RSA Animate - Re-Imagining Work. Music Business Online Curriculum. WorldAfterMidnight.
5 Kickstarter Champs Share the Secrets of Their Success. This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.
Watching your product come to life through public support after pouring blood, sweat and tears into it is every entrepreneur's biggest dream. Kickstarter has become famous for making that a reality, serving as the birthplace of many now-thriving small businesses. But just because Kickstarter has made it easier for you to raise awareness about a product doesn't mean that your campaign will be successfully funded. In fact, just assuming your product will be a hit with consumers and not taking intiatives before, during and after the project launch is a sure-fire way to fail.
We spoke with some online entrepreneurs who found success on Kickstarter about what small businesses need to know before launching a campaign — and what they wish they would've known before launching their own. Meet the Entrepreneurs — Jason Rohrer. Six-Figure Businesses Built for Less Than $100: 17 Lessons Learned. Photo: 401K.
The following article is a guest post by Chris Guillibeau, who’s traveled to 150+ countries and studied more micro-businesses than anyone I know. I hope you love this piece as much as I did. Enjoy! Enter Chris Over the past several years, I’ve been on a quest to study micro-businesses—small operations (typically one person) that make $50,000 a year or more (often a lot more). Creativity + Innovation Experts. 4 hour work week.
Sean Parker's Airtime Officially Launches. The much hyped, yet highly secretive Airtime, founded by Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning, has finally revealed itself to be a browser-based video chatting application to help you create shared experiences with people you know and people you’ve never met before.
The app lets you connect with existing Facebook friends, but most importantly, it connects you anonymously with strangers, finding them in relation to your location and interests. Essentially, it’s like Chat Roulette, but not nearly as creepy, and with little to zero nudity. From Jimmy Fallon, who opened the event presentation (Joel Mchale, Ed Helms, Jim Carrey and Snoop Dogg also took part): “Airtime is going to change the whole way we connect on the Internet.”
It allows you to “make new friends based on interests. We first heard wind of the startup back in September, where we only knew it was operating in the live video space. From the release: Startup Copycats: You’re Doing it Wrong. Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Stefano Bernardi.
Stefano recently left his job in Venture Capital in Europe and moved to San Francisco joining the founding team of Betable, where he works on the platform product. He is a part-time hacker, angel investor and product advisor, and was selected from more than 300 people to “shadow” Dave McClure at 500 Startups. You can read more about him, his posts and his tweets.
Yesterday I was having brunch with another Italian entrepreneur in San Francisco. He said he was thinking about going back to Italy to create startup copycats, that spurred an interesting conversation and I wanted to share my thoughts on it. I’m not going to debate on the morality of it, I’ll just assume that someone has decided to clone an American startup in a foreign market and I’ll try to give some advice regarding what type of projects to choose. Don’t clone consumer Internet startups. Consumer Internet is a single winner market, where only one gorilla company emerges. Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang. By Jeremiah Owyang, from Silicon Valley In many respects, Silicon Valley sits atop the world.
Its growth and influence has made it the globe’s top location for innovation, STEM jobs, IT patents, venture capital funding, and Internet and software growth, and Unicorn startups galore. Think Forum. Home Google Engage for Agencies. LeanLaunchLab: Test and innovate on your business model using the business model canvas, lean startup, and customer development. Lean Canvas: Your Startup Blueprint. Business Model Validation Software - Lean Startup Canvas. The New Science of Viral Ads. It’s the holy grail of digital marketing: the viral ad, a pitch that large numbers of viewers decide to share with family and friends. Several techniques derived from new technology can help advertisers attain this.
In our research, two colleagues and I use infrared eye-tracking scanners to determine exactly what people are looking at when they watch video ads. We also use a system that analyzes facial expressions to reveal what viewers are feeling. These technologies make it possible to isolate elements that cause people to stop watching and to find ones that keep them engaged. In addition, they make it possible to determine what kinds of ads are most likely to be shared and what types of people are most likely to share them. Problem 1: Prominent Branding Puts Off Viewers When people watch ads, they focus on a few things, such as the actors’ mouths and eyes. The solution: Utilize “brand pulsing.” Problem 2: People Get Bored Right Away The solution: Create joy or surprise right away.