My wife is currently flying back into Boston from Pittsburgh. I am currently working. How can I leave at exactly the right time so I can maximize my work time, but still not be late so I don;t get in trouble with my wife?
Sure, I could call the airline and check their website, but from my experience those tools are usually a good 30 minutes behind, making them useless, especially for shorter flights.
But with www.FlightAware.com I can see the exact location and estimated arrival of my wife's flight in real time. So I know exactly when it should land, then allow a bit of time for her to grab her baggage and get off the plane and I end up with perfect timing.
This company sells deodorant and cologne / body spray products for young men, and this is a mousepad they made for promotion. Talk about connecting with your audience through promotional marting items...
While this item probably won't work for your company, you should think long and hard if you really want to give out another pen or clock with your logo on it. What can you give out that will enable a unique connection between your buyers and your company? What will make your buyer's life easier or more enjoyable?
Pairwise, is developing personality test that compare you to other groups of people based on your selection of one image over another in a series of paired images. In this TechCrunch article you can learn a little bit more about Pairwise, and also take a sample quiz that compares you to founders of Y Combinator companies. My results from taking the quiz comparing me to the founders of Y Combinator companies are below.
How do you compare to the Y Combinator founders?
67%
similar
You are somewhat similar to the group. Compared to the group, you:
· like to read a little more
· are a little less risk-averse
· are less cleanly
· are a little less likely to plan ahead
· a little more masculine
· are more of a night person
· like music in the workplace more
· are a little less likely to think things through before acting
This is a great video. I think the people who lived through the last bubble in 1999-2000 will find this even funnier than most people. Having the context from 1999 just adds a lot to the experience. What is also interesting to me, is that this time the bubble has not really carried over into the public stock market. So the stories of so many people being worth tons of money because they bought all these tech IPOs that skyrocketed is not happening. This is good because it makes this bubble smaller, and less risky.
What is also interesting to me, is that in the last bubble, there was no YouTube. So there were not a massive number of video parodies. but there were some pictures, like this one that was mocking the fact that all you needed to do was put a ".com" on the end of any word and make $100 million.
I have a lot of interest (and some expertise on SEO). This is a quick test to see how much one link can do, for a particular company. Especially from a small and not that important website :)
This website is about pearl jewelry, they sell lots of pearl necklaces, pearl rings, and other pearl jewelry. I actually took a trip to Tahiti this summer, and it was beautiful, and the amazing black pearls they have were a sight to see. The pearl necklaces there were expensive, but good. I was glad we did not buy a pearl necklace there.
But, here is a link to The Pearl Source - Pearl Necklace - a great place to buy pearl jewelry here in the US. They have very high quality merchandise and excellent prices for Tahitian pearls and other pearl jewelry. You can actually get a better deal (and have a trusted pearl jewelry source in the US) than in Tahiti.
I think this goes a little bit too far for a few reasons:
1) Other people who use your PC can get items posted to your Facebook feed - just imagine "Mike Volpe just bought a miracle bra from Victoria's Secret" getting posted to my Facebook feed if my wife used my PC to buy something... scary.
2) Facebook is making money off of me, using my personal recommendations, without my explicit consent, and I don't get a dime. Why not cut me in on an affiliate program if you are using my name and face to sell something?
If you happen to work in marketing or sales, learn more about how you can stop your cold calling and start finding prospects that actually want to talk to you in this article about Inbound vs Outbound Marketing.
Rappers are starting to brag about Euros... has the slide in the value of the US Dollar really gone that far? Are you no longer "successful" if you have US Dollars? Scary.
A recent song/video from Jay-Z talks about how he carries Euros because of the falling value of the US Dollar. This got coverage in the Wall Street Journal on 11/19/07 and elsewhere. One WSJ blog called Jay-Z the new Alan Greenspan.
I'm not sure if Jay-Z is truly a legendary economist, but he is certainly one of the most clever marketing minds of our time. Just do a Google search for Jay-Z Euro and see how much PR coverage he got from this.
See this video that shows a clip from the Jay-Z video:
Jay-Z pulled a pretty slick move to capitalize on the popularity of the American Gangster movie. Check out this article on Yahoo Music News (quote below).
IKEA seems to have some trouble producing a map of the US. Look at this image from this page on their website. Pretty weird. It sort of resembles the US, but Maine looks like it is stretched way out, and Florida has a funny shape as well. You wouldn't think it would be too hard to find a reasonable image of the US for a website, there are thousands of them out there. I guess we should cut them a break. I bet most Americans can't even find Sweden on a map.
Cisco is buying WebEx. I don't get it. Sure, a lot of Cisco customers could purchase the WebEx product (a lot of them probably do already, WebEx claims 65% marketshare), and I am sure Cisco will be able to grow WebEx sales at a good rate. But Cisco will also have to absorb WebEx's employees, and is inheriting technology that is not that good and is about a decade old. There are a lot of other much smaller companies that have better and newer technology. If Cisco is looking to really get leverage from their customer relationships and distribution, why don't they buy a small startup with newer/better technology than WebEx, and then use the Cisco brand and channel to really supercharge the sales? Why would they bother to pay $3 billion for WebEx (with $380 million in revenue), when they could pay $25 or $50 million for a startup with better technology? The only reason I can think of is that Cisco needs the $380m in revenue and $50m in profit from WebEx to meet its growth goals.
Not only is JetBlue responsible for my first photograph as an engaged man, but my fiance and I also made it into the JetBlue internal employee newsletter and we both got a very nice holiday gift (JetBlue baseball hats) from them. But, recently JetBlue has taken a lot of criticism from people for a bunch of problems they had in the snow storm that hit Boston. I still think they do a better job than any other airline (now that Song does not exist) of making travel fun and easy, and they are still my preferred airline. While the recent delays and bad service were not good, I think JetBlue's handling of the situation should go down as an example of a great response to a potential PR nightmare. Here are some of the things I think that companies should do when faced with a challenging PR situation because of a problem with their product or service, and examples of what JetBlue did so well:
1) Act quickly. In contrast to the "ongoing" investigations of the theft of millions of records of customer's personal information at TJX Corp (TJ Maxx and Marshalls) which occurred months ago and they still are not saying what exactly happened, how many records were lost, etc.; JetBlue came out quickly and only a couple days after the problems had a message to their customers.
2) Be honest and admit you made a mistake. Many companies will come out with statements that are vague and reference "recent customer service issues" or "in response to reported problems with". JetBlue was totally upfront and accepted responsibility and admitted what they did was wrong. There is not a single sentence that gives any sort of excuse for what happened. While in fact, their problems were partly because they tried not to cancel flights in the first place, unlike other airlines that canceled flights pretty early so they would not be exposed to a potential problem. But, JetBlue does not mention any of these excuses. Very smart. See below the email JetBlue sent to their customers.
3) Treat people like human beings and talk to them in plain language. Don't use confusing "corporate speak" and terminology you would not use in a casual conversation with friends. The last thing people want is to feel like after they have been treated badly is that they get some weird "apology" from a corporation on official letterhead and using a bunch of terms like "service anomalies" or "satisfaction issues". JetBlue was very upfront and did not use any big company jargon. In fact, if you look at the video from the CEO on YouTube, it does not even appear that he is reading from a script, it is like he is right there with you, apologizing to you personally. He stutters, repeats himself. This is not an apology from a corporation to its customer base. This is a guy named David, apologizing to me, Mike. Click on the video to play it.
4) Be clear about what specifically will change in the future. Vague promises about fixing problems and making people happy are not believable. You need to be specific and lay out a timeline. JetBlue was pretty specific about most things, but was especially smart about the customer bill of rights, which clearly out lines the rights you have as a customer. My big problem with this is the use of the term "Controllable Irregularity". It sounds like some type of bowel problem, not something to do with my flight, especially when they do not define it in the document. What is funny about this though, is that these rights are way better than I have ever been treated by any other airline. I was once stuck at Logan for 6 hours waiting for America West (aka America Worst) to get a toilet unfrozen. Yes, the toilet being frozen meant we could not take off. Apparently none of the maintenance guys at Logan could fix it, they needed to call a specialist. Anyway, I wonder if some of the big airlines will start to have something like this... I doubt it.
Any good sales person knows that you don't give the same sales pitch to every prospect. You customize your materials and presentation to what the prospect wants to hear based on a bunch of factors (industry, experience, business challenges, etc.). You can also get custom golf clubs made for you, and it costs about the same as a similar set of "normal" clubs. And Cafe Press has made a whole business out of making apparel and promotional merchandise one at a time. Finally, there are technologies to allow billboards to change content based on time of day and weather conditions. So, if the web is the new and best medium for marketing and sales, and software and web pages are just code that can be altered easily and automatically by computers... why do so few websites customize content based on who is using the website? The answer is because there are no good tools to allow most businesses to do this easily. For those of you who know me well, you know that I am joining a startup, and this is one of the problems we will be addressing. You can check out the HubSpot online marketing website to learn more.
I really don't think this data matters much at all, for both VCs and entrepreneurs. Sometimes data gets aggregated to a point where it loses most of its meaning, and that probably happened here for a few reasons:
Since this data aggregates across INDUSTRIES, it hides rising valuations in one industry and lower valuations in other industries (quote from Venture Wire: "in health care U.S. companies raised later-stage rounds at a median pre-money valuation of $49.5 million in 2006, up from $40 million in 2005" [this 24% growth in valuation off of a base number about 1/3 higher than the median could really skew the statistic]
For the same reason, it hides different valuation trends by ROUND OF FINANCING, so while the MEDIAN valuation rose, this is from higher valuations in later rounds, while angel and A rounds seem to be staying about the same (quote from VentureWire: "The median pre-money valuation for later-stage financings of U.S. technology companies rose to $33 million in 2006, up from $29 million the year before. By contrast, the median pre-money first-round valuation in 2006 nudged to $6.2 million from $5.9 million in 2005")
Finally, because it is an overall median, even if the valuation per round of financing stayed the same, but there were more later stage deals, then this median would rise because generally valuations increase in later rounds (since companies not doing well can't raise more rounds usually) - this may or may not be the case right now, I don't have data on this one ;)
Basically, as with all these VC stats, I think you should just focus on making your company successful (or funding and building companies that will be successful) and leave the aggregate stats to Dow Jones and the Fed. If you build value in your company, it will all work out in the end, no matter what the stats say.
We have been doing some SEO at my company for some time, with reasonable results. And being a decent size company, we get pitches from lots of vendors who want us to spend a lot of money with them to outsource our SEO. There are also companies, like HubSpot Online Marketing, that are building tools to make SEO just part of how you build and manage your website. But most of the pitches we get are from companies that are SEO "experts" who have "figured out" Google and other engine's ranking algorithms. Many of these "expert" companies that want our business try to tell me that SEO cannot be done in house and only very technical experts can do it effectively. While there might be some benefits that these experts bring to the table, to me the extra cost they ask for is not justified. So, when I saw this article Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is Not Rocket Science I really enjoyed it. We actually do outsource it to a small company right now, but not because we could not do it ourselves, mostly because it is easier and more flexible to outsource than have an employee do it. Sort of like hiring someone to mow your lawn. We could do it, we just want to spend our time on other things. For those of you looking for some insights on how to do some SEO on your own, you should check out this article Improving your Organic Position on Google: A How-To Guide For Small Business.
I had a great time meeting a bunch of entrepreneurs, VCs and MBA students last night at the Charles Hotel for the 2007 MIT Sloan Mass Tech Trek reception, sponsored by General Catalyst. Jorey Ramer, VP Corporate Development of JumpTap made some insightful remarks about the benefits of starting a company in the Boston area. The MIT Sloan Mass Tech Trek is an event totally organized by MBA students at MIT Sloan (I know because I was lead organizer for 2 years) where usually about 100 students visit about 30 companies in the Boston area over a 3 day period. It is actually how I got my first job out of MIT, and I have gone to all the receptions for the last 4 years since graduating and met some cool people in the Boston high tech / startup world. For those of you looking to better connect with a great pool of MBA talent for marketing, entrepreneurship and technology, the student clubs at MIT Sloan are a great way to do it. Here is a list of many of the MBA student clubs at MIT Sloan, with contact information.
The Internet has long promised to make marketing more of a science and less of an art. Unfortunately this promise has been pretty un-fulfilled. There is still no good way to really measure everything you want using a simple service or tool. I've been doing marketing for a number of years now. When I was at a dot-com startup in 1999, I built models to analyze all of our Internet advertising (banners, text links, and some pay per click with GoTo.com) and launched an affiliate program. What I loved about this type of marketing was that you could analyze it and know the ROI on each program. What I did not like was that the majority of our sales were not traceable to a specific marketing event. My dot-com (gazoontite.com) also had a print catalog business and retail stores. So, for much of the revenue from those channels, and a good portion of the revenue from the web as well, we had no idea what really caused someone to buy. This problem of tracking marketing ROI gets even more complicated when you understand that people visit your website multiple times and become a lead by filling out a form multiple times and also view your marketing online and offline multiple times. And then what happens if part of the sale is completed offline. My current company, SolidWorks, a 3D CAD software company, does a lot of lead generation through online and offline programs, but all of our sales are completed offline by a great network of hundreds of resellers around the globe. Trying to figure out which particular marketing program (or combination or series of programs) really made someone become a customer is a pretty complicated multivariate analysis, made harder by the fact that it is difficult to get data for many of the variables. At my current company we face many of these challenges and more, and have done the best we can to overcome them, given the tools that exist today. Unfortunately the problem is a big one and we have only scratched the surface. All this brings me back to my first point... There is still no good way to really measure all your marketing activities using a simple service or tool. But the good news is that there are some people working on the problem.
SEM Director - Donna Bogatin discusses on her blog a presentation from the CEO of SEM Director, Russ Mann. These seem like pretty lofty goals, and I am surprised by their strategy of targeting Fortune 500 companies since the sales cycle is long, and these companies have complicated requirements and a lot of legacy systems that are difficult to deal with. But, the problem they are targeting is real.
Who will build the holy grail of marketing? I'm not sure. But anyone who gets us closer will make marketing more of a science and less of an art, which makes me happy.
Is Web 2.0 Another Bubble? The new 'cool' topic to discuss seems to be is if the current excitement and innovation around "Web 2.0" is a bubble or not. In fact, there was a WSJ article interviewing Todd Dagress (Boston VC) and David Hornik (Bay Area VC) My favorite quote from the article... "By the way, the combined cash flow of Spot Runner, LinkedIn and Facebook is less than that of one Costco store. " - Todd Dagres, Spark Capital Yeah but, Todd, isn't is about growth and margins? Would you prefer to buy a Costco store rather than your recent investment in http://www.nextnewnetworks.com/? I don't think so. (BTW, I LOVE Costco. I would buy every product in my house from them if possible. But that does not mean I want to invest or work there.) As someone who lived through the 1999-2000 bubble - and was in San Francisco, aka 'ground zero' for the bubble - I really do not think we are even close to a bubble right now. A lot of the craziness we saw in '99 is NOT happening today, such as:
There are no huge launch parties spending VC/investor money on booze - I went to a bunch of really expensive "launch parties" for all kinds of dot-com startups in 1999, which were basically booze and appetizer fests paid for with VC money (the VCs went and thought it was a great time)
No one is spending millions on stupid advertisements - No one is buying SuperBowl ads like Pets.com (let's ignore GoDaddy.com) and no one is spending millions on 'partnerships' with AOL, Excite/@Home, etc. People are paying per click with Google instead, whichi has no long term committment and is infinitely scaleable
There are no huge Series B VC rounds - One of my old startups (gazoontite.com) raised $26m in a Series B From Hummer Winblad and Oak Investment Partners, with very little revenue and no profit. While there is a lot of angel and serties A activity, the investments seem to max out at $4-6m, which is far less that the frothy investments and crazy valuations of the real bubble in 1999.
What is happening today is a huge amount of innovation using a new generation of development tools and social paradigms around the web. We are seeing a lot of entrepreneurs try new things and create value through building things not possible or not conceived a while ago. But, this is not a bubble. This is actually a good thing. And yes, many of them fail. Startups always do. but some succeed. And that is how the world changes. Sure, maybe valuations are a bit high and maybe a hot sector is attracting more attention than it should, but that is not a bubble. A bubble is pure craziness that will lead to a horrible burst / crash. We're not there. At least not yet.
Let me go on record saying that the biggest threat to Microsoft today is Google SpreadSheets and Documents. Not search, not Gmail... but spreadsheets and documents. And, if you read this article from innovation Creators about Google taking $200m from Microsoft & Lotus there is already a financial impact. I could not agree more. Google Documents and Spreadsheets has all the characterisitics of a disruptive technology.
Much lower cost - free v.s $100's of dollars
Less functionality in the traditional sense... BUT more functionality in ways that are important for a small but growing and important market segment - the collaboration and web-centric features will be the future of how we use documents and communicate
I am currently using Google Spreadsheets and Docs for a bunch of things, including tracking gifts and thank you notes for my wedding with my fiance. While Google spreadsheets does not do everything Excel does (pivot tables, charts), it does "enough" (to be dangerous), and the collaboration functionality is very cool and more importantly... quite USEFUL.
When I talk to people about marketing, I am hearing more often things like "viral" or "network effect" or "referral" or "tell-a-friend" or "word of mouth" marketing. While there are technically different definitions to all of these terms, the concept of getting more people to talk about your product or service is powerful, because it is (1) free to your company and (2) the info comes from a trusted source (the friend, not your company). BUT, the key question is always "HOW can I get more people to talk about my product?" I have long believed that if people have a great experience with your product they will want to tell people about it. And here is one of the more interesting viewpoints I have seen, packaged in an entertaining video. Basically Seth says to make something that is both remarkable and valuable, and the rest will take care of itself. While I also think there are things you can do to mkae your idea more discoverable and interesting, which increases the chances people will find it and talk about it, at the core I agree with him that it is more about what you create than how you market it. Video of Seth Godin speaking at Google about viral and word of mouth marketing
It is surprising to me that in so many Web 2.0 blogs you see and feel a real bias toward the Bay Area in their coverage of new and interesting technologies and services. I mean isn't one of the whole points about "web 2.0" and the "social web" supposed to make your geographic location meaningless? Have we all forgotten that we read "The World is Flat" just a couple shourt years ago? I can hire programmers in Russia, have curtomer service reps in India, marketing people telecommuting in all 3 US time zones, and a headquarters in Bermuda or the Grand Caymans to save on taxes... but I can't get Blog coverage if I'm not in Silicon Valley? Come on guys... practice what you preach. Here are some examples of what I am talking about:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/10/24/ilike-brings-free-indy-music-to-itunes-recommendations/ In Michael Arrington's coverage of tons of music reccommendation engines such as Pandora, iLike, Last.fm, MyStrands, and Qloud he never mentions in any of his articles a company called Goombah, which is based on the east coast. While it is not clear if what Goombah has is that much better or different than all the rest, at least mention them
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_race_to_beat_google.phpIn this article Richard McManus neglects to mention ZoomInfo (Alexa ranking of ~1900, a pretty big company) in his article about potential Google competitiors. ZoomInfo has been around longer, developed cooler stuff and is much larger and more established than most of the other companies in the article.
Maybe this all just goes to show that the "social web" has not gone as far as we all might think, and that being geographically close to people does build better relationships, at least in 2007.
I am not sure if there is any company out there right now who really has a good shot to unseat Google as the king of search. But, that doesn't mean it's not fun to talk about. Check out this article on the Read/Write Web. At a minimum it is a good summary and categorization of the players out there who have a shot at beating Google, and maybe you'll get lucky and discover the next Google. Some of my thoughts...
The article missed a bunch of companies, of course, since it is not possible to name everyone, especially in the Web 2.0 world where things seem to pop up overnight like mushrooms. One notable company (Alexa ranking of ~1900) missed in the vertical search space is ZoomInfo. They are building some nifty stuff and the ability to search on people, rather than documents that mention people is useful since many times different documents are referring to the same person, and you want to find all information related to a single person. And many times this with the same or similar names to others. Just try to find yourself or some business colleagues on ZoomInfo... and then try the same thing on Google. The problem gets worse if you want to find your friend Jane Smith or Dave Jones...
Google's strategy in search should not be to be an innovator. Their innovative activity should be focused on things like spreadsheets & documents, Gmail, and other services that could unseat Microsoft. In search, they should just focus on taking the best of what these upstart companies produce and copying it. They have a huge market share in search and a really powerful brand. As long as they do not fall too far behind, they will not lose much ground.
I was reading OnStartups, Dharmesh Shah's blog, and thought there were some really good comments about startups needing to find customers that are similar to each other is right on. Too many startups try to hedge their bets and be all things to all people, and end up spending a ton of time creating features and solutions to serve a large diverse group of customers and are really more of a consulting company than a product company.
Focus on a specific market segment, serve that one well, and then grow from there. Certainly, if you are a believer in the Innovator's Dilemma, then you will say that startups rarely begin with the right strategy and need to evolve business models over time, which is also true. However, this does not mean you pursue multiple business models at the same time. It means work hard on one model and one type of customer, and them make small changes over time as you get feedback from the market.
Any good sales person knows that you don't give the same sales pitch to every prospect. You customize your materials and presentation to what the prospect wants to hear based on a bunch of factors (industry, experience, business challenges, etc.). You can also get 
Let me go on record saying that the biggest threat to Microsoft today is Google SpreadSheets and Documents. Not search, not Gmail... but spreadsheets and documents. And, if you read 
