Hearsay Social CEO Clara Shih on Social Business Just last month, TechCrunch TV posted a terrific interview between TC’s Leena Rao and Hearsay Social Founder and CEO Clara Shih. Hearsay Social is a social media CRM tool with capabilities that span from day-to-day community management to large enterprise social media compliance. In the video interview below, Shih describes the core functions of Hearsay Social and how the platform can be used by brands and agencies to help meet their social media goals. What’s impressive and notable is the focus that Hearsay Social places on social business collaboration. About the author: Zach Cole View all posts by Zach Cole Zach Cole is an Assistant Account Executive at Edelman Digital and a proud graduate of Emerson College.
Innovation without Age Limits Plugged in: A programmer shows his style at a New York area hackathon. Young people entering the workforce today have never known a world without the Web. Venture capitalists in Silicon Valley prefer to fund the young, the next Mark Zuckerberg. Why? The common mantra is that if you are over 35, you are too old to innovate. To a degree, the cult Silicon Valley has built around young people makes sense—particularly in the Internet and mobile technology. These graduates grew up in an era when the whole world was becoming connected. The young understand the limits of the Web world, but they don’t know their own limits. But great ideas by themselves don’t lead to breakthrough technologies or successful companies. Indeed, research by my team revealed that the average and median age of the founders of successful U.S. technology businesses (with real revenues) is 39.
“Humanware” In today’s high-tech world, we depend on technology in order to get work done. Traditionally, the focus has been on two dimensions of that technology – the hardware and the software. The hardware could be described as the “nuts and bolts” of the system. It has its own descriptive language –terms like processor speed and gigabytes of storage. The software part of the equation can be divided into two major subcomponents; the operating system and the applications. Applications are particular sets of commands that enable users to accomplish particular functions. functions it can provide within its designated area and can also be replaced or updated with the latest version. Summarizing so far, if we have capable technology, a functioning operating system interface, and a software application that is appropriate for getting a particular task accomplished, then we should be successful in the utilization of that technology to reach our goals. Step back in time to 1990.
Is online retail the next bubble waiting to pop? Internet retailing is sizzling, with big bucks chasing a flood of companies hawking everything from coupons to laptops. Yet, experts warn that not only are valuations too high, but that most of these firms will ultimately go belly up. Online retail in India is on fire. That’s because these e-tailing sites have been pumped with cash for expansion, and there’s now a frantic race afoot to try and scale up as quickly as possible. Could the same thing happen here? Sky high valuations It is still early days for e-tailing in India, but Flipkart, India’s closest version of Amazon is currently valued at a staggering $1 billion (Rs 5,300 crore). Other players who have bagged similarly lucrative deals include fashion and lifestyle players Fashion and You (which raised $40 million in November at valuations of $200 million) and sports gear website Myntra (which raised $40 million at similar valuations). The trend, says Murthy, is being driven by the ‘Greater Fools Theory’.
The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups October 2006 In the Q & A period after a recent talk, someone asked what made startups fail. After standing there gaping for a few seconds I realized this was kind of a trick question. It's equivalent to asking how to make a startup succeed—if you avoid every cause of failure, you succeed—and that's too big a question to answer on the fly. Afterwards I realized it could be helpful to look at the problem from this direction. In a sense there's just one mistake that kills startups: not making something users want. 1. Have you ever noticed how few successful startups were founded by just one person? What's wrong with having one founder? But even if the founder's friends were all wrong and the company is a good bet, he's still at a disadvantage. The last one might be the most important. 2. Startups prosper in some places and not others. Why is the falloff so sharp? 3. If you watch little kids playing sports, you notice that below a certain age they're afraid of the ball. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.
Shannon Clark - Google+ - Nearly a decade ago I worked on a few of these standards… How Kai Fu Lee Talked Me Out of Making a Million Dollars Altucher Confidential Posted by James Altucher The other day on Twitter someone asked me how to make a billion dollars. My response: first make a million. [As an aside: follow and ask me any question on Twitter]. I wanted to make what I thought would be a quick and easy milion dollars at the age of 20. (Lee Chang Ho in the Chun Lan Cup championship, 2005) I was obsessed with the game while I was in grad school. So I visited Kai Fu Lee. (Kai-Fu Lee) I had first met Kai Fu Lee when I was trying to decide what grad school to go to. But later, when I visited Kai-Fu, it had nothing to do with speech recognition. The basic idea was this (very basic): take 10,000 othello positions that are either totally winning or totally losing. Make the move that most closely matches a winning position. So I wanted to win a million dollars by using his same technique for Go and I went to him asked him if he would work on it with me. I gave up. Related Links: Follow me on twitter Kai-Fu Lee’s original research paper on Othello
Fishing for Survival Before you read any further, please watch this video by Michael Dudok De Wit The Monk and the Fish, in which Dudok de Wit tells the story of a single-minded monk and a very elusive fish. Many people have heard the old adage, “If I give you a fish, you eat for a day. If I teach you to fish, you’ll eat for a lifetime.” I will take the liberty to add, “If you learn about the fish then you’ll be prepared for the future”. Our early work in complexity emerged from a shared interest in how traditional learning and development programs focused far too often on “giving participants the fish,” and the failure of the training as soon as the conditions changed. Consider a typical training design, which begins with clear and precise “behavioral objectives” that provide all participants with what is expected as an outcome of the training program. “By the end of this Workshop the participant will be able to do___, when presented with___, under the following conditions___.” “There are some times,” D.
Robert Scoble - Google+ - MUST WATCH FOR ENTREPRENEURS: An hour with great company… FeaturePlan - Product Management Software FeaturePlan FeaturePlan is a central knowledge base and decision making tool that stores all your product information, from new customer ideas and customer enhancement requests, to market and technical requirements. It allows you to identify market problems and define the features and roadmaps to best respond to your customers needs through the products you develop. An agile, enterprise-class solution, FeaturePlan enables collaboration across all of your company's product groups, including marketing and sales, engineering, professional services, support, and product management. In addition to supporting day-to-day product management activities, FeaturePlan product management software also provides robust analytics and reporting capabilities that dig deeper into your processes to help you leverage best practices in product management within your company.
What cloud boils down to for the enterprise — Cloud Computing News