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Facebook Has Decreased Page Reach, And Here’s Why. With A Flick Of The Wrist, Facebook Could Destroy Current Advertising Models. Advertising is something that we’ve all grown accustomed to in today’s society. For companies that provide free services, it’s an important part of keeping those services free for everyone to use. But are ads even working on us anymore? That’s up for debate and discussion, and those are decisions everyone can make for themselves. One of the biggest companies ever facing the conundrum of introducing advertising is Facebook. No matter where the advertising is placed, it’ll either rub people the wrong way, or will be ignored completely. Advertising works most effectively when it’s in line with what people are already trying to do. Is that “new” advertising the future or is it more of the same?
Where Myspace failed, Facebook has a real opportunity to capitalize on the fact that ads are just not so good for the user’s experience. Making Something You’re Proud Of Zuckerberg has also made this statement time and time again: What’s Best For Users How Advertisers Should Connect. A Secret Is No Longer A Secret Once You Tell The Internet. Sure the headline of this post is just common sense, but I feel like we all need a reminder this holiday season, especially as all the salacious photo evidence from the past couple of nights is just hitting Facebook.
For those of you that have been busy drunkenly accumulating that evidence and not reading tech news over the holidays, a couple of things happened this past week that make this reminder especially pressing. In an amazing confluence of events over the break, Mark Zuckerberg’s sister Randi posted a photo of her famous family trying out the Poke app to her “Friends” on Facebook. Then she tagged her sister Arielle in it. Not knowing or perhaps forgetting that every time you tag a friend in a photo on Facebook, that person’s friends can also see said photo, Randi was shocked, on Twitter, to find out that one of Arielle’s friends had subsequently screencapped the pic and tweeted it out to her over 40k followers. A secret is no longer a secret once you tell the Internet. Study: Learning Spanish With Duolingo Can Be More Effective Than College Classes Or Rosetta Stone. Education is quickly moving online, but we haven’t seen all that many studies that actually look into the effectiveness of these new forms of online learning.
To see how its program performed, the language learning service Duolingo, founded by CAPTCHA inventor Luis von Ahn, commissioned a study (PDF) into the effectiveness of its program. The result, which even surprised von Ahn: it only takes a Duolingo user 34 hours to learn the equivalent of a first college semester’s worth of Spanish. A similar study by the same researchers who conducted Duolingo’s study, by the way, found that it took Rosetta Stone users between 55 and 60 hours to learn the same amount of material.
These studies were conducted by Roumen Vesselinov, a Visiting Assistant Professor at Queens College, City University of New York, and John Grego, Professor and Chair of the Statistics Department and the University of South Carolina. Duolingo is clearly doing something right. Something Someday Will Kill Facebook, But We’re Not There Yet. Two years ago I wrote a post entitled “Can Anything Stop The Facebook Juggernaut?” In which I marvelled at the fact that Facebook was then worth a whopping $35 billion, according to Second Market. Today, after its much-touted stock price “collapse,” the company is worth roughly $51 billion. It’s a strange world when a market-value increase of $16 billion/~45 percent over a two-year period is somehow perceived as a crisis.
My answer then to that post’s titular question was a grudging no. (My assessment of Facebook as “relentlessly mediocre” remains unchanged today.) Which remains true, in the short term. Warren Buffet always advises investors to buy a company with “moats” defending them from competitors, and Facebook has one of the deepest and most dragon-laden moats in the world. Second, their Open Graph strategy means that Facebook isn’t just Facebook; they’re woven into the bones, and in some cases arguably the DNA, of millions of other apps and web sites.
Slow Boiled Frog. Claim: A frog placed in water that is brought to a boil through gradual temperature increase will make no attempt to escape. Example: [Collected on the Internet, 1998] Origins: The "boiled frog" story is indeed a kind of "old folk warning," an all-purpose didactic anecdote particularly favored by business types to illustrate the point that moving too recklessly and aggressively may leave one with an empty pot, but traversing a steadier course of more gradual change is much more likely to bring about the desired result. (One specific application might be the computer market: a PC manufacturer who comes out with an entirely new line of machines incompatible with software written for earlier models might lose a good deal of his customer base, but one who ensures that his new PCs are backwards-compatible with older software will have a much easier time inducing his customers to upgrade their hardware.)
I am told the above instructions work because frogs are cold-blooded. Sources: Death of Success: 6 Damaging Behaviors Salespeople Should Avoid. Death of Success: 6 Damaging Behaviors Salespeople Should Avoid According to a Harvard Business Review article by Steve W. Martin, 70 percent of top salespeople are born with natural instincts that make them successful, and the other 30 percent are self-made and must learn to be successful without natural sales instincts. Martin goes on to state that for every 100 people who enter into a sales job without natural sales traits, 40 percent will fail or quit, 40 percent will perform at an average level, and only 20 percent will perform at an above average level.
Natural instincts or not, born salesperson or self-made salesperson, success comes down to one thing…how much do you want it? Successful salespeople are successful because they work continually on eliminating the most common reasons for failure. When a sales person fails or quits it can normally be attributed to one or more of the following damaging behaviors: 1. 2. Professional salespeople face adversity every day. 3. 4. 5. 6. Rocket Internet Taps Summit Partners For Another $26M For Lazada, Its Asian Amazon Clone, As It Ramps Up Its Marketplace Ambitions. Rocket Internet, the incubator and investment vehicle run by the Samwer brothers, is continuing its aggressive push in Asia, and is turning to more investment to do it: today the company announced that Lazada, its online shopping mall — think Amazon here — has picked up another €20 million ($26 million), this time led by Summit Partners.
It will be using the investment to help push a “marketplace” model, where, similar to Amazon it will offer a platform for smaller merchants to sell their products, providing the logistics and fulfilment that underpins it. You may recall that it was only a couple of weeks ago that Lazada announced $40 million in funding, with that round led by Kinnevik, an existing Rocket investor. While Rocket relies a lot on past investors to go in on new ventures — one common name, in addition to Kinnevik, is JP Morgan – this is the first time that Summit Partners has invested in Lazada. It does, however, have something of a track record with Rocket. 25 Awesome Innovation Quotes. The Top 25 TechCrunch Posts From 2012. The story of you. At 9 Million Users Strong, Fab Raises More Money And Is Just Getting Warmed Up. In February 2011, Jason Goldberg and Bradford Shane Shellhammer were faced with one of the most painful experiences an entrepreneur must deal with: to decide whether to shut down their business, Fabulis, which was a social network for the gay community, and return the money back to investors.
So to deal with this predicament, what did the two friends and founders do? They got drunk. Goldberg and Shellhammer took a break from the grind and went for a boozy dinner in Manhattan to figure out what to do next. Goldberg asked his friend over drinks, “If we could take this money in the bank ($2 million at the time) and do something else with it, what would you do?” To illustrate the exercise, Goldberg drew a circle with three slices on a paper napkin. One slice stood for what they were most passionate about, another represented what they could be best in class at, and the final slice focused on what market was out there that still had the potential to be disrupted. A Friendship As A Foundation.
Social Network. RSA Animate. Social. Teachers Homepage. Idols. Fashion. A Sneak Peak At The New Yahoo Home Page Redesign? TechCrunch has obtained a secret copy of what may be a mockup for the new Yahoo home page. Yesterday, Yahoo’s new CEO Marissa Mayer shared her broad vision for the future of the Internet company with employees. According to AllThingsD, Mayer didn’t share specific plans for fixing search and email or an “in-process and dramatic home page redesign.”
While ATD reporter Kara Swisher seems to have the phones at Yahoo bugged, and perhaps a @yahoo-inc.com email address, she hasn’t been able to get a peek at the redesign. Yahoo has also been cracking down on leaks, but that didn’t stop us. Click on the image below to open the screenshot in a new window: Yes, the new home page looks a lot like the home page of Google, Mayer’s former employer. Mayer has been borrowing many ideas from her years at Google including a focus on product and data, free food in the cafeteria, and weekly “FYI” meetings like Google’s “TGIF” meetings. If you are not logged in, Yahoo’s home page first top nav button is “You!”
Lytro Expands Retail Presence, To Be Available Next Month From Amazon, Target, And Best Buy. The $399 Lytro camera is a marvel of imaging technology and it will soon be a whole lot easier to buy. Starting in early October, the novel camera is hitting Amazon.com, BestBuy.com and Target.com, along with select CityTarget stores. The camera was previously only available from the company’s website, Lytro.com. “Since introducing the Lytro camera just six months ago, nearly 400,000 light field pictures have been shared on Lytro.com. We are excited to take this picture revolution one step further by making Lytro available to more photographers in the US and around the world,” said Charles Chi, CEO of Lytro in a released statement today. The Lytro camera will also be sold through international partnerships with Blode Robot, Qool Labs, and Future Shop. In our March 2012 review found the Lytro to be a fun, but ultimately, an unfinished product.
Unlike a traditional camera, a Lytro camera allows the photographer to adjust the point of focus after the picture is shot (see images below).
Pearltrees tips. Hipster Coffee Lovers Rejoice, Blue Bottle Coffee Raises $20M. The best part of waking up, is $20M in your tip cup. I drink a lot of coffee, if you can’t tell. I love coffee so much that I make it a point to hit all of the best spots in every city that I visit. One of my favorite joints in San Francisco is Blue Bottle Coffee. It’s so good that words can’t describe the taste of its coffee. It looks like the company will be around serving us great coffee for a long time, and perhaps in cities all over the world.
UPDATE: We have confirmed that Index Ventures and True Ventures have both invested, with True Ventures leading the round. UPDATE 2: True Ventures has written a post about their investment. That’s a lot of money for a coffee shop. Currently, there are 10 Blue Bottle shops or stands in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City. We’ve reached out to the company to check on the specifics of the deal, but we imagine that True Ventures and Index Ventures might be involved due to Tony Conrad and Mike Volpi’s involvement as advisors.