Basic SEO principles, but it is good to remember.
From Social Media today:
http://socialmediatoday.com/ticketkick/445624/5-techniques-get-your-business-top-google
Basic SEO principles, but it is good to remember.
From Social Media today:
http://socialmediatoday.com/ticketkick/445624/5-techniques-get-your-business-top-google
Some days ago I receive a tweet from Steve Blank @sgblank where one of his student did a wonderful job in a report that reveals in-depth research about what makes Silicon Valley startups successful. Today I received a post from my old Siebel Colleague Bruce Cleveland about the same.
It is really worth to read, at least the summary bellow, but if you want to read the full report you can find it here: Startup Genome Report
Startup Genome Report
Some of their key findings:
1. Founders that learn are more successful: Startups that have helpful mentors, track metrics effectively, and learn from startup thought leaders raise 7x more money and have 3.5x better user growth.
2. Startups that pivot once or twice times raise 2.5x more money, have 3.6x better user growth, and are 52% less likely to scale prematurely than startups that pivot more than 2 times or not at all.
3. Many investors invest 2-3x more capital than necessary in startups that haven’t reached problem solution fit yet. They also over-invest in solo founders and founding teams without technical cofounders despite indicators that show that these teams have a much lower probability of success.
4. Investors who provide hands-on help have little or no effect on the company’s operational performance. But the right mentors significantly influence a company’s performance and ability to raise money. (However, this does not mean that investors don’t have a significant effect on valuations and M&A)
5. Solo founders take 3.6x longer to reach scale stage compared to a founding team of 2 and they are 2.3x less likely to pivot.
6. Business-heavy founding teams are 6.2x more likely to successfully scale with sales driven startups than with product centric startups.
7. Technical-heavy founding teams are 3.3x more likely to successfully scale with product-centric startups with no network effects than with product-centric startups that have network effects.
8. Balanced teams with one technical founder and one business founder raise 30% more money, have 2.9x more user growth and are 19% less likely to scale prematurely than technical or business-heavy founding teams.
9. Most successful founders are driven by impact rather than experience or money.
10. Founders overestimate the value of IP before product market fit by 255%.
11. Startups need 2-3 times longer to validate their market than most founders expect. This underestimation creates the pressure to scale prematurely.
12. Startups that haven’t raised money over-estimate their market size by 100x and often misinterpret their market as new.
13. Premature scaling is the most common reason for startups to perform worse. They tend to lose the battle early on by getting ahead of themselves.
14. B2C vs. B2B is not a meaningful segmentation of Internet startups anymore because the Internet has changed the rules of business. We found 4 different major groups of startups that all have very different behavior regarding customer acquisition, time, product, market and team.
Complimentary 1to1 Webinar Tuesday, May 24th | 2:00PM Eastern
Consumers are a fickle bunch, often swayed by flashy promotions and discounts. Additionally, advances in social networking and mobility have fundamentally changed the way customers behave. Fortunately, this transformation also opens the door to more direct relationships. Consumer packaged goods companies (CPGs) must engage consumers across channels and learn their underlying needs and preferences to create a connection that cements long-term loyalty and evangelism—and grows revenue.
CPGs must engage consumers based on their needs and preferences to create a connection that cements long-term loyalty and grows revenue. Our presenters will examine how to build consumer relationships and cut across channels.
Attendees of this exclusive webinar will also receive a complimentary copy of the new white paper by Peppers & Rogers Group, Social Loyalty: A New Way to Make Friends and Influence Business.
The total library is a great site where SpaceCollective members team up to explore what it means to be human today and into the future. With the image of Jorge Luis Borges (the great Argentinian writer) as the icon of the Total Library. Go to: http://spacecollective.org/projects/The-Total-Library
This is part of the project Space Collective: Where forward thinking terrestrials exchange ideas and information about the state of the species, their planet and the universe, living the lives of science fiction today.
Wikipedia definition: “Oauth (Open Authentication) allows users to share their private resources (e.g. photos, videos, contact lists) stored on one site with another site without having to hand out their credentials, typically username and password.”
There are many reasons why one should not share their private credentials. Giving your email account password to a social network site so they can look up your friends is the same thing as going to dinner and giving your ATM card and PIN code to the waiter when it’s time to pay. Any restaurant asking for your PIN code will go out of business, but when it comes to the web, users put themselves at risk sharing the same private information. OAuth to the rescue
This is what you see when you are in any web application which wants to use your data stored in another web application, you will see that you have to put your user and password in the “screen” of the second application, so the first application does not know your credentials, but the second application will allow access to “part” of your data (scope) to the first application. I hope that this is clear!!! Basically, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, gmail, google docs, etc can use this protocol.
The official page for this standard is: http://oauth.net/
If you want more details to understand this protocol. This is a good Beginner’s Guide to OAuth.
This is the Google implementation of this protocol, to allow access to Google applications.
This is a good video to explain Oauth 2.0, from the user point of view. If you want more details have a look of the subsequent videos:Oauth Part 2, Oauth Part 3 and Oauth Part 4.
I know that this post is quite technical, but quite useful to understand the authentication in the cloud.
I remember when I was a kid and I saw my father reading the news every morning, before he goes to work. He used to read the local newspaper (“La Capital” de Mar del Plata”) and the national Newspaper (“La Nacion” in Argentina). Also I remember that he checked in his personal agenda, all the things that he had planned for that day, before he went to run his construction company. He had everything in order, in the correct place, he was a civil engineering. If I speak about my father, I can write forever, I miss him very much. But let’s back to the point about the information received every day.
Now a days, we have TOO many sources of information, as it was predicted by Marshal McLuhan, we don’t have too much time to digest all this information, from the TV, Newspaper, Web, etc. But if we just focus on the web, even tough there, we also have too many sources. We have to check:
A friend of mine create a simple, but really good android application.
This simple application allows you to update your twitter status talking instead of typing. After the text is recognise you can amend the text before uploading to your twitter status.
Search for twitalk in your Android market, and start to use it.
Or go Appbrain to download the app, I hope that is useful for you and you will help my friend as well. Spread the word.
I downloaded Layar in my iPhone, and the idea is great.
You can see the world with your iPhone (like when you take a photo), and different things could appear in your mobile screen.
You can play, you can see more information in a museum, etc, depending on which layer you use at the moment, or you can virtually walking on the Layar office.
Have a try to download this application in your iPhone or Android. (Layar)
I received today in my email an invitation to test Office Web Apps: http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/web-apps/
Finally Microsoft started to realize the importance of the cloud, there is also an interesting comparison between Office Web Apps and Google Docs:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/168309/microsoft_office_vsgoogle_docs_a_web_apps_showdown.html