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Conseils précis. Product Management. Your Product Needs to be 10x Better than the Competition to Win. Here’s Why: Last night I had the great privilege to interview Bill Gross, one of the Internet’s true pioneers. To say he has had an impact on the web would be an understatement. His impact has even helped a small country gain admission to the United Nations. All of that are in this week’s episode of This Week in VC. Summary notes, as always, provide below. Overture (Goto.com) He invented the category of sponsored search. He created GoTo.com (later renamed Overture) out of a frustration with search.

The idea actually came to him from the Yellow Pages business. He was skeptical of spending the money but astounded at what a transformational impact it had on his business. Bill’s rationale was the more serious your business was, the more you could afford to pay for placement and therefore the more likely it was for consumers. So he launched a company with exclusively paid search. Heresy. Google was clear that they WOULD NOT go into this business. IdeaLab Testing HN efficacy / longevity. Startups Need Focused Websites. Image via Wikipedia There’s a startup tendency to be more broad than more focused when it comes to websites and messaging. Part of it stems from trying not to cast a wide net for potential customers and part of it comes from the search for a repeatable customer acquisition process.

Startups are better off with a focused website that speaks to their ideal customer in a direct manner. There’s only so much time to capture someone’s attention and the most likely outcome for a visitor is the click of death: their “Back” button in the browser. Here are some questions to ask regarding the focus of a website: How many “products” are listed and how many do you really have? Staying focused with messaging is difficult. What else? Like this: Like Loading... The Eight Pillars of Innovation. The greatest innovations are the ones we take for granted, like light bulbs, refrigeration and penicillin. But in a world where the miraculous very quickly becomes common-place, how can a company, especially one as big as Google, maintain a spirit of innovation year after year? Nurturing a culture that allows for innovation is the key.

As we’ve grown to over 26,000 employees in more than 60 offices, we’ve worked hard to maintain the unique spirit that characterized Google way back when I joined as employee #16. At that time I was Head of Marketing (a group of one), and over the past decade I’ve been lucky enough to work on a wide range of products. What’s different is that, even as we dream up what’s next, we face the classic innovator’s dilemma: should we invest in brand new products, or should we improve existing ones? Have a mission that matters Work can be more than a job when it stands for something you care about. Think big but start small The best part of working on the web? Product Managers, turn a weakness into a strength | The Recovering MBA. Much to my chagrin I do not code. Somewhere in the archives of my brain is some C++ I learned back in the stone age (late 90's) but that's about it. I certainly understand the value in knowing how to code at least at a basic level as a Product Manager I just haven’t taken the time to learn yet.

& Well I should say I’m trying to learn and so far I’m pleased with the process on Codecademy . I have a long ways to go however. While it’s debatable in many circles I personally think this is a huge weakness of mine. It’s so much harder to have a deep understanding of what it takes to build an application, how all the pieces fit together, and what it means to maintain web based software when you don’t have a fundamental understanding of it. Personally I think I've done a reasonably good job understanding enough of the building blocks and high-level components that I can at least get by on that front.

The challenge goes beyond just the technical though. Here’s the rub. That's a marketer. Toutes les disciplines du web forment un grand ensemble. (4) What are some top strategies for conversion optimization. Gamification – a maturing concept. My engagement with the concept of gamification has followed the pattern below. I think this has been true for many people. The badges on Foursquare were fun and I thought the idea of using gaming concepts to make non-game service more engaging had legsI started to get bored with earning meaningless badges and points all over the placeI started to see the word ‘gamification’ in business plans as a sure-fire, but unexplained, driver of success (for a time ‘viral marketing’ was used with a similar lack of understanding and lack of impact)I lost interest in the whole concept Then this morning, having not heard or thought much about the concept of gamification for six months, I saw an article on Vator.tv titled Gamification is not, alone, a sustainable solution which I anticipated would re-enforce my opinion.

And good gamification really works. Consider this Sephora case study (again from Vator): How to Build the Case for a Gamification Program in a Fortune 1000 Organization | Gamified Enterprise. Gamification is powerful. It is fresh, it is new, and it is revolutionary. Sound like the first line of sales pitch? Yes? Good. That is exactly what I was going for. Selling to the Salesmen One of the least-discussed questions related to gamification is a simple one: how can an individual gather support for it within an organization?

A gamification evangelist has a huge responsibility–he or she can be the sole person that drives adoption across the organization. (If you like Tarantino, you can skip to the end of our story by checking out In my experience, there are four steps to take in order to drive acceptance, endorsement, and sponsorship of an enterprise gamification program. 1. In my case, this was Halo. Curious what that might look like? EMC Levels Up While I do not expect other evangelists to use Halo as their muse, I would expect others to match their organizational goals with a concrete example of existing gamification. 2. 3. 4. Pokémons et gamfication. Pokémon : attrapez-les tous ! La saga a débuté par un simple jeu vidéo édité en 1996 au Japon. Trois ans plus tard, les pokémons franchissaient la frontière japonaise pour envahir le monde, sous de multiples formes : jeux vidéos, jeux de cartes, figurines, et même Boeing 747… Son succès, The Pokémon Company le doit à l’exploitation d’une caractéristique des joueurs, identifiée par la typologie de Bartle.

El Gamificator analyse, sous l’angle de la gamification, la success story de la franchise. Pokémon : un jeu pour les collectionneurs À l’origine, il y a 150 pokémons. Bien qu’on nous encourage à les attraper tous, rien ne nous oblige à le faire pour terminer le jeu. En game design, il y a une théorie qui explique ce genre de comportements : il s’agit de la typologie des joueurs de Bartle. . • Les tueurs préfèrent combattre d’autres joueurs. • Les sociaux recherchent la communication et l’interaction. • Les explorateurs aiment découvrir le monde.

Des Pokémons sur un Boeing Des Lego Pokémon. How Game Mechanics Will Solve Global Warming. The last 10 years have been called the era of Web 2.0, a term used to describe a new type of online experience, wherein a user could be both author and audience. That decade, said SCVNGR CEO Seth Priebatsch today in his opening keynote at the SXSW conference, was the decade of social. That decade, however, has been won, said Priebatsch. Facebook has come away as the clear leader and now, a new decade is upon us - the decade of games. These are not children's games, however. These are games that could change the world. Priebatsch, a highly energetic 22-year old who dropped out of Princeton after his freshman year to start location-based game SCVNGR, delivered a wide-reaching presentation explaining that this next decade, put simply, could deliver the tools necessary to save the world. And no, we're not exaggerating. "The last decade was the decade of social. Facebook, with its 600+ million social connections has won the competition in terms of mapping our social interactions, he said.

Steve Jobs: Get Rid of the Crappy Stuff - Carmine Gallo - Your Communications Coach. Inside Match.com: It's all about the algorithm. - By David Gelles. Entering the offices of Match.com is a bit like strutting into a disco. Coloured lights flash from the ceilings, workers lounge on circular banquettes, dance music plays from hidden speakers.

Despite being in a mid-rise office tower overlooking a turnpike in the dry, landlocked city of Dallas, Texas, the Match offices are evocative of a racier environment, where anything might happen. On a hazy Monday in June, I came to meet Mandy Ginsberg, the president of Match.com US, the world's largest online dating site. Petite, preppy and freckled, with long brown hair, Ginsberg was wearing sandals, tight black jeans and a loose blouse.

Her jewellery was limited to a diamond bracelet and a wedding band. Confident and casual, she seemed as good a person as any to be the face of online dating. With the number of paying subscribers using Match approaching 1.8 million, the ­company has had to develop ever more ­sophisticated programs to manage, sort and pair the world's singles. Kremen was right. Blog. The Dangers of Relying on Facebook I wanted to share a short post-mortem on our recent Facebook difficulties. Our app Pixamid is heavily reliant on Facebook - so much so that unless a user logs in with Facebook, the app is almost useless (it will still take photos and save them to the iPhone, but no magic whatsover). We knew that by only supporting Facebook identities, we would lose some users.

But the advantages for us (ease of implementing Facebook’s Single-Sign-on, the access to both a user’s social graph and a limitless photo store, and the nearly ubiquitous nature of Facebook) were huge, so we decided early on to start with Facebook-only. We went ahead and built our app with this reliance. Users could only log in with Facebook, every photo that was taken was immediately uploaded to Facebook, users could tag their Facebook friends to share photos only with them. We launched quietly, and started building a small but happy user base. Then, disaster struck. The answer I got was curious. SXSW 2011: The internet is over | Technology.

If my grandchildren ever ask me where I was when I realised the internet was over – they won't, of course, because they'll be too busy playing with the teleportation console – I'll be able to be quite specific: I was in a Mexican restaurant opposite a cemetery in Austin, Texas, halfway through eating a taco. It was the end of day two of South by Southwest Interactive, the world's highest-profile gathering of geeks and the venture capitalists who love them, and I'd been pursuing a policy of asking those I met, perhaps a little too aggressively, what it was exactly that they did. What is "user experience", really? What the hell is "the gamification of healthcare"? Or "geofencing"?

The content strategist across the table took a sip of his orange-coloured cocktail. This, for outsiders, is the fundamental obstacle to understanding where technology culture is heading: increasingly, it's about everything. Web 3.0 The game layer The dictator's dilemma The road to that end state won't be smooth. E-commerce : 5 sites au concept original.

Avec plus de 80 000 sites de e commerce en France et une augmentation des achats en ligne en constante évolution, certains acteurs du e commerce tentent de tirer leur épingle du jeu en innovant avec des sites aux concepts originaux. Article rédigé par Pauline Motheron. Pauline est une jeune auto-entrepreneure en création et gestion de sites web, présente sur internet depuis 1998. Elle s’intéresse plus particulièrement aux nouveaux sites internet au concept original et innovant. Avec plus de 80 000 sites de e-commerce en France et une augmentation des achats en ligne en constante évolution, certains acteurs commerce sur internet tentent de tirer leur épingle du jeu en innovant avec des sites aux concepts originaux. Videdressing.com : la vente d’occasion à grande échelle aux services des particuliers. Jimmyfairly.com : le « buy one give one » à la française. Un peu de douceur dans ce monde de brutes.

Shoesofprey.com : acheter les chaussures que vous aurez dessinées.