A year of tech industry hype in a single graph. Tech industry trends follow a fairly predictable pattern: there's a rush of hype, an inevitable backlash, and then a long, tired slog towards a product that actually works. It eventually produces incredible things like the internal combustion engine or my Droid 4, but it can be hard to tell exactly where given technology is on the slow journey from bullshit to reality.
Luckily, the analysts at Gartner have given us a kind of roadmap, plotting out the trends of 2014 on an immutable line they call the Hypecycle. Gartner has been making these for 20 years, and there's always a lot of guesswork involved, but this one's particularly useful as a snapshot of the present moment. Speech recognition is just starting to be useful (hello, Siri), and virtual reality decks like the Oculus Rift are getting there. People have stopped saying "big data" as much, but "internet of things" is still ascendant, and god help us once "neurobusiness" gets going.
Network Relationship Management. How To Get Media Coverage For Your Startup: A Complete Guide. The following is a guest post by Leo Widrich, co-founder of Buffer, a smarter way to post on Social Media. [Note: I'm an angel investor in Buffer and love what they're doing] The Complete Guide to Getting Press Coverage For Your Startup Whoa, this guide was long, long, long overdue. Over the past few months, a lot of people reached out for help on how to best get press for their startup. So from now on, just a link to this guide will hopefully be useful. Over the past 6-9 months, I am extremely thankful for the amazing stories lots of great writers from news and tech sites have written about Buffer. To put it into perspective: Mashable featured us 6 times, TechCrunch twice, over 10 articles in The Next Web, plenty of write-ups from ReadWriteWeb, GigaOm, LifeHacker, VentureBeat, Inc. It is up to you to judge how good or bad the above outcome is and there are others who have done better of course.
First off, I don't want to fool you and need to emphasize the nature of our product, Buffer. Leo. Udemy.png (620×2484) Top Ten Reasons Why Large Companies Fail To Keep Their Best Talent.
What Makes A Startup Successful? Blackbox Report Aims To Map The Startup Genome. Generally speaking, the odds are stacked heavily against the average startup. The rate of failure among entrepreneurs and startups is startlingly high — it comes with the territory. Otherwise, entrepreneurs wouldn’t be pirates. But, what if there were a way to reduce that failure rate by cracking the formula of startup success? No easy feat to map the double helix of startups, but entrepreneurs are risk-takers by nature, so four of these risk-loving international entrepreneurs came together to found the Startup Genome Report, a report that is part of a larger project that dives into the very anatomy of what makes Silicon Valley startups successful — or not. The entrepreneurs who founded the Startup Genome report (Bjoern Herrmann and Max Marmer), have also created a business accelerator called Blackbox, which will be leveraging the data they have collected (and will collect) from their ambitious R&D enterprise.
Raising Eyebrows: A Failed Entrepreneur Finally Gets it Right. If you’re tired of business books that promise to teach you how to make millions from social media, take a break with Raising Eyebrows: A Failed Entrepreneur Finally Gets It Right. Author Dal LaMagna, founder of Tweezerman, uses his own tales of failed entrepreneurship to illustrate learning points. It’s a great read. This Book Isn’t a Magic Bullet There’s no magic list of ways to make money in this book. In the first half of the book, LaMagna yearns to be a film producer. Lessons Learned Here are a few of the nuggets of truth LaMagna shares that struck a chord with me: Being a partner is somewhat similar to marriage. LaMagna spends a great deal of time trying to raise enough money to get started in the tweezer business when someone asks him, “Instead of spending your time raising money, why don’t you go find something you can do with the money you already have?” And my favorite: A small company is not going to thrive if the founder tries to do everything.
Why Read It. How Facebook pushes updates to its site every day - Facebook. The U.S. Small Business Administration.