Www.appcelerator.com.s3.amazonaws.com/pdf/enterprise-survey-q3-2013.pdf?mkt_tok=3RkMMJWWfF9wsRojvKzPZKXonjHpfsX57%2BokXqG1lMI%2F0ER3fOvrPUfGjI4FTctiI%2BSLDwEYGJlv6SgFTLPDMa5o0LgFXBA%3D. 10 Ways to Become a Better Entrepreneur.
How Paypal and Reddit faked their way to traction — Design + Startups. There were several factors that contributed to YouTube becoming the #1 video sharing service on the web. But a lot of initial adoption was driven by the fact that it had pirated content hosted on it. If you wanted to watch the latest episode of Lost for free, YouTube was your best bet: no queued downloading through torrents, just stream it from the server. Kim Dotcom noted how pirated content was driving YouTube’s adoption and figured that seeding some of that could unlock traffic for MegaUpload. It definitely worked. But playing with pirated content, somebody was bound to get burnt. Kim Dotcom’s mail to his crew, which ultimately damned MegaUpload, offers a rather brute-force but effective tactic for seeding platforms.
Some community owners, as in the case of MegaUpload, solve this by creating a false aura of activity using a variety of methods. There are typically three ways of going about this: Seeding and Weeding Seeding Demand In the book, Paypal Wars, Eric M. Seeding Supply. Thinking Innovation? Don’t Burden Your Product Manager. Recently, I was at a conference speaking to entrepreneurs and product managers and when asked if innovation is one of the key functions product managers should also own, quite a few entrepreneurs agreed to it. As per them, product managers need to think innovative and importantly, own the innovation piece in the company. Innovation Bulb : Who has the switch? And that’s a wrong expectation. Expecting product managers to hustle through growth hacking is a good short term bet, but will backfire in the long run. And here is why. #1 : Let’s Define Innovation.
“Innovation is the application of new solutions that meet new requirements, inarticulate needs, or existing market needs. From a product management point of view, it could be an out of turn idea that makes its way into the product roadmap. Now, let’s be honest. Chances are that the geeks are coming up with more crazy (and weird) ideas than your sales/marketing team. . #2 : Does Your Startup Always Need Innovation? What about innovation? Unheap - A tidy repository of jQuery plugins. 3 Free Apps to Help You Network Like a Pro. As the saying goes, it's not what you know but who you know that can get you ahead in the world of business. While it also helps if you're amazing at what you do, there's no question that networking can help you get further faster.
If you're working on building your startup but need a professional connection or two to take it to the next level, these three networking apps can help you collect new contacts and keep track of the ones you have. The designers of this app believe that talented people are all connected by no more than two degrees of separation. Since you already have so much in common, all you need is a third party to introduce the two of you and that's where INTRO comes in.
The app uses your LinkedIn and Facebook connections to find new people with the same interests then it automatically sends you an introduction card that you can accept or decline. INTRO is free for iPhone and Android. 2. Once you've organized your contacts, Brewster helps you keep in touch using lists. 3. FoundersCard. If You Want to Start Something You’re Passionate About, You Just Need 10 Minutes. “Got ten minutes? Go.” This was the subject line of an email that Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia sent Jamie Wong several years ago. At the time, Wong hadn’t yet founded Vayable—she already had the idea for the online travel marketplace, but she was still reluctant to execute it. “I felt for some reason like I wasn’t ready,” she says. When Wong, then an Airbnb host, encountered Gebbia at a meetup, she talked to him about how she really wanted to start her own company. “I asked him if we could grab a coffee, and we did,” Wong recalls. “Then afterwards he sent me an email showing me the first version of Airbnb.
She was impressed (and shocked) by how Airbnb had since grown from its first version. Getting It Out Naturally, it took Wong more than ten minutes to create Vayable. “When I moved back to San Francisco (where I grew up), I knew that I wanted to start this company,” Wong says. It turned out that Wong’s “irrationality” would spell major entrepreneurial success. Connecting the dots. Sleepers (1996. How Online Comments Are Becoming A Big Business. They almost seem like an afterthought, the comments attached to Internet content.
These scribblings may seem like the anonymous musings of the masses, but many corporations are viewing them as a high-powered vehicle to drive lead generation and community building, and funding trends for commenting vendors suggests that this is not afterthought: Comments are a very valuable Web business. Chances are you've used Livefyre and not known it. After all, their clients include some of the biggest media out there. With huge partnerships with Sports Illustrated, The New York Times, and TechCrunch, Livefyre's business is largely enterprise, and geared towards giving its clients, who boast millions of readers, new outlets to express themselves. So when Livefyre announced a $15 million funding round last month to ramp up their mobile and moderating features, people took note.
Let Them Comment Users crave both more options from comments and more ways to engage with other readers and writers. Want Press Coverage for Your Startup? Master Your Media Pitch. Welcome to our fifth blog on DIY public relations. So far, we’ve talked about creating stellar media plans, media lists, press releases, and press kits. Each of these blogs is important, as one builds on the next. But, I’ll let you in on a little secret: this particular article is really critical! If you don’t master proper pitch protocol, you will have a difficult time getting media coverage. So let’s get down to it. Press Release vs. You really do need a compelling pitch. I had a colleague tell me (and I think he even believed it himself when he said this) that he has never written a pitch—and that all of his media coverage was secured simply by distributing a press release. Say My Name The most important step is also the first one, which is to be sure you pitch the right reporter.
Get Personal, But Stay Professional It is important that you walk the line between being friendly and formal when pitching. On the opposite end of the spectrum is the one size fits all, cut-and-paste pitch. NASSCOM for Start-ups. Mobile design: It’s user experience, stupid, and here are 4 ways it fails. This is a guest post by mobile design consultant Mariya Yao People downloaded over 30 billion apps in 2012, yet the average smartphone owner only uses about 15 of them every week. Even worse, a study by Localytics estimated that 22 percent of apps are only opened once. With all the money and effort being poured into mobile right now, why is engagement so low? While the answer to that question is certainly complicated, a number of common mistakes companies are repeatedly made in the app on-boarding process.
Above: Can you guess what any of these apps actually do? Mistake 1: Forcing registration before demonstrating value When you demand that users go through a sign-up process or hand over their social credentials before you’ve offered them any clear benefit, you risk losing them right off the bat. Above: Pheed (left) and Tumblr. Consider two apps: Pheed and Tumblr. Mistake 2: Overly detailed tutorials Tutorials are quite common in mobile apps. Above: The new Flickr app gets it right Wrong. 85 Top Responsive Web Design Tools. As the mobile market continues to grow, demand for responsive website design intensifies. This has introduced a new set of tools, 10 of which we've listed below, to help lay out, design, code and plan a responsive website. While some may overlap, each deserves a spot on the list; when combined, they can help you craft a website that provides an optimal viewing experience for users on all devices. (Along with each recommendation is a list of alternative tools that may be useful.)
If you are a designer or developer, what are some of the indispensable tools in your responsive toolbox? Please share your recommendations with our readers in the comments, below. 1. Gridset Developed first as an internal tool that has now grown into a full-fledged product, Gridset lets web designers and developers design, prototype and build custom, responsive grid-based layouts for their projects. 2. Alternatives: Skeleton, Foundation, Base, InuitCSS, LESS Framework, Gridless, 320 and Up and Gumby. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
5 Awesome Resources for College Entrepreneurs. Who said college was a time for sitting in class? Go start a company instead! It’s odd that so many people think college students can’t start kickass companies: they can and they have! What even cooler is this: Universities are now starting to actively promote and encourage entrepreneurship in its students! If you’re a college student, the number of free resources available to you is second to none. Maybe you don’t know about them because you listen to your professors talk all day long about brushing up your resume to get some stupid corporate job… …but they’re out there, just ripe for the picking, just waiting for you to find them. Here’s some specs on 5 awesome resources available to university entrepreneurs.
I wish I knew about these when I was in college, and seriously, if you don’t take advantage of these and then complain later (“there’s no resources to help me become an entrepreneur! 1. 2. Easy, my friend! 3. There’s tons of startup Meetup groups, too (even in small cities!). 4. 5. Breeden Ideas - Jake Breeden - Free Personality Test.
Competitors. Users. Lists.