets to BodyScience AAAS
Tattoo-like patch may be future of health monitoringCNET
Electronic skin could be used to heal woundsTelegraph.co.uk
BBC News -Los Angeles Times -Plastics & Rubber Weekly
all 459 news articles
--
This article was sent using my Viigo.
For a free download, go to http://getviigo.com
Sent from Ismawan E. Chamdani's BlackBerry®
Y Combinator’s 7th Annual Startup School Set For October
Y Combinator has just unveiled the dates and times of its 7th Annual Startup School; 2011s event will take place on October 29th at Stanford University, where hundreds will gather to listen to talks about entrepreneurship and innovation by some of the Valley's most influential founders and investors.
While the event is free, it is always extremely popular. Attendees must fill out an application form, with a September 28th deadline, and founders and aspiring founders will find out whether they've been accepted on October 4th. Past Y Combinator Startup Schools have included talks from Mark Zuckerberg, Ron Conway, Paul Graham and Andrew Mason, which explains the high demand.
Posterous founder and Y Combinator part-time advisor Garry Tan describes why the experience was so unique, "Startup School 2008 was my first interaction with YC I didn't know anything about starting a startup even though I had worked at one. It is probably the most direct way to get valuable wisdom from the most brilliant people in the industry, meet others like you real hackers and future founders, not like any other startup conference."
We will of course be covering it just like we did last year.
---------------
Crunchbase
Y COMBINATOR
Company:
Y COMBINATOR
Website:
http://www.ycombinator.com
Launch Date:
1/4/2005
Funding:
$10.3M
Y Combinator is a venture fund which focuses on seed investments to startup companies. It offers financing as well as business consulting along with other opportunities to 2-4 person...
Learn more
Crunchbase
PAUL GRAHAM
Person:
PAUL GRAHAM
Website:
http://paulgraham.com
Companies
Y Combinator, Skepsu, 280 North, Evolving
Paul Graham is a partner at Y Combinator. He is also the author of On Lisp (1993), ANSI Common Lisp (1995), and Hackers & Painters (2004). In 1995,...
Learn more
While the event is free, it is always extremely popular. Attendees must fill out an application form, with a September 28th deadline, and founders and aspiring founders will find out whether they've been accepted on October 4th. Past Y Combinator Startup Schools have included talks from Mark Zuckerberg, Ron Conway, Paul Graham and Andrew Mason, which explains the high demand.
Posterous founder and Y Combinator part-time advisor Garry Tan describes why the experience was so unique, "Startup School 2008 was my first interaction with YC I didn't know anything about starting a startup even though I had worked at one. It is probably the most direct way to get valuable wisdom from the most brilliant people in the industry, meet others like you real hackers and future founders, not like any other startup conference."
We will of course be covering it just like we did last year.
---------------
Crunchbase
Y COMBINATOR
Company:
Y COMBINATOR
Website:
http://www.ycombinator.com
Launch Date:
1/4/2005
Funding:
$10.3M
Y Combinator is a venture fund which focuses on seed investments to startup companies. It offers financing as well as business consulting along with other opportunities to 2-4 person...
Learn more
Crunchbase
PAUL GRAHAM
Person:
PAUL GRAHAM
Website:
http://paulgraham.com
Companies
Y Combinator, Skepsu, 280 North, Evolving
Paul Graham is a partner at Y Combinator. He is also the author of On Lisp (1993), ANSI Common Lisp (1995), and Hackers & Painters (2004). In 1995,...
Learn more
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/-ny64fDGK6k/
--
This article was sent using my Viigo.
For a free download, go to http://getviigo.com
Sent from Ismawan E. Chamdani's BlackBerry®
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Mobile Video: 3 Ways to Improve the User Experience
Jeroen Wijering is the creator of the incredibly successful JW Player, which has generated millions of downloads since its release in 2005. In 2007 he co-founded LongTail Video, focusing on a full-fledged online video platform that includes encoding, delivery, syndication and advertising.
With the Android and iOS platforms growing like weeds, online publishers are scrambling to "mobilize" their video players. Because Apple's iOS doesn't run Flash, most of these publishers turn to the HTML5 <video> tag for delivering their clips to mobile devices.
While universalizing mobile video is a critical first step (better to have your videos play than not), it only marks the beginning of the process. The mobile user experience (UX) model is vastly different from that of the desktop browser, which means additional work is needed in areas such as interface, streaming and advertising. These UX differences hold several implications for video players.
---------------
Touch vs. Mouse
---------------
The most obvious difference is user input. A mouse controls desktop video players, whereas both iOS and Android rely on capacitive touchscreens. Since a fingertip is both bigger and more difficult to position than a mouse cursor, buttons on mobile video players must be larger than their desktop equivalents.
When using a mouse, there is the so-called "mouse-over" state when the mouse is positioned over a button, but not clicked. Some video players rely on this tool to pop up a volume slider or selection menu. However, the tool is not available on touch devices, so mobile players cannot rely on it.
On the other hand, touch devices do allow users to control applications by sliding one or more fingers across the screen. This type of interaction (found in features like gestures and multi-touch) is relatively new and still unexplored, but could become widely used over time. Some basic gestures, like sliding over a webpage or scrolling through a playlist, are already widely recognized today.
---------------
Full-Screen vs. Windowed
---------------
Another key differentiator is screen size. Mobile screens are three or four inches in diameter, a big leap from 14-inch laptops or 20-inch desktop monitors. Therefore, on both Android and iPhone, videos are usually played back in full-screen, instead of a smaller window within an HTML page. This means that visual interaction with other parts of the page including companion ads that pop up is lost on mobile devices. Publishers should not rely on this advertising model.
In full-screen mode, both Android and iOS expose only system-provided video controls like pause and seeking. Important online video components such as additional share buttons and overlay ads are simply not possible. Therefore, any custom controls or graphics are best displayed before the video is started and/or after it has ended.
---------------
On-the-Go vs. At-the-Desk
---------------
Mobile devices are frequently used on-the-go, meaning their Internet connection may be poor and unreliable. Connection speed can change dramatically, even within a single video playback session, for example, when a user switches from 3G to Wi-Fi. Therefore, iOS devices support a specific type of video streaming that continuously adapts video quality to the available bandwidth connection: HTTP live streaming. It is highly recommended to use this functionality for mobile video playback.
Unfortunately, Android only supports this type of streaming as of version 3.0. To ensure optimal video quality, players can offer an up-front video quality selection. As Android manufacturers migrate from the 2.x to the 3.x platform, HTTP live streaming can and should replace this manual quality selector.
An additional "watch later" tool is convenient for mobile players. Users who are casually browsing on a mobile device can tag a video to save for later viewing. The publisher will then remind the user about the video at a later point. Publishers can implement "watch later" functionality using cookies, logins or one of the emerging services dedicated to this functionality.
---------------
In sum, the vast differences between desktops/laptops and mobile devices require a major redesign of existing video players. But things don't stop at the player. The surrounding website needs optimization as well, with less content, fewer sidebars, less clutter and more focus on the video itself.
Mobilizing your video is not about swapping Flash for HTML5. Instead it's about adapting your content to the device and facilitating a unique and interactive type of user experience. Mobile video consumption is exploding, but it's also still evolving, as are the platforms that serve the content to consumers. By going above and beyond the bare minimum now, you'll be well positioned as mobile continues to grow.
Images courtesy of iStockphoto, PashaIgnatov, and Flickr, Luca Zappa.
More About: Mobile 2.0, mobile development, video
For more Dev & Design coverage:
Follow Mashable Dev & Design on Twitter
Become a Fan on Facebook
Subscribe to the Dev & Design channel
Download our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad
With the Android and iOS platforms growing like weeds, online publishers are scrambling to "mobilize" their video players. Because Apple's iOS doesn't run Flash, most of these publishers turn to the HTML5 <video> tag for delivering their clips to mobile devices.
While universalizing mobile video is a critical first step (better to have your videos play than not), it only marks the beginning of the process. The mobile user experience (UX) model is vastly different from that of the desktop browser, which means additional work is needed in areas such as interface, streaming and advertising. These UX differences hold several implications for video players.
---------------
Touch vs. Mouse
---------------
The most obvious difference is user input. A mouse controls desktop video players, whereas both iOS and Android rely on capacitive touchscreens. Since a fingertip is both bigger and more difficult to position than a mouse cursor, buttons on mobile video players must be larger than their desktop equivalents.
When using a mouse, there is the so-called "mouse-over" state when the mouse is positioned over a button, but not clicked. Some video players rely on this tool to pop up a volume slider or selection menu. However, the tool is not available on touch devices, so mobile players cannot rely on it.
On the other hand, touch devices do allow users to control applications by sliding one or more fingers across the screen. This type of interaction (found in features like gestures and multi-touch) is relatively new and still unexplored, but could become widely used over time. Some basic gestures, like sliding over a webpage or scrolling through a playlist, are already widely recognized today.
---------------
Full-Screen vs. Windowed
---------------
Another key differentiator is screen size. Mobile screens are three or four inches in diameter, a big leap from 14-inch laptops or 20-inch desktop monitors. Therefore, on both Android and iPhone, videos are usually played back in full-screen, instead of a smaller window within an HTML page. This means that visual interaction with other parts of the page including companion ads that pop up is lost on mobile devices. Publishers should not rely on this advertising model.
In full-screen mode, both Android and iOS expose only system-provided video controls like pause and seeking. Important online video components such as additional share buttons and overlay ads are simply not possible. Therefore, any custom controls or graphics are best displayed before the video is started and/or after it has ended.
---------------
On-the-Go vs. At-the-Desk
---------------
Mobile devices are frequently used on-the-go, meaning their Internet connection may be poor and unreliable. Connection speed can change dramatically, even within a single video playback session, for example, when a user switches from 3G to Wi-Fi. Therefore, iOS devices support a specific type of video streaming that continuously adapts video quality to the available bandwidth connection: HTTP live streaming. It is highly recommended to use this functionality for mobile video playback.
Unfortunately, Android only supports this type of streaming as of version 3.0. To ensure optimal video quality, players can offer an up-front video quality selection. As Android manufacturers migrate from the 2.x to the 3.x platform, HTTP live streaming can and should replace this manual quality selector.
An additional "watch later" tool is convenient for mobile players. Users who are casually browsing on a mobile device can tag a video to save for later viewing. The publisher will then remind the user about the video at a later point. Publishers can implement "watch later" functionality using cookies, logins or one of the emerging services dedicated to this functionality.
---------------
In sum, the vast differences between desktops/laptops and mobile devices require a major redesign of existing video players. But things don't stop at the player. The surrounding website needs optimization as well, with less content, fewer sidebars, less clutter and more focus on the video itself.
Mobilizing your video is not about swapping Flash for HTML5. Instead it's about adapting your content to the device and facilitating a unique and interactive type of user experience. Mobile video consumption is exploding, but it's also still evolving, as are the platforms that serve the content to consumers. By going above and beyond the bare minimum now, you'll be well positioned as mobile continues to grow.
Images courtesy of iStockphoto, PashaIgnatov, and Flickr, Luca Zappa.
More About: Mobile 2.0, mobile development, video
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Occipital To Create 2nd-Generation Augmented Reality on Mobile Devices
Boulder-based computer vision startup Occipital has raised $7 million in Series A funding, and aims to leverage the investment to develop a next-generation computer vision platform.
Occipital, a TechStars veteran, is most widely known for the hit barcode-scanning app RedLaser, which it sold to eBay last year. Now, the startup's most notable app is 360 Panorama for 3D panoramic image captures via mobile.
But Occipital has bigger plans. It wants to be the computer vision foundation just as RedLaser became the backbone of many barcode-scanning apps powering apps that will help mobile users interact with the physical world around them.
"360 Panorama is just the tip of the iceberg," says co-founder Jeff Powers. What's the whole iceberg actually look like?
"The iceberg is what sits underneath 360 Panorama it's the beginnings of a sophisticated computer vision platform that aims to fundamentally transform the way we interact with environments," co-founder Vikas Reddy explains to Mashable. "Think computer vision plus augmented reality and the applications that become possible when your smartphone has a visual understanding of its surroundings."
This is where third-party developers will come into play. Occipital will be soon be launching a platform that will give enterprising developers a crack at creating new layers on top of the computer vision technology inside 360 Panorama.
"Currently, there are companies that have introduced specific mobile applications that use limited computer-vision techniques," says Occipital investor and new board member Jason Mendelson. "No one has produced a platform that allows developers to create dynamic content that automatically leverages best-in-class computer vision technology."
Occipital's $7 million Series A round was led by Foundry Group. Jason Mendelson and Brad Feld of Foundry Group, Manu Kumar of K9 Ventures and Gary Bradski of Willow Garage will join the startup's board.
Image courtesy of Flickr, jurvetson
More About: 360 panorama, Augmented Reality, funding, occipital, startup
For more Dev & Design coverage:
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Become a Fan on Facebook
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Download our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad
Occipital, a TechStars veteran, is most widely known for the hit barcode-scanning app RedLaser, which it sold to eBay last year. Now, the startup's most notable app is 360 Panorama for 3D panoramic image captures via mobile.
But Occipital has bigger plans. It wants to be the computer vision foundation just as RedLaser became the backbone of many barcode-scanning apps powering apps that will help mobile users interact with the physical world around them.
"360 Panorama is just the tip of the iceberg," says co-founder Jeff Powers. What's the whole iceberg actually look like?
"The iceberg is what sits underneath 360 Panorama it's the beginnings of a sophisticated computer vision platform that aims to fundamentally transform the way we interact with environments," co-founder Vikas Reddy explains to Mashable. "Think computer vision plus augmented reality and the applications that become possible when your smartphone has a visual understanding of its surroundings."
This is where third-party developers will come into play. Occipital will be soon be launching a platform that will give enterprising developers a crack at creating new layers on top of the computer vision technology inside 360 Panorama.
"Currently, there are companies that have introduced specific mobile applications that use limited computer-vision techniques," says Occipital investor and new board member Jason Mendelson. "No one has produced a platform that allows developers to create dynamic content that automatically leverages best-in-class computer vision technology."
Occipital's $7 million Series A round was led by Foundry Group. Jason Mendelson and Brad Feld of Foundry Group, Manu Kumar of K9 Ventures and Gary Bradski of Willow Garage will join the startup's board.
Image courtesy of Flickr, jurvetson
More About: 360 panorama, Augmented Reality, funding, occipital, startup
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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Mashable/~3/6ZILRRf67rM/
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powered by Sinyal Kuat INDOSAT
Why Evernote Bet the Company on Mobile & Social Media
The Social CEO Series is supported by MessageMaker Social, the social media management system (SMMS) that lets you publish and manage targeted content across a large number of social interaction points while generating actionable intelligence. Visit messagemaker.com/social and follow us @MsgMkrSocial on Twitter.
Three years and 11 million users later, Evernote is the archetype of a flourishing modern day startup it's nimble, its product is accessible anywhere and it's tapping into the power of social media to improve its product and encourage word-of-mouth testimonials.
At the helm of the emerging note-taking empire is the personal-memory-assistant-obsessed Phil Libin. As a blogger, active Tweeter and Google+ neophyte, Libin is the quintessential social CEO, and he bet the success of his company on mobile and social media before it was cool to do so.
"Most of our roadmap comes from [social media] discussion," says Libin, on the company's approach to listening to social channels to gather product ideas from customers and evolve its mobile, desktop, web and browser-based arsenal of products. "It's almost like cheating."
The startup, currently in the midst of a social product transformation and nicely cushioned with $50 million more in the bank, has colossal ambitions; Libin aims for Evernote to become a 100-year company.
Will social media play a role in Evernote's long-term success and evolution? Keep reading to find out.
---------------
QA With Phil Libin, CEO, Evernote
---------------
Does Evernote have a social media strategy? If so, how was the strategy developed and how has it changed over time?
I think "strategy" is too generous a word for it. Let's say we had a social media hunch. Our hunch was that social media has already connected everybody to everybody else and lets people spend a huge amount of time talking to their friends. What do people talk about? They talk about stuff they love. So we figured that we didn't need to be "social" to get everyone to talk about us, we just needed to be great.
So our first social media strategy was to find out what our users loved and talked about and make more of that, so that our users would love it even more and talk about it even more, etc. Genius insight, I know.
Then we started measuring stuff and found that users who had been referred to Evernote by a friend were much more valuable to us than users who had stumbled across us by themselves. So this got us thinking and eventually turned our whole approach to marketing upside-down.
You know how every company has some department in charge of getting people who have never used their product to become first time users? Usually that's the job of the marketing department. Not at Evernote. The job of getting someone who's never heard of Evernote to use it for the first time is the job of our existing users. The job of our marketing department is to help our existing users do that job.
"The job of getting someone who's never heard of Evernote to use it for the first time is the job of our existing users. The job of our marketing department is to help our existing users do that job."
That's the role of social media for us: (1) find out what people love so we can make a better product, (2) educate our users so they get fully engaged with the product and feel comfortable referring us to their friends, and (3) spread the best stories, tips and experiences so that one enthusiastic Evernote user can inspire a thousand new people.
Also, I try not to swear in the podcast. Is that strategy or tactics?
Mobile seems to have been a priority for the company since day one long before the iOS and Android platforms took off. How were you able to recognize and predict the significance of mobile applications?
We didn't predict it, we bet on it. And then we hoped really really hard that we bet right.
From the start, we made a big promise to our users we would help them remember everything. In order to live up to that, Evernote would need to be easily accessible from every computer, phone or other device that a person used, for the rest of their lives. So, it wasn't that we predicted the rise of mobile, as much as we felt that mobile would be critical to our success.
It's important to keep in mind that although mobile platforms and browsers were less powerful, the underlying technology was already in place, and we took advantage of available capabilities. The thing that we could not have predicted at all was the rise of app stores and the effect they'd have on our growth and on the whole ecosystem.
Evernote is transitioning from a mostly personal note-taking service to a social note-taking platform. Why do you feel the need to add social features and in doing so, change part of the purpose of the product to an already successful service?
Fundamentally, Evernote is for individuals to save and find their private memories. If I look at my own account, I see a huge array of memories from presentations that I've given, to meals that I ate in Japan, to the latest gadget that I clipped from Uncrate. Most of this stuff is only relevant to me, but there are some memories that I want to share with my friends or my coworkers or my family. If Evernote is to be a full extension of memory, then we must embrace a very important part of memory: sharing.
Now that Evernote users can more easily share notebooks and notes on Facebook and Twitter, are they using these features? What specific types of behaviors are you noticing?
Yes, the adoption of these new features has been great. Sharing was a very popular feature request. There was a clear desire within our user community to selectively share the notes they love. It's much more than Facebook and Twitter, we're seeing a lot of users sharing entire notebooks with their colleagues and classmates. Our sharing functionality is not fully deployed yet, but we've got some major new additions coming out soon.
What are your thoughts on Google+? Are you thinking about ways to integrate Google's social network into the Evernote experience (or vice versa)?
I love it. G+ is the first new Google product in a while that I was seriously impressed with from the first time I saw it. It's obviously going to be a part of our social sharing strategy, but we're giving it a bit more time to develop before we jump in with engineering resources. I'm very optimistic about the future of Google+.
Are there any standout moments that you can recall when the Evernote community rallied behind the startup using social media?
One such moment actually happened fairly recently with the launch of Evernote Peek. We had the idea for a learning app that could be controlled by the iPad 2 smart cover. We were excited about the app, but we weren't sure how the community would react to this new addition to the Evernote family. The response was tremendously positive. It was without a doubt the most social media attention we've ever had for a release, and it even became a trending topic on Twitter. It was really interesting to watch as word spread about the app.
What are some Evernote use cases that you've discovered through your community members?
We're constantly learning from our community that's the key area of focus for our marketing team. Almost every week, we have a user story or case study on our blog that highlights a new and unexpected way that someone is using Evernote.
One of our users suffers from a traumatic brain injury and literally uses Evernote to help with his memory. We have small business owners that use Evernote and its sharing capabilities to run virtually every aspect of their business. One of my personal favorites was a user who told us that he used Evernote to remember his sins for confession. It's astounding to see all the variety.
You've stated that you want Evernote to become a "100-year company." Do you think social media will play a role in the company's longevity? Why or why not?
Yes. Although I think it'll just be called "media" well before the century is up.
The growth of social media is one of the most exciting developments of the past few years. It lets us spend 90% of our resources building a great product by giving us huge leverage on the effectiveness of that other 10%. Social media has created a positive feedback loop: You make a great product, people talk about it, which helps you make a better better product, which makes more people talk about, etc. Systems with built-in positive feedback loops are much more sustainable and much more likely to last for a 100 years.
When you talk about Evernote's future, you speak of the service as becoming a "trusted second brain for all your lifetime memories." How do you plan to make that vision come to fruition?
That's a critically important question. Over the past several years, we've focused our development on creating the means for capturing and finding important information and ideas that occur in the course of our daily lives. That's a part of memory, but not all of it.
You're going to be seeing lots of new products and extensions to Evernote some made by us, some by our partners that will add layers and functionality on top of the platform that we've already created. In addition, Evernote itself will continue to improve and evolve. We want an elementary school student that's using Evernote today to be able to quickly search through millions of notes twenty years from now to find her first book report. That's a big challenge that we're excited to tackle.
"We want an elementary school student that's using Evernote today to be able to quickly search through millions of notes twenty years from now to find her first book report. That's a big challenge that we're excited to tackle."
Another part of the plan is to optimize all of our financial structures, data policies, company culture, etc. for long term trust. We're spending a lot of time on that.
As a blogger, Twitter user and seemingly well-rounded social media CEO, what advice do you have for other founders and CEOs looking to use social media sites effectively?
I know that calling me "well-rounded" was a fat joke, but I'm going to overlook it.
I guess my main observation is that social media users can smell inauthenticity in much less than 140 characters. Enjoy yourself, have fun with the conversation, be yourself. You can't fake it.
---------------
Series Supported by MessageMaker Social
---------------
The Social CEO Series is supported by MessageMaker Social, the social media management system (SMMS) that lets you publish and manage targeted content across a large number of social interaction points while generating actionable intelligence. This smart, simple SaaS solution elevates your company's social presence among thousands of social Pages and accounts, helping you meet compliance regulations, maintain brand consistency, maximize engagement and generate actionable intelligence — without adding additional human resource costs. Visit messagemaker.com/social and follow us @MsgMkrSocial on Twitter.
Image courtesy of Flickr, Johan Larsson
More About: evernote, Social CEO Series, social media, startup
For more Business & Marketing coverage:
Follow Mashable Business & Marketing on Twitter
Become a Fan on Facebook
Subscribe to the Business & Marketing channel
Download our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad
Three years and 11 million users later, Evernote is the archetype of a flourishing modern day startup it's nimble, its product is accessible anywhere and it's tapping into the power of social media to improve its product and encourage word-of-mouth testimonials.
At the helm of the emerging note-taking empire is the personal-memory-assistant-obsessed Phil Libin. As a blogger, active Tweeter and Google+ neophyte, Libin is the quintessential social CEO, and he bet the success of his company on mobile and social media before it was cool to do so.
"Most of our roadmap comes from [social media] discussion," says Libin, on the company's approach to listening to social channels to gather product ideas from customers and evolve its mobile, desktop, web and browser-based arsenal of products. "It's almost like cheating."
The startup, currently in the midst of a social product transformation and nicely cushioned with $50 million more in the bank, has colossal ambitions; Libin aims for Evernote to become a 100-year company.
Will social media play a role in Evernote's long-term success and evolution? Keep reading to find out.
---------------
QA With Phil Libin, CEO, Evernote
---------------
Does Evernote have a social media strategy? If so, how was the strategy developed and how has it changed over time?
I think "strategy" is too generous a word for it. Let's say we had a social media hunch. Our hunch was that social media has already connected everybody to everybody else and lets people spend a huge amount of time talking to their friends. What do people talk about? They talk about stuff they love. So we figured that we didn't need to be "social" to get everyone to talk about us, we just needed to be great.
So our first social media strategy was to find out what our users loved and talked about and make more of that, so that our users would love it even more and talk about it even more, etc. Genius insight, I know.
Then we started measuring stuff and found that users who had been referred to Evernote by a friend were much more valuable to us than users who had stumbled across us by themselves. So this got us thinking and eventually turned our whole approach to marketing upside-down.
You know how every company has some department in charge of getting people who have never used their product to become first time users? Usually that's the job of the marketing department. Not at Evernote. The job of getting someone who's never heard of Evernote to use it for the first time is the job of our existing users. The job of our marketing department is to help our existing users do that job.
"The job of getting someone who's never heard of Evernote to use it for the first time is the job of our existing users. The job of our marketing department is to help our existing users do that job."
That's the role of social media for us: (1) find out what people love so we can make a better product, (2) educate our users so they get fully engaged with the product and feel comfortable referring us to their friends, and (3) spread the best stories, tips and experiences so that one enthusiastic Evernote user can inspire a thousand new people.
Also, I try not to swear in the podcast. Is that strategy or tactics?
Mobile seems to have been a priority for the company since day one long before the iOS and Android platforms took off. How were you able to recognize and predict the significance of mobile applications?
We didn't predict it, we bet on it. And then we hoped really really hard that we bet right.
From the start, we made a big promise to our users we would help them remember everything. In order to live up to that, Evernote would need to be easily accessible from every computer, phone or other device that a person used, for the rest of their lives. So, it wasn't that we predicted the rise of mobile, as much as we felt that mobile would be critical to our success.
It's important to keep in mind that although mobile platforms and browsers were less powerful, the underlying technology was already in place, and we took advantage of available capabilities. The thing that we could not have predicted at all was the rise of app stores and the effect they'd have on our growth and on the whole ecosystem.
Evernote is transitioning from a mostly personal note-taking service to a social note-taking platform. Why do you feel the need to add social features and in doing so, change part of the purpose of the product to an already successful service?
Fundamentally, Evernote is for individuals to save and find their private memories. If I look at my own account, I see a huge array of memories from presentations that I've given, to meals that I ate in Japan, to the latest gadget that I clipped from Uncrate. Most of this stuff is only relevant to me, but there are some memories that I want to share with my friends or my coworkers or my family. If Evernote is to be a full extension of memory, then we must embrace a very important part of memory: sharing.
Now that Evernote users can more easily share notebooks and notes on Facebook and Twitter, are they using these features? What specific types of behaviors are you noticing?
Yes, the adoption of these new features has been great. Sharing was a very popular feature request. There was a clear desire within our user community to selectively share the notes they love. It's much more than Facebook and Twitter, we're seeing a lot of users sharing entire notebooks with their colleagues and classmates. Our sharing functionality is not fully deployed yet, but we've got some major new additions coming out soon.
What are your thoughts on Google+? Are you thinking about ways to integrate Google's social network into the Evernote experience (or vice versa)?
I love it. G+ is the first new Google product in a while that I was seriously impressed with from the first time I saw it. It's obviously going to be a part of our social sharing strategy, but we're giving it a bit more time to develop before we jump in with engineering resources. I'm very optimistic about the future of Google+.
Are there any standout moments that you can recall when the Evernote community rallied behind the startup using social media?
One such moment actually happened fairly recently with the launch of Evernote Peek. We had the idea for a learning app that could be controlled by the iPad 2 smart cover. We were excited about the app, but we weren't sure how the community would react to this new addition to the Evernote family. The response was tremendously positive. It was without a doubt the most social media attention we've ever had for a release, and it even became a trending topic on Twitter. It was really interesting to watch as word spread about the app.
What are some Evernote use cases that you've discovered through your community members?
We're constantly learning from our community that's the key area of focus for our marketing team. Almost every week, we have a user story or case study on our blog that highlights a new and unexpected way that someone is using Evernote.
One of our users suffers from a traumatic brain injury and literally uses Evernote to help with his memory. We have small business owners that use Evernote and its sharing capabilities to run virtually every aspect of their business. One of my personal favorites was a user who told us that he used Evernote to remember his sins for confession. It's astounding to see all the variety.
You've stated that you want Evernote to become a "100-year company." Do you think social media will play a role in the company's longevity? Why or why not?
Yes. Although I think it'll just be called "media" well before the century is up.
The growth of social media is one of the most exciting developments of the past few years. It lets us spend 90% of our resources building a great product by giving us huge leverage on the effectiveness of that other 10%. Social media has created a positive feedback loop: You make a great product, people talk about it, which helps you make a better better product, which makes more people talk about, etc. Systems with built-in positive feedback loops are much more sustainable and much more likely to last for a 100 years.
When you talk about Evernote's future, you speak of the service as becoming a "trusted second brain for all your lifetime memories." How do you plan to make that vision come to fruition?
That's a critically important question. Over the past several years, we've focused our development on creating the means for capturing and finding important information and ideas that occur in the course of our daily lives. That's a part of memory, but not all of it.
You're going to be seeing lots of new products and extensions to Evernote some made by us, some by our partners that will add layers and functionality on top of the platform that we've already created. In addition, Evernote itself will continue to improve and evolve. We want an elementary school student that's using Evernote today to be able to quickly search through millions of notes twenty years from now to find her first book report. That's a big challenge that we're excited to tackle.
"We want an elementary school student that's using Evernote today to be able to quickly search through millions of notes twenty years from now to find her first book report. That's a big challenge that we're excited to tackle."
Another part of the plan is to optimize all of our financial structures, data policies, company culture, etc. for long term trust. We're spending a lot of time on that.
As a blogger, Twitter user and seemingly well-rounded social media CEO, what advice do you have for other founders and CEOs looking to use social media sites effectively?
I know that calling me "well-rounded" was a fat joke, but I'm going to overlook it.
I guess my main observation is that social media users can smell inauthenticity in much less than 140 characters. Enjoy yourself, have fun with the conversation, be yourself. You can't fake it.
---------------
Series Supported by MessageMaker Social
---------------
The Social CEO Series is supported by MessageMaker Social, the social media management system (SMMS) that lets you publish and manage targeted content across a large number of social interaction points while generating actionable intelligence. This smart, simple SaaS solution elevates your company's social presence among thousands of social Pages and accounts, helping you meet compliance regulations, maintain brand consistency, maximize engagement and generate actionable intelligence — without adding additional human resource costs. Visit messagemaker.com/social and follow us @MsgMkrSocial on Twitter.
Image courtesy of Flickr, Johan Larsson
More About: evernote, Social CEO Series, social media, startup
For more Business & Marketing coverage:
Follow Mashable Business & Marketing on Twitter
Become a Fan on Facebook
Subscribe to the Business & Marketing channel
Download our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Mashable/~3/c7dWFDgI49k/
--
This article was sent using my Viigo.
For a free download, go to http://getviigo.com
Sent from Ismawan E. Chamdani's BlackBerry®
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