"Be frank and explicit. That is the right line to take when you wish to conceal your own mind and to confuse the minds of others." - Benjamin Disraeli
"Being contrarian is one thing. Ignoring the obvious is another." - Douglas Craver
“Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.” - Maria Robinson
“Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.” - Henry David Thoreau
Knotice, which offers digital marketing software and services, is the latest tech company to open an office here. The list includes well-known companies like Facebook and Zynga. But Seattle also is attracting smaller companies, such as New Zealand-based GreenButton, which recently opened an office in Seattle.
So wonderful to see Knotice named along with these other great tech brands.
As Maria Robinson once said, “Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.” Nothing could be closer to the truth. But before you can begin this process of transformation you have to stop doing the things that have been holding you back.
Thanks to Ron Copfer for sharing this on Facebook.
The growth of smartphone adoption and associated mobile technologies has been staggering. As of the end of 2011, the majority of U.S. adults under the age of 35 now own a smartphone. Sixty-two percent of them have downloaded apps (mostly games), and mobile Web usage among these consumers has grown 45% since last year.
There’s a theory in programming chess computers that applies to other areas of life, including this one. It’s called “conspiracy theory”. If too many things have to happen in order to bring about the situation you want, then back out of it and try again later.
According to Brian Deagan, co-founder and CEO of Knotice, the new office will help the company better serve its west coast clients. "It's a significant step in the growth of the company," says Deagan. "Not only does this continue to extend our national footprint, it also allows for future expansion. With access to outstanding technology and marketing talent in the Seattle area, it eliminates any potential bottlenecks on future growth and innovation."
The Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University and the Council of Smaller Enterprises (COSE) revealed the Weatherhead 100 ranking at a special awards dinner in Cleveland last night. The Weatherhead 100 recognizes the fastest growing companies in Northeast Ohio. This marks our third consecutive appearance on the list. The fastest growing software company in Northeast Ohio, we ranked #8 again this year with a 547.43% increase in sales over 2010.
The power of a great idea combined with great talent.
We are producing data on a massive scale that is fast polluting our working environments and also encroaching into our personal lives,” he said in a statement when first announcing the policy in Feburary. “At [Atos] we are taking action now to reverse this trend, just as organizations took measures to reduce environmental pollution after the industrial revolution.
Email is a huge time waster for organizations of all sizes.
Deagan said digital marketing “is a market with enormous opportunity” as companies shift advertising dollars “from offline to all things digital – which is usually cheaper, faster and measurable.”
He envisions Knotice taking one of two growth paths.
One path is going it alone – without additional outside investment – and reaching sales of $30 million to $50 million in the next five years. The other route would be bringing on equity investors and growing to $100 million in sales in the next five years.
“We’re happy building a business to either size,” Deagan said. “It really comes down to the right deal with the right financial partners.”
The West Coast office could help draw outside money, he said.
“With a presence in Seattle,” he said, “the risk of talent being a bottleneck to growth is addressed.”
Go West young company!
LeanDog has taken lean practices well beyond the manufacturing realm, where techniques like Kaizen originally made their mark. Today, the Cleveland firm, which helps organizations in virtually every industry take waste out of their IT operations, has hit its stride, growing sales more than 1000 percent since 2007 and landing at 311 on Inc.’s annual list of America’s 500 Fastest Growing Companies.
Congrats to my friends @LeanDog who go out of their way to make me feel like home every time I'm there. Such a breath of fresh air in a City like Cleveland where collaboration is perceived as a threat to our public/private leadership.
"Knotice started this year with 55 employees, and today employs nearly 90, with several positions still available," says CEO Brian Deagan. "Current openings include account executives with mobile experience, software engineers, sales professionals, creative talent, finance and administrative staff . . . We're opening a Seattle office in November, so we're excited to see what the future holds."The company's technology lets marketers access customer data across all channels. Concentri, its on-demand direct software platform, unites mobile marketing; email marketing, the Web and direct display within a Universal Profile environment, letting marketers manage all their digital touchpoints from a single log-in.
"Other less advanced solutions require the user to move data back and forth between disparate systems – which can be a real pain," Deagan says.
“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.” – “Think Different”, an advertising campaign for Apple Inc, 1997.
The social network sciences have become a rich and amazing source of data based validation and hope for social networks. We can intentionally and strategically grow them. And to the degree that we don't have formal power and cannot buy relationships to formal power, we grow our influence at the rate we grow our networks. In the new world of networks, influence can be grown more sustainably than it can be purchased.
The business case for growing influence networks using the principles of the social network sciences is clear and compelling. The principles work whether we are striving to influence choices, habits, votes, opinions, proposals, or adapting to change.
The way we shop is changing and marketing strategies are simply not keeping pace. Whether we're shopping for corn flakes, concert tickets or a honeymoon in Paris, the Internet has changed how we decide what to buy. Today we're all digital explorers, seeking out online ratings, social media-based peer reviews, videos, and in-depth product details as we move down the path to purchase. Marketing has evolved and modern marketing strategies have to evolve with the changing shape of shopping.
At Google, we call this online decision-making moment the Zero Moment of Truth -- or simply ZMOT.
Embrace it or die.
The hot mobile statistic of the week is that there will likely be more mobile internet users in 2015 than PC users, according to IDC. Whether or not that turns out to be an accurate prediction it’s going to be true at some point, and probably within five years at the outside.
Spotted by an Inside Facebook reader, the new tab, found in Page Insights, includes such data as impressions per post and the total percentage of a Page’s fans that left feedback on the post.Before this test, admins could only see daily impressions and feedback data in Insights, Inside Facebook said, noting that the enhancement could compete with certain low-end page management companies. Still, some level of in-house skill is required even with this new data, it added: “To pull actionable lessons from the Insights data, admins will have to do some legwork in Excel.
Today we are releasing the first benchmarking application for startups based on the Startup Genome framework. Founders can now assess their type and stage, diagnose themselves for premature scaling and compare themselves to other startups across more than 25 key performance indicators. Try it here.
Imagine if we took all the money wasted on econ dev and put it in projects like the Startup Genome.
Led by start-ups, small employers have generated 65% of net new jobs over the past 17 years, says the Small Business Administration. As such, steady declines in start-up size, which stretch back more than a decade, could explain the slow labor market recovery following the previous recession in 2001, as well as today, according to Brian Headd, an economist at the SBA's Office of Advocacy.
"This is a significant change and not necessarily tied to business cycles," says Mr. Headd.
Rather than purchasing the tools and manpower needed to run their companies, more small firms are renting, sharing or outsourcing resources, typically through online services, according to Steve King, a partner at Emergent Research, a research and consulting firm for small businesses.
By tapping into Web-based business tools, Sam Rogoway earlier this month launched Near Networks, a nationwide video production firm, with only four employees. An entrepreneur based in Santa Monica, Calif., Mr. Rogoway says tasks that used to require extra workers can now be done online.
I don’t care if you’re a billionaire. If you haven’t started a company, really gambled your resume and your money and maybe even your marriage to just go crazy and try something on your own, you’re no pirate and you aren’t in the club.
That thrill of your first hire, when you’ve convinced some other crazy soul to join you in your almost certainly doomed project. The high from raising venture capital and starting to see your name mentioned in the press. The excitement of launch and…gulp…customers! and the feeling of truly learning something useful, you’re just not sure what it is, when the company almost inevitably crashes and burns.
Now that person is interesting. That person has stories to tell. That person is a man who has been in the arena.
As I pondered these findings, I started looking at how people used pronouns in other texts — blogs, emails, speeches, class writing assignments, and natural conversation. Remarkably, how people used pronouns was correlated with almost everything I studied. For example, use of first-person singular pronouns (I, me, my) was consistently related to gender, age, social class, honesty, status, personality, and much more. Although the findings were often robust, people in daily life were unable to pick them up when reading or listening to others. It was almost as if there was a secret world of pronouns that existed outside our awareness.” ~ James Pennebaker
While our two companies run very differently, we have come together to support what we believe is the only set of ideas that stand a chance of turning things around—ideas that can pass political muster in an otherwise very deeply divided Congress. These ideas center on reinvigorating what up to recently has been the most reliable source of job growth and innovation in our economy—the formation of new firms.
GenOn is one of the nation's largest operators of electric generating plants. Without new, growing companies and the people they employ, the demand for electricity will not generate growing profits for our company.
The Principal Financial Group provides employee benefit programs to 100,000 growing businesses employing six million U.S. workers. That includes services to nearly 800 employee-owned businesses. We know growing businesses are the real job creators in our economy today.
In our view, there is no hope of giving consumers renewed confidence in America unless governments at all levels mount a vigorous effort to get rid of rules that discourage entrepreneurs from launching and growing new businesses.
This month's Pew Internet Report on Smartphones spotlights some specifics. Under 30, nonwhite, low-income and less-educated smartphone users report "they mostly go online using their phones." Some 87% of them, according to Pew, sometimes use their mobile phones to browse the web, but 38% use their handsets as their primary means to access the Internet.
Dane Stangler, director of research at Kauffman, says the annual number of new "employer firms"—start-ups that employ more than just the founder—was steady for years and has drifted down since the mid 1990s. "So all of the energy that we've poured into entrepreneurship over the last 30 years"—incubators, education, special funding—"hasn't moved the needle," he says.
And it won't with the bloated econ dev orgs that have sprouted all over the country to hand out public money. Our government isn't the answer. The sooner we recognize that the sooner we'll turn the corner on value creation that results in job creation. I couldn't have said it better.
Amazon, in opting for the latter, could become the first of many major digital-content sellers to take the route of such Web applications, which use a technology called HTML5 that give browser-based software similar functionality to downloaded software.
The presentation that really brought home the potential of these next-generation web technologies for me was by Brad Neuberg, a developer who used to work at Google. Neuberg’s talk had the theme of “Small pieces, loosely joined,” and showed how technologies such as HTML5, CSS3, SVG, Canvas and WebGL can be used together to create stunning applications within the browser. The centerpiece of his presentation was the slide deck. It wasn’t a standard PowerPoint or Keynote presentation, but rather, a jaw-dropping, browser-based, 3-D slide demo, built using the very tools that Neuberg was talking about,. Neuberg could slickly navigate between the various slides in the presentation at will, and many “slides” contained a live demo of the technologies discussed. If you have Safari on Mac OS X Snow Leopard, you can check it out here. (Note: To navigate between the slides, use the arrow keys. You can zoom in and out using the space bar. The 3-D slide demo only works properly in Safari currently, but you can view a video of it in action in this blog post). While these technologies are impressive on their own, Neuberg’s demo showed that the way they can be easily combined in the browser will lead to real innovation in web apps over the next few years.
In the last month or so, we’ve seen some major services relaunch their websites for the iPhone, iPad, and other tablets based on HTML5 and bring them to the mainstream users—so much so that even giants such as Microsoft (MSFT) are ready to cast aside their own technologies in favor of HTML5.
Google (GOOG), whose apps keep getting better and better, is clearly leading the HTML5 charge. If that wasn’t enough, in July, Pandora relaunched its website for tablets. Earlier this month, Twitter launched an HTML5-based Web client that’s as fantastic as the dedicated app itself.
On Wednesday, August 10, Amazon (AMZN) launched Kindle Cloud Reader, which is so good, writes our Darrell Etherington, that "you’d be hard-pressed to tell that you aren’t using a native app, especially if you place a shortcut to the Web app on your iPad’s home screen." Vudu, owned by Wal-Mart (WMT), launched an HTML5 version of its Web app. As we had previously noted, "more than 2.1 billion mobile devices will have HTML5 browsers by 2016, up from just 109 million in 2010, according to a new report by ABI Research."
Started in late June, Google+ is growing faster than Facebook and MySpace Inc. did in their early days. The service, which lets people connect with and manage groups of friends on a website, gained about 25 million users worldwide in less than a month, estimates market researcher ComScore Inc. Facebook has more than 750 million active users.
In a world that is more "connected" than ever before, technology still does not facilitate meaningful conversations. Twitter limits to 140 characters and Facebook minimizes to 1-click actions. We believe E-Mail is still the most viable platform for having meaningful conversations and we're here to fix its problems.
10 years from now, we believe we'll still be using E-Mail. Except, it'll be 10x better, and E-Mail as we know it now will be vastly different. We are here to lead that movement to evolve E-Mail.
Wish they had a free plan so I could check it out!
As Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett point out in The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, phenomena usually described as "social problems" (crime, ill-health, imprisonment rates, mental illness) are far more common in unequal societies than ones with better economic distribution and less gap between the richest and the poorest. Decades of individualism, competition and state-encouraged selfishness – combined with a systematic crushing of unions and the ever-increasing criminalisation of dissent – have made Britain one of the most unequal countries in the developed world.
Something tells me that while we drink the coolaid of economic development "Cleveland-style" this is more likely the outcome for CLE than what we're being told. Afterall something like 3 out of 5 people in CLE live at or below the poverty line.
Facebook's use as a job-recruitment tool remains small, but its appeal may be growing. Some recruiters say they have all but eliminated their spending on job boards, which can charge a few hundred dollars per job posting, depending on volume. Others note that while LinkedIn contains a more comprehensive résumé database, candidates tend to value referrals from their connections on Facebook more.
The majority of social-media traffic to Waste Management Inc.'s careers website comes from Facebook, beating out LinkedIn, said Jenny DeVaughn, manager of social media and employment branding. The Houston-based environmental services company is currently trying to fill 1,500 positions—from software developers to garbage truck drivers.
In addition to posting jobs and videos of current employees on its Facebook page, the company has recruiters and other employees find user groups and join discussions.
Here are a few:As a college student in 2004, Brian Stelter anonymously launched TV Newser, an insightful and gossipy blog about television news that soon became must-reading among industry insiders. His reporting was so compelling that he was hired by the New York Times, where he now is one of the top media experts in the nation.
Recognizing that the mainstream media were missing lots of market-moving news in the tedious corporate disclosures filed at the Securities and Exchange Commission, Michelle Leder started publishing the overlooked information at Footnoted.Com. Last year, she sold her journalistically and commercially valuable site to Morningstar, a $2 billion financial publishing company that wisely kept her on as editor.
Appalled by the shriveling local coverage in Minneapolis-St. Paul, veteran newsman Joel Kramer in 2007 launched the non-profit MinnPost, which has become perhaps the most successful grassroots news organization in the country. MinnPost not only helps to fill the news void in the Twin Cities but also provides valuable visibility and professional incomes to the writers who contribute to it.
How does this apply to your profession? Have you seen similar examples of this in your chosen career?
What we do
Our goal is to inspire urban planners, architects, developers, educators, economists, and policy makers to apply new approaches and technologies in ways that make community development more participatory, collaborative, and effective. We highlight new online tools and examine how they can be used in the emerging culture of citizen participation and engagement. We also explore low-tech, high-impact strategies for community involvement. Every day, new projects and developments across the globe demonstrate creative ways for including citizens in the shaping of places -- EngagingCities is where you can follow and become part of this movement. We share the stories of the people, places, and practices that turn engaging ideas into applicable realities.
Like a lot of Web innovators, the Obama campaign did not invent anything completely new. Instead, by bolting together social networking applications under the banner of a movement, they created an unforeseen force to raise money, organize locally, fight smear campaigns and get out the vote that helped them topple the Clinton machine and then John McCain and the Republicans.
Cleveland’s annual GiveCamp this weekend produced 22 projects engaging more than 200 tech volunteers. They collaborated to tirelessly create an amazing array of websites and apps for appreciative local non-profits, representing a half-million dollars worth of services.
It’s another amazing example of generous communities, adding to this already robust emerging social pattern. What is less easily measurable are the rich learning sets and network connections in the tech community that will continue to ripple into the future.
What could be parallel events for the medical, architecture, finance, and agriculture sectors?
Here is a one-page overview of the four principles and four conversations for building thriving communities. It is a quick reference for people in communities learning how to engage in the building of their communities.
The Four Principles of Community
Our individual well-being will always be related to the well-being of the communities we belong to.
In thriving communities, people know and look out for each other, learn and share with each other.
The core difference between thriving and stuck communities is the kinds of conversations people have together.
In thriving communities, people talk about what they would love to see possible, what they bring to the community, what they can do to realize their dreams for the community, and who else can help make this happen. In stuck communities people talk about problems, deficiencies, permission, and blame.
Scoville takes all of the places you’ve “checked in” at (either on Foursquare or Facebook) and uses them to create recommendations for others in your community. The idea is to let you know about the happening spots in your city. This could be very appealing to planners, because it very much resembles a community-driven asset mapping tool.
We are a non-profit tech company that develops free and open source software for information collection, visualization and interactive mapping.
So, search engine optimizers have largely moved away from using social media in their link building strategies as a way to get links to help search engine optimization factors.
However, this is all an evolving topic. What I mean is that the search engines are seeing social media as a place that can offer very legitimate and valuable information when it comes to links.
If a link is being tweeted over and over and over again, there must be something interesting there. For the search engines to completely ignore this information would be shortsighted and too absolutist.
And sure enough, Danny Sullivan teased out in an interview that both Bing and Google use signals from the social media world to influence link popularity.
You will definitely want to read the entire article if you’re into this kind of thing. But here are some of the cooler quotes.
Bing on Twitter: “We do look at the social authority of a user. We look at how many people you follow, how many follow you, and this can add a little weight to a listing in regular search results.” (Google said that they to use it as a signal.)
Danny: “Do you calculate whether a link should carry more weight depending on the person who tweets it?”
Bing and Google: “Yes.”Danny: “Do you track links shared within Facebook?”
These are important quotes:Bing: “Yes. We look at links shared that are marked as “Everyone,” and links shared from Facebook fan pages.”
Google: “We treat links shared on Facebook fan pages the same as we treat tweeted links. We have no personal wall data from Facebook.”Those are important because it discusses the value of fan pages.
Press releases are great SEO builders. When you distribute one using a press release distribution service like PRWeb (there are other services, but I have a long-time love affair with PRWeb and they know it), it sends your release to dozens of news and niche websites. On each of those pages where your press release lives, there’s a link back to your website. Google thinks your website must be pretty awesome to have so many links from other sites, so it ranks your site higher in search engine results.
Here are my top 10 tips for getting the most out of your press releases:
1. Start with a gripping headline. Headlines are what draw readers in. If yours isn’t engaging and exciting, it’ll get skipped over. But on the other hand, if it’s something that stops you in your tracks, like “Fancy Underwear: Coming to a Mailbox Near You” (a headline I just made up for a pretend online lingerie store), you’ll get the clicks.
It seems like every politician has a plan for putting people back to work. But we and the Planet Money team couldn’t help but wonder…how do you create a job? Can politicians truly create many jobs? Is it possible the whole thing is just well-intentioned hot air?
Thanks @danyoungdxy for turning us all on to this!
We were doing research on how Chattanooga had turned itself around in recent years and the big question was emerging leadership," McManus says. "Generation after generation has left, so our problem was how to retain our best and brightest. It's the creatives who set trends and create places, so we had to go and create real programs.
Recognizing our nation’s need for greater economic participation at all levels of society, the Ice House Entrepreneurship Program captures and conveys the “mindset” of entrepreneurs who overcame adversity and are now helping lead our economic recovery. The program was created by the Entrepreneurial Learning Initiative and Clifton Taulbert’s Building Community Institute.
Getting cloudier
The number of people in the U.S. who use services on the cloud is forecast to skyrocket.
Year Subscribers
2010 46 million
2011 65 million
2012 89 million
2013 116 million
2014 144 million
2015 172 million
2016 196 million
Source: Forrester Research
Recognizing our nation’s need for greater economic participation at all levels of society, the Ice House Entrepreneurship Program captures and conveys the “mindset” of entrepreneurs who overcame adversity and are now helping lead our economic recovery. The program was created by the Entrepreneurial Learning Initiative and Clifton Taulbert’s Building Community Institute.
For example, Knotice, a firm based in Akron, Ohio, has expanded its staff by more than 500 percent over the previous five years. The company recently announced that it will add 23 news jobs over the next couple months by placing a billboard that reads "Grow with us.""Knotice is proud to call northeast Ohio home and we are thrilled to be able to provide job opportunities to talented individuals in the area," said Knotice co-founder and CEO Brian Deagan. "Company growth cannot happen without great people and great customers, and we are thankful to have both."
Great jobs start with a great management team.
Doug is a Board Member of One Revolution and directs their social media outreach. He is working to raise $10K to bring Chris, the documentary and the Nametags program to Cleveland/NEO for a week this Fall. If you would like to help email Doug at: doug@launchtribe.com
I feel lucky to call Chris a good friend and to serve on the Board of Directors for One Revolution.
The seeds of Knotice were planted in 2001, when marketing firm Craver Marcom Inc. created a technology division designed to help broadband Internet service providers better communicate with their customers. The company hired Mr. Deagan and Bill Landers, who is Knotice's chief technology officer, to help run that division, called eMarketing by CMI. In 2003 they ended up buying it from Craver Marcom, which owner Douglas Craver shut down that same year to go into consulting instead.Mr. Craver also connected the startup to Jonathon Grimm and his father, Richard Grimm, who helped finance the launch. Richard Grimm — who was CEO of Technicare Corp., a medical imaging company that closed its Solon plant in 1986 — remains on Knotice's board of directors. Jonathon Grimm, who previously worked in the investment banking and private equity fields, today is Knotice's president and chief financial officer.
Knotice has been in Northeast Ohio since late 2003, when Jon Grimm, Brian Deagan, and Bill Landers spun the company out of Craver Marcom. They had an idea for a product that allowed marketers to conduct their key digital marketing functions (web content targeting, email, and mobile marketing) on a single software platform.
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Many "free" apps such as the version of Rovio Mobile Oy's "Angry Birds" on GetJar make money for developers from tiny embedded ads, similar to those on Google sites. Such ads will provide less than 10 percent of application revenue that is expected to reach $9 billion this year from handset and Google stores alone, said Stephanie Baghdassarian, an analyst at Gartner Inc. in Paris.
Free Apps
Free applications will account for 86 percent of downloads from the stores of Google and handset makers this year and more than 88 percent in 2015, according to estimates by Gartner.
"We're in favor of free and open systems in every way," Laurs said in the phone interview. "We don't think developers should have to pay a tax on downloads or future commerce through their apps, or accept restrictions."
Other application stores such as Apple's encourage developers to charge for downloads and then take 30 percent of the revenue. While saying this may be attractive for small developers who want help with marketing and revenue collection, Laurs called this a "tax."
Many applications are mobile extensions of existing businesses that operate over the Web, such as airlines, banks, and communications and social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, Laurs said.
'Angry Birds'
The free model is suitable for applications linked to existing businesses because the companies can then sell apps and other products to users without worrying about fees, he said. It is also a better model for users who don't have a convenient method to make payments, he said. GetJar gave up on charging for apps in 2006.
Companies spend an average of 75 cents for every piece of mail they send to their customers. This adds up to huge monthly costs and a lot of wasted resources, because most customers would prefer to do without the clutter that comes with mail.
With Manilla, companies can stop printing and sending regular mail. This allows them to connect more directly with you to provide bills, statements and other services.
LawPivot is a legal Q&A site in which small and medium-sized businesses can receive crowdsourced and confidential legal answers from relevant lawyers, and find the right lawyers for all their needs. In addition, lawyers can better market themselves to businesses by answering questions and creating an online reputation on LawPivot. Our management team consists of the former lead mergers and acquisitions lawyer for Apple Inc. and lawyers who worked at top national law firms. We started LawPivot in order to ease the burden on businesses in finding answers to their legal questions, in an easy and affordable way.
Following Froyo, Gingerbread, Honeycomb, and other foods you shouldn’t have at this hour in the day, Google’s properly labeled its upcoming Android iteration. Introducing Ice Cream Sandwich, with an absolutely incredible new logo. (Surprise, surprise!) Google is calling it “the one OS that works everywhere” with new APIs to help with scalability — phones, tablets, and anything else in between. (We’re assuming Google TV eventually, but there’s no direct mention and the slide didn’t show any TVs.) No pictures of the UI in action, but as you’d expect, Google is saying the new Honeycomb design elements will be coming to the phone with the update — “including the holographic user interface, more multitasking, the new launcher and richer widgets.” On stage, we’re watching 3D headtracking via the webcam, called Virtual Camera operator — it figures out who is speaking and focuses on the person. Alas, no word on release date. More pictures after the break!
Following Froyo, Gingerbread, Honeycomb, and other foods you shouldn’t have at this hour in the day, Google’s properly labeled its upcoming Android iteration. Introducing Ice Cream Sandwich, with an absolutely incredible new logo. (Surprise, surprise!) Google is calling it “the one OS that works everywhere” with new APIs to help with scalability — phones, tablets, and anything else in between. (We’re assuming Google TV eventually, but there’s no direct mention and the slide didn’t show any TVs.) No pictures of the UI in action, but as you’d expect, Google is saying the new Honeycomb design elements will be coming to the phone with the update — “including the holographic user interface, more multitasking, the new launcher and richer widgets.” On stage, we’re watching 3D headtracking via the webcam, called Virtual Camera operator — it figures out who is speaking and focuses on the person. Alas, no word on release date. More pictures after the break!
Behind the computer science chatter about event-driven access to web servers as opposed to thread-based access and figuring out why JavaScript engines are so hot, here are some basic reasons why Node.js is hot and what it allows programmers to do.
It’s easier. It’s built to run in JavaScript, which has a huge developer base and has a warm and fuzzy community. Never underestimate the power of familiarity and friendliness.
It’s faster. We’re impatient people, as Facebook’s continued efforts to shave microseconds off load times illustrates. So, in addition to all the hardware used to speed up our servers, we’re optimizing our code not just in the application, but at the server to make things load that much faster. Much like Ajax offered a better browsing experience, Node.js offers a better web-serving experience.
It’s scalable. If you’re building a successful consumer-facing business, you’re going to eventually need a lot of servers (or a cloud provider with a lot of servers), and so whatever you plan to run on those has to be able to handle a massively distributed environment. Node.js does, which gives it an edge.
What are you building your startup or next application with? Have you given much thought about how you'll scale your solution? I ask because I see so many applications built on the wrong programming platform because the founder took the word of someone "married" to a particular programming language or given bad advice from some econ dev org. Before they know it they've blown $50K and have nothing to show for it.
After analyzing 22 million tweets last year, researchers at Hewlett-Packard found that it’s not enough to attract Twitter followers — you must inspire those followers to take action. That could mean persuading them to try Bikram yoga, donate to the Sierra Club or share a recipe for apple pie. In other words, influence is about engagement and motivation, not just racking up legions of followers.
Industry professionals say it’s also important to focus your digital presence on one or two areas of interest. Don’t be a generalist. Most importantly: be passionate, knowledgeable and trustworthy.
At Airbnb, which was founded in 2008 and lets people book vacations in other people's homes, institutionalized fun is a philosophy. "You can't take the day too seriously if you're in a meeting with somebody wearing a fake mustache," says Mr. Gebbia, who often participates in the company's Mustache Monday.
He says creating a space where people feel comfortable spurs innovation: "We're going to work hard and play hard."
The plan for Airbnb's new office, a 25,000-square-foot San Francisco facility the company moved into three weeks ago, was inspired by its first one: Mr. Gebbia's apartment. There, employees at the growing company had worked cheek-by-jowl, even in bedrooms and the kitchen. The new office has long, spacious benches that surround three "living rooms" used as conference rooms, modeled after the three most popular houses that the company rents out to travelers on its website.
I REPEAT: He says creating a space where people feel comfortable spurs innovation: "We're going to work hard and play hard."
Zynga plans to create an unusual triple-class ownership structure that will allow its founder and chief executive, Mark Pincus, to keep tight control over voting power after its IPO. The company is offering Class A shares to new investors, but keeping Class B and Class C shares within the control of current owners, including management.
While Class A shareholders will be entitled to one vote per share on company matters, Class B and Class C shares will entitle their bearers to more than one vote per share, though the exact number hasn't yet been outlined by the company.
Mr. Pincus, who named the company after his late American bulldog, stands to reap the greatest fortune from the IPO, with 16% of its class B shares and 100% of its class C shares. The deal is also likely to provide a big boost to Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the storied Silicon Valley venture firm, which holds 11% of Zynga's stock.
Note to self.
But as I scanned the room last night and watched those friends of mine, I realized that each of them was now involved in an Internet startup in some way or another. I then thought about the rest of my Marin pals, and realized that nearly every one of them is either running or considering running an Internet startup. Only thing is, to them it's not about "starting an Internet company." Instead, it's about innovating in their chosen field. And to do so, they of course are leveraging the Internet as platform. The world is pivoting, and the axis is the industry we've built. This is what we meant when we chose "Web Meets World" for the theme of the 2008 Web 2 Summit, but it's really happening now, at least in my world. I'm curious if it's happening in yours.
Is it happening in your world?
I guess my point is this: The Internet no longer belongs to the young tech genius with a great idea and the means to execute it online. Innovation on the Internet now belongs to the world, and that is perhaps the most exciting thing about this space. It's attracting not just the "next Mark Zuckerberg," but also thousands of super smart innovators from every field imaginable, each of whom brings extraordinary insights and drive to play. And that's another reason I love this industry, because, in the end, it's not a singular business. It now encapsulates the human narrative, writ very large.
Would anyone like to argue against this opinion?
Cincinnati won the honors as the most “social media-savvy city in the world” from Mashable.com, a top website for social media, digital and technology news, in a contest the site held to celebrate Social Media Day, which is Thursday.
Cincinnati won in part because of “a very convincing video” submitted by Blair Ward, a 22-year-old student at Northern Kentucky University’s Chase College of Law.
CincyTech has garnered its first exit with the sale of a drug-licensing program from Blue Ash Therapeutics to Forest Laboratories on April 19.CincyTech will receive 10 times its original investment -- $2.5 million – which will be distributed to the partners in Fund I: Fort Washington Capital Partners, the Health Foundation of Greater Cincinnati, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, and the Castellini Foundation. (Ohio Third Frontier also has money in CincyTech’s Fund I but does not receive a payout.)
CincyTech invested $250,000 in Blue Ash Therapeutics in January 2010 after spending a year working to license the drug-development program for azimilide from Procter & Gamble Pharmaceuticals and then Warner Chilcott, finding co-investors and finding a CEO, Greg Flexter (pictured left), to work with former Procter executive and scientist Kevin Malloy (pictured right).
The deal is the first “exit” – or cash out – for CincyTech, which has invested $7 million in 21 companies since May 2007 and has helped attract $140 million in co-investment and follow-on money to these companies.
Investors are beginning to consider social ventures more seriously. "There's never been more interest from a more diverse group of investors in impact investing than there is now," says Gilbert. In November, a JPMorgan (JPM) research report labeled impact investments as an "emerging asset class" with potential investing profits in the hundreds of billions over the next decade. (The report was produced with the Rockefeller Foundation and the Global Impact Investing Network.) The bank distinguished impact investments, intended to create social and environmental benefits, from socially responsible investments designed to minimize the harm of business operations. "The impact investment market," the JPMorgan report notes, "is now at a significant turning point as it enters the mainstream."
To meet the entrepreneurs behind the 25 ventures, flip through this slide show.
Are you a Social Entrepreneur? Please share your thoughts and experiences.
Aviary is a pioneering and leading provider of creative tools for web and mobile.With a suite of online creative applications and a powerful API, we offer a simple (and free!) solution for creators of all genres to build, edit, and share their work. We're a small, creative team and we're passionate about powering the world's creativity. If you're an awesome person who wants to help us achieve that goal, we'd love to hear from you!
Kubec also said that, at least in Europe, people have been getting malware just from listening to music. "You can run a standalone music application, which displays an ad. If it hits a Java exploit, you get infected." He also criticized the blogging tool WordPress for its shared theme plug-ins, because they're often written with backdoors installed, creating yet another vector by which hackers can access your Web site.
This brings up another point. If entrepreneurs can build sophisticated technologies so cheaply in the Web world, who needs venture capitalists any more? Software startups often spend the first few months of their existence polishing business plans and pitching investors. They can instead be working with smart people all over the world and focus their energy on perfecting their technologies, as Beat The GMAT did. When law school grads can build successful technology companies—Park says his site has been profitable since its inception, with annual revenue close to $1 million—the notion that website founders need computer programming backgrounds is outdated.
I know what I'd rather be doing.
About RockMelt
Your Browser. Re-Imagined.
RockMelt is re-imagining the browser for how people use the web today by making it easy to stay in touch with friends, search online, and get updates from your favorite sites.
If it makes it easier to stay connected to my large Social Sphere then it will.
In November, Nansee Kim-Parker raised $20,000 on LendingClub.com in less than two weeks to open TokyoMoto, a San Francisco motorcycle-repair shop. After clearing a prescreening process, she posted details of her background and her business idea and attracted hundreds of small lenders from around the country. Her loan has a three-year fixed interest rate of 9.85%.
"It's like a village, gathering support here and there," says Ms. Kim-Parker, who calls traditional bank credit "unaffordable" for small businesses.
Lydia Hamilton-Monnie says she was turned down by three banks before raising $25,000 on Prosper last year to open a plus-size women's apparel store in Milwaukee. With a three-year fixed rate of 12% on the loan, Ms. Hamilton-Monnie says she is on track to pay back her nearly 1,000 lenders by December 2012.
Peer-to-peer lending sites, which first appeared in the U.S. five years ago, charge borrowers a fee for connecting them to a network of lenders, who put up anywhere from $25 to $1,000. Lenders are paid back with interest, with the rate set on the basis of a site-assigned credit rating, minus the site's fee. Most loans are for less than $10,000, but they can exceed $30,000.
Forget the banks, or even funding from local quasi-public/private funds, get you startup up and running with a peer-to-peer loan. Have you looked in to or used peer-to-peer loans? What do you think?
These and other high-profile hacking attacks are changing the way the public perceives the incidents. "Breaches are increasingly viewed less as a weakness on the part of the company and more as the sophistication and relentlessness on the part of the hackers," said Michael Fox, who specializes in data-breach response at ICR Inc., a communications firm. "There's not as much of a stigma attached."
While a breach often results in fines and other costs, customers don't tend to flee. Sales at TJX Cos. Inc., the parent of TJ Maxx and other stores, climbed 7% in the fiscal year following its disclosure in January 2007 that hackers stole as many as 94 million credit- and debit-card numbers.
I (Douglas Craver | @dougcraver) often tell the tech startups I advise that there is a lot more forgiveness in the market than you thing. Problems are inevitable and it is all about how you handle them that counts, not the problem itself.
Appirio's just released a software package that lets enterprise customers put together an iPad or iPhone app almost on a click-and-drag basis. The apps are hooked together using Salesforce.com's cloud-based systems, and pushed out "live" to business's iPad users.
Sounds simple, but Appirio's new package comes with huge promises, too. It allows developers with almost no iOS experience to build an app, meaning they could even be company executives rather than coders. Its home base in the cloud means it won't hog up company hard drive space, either. As founder Narinder Singh tells Fast Company, it's really hard today for businesses to put together their own apps, since "you want the experience of a native app that feels like Angry Birds but you don't have the experience to build it yourself." Companies find themselves using in-house coder teams, but that's not necessarily speedy or cheap.
Hence the new package, which basically lets firms quickly strap together a native iPad or iPhone app to meet a particular business need, distribute it to their staff, and have them "updated in real time, in the field without needing to redeploy," Singh says. And unlike a web-app solution, mobile apps can allow companies to manage apps in a much more centralized, controlled way, and leverage the extra powers a native app on an iPad and iPhone can have compared to a more limited web app--including ease of use, since they use all the familiar input methods used by iOS. To speed up the app-building process, the company's even put together a suite of template apps, including systems like field surveys, location-based apps, time and action-tracking apps, and search and display apps.
Thanks to my partner Jack Ricchiuto (@zenext) for pointing me to this article. I recently told him that DIY SaaSs that let the user build their own apps, like you can do with Podio (http://www.podio.com) for project management, were the future of what I call "self-service computing" made possible by the Cloud.
The results were the latest sign of trouble for the company, which is watching handsets from rivals like Apple Inc. eat away at its once-dominant share of the smartphone market. RIM hasn't released a new BlackBerry model for nearly a year as it tries to rejuvenate a product line that's been criticized as clunky, under-powered and stodgy.
Research In Motion is signaling weakness in the marketplace, with sales of high-end BlackBerry devices falling and delays in releasing a new operating system hurting its share of the mobile business, MarketWatch's Dan Gallagher tells Laura Mandaro.
It has seen its share of sales in the benchmark North American market fall to 16.5% at the end of the first quarter of 2011 from 41.3% in the year earlier period, according to research firm Gartner.
Some observers worry RIM is fast following in the path of Finnish handset maker Nokia Corp., which recently issued a steep second-quarter revenue warning, citing market-share loss to rival smartphones, most notably low-end devices powered by Google Inc.'s Android software.
Following up on the advertising toolbox, you also need to let the media (oh if only there was a site about web 2.0 and social networking where you could get covered…) know about your new venture. We’ve gathered 20+ sites that will help you with getting your press release out in the world for free.
Chris Waddell
Champion paralympic skier
Middlebury CollegeA couple of years ago, I spent a bunch of time in Tibet and I came home. And I went to go get my mail. My mailbox is at the end of my street, so I parked my car and started pulling my chair out. And this little girl rode by, probably like 6 years old, on her little pink bike, streamers coming off her handlebars, and she said, “What happened to your legs?”
I said: “I was a ski racer here at Middlebury, and it was my first day of Christmas vacation. I went to the mountain with my brother, met up with a bunch of friends, took a couple of runs preparing to train, and my ski popped off in the middle of the turn. And I fell in the middle of the trail, and I broke two vertebrae.”
She said, “So you’ll never walk again?” And I said, “No, probably not.” As she rode away, she said, “That’s too bad.”
I wish that I had stopped her because if I’d never had my accident I never would have been the best in the world at anything. I wouldn’t have turned a hobby into a profession. I don’t think I would have had the guts to get up in front of you and talk. Wouldn’t have acted in a soap opera. I wouldn’t have met presidents and heads of state.
But that little girl saw the tragedy; she didn’t see the potential gift.
Solution: As a Result, Social Media Management Systems are Emerging
Like CMS and WMS for centralized website management, Social Media Management Systems (SMMS) empower social media teams to manage multiple distributed social channels from one location –enabling the opportunity to build deeper relationships by being in more places at once.Definition: Social Media Management Systems are collection of procedures used to manage work flow in a disparate social media environment. These procedures can be manual or computer-based and enable the manager to listen, aggregate, publish, and manage multiple social media channels from one tool.
How it works: Three simple features In the most basic sense, these management tools do the following: 1) connect with social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. 2) Allow the manager to quickly publish from one location to each of those channels, some provide ability to customize to each channel 3) Aggregate and Manage social data. The system allows the manager to see an aggregated view of what’s happening (from views to comments) and may offer some form of analytics and conversion metrics.
Since its inception, Knotice has been consistently recognized as one of the fastest-growing companies in northeast Ohio (most recently #8 on the 2011 Weatherhead 100, among others). With increasing demand for Knotice’s marketing software and services, the company is in the process of hiring for approximately 23 new professional-level jobs between now and August 2011 across several departments. (For a complete list of opportunities, go to www.knotice.com/careers.)
To help attract the attention of qualified professionals who may be ready to make a change, Knotice has even erected a billboard along I-77 North near downtown Cleveland that reads “Grow with us” – a not-so-common sight with the current economic conditions.
That’s why the resume is on the out, and the bio is on the rise. People work with people they can relate to and identify with. Trust comes from personal disclosure. And that kind of sharing is hard to convey in a resume. Your bio needs to tell the bigger story. Especially, when you’re in business for yourself, or in the business of relationships. It’s your bio that’s read first.To help you with this, your bio should address the following five questions:
- Who am I?
- How can I help you?
- How did I get here (i.e. know what I know)?
- Why can you trust me?
- What do we share in common?
In 2007, Cyrus Massoumi was flying home to New York after a business trip when he ruptured his eardrum. The McKinsey consultant needed to see an ear-nose-throat specialist immediately, but it took him three days to even find a doctor. Massoumi couldn't believe the holdup: If he could book a dinner reservation online, he thought, why not a doctor's appointment? That's when he came up with the concept for ZocDoc, an OpenTable for medical appointments.
This is one of those no-brainers why didn't I think of that ideas? What are other problems can be solved using the OpenTable appointment model?
Jim did an awesome job on our new logo. Please check out his design services and let him know we sent you. He's one of a few NEO/CLE designers I know who fully grasp Web 2.0. You won't be disappointed.
Julian's classroom has windows on three sides and room for his desk as well as a separate lectern. Inside, 27 children sit in front of 27 laptops, all logged on to the Khan Academy. Used in the classroom, the Khan Academy flips the traditional curriculum; students listen to the lectures at home, on their own time, and do the homework in class, which allows the teacher time to address student issues individually. As the class progresses, Julian wanders through the desks with an iPad running Khan's dashboard, so he can see who's ahead and who's behind. He doesn't really need it: He already knows exactly how each student is progressing. And he isn't doing as much individual teaching as one might expect. Often, the lagging students are tutored by the students who are ahead. "The kids know whom to call on," says Julian. "It happened on its own. They just began to get out of their seats and work with each other. They've identified their trustworthy peer tutors. They know they can call on Sriram and Akhil and Albert, and that they know what they're talking about. Mainly, I've had to spend time teaching them how to teach."
Erin Green, principal of Covington, loves the Khan Academy and plans to expand it to more classrooms. "Many of the students are working at a level of mathematics that I have never seen in an elementary school before, maybe not even in a junior high school before," she says. "They're engaged and they're excited, and that's the most exciting part. It meets you at your level."
The Khan Academy has also been introduced in two seventh-grade classrooms for struggling learners in the Los Altos district, and the district is considering using it in all schools next year. "Their improvement has been dramatic," says Khan of the slow group, who notes that his studies are small, not peer-reviewed, and just intended for him to get a sense of whether Khan Academy methods are working or not. "We're seeing 70 percent on average improvement on the pre-algebra topics in those classrooms. It definitely tells us it's not derailing anything. All the indicators say that something profound looks like it's happening."
Powerful stuff!
