The Best Entrepreneurs Know How To Fail Fast Last night at the TechStars Boulder Mentor dinner I got into a conversation about what makes a better CEO of a new startup – an experienced entrepreneur who’s last company was a failure or a big company executive with a stellar pedigree who has never worked in a startup. Give me the experienced entrepreneur whose last company was a failure 100% of the time. The cliche “you learn more from failure than success holds true”, but more importantly the dude that just came off a failure and is ready to go again is super-extraordinary-amazingly hungry for a success. It doesn’t matter how much money he’s made in his past companies – once he decides to go for it again he’s going to be ready to crush it. Spend four minutes listening to Mark PIncus’s interview on Vatornews about his lessons from Tribe – fail fast. Mark is the CEO of Zynga (I’m on the board). Note to everyone: check your pedigrees at the door – tell me about your successes and failures when we meet for the first time.
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. 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. "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. With that battle won (at least according to Priebatsch), the next battle is over gaming. "The game layer is he next decade of human technological interaction," he explained. So what does this all mean?
New App Combines Personal & Business To-Do Lists Apps that track tasks are a dime a dozen, and most business collaboration tools come equipped with a to-do list function. But when Andrew Wilkinson and his team at design consultancy Metalab sat down to build their ultimate task manager, Flow, they were shooting to bridge the gap between these two groups of productivity products. "The idea behind Flow is that you can bring your entire life into one place," Wilkinson says. "In the same place you remember your grocery list or the fact that you need to clip your toenails, you can also be collaborating with your team at work, you can be working on a home improvement project with your boyfriend." Flow, which launched Tuesday afternoon, is something like a cross between Cultured Code's Things App for Apple products and 37 Signal's Basecamp. Like Things, it allows users to create projects, schedule tasks and tag items for organization. The price tag for this service, which includes a free iPhone app, is $9.99 per month.
The Freedom of Fast Iterations: How Netflix Designs a Winning Web Site By Joshua Porter Originally published: Nov 14, 2006 "We make a lot of this stuff up as we go along," the lead designer said. Everyone in the group laughed until he continued, "I'm serious. We don't assume anything works and we don't like to make predictions without real-world tests. Predictions color our thinking. We were talking with the design team at Netflix. Netflix isn't the only company using a fast iterative design approach. "In the case of the Toolbar Beta, several of the key features (custom buttons, shared bookmarks) were prototyped in less than a week. This "try and see" attitude is taking hold. So how often does Netflix update its site? Every 2 weeks they make significant changes. At first, this sounds like a frustrating design constraint. Besides living in the now of their web site's design, The Netflix team gets other benefits to fast iterations. Benefits of Fast Iterations Fail Fast A major benefit of fast iteration is you also fail fast. Side Effects
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"? 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 Alarming ones, too, of course, if you don't know exactly what's being shared with whom.
Content Marketing in a Blink: The Content Grid v2 [Infographic] — It's All About Revenue Last June, Eloqua published the first infographic on the then-nascent content marketing industry. We called it The Content Grid. The public seemed to like the visual. It earned six awards, sparked dozens of speaking engagements, and triggered a number of “how do you ____” calls from Fortune 500 companies. What a difference a year makes. Enter June 2011. A mature industry needs mature resources. The Content Grid v2 picks up where its predecessor left off. Enjoy The Content Grid v2. Click image for full size: If you want to embed The Content Grid v2 on your blog, be our guest.
Vive l’échec ! L’entrepreneur crée pour réussir. Pourtant, sa réussite n’est souvent basée que sur une succession d’échecs, plus ou moins gros et graves. Des baffes, des portes, des murs, voilà le régime quotidien du créateur en herbe. En France, pays entrepreneurial s’il en est, l’échec est pourtant décrié, au point même que la peur de l’échec est une des principales raisons (non déclarées) de ne pas créer sa boîte. Aux USA, la donne est bien différente, plutôt que de voir la personne qui s’est plantée, on voit la personne qui a tenté, qui a essayé, et qui a sûrement appris tout un tas de choses dans l’aventure, et qui sera encore meilleure la prochaine fois. Je crois qu’il serait bien que l’on accepte un peu mieux l’échec en France. Janvier 2008 – Août 2006 > Microsoft, Division Plateforme & Ecosystème Responsable Marketing – En charge des relations avec les éditeurs de logiciels françaisGestion d’un budget de 150K€ – management de 2 personnes. Pourrait devenir : Et vous, ça donne quoi pour votre CV ?
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.
L’entrepreneur est un inconscient On prête volontiers tout un tas de super qualités à l’entrepreneur, qui est un peu devenu un héros des temps modernes. Les Pierre Kosciusko-Morizet, Jacques-Antoine Granjon, les frères Rosemblum, Oriane Garcia, Catherine Barba… tous mériteraient presque d’avoir des produits dérivés à leur effigie. Si l’on écoute un peu les journalistes (ou, pire, les blogueurs), l’entrepreneur serait pétri de dons : visionnaire, travailleur, porteur de valeurs, concret, humain, tourné vers l’action. Un trait de caractère nécessaire… Être inconscient, c’est ne pas se rendre compte de ses actes, ne pas prendre la pleine mesure de ce que l’on fait. Le domaine du rêve Si l’inconscience traduit une sorte de fuite de la réalité, c’est aussi le lieu où se forment les rêves. Schizophrène ? L’inconscience serait donc un trait de caractère partagé entre les entrepreneurs. Et pour réussir, c’est bien ça. Freud n’a pas fini d’avoir du boulot.
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. We launched quietly, and started building a small but happy user base. Then, disaster struck. We had received no warnings from Facebook, and tried desperately to get some answers. The answer I got was curious. Pixamid uploads user photos to an album on Facebook which Pixamid creates.