7:28 AM
Unknown
Microsoft's search engine claims users prefer it to Google. Here, we identify their strengths and weaknesses.
via http://www.entrepreneur.com/blog/224639
via http://www.entrepreneur.com/blog/224639
Showing posts with label Startup. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Startup. Show all posts
Saturday, October 13, 2012
Forbes: UPDATE: SEC Inspector Javert Earns $1.8 Million Interest On $78,000 Judgment
Starting from the Disco year of 1976 and running through 1982, the Securities and Exchange Commission alleged that James L. Douglas a/k/a James L. Cooper had offered and sold over $7.5 million of purported oil and gas program interests in at least 45 limited and general partnerships to over 300 investors. Allegedly, Douglas
via http://www.forbes.com/sites/billsinger/2012/10/13/update-sec-inspector-javert-earns-1-8-million-interest-on-78000-judgment/
via http://www.forbes.com/sites/billsinger/2012/10/13/update-sec-inspector-javert-earns-1-8-million-interest-on-78000-judgment/
Entrepreneur: 3 Hidden Security Risks for WordPress Users
The popular website development platform may be free, but it also is more vulnerable to hackers and other issues.
via http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/224613
via http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/224613
Friday, October 12, 2012
Mouthee’s Social Recommendations Platform Makes It Easy To Share Word-Of-Mouth (Get It?) Reviews
Plenty of startups still believe there’s room in the social recommendations space, and now, another new contender heads into battle. Chicago-based Mouthee is today officially debuting its website and iOS application, which allow users to quickly share reviews of local restaurants and hotels, as well as movies, music and books.
Mouthee co-founder David Pritzker says he first had the idea for the service back in October 2010. “I had been talking with my co-founder Chad Silver – he and I were always exchanging recommendations of things between each other. We were talking about how we had gotten frustrated with the existing review platforms that were available,” he says. “We had both gotten into situations where we had relied on anonymous reviews that weren’t exactly all that they were cracked up to be.”
The iOS application has actually been available for a few months, but it was a soft launch. The company only told friends about it, and to date, there are just “several hundred” users on the service. However, the website version of Mouthee is only now going live.
Using the app (or website) is very simple. There’s a News Feed of recommendations, which you can filter by “nearby” or by your friends’ recommendations on the service. When you find something you like, you can also take actions to buy it via the app. For example, you can make reservations through OpenTable, buy a song through Amazon or iTunes, or purchase movie tickets via Fandango. These affiliate sales provide Mouthee’s initial revenue stream as well.
It’s a handy, well-built app, but the more important question here is, how does Mouthee plan to compete in this crowded space? We’ve seen a number of social recommendation apps come (Tout’d,Livestar, Stamped, Tipflare) and go (remember Oink?) in recent months – what will Mouthee do to differentiate? For starters, says Pritzker, some like Stamped only focus on positive reviews, which he finds problematic. “They have a really cool approach…but the problem I see with that is that you’re dealing with an inherently skewed data set,” he says.
And the others? “Our key focus is really to make this as intuitive and as fun as possible,” says Pritzker. In other words, they hope you’ll use Mouthee because you like to – it’s that simple.
Because it’s based in Chicago, many of Mouthee’s local reviews are for places in that city, but Washington D.C. and NYC also make a showing. There are around 8,000 total reviews on the service today. You can download the app in iTunes here, or visit Mouthee on the web.
Thursday, October 11, 2012
What happened to ‘people discovery’ apps?
The SXSW festival is known as a launchpad for new trends in mobile apps, and last year the prophets declared that GPS-enabled "people discovery" apps were the next big thing. Open your phone and up pops a list of potential new best friends. "You're into 80s anime, soft corn tortillas and speed metal. Well hello stranger, let's grab a beer!" That's how it was supposed to work. Highlight was one of the first to make a big splash, combining easy onboarding with a simple UI and powerful technology to help you find people with mutual friends and interests near you. The company raised money from Benchmark Capital, SV Angel, Quora founder Charlie Cheever, and Mike Arrington's CrunchFund. Robert Scoblecalled it "the coolest app [he has] seen this year."
"YOU'LL WALK INTO A ROOM AND YOU'LL KNOW EVERYONE'S NAME."
"There are all these reasons why learning about the people around us is high-friction, so we don't do it and keep our headphones in and stare awkwardly at our phones," Highlight founder Paul Davison told The Verge. "I'm completely convinced that in 10 years, this will just exist. You'll walk into a room and you'll know everyone's name and where they work, and you'll have something surface the most interesting things you have in common with people around you." There's no doubt that there's some cool technology behind Highlight, but it turns out that people just don't have time to see which neighbors are also intoHomeland. Today, Highlight is still considered one of the front runners in terms of mindshare, but boasts just over 5,000 daily users according to app metrics site AppData. This number is down from about 9,000 back in May. Serendipity, it seems, is not a killer feature.
And that's the problem with acquiring users as a people discovery app: providing a real utility that brings people back for more. "A lot of these apps come from a problem that 99 percent of people don't have," Kirill Sheynkman, Senior Managing Director at RTP Ventures says. Instead of focusing on discovering great places you can go to with friends and family, the apps focus on discovering people outside your social circle during your free time. "Most people go home after work and watch TV. It's a young college kid's problem," Sheynkman says. Highlight's founder disagrees: "The ability to publish profiles into the air above our heads... is a profound shift in the way the physical world works," and will take some time to sink in.
Highlight so far seems to have stuck with its original mission, and as the user numbers show, paid the price (for now, at least). A number of other players in the space have pivoted, with varying degrees of success, while expanding to other platforms. It seems "people discovery" might not be the golden egg these tech companies are sitting on. In fact the killer feature is location as a piece of metadata which can help you find information about current events, restaurants, and people you just walked past. Some apps like Glancee got lucky and didn't have to pivot. The company was acquired by Facebook back in May, perhaps in part because it focused on discovering places and not just other people.
Foursquare some time ago realized that seeing where your friends are isn't compelling enough, so it shifted its focus to providing the best possible recommendations for places to go with your friends. Its "Explore" functionality has grown in scale, as has its New York City office, which now numbers over 100 employees. The service has grown to 25 million users, and more than 500,000 of whom log on every day (which is only counting those who've signed up using Facebook). People come back because Foursquare uses what it knows about your tastes as well as your location to make relevant recommendations. And of course, helping people find places to spend money yields a real business model.
Sonar, a New York-based startup, seems to have found a niche finding friends you already have, but across more than one social network. While Foursquare and Highlight only let you see the location of people signed up for those services, Sonar ties in Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Foursquare, to see where people you know (and people you follow who've posted their whereabouts publicly) are hanging out near you. "We're not trying to be a people discovery app," CEO Brett Martin says. "The only time you'll want to be notified about someone you might really like near you is dating." A spokesperson for the company elaborated: "We recognize that our users aren't as interested in strangers, so we focus on friends," she said. More than 255,000 Sonar users open the app every day — up from less than 50,000 a month ago thanks to the company's new Android app — and that's only counting those who've connected Facebook as a network. People use Sonar to see who's close by at conferences, concerts, and other public spaces where it would be fun to find people you know. "Wherever you go, we are pulling in every geo-social signal nearby like check-ins, tweets, etc," Martin says.
"WE RECOGNIZE THAT OUR USERS AREN'T AS INTERESTED IN STRANGERS, SO WE FOCUS ON FRIENDS."
Even more elaborate than Sonar is Banjo, which lets you view location-tagged posts from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Instagram, and Google. Banjo can help you meet people, but it's much more useful as a way to transport yourself to an event and see what's going on. Fox News and CNN use Banjo to view tweets and Facebook posts from people at crime scenes. People from 190 countries around the world used Banjo to view tweets and images posted from within each Olympic venue this summer. "We're solving for there, and not for here," CEO Damien Patton says, "because 80 percent of the time our normal ‘here' is our place of work or at home. There isn't enough changing ‘here' to continually warrant going into a product to see what's new around you." Banjo capitalizes on users' "fear of missing out," letting them pick any place in the world and seeing location-tagged content served in real time from that location. "The biggest difference between us and competitors is that we're a technology company," Patton says. "We're building through technology, and not just consuming APIs."
"WE'RE BUILDING THROUGH TECHNOLOGY, AND NOT JUST CONSUMING APIS."
"The next ten years is about carrying around sensors and sharing data about our environment," Sonar's Martin says, and most of the "people discovery" apps have already made changes to that effect. And that's the key here: pegging a real utility that brings users back to the app because it's a service app, and not an entertainment app. There is always the chance that Davison is right, and focusing on one network singularly will pay off in the long run. Imagine a world where you walk into a room, open Highlight, and are instantly able to find out how you met "that guy" at the other side of the room. But it seems that at least for now, the public as a whole isn't interested, much like they "weren't ready" for Apple's Newton tablet when it debuted. Davison understands that. "It's a lot like when the Web emerged in the early 90s: It took us some time to figure out the norms, use cases, and new ways of using this technology, but eventually we did, and the world was forever transformed."
We Are Very Excited About Three World-Changing Startups We Discovered This Morning
There are too many new startups coming out each day to keep track of, but today we stumbled upon three which are actually pretty cool – world changing even.
Here they are, in order of world-changingness, from "oh, handy" to "wow, that'll shake up humongous industries."
Silvercar makes business trips easier. One of the more annoying parts of a quick business trip is the hassle of dealing with renting a car. It's expensive. There are hidden fees. It takes forever. SIlvercar, which just raised money from Michael Arrington and others, wants to make it simpler. It will rent just one kind of car, Audi A4s, and it will rent them to you through a mobile app. That's it.
Oyster is a Netflix/Spotify-for books. GigaOm reports that Peter Thiel has invested $3 million in a company called Oyster. Oyster will be a mobile app with its own library of books that consumers will pay a monthly subscription to get access to. The book industry is actually a kind of small industry with revenues in the tens of billions. Still, books have influence beyond their commercial value, so this is a pretty big deal.
Holy cow, Lit Motors could change everything in China, India, Europe, and in the U.S. Lit Motors is making an electric motorcycle with doors, two pedals, and a steering wheel. It has a prototype called the C-1. It will have a range of 200 miles on a single charge, and it will go 0-60 in under six seconds. It has built-in gyros to keep it upright at a standstill, at speed, and in a collision. It'll eventually cost $14,000. It's going to be an uphill battle, but if Lit Motors can get this thing on the road, it would turn the auto industry upside down, starting in the developing world, and maybe even in the U.S.
Related articles, courtesy of Zemanta:
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
The Joys of working in a startup? Well, get busy living or get busy dying
[Editorial notes: So how does it feel to work for a startup? Here is a guest post by Albinder Dhindsa, Head of International Expansion at Zomato.]
“Get Busy Living or get busy dying” – Red from Shawshank Redemption
Undeniably one of the greatest quotes from one of the best movies ever made. I guess its not a surprise that a movie about a prison is what came to my mind when I thought about parallels for corporate life.
Fret not though, this article is not about lampooning the power-pointy, neck-tied existence of cubicle people. Rather, its a call to experience the joys of working in a start-up, at-least once in your career.
So, if Shawshank is my parallel for corporate life, the one for joining a start-up has to be bungee jumping, except if the bungee station was run by meth addicts, and you don’t know if the ties will hold (and yes, the entrepreneurs are the meth addicts in this analogy). Here are some lessons from personal experience.
Its a challenge like no other – This seems like a tired old way to put it but it is the simple truth. Most of us have faced challenges in academic and professional life, but unlike those challenges, the problem statement in a start-up is pretty vague and self-defined. Most of us get hired by companies based on skill set that is somewhat compatible with a job description. Start-ups do that to a certain extent too, but most decisions are based on fit and attitude. At least at Zomato, we hire people not skill-sets. As long as the between-ears processor is clicking, we figure you will learn whatever it is you need to do.
Since you are not entirely sure about the nature of the challenge, figuring it out becomes even more…ummm…challenging? Its strangely liberating and scary to look for the next step, let alone figure out whether its the right one or not. Here is another wrench, you are probably going to be asked to look at twenty different things from day one and most of them are likely to be ones where you have no domain knowledge. If that doesn’t sound exciting enough, you might want to try skydiving (without a parachute of course).
It makes the 360 degree evaluation comically redundant – Once you are working in an environment where you are not required to turn in TPS reports you find out your true nature pretty quickly. Things like prioritization and time management are no longer chores but show themselves as essential parts of your personality. Same goes for figuring out if you are internally motivated to do this work or were you doing it just to support your Bangkok trips. Self discipline and internal drive in people differentiate most successful start-ups from the not-so-successful ones. When you are truly unfettered from the chords of hierarchy do you begin to understand the task-master manager on your floor who drove his employees more than anyone else – he was simply acting as an external agent to replicate these two traits.
You figure out why organizations become what they do – We try everyday to create an organization that is unlike anything any of us has previously “endured”. The structure needs to be flat and people need to be creative etc etc. However, you soon start seeing those annoying little corporate tendencies like update calls, reporting structures and training manuals start rearing their heads. They start off as ways to help maintain a semblance of control but soon become weapons of scalability. Here is the obvious tip, get in while that stuff is still being written- its infinitely more fun to create rules rather than follow them. At Zomato, we are still retaining hope that our culture will help us grow more organically without becoming a rigid organization. Only time will tell if we can succeed.
You find out what it is like to play cricket when the power outage outlasts the laptop batteries.
You go from incentives to ownership - In a start-up, your Beta with the company is one even when it all comes crumbling down. However, day in and day out – I see people who are infinitely happier betting on themselves rather than “working for tips”. Of course, everybody hopes there is a payout at the end of all the work – but the people who stick around in start-ups are those that see it as a personal statement rather than a career decision. So if you are on the fence about taking an offer at a start-up out of college or another job or business school – take a hard look at the people in the company. Would you bet on them? if yes, now ask yourself, would I bet on me?
What are your thoughts?
Aside, watch the videos from Shawshank Redemption and Office Space
Tools to Bootstrap your Startup Weekend Idea
Written by mike
This past weekend, I had the opportunity to attend Columbia MO's second annual Startup Weekend (you can read about Zapier's origins at the first annual, last year) While the Zapier team was officially registered as mentors, Wade and I decided to also build a gag startup, PRLibs.
PRLibs — madlibs to create press releases for startups. We realized that many startup press releases sound the same and that we could build something to auto-generate them. I think the expression is, "adding fuel to the fire".
The product works like this: users fill out a few form boxes with details pertaining to their startup. Those form entries (coupled with a website scrape which we added later) combine to create an often hilariously inaccurate madlib-style press release.
Wade and I decided that we wanted the final product to auto-post to a blog somewhere. We could have spent a few hours installing, configuring, and designing a WordPress blog (or similar) but realized we could get there even faster by using Posterous and using their built-in "Email a blog post" functionality.
The final piece of the puzzle was the glue between our madlib form and sending an email. Something Zapiercan help with! You can hook up simple HTML forms to Zapier using our Webhooks app. In a few minutes we had our Zap, Webhook -> Send Email, and even used Zapier to build final paragraph out of the submitted form fields.
Zapier can help you get from idea to working demo, even if you don't know how to program. Many times (like in the example above) you can build an entire demo only knowing HTML.
There are a ton of other tools out there that can help you get from zero to demo, especially if you are not a developer. This list is compiled from actual observed successful usage at Startup Weekend:
Kickoff Labs Landing pages and email collection. A great thing to have live by the end of the night, Friday
Balsamiq Pitching an idea or vision? Mock-ups can quickly convey information to would be developers
WooThemes Get a custom Wordpress Site off the ground by Sunday
Posterous and Tumblr can host your Blog without needing a server of developer
So, how'd we do? 54 hours and a working demo later, we had this nice traffic graph:
I believe one of the judges referred to us as "worst startup of all time". In other words, PRLibs was a smashing success and great way cap-off the real Startup Weekend participants. Congratulations to everyone who participated!
6 Tips To Get Your Startup Covered By Any Blog
1. Find Your Target Market
Everyone wants to make headlines on USA Today, but what most people don’t realize is that they will probably gain more traction by getting covered by industry blogs in their particular fields rather than big publications.
So as a first step, I would suggest to find 5 bloggers (they don’t need to be from leading publications) that already write about your industry. They are most likely to write about your startup. Read their articles and make sure they pertain to your project.
After that, try searching for their e-mails. If it’s not publicly available on the site, 99% of the time it’s one of these combinations:
- first letter of their first name and their last name @ sitedomain.com (For example, if full name to be Alex Debelov at virool.com, it will be adebelov@virool.com)
- first name dot last name @ sitedomain.com (i.e. alex.debelov@virool.com)
- first name @sitedomain.com (i.e. alex@virool.com)
- last name @sitedomain.com (i.e. debelov@virool.com)
If none of these combinations work, you can try to find particular person on Facebook or Linkedin by simply searching for their name (and maybe other aspects you know about them, like: location, education, etc.)
2. Do Not Solicit Bloggers with a Standard Pitch
Bloggers are people and just like any person they hate being solicited by entrepreneurs. Think of the last time telemarketer called you, were you annoyed or excited about what they were trying to sell you?
Just the same way, bloggers hate being bothered by products that are irrelevant to them. They hate getting standard Press Releases in the e-mail and then asked to write an article about it. That’s not a good way to do it.
Whatever you do, don’t solicit bloggers with a standard pitch.
3. Make a Custom Pitch
Read what a particular blogger writes about and realize whether it’s actually relevant to your startup. If it is, then create a custom pitch to the blogger. Make sure you actually read his/her articles and incorporate some of the themes into your e-mail. A great custom pitch would be,
“Hi Blogger Name,
I read your article about X subject, and believe you will find my product/service interesting, because we have created an innovative solution for this industry.
What we’ve accomplished is similar to what your wrote about Product A in Article Y, but to a greater capacity.
I would love to have you cover a story about my product/service as it pertains to your interests in the field”.
That’s it.
4. Don’t Oversell
Another thing bloggers hate is when you try to oversell them on your product/service thinking that it will get them excited. Get rid off things like:
“leading”, “world’s best”, “first” and whatever other adjective you might use that will make you sound like a douche. Remember, bloggers need to stay objective about what you do and the more adjectives you use to describe your startup, the more skeptical they are going to be.
5. Make it Relevant
This goes back to making a custom pitch. If the person writes about Tech News in Boston and you are operating a business out of California, and you still want to get covered, then make your pitch relevant. In my case, I would tell them, “I went to school in Boston and conceived Virool, while I was a student there. However, I moved out to Bay Area, because the tech environment was more vibrant here.”.
Here the blogger can still make your story relevant to Boston natives reading their blog.
6. Build Relationships
Bloggers are more likely to write about you if they know you. Yes, relationships matter! So how do you build relationships?
a. Phone calls are better than e-mails. Meetings are always better than phone calls. If the blogger meets you, they will feel more comfortable writing about you and covering your product/service. They will also be able to sense the passion you have for your field, that couldn’t be felt as much over the phone/e-mail.
b. Throw a party! – Seriously, a ton of tech companies throw huge launch parties with a particular goal of getting a lot of PR. Parties are also a great way to meet a ton of writers in short amount of time. And trust me, most bloggers will not turn down free food and booze.
c. If all else fails, then leverage other people’s relationships. Don’t be afraid to ask your friends/acquaintances for intros to bloggers. Bloggers always seek interesting subjects to write about and a short intro from a friend can go a long way to get your product/service covered.
Hope this was helpful.
Monday, October 8, 2012
Startup Offers Failed Entrepreneurs A Million-Dollar Signing Bonus
It's hard to hire in tech.
How hard?
A startup called Twice is offering a $1 million cash and equity signing bonus to anyone who launched a startup through accelerator programs Y Combinator, 500 Startups, or TechStars and now needs another job.
Twice is calling it a $1 million "acqui-hire."
It's a smart move.
People who "failed" at their own startup—funded by Y Combinator, 500 Startups, TechStars, or not—are coming away with tons of useful experience Twice can benefit from.
There will probably be lots of competition for the offer.
Here's the press release from Twice:
Twice Launches $1MM Restart Fund for Top-Notch Startup Talent
Blanket Standing Offer for Any Y Combinator, 500 Startups, or TechStars Company
San Francisco, CA -- October 8, 2012 -- Twice, the first concierge-style marketplace for buying and selling secondhand fashion, today announced the launch of Restart Fund, which will offer $1MM to acquire any Y Combinator, 500 Startups, or TechStars company or similarly well-qualified team. Most Silicon Valley insiders are familiar with Start Fund, which provides $150,000 in funding to every graduating Y Combinator startup, and the name Restart Fund is a tongue-in-cheek nod to this initiative.
Since its inception nearly two years ago Start Fund has proven to be a savvy move, but it has also fueled a spurt in seed funding that has resulted in many promising teams unable to raise a Series A. And even in the best of times, popular wisdom holds that 9 out of 10 startups fail -- often due to circumstances well outside their founders’ control. The Restart Fund is a bold step toward filling this gap in the startup ecosystem--bringing top-notch engineering and design talent together to focus on a business with proven traction, a large market, and ample resources.
“Given the current state of Silicon Valley’s hiring environment, it’s a super smart move for Twice to acquire a talented team with proven execution ability but whose own products haven't found traction,” said Elad Gil, founder of Mixer Labs, former Twitter VP, and Twice investor.
Restart Fund was developed by Twice’s founders based on their personal experiences as entrepreneurs. “My co-founder Calvin and I quit our jobs at Google and began working on a micropayments business, but we were never able to hit product/market fit. We were left wondering what to do,” said Noah Ready-Campbell, CEO of Twice. “We were approached by several big companies about talent acquisitions, but we knew we still wanted to work on something that had a lot of opportunity for growth. If Restart Fund had been around, it would have been a very interesting option.”
Due to the rigorous application process, membership in a top startup accelerator is the primary criterion for an offer from Restart Fund, though acquired teams must also pass Twice’s standard hiring screens. “We were accepted into Y Combinator, so we saw firsthand the quality of our peer companies,” explained Twice CTO Calvin Young. “This happened right around the time our micropayments business was slowing down, so we ultimately chose to decline YC, but some of the best engineers I’ve ever met have gone through the program.”
This engineering strength is the primary reason Twice chose to create Restart Fund, as the operational nature of the company’s business poses significant technical challenges to overcome. “In order to take photos efficiently, for example, we’ve had to develop many custom image processing tools, and basically ended up building our own internal Instagram,” explained Mr. Young. Given that the company sells clothing, the look and feel of its site is extremely important. “In our view, designers are without question as important to the product team as engineers,” he added.
Twice closed a $4MM Series A round of funding in August led by IA Ventures with a syndicate including Felicis Ventures, Lerer Ventures, SV Angel, CrunchFund, and High Line Venture Partners.
For more information, including application details, please visit www.restartfund.com or www.liketwice.com/jobs.
Is your market actually big? Or is it a fake market?
Every entrepreneur wants to believe their product is taking on a big market. Sometimes they’re kidding themselves.
If they are making something fun, they’ll say- “we’re competing against TV! The market is huge!” If they are making something utilitarian and functional, they’ll say, “everyone wants to save time- there’s millions of people who want that!” Or worse, they’ll combine two products that have big markets – Facebook and eBay, let’s say – and think “FB is huge, and eBay is huge, so a social network for auctioneers would also be huge!”
This is lazy, fuzzy thinking.
The reason why it’s useful to target big markets is that there’s pre-built demand for your product category. This makes growth and customer acquisition much, much easier. When customers understand your product category, and then your job can be to define why it wins versus the competition, rather than educating your customers on why need it in the first place. The negative is that you have a bunch of direct competition and an already established axis for how people will evaluate your product’s desirability. But that’s OK, entrepreneurs love to compete with big, slow companies right?
The “What kind of X do you use?” test
IMHO, here’s the best test of a big market- you’d ideally be able to go to 10 customers in your market segment and ask, “what kind of X do you use?” and the majority of them would be able to answer the question directly, showing a clear grasp of what X is. If you ask people, “What kind of car do you use?” they will know. Ask a sales professional “What kind of CRM do you use?” and they will also know, even if they say “we use an excel spreadsheet.”
If they say, “huh? What’s that?” then you’re in an imaginary market. Or the kinder way to say it- you’re in a “new market,” which sounds better than to say that there’s no market for your product.
An even stronger signal is when they know the label for a product category, like “car” “CRM” “browser” “phone” rather than the functional description “get you from A to B” “track your customers” etc. This is an even stronger signal that there’s a real, established market and customers know what they want to buy. If you have to explain what the category is as part of your question, then it means they still may not get it. A further improvement is then if they know the name of the product category, can tell you about the different products, and how they compare to each other. For example, if you asked me about “fast food restaurants” I could name you a whole bunch and tell you about McDonald’s versus Taco Bell versus something else. And that opens up the opportunity to also introduce a new “healthy fast food restaurant” which could be an entrant to the market.
The electronic version to do this “What kind of X do you use test” is to use Google Keywords Tool and see if a bunch of people are searching for your category. This isn’t to help generate SEO, it’s to help validate that people even know how to talk about what you’re doing. You’ll see that, for instance, a product like “blog” has 10s of millions of searches, which means millions of people understand what a blog is.
I also wrote a more detailed post a year ago about using the Google Keywords Tool for market research, for anyone interested in additional reading.
Want to tap into something people already know they need?
Remember that the first telephones were called “speaking telegraphs” and the first cars were called “horseless carriages.” No matter how important those inventions ultimately came to be, initially they had to conform to what customers expected. Only until a few years could they establish their own product category and competitive dimensions.
The other datapoint that has to be mentioned here is Apple. They helped convince me that reinventing a category is just as important as inventing a new one- while it can be a great feeling to bring something completely new to the world, Apple showed that you can be extremely innovative by taking products like laptops, MP3 players, smartphones, music software, etc., and upgrade them so much that it unlocks a whole new category for people. So for those who think that taking on an existing product category is tantamount to cloning, just try to improve an existing product as much as Apple does, and you’ll get somewhere.
The whole point of this post is: Start sizing a market based on what your target customer understands. If they don’t understand what your product is, and how it stacks up against substitute products, be honest with yourself: You’re in a new market. This means a whole different set of strategies and tactics for how to introduce your product. Start by figuring out where you are, and the rest will be a lot easier.
Sunday, October 7, 2012
10 Ways Startups Can Deal With Patent Troll Demands
It’s no fun receiving a patent demand, but rest assured, you are not alone. When that dreaded “invitation to license” or, worse, “complaint” arrives at your doorstep, what should you do? Here are some tips based on our collective experiences counseling over a hundred startups and surveying hundreds of technology companies about their practices. (The full report on startups and patent trolls, including how often survey respondents used different strategies, and how much it cost them, can be found here.)
1. Don’t Panic
This is perhaps the hardest advice to follow. Being on the receiving side of a demand can be extremely upsetting. But patent demands are now increasingly a fact of life, and investors, underwriters, board members, and potential acquirers know this. Most troll demands will go away before a suit is filed and most cases are not bet-the-company-litigation. Your supporters will not likely back away from you just because of a patent troll suit. Just as in business, keeping your cool will help you stay in control of the situation, rather than vice-versa.
- Keep A Low Profile
If you’re small, there’s a reasonable chance you’re only one of many receiving a demand letter. Take a look at the patent and the allegations; if you can form a reasonable belief that a license is not needed, file the letter away. Twenty-two percent of respondents to the survey referenced above resolved the threat by doing nothing.
- Find A Lawyer With A Long-Term View And Business Savvy
Your lawyer is a great resource, but make sure she understands and has your business interests in mind. Some lawyers are reluctant to advise you to do nothing. Yet, that is often the best strategy. Choose someone who you trust to watch your back business-wise, and who is interested in a long-term relationship with you. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to these cases.
- Know Yourself
Though your first instinct when seeing a demand may be to think of the million reasons the patent is rubbish, the easier way out is to assess whether the patent has anything to do with your business. By reflecting on your own business, you may be able to come up with easier ways out – that you don’t practice the patent, are indemnified, are licensed, or don’t have any revenue. If the patentee is persistent, these defenses are more likely to convince them to drop their case. As appealing is it may be to “kill” the patent, principles can be expensive in patent litigation. Your priority should be getting yourself out. One exception is if you have your own unique prior art; then, go ahead and focus on invalidity and leverage it to try to obtain an early resolution.
- Check Out The People, Not Just The Patent
If the patentee is persistent, check them out. Who is holding the patent, who represents them, have they been involved in other litigations or campaigns? Get as much information as you can. Who is behind the suit can matter as much if not more than the patent they hold. Some patent trolls are out for quick cash. Others may have different reasons for targeting you: They think you are an easy target; they are using your money to go after someone bigger; or they are hoping to use you to set an example for their future campaigns. But few actually want to take their cases to trial. Check the company out using Secretary of State websites, conducting online searches, and checking patent ownership (assignments.uspto.gov). If they’ve sued before, find out how the story ended, including by calling up other targets or their lawyers. Your local public law school library, or tools like PACER or Docket Navigator may be able to provide some information; Lex Machina, a company one of us advises, offers a report on who has sued you and to put you in touch with others who have requested the same report. Find out who the decision makers are, whether they are involved in other businesses subject to countersuit, whether they have perhaps sued you before (it happens; these guys change their names and change counsel and sometimes go back to the already-licensed well).
- Poverty Defense
These cases are about money. Don’t be shy about telling the patentee about your financial situation and that you really aren’t worth their time. Ask what it will take for them to go away, and educate them that there’s really no revenue from the accused products. Your lawyer can do this by sharing information about your financials on a confidential basis. Or you can make the call yourself, explaining that you have a little cash to resolve the problem and don’t want to spend it on a lawyer. Often it is best to focus on economic defenses, as the patent troll is unlikely to agree that you don’t infringe and even less likely to agree that the patent is invalid. But they don’t often want to pursue costly litigation when there is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
7. Team Up
If you’re small and you’re sued, the odds are good that you will have company. Seek out joint defense groups and allow codefendants with more exposure to lead the way. Be a member in good standing of a joint defense group, but be careful that you don’t end up committed to costs that you would not have incurred on your own. While you may be able to put the case on “life support” (see below) the other defendants may opt for a more aggressive defense and split costs on an equal basis with you. Joint representation —when a single firm represents multiple parties and the costs are evenly split among them— makes the most sense when parties have similar exposure and goals. When the parties have different exposures and goals, joint defense—where parties coordinate but have their own counsel — is likely the more economic choice.
8. Life Support
Lawsuits are expensive, but they can be done efficiently. Keep a low profile. Produce documents without a fight. If you can, offer to help with the defense so you don’t have to pay a lawyer to do all of the heavy lifting, e.g. you can have an engineer assess non-infringement defenses or search for prior art. The distraction is costly, but perhaps less so than the lawyer’s fees.
9. Pick Battles Carefully
Prioritize the fights that matter; typically “I don’t infringe” or defenses related to your exposure will win the day. In certain circumstances, an administrative challenge (reexamination or post-grant review) to the asserted patent may also provide you with leverage. Be aggressive where it counts most. There may be opportunities to set a precedent that you won’t go down without a fight, and to do so without breaking the bank. Other times the adage, “even when you’ve won, you’ve lost” — in terms of time, attention, and resources — applies.
10. Advice For All Times: Don’t Be An Easy Target
Trolls pick their targets by studying websites, looking at product specs, and trying to make out a case that you need their patent. Don’t make it easy for them. Require registration before granting access to whitepapers, detailed documents, or video tutorials that delve into the behind-the-scenes details. Think twice about being on customer lists or advertising the ins and outs of your business, the products you use, etc., unless there’s a good business reason for doing so. Often it is the companies that advertise most successfully that are the most frequent targets of troll demands — troll threats should not drive business decisions, but don’t be surprised when your successful marketing campaign is followed by an onslaught of troll letters.
Never Give Your Information To 10 Minute Old Startups
Handing over sensitive information to startups that are only a few minutes old can lead to bad, bad things.
The Startup
The startup under fire today is a web service by the name of Ice Box Pro posted on Hacker News today proved that point. The service was designed as a way to back up filed to Amazon Glacier that you put in a special Dropbox folder. I was curious to see how well it performed, so I decided to sign up and give it a test run. What follows is a perfect example on how not to handle security.
Clicking on the Account tab brings you to your account page, visible below.
The Your Account page of an Ice Box Pro account
Visible are your name, email, AWS ID and Key, and the AWS Glacier vault created by Ice Box Pro. Upon setting your AWS ID and Key, only the last few characters are actually visible. What’s even more interesting, however, is the /users/87 part of the URL. As it turns out, your User ID is baked into the URL. In this example, I was the 87th user to sign up for Ice Box Pro. My original account was somewhere between 5 and 15, although I entered in random text for the email address so I couldn’t log back in.
So what’s the problem? I’ll give you one guess as to what happens when you change that 87 to another number.
Viewing other users information
That’s right, you could change that 87 to any number you could think of and it would spit back the information for that user. You would see exactly the same information you could see for yourself. This quickly reminded me of the Stripe CTF a few months ago. Since you can only see the Name, Email, and the last few characters of the users ID and Key, the information isn’t too dangerous with the exception of it being a spammers gold mine. But wait, it gets worse…
Compromising accounts
See that Edit link at the bottom of the account page? Click it and you’ll see the account edit view!
In the Edit your profile view, you can change your name, email, password, and AWS info
The important part here is to note that if I had filled out an AWS access key ID and AWS secret access key previously, the entire key would be visible on this screen. So while only the last few characters are visible from the account view, the entire key is visible from the edit view. It’s worth noting that the edit option is available for any user account and can be accessed by anyone.
This means that by going to /users/1/edit and /users/2/edit, you could edit the details of the two founders of Ice Box Pro. From here you can reset their password, login as them, and get access to any file they backed up. Even worse it gives you access to their AWS keys.
If you setup your access correctly, then only your AWS glacier service can be accessed. Some users, however, I found used their master AWS keys which give access to every area of Amazon Web Services (EC2, S3, etc).
Conclusion
Never give any kind of information to a startup that came into existence just 10 minutes ago. At least give it a few days for them to work out the security vulnerabilities such as this. The one I saw today was one of the worst imaginable. Full control over any users account, password, and AWS keys. Users that used their master AWS keys opened themselves up to a major headache if the keys were accessed by the wrong people and not revoked in time.
Saturday, October 6, 2012
The 14 Most Interesting Startups To Emerge From DEMO
DEMO Fall 2012 wrapped up in Santa Clara today, where 77 startups took the stage to show off their apps, services and products. The young companies were given six minutes to pitch their ideas and impress the audience, collectively competing for the $1 million advertising prize that went to the idea with the most promise.
From a bird identification app and an “Internet of Things” to apartment finders and augmented reality, here are the 14 startups that stood out from the pack during the three-day launch event.
THE WINNERS
So RentLingo decided to use social networking to make the rental process less of a pain in the ass and help landlords find great tenants and renters find the best apartments. To do that, the startup aggregates info from the major listings players and uses Facebook’s Open Graph to give users social context as they search for apartments. It presents this all via a dynamic map UI, giving listings more of a localized feel and allowing you to see what friends have lived in a particular area and reach out to them (within the app) to ask questions.
Your friends can then drag and drop a comment about the apartment, all of which is visible to people within your network and social graph. The site aggregates and lets you view all of this social sentiment around each listing, aiming to provide a more effective and relevant “review” system. Listings with reviews from your network show up as blue pins, while national listings show up as red pins, all of which can be easily filtered by price, size, location and recency.
The idea is to turn the platform into a place where owners go to see what renters are saying about them (a la Yelp) and to help students and renters find great spots with the help of their social graph and location targeting. With Padmapper, Craigslist, Zumper and seemingly hundreds more, it’s a crowded space, but RentLingo has taken a unique angle that could be powerful at scale.
Ube’s app allows users to easily control IP-enabled smart devices using their Android or iPhone. This includes smart TVs, set top boxes, AV receivers, DVD players, thermostats, garage doors openers and more. You can even use the app to control your devices while you’re away from home using the Ube Cloud — all you need is a smartphone and a WiFi router. The company said that its app will work with over 200 IP-controlled devices when it launches next month. Peter covered Ube’s launch yesterday, which you can check out here for an in-depth review.
It was also a big day for Rock Health (and healthtech at large), as two of DEMO’s five winners were part of the health accelerator’s most recent batch. We covered Rock Health’s third batch here, and descriptions are included below.
At DEMO, Neumitra presented its newest product, Bandu, a smart watch that helps users reduce stress and “slow down.” Using smart sensors to identify biometric signals, Bandu monitors your body temperature, motion and skin conductance. When it finds significant changes in the norm (i.e. red flags that indicate an increase in stress), the device prompts you to take a number of mood-altering actions, of the non-narcotic or barbiturate variety, of course. Sending notifications to your phone, Bandu might suggest that you play a game, or call a kindly grandmother, or play some music.
DEMO saw the launch of NeuroTrack’s newest product, which aims to make Alzheimer’s diagnosis more widely accessible by removing the need to take an eye-tracking test and, instead, simply allows users to take the test using a mouse or trackpad.
The end-goal is to match users with the right politician (the one who aligns closest with your political views) and does so by prompting them to choose the three issues that matter to them most. The site then asks an additional ten questions, using your responses to determine your political match. If that doesn’t satisfy, users can go through each question, digging down into the data and compare each politician’s stand on the particular issue.
Users can then make a donation to their chosen candidate and engage with them on various networks. Obviously, it’s simple as is, but you can see this potentially being a useful platform for politicians to engage their constituency based on issues that matter to them and a way to disseminate propositions (oh, California), petitions, etc. ElectNext itself simply wants to create a tool that increases voter participation in the U.S. Even if this isn’t the way to do it, the goal is an admirable one. But good luck with the young people, I hear they’re apathetic.
NOTABLES
Users can set up their phones, for example, so that access is granted only by scanning their glorious visage. On top of that, the app (which will be available on iOS and Android in the coming months) lets you choose different levels of security for individual sites or apps, so you could keep nosey roommates out of your Dropbox account or your Gmail. Or maybe your son or daughter has been racking up your bill from in-app purchases in a game on your iPad, in which case you could have PassBan grant access if and when it hears your voice.
Another cool feature: The app works remotely, so that you could, say, grant or deny access to websites your progeny is trying to view at home while you’re at work. Users can pick and choose between voice, face, location, etc. for different apps and websites or set up a combo of those on one particular app or website. The startup is currently in beta and will be launching to the public soon. So stay tuned.
While the startup also offers a white-label program for DIY app development, at DEMO the startup added a new product to its growing arsenal of tools for the SMB market. The new product, called Bizness CRM, was initially built internally to help its white-label resellers sell apps and websites to startups and small businesses. Unable to find a good third-party product to recommend for those looking to sell to SMBs, the team turned it into a product.
One of the CRM platform’s key features is a lead generator that allows users to find leads in any industry, any location and then narrow that list based off of optional criteria, like “has website” or “has Twitter page,” etc. Obviously, a small business that has a quality website and a social media presence is much more likely to invest in a mobile app if they’ve already seen results from traditional marketing, so this helps sales teams and marketers save time and narrow the field.
The platform also includes a tracking pipeline, a scheduling calendar, a metrics dashboard, team collaboration and a native iPhone app to track sales on the go.
Not just another social analytics platform, Tellagence instead calls itself a “conversation monitoring system” that identifies context and relationship dynamics to predict the path of communication. The goal is to allow brands and businesses to optimize marketing efforts and increase reach by moving away from focusing on individual influencers to targeting smaller, key group of users and their most significant relationships.
The startup’s first product focuses on Twitter and is geared toward enterprise marketers. For more on the science, go here.
ONES TO WATCH
YouBetMe is an app that lets you challenge your friends (and strangers) to a wager about anything — at anytime. The app lets you capitalize on all of life’s betting opportunities, whether it’s on Monday Night Football, whether your startup will get covered by TechCrunch, how many Jello shots you can take, etc. Users can also create and confirm bets on the go through the app’s SMS-based betting platform, tracking betting data and view public ratings designed to keep bettors honest.
Bonfyre is a photo and content-sharing app that lets users create private groups to share with those who matter most (and will find the share relevant). Those private groups are created around events, which become part of group photostreams and forums to enable reminiscing, event planning and good ole realtime mobile sharing.
Blipboard is a personalized mobile map of the exciting stuff happening around you. The map surfaces places and events nearby based on the activity and interests of your friends, influencers and other businesses. Users can create “blips” or location-based alerts designed to attract others to the venue. The app is headed to the app store shortly.
Candy Lab’s new mobile app uses augmented reality to turn the world around you into a video game — with advertising. The company calls Cachetown a combination of “Google AdWords, Foursquare, and Super Mario Brothers,” delivering its game layer in location-based AR.
Related articles, courtesy of Zemanta:
- Startups: Zumper Wants to Send Craigslist's Apartment Ads Packing
- Zumper Raises $1M From Kleiner, Andreessen, Greylock, NEA, Others
- RentClick.ca is Expanding to Saskatoon Giving Renters and Landlords More Options in the Rental Market
- RentClick.ca is Expanding to Abbotsford Giving Renters and Landlords More Options in the Rental Market
- How to Write a Powerful Property Description
- RentClick.ca is Expanding to Surrey, BC Giving Renters and Landlords More Options in the Surrey Rental Market
