Great Marketing? Know the Purpose of Your Product. One Startup’s Story: The Evolution Of An Outsourcing Strategy. Guest author John Fearon is CEO of Dropmyemail.com, which backs up emails in the cloud and Dropmysite.com, a cloud-based backup company. At any startup, the first hurdle is the lack of resources - lack of funds, lack of manpower, lack of time. Outsourcing – or relocating - the work can be a great to overcome those obstacles while controlling costs, increasing efficiency and even making workers happier But it’s not a simple, one-size-fits-all process. In building my company - Dropmysite / Dropmyemail – I found that managing outsourcing was an ever-evolving combination of local and remote capabilities that stays flexible enough to meet changing conditions.
(See also Are Crowdsourcing And Outsourcing No-Nos For Startups?) Learning The Hard Way: My Outsourcing Experiences When we launched two years ago, for example, the whole development team was based in India. Plus, with India being 2.5 hours behind my Singapore headquarters, my productive workday was effectively extended. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 5. Silicon Valley's Perverse Lesson: To Get Rich, Don't Make Money. $1.1 billion. That's how much your company is worth if it's long on users and short on paying customers. Just ask Tumblr. Or Instagram. Each yanked down billion-dollar acquisitions despite making virtually no revenue.
Is this a big deal? Acquihires And Billion-Dollar Payouts Some seem to think so. Lazy profit-seekers love these periods in the Valley. Venture capitalist Mark Suster goes one step further, holding that acquihires actually have a corrosive effect on the tech industry: You have been at Google, Salesforce.com, Yahoo!
And that [jerk] sitting in the desk next to you who joined only last week now has $1 million because he built some fancy newsreader that got a lot of press but is going to be shut down anyways. What kind of message does that send to the party faithful who slave away loyally to hit targets for BigCo? It says if you want to make “real” money - quit. Fair enough. But the same holds true for the billion-dollar exits on chimerical revenues. The Downside To Making Money. Why Google Glass Is Creepy.
Every new technology causes initial public discomfort. It took society a long time to accept cell phones as commonplace. Before that, television. And before that, tractors. So when people scoffed at Google Glass, I rolled my eyes. The biggest concern seems to be distraction. Just what we need, right? Those are misguided concerns. Hilarious parody videos show people undergoing all kinds of injury while peering at the world through a screen cluttered with alerts and ads. Even so, Google Glass might have a tough slog ahead for social acceptance. No, the biggest obstacle is the smugness of people who wear Glass—and the deep discomfort of everyone who doesn't.
For a year now Google employees and celebrities have been allowed to wear Glass. There she was, wearing this creepy-looking, faux-futuristic forehead band—with a built-in video camera pointed at my face. This puts Glass wearers in a position of control. Months before Glass's public launch, one Seattle bar has already banned them. Robert Scoble - Google+ - Open Garden brings mobile a new kind of network I'm not… +Robert Scoble Unfortunately, you didn't bring up an EXTREMELY important downside of Open Garden.
I started using it about a month ago when I was looking for exactly what Mischa was describing, where I was sick of fiddling with paring and settings to tether my Nexus 7 to my Galaxy Nexus. However according to some complaints and responses from Google, the way Open Garden is connecting to other devices (I believe it's done via a VPN) means that a great number of apps think that they don't have a connection when their only connection to the internet is via Open Garden. There have been statements from Google developers that this will be fixed in an upcoming version of Android, but at the moment apps like Pocket, Feedly, the Play Store, and basically anything other than Chrome or Youtube cannot be used.
This is a really awesome service that I want to make use of but at the moment it's extremely limited. You Are the Network. Fred Wilson: Yahoo Will Put Tumblr on Same Level as Facebook, Twitter. One of Tumblr's earliest investors, venture capitalist Fred Wilson, says the Yahoo deal will lead to an influx of advertising on the platform and bring it to the level of Facebook and Yahoo in advertisers' minds. "Tumblr has been pushing their native advertising system into the marketplace for the past year," Wilson told interviewer John Battelle Tuesday at the CM Summit in New York. "It's a beautiful system. They say to a marketer, 'Create a Tumblog. Post what you want to the Tumblog and that could be imagery, it could be video it could be GIFs, it could be anything and then we will allow you to promote that throughout the community, much like the way Twitter does.'" Wilson said that marketers haven't been very receptive to the pitch.
Wilson, whose firm Union Square Ventures invested $350,000 in Tumblr in 2007, also said that Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer realized that the company lacked a social media presence and couldn't create one from scratch. Image via Getty, Mario Tama. Flickr, Vimeo could see deep integration with iOS 7, claims report. Apple's iOS mobile operating system gained integration with Twitter and Facebook in recent years, and a new report from 9to5Mac claims that the next version of the platform will likely add similar integration with Flickr and Vimeo. Citing unnamed sources familiar with Apple's plans, 9to5Mac claims that users will be able to sign into their Flickr and Vimeo accounts through iOS 7's settings menus — much in the way you can integrate Facebook and Twitter accounts right now. Additionally, it is likely that third-party apps will be able to access Flickr and Vimeo services using the native integration with iOS.
Earlier reports have claimed that Apple and Yahoo (owner of Flickr) have been in talks to develop a deeper partnership for iOS 7. Users will allegedly be able to upload photos and videos directly from the iOS Photos app to Flickr and Vimeo, similar to how you can share photos or videos directly to Facebook or Twitter now. One way to use that terabyte of storage Flickr now offers. The One-Person Product. In 2006, I moved to New York and started working for David Karp doing web development for various media companies.
That fall, in a brief gap before starting a new client, David said that we were going to make a prototype of an idea he’d had for a while. He had already bought the domain: tumblr.com, because it was an easy platform for publishing tumblelogs. David Karp in September 2006, a few months after hiring me to build websites with him for clients. In March 2007, Tumblr exploded after Gina Trapani wrote it up on Lifehacker and her post made it to the Digg front page (the first Digg!). We soon added following and reblogging, which dramatically turned this publishing platform into the social-publishing hybrid that has made it so compelling and unique. That summer, David decided we should stop doing client work, take some funding, and take Tumblr full-time.
David’s characteristically spotless desk in December 2007. Growth continued extremely strongly. David and me in February 2008.