May 4, 2012

Portland to become the next Silicon Valley?

Portland is making efforts to increase the success of the city’s startup businesses by helping them find mentors, talent and resources.

The City of Roses offers a “brew” of services for startup companies’ through two initiatives, Portland 100 and Techlandia.  The initiatives stem from the Software Association of Oregon (SAO), and the goal is to help startup businesses attract talent and grow their business to $100 million or more liquidity, or achieve $100 million or more in sales within five years.

Portland has quite a few noteworthy startups including one of our own clients, Chirpify.    Additional startup information can be found on the Portland Startup Scene website.

 

Twitt
April 23, 2012

iPhone-ification of the mobile industry

We often work with clients in the mobile industry in one way or another – and have for many years. So of course we’re aware of how much the industry has changed in the last 5 years, driven in large part by the introduction of the iPhone. Still, it’s not always easy to see the change. Except, well, I guess it is… if you take the time to compile a graphic showing phone form factors. (image via my nephew, who works for AT&T)

iphone.jpg

Twitt
April 5, 2012

The Death Of The New York Times?

We’ve all heard over the last decade how the death of most newspapers is imminent. And here in Seattle, we’ve already seen that take shape with the dismantling of the Seattle Post Intelligencer a couple years ago. Today, I found a guest post in Forbes quite shocking. In it, investor Eric Jackson of Ironfire Capital lays out the financial ins and outs as to why the New York Times will disappear as we know it in 2015. I’m a bit skeptical because this isn’t the first time I’ve heard such dire predictions, but then again I don’t try and disguise myself as a financial genius. Take a read and see what you think.

Twitt
April 4, 2012

Punchkeeper wants to skinny up your wallet

How many customer loyalty cards are you currently carrying in your wallet?  Punch or plastic cards for the local grocery store, casino, bookstore and coffee shop are bulking up consumer wallets across the country…and a Seattle startup, Punchkeeper, has created an alternative to the fat wallet syndrome using a smartphone application and QR codes.  In just a few months, co-founder Val Trask and her team have enticed numerous local businesses to ditch paper and plastic in favor of digital.  As part of our continuing series of interviews with entrepreneurs, we asked Val to share some of her startup experiences.

Question: Tell us a little about Punchkeeper.  How did you get the idea for this startup, and who are your current mentors (if any)?  What’s your timeline for expansion — will you be seeking investors?

Answer: Punchkeeper was born from lunch hour banter between my co-founders Matty Mitchell, designer and Jon Ohrt, developer. They loved loyalty programs but hated carrying punch cards and it wasn’t long before they realized that, with their powers combined, they could do something about it.  At the time I was finishing my MBA and they brought me on to turn the idea into a business.

We spent our first year bootstrapping. We were as scrappy as possible while conducting market research, making the app, beta testing, building a team, and getting into our first stores. Our next phase will require funding to scale and add more features. We’re polishing our pitch deck at the moment.

Question: Once Google acquired Punchd, we figured Google Wallet would eventually include a digital loyalty card function.  When you have a potential competitor as large as Google, how does this figure into your marketing strategy?  How do you plan to differentiate Punchkeeper from similar alternatives?

Answer: Nobody likes to hear that their new competitor is Google. It’s a young and large industry though, and there’s no shortage of potential. Punchkeeper differentiates by offering customization of digital cards so that businesses can actually have their cards reflect their own branding; many business owners liked that about paper cards and we didn’t want to lose that personalization. Also, not every small business owner wants to work with a big company, many are fond of greater human contact and small businesses helping small businesses.

Question: You’ve got quite a roster of local area small businesses that have signed on to use Punchkeeper.  How did you reach out to them?  As a startup, we’d assume that your sales staff is minimal, so can you share your successful strategies for building a merchant network with other entrepreneurs?  What has been your best promotional tactic to date?  Do you plan to extend out from the Seattle area by the end of the year?

Answer: We’ve worked hard to get in front of as many business owners as possible. It’s tough when there’s a small staff but the app isn’t worth much without locations for people to use it. The only advice that I can give to similar businesses trying to gain initial traction with a limited budget and bandwidth is to just keep at it – like so many things, it’s a numbers game.

In terms of promotions, we’ve tried a lot of grassroots approaches. The best so far has been word of mouth, or first-hand experiences from happy business owners and the customers that visit their shops. A lot of the success of adoption at a business is the extent to which staff is trained and promotional materials are visible. We dedicate substantial effort into understanding how to best help a business reach out to its audience effectively.

We’re already in a few locations outside of Seattle and we plan to use funding to help support more growth nationally. One of the beauties of a business like this is that you could be a business owner in a town that I’ve never even heard of and be up-and-running with our app within a matter of minutes.

 

Twitt
March 29, 2012

Everything You Need To Know Before Giving Your Facebook Password To An Employer

At one time, social media tended to leave the door to people’s lives wide open. Virtually anyone who wanted to take a step into your digital life could with ease. But as users of social media platforms have become more savvy and interested in protecting their online privacy, platforms like Facebook and Google+ have stepped up and offered complex security controls for users to decide whom they want to share their information with.

This week, there have been a lot of developments surrounding the ethicality and legality of employers and universities requesting login credentials for applicants’ social media accounts. While platforms have caught up with the demands of the people, businesses and now Congress, have not.

WHAT’S THE ISSUE?

Companies may be interested in how you present yourself online, but if given login information, these prospective employers will have access to more than just your timeline and pictures. They’ll have access to your more private messages and even your friends’ information.

Many are asking, is this access right and should login information be allowed to be requested?

FACEBOOK’S STANCE

Facebook itself has a whole slew of rights and responsibilities that users enter into an agreement with, which the company claims are designed to protect the privacy of you and others. A few of these responsibilities include not doing anything that would compromise the integrity of your or others’ accounts. This includes the handling of passwords.

Facebook’s terms say, “You will not share your password . . . let anyone else access your account, or do anything else that might jeopardize the security of your account,” and, “You will not solicit login information or access an account belonging to someone else.”

In other words, don’t share your password and don’t access other people’s accounts.

Facebook has even cautioned against this practice. In a March 2012 blog post by Erin Egan, Facebook’s chief privacy officer for policy, Egan said if an employer discovers that an applicant is part of a protected group (which includes information such as gender, race, religion and age), the employer might be vulnerable to claims of discrimination if it does not hire that person.

POLITICAL PRESSURE

Recently, members of Congress have taken up this issue. Two senators, Richard Blumenthal and Charles E. Schumer, are calling for an investigation to be launched on this privacy issue. They are interested in knowing if requiring potential employees to provide their social networking logins violates federal law.

The House of Representatives even took a stand and introduced an amendment that would give the Federal Communications Commission the authority to prohibit this practice. The amendment failed in the House recently with a vote of 184 to 236.

REACTIONS SO FAR

Should employers be able to do this? Are standard reference checks for employment insufficient in a digital world? What about the issue of compromising other user accounts since many people recycle the same passwords? These are some of the questions that have recently come up.

Readers are placing strong opinions on these stories in the news. They say they would never share their passwords and would turn away from an employer who requests it. Many have equated this with going through someone’s mailbox. Many editorial articles also recommend not sharing.

One thing is sure, social networking sites are veritable databases on people’s lives and are no doubt very tempting for businesses and universities to use. And it is unlikely that the issue surrounding this new HR tactic will fade away soon. At least not until all applicants decline, companies receive backlash from the practice, or legal action is taken. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

Twitt
March 28, 2012

Semantic Search: Google Takes the Next Step in Eliminating SEO for SEO’s Sake

You’re hungry. It’s Sunday. What’s open? You open your laptop, turn to trusty Google, and type in “restaurant open sunday [your town's name].” Ah, the top result is for best restaurants in town! You click on it. One of them has to be open in order for it to rank, right? None are them are open on Sundays. You go back and click on a result for a Yelp rating of a new place down the street, hoping that Google led you in the right direction. Nope, not open either. You go back one more time and click on a result that claims to have open and close times for businesses in your area. Oh no – you weren’t looking for a spam page with instructions on sending a text for $9.99 to find your one true love’s astrological sign. Your mood worsens, your stomach growls louder, and you bail, doomed to a night of stale cereal and the chunky bottom of the soy milk container.

Sound familiar? Frustrated searchers, artificial intelligence is here to save the day. Google recently announced semantic search, a new kind of search that will interpret meaning of search terms and the ability to detect intention when phrases are constructed. Currently when you type a phrase into Google, the search engine ranks sites based on what most accurately will satisfy the combination of search terms. With semantic search, Google’s artificial intelligence will calculate meaning of each word typed into the search box, analyze possible interpretations of the words stringed together, and produce (in less than a second!) results for you based not on combinations of words, but meaning.

Here is an example of new semantic search in Google:

While Google has been able to answer questions like measurement conversion and translating simple words into foreign languages in this format, this example is remarkable. The search engine now knows tall means height, interpret Empire State Building as one object, derive from sentence structure that the searcher is looking for a specific fact and pull the same accurate answer from four fairly credible sources.

For the searcher, this clearly will reduce search time, improve user experience, and decrease any chance of frustrated searchers turning to Bing, Yahoo or any other competitor. This change is reminiscent of what Ask Jeeves worked towards in the 1990′s: search engines acting as quick-thinking personal research assistants, ready to understand and serve anytime on a silver platter. This change is a huge step in Google’s overall goal of providing the most accurate results possible to the searcher and eliminating SEO for SEO’s sake.

What does this mean for SEOs? Blatant honesty in all SEO initiatives. While Google already penalizes sites with clearly deceptive SEO, this eliminates the common practice of including umbrella terms in backend SEO like title tags and meta tags. Keywords, meta tags, title tags, link titles, and content must be entirely accurate and reflective of what pages actually have to offer if sites want their pages to rank and be viewed as resources. My gut tells me this is the first step in Google’s next major algorithm change that will penalize sites with even slightly misleading SEO.

While I can see how this works with objective facts, I’ve yet to find anything or even begin to imagine how this will work with subjective searches. Any ideas?

Twitt
March 22, 2012

Scoring with Gartner

Not in your market’s last Magic Quadrant? Make an attack plan to get in the next.

First, visit Gartner’s Magic Quadrant listing and identify the one(s) you think your business deserves to be in. Second, note the “last update” and “refresh” dates to learn when the next revision is scheduled to be released. Third, click through to the summary of the report and grab the author names. Fourth, go to the briefing request form and fill in your details. Be sure to note that you want to speak with the authors of the report (and any other applicable researchers).

In a week or two, Gartner staffers will reach out to let you know if a meeting is possible. The most common reason for meeting rejection is “the meeting does not line up with analyst research needs at the moment.” In that scenario, try again in 6-8 weeks.

Keep in mind, you do not need to pay a dime to brief Gartner analysts and/or be included in a Quadrant.

When you do get a briefing, ask the analysts about their plans for the Magic Quadrant and any other applicable reports. Find out when they will start work and offer to supply more information. Be sure to ask what qualities “leaders” will possess, so you know how to best position your business.

If your Magic Quadrant comes out and you’re not happy with your company’s position on the grid (you’re in the challenger bucket and you were hoping to be a leader…), chat with the analysts about this during your next meeting. You will be able to meet with analysts a minimum of once a year without a paid relationship.

You can repeat this same process for the Forrester Wave. While expensive, the Magic Quadrant and Wave reports are respected guidebooks for press, customers, partners, investors and more.

 

 

Twitt
February 29, 2012

TechCrunch flames out

PaidContent.org has a post up regarding TechCrunch, and it isn’t pretty.

The site has lost almost every one of its top writers and traffic has fallen sharply, dropping by 35 percent from a year ago.

The included graphic says it all. Read the whole thing for the gory details.

techcrunch traffic.jpg

Twitt

NPR: Be fair to the truth

NPR has released a new ethics handbook entitled “This is NPR. And these are the standards of our journalism” that’s getting a tremendous amount of attention in media circles, and for good reason. Here’s a key paragraph:

At all times, we report for our readers and listeners, not our sources. So our primary consideration when presenting the news is that we are fair to the truth. If our sources try to mislead us or put a false spin on the information they give us, we tell our audience. If the balance of evidence in a matter of controversy weighs heavily on one side, we acknowledge it in our reports. We strive to give our audience confidence that all sides have been considered and represented fairly.

As we discussed in an earlier post regarding The New York Times editorial that asked “Should the Times be a truth Vigilante” (answer: yes!) — there is an insidious slide in journalism toward what’s known as “He said, she said” reporting. Jay Rosen at PressThink describes it this way:

* There’s a public dispute.

* The dispute makes news.

* No real attempt is made to assess clashing truth claims in the story, even though they are in some sense the reason for the story. (Under the “conflict makes news” test.)

* The means for assessment do exist, so it’s possible to exert a factual check on some of the claims, but for whatever reason the report declines to make use of them.

* The symmetry of two sides making opposite claims puts the reporter in the middle between polarized extremes.

The result, of course, is a reader who’s left to guess where the truth lies. In short, an uninformed reader. And we think this is lazy journalism. The new NPR handbook strives to get the balance right, and in the process coins a new phrase: be fair to the truth. In fact, they are now very explicit about this at the very start of the handbook:

Our Mission.

The mission of NPR, in partnership with its member stations, is to create a more informed public, one challenged and invigorated by a deeper understanding and appreciation of events, ideas, and culture within the United States and across the globe. To this end, NPR reports, produces, acquires and distributes news, information and other content that meet the highest standards of public service in journalism and cultural expression.

Bravo.

(via DF and PressThink)

Twitt
February 14, 2012

Do You Give A Tweet? Study Finds 1/3 Of Tweets Worth Reading

In the immortal words of Ugly Kid Joe, “I hate every tweet about you.” Well, that’s not quite what the flash in the pan ’90s band said, but if they did write the song “Everything About You” in 2012, the lyrics might go something like that.

That’s the conclusion I came to after reading details of a new study from researchers at Carnegie Mellon, MIT and Georgia Tech. The researchers surveyed  1,443 Twitter users who rated 43,738 tweets during a 19-day period (Dec. 30, 2010 to Jan. 17, 2011) from the accounts of some 21,014 Twitter users they collectively followed.

The results? Only 36% of the tweets those surveyed received were deemed worth reading, 39% were mediocre at best, and 25% of tweets were not worth reading at all. Among those surveyed, Twitter content was deemed “not worth reading” for various reasons. Tweets that were part of someone else’s conversation, or updates around a current mood or activity, were the most strongly disliked, whereas tweets that included questions to followers, information sharing, and self-promotion (such as links to content the writer had created) were liked more often.

According to a Carnegie Mellon press release about the study, they have nine suggested ways for improving tweet content:

  • Old news is no news: Twitter emphasizes real-time information. Followers quickly get bored of even relatively fresh links seen multiple times.
  • Contribute to the story: Add an opinion, a pertinent fact or add to the conversation before hitting “send” on a link or a retweet.
  • Keep it short: Followers appreciate conciseness. Using as few characters as possible also leaves room for longer, more satisfying comments on retweets.
  • Limit Twitter-specific syntax: Overuse of #hashtags, @mentions and abbreviations makes tweets hard to read. But some syntax is helpful; if posing a question, adding a hashtag helps everyone follow along.
  • Keep it to yourself: The cliched “sandwich” tweets about pedestrian, personal details were largely disliked. Reviewers reserved a special hatred for Foursquare location check-ins.
  • Provide context: Tweets that are too short leave readers unable to understand their meaning. Simply linking to a blog or photo, without giving a reason to click on it, was “lame.”
  • Don’t whine: Negative sentiments and complaints were disliked.
  • Be a tease: News or professional organizations that want readers to click on their links need to hook them, not give away all of the news in the tweet itself.
  • For public figures: People often follow you to read professional insights and can be put off by personal gossip or everyday details.

So tweet away my friends. But just know if not thought out, those tweets may fall on deaf tweeters.

* Shameless plug. Read the VOXUS white paper on creative Twitter campaigns here.

 

 

 

Twitt
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