Jazz Tigan, co-creator of the Hugalopes, came by our office for lunch yesterday to update me on his progress.  Kevin Coleman also stopped by and recorded Jazz for MixTent‘s Storybin.  The last time I saw Jazz and his co-founder Cris was 10 months ago.  They were just on the beginning part of a journey to turn their “fuzzy Mr. Potato head” style toy into a reality.  They had hand-sewn some prototypes, and they were contemplating a Kickstarter project.

A lot has happened in 10 months.  Jazz and Cris ran a successful Kickstarter project, raising over $21k — way past their $8k goal.  Then this past April, they announced a licensing deal with Jakks Pacific, a top five top toy manufacturer that also licenses brands like Disney, Warner Bros, Star Wars, Nickelodeon and others.  From dream to licensing deal, Jazz and Cris credit much of their success to the funding and publicity they got from the Kickstarter project.

I was super curious to get tips from Jazz on how to run a successful Kickstarter project, so he agreed to let me tape the meeting so other entrepreneurs can learn from his experiences as well.  Jazz shared tips not only about Kickstarter, but about being an entrepreneur in general.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In the video, Jazz offers tips around the importance of timing the Kickstarter project, how many tiers to offer and at what amounts, how to make sure you go over your goal and get the project funded, how to (and how not to) publicize the project, and much more.

Kickstarter is changing the way entrepreneurs bring ideas and products to market, allowing them to rely less on venture capital and angel fundraising, and more on stoking demand for their concepts before going to market.  It’s a great form of ghetto testing and helps provide validation from the marketplace before you spend a lot of time on the business.  If you’ve run a Kickstarter project and you have tips to share, I’d love to hear them in the comments section below.

The Socialize Executive Team Talks Tech

Tody I moderated a discussion today with Socialize executive team members Jason Polites, Isaac Mosquera and Sean Shadmand about how Socialize has created an infrastructure that supports over 7 million API requests per day, 2.5 million social actions (now creating over 1 million new actions per month), 100,000 new users per day, over 7,000 SDK downloads, thousands of live iOS and Android apps running Socialize, all doubling monthly.

I have been getting requests from many companies of all sizes asking how Socialize has built and scaled a large infrastructure with just an 8 person engineering team.  Other startups interested in offering APIs and SDKs have wanted to know what we’ve learned and what pitfalls to avoid, and larger, progressive Fortune 1000 companies have been interested in re-working their infrastructure to be more scalable and efficient.

A partner at Accenture recently told me that I should share some of the secret sauce for other companies to learn from.  The Socialize team believes in being as open as possible with non-proprietary knowledge sharing, to help others benefit from what we’ve learned, and in turn to be able to learn from others as well.

Socialize has created a drop-in social platform that greatly boosts mobile app installs and engagement. If you don’t yet know what Socialize does, you may want to learn more about that here before watching this infrastructure talk.

Here’s the video, with a summary of the discussion points below:

Click here to view the embedded video.

In this 45 minute discussion, the Socialize executive team discusses:

• How Socialize approaches infrastructure from the perspectives of process and business logic
• How teams of one to two employees each for API, iOS SDK, Android SDK, Web and QA work together to create a modularized API infrastructure
• How Socialize teams use APIs to communicate internally within the company to create accountability, efficiency and speed
• Best practices in segmenting internal teams around APIs, including integration testing, unit testing, minimizing distraction and documentation
• How to then break APIs up into products which can be exposed beyond the company internally, and how each API has its own Pivotal Tracker, Github issue tracking, Sphinx auto-generated documentation and change-request systems
• How Socialize treats internal teams as customers of each other, and uses that approach to define and refine the scope of the product, and limits feature creep
• How the SDK team becomes the ‘head of the product,’ scoping and defining functionality back into the company as one of the teams
• The value of hardlining, staying away from perfecting an unreleased API, and getting good at creating a plan to deal with grwoth
• Using a specific approach to scrum Socialize calls “short-cycle scrum” and tools like Basecamp, Google Docs and Pivotal Tracker  to manage situation which often come up, such as capturing and implementing ideas from employees and customers in a structured, productive way, how to stay away from premature design discussions, and how to innovate asynchronously.
• How short-cycle scrum allows each team member to be a product lead within their team,
• Taking full advantage of Amazon services for databases, redundancy, queueing, hosting, scalability, load balancing, all done programmatically, which allows for spooling up of infrastructure literally in minutes
• The benefits of agile development methodologies, and specifically scrum, for those who haven’t already used it for development, and how to trust scrum even though it is counter intuitive to remove dates from projects
• The importance and value of prioritization of focus, and how we use these methodologies to do that, and make the less important things fall away
• How Socialize is breaking up the Socialize action bar into modular components
• How on a micro level, within the code base, the Socialize SDK communicates across the stack using the same type of modular infrastructure Socialize employs as a company at a macro level
• Best practices around continuous integration with TeamCity, code coverage and testing, using GetSatisfaction for support, and how this approach makes support easy
• How Socialize has implemented Splunk not just for log monitoring, but also at the application level for business intelligence, reporting and alerting, and even exposing Splunk data to Socialize clients

I’m a power user of multiple 37 Signals products, including the Basecamp project management system (much less so since Socialize moved to agile scrum methodologies company-wide)  and its Customer Relationship Management system, Highrise.

Highrise is kind of like democracy:  Not great, but definitely the best thing out there, especially if you want a lightweight CRM.  (Salesforce is what you’d probably turn to for a more deeply integrated, enterprise-level CRM).

My Original Cry for Help on Twitter

The biggest problem I have with Highrise, though, is its poor Deals section.  The entire reason a CRM system exists is to manage customer relationships, and part of that is an uncanny ability to manage sales opportunities.  I’ve hacked Highrise to make it better, but I wasn’t satisfied.  I put a request out on Twitter and that’s how I met Alexey Panteleev.

Alexey of Yoxel.com (great service, by the way — check it out) created a Chrome extension that’s absolutely killer with Highrise.  In this post I’ll talk about how I’ve hacked Highrise to work well for me, and how Alexey’s extension makes it even better.  If you want to try Alexey’s extension too, just leave a comment below and I’ll connect you to him.  If he gets enough interest in it, he may productize it and offer it to anyone using Highrise.

Step 1: How to Hack Highrise for Deals

Rudimentary Deal Funnel is Highrise's Biggest Shortfall for Deals

The first thing to know about Highrise & Deals is that it’s rudimentary.  And you have to be OK with that.  If you’re used to sophisticated sales funnels and data visualization, then you probably need to go use another more robust CRM.   I generally subscribe to 37s’ approach that simpler is better.  There’s just one big problem with that in the deals section:  There’s no funnel at all.  That means you only have options of “Pending,” “Lost” and “Won” for your deals.

Deal Category Hack

When you get past a dozen deals, the Pending status becomes very noisy.  So here’s the hack I use to give me more granularity within the Pending status:  I’ve created a number of Deal categories which detail what stage the deal is in.  At right is a screenshot of what that looks like.

Main Deals View with Category Hack

That works fairly well, with a few exceptions.  While I can see all the deals, they’re not sorted in any type of funnel.  It’s also very difficult in Highrise to quickly see which deals you contacted the longest ago, or contacted the most recently.

That’s where Alexey’s Chrome Extension comes in, which I describe below.

Before I do, though, one more trick for hacking Highrise Deals:  I recommend you use a combination of Tags and Deals to track your pending deals.  What I do is tag companies with a series of tags before I’m sure that they’re a serious prospect.  That way I don’t dilute the Deals section with a lot of “maybe” deals.  It’s easy to sort in Highrise using Tags — in fact, as bad as Highrise is in Deals, it redeems itself with Tags.  And here’s a pro tip:  You can use the Highrise Rapportive Raplet to tag contacts right from email.  That’s an invaluable way to keep tags current.  Another pro tip:  You can export contacts with certain Tags out to Mailchimp for email marketing.

Step 2: Alexey’s Highrise Chrome Extension

Alexey’s chrome extension is still in the alpha stage, but it performs flawlessly.  While it might not be visually stunning yet, it’s a workhorse in terms of functionality.  It has three tabs, ‘Categories,’ for deals sorted by category (a true sales funnel for Pending deals if you’ve hacked the categories as I have above),’Oldest’ meaning the deals that were touched/contacted the longest time ago, and ‘Newest’.

Here it is, in all its glory:

Alexey's Chrome Extension for Highrise Deals

Big props to the Vator team for putting on a great, intimate Gamification conference in Berkeley today.  I captured some of the content, with my (chicken-scratch) notes below each video.

Michael Wu, Chief Scientist, Lithium Techologies: Michael’s keynote was fantastic.  He crammed a 2 hour workshop into a 45 minute presentation, so there was a lot of theory to digest in the video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

My notes from Michael’s talk: (not necessarily super coherent)

Social = connection but gamification = interaction.   While connection is huge as evidenced by Facebook, interaction is what builds loyal relationships.

Gamification is created on top of connections.  Connection = baseline framework.

The latent value of a connection (fan/friend) is the potential to interact.

3 most common commercial uses of gamification: Deepen engagement, sustain loyalty, onboard new users… many more in non-business use (government, education)

What powers the magic behind gamification: The Fogg Behavior Model = 3 things that drive human psychology:

• Motivation
• Ability
• Trigger

Gamification = temporal convergence of the these 3 things.  Must drive users above an activation threshold before triggering them.  In more detail:

Discussing motivation:

What motivates people:  Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is what motivates people: Physical / Safety / Belonging / Esteem / Self-Actualization.    All social cohesion happens in “belonging” stage.  Game mechanics happen in “Esteem” stage.   Gamification = primal to the human psyche.

The self-actualization stage = “being stage” — things like self sufficiency… goodness… completeness… autonomy… mastery… purpose… Game mechanics can be applied here as well.

Watson & Skinner say human behaviors are learned through conditioning… for example, assigning “points” for what works to reinforce behavior.   But points by themselves have no value.  The proper use of points depends on the reward schedule.  Drive different human behavior by providing different reward schedules, like:

Variable Ratio (VR):  This is what guides game addiction.  The “wildcard” where the user never knows exactly how many points are going to be distributed, and when.

Variable Interval (VI): Is same point amounts but on varying schedules.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi:  Psychology of Flow = forget about physical feelings (hunger, sleep), passage of time, ego… it’s HARD to get users to this state.

To do so, the skill has to match the challenge.  If the challenge is too hard, people get anxiety, if too easy, people get bored.  Flow = fine line between certainty and uncertainty.  Too much control = boring.  Too challenging = frustrating.  Very hard to please all users and get them into “Flow”.  Over time people acquire more skill, so even if they’re in the “Flow” at one point in time, they will fall out of it over time as they get better.

Developer must have variable, ongoing control over how hard the gameification mechanics are to keep the user in Flow.  (or the right algorithms to do so automatically)

Moving onto Ability:

Ability DNE skill.  Ability = measure of access to resources at the moment when the user needs to perform the behavior.  Resource types = 1) effort (physical, mental), 2) scarce (time, money, authority/permission, attention), 3) Adaptability (capacity to break norms)

Ability is context dependent… access to resources above is different for everyone.

Example he just gave:  Everyone in the room has the skill to send a tweet.  But Michael (presenting) does not have the ability to tweet because he’s giving a presentation (he’s lost access to time and attention resources above, because he’s presenting).

2 perspectives on ability:  Think about it from a task perspective, not a user perspective.  Task perspective = focus on simplicity — on perceived ability by user to do that task.    Another example:  Do it the “hard way” by training the user to have more ability (user perspective), or the “easy way” by making the task simpler (task perspective).  Example he gives is publishing video:  Anyone could do it before, but YouTube made it seem easy, so now many more people do it.  Other examples are progress bars (90% done, you feel like it’s easier… divide & conquer… )

Last factor:  Trigger

Trigger = anything that asks the user to perform a behavior right now.  User must be aware of trigger and must understand what the trigger means.

Why are triggers necessary?  Some reasons:  User is unaware of his ability… user does not know when to do something… user may be distracted… user may question his motivation… good triggers break these routines and reassure user’s motivation and bring to user’s attention how easy the task is.

Trigger is all about timing.  There are a lot of bad triggers out there:  For example, spam mail.  Bad trigger because spam arrives at a time when we don’t have the ability (i.e., bad timing).  ”Cancun vacation” spam email … user does not have motivation or ability to act on it.

Different types of triggers:

Spark trigger: User has ability but is not motivated.

Facilitator trigger:  User is motivated but does not have ability (often used with progress bar to create anticipation as user improves towards his goal)

Trigger effectiveness also depends on “gamer archetype”… creator of Dungeons & Dragons created this.  Says all men created in image of 4 types:  Achiever, Explorer, Killer, Socializer.  Look at these 4 types:

Killer:  Less than 1% of population.  Highly competitive.  How to trigger:  Challenge them.  Foursquare does this well:  ”You’ve been ousted as mayor”.

Socializer:  80% of population:  Opposite of Killer — hate confrontation.  Value relationship & followers.  Best way to trigger = show that their friends are doing it.

Achiever:  10% of population:  Aspire to be killer but can never beat them.  Triggered by status increase.

Explorer: 10% of population.  Driven by discovery & uniqueness of their contributions.  Hate time & space constraints.  Trigger by calling on their unique skill (you are the only one with this skill).

===== END of 3 points description ====

Beware of moral hazard of game play:  Skinnerian operant conditioning:  The reward can become learned & become the motivator instead of the behavior.  Example:  gamify flossing — reward with perks, like a toy:  kids will floss, but for the wrong reasons… you won’t be able to keep up… then they lose all motivation to perform the desired task.

The overjustification effect:  Rewarding people with extrinsic rewards will actually decrease a person’s intrinsic motivation for the gamified behavior.  If your kid hates to do math, don’t reward them with $5 to do math, because they will hate it over time (yes he says this is counter intuitive).

Most commercial gamification uses perks & cash… can get expensive after a while.  Points & badges works on much larger scale (they’re free).  BUT the problem is all of these are extrinsic rewards; won’t keep working in long run.

There are 2 sustainable gamification strategies.

Bad news:  Gamification is NOT sustainable by itself in the long run
Good news:  Gamification is GREAT to get someone started on something… creating new habit… but there must be an intrinsic value beyond the gamification.  Gamification becomes secondary over time.  Gamify = start & reinforce behavior.

… which means:  Gamification is great for onboarding.

Other option:  figure out someone’s intrinsic motivation through gamification (like a testing framework) and then focus on the user’s intrinsic value.

So to sum up:

1) Make gamification work long enough for user to realize intrinsic value
2) Make gamification work long enough for the system to identify user’s intrinsic value

Some examples of gamification:

Speed Camera Lottery:  Like a regular speed camera; takes pics of speeders… BUT also takes pics of drivers obeying the speed limit, and some of the $$$ collected is paid out to safe drivers.
Trigger type: Spark
Result:  It worked very well by changing user’s behavior long-term: average speed dropped from 32mph to 25mph in 25mph zone

Gap gamify store check-in:  Gap free jeans giveaway event:  User checks in at Gap store to win a pair of jeans (giving 10,000 away)
Trigger type: “Ends today”
Result:  Moral hazard here, because once the 10,000 pairs are gone, user stops checking in.  There is no resulting intrinsic value for the user past the prize.

An evaluative framework + a design paradigm for gamification:

• Motivate user with positive (not negative) behavior
• Increase the user’s ability by simplyfing the behavior of the task being gamified
• Place the proper trigger at the right time

Gamification is iterative — start at the 3rd point and iterate up.  I.e. start by placing a trigger… then try to make the task simpler… then try to motivate user differently.

Gamification is very data intensive:  You need deep behavior metrics & analytics, for example to track players you need to be able to track their behavior… you need feedback data to iterate on the game.

Other takeaways:
Gamification of work DNE mixing games with work.  Don’t confuse the two.

Ranjith Kumaran, Founder, PunchTab

Click here to view the embedded video.

My notes from Ranjith’s talk: (not necessarily super coherent)

Session by Ranjith Kumaran, founder of PunchTab.com and co-founder of YouSendIt.com

Monthly Metrics from PunchTab.com:

18 out of 10,000 users will actively ‘like’ something on Facebook.  Gamify on FB = 157 out of 10,000.

1 in 10,000 are active on Google+.  Gamify on G+ = 9 in 10,000

UGC is really tough: Comment threads are fairly active… 32 out of 10,000 will actively comment once/month.  Game-enable = triple it — 70 to 80 out of 10,000

Sharing activity on twitter = 3x that of Facebook (similar to what Komal found)

This speaker’s main point:  Player should be able to play passively — for example, gamification happens when user is doing something else.  Example in our case would be that user accumulates points by taking a social action in an app, or by reading content in an app.  ”Just by showing up you get a little bit of social currency.” … that gets users into the system.  Over time users realize they have a lot of ‘social currency’ locked up in a system when they’ve been gaining it passively, then over time they start making incremental choices to increase that social currency — i.e., once they have a big # of points, then they care more about increasing it.

“Make it real within 30 days” –> ideally within first 17 days have the user take an action that gets them personally invested:  unlock a badge, for example.  Then the user becomes aspirational.

The takeaway:  Give users points for doing stuff they’re going to do anyway to get them onboard, and then make sure they know how many points they’ve accumulated.

Jonny Shaw, Founder, NakedPlay.co and Chethan Ramachandran, Co-Founder and CEO, Playnomics

Click here to view the embedded video.

My notes from Jonny & Chethan’s talk: (not necessarily coherent)

Taking gamification to the next level (past badges):  Personalized play…

To unlock big brand and advertiser budgets, we need a new type of strategic framework.

Richard Bartle created the “Killers/Achievers/Socializers/Explorers” types of players… these speakers argue that these 4 categories are no longer relevant.

These speakers have created a new framework for gamification that’s built around social & mobile, where casual play is much more pronounced:

Horizontal axis of new framework:  Pleasure — why do people play?  Pursuing pleasure — “proactive” or “reactive”  Are users seeking pleasure, or are they more likely to react to pleasurable experiences.

Vertical axis of new framework:  Intuitive vs. Diligent .  Do you strategize & think, or do you use reflex & instinct.

Third axis = smaller circle inside the larger circle:  Solus vs. Social

Use this framework to define 8 fundamental types of players:

Outer ring: 
Top left:  Scientist: Trying new things and intuitively applying learnings, i.e., Cut the Rope game

Top right: Habitualist:  Seek repetitive pleasure feedback.  (I.e., gambling slots game).  Overindulgent & spontaneous.  Much of gamification today is at this level.

Bottom left: Strategist:  Control environment to suit skills.  Keeping self in check.  I.e., Minecraft.

Bottom right: Soloist: Detached security & controlled environments… classic motivation of single player puzzle games.  I.e., Drop7 game.

Inner ring:
Top left: Politician:  Trying to get ahead by intuitively adapting to people.  Huge oppty for more to be built in this area.  I.e., Chore wars

Top right: Socialite:   Connecting people at all costs.  Getting a fix out of other people.  Draw something = tip of iceberg of this type of game.  All about being intuitive, reactive & social.

Bottom left: Competitor: Gaining respect; beating the other guy.  Control & power.  I.e, Words With Friends

Bottom right: Collectivist:  Follow social norms with badges & uniforms.  Heart & soul of gamification at the moment.  I.e., Foursquare.

Takeaway:  Adaptive play, personalization, customization… if you know the core behaviors & personalities you want to speak to, you can start creating environments for the users…  For example, a frequent flyer program that changes based on risk appetites — you can gamble all your points for that elusive first class upgrade… but you might lose all your points.

Explaning Gamification:

Take the humble, old-school crossword:  The best gamification platform of all time.  The best loyalty program of all time.  (People bought the paper for the crossword puzzle… came back the next day to see the answers).  It didn’t have any badges… no gimmicks… yet created 30 year loyal buyers of the NY Times.

“People like playing games more than people like collecting badges”

On Maslow again:  20th century did well with “Esteem” — expensive cars, luxury goods, etc… but 21st century & future of marketing is around self actualization:  and game play fits into that.

Panel of Gamification Experts:

Click here to view the embedded video.

There’s long been a raging debate going over HTML vs. Native Apps.  Just Googling the debate returns over 3.7 million results.

I’m here to tell you, that’s the wrong way of thinking of things.

It’s like debating whether oil or water will win when mixed.  You can’t get the right answer if you’re asking the wrong question.  While oil and water don’t mix well, they can co-exist in the same bottle, and there are valid times you might want to use each.

Let’s dive into the right way to think about mobile, and specifically about the role native apps will play.  A better analogy of the mobile landscape is from the point of view of a car manufacturer like Honda.  Honda makes a lot of Honda Accords — they’re its bread & butter.  But for years, Honda had a Formula One team.  A Honda Accord will never compete at the Formula One level, nor was it meant to.  And conversely, if Honda only had a Formula One team, it wouldn’t have the massive market share in the auto market that the Accord and other bread & butter models provide it, but Honda did learn a lot about how to make really great engines from its Formula One program.

In the same way, mobile apps are the “Formula One” of mobile, and HTML is the Honda Accord.  You can get wide distribution across many phones by having a mobile HTML presence, but you can’t do the sexy, progressive types of things that you can do with apps, because an app is typically compiled software which can leverage the specific hardware functionality of the phone (the camera, the address book, geolocation, the microphone, and many other things).

Part of this raging debate has been that HTML will catch up to native apps, and in ways it has.  Often times the refrain you might hear is that “in 2 years, HTML will catch up to where apps are today.”  Quite possibly true — HTML5 can access the phone’s GPS and take advantage of local storage, for example — something it couldn’t do before.  But the second half of that statement that I never hear anyone ask is “where will apps be in 2 years?”  Mobile hardware is not standing still — rather it’s evolving rapidly.  As my co-founder Sean once pointed out, the basic desktop computer hasn’t changed in 30 years:  Keyboard, monitor, mouse.  But phone hardware is changing massively every six months, and it’s hard to impossible to imagine what it’ll look like two years — four product cycles — from now.  A great example of this is Project Glass by Google.  Who would’ve really thought that a set of glasses that take advantage of augmented reality would be science fact, and not science fiction, by 2012?   HTML is a trailing standard; there is no possible way that HTML will ever catch up to compiled software so long as the hardware is evolving at a rapid pace, which it will continue to do for the foreseeable future.  And as a funny aside, did you know that the HTML5 spec hasn’t even been ratified yet, and isn’t set to be until 2014?  I’ve recently heard engineers at Facebook, Gannett and other places stating that they’re re-focusing on native mobile apps, because while HTML can get a user to 90% of the experience of a native app, eeking out that last 10% is hard to impossible using an HTML approach.

That’s not to say there aren’t very valid and useful reasons to focus on mobile web today.  As a business, you might want wide distribution of your content — the equivalent of needing to sell many Honda Accords.  I’m not going to focus on those benefits in this blog, but they’re there, and they all depend on your goals as a company wading into the mobile space.

This blog is all about apps, and what they might mean to your business or brand:

Back in 2008 when we started PointAbout and we were making high-end $100k+ apps for large brands, we had to convince clients to dip into experimental budgets, because many client weren’t sure if apps were a fad.  I’m here to tell you apps are not a fad.  Apps are the future of packaging and distribution of your business in the digital age.  Here’s why:

The internet is complicated and distracting to the average user.  We call it “browsing” for a reason — the entire world wide web is out there, competing for my attention.  Grandma probably doesn’t wade too far across this web — she might have an email account she checks regularly, and a few safe sites bookmarked.  Ask Grandma to find a restaurant to eat at tonight, or to list an item on eBay and all bets are off.

The web isn’t packaged well, and distribution is full of danger zones.  There’s no concept of ownership, and no intimate connection between the user and the brand.  The web is kind of like the wild west — a lawless place you wade into at your own risk.  As geeks, especially in the Valley, we often forget how scary and confusing a place this can be for the average user.

Apps fix these problems, but that’s just the start.  Oh, there’s so much more to apps than just fixing the packaging & distribution problem that’s been vexing companies on the web.

Let’s start with some vocab.  Back in 2010, I wrote about the evolving definition of the word “app”.  Bill French said it best back then:

“Apps have become a meaningful abbreviation to technology that just works. Apps provide a common and easily understood idea that has been widely accepted as a solution – indeed a means to get stuff done quickly and effectively.”

And I have thought about apps in that context ever since.  Think of an app as a piece of functionality that just works.

When you think about apps in that way, you start to see what some of the opportunities are for apps to permeate our lives.  Here are just a few examples:

• 

  Unlock Your Door with The Lockitron App

  Apps Replace Hardware: Last year, Marc Andreessen argued that software is eating the world.  I agree wholeheartedly, and apps are a huge delivery vehicle for that trend.  Take, for example, the Lockitron app, which I blogged about in 2010.  No longer do I need to carry keys around — I can unlock the office door using software.  The app is the new key.

• Apps Interface Well with Hardware:  Not only are apps replacing hardware, but on the flip-side they also play very well with hardware.  Some easy examples (of which there are many) are:  Using an app as a universal remote in the living room, as a Wii-style game controller with your TV, to control an R/C vehicle, to check your blood glucose levels, to frame and focus videos from an HD camera and much more.  Last year I made a video on the rise of APIs and their importance to mobile.  As more hardware becomes accessible via APIs, you’ll start to see apps controlling them in a big way.
• Apps Make Appliances Smarter:  Going a bit deeper on the point above, at first blush you might not be sure why your stove would ever need an app.  But when you think of an app as a piece of functionality that just works, then it starts to make more sense:  Have you ever wondered if you left your stove on?  Have you ever wanted to pre-heat your oven?  What if you could do just those simple functions from an app on your phone?  Wouldn’t that be valuable to you?  If your stove alerted you just once that you left it on when you left the house, wouldn’t it become super valuable for you at that point?
• Apps Make Content More Monetizable:  When content can be packaged and distributed in ways that the consumer understands (i.e., an app for $1.99, or an in-app purchase of an edition within a magazine app), it becomes much more monetizable.    Add to that the emerging research that tablets are very good at driving buying behavior and you’ve got a game changer for media companies.
• Apps Make Experiences More Relevant:  The ability of apps to access various aspects of the phone, such as its GPS, are giving birth to apps like ScoutMob, which offers geofenced deals, and RunKeeper, which allows users to better track their physical activities, and Nexercise, which is gamifying exercising.  It’s the powerhouse combination of apps and the phone’s functionality that creates very relevant experiences for users.  As phone hardware evolves, this one will explode.
• Apps Form an Intimate Connection:  Apps make the chaos of the world wide web feel bite sized, and safe.  Grandma knows that to read the news, she can just open the New York Times app.  To make a call, she opens the phone app.  To check email, she opens the email app.  To figure out how to get somewhere, she opens the maps app.  The apps a user has installed on their phone form a very intimate distribution channel and connection between the app publisher and the user.  The app can send push notifications and get the user’s attention in other high-value ways.

I recently moderated a panel on mobile marketing at the Mid Atlantic Marketing Summit, then rushed over to MoDevUX just up the street to do a presentation on Designing for Social Apps.  Props to the Washington, DC area for putting on some great events, and specifically to Pete Erickson for putting on a great MoDevUX event, and Paul Sherman for the fantastic Mid Atlantic Marketing Summit.  While I was at each event, I captured video of several sessions.  (Learn why capturing content is an important element to building a personal brand and check out the sub-$500 rig I use to do it with.)

Here are some videos from the Mid Atlantic Marketing Summit:

David Payne, Chief Digital Officer, Gannett Corporation

Click here to view the embedded video.

Sean Murphy, EVP, e-Commerce, CustomInk

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here are some videos from MoDevUX:

UX Professionals – A panel discussion on the challenges of great UX and where the future is headed with David Wright (Lead Interactive Designer at NPR), Barney Kirby (Director of Interactive Strategy at Marriott), Camellia George (Senior Interaction Designer at WaPo Labs (The Washington Post Company)), Peter Corbett (CEO / Founder at IStrategy Labs) and Jim Sabia (Director of User Experience and Design at AOL)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Rise of the Machines by Dave Wolf (VP of Strategy at Cynergy)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Adapting ourselves to adaptive content by Karen McGrane (Managing Partner at Bond Art + Science)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Making Privacy Look Good: A UX/UI Discussion by Morgan Reed (Executive Director at Association for Competitive Technology) and Lynette Mattke (Founder at PicPocket Books)

Click here to view the embedded video.

I moderated a panel at this year’s Mid Atlantic Marketing Summit at the Gannett headquarters in McLean, VA titled “Mobile Marketing: Beyond The Hype.” The panel discussed what’s working well in mobile marketing, what’s not working well, and what some of the most interesting trends on the horizon are, among many other things.

Full speaker bios available here. Panelists were:

• Craig Etheridge, VP, Mobile Advertising Sales, USA TODAY & Gannett Digital
• Michael Lombardi, VP of Marketing, WeatherBug
• Kurt Roberts, Director, Creative Technology, RP3 Agency
• Nicole Stemberger, Senior Strategist, AKQA

Here’s a video of the event:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here’s a picture I took while in DC!

I spoke this week at the fantastic MoDevUX conference about how Socialize has designed an API & SDK for app developers. The Socialize SDK has seen rapid uptake from developers, as detailed in this post. Here’s my presentation:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Last July I visited a new startup hacker space called “StartupHouse” and I wrote a post up about it because I thought it looked really promising.

My, how things can happen in the span of 9 months.  It’s been re-named “StartupHQ,” with StartupHouse becoming the hacker hostel next door (bunk beds or regular beds, cost around $30 to $50/night.) StartupHQ is not just promising — it’s looks amazing for small startups and for events (max 150 people, they say).

Here’s what the space StartupHQ looked like when I saw it originally:

Here’s the exact same space today:

If you’re interested in renting a desk at the space, please leave a comment below and I’ll connect you.

Here are two videos of the space, and more pictures below:

Part of being a lifehacker means being an efficiency nut on the computer — I’ve previously written about playing a computer like an instrument, the massive value of CloudApp, and I have an ongoing GeekSpeed challenge for those who feel up to the challenge of quantifying their speed on a computer.  To put it simply:  If you’re on the computer for hours every day, you need to be really good at doing things quickly on it.

I’m on a cross-country flight right now, so it’s a perfect opportunity for me to go into detail on some of the many things I do on the computer to be radically efficient.  Similar in spirit to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, I’ve created Daniel’s Hierarchy of Speed.  Start at the bottom; once you’ve mastered a point, move up the stack.  Many of these tips are Mac-specific.  If you’re on a PC, I’m sorry but I can’t help you.  But I do wish you the best of luck being productive.

Daniel’s Hierarchy of Speed: Master them from bottom up 

8. Use CloudApp to share screenshots (bonus: use Skitch to edit before snapping)

7. Write blogs for content you’re often asked to explain over & over

6. Use TextExpander for repetitive text entry

5. Use CloudMagic to quickly find anything in your email, Google Docs, and more

4. Use advanced keyboard shortcuts (found in Google Labs section) to navigate through Gmail

3. Browser-specific keyboard shortcuts: Use CMD+F to find content on web pages instead of searching manually, CMD+L to navigate to URL area, and CMD+SHIFT with left and right brackets [ ] to navigate between tabs in Chrome

2. Use iCopy to keep a running list of your last 100 copy & paste items

1. Learn to touch type (if you don’t have this mastered, stop reading now, go learn it, and come back once you have).  Then learn all of the basic keyboard shortcuts — CTRL+X to cut, CTRL+V to paste, etc.  These are the basics and form a foundation for everything else.

By mastering the Hierarchy above, I calculate that you’ll save 2.1 weeks in front of your computer every year.  Spend that time on other activities you enjoy, or just be that much more productive.  There are many other tools I rely on which aren’t exactly a part of the Hierarchy but I highly recommend, like Rapportive, Alfred, Dropbox, Cinch, Witch, Growl, PDF Pen (esp. good for stamping sigs on PDFs) and Evernote.  These and other lifehacking tools are detailed in my other blogs as described at the beginning of this post.

The Hierarchy is very specific and micro, but there are also very macro things you can do to be more efficient.  One of them is to use agile development cycles as I describe here (and not just for software development, either, but in everything you do).  Another macro tip is to do something you love.  That gets much more philosophical and it out of the scope of this post (here are some related thoughts, though)

Here are some of the Hierarchy points in more detail:

#2: iCopy:  Having a running list of the last 100 things I’ve copied & pasted to my clipboard is useful many, many times each day.  I can’t even fathom only having access to the last thing I copied & pasted.  Collolary:  I’m assuming you already are using CTRL+C, CTRL+X and V to copy or cut, and paste.  You can access your last 100 items using a custom keyboard command — I use CTRL+J.  So I can copy something, then copy something else right after that, and easily access the first thing I copied when I’m pasting.  To the right is what my last 100 items drop-down looks like, with some of the most recent items not blurred.

#6: TextExpander: It’s a bit hard to explain TextExpander at first — it’s easier to just see it in action.  Below is a very short video of me creating and then using a TextExpander snippet.  If you have to write the same content on a computer multiple times in any program (and who doesn’t) then you need to be using this.

(Expand the video to full-screen so you can read the text)

Click here to view the embedded video.

#8: CloudApp:  I wrote an in-depth post about CloudApp here.  I probably use CloudApp 20x to 50x per day — not quite sure how I lived without it.

I’m sure there are many other lifehacking tools I’m not aware of — I’d love to hear about them in the comments below (please be specific in stating what you love about them, how you use them, and why).

Strong Socialize Developer SDK Adoption, with over 6,000 SDK downloads, 700+ auth's and 170+ live apps running Socialize.

I received an email from the CEO of another SDK-based technology company asking how we’ve been so successful getting developers to adopt the Socialize SDK.

I like to have conversations like these in public so that other entrepreneurs in the same position can benefit from what we’ve learned, and share their knowledge as well.  What he’s asking about is a very sensitive subject:  Mobile app developers are already suffering from SDK overload, and the problem is just going to get worse before it gets better.  Knowing how to successfully get developers to adopt and implement an SDK is a huge tactical advantage.  Having said that, I’m not going to give away the many things we do at Socialize, but I’ll give a bit of knowledge away in the spirit of doing so, and I’ll hope that other entrepreneurs do the same.

First things first:  For those of you who don’t know the difference between an API and an SDK, here’s a high-level analogy to baking a cake:

What Socialize has developed is an SDK that gives any mobile app developer the ability to drop social functionality into their app.  I recently wrote a related blog showcasing how these social features can help any company create Instagram-type viral growth through social actions.

The main tip I’ll share has more to do with strategy than execution:  Define your goals and then make sure the time, effort and money you expend on SDK advertising is consistent with those goals.

For example, our goal at Socialize is to be integrated into apps with 500,000 or more downloads.  That means that we’ve mostly stopped sponsoring or participating in hackathons, because they tend to draw smaller indie developers.  And while Socialize is really, really good for indie developers, we’ve grown to the size where us spending marketing dollars on smaller developers won’t move the needle on our macro goals.  (We do still offer fanatical support to any size developer via our Socialize support forum.)

Here’s one trick I’ll share around SDK advertising.  I recently read this great post by Ben of Plenty of Fish about a different type of banner ad.  I decided to try reproducing his results — and boy, did I ever.  Here’s the standard banner ad we’ve been running in a very targeted fashion:

The Regular Socialize Ad - Click To Enlarge

I tested replacing it with this hand-drawn version:

Hand Drawn variation of Socialize Ad

Conversion rates were consistently 200% to 300% above the regular version:

Hand Drawn ad Socialize Results: Click to Enlarge

I don’t yet have data on actual conversion rates of users that clicked the ad (maybe serious users don’t actually install the SDK, etc) but that’s coming.  If you’re interested in this topic, you might also like my related post on A/B Testing.

Are you a technology entrepreneur with a startup focused on SDK adoption by developers?  What tips do you have to share?  Please leave them in the comments below.

I just sat down with Arte Merritt, who recently started a great new job at Turner Broadcasting (owner of many channels you know like CNN, TNT, TBS, CartoonNetwork, etc).  Arte’s job is to help Turner get closer to innovative startups, and he’s got cash to back it up.

Turner is the creator of some very forward-thinking brands in media — back when CNN was launched, 24/7 news was a big departure from the standard evening news cycle.  And Turner has continued to make bold moves in programming, recently picking up Conan O’Brien on TBS.  But Turner wants to explore new and disruptive media distribution channels, and according to Artie, they figured there was no better group than scrappy technology entrepreneurs to help Turner regain a strong, innovative leadership position.

Just over six months ago, Turner opened a San Francisco office and has now ramped up MediaCamp, a twelve week accelerator program that includes a $20k cash component.  Think Y Combinator-style mentorship combined with access to Turner’s internal teams.  Applications for MediaCamp are due on April 16th, so if you have a technology that could disrupt the media space and you’re interested in applying, fill out the quick application (looks like it should take about 10 minutes) to be considered.

Here’s a video of Arte laying the details of MediaCamp out, and why Turner’s doing it:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here’s another picture of Arte at the interview:

I was recently approached by a friend in the venture capital industry who asked me to write about my experience as an entrepreneur and transplant to Silicon Valley.  Here’s the resulting transcript of our discussion.  I’m publishing it in the hopes that it helps other entrepreneurs, as well as those who haven’t yet taken the leap but want to.

Can you tell me about the fundraising cycles your company has gone through?

PointAbout founders in original office: A townhouse on Capitol Hill (posing here for an interview)

We began in Washington D.C. in 2008 in a townhouse on Capitol Hill. It was a terrible time to fundraise due to the financial crisis, so we self-funded a mobile consulting firm called PointAbout which built mobile apps for large brands, including Disney, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, Newsweek, Cars.com and many others.  That firm quickly grew to over 30 employees (and a much nicer space in DC — although still a townhouse!)

AppMakr started life in this closet!

Two years ago, while still in DC, we launched our first product, AppMakr, which immediately got tremendous traction and tons of press in publications like USA Today, Entrepreneur, TechCrunch (a couple of times), Mashable, and the list goes on. We made a hard decision to sell the consulting firm and move to Silicon Valley to focus on making AppMakr successful.  Luckily we found a great home for PointAbout and packed our cars up summer of 2010 to move out West.  We raised a $1MM seed round by year-end 2010 based on the traction of AppMakr.  I wrote a fundraising manifesto of that experience to help other entrepreneurs in the same position, and I recently expanded on it with a post on how to optimize an AngelList profile.

By early 2011, we realized we had unique (and hard-won) expertise gleaned from building high-end apps via the PointAbout consulting business, combined with tens of thousands of “apps for anyone” apps made on our AppMakr platform.  So we set about solving some really big problems in mobile:  How to get developers more app installs, and how to keep existing users of apps coming back into the app.   At first, we were just working to solve these problems for AppMakr-made apps, but then we had a eureka moment:  Why not make this solution an API with mobile SDKs so any developer could drop it into their app?  And so Socialize was born, and we started to infuse every AppMakr app with the Socialize social platform, while also making Socialize available to any developer.

Learn more about Socialize in this 7 minute video

An app is only as powerful as the number of people using it on a regular basis, and we knew how to fix both problems with one big ace up our sleeve:  We knew how to make apps social.  But not just any type of social — interest-based social, also referred to as the “interest graph.”   We’d recognized that users of a mobile app all share a common interest.  By making the app social, we thought we could dramatically improve app discovery and re-engagement based on people’s tendency to want to interact with others who share common interests (a thesis that’s proven to be true, with boosts of up to 551% in app installs and 316% in app engagement).

To date we’ve raised a total of $1.5MM from angel investors for the company.  We also re-invested the proceeds of the sale of our consulting company PointAbout into Socialize (or to put it into poker terminology, we “doubled down” because we really believe in the company and our incredible employees!).  It was very rewarding to self-fund a large chunk of our company’s growth.

What are 3 things that factor into your runway calculation?

We calculate our runway based on cash in the bank divided by current and planned expenses, which for a tech startup consists mainly of salaries.  You’ll also want to have a monetization plan, which you may or may not yet be executing on depending on what part of the startup life cycle you’re in (I do not recommend focusing on monetization at the expense of traction early on — first, make something people demonstrate they want.  Then make sure you can monetize it, and finally scale it up while applying monetization in ways that doesn’t kill your growth.  It’s a tightrope that isn’t easily traversed, and making it look effortless is a very hard-won skill!)

Founders will generally want to raise as much money as they can on terms that are favorable enough to the entrepreneur to make the fundraise worthwhile in the long run — or to put it another way, you don’t want to raise money on such unfavorable terms that you’re only making your investors a lot of money.  Any time I feel I’m able to raise more money than I have previously raised without over-diluting the founders and employees, I do.  A successful and positive relationship with investors should be viewed as a partnership — even a marriage:  You both need each other, and together you can achieve much greater success.  As an entrepreneur you should view yourself as the “fire starter” and the investor as the “gasoline on the fire.”  I so often have entrepreneurs come up to me with an idea and ask how to fundraise based on that idea.  My response is always, “show me the fire.”  Unless you have a great past track record, which I describe in more detail below, you’ll have a very hard (impossible) time raising money on an idea.  Actions and results speak, so go start that fire first.

Each fundraising opportunity can be thought of as a 3-legged stool consisting of the terms of the raise, the size of the raise, and the runway that it gives you, and you need to balance all three appropriately.

Your ability to raise money will be based on how much demand there is from investors in your company. Founders have to make the call between spending extra time fundraising vs. spending more time focusing on the product. If spending an extra 6 months developing a product drives way more traction for your company, then find a way to do it before you fundraise — the process will be way easier and faster and you’ll get way better terms.  This balance is especially important because fundraising is so distracting that it can often stall product development in a small startup.  So one comes at the expense of the other.  Timing fundraising correctly is key — especially when you add in macro factors outside your control, like the general investing appetite among angels and VCs due to IPOs (or a corresponding lack thereof).  One of the best examples I’ve seen detailed of a company fundraising based on traction comes from the founder of Fab.com via this post titled “Behind the Scenes: How Fab Raised $40 million with a lot of data and not much pain“.  It’s a fantastic post.

Silicon Valley is a very dichotomous world. On the one hand, you’ll see founders who have a strong track record of successful exits or lots of social validation and fundraising easily, and then on the other hand you’ll find everybody  else. When we arrived in Silicon Valley two years ago, we were definitely in the “everybody else” category — nobody knew who we were.  And because the valley has a very tight-knit “social proof” and validation structure, it’s very difficult for startups outside this geographic area to raise initial rounds (this largely changes if you’re an established company with a strong track record raising a series B or later round).

Starting off in programs like Y Combinator give you an instant catapult into the former category, because being selected for YC provides a lot of validation in the eyes of investors.  We’ve fought our way into investor’s mind-space the hard way, by getting tons of press for both Socialize and AppMakr and great traction from users, but if I were to do it again I would definitely a) get out to San Francisco as quickly as possible and b) go through a program like YC or 500 Startups to short-circuit the process.  You could say we did it the ‘old fashioned way,’ if there is such a thing, but I definitely wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.  If you’re not in San Francisco, don’t kid yourself into thinking that making an impact in your startup community trumps building a successful, world-class company.   While you certainly can make an impact wherever you are, the opportunity cost of not being in the valley is incalculable and will likely cost you many millions of dollars personally.  There are many things outside of your control as an entrepreneur, so control the things you can and optimize them.  Location is one of those things.  (This advice doesn’t apply if what you really want to focus on is making an impact in your startup community… I’m assuming you want to ‘go big or go home’ with your startup).

When you have raised a given amount of money, how do you think about balancing the amount of runway vs. the burn rate?

It’s a vexing process. The process of adjusting your spending consists of a series of evaluations that, when plotted on a timeline, might look like an inverted Fibonacci Sequence. What I mean is that, say you have a runway of 13 months:  You might make some big decisions about whether to fundraise and/or reduce burn to extend runway when you have, say, 8 months of cash left in the bank, and then you’ll really be thinking about it when you have 5 months left, and you’ll start freaking out when you have 3 months left, and when you have 2  months left it’ll be all you think about, etc.   (The caveat here being that if you can bank more than 13 months of runway on favorable terms, you definitely should).  The closer you get to the end of your runway, the more the balance tips to reducing burn or raising funds, and the more often you think about it.  The best tip I can provide here is to focus on making a killer product and don’t expand your team faster than absolutely necessary.  If you think you need to hire someone, you can probably wait until the pain is double what you’re feeling now.  You can never get the money back that you spend, so be very judicious about spending it.

What are two things investors want to see when you pitch to them?

Socialize SDK end user growth

This sounds silly, but investors really do want to see graphs that are going up on the right.  If your numbers are not increasing exponentially, they’ll likely be far less interested.  When you think about it, it makes more sense than at first blush:  If there’s not something about your business that’s exploding, you probably haven’t found a good product/market fit yet.  There’s a fantastic blog by Marc Andreessen about product/market fit that I recommend to any founder.

Investors also want to see gross numbers in sizes that matter. For example, in the case of Socialize, one metric for our performance is the number of people using apps that have integrated Socialize — a number that’s been doubling every month for the past 6 months, and has now rocketed past the 2 million mark. Four months ago, the number of users was under 100k.  That’s the kind of growth investors look for.  Also interesting to note:  an exponential growth curve looks almost exactly like a linear growth curve at the beginning — how’s an investor to know which yours is?

Can you give an example of a PR effort you managed?

We timed our AppMakr launch so that Mashable, Techcrunch and multiple other sites all wrote about us on the same day.  That gave us great mindshare when we launched.

We also make sure our website has a clear and focused value proposition. I spend a lot of time honing our message to be as relevant as possible. We do a lot of A/B testing of our message, then use the results to influence our product roadmap.  Here’s a tip:  Making a slick product video to show your company off can cost upwards of $10k.  Here’s a way to hack it, called “PowerPinch” for under $500.   It’s fantastic for presentations too — everyone’s tired of PowerPoint.

What’s a weakness of your business and what have you done to address it?

Getting developers to adopt an SDK is a valuable skill

Easy question. Our business relies on selling our product to app publishers and developers, which is very difficult because there’s no single major distribution channel to tap into.  You can’t just say “we’re going to spend $1MM targeting app developers.”  Savvy investors know how hard this is and give major kudos to companies that have figured out how to successfully get the attention of developers. We’ve expended a lot of effort making our SDK as easy to use as possible for developers to drop into their app: Five minute install, open-source for easy customization, or build against our API if you’re hard-core.  I won’t go into the details of our secret sauce targeting developers, but the graph at left speaks for itself, as does our nearly 6,000 SDK downloads.  Find a hard problem to solve, and be the best in the world at solving it.

When you first moved into the valley a year and a half ago, how did you reach out to the first angel investors?

It was very hard to arrive in a new city not knowing anyone, but that really motivated me to create a personal brand and a great brand for our company.  We were among the earliest companies to use AngelList, and I also took the time to do fun things like interviewing Naval on my tech blog to get our name out there.  (A good litmus test: If you can get on the front page of HackerNews, you’re doing something right). The valley is a difficult place for newcomers in the sense that people prioritize the time they’ll spend with you based on how relevant you are to them.  If you’re not relevant, and if you’re not doing something amazing, it’s incredibly hard to expand your network in the early days.  Everyone is time-constrained.  As Dave McClure says (paraphrasing), “it doesn’t matter if people love you or hate you, as long as they care, because you can always iterate on hatred, but you can’t iterate on apathy.”

Find awesome founders you can do stuff like this with!

Being an entrepreneur in the valley often feels like getting up every morning, being punched in the face, and then jumping up to do it again the next day.  Creating something from nothing is incredibly hard.  You have to absolutely love what you’re doing to be successful at it, and you have to pick the right team to do it with, or your life will be miserable.  I was lucky to find some incredible co-founders in Sean and Isaac, and that has let us build an incredibly talented team of A players.

I love to create value and build a product with a fantastic team that will pay rich dividends in the long run. It’s a very different life from the consulting business we started back in Washington, DC, and it’s not for everyone.  But if you think it’s for you, get off your butt, get out here to San Francisco, and start giving it a try.  You only live once!

If you have any thoughts or questions for me, please leave them in the comments below.  I’d love to continue the conversation with you.

Thanks to @SpacemonkeyMike for tipping me off to the recent Startupism conference in San Francisco, a two day conference that brought together more than 400 entrepreneurs and speakers like Phil McKinney, the ex CTO of Hewlett Packard, Chris Redlitz, a fantastic investor from Transmedia, Robert Scoble, Steve Jurvetson of venture capital firm DFJ and many others.

I was able to capture video of a mobile monetization panel and Phil’s keynote, which are below.  Looking forward to next year’s event!

Mobile Monetization & Distribution
Description: “This panel will explore the best strategies for developers to nail down monetization, distribution, and discovery in an ever growing and changing ecosystem. Our panelists will share insights and perspective that will help you get ahead in the mobile race.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Phil McKinney, ex CTO of Hewlett Packard
Bio: Phil founded and oversaw HP’s Innovation Program Office (IPO). IPO is a separately staffed and funded team chartered to identify and incubate adjacency and fundamentally new technologies, products and businesses for HP. Over the course of his career, he has been profiled or had his work on innovation written about in media outlets ranging from tech press to Vanity Fair, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. McKinney also writes a column for Forbes called “The Objective,” hosts a popular “Killer Innovations” podcast that CIO Insight has called “a must listen,” and tweets from his @philmckinney handle.

Click here to view the embedded video.

More pics:

Daniel, Mario and Edward with the Golden Gate bridge in the background

I recently watched a 60 Minutes episode about “The 99ers” — those who have been unemployed for 99 weeks or more.

If you’re a 99er, this blog post is aimed squarely at you.  I’m going to tell you how to get a job within 99 days by following one simple tip.

Although there’s only one thing you need to do to get a job within 99 days, that doesn’t mean it’ll be easy.  You’re going to have to learn to think and act differently, and that’s hard.

First, some background:  I’ve never been out of work for 99 weeks.  In fact, I’ve never been out of work, period.  But that doesn’t mean it’s been easy for me.  My father immigrated from Costa Rica, and he instilled in me a work ethic that was foreign to my elementary, middle and high school friends.  My parents told me that if I wanted to go to college, I was going to have to pay for it — all of it — on my own.  And so I did.  I sold sodas when I was 10 years old to construction workers in my neighborhood.  I sold candy bars on my school bus every day coming home from school.  I re-sold neighborhood parking spaces in high school to students so they could park during the school day, and in college I sold Frisbees and discount club cards.  My entire life, if I wanted an income, I’ve had to go out and find it myself.  I tell you this because I want you to know where I’m coming from:  Everything I’ve accomplished, I’ve done on my own.  Nothing has been handed to me.  So I had to learn from a young age how to be self-sufficient.  I had to learn to be an entrepreneur — how to create value… how to create something out of nothing.  And if you’ve been out of work for 99 weeks or more, now you have to learn how to do that, too.  You have to stop relying on others to help you.   You have to look inside yourself and find a strength inside of you that you may not realize is there.

The only way to do that is to get over your fear.  Fear is all that’s stopping you from being employed.  Fear is all that’s stopping you from having a great job, or from being an entrepreneur yourself.  I’m going to show you how to get over your fear, and by getting over your fear, how to follow the one simple tip you’ll need to be successful.  You can’t follow my tip, though, until you’ve conquered your fear, so that’s step one.

Days 1 – 7: How to conquer your fear and find strength inside yourself

The first step to conquering your fear is to get over any embarrassment you might have about what I’m about to ask you to do.   You might have a great undergrad degree.  You might have a master’s degree, or a Ph.D.  But if you’ve been unemployed for 99 weeks or more, none of that matters.  Get ready to put your pride aside so you can get back into the workforce.  There’s a cost to everything, and your pride may be costing you an income.   So in this 99 day plan to you getting a job, we’re going to spend the first week helping you find the strength inside yourself that I know is there.

I’m going to ask you to do the scariest thing you can possibly imagine:  To make a fool of yourself by creating value.  The reason you necessarily have to make a fool out of yourself is because embarrassment = opportunity.  For example, I recently hacked a taxi cab line.  If you watch the video, you’ll see that I made a fool out of myself doing it.  But that’s why there was an opportunity — nobody else could get over their fear of embarrassment to try what I did.  And people will respect you for having the guts to make a fool of yourself — or at the very least, they’ll admire the results you’ll achieve.

So here’s how I want you to create value to get over your fear of embarrassment:  Follow the steps in this blog titled Litmus Test: Can You Be an Entrepreneur?  I want you to spend a week making a fool of yourself by buying restaurant discount vouchers at Costco can reselling them in front of the restaurants.   Every day for seven days, I want you to try reselling these vouchers.   Is this a scary thought?  Are you already making excuses about how you can’t accomplish this goal?  Get over it.  Learn to be relentlessly resourceful.  If you’re already telling yourself you can’t achieve this goal, you have a losing mentality.  You are helping yourself fail.  You can do this — it’s not rocket science.  You just have to get over yourself enough to try it.  Here’s a smattering of the objections I can imagine you might be coming up with to give yourself an excuse not to try it:

1. I don’t have time to try this.  Oh really?  You’ve been unemployed going on 99 weeks or more.  Do you really want to keep trying more of the same things that haven’t been working for the past year or more?  Try something new for a week.  What have you got to lose?
2. I don’t want to be an entrepreneur.  I just want a job.  Guess what — in order for you to successfully follow my tip and get a job within the next 99 days, you have to conquer your fears.  This litmus test isn’t about being an entrepreneur — it’s about taking control of your life and your job search in a new and different way that will guarantee your success.  The reality is that if you can do this for a week, getting a job will feel easy.
3. I don’t have the $70 I need to get $100 worth of vouchers.   Costco has a great return policy.  If you try to sell these vouchers and you fail, you can just return them to Costco.  So use that knowledge to find someone who believes in you enough to loan you $70.  Be relentlessly resourceful — sell something you own if you need to.  You can even hit me up for the $70 if there’s nobody else for you to turn to.  But I’ll warn you — it’s going to be harder to get the $70 from me than from someone you already know.  See the footnote at the bottom if I’m the only option you’ve got.
4. 

   No Costco near you? Try Restaurant.com

   There’s not a Costco near me.  So what?  Is there a Costco near any of your family members or friends?  Have them pick the vouchers up for you and mail them to you.   What about Sam’s Club or BJs?  What about using Restaurant.com?  I chose a random zip code, 82003 in Cheyenne, WY and got several results on Restaurant.com, like a $50 gift certificate for $20 to Shadow’s Pub & Grill.  Don’t make excuses, just find a way to get a voucher for a restaurant that you can sell for more than you paid.

5. The restaurant manager will probably kick me off the premises if I try to resell a voucher.  You’re probably right — that’s part of what making a fool of yourself is all about.  And that’s why you should pick a voucher to a chain where you can try a different one.  Or better yet, talk to the manager.  Tell him or her that you’ve been out of work for 99 weeks and you’re just trying to make ends meet.  Who knows — the manager may take pity on your situation and even help you find someone who will buy it.
6. I can’t make enough money reselling vouchers to feed my kids.  The point of this exercise isn’t to make a lot of money (although who knows!).  The point of it is to prove to yourself that you can do this.  And don’t skip out on the exercise just because you already think you can do it.  Until you’ve successfully re-sold one voucher, you haven’t passed this test, and you’re only cheating yourself by not trying it.  If you really want to get a job in the next 99 days, you’ll follow all of these steps.
7. 

   Me, standing on the side of the road to get real estate clients

   I’m not licensed to sell stuff.  So what?  Our nation is built on the backs of entrepreneurs and risk takers.  Get into the mentality of asking for forgiveness instead of asking for permission.   When I first started my real estate company in 2003, I didn’t have any clients.  But I knew that at a certain intersection, people would wait at a light to make a left turn into a new housing development.  And I figured that many of those people probably didn’t have a Realtor.  So I stood on the corner at that light with a sign and flyers.  It was embarrassing!  I got stopped by cops all the time.  But none of them made me leave — they were all impressed that I had the drive to try an innovative way of finding new clients.  And that’s what I want you to do.  Don’t let any of these lame excuses stop you.  As Yoda says “Do or do not.  There is no try.”  So either decide that you’re going to do this, or do not, and stop reading this post right now, because you don’t want a job badly enough.

Start small, with just one voucher.  Try to sell that.  If you buy it for $70 and it’s worth $100, then try to resell it for something like $90 to the people walking into that restaurant.  Go down to $80 if you have to.    Just make a bit of margin on the voucher.  Prove to yourself that you can.

Once you’ve stood in front of restaurants reselling vouchers for seven days, you’ll be ready to move onto the next step.

Days 8-99: Learn to Be Impressive

Once you’ve gotten over your fear of creating value, you’ll be ready to follow my one simple tip for getting any job you want.

That’s it.  That’s all you need to get a job in the next 99 days.  You just have to be more impressive than anyone else that wants the job you want.

This tip is a bit abstract, and easy to dismiss.  But I’m going to spend the rest of this post making it really concrete for you.  I’m going to show you how to be impressive, no matter what job it is that you want.  But it all boils down to this one tip.  If you’re impressive, nothing else matters.  Your salary requirements don’t matter.  Your job experience doesn’t matter.  The fact that you’ve been out of work for 99 weeks doesn’t matter.  None of it will matter based on an inverse correlation of how impressive you are, meaning the more impressive you are, the less any of the other stuff matters.

First, let’s talk about how not to be impressive.  Here’s a quick laundry list off the top of my head, from personal experience screening people who I’ve hired in the past, of ways to leave the wrong impression, or even worse, no impression at all:

1. You just email me your resume with no cover letter or explanation as to why you want the job and are a good fit.  (As you can read in this post, I actually hate resumes in general and don’t use them as my primary hiring mechanism at all)
2. You’re late to an interview
3. You don’t sound confident in your skills (hence the reason we’re spending 7 days creating value, above)
4. You don’t know how to use a computer (see my post on playing a computer like an instrument)
5. You misspell words like “there” vs “their,” “then” vs. “than,” “to” vs. “too” or have trouble with any of the other basic grammar concepts we all learned in elementary school (side note — this problem can also be an indicator of someone who’s really smart in a mad scientist sort of way, which is ironic because it leads to quick dismissal by most)
6. You don’t follow up with me after we have a conversation
7. You don’t appear to care that much about getting the job
8. You talk more than you listen
9. You get easily flustered by interview questions that make you think (example:  ”How many golf balls are there in a bathtub?”  The answer doesn’t matter — I just want to see you think it through.)
10. You have a hard time doing simple math
11. You lack the basic skills required to do the job
12. You’re afraid to take risks
13. You don’t know how to think creatively
14. You can’t produce any good job references
15. You’ve been unemployed for a long span of time
16. You have poor personal hygiene
17. You say things that are sexist, chauvinistic, or generally make comments that could make the work environment uncomfortable for other employees
18. You seem to have trouble grasping new concepts and/or have trouble breaking habits
19. You seem unwilling to do work that’s “beneath you”
20. You seem to need a lot of hands-on managing to be productive

That’s just a top 20 I rattled off in 5 minutes — there are more, but the point is this:  The more impressive you are, the less any of these things matter.

I’ll take technically impressive engineer with bad personal hygiene and a primadonna attitude because I know he or she will get the main job done that needs doing, and do it very well.

If you’re impressive, you can get away with a lot.  And if any of the 20 points above apply to you, you’ll need to be especially impressive because you’ll be starting from a deficit compared to other candidates.

The Inside Knowledge You Need to Be Impressive

Being really impressive can be hard, and takes a lot of work.  The most impressive way to be impressive (pardon the pun) is to be the best at what you do, period.  For example, this guy played the harmonica at Carnegie Hall.  There aren’t many harmonica players that get to do that, and it’s impressive.  He did it because he was arguably the best harmonica player in the world.  This guy dreamt of being the best puppeteer in the world, and got to work alongside Jim Henson, creating the character of Elmo that we all know and love.  That’s impressive.

Tiger Woods is impressive.  Michael Jordan is impressive.  Steve Jobs is impressive.  If you dedicate your life to doing what you love, you’ll have a shot at being the best in the world at it, and that will allow you to open doors that would otherwise be closed to you.

However, if you’ve been out of work for 99 weeks, it’s likely that you never got the opportunity to pursue your passion (or, let’s be honest:  More likely, you never got over your fears enough to pursue it — it’s ok, just accept reality for what it is and move on, because you’re over that fear now, right?).  And being out of work for 99 weeks is a tough time to start pursuing your passion.  You’re probably very resource constrained — maybe you’re living on food stamps — and it would be very hard for you to turn to your family and say, “I’ve always wanted to be a master puppeteer.  I’m going to start learning the skill now.”  Make no mistake, though — while I’m not advocating you become that person due to practical constraints you’re probably facing right now, I am saying that you should choose a field you will enjoy.  The more you enjoy what you’re doing, the more impressive you’ll be at it.  And if you do have the time and money to figure out what you’re truly passionate about, then by all means, start becoming the best in the world at it right now.  You don’t have a second to lose.

For the rest of you, though, to be impressive, you don’t have to be the best in the world.  You just have to be better than everyone else who wants the same job you do. And believe me, that bar is probably set quite low.  So I’m going to show you how to be just impressive enough to get you a job in 99 days.  But in the back of your mind you should remember that the more impressive you are, the easier this whole process will be.

I’ll let you in on a little knowledge you need to be just impressive enough.  As the CEO of a technology company in San Francisco, CA, I can tell you one thing:  Every good CEO is always recruiting.  The people in his or her organization dictate how well the organization will perform.  If you can impress the CEO, you’ll definitely be able to land a job at the company.  That’s just one way to be impressive — I’m going to walk you through a number of strategies to learn how to be impressive in days 8-30 of your job hunt.  You spent the first 7 days learning to create value and get over your fears, now you’ll spend the next 3 weeks honing in on what you want and figuring out how to be just impressive enough at it to get the job.

You Have to Know What You Want

Many people go through life not knowing what they want.  There’s no way for you to reach a goal you haven’t set.  So let’s start days 8-30 by having you figure out what you want in your job search.

Ideally, you’ll want to hone your list of prospective employers down to three at most.  Ideally you can pick one place you really want to work and focus on that.  As I said earlier, there’s a cost to everything, so the more places on your list, the less you’ll be able to focus on any one of them.  Make a top list of potential employers.  Figure out where you want to work.  Don’t limit yourself.  Just decide based on whatever is important to you, where the best place of employment is for you.  Don’t worry about who has job openings — that doesn’t matter.  If you’re impressive enough, a company will hire you no matter what job openings they’ve published.

Spend a max of two days — days 8 and 9 — figuring this out.  Do you want to work for companies that are in a certain city?  If so, there are lots of lists like this one or this one (I picked “Oklahoma” as an example) that will tell you what companies are headquartered in your city.  You can Google “Chamber of Commerce [city name]” to find local businesses, like I did here for El Paso, TX.  Or maybe you’re willing to work anywhere — you just want a company with great benefits?  Use a list like this one to find employers with the best benefits.  Maybe you have a certain skill — let’s say you are a machinist.  Find a a list of employers in your field through an association like NTMA (here’s their list of over 2,000 member companies).

You’re probably used to searching for a job by looking at job openings.  I’m telling you not to do that.  I’m telling you to start by deciding what you want.  Why limit yourself to the jobs section of a newspaper?  If you’re impressive enough, it won’t matter whether there’s a published job opening that hundreds of other suckers are applying for.  In fact, it’s probably better that there isn’t a job posted, because the reality is that any company will hire someone who creates value, and if there isn’t a job posted, you’ll have fewer people competing with you for a job.  And you learned how to create value in days 1-7, right?  You can do this.

Let’s use the machinist example to illustrate this point.  I picked, at random, one of the machine shops from the NTMA directory:  F & F Machine Specialists.  Let’s say that for whatever reason, I really wanted to get a job at this shop.  Maybe it was in my city, or I had a special skill I knew they needed.

My first step would be to learn as much as I could about this machine shop.  A quick Google search reveals a bit about them.  I can tell you from this page on their site that their president is David A. Behrens — the site even has his email address.   By Googling his name + city I can find this page, which states that F&F “has an annual revenue of $10 to 20 million and employs a staff of 50 to 99.”  That’s good intel to have — I know it’s not a small five person shop.  I can also find this page, which tells me that David is 53 years old.  I also noticed that the OEM Account Manger is Karen Behrens, who shares a last name with David.  This tells me theirs is likely a family operation, and that she may be his wife or daughter.  I can also find this page, which is the local NTMA directory page with other businesses in the same chapter.

I can also learn what tools they use in their shop from their website.  If I were a machinist and I’d used any of those tools, I would have a great “hook” to use to start a conversation with the company.

Does all of this sound a bit creepy?  It’s all public information! You may have a fear that by knowing too much about this employer or its president that you’ll seem weird.  And in fact, you will — you’ll know a lot more about the company than anyone else looking for a job there, and that’s a very good thing.  Imagine being able to go into an interview saying, “Mr. Behrens, I know your shop uses a 2004 Mazak Nexus 510C Vertical Machining Center.  I’ve used that machine for the past 10 years.  Nobody knows it better than I do.  I’d like to ask you for the opportunity to come in and work with that machine for one day in your shop, at my own expense. I’m confident that by the end of the day, you’ll see how you can increase output by hiring me.”

Do you see what I’ve done in the paragraphs above?  I’ve done 10 minutes of research on a random machine shop located in Mishawaka, IN to learn enough about it to:

1. Know who to target at the company for a job
2. Know some things about that person to form a personal connection
3. Know what types of tools that company uses
4. Provide that company with a “no lose” trial — have me come in for a day at my expense so I can show my skills off to you
5. Provide a path where I can show value to the president of the company.  ”You’ll increase output by having me work that machine.”

This may not work the first time you try it.  It may not work after you try it 10 times.  But it will work if you try it enough times, because you’re doing things that make you stand out from all the other candidates. There are many other little tricks you can use to be just impressive enough.  Here are some that spring to mind specifically related to F&F and our fictional machinist role:

1. Bring a new client account.  A great way to get a job at a company is to arrive with value.  And nothing is more valuable than handing them a customer account.  Obviously, it’s not easy to do this, especially if you’re not a natural sales person, but if you see an opportunity to bring new business to a potential employers, it’s almost a sure win for you personally.
2. Bring a scrap-book showing off work samples to a job interview.  It’s amazing how much value a simple audio/visual aid brings.  Since most employees show up empty-handed, bringing anything will instantly make you look more impressive.  If you’re a machinist and you have pictures of previous work you’ve done, bring it with you and show it off.  This is a sub point to a larger blog post about building a strong personal brand I recently wrote.
3. Know & understand the needs of the business before your interview.  Most people who show up for a job interview have a very limited understanding of the business, because they don’t care enough to do research before-hand.  But if you’re focusing your job search on three or less companies, you’ll have the opportunity to do a lot more research on them, and you’ll look very impressive if you show up saying things like, “I know you’ve had a big order from Acme Supply recently, and I imagine you’re looking for ways to fill that order.  I’m your man — I’ll work nights and evenings; whatever it takes to make sure you can get the order filled on time.”  You can get knowledge like this by talking informally to current employees, or by reading up on them from a local newspaper.
4. Offer to create value with no cost.  A large reason employers won’t take a chance on you is because you’re an unknown quantity.  Will you work well with other employees?  Are you a hard worker?  Will you show up to work on time?  Will you call in sick a lot?  The more you can do to prove your value at no cost to a potential employer, the better.  Offer to spend a day at the office at your own expense.  Ask them if there’s a project they need to get done but don’t have the time to do, that you can do on a contract basis to start.   Give them a way to see how valuable you can be to their company without the risk associated with hiring you fulltime as an unknown.

As you can see from my examples above, much of being impressive is doing just enough to stand out from everyone else who’s in the same position as you are.  Thinking creatively about your situation and doing things that take you outside of your comfort zone are key elements to being impressive.  That’s why spending the first seven days selling restaurant vouchers is so important — it takes you much further outside of your comfort zone than you would otherwise dare to go. Spend the next 8 through 99 days applying the points above in a methodical fashion, and I’m confident you’ll land a job.   Good luck — I’d love to hear your thoughts and comments.

Footnote:  Do you not have anyone else to turn to for enough capital to buy $70 worth of vouchers?  If you can pass my GeekSpeed challenge in 2 minutes or less, then I’ll consider funding your first $70.   Like I said above, it’ll be easier for you to get the $70 from friends or family, but if you have nowhere else to turn, leave a comment below with your sub 2 minute GeekSpeed entry and we’ll discuss further.  Why the GeekSpeed challenge?  To prove that you care enough about this and to weed out those who don’t.

AngelList is a platform that connects entrepreneurs to angel investors to raise seed stage capital.

Out of the $1.5 million dollars in angel funding we’ve raised for Socialize, over $1 million came from introductions made on AngelList.  We were very early AngelList users under our AppMakr brand, with Brendan Baker doing a detailed analysis of our use of AngelList in his Anatomy of a Seed project.  I also wrote a lengthy manifesto about our fundraising experience, and when AngelList was very new I interviewed Naval Ravikant, one of the AngelList founders.

Recently, using AngelList has changed the way I’ve been fundraising.  Where traditionally, I’ve had to dedicate a block of time to fundraise full time, I can now fundraise passively, meaning just by focusing on having an optimized AngelList presence and a few specific techniques, I don’t have to spend blocks of my time finding high quality angels.  That is a game changer for us — fundraising is an incredibly distracting process, and it’s especially hard to innovate and iterate on your startup when you’re distracted by bolstering the company’s bank account.  Being able to have angels come to me has given me a freedom as an entrepreneur that’s just fantastic.

Nexercise's AngelList profile. Full-size image below.

As I was talking to my friend Ben Young, CEO of Nexercise, about this sea-change in fundraising, I offered to critique his AngelList page to help him optimize it for this type of inbound passive investment.

You can find the Nexercise AngelList profile here, and compare it to my Socialize AngelList profile here.  While I don’t have any official data or insight into what makes an AngelList profile great, Socialize does have 533 followers and a reach of 1,396 with which to message investors, and I have over 1,000 followers on my personal profile.  However, if you have differing views or other tips, I’d love to hear about them in the comments section.  I definitely haven’t figured it all out yet, and AngelList changes daily.

First, some background on AngelList:

If you’re an entrepreneur and you haven’t yet made a profile on AngelList, you need to do that right away.  AngelList is, incredibly, a free service.  It’s one of the most valuable tools I have as an entrepreneur, and it’s 100% free.  There are lots of other angel groups out there that charge a fee for the privilege of pitching to them.  Steer clear of those — despite a similar sounding name, AngelList is not anything like that.  Think of AngelList more as a Facebook type of social platform that’s dedicated to connecting entrepreneurs to investors.  Oh, and did I say it’s 100% free?

The Basics: The basics in AngelList are pretty straight forward.  Fill your personal and company profiles out, and keep them updated on a regular basis.  You can get all this done in the span of an hour or two.

Socialize's 'previous investor' list

But AngelList really starts to shine once you get its “Social Proof” engine cranking.  The thing to know about this engine is that AngelList isn’t a magic bullet.  It won’t make your startup hot if it’s not.  But what it will do is give you what I call “force multiplication.”  If you can manage to convince some great advisors or angel investors to believe in you, having them reflected in your AngelList profile will pay great dividends.  It all comes back to social proof — get people to believe in you, and have that reflected in AngelList, which will in turn get more people interested.

If you don’t currently have strong social proof for your startup, then just start by making an AngelList profile and work on getting an advisor who’s well known in your field to believe in you and your startup, and be willing to be publicly listed as an advisor on your AngelList profile.  You can start with just one. If you can’t get one well known and well respected subject matter expert to believe in your startup, then you have to really focus on iterating on your startup concept until you can get someone excited about it who can in turn get others excited through a platform like AngelList.

AngelList Pro Tips:

The I send to all AngelList members who follow me

Once you’ve gotten the basics covered, you’ll be ready to really use AngelList as an engine to drive investor interest.  I have three main pro-tips for you.

The first one is to message everyone who ‘follows’ either your personal profile or your company’s profile.  At left is the message I send out to everyone who follows me.

Keep your expectations low — AngelList is on a ‘follow’ kick right now, encouraging people to follow each other to build out its network, so you’ll get lots of followers who don’t really have a deep interest in what you’re up to.  However, if you message all of them, you can expect a 10% to 30% response rate.  I’ve found that those who do respond turn into great conversations, regardless of whether they’re investors or not.

Messaging Investors through AngelList

The second tip is to leverage your follower & investor network to announce company news and funding announcements.  AngelList lets you “Message Investors” which is broken into two buckets:  Your direct investor-followers, and investors who follow your investors.  You can see what that looksl like in the image at right.

You have to be more judicious with this list, as it requires your investors to “forward” your message to their followers.  Sending a company update out monthly is a good schedule.  Also, when you open up an angel round, or you get a new investor in a current round, you should also announce that news to this list.

Using comments on AngelList is a great way to get your message out

My last pro tip also centers around messaging:  You can send public updates out in the “comments” section.  I also post a company update monthly here (caution: this update is public by default, so don’t reveal anything you want to keep private).

You can also encourage others to post comments about your startup in this section.  It’s a great way to jump-start some social proof for your profile page — whenever you talk to someone who likes what you’re doing, send them a follow-up email asking them to make a comment on your profile page.

Here’s a little mini trick for this comments section:  Due to federal regulations, any fundraising information has to be limited to accredited investors.  You can put fundraising information in this comment area, and AngelList will automatically convert the comment from ‘public’ to ‘investors only.’   It’s a bit nerve-racking to do this, though, because your comment starts out as being public before AngelList runs it through a filter to make them investor-only.

Do you have any other pro tips?  If so, please share them in the comments below; I’d love to hear them.

Evaluating Nexercise:

Here are my comments about Nexercise’s profile in three screenshots (click to enlarge each), with my commentary interspersed in between the images:

Nexercise's AngelList Profile Critique - 1 of 3 (Click to Enlarge)

In the image above, I mention that Nexercise may want to optimize its tags.  Here’s what I mean by that:  A startup is limited to four tags (called “markets”), and they’re a great way to get exposure for your startup.  Therefore, you want to choose tags which have as many followers as possible, and as few startups as possible.  I would recommend that Nexercise switch out one of its two similar tags (‘fitness’ and ‘health & wellness’) and instead use a tag like ‘Gamification,’ which has 12,333 followers but only 89 startups.  Nexercise’s current ‘Fitness’ tag, in contrast, only has 3,404 followers and 184 startups, and ‘Health & Wellness’ has 2,214 followers and 577 startups.  So by switching at least one of those tags out with the Gamification tag, Nexercise should be able to get more exposure.

Nexercise's AngelList Profile Critique - 2 of 3 (Click to Enlarge)

In the images above and below, I call out some of the great things Nexercise has done in their profile, as well as some areas for improvement.

Nexercise's AngelList Profile Critique - 3 of 3 (Click to Enlarge)

I got to catch up with some friends this week while I was in Toronto for a mobile panel, and we started talking about the topic of personal branding.  One of my friends is a real estate agent, and the other is an aspiring actor (well, not so aspiring — he spent all day on set today shooting a US-based TV show.  Turns out a lot of American shows are shot in Toronto).  Both of them want to create a strong personal brand in their respective fields.

Having started a real estate brokerage in the past, I have some great tips on how to create a successful real estate brand, and I believe in the power of personal branding.  So instead of sending a private email with my tips to my friends, I figured I’d write a blog about it in the hopes others can join the conversation about what’s worked for them.

Daniel’s Top 10 Tips to Turn You Into the Coca-Cola of Personal Brands:

1) Conquer your fear.  Fear is what stops many people from starting to build a personal brand.  If you’re a service provider, it’s likely a fear that by giving away your expertise, you won’t have anyone willing to pay you.  That couldn’t be farther than the truth.  Read my blog on how sharing your knowledge freely makes you a superstar.  None of the ideas below will do you any good if you’re afraid to execute on them.  Be prepared to be embarrassed.  Get over it, and move on.  Your brand is counting on you.

2) Capture content.  I can’t stress this enough as the most important part of building a personal brand (once you’re over your fear of execution).  Capturing the expertise that’s inside your head is a primary building block in successful personal branding.  Your genius insights and thoughts aren’t going to help anyone if they’re just spoken to one person.  There’s no scribe following you around breathlessly writing down every word you say.  You alone are responsible for acting as a force multiplier:  If you think it, say it or write it, then do it in a way that as many people can participate as possible.   Following are a few very pragmatic ways to accomplish this, but everything starts with a commitment to capture content.

3) Answer questions in a blog.  When you get a written question from someone (for example, a real estate client over email), don’t write them back over email.  Instead, write the answer in a blog post.  Instead of spending 15 minutes writing the same answer over and over again via email, spend 3 hours composing the answer once in a blog post, and then send that link back to the person over email. You accomplish many objectives this way.  The most important result is that the person asking you the question gets a much better answer, because you’ve put 3 hours of thought into it instead of 15 minutes.  This is why I often say Henry Ford would’ve loved blogs, because you’re creating an assembly line of knowledge.  You also create a public knowledge base that others can build on, and you benefit from what I call the “Angelina Jolie Effect.”

4) Capture video at events and panels.  How many events do you go to (conferences, trade events, speeches — anything) where great content is shared?  Next time you attend an event like this, look around the room.  Is anyone capturing the content?  Probably not — as I’ve said before there are often cultural barriers to capturing content (if you don’t know what I mean, try setting up a camera and see what types of strange looks you get).  But therein lies the opportunity:  Since nobody else is capturing the content for repurposing later, it’s getting lost — imagine if you can capture all the great content from an event and be the one to share it with the world.  You’ll build a great brand because you’ll be offering content nobody else has.  That’s why I capture video at every panel I speak on.  In fact, I wouldn’t even travel to do a panel if I couldn’t capture it.  Sure it might be nice to share a discussion with 500 people in a room in one day, but by capturing it tens of thousands of people can see it over the course of years.  The rig I use to capture content is this Kodak zi8 camera.  The entire setup costs less than $500.

4) Use SocialCam liberally.  SocialCam is a fantastic app for capturing video content.  For example, when I was hacking a vegas cab line, I took a video of the experience using SocialCam.  SocialCam then automatically uploaded the video to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, and I later embedded the YouTube video in a blog I wrote about the experience.  But you don’t even need to embed the video in your blog — just taking lots of videos using SocialCam on your phone is a great start; it’ll give you content that you can repurpose later.  And if you’re a Realtor, for example, you can have a client log into their Facebook account on SocialCam, do a video with them about any real estate related topic (maybe a testimonial, for example) and then have your client post the video post to their wall and Twitter stream.  It’s a great way for you to get exposure to their friends and followers using them as a ‘hook’ to vouch for you.  SocialCam is one of my favorite brand-building tools today.  Use it liberally and often — when you’re in the car going to see a client, for example, take a SocialCam video of what you’re up to.  Just get that expertise out of your head and into a digital format that can be shared with the world!  If you’re super hardcore about capturing content you can do what my friend Frank LLosa of FranklyRealty did and create something like the “Wheel Estate Cam” (better ask him for permission first).

5) Do screencasts showcasing your expertise.  Back when I was in real estate, I did lots of low-budget, cheesy videos that showcased our company’s expertise in the real estate market, like this one and this one.  These screencasts and videos are so low budget as to be laughable, but that’s actually what makes them so awesome.  The rawness of the video (I refuse to edit whenever possible) makes it feel real and not like a marketing slick.  And I got an amazing amount of business from these videos.  The video at right has been watched almost 15,000 times.  I literally had home buyers from all over the country contacting me asking me to represent them.  Stop for a minute to think about that:  There are ~50,000  licensed Realtors in most states, and yet buyers were so desperate for real information that they were reaching out to me — someone who wasn’t even licensed in the majority of the states where these requests came from.  Again, this is about getting the expertise out of your head and into a format where others can benefit from it.  This goes for my actor friend as well — showcase your skills by capturing your acting prowess whenever and wherever you can.  One thing I hear time and again from people is that nobody would want to hear what they have to say.  That’s just total BS.  In many cases you’ve spent years learning information that makes you a professional.  Just because it’s mundane to you doesn’t mean it’s not interesting to someone who’s learning about it for the first time.  Case in point — none of what I’m writing is new to me, but I’m spending the time to get the expertise out of my head and into yours.  And the fact that you’re still reading about it tells me it’s interesting to you!  So pay it forward to others by doing the same.  Get that knowledge out of your head.

6) Become a Subject Matter Expert (SME) at something.  You pick what that something is.  Maybe you’re the world’s leading expert on how paint dries.  Whatever it is, make it your own and make yourself known for it.  A great example is my friend Joey the Cat.  He’s the world’s leading expert on skeeball machines.  He dresses up as a cat and plays, rents, sells (and probably dreams) skeeball machines.  But you know what?  He’s been featured on NPR, the NY Times, and a ton of other outlets for this expertise.  When anyone thinks (or google searches) for skeeball rentals, Joey comes up on the first page of Google.  He’s thrown himself into being the world’s leading expert on skeeball.  What’s your SME claim to fame?

7) Focus.  If everything is important, then nothing is important.  You want to pick a very defined, focused area to begin building your personal brand in.  Don’t succumb to ABBA.   The more focused your SME area, the faster you’ll see results.  Corollary to this point:  Don’t give up if ou don’t see results right away.  It may take you 6 to 12 months and hundreds of videos, blog posts and tweets to become recognized by Google and your target audience.

8) A/B Test and optimize.  Once you figure out what’s working, start optimizing it.  Here’s a great post on using Optimizely for A/B testing.

9) Use Twitter to run contests.  My friend mentioned that he got his own trailer on set for the TV show he was acting in.  I suggested he consider doing a super simple Twitter campaign the next time he was on set:  Send a Tweet out a day or two before the shoot stating that the person who re-tweets his tweet the most gets to go with him to the shoot, and hang out in his trailer for the day (or for an hour, whatever).  In this way, he’d be using something he has proprietary access to — a TV/movie set — as a hook for a simple Twitter contest campaign.  Almost all of us have some type of access to something that our friends & followers don’t.  Twitter is a great way to engage an audience and make them more passionate about your personal brand.  For example, whenever I’m on a panel I give out my twitter ID and encourage people to tweet their questions during the panel.  I weave answers to their questions into my panel responses.  It’s a great way to make the audience feel like they’re a part of the conversation, and it keeps the panel more relevant to their interests, and therefore more engaging.

10) Get great press.   Getting great press can be incredibly easy if you know how.  When people read content in the news, they have a bias to believe it’s true.  Getting press is many times more valuable than advertising, so leverage my techniques to show off your SME to the world.

Bonus:  #11) Be more efficient.  You’ll find any of the items above way easier if you learn to play a computer like an instrument and use simple knowledge sharing techniques like this one that will provide you massive productivity gains.  Become a force multiplier by learning how to leverage technology to make you more efficient.

Good luck!  I’d love to hear your top brand-building techniques in the comments below.

The pictures at the top were a few killer panos I took of my stay in Toronto.

I recently did a panel at Canadian Music Week on Tablets & Media, and during the event, a member of the audience tweeted this.

I love taking cool & unique pics with my iPhone like my killer panos, so I checked the link out, and it turns out it’s a photo + video mashup app called Cinegram. Here’s what the mashup looked like from the conference today:

@drodio on the big screen! #DMS2012. Created with cinemagr.am

As posted on the Socialize blog:

Socialize CEO Daniel Odio participated on a fantastic panel at Canadian Music Week titled “Media on Tablets & Mobile Devices,” moderated by Anthony Bruno, Community Manager, digitalmusic.org at NARM.

Here’s some insight from Daniel on the panel:

I just finished a great panel at CMW. On the panel was also Stephen Henrik of The Globe & Mail, Thom Cummings from SoundCloud, Michael Schneider of MobileRoadie and Ted Cohen of Tag Strategic. In addition to touching on topics such as APIs, how to leverage mobile, specific examples of what’s working and what’s not working, we discussed the meteoric rise of tablets as both consumption and creation devices, and how they compare to smartphones and other mobile devices. If you’re interested in the mobile space and tablets in particular, definitely check the video out: It was a wide ranging and very useful hour.

Anthony did a fantastic job moderating and keeping the panel specific and relevant to the audience. He’s one of the best moderators I’ve seen. Panels can often become very theoretical and it can be hard for participants to take solid actions away from the panels. As I’ve done in my previous panels, I always try to be very pragmatic with my advice and suggestions, and Anthony really ensured the audience left with useful insights. Well done.

Here’s the full panel description: “Marshall McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” message has never been more relevant. In a post desktop world of tablets and mobiles, content providers and companies have to literally think outside the box to factor how their content is experienced on different devices. Interactivity, portability and multi-platform integration are all important factors that will be analyzed. We’ll also be looking at some killer apps, and how they’ve performed on different platforms.”

Here’s a video of the panel (and here’s how & why I capture content):

Click here to view the embedded video.

And here are a few more pics of the event, along with a mentoring session Daniel did:

Model X Reservation Holder #486!

This weekend, Telsa held an exclusive Model X preview for reservation holders. As the CEO of a mobile startup, I have mad respect for Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla. Here’s a guy who, after starting and selling PayPal, started not one, but two companies with prescient timing: Tesla and SpaceX. As gas heads towards $5/gallon (with the imminent threat of shooting up higher) and the US retires its Space Shuttle program, Elon’s two startups are positioned perfectly. For more background on Tesla, take a look at the blog post I wrote after touring the Tesla Factory.

Critics are raving over the Model X. As someone who’s passionate about cars & motorcycles and hopeful for the future of electric vehicles that perform as well or better than their fossil fuel burning brethern, I was originally a reservation holder for the Model S. When I saw the Model X, I immediately swapped my reservation out. Now I’m #486 on the list for a Model X. You can get a reservation of your own here — it’s a $5k refundable deposit. Your only risk, really, is that Tesla doesn’t stay viable as a company, but as someone in the tech industry, I really believe in Elon, his vision, and his ability to execute. I’m willing to take that risk.

Philz Coffee + Tesla = Perfect Match

My main reason for switching to the Model X from the Model S is the additional space (7 easily accessible forward-facing seats) and four wheel electric drive. The Falcon Wing doors give the vehicle a great unique feel, although I have no idea how practical they’ll be with daily use. I also figure that by the time Tesla delivers the Model X in 2014, it will have gotten most “version 1.0″ kinks out of the system with the Model S.

It was funny to see a temporary Philz Coffee stand set up at the Tesla event. I had just recently interviewed Philz Coffee CEO Jacob Jaber about how he was extending his brand. Seeing Philz at Tesla was a perfect example of two great brands I love promoting each other.

Below are some photos and videos of the Tesla event I attended today. What do you think about the Model X? I’d love to get your thoughts in the comments below.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Based on the recommendation of one of our engineers (thanks Nick!) I’m trying out this Seagate hybrid Solid State + 7200 RPM drive ($175 at Amazon: Seagate Momentus XT 750 GB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s 32 MB Cache 2.5 Inch Solid State Hybrid Drive ST750LX003).

What makes it a great efficiency hack?  The idea is that I’ll get the benefits of blazing fast boot up & application opening speeds, combined with the 750 GB capacity of a traditional drive.  Here’s a description of the drive from the manufacturer:

Boot-Up Time: Momentus XT drives are known for incredibly fast boot-up times, and now they are even better with FAST Factor boot technology. This system boot-up technique can reduce your boot time to mere seconds for a fast cold-boot start. It can cut your system start-up time by up to 65% over a traditional HDD. FAST Factor boot technology will deliver the fastest boot possible, whether you boot your system once a day or once a week. Your OS boot-up files are always there, ready to work.

Flash Management: Momentus XT solid state hybrid drives also implement a management feature that provides seamless integration between hardware, firmware and high-speed NAND flash while maintaining data integrity under all conditions–any system, any OS and with any driver.

Adaptive Memory Technology: Adaptive Memory technology delivers SSD-like response from the applications and files you use the most. It lets the Momentus XT drive selectively tackle frequently used data, copy it to the flash, track its relevancy and keep the flash current. You get the instant response experience you need to perform at your best.

I haven’t tried it yet, but I’ve ordered it.  I’ll let you know what kind of performance improvement I see.  The reviews are very positive, and I’ll ask Nick to post his experiences here.  If you’ve tried this drive and have any feedback on its performance, I’d love to hear about it.

A colleague of mine had to pay me via check, but he was 2,000 miles away.  What to do? My bank, USAA, doesn’t have any physical branches, so he couldn’t just walk in and deposit the check in my account.

He could mail me the check, but why wait?  I had him take a picture of the check with his phone.  Then I used the USAA app‘s Deposit@Mobile feature to take a picture of my computer screen which had a picture of the check he’d taken using his phone.

Here are pictures of it all going down.  I was able to easily deposit the check while the check was in my colleague’s hands, 2,000 miles away.

USAA Check deposit lifehack

USAA Check Deposit lifehack closeup

My next challenge to FBLA at TJ: A Hoos Savings Club card for the school year w/ local businesses. If you make it a success, you'll rake in a lot of money.

I recently wrote a post about how the US really needs college students to be entrepreneurial.

I should’ve addressed it to high school students instead.

I’ve challenged Georgetown MBAs and others of college age (and older) to get out of the classroom and do something entrepreneurial.  I’ve shared an easy litmus test method for people to get a handle on whether or not they have what it takes to be entrepreneurial.  And yet it was this talk at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (“TJ” for short) that’s gotten the greatest response.

Not college students.  High school students.

Here’s what the student leader of TJ’s Future Business Leaders of America club just emailed me:

Hey Mr. Odio,

Hope you've been well. FBLA has been going great this year, and we've

actually been using your challenge to go out and buy something from Costco

and sell it as a focal activity for the year. Most of the members refer to

it as "the Daniel Odio Challenge".

Philipp Stauffer of the Wharton Club of Northern California hosted an incredibly intimate evening with Jacob Jaber, the CEO of Philz Coffee, at the new Philz Palo Alto location (picture above is of Jacob at that store).

Jacob talked about his and his father’s success expanding Philz from a single grocery store in the Mission district of San Francisco into the 10 store Philz Coffee experience most San Franciscans know and love today. Jacob said his goal is to have 14 stores by year’s end, 40 stores within a few years, and to be “all over the world” after that, all while maintaining the One Cup at a Time culture that distinguishes Philz from other coffee shops like Starbucks & Peets.

And here’s the thing — it seems possible that he could pull it off.

Explosive Growth

The thing that kept going through my mind as he gave his talk to the Wharton Club was that back in the 1970′s, Starbucks was also just a single coffee shop, and that the values that Jacob holds dear — providing an incredible customer experience and brewing the best cup of coffee — must have once been important to the founders of Starbucks too. And yet as any company expands, it almost always loses the character traits that make it special when it’s small and intimate.  Starbucks has traits that make it great today, but “intimate” isn’t one of them.

I’ve already seen danger signs of this happening with Philz, and Jacob mentioned them in his talk below. For example, Philz coffee is offered on Virgin America flights, but it “doesn’t taste as good” according to Jacob — and he’s right. The Virgin coffee experience doesn’t come close to the experience at a Philz location. To mitigate, Jacob only put the Philz logo on the Virgin seat-back ordering screen. Jacob’s point was that although it may not be the same experience as having a cup of coffee in a Philz store, it’s still “way better” than any other coffee you can get on an airplane. Brand dilution or clever brand extension? I’m not sure, but what I do know is that he didn’t push the branding as far as he could have because he recognized the danger of the former happening.

The careful and deliberate thought that Jacob has put into expanding the Philz brand intrigued me. His perspective is that Philz isn’t in the coffee business, but rather it’s in the people business. He sees his job as making sure the retail reps behind the counter — the ones interacting with customers — are having a great day, so they can impart their happiness on customers. And he really seems to believe it — a big sign in the Palo Alto store states that the Philz mission is to “Better People’s Day”. He spends a lot of his time figuring out how to inculcate the Philz culture in the company as it grows. He’s not afraid to ask a lot of questions.  His focus on maintaining a tight company culture as Philz expands past 200 employees made me think of the company manifesto we created at Socialize — 30 points that guide our company as it grows.  We both believe in the value of strong company cultures.

You Decide

Image from the PhilzCoffee.com website

Jacob  says the most important management technique he’s learned consists of two words: “You Decide.” He uses these words to empower employees to make decisions and relieve him from having to micro manage the company as it grows. And what’s funny is that after the event was over, as I sat on a couch at Philz writing this blog post up (with everyone else long gone), I overheard Jacob interacting with an employee. There were trays of untouched sandwiches left over from the event, and an employee asked Jacob what to do with it. And no joke, I heard him tell the employe “you decide,” and that he’d like to get what was left to a homeless shelter if nobody else wanted it that evening. Not 10 minutes later a customer sat down near me and completely unprompted, I heard that employee offer the customer a free sandwich from the tray of food, and the customer was incredibly grateful. Imagine it from the customer’s perspective — you come in for a cup of coffee, and suddenly you’re offered a free sandwich. And it stemmed from Jacob’s “you decide” mantra.

It’s all About the Product

Another thing that really stood out was how having an amazing product has driven much of the success of Philz and makes Jacob’s job way easier. This may sound obvious, but there’s something really special about a cup of Philz coffee. If you live in San Francisco or you’ve ever had one, you’ll know what I’m talking about. It really is amazing coffee, and the way it’s made — by servers who really care — completes the experience (brewed at “somewhere between” 190 to 200 degrees, Jacob says — and his favorite blend is Tesora). Here are some examples of how actually brewing an amazing cup of coffee has impacted Jacob’s job as a CEO:

• Jacob has never had to scout space for his Philz locations. Landlords come to him and ask him to open a Philz location in their buildings (even in the prime Palo Alto location) because the shops are so popular
• Jacob has been able to hire an amazing senior management team — supply chain manager from Nabisco, HR manager from Macy’s — because they knew and understood his coffee, and by extension, his vision for the growth of Philz was clear
• The corporate buyer for Virgin America lives across the street from a Philz location. In the video, Jacob describes how the Virgin buyer said “of course” when approached about carrying Philz coffee on Virgin flights, because he’d had Philz coffee many times and loved the coffee
• Jacob has been able to assemble a dream team of advisors — including a Harvard Business School professor who’s writing a case study for Harvard MBAs about the Philz story — because of the quality of his product

Watch the video and leave a comment — tell me if you think Jacob can pull off an expansion of Philz while maintaining the philosophy and culture that makes Philz unique. I’m not sure what makes Philz special will translate to a global brand, but I’m also not ready to count Jacob out after meeting him, and  I’d love to know what you think.

Video of Jacob Jarvis spilling the beans on Philz’s success:

Click here to view the embedded video.

More killer panos of the Wharton alums at the event:

PS — for a blog on brewing the perfect cup of coffee at home, read my post on Burr Grinder coffee adventures.

We’ve all grown up with computers.  Well, if you’re my generation — X — your  first experience with them was probably as a kid under 10 years old, which isn’t quite the same as thinking a magazine should work like an iPad, but that’s kind of the point:  The introduction of smartphones and tablets means that the youngest generations will grow up in a world where the PC is just another device, and not the device like it was for me.  A computer is going to be more like a washing machine — useful, but not the hub of your digital life.

So if the computer’s not the hub, but rather your digital experience is woven into daily life instead of sitting in front of a screen and keyboard, what will the world feel like?

A lot more connected, for one.  Facebook’s recent S1 Registration prospectus, a document that’s filed to register the securities with the SEC, shows how much reach Facebook already has.  For those of us that live in the tech world this has been obvious for some time (hence the impetus behind Socialize), but the numbers are still staggering.  Facebook has 845 million active monthly users (more than 2x the population of the entire US) and 483 million active daily users (still more than the population of the entire US).  Using Facebook doesn’t require a computer — just some type of digital interface, like a smartphone.  Of Facebook’s 845 million monthly active users, 432 million of them used a mobile device to access Facebook.  That’s already over half the total and growing quickly.

It can be hard to imagine interfacing with the internet without a computer and keyboard.  Often people try to imagine the equivalent of a monitor and keyboard projected onto a wall, and although forward thinkers like Pranav Mistry have done some very interesting work in this space, I’d argue that by and large, the monitor and keyboard are artifacts of an age when the only workable input & output mechanisms technology allowed were these very limiting interfaces, and you’re better off forgetting about them entirely, and instead thinking about how analog beings (i.e., you and I) experience life naturally.  We aren’t born knowing how to type, after all, but we all naturally learn spoken language to interface with other people.  We all learn body language, and the importance of human hearing, smell and touch.   Technology started off by using sight as its primary interface and has been largely been stuck in that one sense.

But recently, advances like Siri for the iPhone are showing us that being able to interface with the digital world in more natural ways isn’t that far in the future.  And the rise in importance and usefulness of Audio APIs is another great example of the expanding human senses technology is successfully utilizing.

I’m also very bullish on appliances starting to become smarter thanks to apps.  For example, having an app running on your refrigerator seems silly until you ask yourself this question:  Have you ever been at the grocery story and unsure if you had to buy more milk?  Wouldn’t it be nice to have a refrigerator that was a bit smarter and could tell you what you needed to buy — or better yet, just order what you needed for you, within certain parameters you set, like a monthly budget?

How about your stove?  Have you ever left the house wondering if you remembered to turn all the burners off?  If your stove was smarter, it could answer a query as to whether you’d shut everything off, or better yet it could alert you if you left and didnt’ turn everything off.  Imagine receiving a text message (technically a “push notification) from your stove telling you “You left the house without turning me off!  I’ve shut all the burners off until you return.”

We’re already starting to see connected appliances, and with the rise of APIs (as I talk about in this keynote), creative people will start mashing up all sorts of great experiences between appliances and other facets of our lives (imagine your refrigerator being able to interface with your Mint.com account.  ”You don’t have the budget to order Haagen Dazs this month, so I ordered Breyers ice cream for you instead.”)  APIs enable that sort of thing.    And as I discuss in this post, an app is a perfect vehicle for smart appliance functionality because an app is great at doing one thing, and doing it really well.

Also just now coming over the technology horizon are smart sensors.  As we move beyond PCs, the devices we are using will become much more aware thanks to smart, connected sensors that communicate with your smartphone (or similar device).  I can imagine sensors being woven into clothing (a ski jacket with a bluetooth-enabled barometer to help predict dangerous avalanche conditions, a breathalyzer woven into your collar to tell you if you can drive).  These types of sensors already exist in a big way (as I outline in this presentation about apps) and mobile apps are the perfect vehicle to tie them together and make them smart.

Ray Kurzweil: Singularity Is Near

There’s a lot more to the post-PC era, but what it really means for the average person is more freedom, in a more connected manner.  You’ll have access to information wherever you are, and you’ll be able to make better decisions because you’ll have more data ready at your fingertips with which to make those decisions. This has all already begun in, but we’re just at the beginning of it.

Maybe Ray Kurzweil isn’t so crazy after all — maybe the Singularity is Near.

A group of 16 U.Va. McIntire School of Commerce students (my alma mater) came to San Francisco for a week during their spring break to learn about life as an entrepreneur in the mecca of geekdom.  I had to be in Cincinnati giving a mobile conference keynote, so my co-founder Sean kindly spent 90 minutes with them, talking about life as a tech entrepreneur and bringing other startups from our SOMAcentral space in to speak with the students.  After meeting with us, they also met with a slew of other startups, including my brother Sam’s company, FreshPlum (read about how Sam and I ended up in SF from our DC roots).

Selling Frisbees to pay for college

Here’s my message to the 16 students who spent their spring break in SF:  Our nation needs you to be entrepreneurs, and badly.  I don’t mean this in a fluffy, “you can be anything you want” type of way.  Rather I mean it in a “our nation is facing threats from ascendant countries, and the only way for us to maintain a dominant global position is to capitalize on what we do best” way.  And what we do best is leverage our unique melting pot culture and freedoms to create value through creativity and capitalism.  Entrepreneurism — and tech entrepreneurism in particular — is the most direct and value-adding way to leverage the unique strengths of our nation.  It’s the winners that write history and we are in jeopardy of losing that privilege.

The Hoos Savings Club Card: Like an analog Groupon. Discounts to area businesses; sold the card for $20. Good for one school year.

It’s easy to go work for someone upon graduation, and sadly, most universities are geared towards supplying employers with copious numbers of educated young people to act as proxies, creating value for corporate bank accounts.  The entire machine is structured to foster just enough fear that most graduates are reluctant to strike out on their own to realize the full potential of what they’re capable of.

I do see glimmers of hope, though.  When I was a student at U.Va., I was highly discouraged from being an entrepreneur.  I had no choice though — I had to pay for college myself, so I did crazy things like selling U.Va. branded Frisbees at the area bookstores like Mincers.  I pitched a Hoos Savings Club Card (think: analog Groupon) to students in front of Kroger for $20.  The university was so unfriendly to me as an entrepreneur, though, they tried to kick me out, saying that the grounds of a public institution funded with taxpayer dollars was not an appropriate place to be running a business.

The fact that students from U.Va. are now being encouraged to visit entrepreneurs for a week (albeit on their spring breaks — ‘not yet quite a part of the curriculum, dear students — you’ll have to do it on your own time!’) is a start.  Other schools like Duke have gone even farther, setting up programs like the Duke Global Entrepreneurship Network where students spend summer breaks working at tech startups.

And the category leader is Stanford, which has long been progressive in seeding and encouraging tech entrepreneurism and producing heavyweights like Google, Yahoo and countless others.  I hold Stanford up as the model to which all other universities should race, with a strong emphasis on value creation through entrepreneurship, and specific examples like its “How to Change the World” week, labeled as a ‘practical guide for impractical people’ — love it, classes on entrepreneurship with guest lectures from the best tech thinkers in the world (photo above is of Reid Hoffman speaking at one of Heidi’s classes), challenges like this one from Tina Seelig, and countless other resources for entrepreneurs.  To put it simply, being a student at Stanford means the world is at your doorstep as an entrepreneur.  Being at any other university means you’re the doormat, with everyone else stepping on you as they race to join the corporate ladder.

By and large, universities and students need to wake up to the immense and urgent need to inoculate our student culture with the values of entrepreneurism.  It’s not just a “nice to have” elective-style course.  It needs to be a foundational element of any business school, it needs to be offered in non-business curriculum like computer science, engineering and medicine, and it needs to be taught in a very hands-on, non-ivory tower academic manner.  As I argue in a presentation to these MBA students at Georgetown University, being an entrepreneur means facing your fears head-on.  Since most students would fail this litmus test to being an entrepreneur, universities have an opportunity — dare I say an obligation to our nation — to step in and help young students get past their fears.

Learn to be massively efficient

If you’re a student and you want to take control of your future and do something for our nation, I encourage you to get involved in tech startups in whatever way you can.  Spend a summer in Silicon Valley.  Read, then re-read, all these essays by Paul Graham.  Learn about best-in-class tech practices like A/B testing and Scrum agile development, how to play a computer like an instrument and generally how to be  massively efficient with technology.  Start applying those principles in your life now — don’t wait until you graduate.  Take my GeekSpeed challenge if you think you’re up to it, to see how well you’re doing.

I’ll make this commitment to you: If you want a summer internship in silicon valley, AND you can post 2 minutes or less on the GeekSpeed challenge, leave a comment on this blog below (put the URL of your GeekSpeed challenge result in the comment).  Describe your skillsets (specifically tell me if you’re technical in any way — even just hacking javascript or general HTML makes a ton of difference) and I’ll do my best to find you a place where you can spend the summer here or in another tech hub like Austin or Boston.

Here’s the video of the McIntire students with Sean Shadmand of Socialize, as well as appearances from SocialBakers and Sumazi:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The problem with humans is that we make lots of decisions without having data to back us up.

And to compound the problem, unlike the movie Sliding Doors, where the main character gets to see how a different decision plays out in her life, we never know if we made the right decision, because we can’t know how things might have turned out otherwise.

Enter A/B testing.  Through the magic of large numbers and averages, A/B testing gives us a way to see how two different decisions play out.  Really, it’s magic, because it gives you a way to have two competing options fight each other, UFC style.

The problem is that A/B testing can be hard to set up on your website.  But a newish startup named Optimizely takes the pain out of the process.  I’m seriously amazed at how good it is.  (You can get 25% off the Optimizely monthly fee if you have a FoundersCard, by the way).

Here are examples of how we changed Socialize’s messaging based on a series of A/B test results:

Our original messaging centered around “app intelligence”.  Optimizely helped us hone that into a message about “boosting downloads,”  which resonated much more with developers.

Now we’re focused on the sub-text:  Here’s a current Optimizely campaign we have running:

vs.

Here’s how the results are playing out — you can see that the message on the right (called “best marketers”) is beating the pants off of the original message on the left, with a 67% gain.  (There’s another, similar version called “best champions” with an even greater gain of 84% over the original) :

Here are just a few examples of the 1,050 possible permutations our front page can take (we’re concurrently running four A/B experiments w/ 3 to 7 options each):

Out of these 1,050 possible combinations, one will deliver the best possible conversion result, and with A/B testing we can find it.  Once we do, we’ll focus on another area of the site to test (maybe the blue button, for example) and optimize that.   If you get really hard-core about this (which we’re not yet), you can work on optimizing all aspects of the page at once, with true multi-variate testing.  (Optimizely charges substantially more for this, so for now we’re just running a series of concurrent A/B tests, which approximates the result you get from true multi-variate testing).

I highly encourage you to start A/B testing your website, if you’re not already.  You really don’t have any excuse not to, since Optimizely makes it painless to set up.

I was recently at the MobileX conference in Cincinnati and in preparation for the conference I told the organizers to check out Twitterfall, which they did in a big way, putting it up on a side screen in the auditorium.  It was awesome, and although I just made up the 237% cooler figure, it is truly a powerful way to make your events interactive.  For example, in my keynote I referenced Twitterfall for realtime tweets to be able to work audience questions into my presentation in a seamless fashion.  It’s also great for introverts (you know who you are!) who want to ask questions but don’t want to disrupt the event by raising their hands.

Here’s a video showing how the experience was for attendees:

Today I gave a keynote at the sold-out MobileX conference in Cincinnati.  I can’t tell you how impressed I am by this group.   Brian, Therese, Evan and the entire crew did an amazing job scheduling and executing on this event, and it’s no wonder it sold out.  Top notch facility and speakers.  They had camera crews throughout, so although I brought my own camera equipment as I always do to capture content, I’ll likely just swap it out with theirs once it’s live.

Here’s video from the main keynote I did (slides are below):  The title was “Capitalizing on the Mobile Tsunami: Trends and how to Leverage them for Success.”  I talk about mobile trends our company is seeing and provide a perspective of being a mobile entrepreneur for the past four years, first with the consulting company PointAbout, then the DIY app creation product AppMakr, and now with the social API Socialize.  I’d also like to credit my cofounders Sean Shadmand and Isaac Mosquera for their contributions to the content in this presentation, as we all bounce ideas off each other all day, and the final product is stellar.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Socialize & AppMakr breakout: After the keynote, I got to do a much more intimate break-out session to discuss Socialize and AppMakr in more detail.  We also touched on how to leverage social media in general, outside of mobile.   I referenced my Henry Ford blog but neglected to reference my post on why service providers should blog, which would’ve been perfect to discuss.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Slides from Keynote:

Being a mobile entrepreneur

Here’s a great pano from the event, a relevant twitter feed below that.

.

]]> http://www.DanielOdio.com/2012/03/05/who-says-cincinnati-doesnt-get-mobile/feed/ 4 http://www.DanielOdio.com/2012/03/05/why-i-really-love-scrum/ http://www.DanielOdio.com/2012/03/05/why-i-really-love-scrum/#comments Mon, 05 Mar 2012 00:52:08 +0000 DROdio http://www.DanielOdio.com/?p=1791

 We’ve been using scrum all over the company for the past year, and the more I use it, the more i love it.  I previously wrote a blog about using the scrum agile development methodologies in a non-development capacity — i.e., with a sales or marketing team.  I got a lot of questions from that blog about exactly why Scrum was so great, so in this post my goal is to tell you why I love Scrum so much, and why I recommend it to be adopted within any company (and if the US Government ever implemented Scrum — correctly — we’d seriously save trillions of dollars.  That’s probably an impossible wish, but  after all, thinking big is free.)

Here’s a good 7 minute video describing Scrum.  If you’re not at all familiar with the methodology, you might want to read my case study below before you watch the video — it’ll make more sense that way.

Scrum in 7 Minutes:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Scrum Case Study:

Here’s a real-life example of why scrum is so amazing.  The Socialize marketing department uses scrum to prioritize projects and tasks.  Here’s how we do it:

Awesome Reason #1:  ”Hey, wouldn’t this be cool”  How often do you hear someone in your company have an idea of something that “would be cool” to do?  The idea may, in fact, be the coolest ever, but where do those ideas go today?  Do they get recorded somewhere?  Do they get lost with a dismissive “yeah that would be cool”?  How do you prioritize all those cool ideas?  The first absolutely enormous value of the scrum agile methodology is that it gives all these cool ideas a home.  That home is called the “icebox.”  The icebox is a place where ideas can be placed by anyone in the company who has access to the scrum project.   We use and love Pivotal Tracker to track our scrum projects and I suggest you do the same.  It’s the best scrum software I’ve found to date (I’m happy to hear about others in the comments, though).  Here’s what the icebox looks like (right-side of the Pivotal Tracker screen)

Pivotal project dash, with overlay

Same dashboard, no overlay

Story open

(In the image above, i’ve blurred out sensitive information but kept as much unblurred as possible).

The awesome Tracker Widget

Now, whenever anyone in your company has an idea, just have them put it into the icebox.  This can be accomplished directly in Pivotal Tracker, or with a great Mac dashboard widget that I use constantly to drop stories right into the icebox for review during the sprint planning meetings.  In this way, you’re divorcing the idea itself from the prioritization of the idea.

I should also define what a “story” is, because that term is used all the time.  A story is a project requirement that’s given from the perspective of the stakeholder.  What that means, really, is that a story is told in a way that adds value.  Instead of “build widget,” as a requirement, a story might be “The customer must be able to use a widget to change the color of a picture without having any programming skills.” It is, literally, a mini story that describes what has to be done in plain English.  Mike Cohn has a great template that a story be written as “As a [end user role], I want [the desire] so that [the rationale]“.

Awesome Reason #2: Meetings: The way scrum teams also interact is different from what you might be used to.  Where normally, you’ll schedule meetings in an ad-hoc fashion to go over progress in a project, scrum projects have a very structured meeting schedule:  A planning meeting at the beginning of each sprint (a sprint is a cycle which repeats and can be of any length — we typically do one week to two week sprints depending on the department) can last several hours and encompasses the entire team.  It’s where the project (or product) owner moves ideas out of the icebox and into the backlog based on the project’s requirements.  It’s also where the project owner prioritizes the backlog so the most important tasks are at the top of the backlog.  Then there are quick (15 minutes or less depending on the size of the team) daily stand up meetings (yes you should really stand up — meeting ends faster that way) between the project team members where everyone gives a progress report.

Awesome Reason #3:  Think for Yourself: So the first two reasons I love scrum are awesome enough, but here’s there the methodology really shines:  As you can see from the screenshots above, there’s are icebox, backlog, current and done categories.  A story moves from right to left as it gets completed — it starts in the icebox and then gets moved to the backlog based on prioritization.  But here’s the beauty:  From that point forward, the actual developers (or those doing the work if not developers) hit “start” on a story and get the work done, and then hit “finish” when they think it’s done.  They can make notes in the story about the work they did.  Team members get to pick the stories they work on based on prioritization.  Say someone only has an hour to do a chunk of work — s/he simply chooses to start a story from the backlog with a lower point score, indicating it’s an easier block of work to finish in that time period.  In this way, those doing the work get to think for themselves instead of having tasks mandated by a project manager.

Related Topic: Socialize Infrastructure Tour (our use of Splunk, APIs and SDKs)

Once the story is marked as “finished,” it gets kicked over to the project owner to accept or reject.  If the story looks good, it’s accepted, and if not it’s rejected, moving the story back in to a “restart” status.

This is what makes scrum so special — it’s an asynchronous way for teams to work and collaborate together incredibly efficiently, without worrying about the element of time, because the time is set in a sprint cycle.  The time might be, say a 2 week sprint, and so the most important work is always prioritized at the top of the backlog to be worked on.  So instead of asking “when will this project be done?,” you can start looking at the number of stories left in the project, and you’ll know that the stories that matter the most to you as a project owner are being worked on first, so the most important work always gets done first.  Another way to look at this is to consider the fallacy of arbitrarily picking a “project completion date” at the beginning of a project.  A body of work will take as long as it takes — nothing will change that.  Picking a fictional completion date will not make work get done faster.  Instead, the important thing is to prioritize the project such that the most important work gets done first.

Awesome Reason #4: Stop Interrupting Me:  Even the best laid plans go to waste when unexpected roadblocks pop up, and oftentimes those roadblocks are caused by internal team members within the company.  Although the project owner is the one defining the requirements of the project, each scrum team has a  scrum master whose job it is to remove impediments from the project succeeding (i.e., keeps everyone productive).  Part of this is also keeping the project owner in line.  Oftentimes, a project owner will want to redefine requirements half-way through a project.  Scrum deals with this by keeping sprint cycles sacred and uninterrupted– if the project owner wants to make a change, it goes into the icebox (just like everyone else’s ideas), to be re-prioritized at the next planning meeting.  The key here is to keep sprint cycles short enough so that feedback and business prioritization changes can be incorporated into the next sprint, while making it long enough so that meaningful work can be accomplished.   The team members will relish this “walled garden” approach where a project owner can no longer walk up to them mid-cycle and make a bunch of unanticipated changes.

I’d love to hear your rants & raves on scrum — we’ve been using it a year and I’m sure there are those of you out there who have a lot more experience with it than we do.  And if anyone wants more detail on how we use scrum, just post a comment below — if I get enough interest, I’ll interview some of our key team members to capture their thoughts, too.

CloudApp is the single most important productivity and efficiency tool I use each day.  And if you’ve read my blogs, you know I use a lot of tools to make my time act as a force multiplier.  But CloudApp is the most indespensible — I literally use it 20 to 50 times each day (Rapportive is a close second).

Until you use CloudApp to experience its magic, though, it can be a bit hard to understand what makes it so amazing.  So here’s an easy, clear example of one of our employees, Nate, using CloudApp, so you can really get how it works.

We have a designer that works remotely.  Nate wanted to ask the designer to do some work on an iPhone screen he was developing.  Below is a screenshot of the conversation they had.  (On a tangent — we use GitHub, Basecamp & Pivotal Tracker in specific ways to manage projects via a Scrum methodology.  Let me know in the comments section if you’d like me to write a post with an in-depth look at how we use these tools).

Here’s the link Nate put into the thread, so you can see the same screenshot the designer saw: http://cl.ly/1H401K373S2d3Q0s1e1i

As I describe in this separate post on how to set CloudApp up on your computer, all Nate had to do to make that URL was take a screen shot of his computer (or phone).  That’s it.  CloudApp takes care of the rest — it listens on your computer for any screenshots you take, uploads them to the cloud, and turns them into a publicly accessible URL that Nate can then share.

CloudApp lets you and your employees quickly share what’s on their screen.  It sounds like a small thing, but it’s not — and aren’t the small things often the things that make the biggest impact anyways?  Being able to take a screenshot of my screen 20 to 50 times per day, and then share that with the people I’m interacting with, on email… on instant messenger… on Twitter… on Facebook… on the web… is a huge deal.  Give it a try; you’ll really wonder how you lived without it.

I’ve long been conflicted about friending people on Facebook.  To keep my Facebook wall interesting, I’ve wanted to keep my Facebook friends to a minimum of close friends (like I do on Twitter, where I only follow the people I really want to see updates from).  But at the same time, Facebook is a powerful channel to connect with a wide swath of people, like LinkedIn.  (On LinkedIn, I connect with everyone I possibly can, especially since the value of LinkedIn increases with the size of your network for many of its functions, like finding someone who works at a company).

I just figured out how to get the best of both worlds, with Facebook’s Wall Unsubscribe feature.  There’s a little arrow above each person’s post in your Facebook wall, which allows you to choose between seeing all their updates, most of their updates (the default), and additionally lets you unsubscribe from all their updates.

I have over 700 friends and would like to grow that to be larger, but with that many friends my wall becomes meaningless because I see updates from people I don’t really know (I don’t need to see yet another photo of the vacation from someone I’ve only met once).

So I’ve started unsubscribing from many of these people’s posts, which lets me maintain the “friend” connection without cluttering up my wall.  If and when I really want to see what they’ve been up to, I can search for them by name in Facebook.

This also lets me make good use of a Rapportive feature I’ve been reluctant to use.  As I wrote in a previous post, I absolutely love love love Rapportive.  It’s an add-on to Gmail which lets me connect with people I’m emailing with in all sorts of ways.  I can connect with them on LinkedIn, for example.  This has allowed me to grow my LinkedIn connections greatly (they recently had to reset my 3,000 connection limit because I had hit up against it).  That’s thanks to the ease of which I can add LinkedIn connections through Rapportive.

Rapportive also lets me “friend” people on Facebook.  But I haven’t been doing that since I didn’t want my wall to become even more cluttered.  Thankfully with this wall unsubscribe feature, I can friend them to get the value of the connection while keeping my wall relevant.   (PS Rapportive, if you read this — it’d be super useful if you guys created ‘scripting rules’, where I could, for example, friend someone on Facebook and you also auto unsubscribe them from my wall… or add someone in Highrise and by default also assign a tag to them).

Here’s a screenshot of what the Facebook friend add button looks like in Rapportive:

Ira Glass, the creator of This American Life and one of our generation’s most prolific storytellers, has some great advice for artists that applies equally well to entrepreneurs:  There’s a time in your life when you are making stuff that you know isn’t as good as you want it to be. You just have to get through it, and keep doing lots of work to break past this point where most people quit.

Watch Ira tell it in detail:

Click here to view the embedded video.

I’ve written about other cool SF-based startup spaces before, including SOMAcentral and StartupHouse.

There’s another cool new space in downtown SF called OneMarket.  It’s more “corporate” than the other spaces, but it’s cool.  I’d describe StartupHouse as the most scrappy — it’s a class B building, but the people behind it have big plans for it.  SOMAcentral, on the other hand, is like grown up shared desks, where startups have offices with doors (it’s an old law firm space).  OneMarket, on the other hand, is more like a New York corporate highrise office building, with a huge atrium and other large tech companies in it like Salesforce.com.

The OneMarket space is large and open, with great views of the city and the Ferry Building one one side.  It’s also right between Market & Mission streets, which means it has good access to public transportation.  Parking can be difficult (or expensive if monthly) but you’re faced with the same problems at SOMAcentral as well (you can likely find cheaper parking at StartupHouse, which has some parking spaces and is in an edgier neighborhood.)  See the map below the videos & photos for details of all three locations.

If you’d like to get an intro to the folks running OneMarket, leave a comment below.  (If you’re interested in StartupHouse or SOMAcentral, please leave comments on those blog posts).

Here’s a video of my cofounders Sean & Isaac doing a walkthrough of OneMarket, with more photos below that.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

OneMarket SOMAcentral and StartupHouse Locations

Sue Ko, AppMakr’s product manager and I did a panel in front of a 500 person audience over two days at the National Telecommunications Cooperative Association’s annual conference in San Diego, CA.

The panel was titled “What’s App” and the session description was: “Innovation will keep your company moving into the future. Recently, a Wall Street executive said that if you’re not in the app business, get into it. Apps are the wave of the future both for operational efficiency and customer engagement. Learn more about apps for telecommunications and see live examples of apps that rural telcos have implemented.”

Our session was followed by Chris Michalopoulos, marketing director at Whidbey Telecom, showing how he helped transform a traditional Telecom experience into an Apple store-esque experience.

‘What’s App’ Session Video

Click here to view the embedded video.

PowerPoint Slides:

Previous day — ‘What’s App’ Session – Video 1 of 2

Click here to view the embedded video.

Previous day — ‘What’s App’ Session – Video 2 of 2

Click here to view the embedded video.

For fun, here’s a pano of the view from the hotel room:

And here’s Sue presenting:

Socialize is well known for the robust infrastructure of its drop-in social platform, which handles over 20 requests per second — over 1.5 million requests in the past 24 hours across thousands of mobile apps and millions of end users.  But how does a team of just ten employees set up and manage such an infrastructure?  Here’s a sneak peek behind the curtain so you can see how it’s done.

Our databases, servers, Partner API and SDKs have been architected to always push meta data to our systems.  Each component is built as stand-alone infrastructure, allowing us to audit and optimize intelligence on how each piece is performing.  We then leverage tools by Splunk to turn our massive log files into actionable intelligence, and we use TeamCity for continuous integration.  Even further behind the scenes we are using Nginx, Apache, load-balanced Amazon AWS & RDS, Robotium, Selenium, gh-unit, OCMock, KIF, Google App Engine and other best-in-class technologies.

It all comes together on a 50″ flatscreen monitor and 32″ iMac that our Quality Assurance engineer monitors and all our employees can see.  We even have a flashing green light that turns red when a build breaks or we detect latencies in our system, and all our developers are notified when there’s a problem.

Here’s a video of Sean describing the systems and how we use them to ensure Socialize is always available and performing flawlessly in your app:

Click here to view the embedded video.

More pictures of our system:

The Socialize Siren

Splunk in Action

Those of you who know me well know I call myself a “lifehacker” which basically means I hack & use technology to be as efficient as possible.  For example, I strongly recommend that those who are in front of computers all day learn to play them like instruments.

I’ve had people ask me how I use technology to be efficient when I’m in sales mode (which, really, any entrepreneur is most of the time).  Here’s a screenshot of what my email client looks like, with the tools I rely on below that:

Click to enlarge. Gmail, with Rapportive, Boomerang, Highrise, LinkedIn and Twitter plugins

Rapportive:  This Gmail Plugin is an absolute necessity for anyone even remotely in a sales type of role.   It lets you learn about the person you’re emailing with, and connect with them via LinkedIn right from the email client.  It also lets you manage their Highrise CRM profile without having to go to Highrise, which is a godsend.  I can’t recommend Rapportive highly enough.

Boomerang:  Lets you schedule email to be sent later, but more importantly, will “boomerang” an email back to your inbox a specified amount of time after you’ve sent it.  It’s a great way to have a soft reminder to follow up with someone.  You can also have it only boomerang the email back to you if the person you’re emailing doesn’t respond.

I can go into more detail on how I use these services (and especially how I use Rapportive to create tags in Highrise right from the email, which I then export to  Mailchimp for monthly marketing newsletter blasts) if you’d like.  Just make a comment below asking for whatever detail you’d like me to delve into.  If I get enough interest, I’ll spend the time to do a more in-depth demo.

I’m a big fan of my iPad, and I’ve found that I can take it to meetings instead of a laptop.  But typing is still a pain and really slows me down.  Even though I’m pretty good at touch typing on the iPad, it’s still way more difficult than on a computer and forces me to take my laptop with me more often than I’d like.  So I set about finding an alternative.

My requirements may be different than yours.  I wanted something that maintains the iPad’s slim profile as much as possible, has some element of style to it, and most importantly, allows me to type well — ideally as well as I can on my 15″ Macbook Pro laptop.  Additional “nice to haves” were the ability to keep my Apple iPad magnetic screen cover and a good set of function keys on the keyboard.  One intriguing keyboard that I didn’t test is the TouchFire keyboard concept on Kickstarter, which is a flexible keyboard that interfaces directly with the iPad’s on-screen keyboard.  When it comes out, I’ll give it a shot as well.

I tested five bluetooth iPad keyboards and found one I really liked:  The Logitech Keboard Case for the iPad 2.  The keyboard is actually one made by ZAGG, with Logitech branding the device.  I time-tested all five bluetooth keyboards against the iPad’s on-screen keyboard and against the Macbook Pro, by typing this text on each device and timing how long it took.  The text doesn’t make total sense, but I wanted something that required numbers, special characters, and copy/pasting.

First, here’s a video of the setup process:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Winner: Logitech Keyboard Case for iPad2 by ZAGG

This keyboard totally rocks.  For me, it’s head & shoulders above the other keyboards for several key reasons.  Most importantly, the keyboard performed faster than the Macbook Pro keyboard, with my test text coming in at 45 seconds vs. 56 seconds.  In fact, it was the fastest keyboard of all the ones I tested.  Here’s the Amazon link for it.

But importantly (to me, at least), I can keep my Apple magnetic keyboard cover on the iPad.  The Logitech case isn’t meant to allow the Apple cover to stay on, but it works.  It’s a bit of a hack — to accommodate the cover, I have to put the iPad in upside down.  That doesn’t matter, except that the charge and headphone ports no longer accommodate the iPad.  But as you can see in the video, since it’s so simple to remove the iPad from the keyboard case, it’s no big deal — and in fact since the cover makes the iPad stick out a tiny bit more from the case, you could still use both with the iPad in the case if you were so inclined.

Being able to keep the Apple cover on the iPad gives me the flexibility to take the case with me when I want it, or leave it when I know I don’t want it.  There’s no level of commitment — not even a “snapping” of the iPad in & out of the case.  This is liberating, although there is a downside:  By keeping the Apple cover on, the iPad doesn’t fit as snugly into the case, so it’ll fall out easily if dropped.  Because of this, you don’t get the level of protection with this case as you do with others that are more secure.  For me the trade off is easy though — if I were carrying the iPad around without the keyboard case, it would be even more vulnerable, so I’m not losing any protection with this case as compared to having no case.  Although I’m not gaining any protection either, I love the flexibility of this solution.

This Logitech case is also one of the few (the ZAGGfolio is the other) that has cut, copy & paste buttons — something I find to be invaluable in an iPad keyboard.  The keys are well spaced out and have a very good tactile feel to them.  Overall, this case is a clear winner to me — so much so that I’ve already called it my own by putting the Socialize icon sticker on it, as well as the optional low-profile clear rubber feet, as you can see in the video and pictures.

Here’s a video of both the on-screen test time and the Logitech keyboard:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Second Place: The ZAGGfolio

The ZAGGfolio is the exact same keyboard as the Logitech Keyboard Case (winner, above), but with a cover that requires a bit more commitment.  The iPad has to be slid into it.  On the plus side, it does provide more protection to the iPad, although it’s also bulkier.  This keyboard gets second place because it uses the same fantastic ZAGG keyboard as the winner, with a time result of 51 seconds, also beating my 56 second time on the Macbook Pro.  (The iPad’s built-in keyboard, by comparison, took 1 minute, 58 seconds to type out the same text).  Here’s the Amazon link.

Here’s a video of the keyboard in action:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Third Place: Logitech Fold-Up Keyboard

This keyboard has an ingenious slide-around design that causes the keyboard to expand into a full-size keyboard.  If it weren’t so bulky, it would’ve nailed a top spot in the keyboard shootout.  However, due to the mechanics needed to support the slide-around keyboard design, when the iPad is clipped in, it feels as hefty as a laptop, negating the inherent benefits of the iPad.  It’s too bad because overall, I like the concept and the keyboard itself is great, nabbing a time of 48 seconds in my time tests (second fastest, and faster than the Macbook Pro time of 56 seconds).  Here’s the Amazon link.

Here’s a video of the Logitech Fold-Up Keyboard in Action:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Fourth Place: Adonit Writer for iPad 2

I really wanted to like this keyboard.  INC Magazine named it as the top iPad keyboard.  And I can see why — it’s beautifully constructed and comes in a very Apple-esque high quality packaged box.  You can tell the designers and engineers put a lot of love into its design.  And for people with smaller hands, it might be perfect.  The build quality was easily tops of the group, but the keyboard spacing made it impossible for me to use effectively.  Although the ZAGG keyboards have the same width as the Adonit, the key tactile response couldn’t be more night & day.  The Adonit keyboard returned the slowest time, at 1 minute, 46 seconds (the iPad’s on-screen keyboard wasn’t far behind at 1:58).  With that kind of poor performance, I’d rather just use the on-screen keyoboard than lug around a secondary keyboard.  So big style points for the Adonit keyboard, but very low functionality score.  Here’s the Amazon link.  Here’s a video:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Last Place: No-Name Brand Cheap Bluetooth Keyboard

This keyboard is so no-name that not only does it not have a brand, it doesn’t even have a proper name.  The box says “Mobile Bluetooth Keyboard” but then it has some text that’s been marked through with a permanent black marker.  It probably said something like “for the iPad” but since it’s not being sold for the iPad2, they marked it out.  No matter — it’s so much cheaper than all the other keyboards, and it looks good with its aluminum-style finish (can’t tell if it’s truly aluminum or not — some people maintain that it’s plastic) that if it worked, I’d be all about using it.

In practice though, it was terrible.  The design was poor and the tactile response was just awful.  Not recommended.  It clocked in a dismal time of 1 minute, 37 seconds.  Here’s the Amazon link (although really, save your money).  Here’s a video:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here’s a gallery of pics:

Thanks to the folks at CES and the Department of Homeland Security for inviting me to participate on a panel focused on mobile security titled Tale of the Tablet.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The panel focused on hardware, software and social security on mobile devices.   If you’re curious about the challenges the enterprise is facing securing mobile devices in this “BYOD” (bring your own device) world, you’ll enjoy the panel.  I was impressed that DHS coordinated a panel like this — especially that they thought to include a company like Socialize that’s focusing on the social privacy & security issues vs. the traditional hardware/software issues facing mobile security.  As I said in my intro, “I’m not a hardware or software security guy, but I’m here because often the biggest point of vulnerability in a device is the human using it.”

Greg Schaffer, Acting DHS Deputy Undersecretary moderated.   Other panelists included:

• Prasanna Mulgaonkar: Director, Endpoint Security Software and Services, Software and Services Group, Services Division, Intel Corporation
• Dr. Phyllis Schneck: Chief Technology Officer and Vice President, Global Public Sector, McAfee
• Christy Wyatt: CVP and GM, Enterprise Business, Motorola Mobility
• Scott Totzke: Senior Vice President, BlackBerry Security, Research in Motion

Here’s the panel description:

This panel of public- and private-sector representatives will discuss the complexities the technology industry faces as its consumers become increasingly mobile and the measures to keep these devices secure constantly changes. The panel will discuss how manufacturers can continue producing the most up-to-date programs without impeding security. You’ll hear from the manufacturers and app developers who are working furiously to create the latest programs to work across multiple operating systems and the government divisions and software security developers who are striving to protect consumers with new security applications. The panel will also consider what responsibility the industry should have in assisting consumers to apply the stringent cyber security measures at home, and how government collaboration or oversight can factor in to the solution. The Department of Homeland Security National Cyber Security Division will moderate the engaging discussion and debate.

To me, this is part of what being an entrepreneur is all about. Turning around in the taxi line, embarrassing yourself in front of hundreds of people, and seeing what happens. Often times, it’s something good, because nobody else is willing to try it.

Click here to view the embedded video.

It’s no secret that Google calendars and iCal don’t play super nicely together.   And it’s even worse on the iPhone.  It got so bad that I was using the Google calendar web app instead of the native calendar app because subscribed Google calendars (called “delegate” calendars) weren’t even showing up.

But here’s a trick — a way to sync your subscribed calendars from Google’s calendaring system onto your iPhone.   This is part of my “lifehacking” series :)

You have to create a separate CALDAV account on the iPhone for each one, which is a pain, but doable.

(click links below for screenshots)

Step 1: On your iPhone, go into Settings >> Mail, Contacts, Calendars >> Add Account

Step 2: Scroll down and choose “Other”.  You should see a screen like this one.  Choose Add CalDAV account

Step 3: Now you’ll have to get the URL for the server.  On your desktop, go to your Google Calendar and choose “Calendar Settings” then grab the private URL for the subscribed calendar you want to add to your phone.

Step 4: OK now you have to do a little concatenating of strings.  Take the private calendar URL you just copied, and then add it to this bit “https://www.google.com/calendar/dav/” so it ends up looking like this.  Then, add “/user” to the end (that’s missing from the screenshot at left).  So you should end up with something like this:  https://www.google.com/calendar/dav/your_private_url_here@group.calendar.google.com/user” (switch out the part in blue with your private URL)

Step 5: Now, you’re going to want to put that into the “server” field on the iPhone in Step 3.  Although you could type in the exact URL above, since it’s long, I recommend you create a short URL out of it, like this, and then open that URL in Safari on your phone and copy it to your phone’s clipboard.  Then, paste it into the “server” field in your new CalDAV account.   Put in your user name & password and name the calendar with whatever name you want for it.

Presto, you should be good to go.  If you have any trouble, drop me a comment below.

I recently wrote about how I’ve swapped PowerPoint out for something I call PowerPinch (a term I made up).

When it came time to make a demo video for Socialize, I wondered if I could use PowerPinch to make the video, and then somehow capture what was happening on my iPad.  It turns out, you can.  Here’s the finished video, and below is how I did it.

Click here to view the embedded video.

PowerPinch script in Google Docs

First, I made the demo video using my PowerPinch process.  To learn more about that part, read this blog on PowerPinch.

Then, I made a script for the video using Google Docs (pic at right).

Once I was ready to capture, I bought a BlackMagic H.264 Pro Recorder box from Amazon, an HDMI cable, the HDMI iPad 2 Connector, and a mini USB cable.  That’s all the hardware I needed to connect my iPad to my Macbook Pro and start recording the content of my iPad screen.

The BlackMagic box comes with its own capture software, called Blackmagic Media Express, which was perfectly sufficient for the job.

The BlackMagic H.264 Pro Recorder w/ iPad

I then read the script into a pair of Logitech USB Headphones and used audio editing program Audacity to splice the audio together the way I wanted it.

I imported both the video and the audio into iMovie, and exported an .mp4, which I then uploaded to Vimeo and YouTube.  Presto!

The video isn’t as smooth as I’d like, but for a $500 hardware budget, I’ll definitely take it as a v1.  It’s more polished than anything I could’ve done without having to whip out AfterEffects.  Plus it’s kinda cool to have done it on the iPad.  If you do have a $5k+ budget to spend, I’d recommend a company like DigitalFlair, which made our AppMakr demo video.

I’d love any ideas you have to improve on this v1 — at some point I’ll try making another one based on what I learned from the first go-around.  So if you have any thoughts or any questions on how I did it, please leave them in the comments below.

A set of Image Tiles in a PowerPinch presentation

Sick of endless PowerPoint slides?  If you want to take your presentation to the next level, and you know basic HTML, you can hack together a presentation on an iPad that lets you interact with your content like never before.   I call it “PowerPinch” because you can pinch, swipe and zoom seamlessly with your presentation, and focus in on the content you’re talking about, then zoom out quickly and move on to the next thing.  It’s seriously liberating.

First, some caveats:  Creating a presentation like this takes more work than throwing a PowerPoint together.  (I’d also argue that the output is obviously better than PowerPoint too).  But if you just need to throw some messaging together, or if your pitch is still in a mode where it’s iterating quickly, I’d suggest you get a flow down with PowerPoint first, and then move it to PowerPinch.   You’ll also need to be able to work within a photo editing program — I use PhotoShop — to put the pitch together.

Ready to have at it?  First, here’s a video showing what a PowerPinch presentation looks like:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click to enlarge (caution -- it's big!)

The first step is to make what I call Image Tiles that form each “slide.”  Assuming you’ll be using an iPad for this, you want to oversize the tile resolution so you can zoom in on the tile on the iPad.  The iPad’s resolution is 1024 pixels wide by 768 pixels tall.  I made each image tile 1859 pixels wide by 1347 pixels tall.  To the right is what one of my image tiles looks like that I used in the video above.

I create the image tile in PhotoShop as a .psd and then save it as a .png.  You want to keep the .pngs at 1 megabyte or smaller, or the presentation will get unruly as you add image tiles.

I save the .png to my public dropbox folder.  That way, whenever I update the .png, the hosted file is also automatically updated.  So, for example, this is the URL of the Image Tile at right: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1096184/pitch/main/00070_hor_soc_overview.png .  And the next Image Tile URL is http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1096184/pitch/main/00080_hor_soc_overview_soon.png.  (If you don’t know what Dropbox is, that’s outside the scope of this blog, but I highly encourage you to read my blog on playing a computer like an instrument, that talks about Dropbox and how it works, along with other lifehacker productivity tools.)

You’ll also notice that the Image Tiles are named with numbers at the beginning.  For example, the first one is 00070_hor_soc_overview.png and the next one is 00080_hor_soc_overview_soon.png.  More on the reason for that later.

Screenshot of the PowerPinch HTML file

Once you have a few Image Tiles created, you’ll want to string them together with a simple HTML file.  You can find and view source on the full, finished HTML file that I load onto the iPad by clicking here.  You’ll notice that I put a spacer .png file between each Image Tile to give them some spacing.  A screenshot of the code is at left.

PowerPinch: Add to Home Screen

Next, just open the web page you just coded on your iPad using Safari, and choose “Add to Home Screen.”  Doing this allows you to make the PowerPinch presentation look like an “app” and keeps the Safari URL bar from showing on the screen.

That’s all there is to it.  You’ll be rocking PowerPinch presentations in no time.

Here are a few other things you’ll need to know:

You’ll want to pick up either a VGA iPad connector or an HDMI iPad connector so you can output your iPad on a big screen.  I went all out and connected mine to a 10 foot VGA extension cable, since many board rooms have short cables, and I really like to be able to walk around with iPad in hand while I’m presenting.

Open your Image Tiles with Preview

Also, the reason I name my Image Tiles with numbers in front of the file name is so they’re easy to print when you want to compile them into a PDF to email out.  Here’s the process to turn your PowerPinch presentation into a PDF on a Mac:

1. Highlight the Image Tiles you want to print, choose “open with” and select Preview.
2. This will open all your Image Tiles in the correct order.
3. Then choose “print” and either Save as PDF, or if you have PDFpen, choose Open with PDFpen.
4. Then you can edit the PDF to taste (remove pages, rearrange, etc) and mail it off.
5. For advanced users, I recommend you make a Quartz Filter to reduce the file size (if you want to know how to do this, just leave a comment below).

Mark Jacobstein, CEO of iSkoot, sat down with me to talk about Qualcomm and its upcoming initiatives.

iSkoot was acquired by Qualcomm last year, and now Mark is VP of Product Management for Qualcomm.

The reason I’m so fascinated by Qualcomm is due to its integrated approach to hardware and software.  I always thought of Qualcomm as a hardware company, but many of its current initiatives are software-focused.  And not just that — Qualcomm is moving rapidly to expose its tight integration of hardware+software as services for developers, such as its Yagatta initiative, which as its website says, “brings text, voice and images together in a single conversation. So you can write it, say it or show it – just like in real life. Sharing your own voice and your own images helps bring your messages to life.”

Mark also talks about what it’s like being a small startup being acquired by a large company, and how he’s working to influence Qualcomm’s company culture to be as nimble as possible.

Here’s the full interview with Mark:

Click here to view the embedded video.

I was one of the mobile and social engagement experts at the 2011 LavaCon conference in Austin, TX this week.  LavaCon is a very well attended niche conference for digital media and content strategists — not the “social media gurus” you so often hear about, but actual content strategists who create, curate and publish content for some of the world’s leading brands.

They have an interesting predicament on their hands:  Traditionally, they’ve wrestled with how to get content out of the enterprise and into b2b and/or b2c consumption.  However, their world is changing so quickly that they’re having to rapidly re-tool their skillsets and expertise to not only be masters of the old world, but also figure out how to maximize on the potential of new and rapidly evolving distribution channels.

This group is wrestling with issues such as:

• Should their role be creating content, or extracting existing content from organizations?
• Mobile seems huge — what’s the best way to capitalize on it?
• Social also seems huge — how do they bring social into their carefully curated content world without causing more problems than they solve?
• There are many new formats to wrestle with — a rapidly evolving ePub standard, HTML5, and many others.  What’s the best way to separate the content from the formatting so content is best positioned to be usable and relevant in the future?  (Hint — they’re on the bleeding edge of XML technologies)

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Click here to view the embedded video.

Twitter stream of event:

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Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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video coming!

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video coming!

In my series about using agile processes not just for software development but in everyday life,  Socialize VP of Engineering Jason Polites has offered up a guest post about what often gets overlooked in software development:

Nice post.  I think there are some very basic tenets relating to SCRUM, or agile in general, that tend to get overlooked though.  Actually.. throw out the word SCRUM for a second and just consider what the concept of agile development is saying.

Imagine a situation where Person A has to complete Task X.  It doesn’t matter what you do or say before they start, Person A will ALWAYS take the same amount of time to complete Task X.  Whether you are operating a waterfall model, an agile model or some other crazy methodology.. Person A will take the same amount of time to complete Task X.  But what does this mean?

If we have an approach that says “we need X tasks completed by Y date”, then we are effectively saying we can predict how long it will take to complete those tasks.  If there is one thing we know with certainty, is that we can guarantee that things will change, and that we can’t predict the future.  So, amazingly,  this approach fails every time (amazing not because it fails, but because it’s still being used and people still expect it to work).

The reality is that you can’t have tasks AND time.. you can only have one.  The tasks will take as long as they take.  We might “think” we can affect this, or we can fool ourselves into believing that we CAN predict the future, but restating the previous, “Person A will always take the same amount of time”.

So.. if we accept that we can only have one or the other, how to we effectively schedule anything?  Well fixed dates DO exist (they’re on the Calendar ;) ) so we can easily fix a date, but we CAN’T decide on a fixed set of tasks to be completed by this date.  Where does that leave us?  Well logically if we can only have a certain sub-set of tasks completed by a fixed date, then we want to make sure the most important ones are completed by that date.

Enter SCRUM stage left.

SCRUM advocates that you have a prioritized list of “tasks” (stories) such that completion order matters, but completion time does not.  SCRUM also advocates that at every definable stage (sprint) there is a viable product.  It may be featureless, but it “works”.  There are a few assumptions here:

1. We assume that people on the project and responsible adults, and that “Person A” (from the first example) will work diligently and efficiently
2. We assume that the MVP (minimum value product) may need to more than one sprint to get going.  This is a bit of a deviation from the rules, but is a reasonable one.

Now although it’s easier to see how this applies to software development vs. anything else, but actually in principle it applies everywhere.  It’s just a way of looking at things and accepting that we can’t predict the future.

You won’t know what will be completed by a certain date, but you’ll know that whatever is completed is the most important.

Google engineer Steve Yegge let an internal Google memo slip publicly (he later called it “the great-granddaddy of all Reply-All screwups in tech history”) where he argued that Google was royally screwing up by not building its social technology and other internal technologies as a platform.  He compared Google to Amazon, which does.

If you’re interested in understanding the importance of a company ‘eating its own dogfood,’ especially as it pertains to APIs that even internal departments use with each other, give the piece a read.

Steve argues that what’s made Amazon so successful is institutionalizing this into its culture early on.

You can also read his follow-up piece here, which he published after the slip was made public.

I really believe Steve is right about the importance of eating your own dog food, and as a company we’re institutionalizing it into our culture.  We’re always working to ‘eat our own dog food’ internally, too.  For example, we originally built Socialize into AppMakr as a custom feature; now that we have launched Socialize as a robust platform, we’re ripping that custom code out and using our public Socialize API and SDK within AppMakr too.  It gives us an opportunity to turn us into our best and most critical customer.

Whenever you can, build technology as a platform that can be consumed internally and externally.   There’s an elegant balance between fast iteration and building out a robust platform, which I can talk about in a later post if you’d like (just leave a request in the comments).

We’ve been using the Scrum agile development framework (or just “scrum”) at Socialize since early this year.  Hats off to Jason, our VP of Engineering, for really championing it and to Sean and Isaac for implementing it with the developers.  Our workflow is to use Basecamp to discuss ideas (Basecamp is like Democracy: it’s not great, but it’s the best thing out there — you can read my rants & raves about Basecamp here), then Github for issues & code repository, and Pivotal Tracker to manage our dev process.  We do fast iteration cycles with one-week sprints, planning meetings every Monday and daily stand-ups to reconnect.

I’ll explain what all that means below, if you don’t already know, but here’s the point of this blog post:  Scrum has worked so well on the dev side — what if it was possible to implement scrum across an entire company, including its non-development components like user acquisition, sales, even accounting, HR & finance?

We decided to find out.  I’m going to write a series of blog posts with our experience implementing Scrum throughout our company, with a focus on the non-development parts of the organization, as I haven’t really seen other companies do this yet.  I figure this is a good opportunity to share our knowledge and learn from yours, so please post your experiences with Scrum, agile and general, and other workflow approaches in the comments.

In this first blog, I’ll talk about what scrum is (at least to me) and show you a video of Jeremia, our developer evangelist, and Christine, our wordsmithstress, discussing the pro’s & con’s of implementing scrum in the user acquisition department (the first non-dev team we decided to test it with).

There are individuals within our organization that know scrum way better than I do because they’re using it every day — Jason, Sean, Isaac and our incredible developers, for example, and I’ll invite their comments.   Our goal is to institutionalize this agile mentality throughout the company.

So what is scrum, really?  

To me it’s simply a way of thinking about getting things done.  There are traditional development models like waterfall development, which (like a waterfall) takes a staged, or phased approach to development.  I’m going to abstract “development” into “workflow” for the purposes of this blog, since we’re talking about using these models in a larger sense throughout the company’s divisions.

The magic of scrum is that it takes time out of the equation.  Or to put it another way, assuming you have employees that are dedicated and are working hard, things take as long as they take.  You’re not doing anyone any favors by setting arbitrary deadlines.  ”This project needs to be finished by Friday” or “This deliverable is due in 60 days” cause way more problems than they solve.  When the team inevitably misses the goals, everyone is disappointed — the goal setters blame those responsible for stepping up to an arbitrary date, and the implementers resent having a date put on them that didn’t reflect reality.

The scrum attitude is that things take as long as they take, so the best thing to do is embrace that reality and instead of setting deliverable-based goals, instead focus on prioritizing everyone’s time effectively so the most important and value-added items are being worked on first.

It’s a very simple but monumental shift in thought.  Things take as long as they take.  Focus on what matters.

Here’s a video of Jeremia & Christine talking about implementing scrum in the UA department.  In the next blog, I’ll discuss some of the difficulties we’ve had implementing scrum in a non-development environment.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Sue and I took a tour of the Tesla Model S factory in Fremont, CA today.  This is the old NUMMI plant.  If you haven’t heard the NUMMI story between GM & Toyota, and you’re a car buff, there’s a This American Life episode about it that’s just mind blowing.  The net of it is that GM tried to learn Just In Time assembly practices from Toyota, they built a factory together for Toyota to transfer this know-how to GM, and GM completely blew it.  The factory shut down and was sitting idle after that fiasco.

When Elon Musk was looking for a place to build his new Model S sedan, he approached Toyota with a $50MM bid for it, which Toyota accepted.  Why would Toyota sell a car production plant arguably worth $1 billion or more for $50MM?  For the answer to that, you really have to understand the relationship between Musk and Toyota, which is well portrayed in this 2010 WIRED magazine article.

As a reservation holder for the Model S, I’m proud to support one of the most amazing entrepreneurs of our generation.  What makes Elon even more amazing is that he’s not only revolutionizing the automobile industry, but the space industry as well, with SpaceX… at the same time.  Elon, my hat is off to you.

Below are a number of pictures and vidoes, and then a gallery with even more photos of the factory and the event, which was very well done.

Here are some videos:

And here’s the gallery:

I often get questions about how I take my killer panos.  Here’s my secret:

1. I take the pano on my iPhone with an app named, appropriately, Pano.  Although there are other pano apps out there, this is my favorite by far.
2. Then, I import it into Camera+.  I apply the clarity exposure filter, then the diana overlay filter and use the cross-process border.

A few years ago I saw some amazing videos of ‘Where the hell is Matt,’ who danced all over the world.

Today I stumbled across another mind numbing performer and internet sensation, Marquese Scott.

They both do amazing things with dance, in two completely different ways.  So I put the question to you for the comments:  Who’s more amazing, and why?

Marquese:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Matt, 2006:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Matt, 2008:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Today I learned about the Startup Genome Report from the Startup Genome, as well as the Startup Genome Compass.

This amazing project by Max Marmer, Bjoern Lasse Herrmann, Ron Berman and Ertan Dogrultan compares over 3,200 startups to find parallels between them that are predictors for success or failure.

the Startup Genome Compass is a ~30 minute form you can fill out to find how your startup compares to others.

Here are a few excerpts from the report — I highly recommend you download the report and answer the questions in the compass to see how your startup compares to others.

The 5 Core Dimensions

The startup killer: premature scaling

There were 15 key findings. Here are the first two. (Download the 52 page report to see them all; it's free!)

There’s some amazing learning for all of us in here.  Congrats on a job well done, guys, and thank you for this amazing project.

It’s hard to over hype the significance of the interest graph, once you really understand its magnitude.  On the flipside, it can be confusing to hear people talk about the interest graph without knowing what all the fuss is about.  (As background to this blog post, you can learn about the origins of the interest graph in this slideshare document and this Quora Q&A post).

I’m going to lay out an argument for the interest graph and its significance on the very fabric of our lives.  And make no mistake — I am indeed saying that the interest graph is a really, really big deal — one that sits right beside other life-changing inventions and discoveries such as fire, language, the printing press, human powered flight, antibiotics,  cellphones, and of course, microwaves.

Let’s start by really defining what I mean by ‘interests’ and how they apply here.

Some people's interests drive them to do pretty crazy things.

Interests aren’t something we really think about, they just are.  We naturally have interests in various things.  Our interests define us as individuals.  Some people are interested in making lots of money, some are interested in changing the world, some are interested in Cabernet wines, some are interested in collecting stamps.  Interests span from the very broad to the very niche.  The language you speak, the nationality you are, the age and gender you are all play a role in defining you and influencing your interests.  A woman who speaks Korean will — just by the fact that she speaks that language instead of English — be much more likely to have a certain set of interests that’s different from a woman who speaks English.  And by the same token, since both are women, they will also likely share a set of interests that are different than a woman may have as compared to a man.

As you can see, the interests we all have form a fabric through which we lead our lives.  They interconnect as individuals, and with each other.  People who love photography are more likely to spend hours researching various cameras, shooting techniques and locations than those who don’t.  We apply our most precious asset– time– on what has captured each of our interests.  Many times, we also spend money in those areas as well.

Mapping leads to understanding -- for example, mapping the human genome

So by ‘interest graph’ what I and others mean is that this web of interests between a person and the world around him or her, as well as between two or more people, forms a ‘graph,’ or a series of connections that could theoretically be mapped.  And if it can be mapped, it can be understood, and leveraged to do really, really powerful things.  Mapping and understanding the interest graph of humans and the world they live in is one of the most exciting things I can imagine.  It would allow us to better understand ourselves, where we choose to spend our time, the ways we interact with the world around us, and the ways we interact with each other.

Now, here’s the funny thing about mapping the interest graph:  We all intuitively know pieces of it, because we live it each day.  We lead our lives by interacting with the world through our interests.  We choose to spend time (and money) on things that interest us.  We know what interests us — we don’t need anyone to map it to explain it to us.  We know what connections we share with others around us — in fact, we often call people with whom we share one or more interests “friends” because we’ve chosen to invest a lot of time with them and we have a strong connection with them.  (It’s outside the scope of this blog post, but a related thought I believe to be true is that friendships are always based on at least one shared interest.  See my other blog post on friend vs. interest connections)

Because our bodies have senses that can detect the interest graph — hearing, sight, etc. — many of us have never realized that we walk through the world only perceiving portions of the interest graph.  It’s like the days before having the Internet, or before having cellphones — we didn’t exactly understand what we were missing, because we’d never experienced the “after” moment before.  That’s where we are today with the interest graph.  Since we can get along pretty well as analog human beings, seeing & hearing our way through the world around us, we don’t perceive the vastness of the interest graph that connects us.  Or to put it another way, we don’t know what we don’t know, so we don’t miss it.

Oh but there’s so much more.

The reality of our world is that we’re all interconnected in really deep, meaningful ways by the interests we share.  Since we only have our analog senses, we have to work hard (and dedicate a lot of time) to uncover those shared interests.  For example, if you love sailing, you have to join a sailing club to meet others that share your interest.  The Internet has made that process much more efficient — you can now join a group online that shares some of the passions you do.  And social media has made that connection even more available — you can follow those who tweet about sailing topics, or become their friends on Facebook.

But there’s still a huge piece missing:  the connection of the digital world to the analog world.

And that’s where mobile devices come in.  The explosion of smartphones has enabled us to carry a digital “doorway” with us to this online world.  We can email, call, tweet, browse the web, and use apps, all actions which connect us to others who share interests with us.

But replicating what we can do on the desktop with a mobile device is just the beginning.  Imagine some of these scenarios:

• You walk into a room full of 50 strangers and you instantly know what interests you share with each person.  You went to high school with the son of one person.  Both you and another person love sailing, and you have both rented catamarans in the US Virgin Islands (imagine what stories you’d both have to share!).  The person over in the corner has a family member afflicted with the same illness as your family member.   Since you know what interests you share with each person in the room, you can instantly connect with people you share strong interests with, have deep, meaningful conversations with them, and form a friendship with them should you choose to.
• You’re at a baseball game.  You know you share the same interest in baseball as everyone in the stadium, but you’re rooting for the away team, and most people in the stadium are rooting for the home team.  If only you could connect with others who were fans of the same team as you are, so you could talk smack about the pitcher of the home team who obviously doesn’t know what he’s doing.
• You believe that eating organic, unprocessed foods along with a calorie-restricted diet is the key to living a long, healthy life.  You’d like to connect with other people who think the same thing you do when you’re at the supermarket, so you can trade tips about what works and what doesn’t, and you’d like to maintain those interest-based relationships over time.

Here’s a real example our InterestGravity API output – click to enlarge

It’s because of my and my co-founder’s passion in the interest graph that we’ve created Socialize.  The first big task for us and our amazing group of employees is to map the interest graph — to ferret out as many of the connections that bind us together as possible.  This isn’t a new problem — people have been trying to identify connections between people and interests since the beginning of time.  The problem is that since people are analog, it’s very difficult to track interests and their connections.  It’s impossible to record every conversation, to know where someone goes all the time and what they’re doing when they get there.

Click to Watch

But we realized something:  People use smartphones, and since a person’s phone is such an intimate device, they typically have it with them all the time.  And furthermore, we’re making a bet that apps on the smartphone approximate a person’s interests.  Or to put it another way, if I love sailing, I might have the sailing app.  And if I love baseball, I might have the San Francisco Giants app.  When taken together, as an aggregate, all of these apps comprise a genome of sorts — something we call the Socialize Genome.  Each app almost acts as a DNA marker for my interests.  When you look at all the apps I have on my phone, they define me and my interests — I can guarantee you that the apps I have installed on my phone are different than the apps you have installed on your phone.

Obviously, while apps may approximate a person’s interests, they’re a poor proxy of interest because oftentimes, people will download an app but then never use the app, or only use it for a short period of time.  How many apps do you have on your phone that you never use?

Apps Represent an InterestGenome - Click to Enlarge

But actually, we think these two problems are related, and we’ve figured out a way to solve them both.  We’ve created an SDK for Android and iOS (iPhone, iPad) devices that is dropped into an app on the phone.  This bundle of code, called the Socialize SDK, creates a mini social platform within each app, unleashing the app’s community so they can socialize with each other.  App developers love having access to these drop-in social features like commenting, sharing, liking and content popularity because it means they don’t have to create all this functionality in the app themselves, and exposing the app’s install base to each other means people use the app more, because they can now socialize with each other, in addition to just interacting with the app itself.

Socialize Increases App Sessions by More Than 20 Percent

So suddenly, with Socialize running in, say, the sailing app, the app’s users can share tips with each other about sailing.  We’ve found that putting Socialize into an app will raise its engagement level by an average of 21.8%.  That also means the developer can make almost 22% more revenue from his app, if she’s monetizing it with ads or in-app purchasing.

But in the larger picture, we also believe that by increasing engagement within apps, and knowing what users are doing in those apps, we can map the interest graph across billions of downloads of hundreds of thousands of apps, installed by hundreds of millions of users.

And if we can pull this off, Socialize will be able to do some very magical things.  Imagine, for example, being able to ‘bump’ your phone with a random stranger and knowing what the top 5 interests you both shared.  Imagine knowing which ten people you should really connect with at a cocktail party based on interests you both share.  Imagine a brand you trust — say BMW — being able to offer you an exclusive test drive of a new vehicle you’re interested in.

By merging the interest graph with mobile devices and a technology like Socialize, we start to begin to unlock some of the incredible value hiding in the interest graph, while providing immediate value to app developers by increasing engagement within their apps.

I was recently invited to a Napa retreat along with others in the mobile app space by Trevor Cornwell & crew from AppBackr.  It was a great, intimate event with about 35 people total.

The panel I was on was: What challenges do developers face?  How do apps get to market effectively?  How does a developer get noticed and build sales?  What strategies work?  What do developers really need?  The core question is:  What is the future of funding and distribution for developers?

Moderator: Jolie O’ Dell – Writer, VentureBeat
Daniel Odio – CEO, Socialize
Jeffrey Dickson – Producer, Paramount
Tim Burks – Radtastical, Inc.

A video of that panel is below, along with other panels from the event.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Vishal from Mobclix gave a rundown of the mobile app economy in his “By The Numbers” keynote:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Jay Jamison of BlueRun Ventures and Frank Pisciuneri of Silicon Valley Bank opined on where app investment is headed in this panel moderated by Alastair Goldfisher, Thomson Reuters, editor of Venture Capital Journal and blogger of peHUB.com

Click here to view the embedded video.

And there was a great panel on “The Distribution and Marketing of Android Apps” moderated by Caroline Lewko – CEO & Founder, Wireless Industry Partnership Connector Inc., with the following panelists:

Charles Yim – Americas Mobile Application Partnerships, Google
Claudia Romanini Backus – Director, Developer Relations, Barnes & Noble
Sheffield Nolan – CEO & Cofounder, AppRedeem
Steve Manning – VP Consumer Monetization Services, Opera

Click here to view the embedded video.

My wife and I have been making an effort to eat unprocessed foods as a part of a healthier lifestyle.  Simply told, that means if there’s a label on the food (or if it’s in a box), we try not to eat it.  I’ll write a more comprehensive blog soon about the thinking behind this approach.

Part of this initiative is to buy organic fruits and vegetables (Rainbow grocery in San Francisco is just amazing) and consume them over other foods as often as possible.  We try to  juice every morning and most evenings, replacing evening meals with juice as often as scheduling permits.

We’ve gone through three juicers looking for the exact right one, and finally we’ve found it.  Here’s a review of the ones we tried, so you don’t have to.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Jack Lalanne high-speed juicer: This was our first juicer.  (The link at left is for Amazon, although you can also purchase it at Costco for $89).  It actually worked quite well.  It has a large opening and consumed all types of fruits and vegetables we could throw at it.  Cleanup was simple enough, although there were a number of large parts to be cleaned.  But there were two things about this juicer that made it a non-starter for us:

Organic produce isn't cheap!

1) We’re buying organic produce, which is way more expensive than non-organic.  And this juicer didn’t extract all of the juice from the items it was juicing, leaving very wet pulp.  This meant that although the juicer itself was cheaper, we weren’t getting as efficient a juice from it.

2) The larger issue, however, is that there’s a lot of literature about the advantages of low-speed (80 RPM vs. 3600 RPM) juicers, called “masticating” juicers.

While the high speed juicers (like the Jack Lalanne) use centrifugal force to extract the juice from a spinning filter, the low speed masticating juicers “chew” the juice out of the food.  You can find plenty of claims on the web about how low speed juicers “preserve enzymes” in the food and “don’t cause oxidation” and “preserve nutrition” in the juice.   The instruction manual for one of the Omega juicers below even went so far as to say that juice from low speed juicers doesn’t lose any of its goodness for up to 72 hours, while juice from high speed juicers has to be consumed within 20 minutes.  I don’t know that I specifically buy any of those claims, but I will say that reason #1 was enough for me — I want to extract as much juice out of the fruits and vegetables as possible from this pricey organic produce.  So, although the Jack Lalanne juicer has a lot of great qualities to it, we were off in the hunt for a low-speed juicer.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Vert Hd Vrt350 Masticating Juicer:  We really thought this juicer was going to be it.  The Amazon reviews on it are stellar and a lot of people seemed very happy with it.  We had done a lot of research on masticating juicers, and this model really seemed to be a step up from the older Omega masticating juicer (below), which is a different design.  But we were quickly disappointed, for two reasons:

1) Fibrous vegetables (think: leafy greens) that are stringy get completely clogged up in the juicer because of its design, so you end up having to chop these items up into chunks that aren’t more than 2 or 3 inches long to keep it from clogging.

2) An even bigger problem is that this juicer choked on carrots.  How can a juicer choke on carrots?!  Especially when there’s a carrot in the stock photo?!  It wouldn’t happen every time, but it happened often enough that it proved very annoying.  A carrot would cause the juicer to grind to a halt, then we’d have to reverse the juicer, pull the carrot out, chop it up more finely, and repeat the process.  Clean-up was also not as easy as I’d hoped — while maybe not worse than the Jack Lalanne, definitely not any better.  So, back to Amazon it went.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Omega J8006 Masticating Juicer: This is our current juicer, and the one I would recommend.  Don’t get me wrong — there are trade offs.  While it definitely produces the driest pulp by far, and while it may be the fastest & simplest in post-juicing clean-up time, it’s by far the slowest in terms of the actual juicing time itself.  Additionally, it has an amazingly small chute, meaning everything has to be chopped up.  If the Vert 350 above had a smaller chute would it also have escaped the carrot problem?  Quite possibly.  But the J8006 is a solid beast of a machine.  While the Vert felt like it was just barely able to handle the food we’d throw at it, the J8006 has no such problems, chewing up everything we’ve given it with ease.  It’s a confidence-inspiring juicer.

The solidness of the machine plus the dry pulp has meant we’ve kept it and are pretty happy with it.  If a juicer came along that could match its qualities but have a larger food chute, I’d definitely appreciate not having to cut everything up (example: the Jack Lalanne could handle an entire small apple through its chute, or if a big apple, cut in half.  With the Omega, we have to cut the apple into 8ths).   However, the fast and much simpler cleanup time and process helps offset the longer and more tedious juicing experience.  And for what it’s worth, the juicer makes a really satisfying ”crunch” as it chews through food.  I know, kinda meaningless but fun just the same.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Good luck in your juicing quest, and I’d love to know what you think, and what experiences you’ve had in the comments below.

Jonathanscard

Jonathanscard — a geeky 2.0 take on the “give a penny, leave a penny” concept — has been all over the news recently (if you haven’t heard the backstory, this is a good place to start). I’m surprised at all the harsh words over my brother Sam’s hacking of the social experiment.

For example, one HackerNews commentator wrote, “Did Sam Odio’s blog get hacked? Because I refuse to believe that the Sam whose comments I’ve been reading on HN would steal from someone. Sam how is what you’re doing different from what Anonymous et al are doing? However irritating Jonathan’s experiment is, it doesn’t give you the right to impose you idea of morality on them” and plenty of other comments.

And It’s funny to see those comments on a site titled “HackerNews.”

HackerNews Comments

The $625 amount Sam transferred off of Jonathanscard onto another Starbucks card was the exact amount my startup, Socialize donated to the card to promote its SDK Speed Challenge competition.  That was not an accident.

Sam took a social experiment and ran a social experiment on it.  The money that he transferred was funded by Socialize, and Sam’s donating the funds to a good cause.  The card has already been bid on eBay past its face value, garnering even more funds for Save the Children  (which is an awesome hat trick.)

Jonathanscard was a social experiment, so isn’t what happened exactly the point?

8/14 UPDATE: Read Sam’s update about the experiment and his Q&A about the reaction he’s been getting

Shane swears this photo wasn't staged! Click to enlarge.

I recently met Shane, the CEO of Joyride.com.  Six weeks ago, he found my blog about our SOMAcentral office and inquired about space there.  That inquiry kicked off a camaraderie that led me to ask him today if he’d let me follow his progress as he worked to launch his business.  He agreed, so here’s the setup:

I am surrounded by San Francisco based startups every day.  And one of the things I forget about is how different SF’s “lean startup” mantra is from other parts of the country.  New York may be like this as well, but I’m not sure other urban centers are (if you disagree, I’d like to hear about it in the comments).  Among the big proponents of the lean startup philosophy are Dave McClure (check out his Startup Metrics for Pirates deck / video and presentation at FounderConference 2010– 3rd video from top) and Paul Graham via his essays, among others.

Shane has been working hard to launch Joyride.  When he came to SF to visit, we had a very animated discussion about how he could pare his concept down to the “MVP” to launch sooner, and then iterate quickly on his core feature set.  What functionality did he really need to launch?  How could he launch with less?  What was the absolute core product?  You can imagine what side I was on — point #2 of the Socialize Core Values Manifesto guarantees that we launch early and then iterate quickly.

There’s a strong argument to the contrary, though.  In April of last year I wrote a post titled “Could the 80/20 principle be wrong?” where I speculated on the importance of focusing on a few things but doing them very well.  But exactly where does the line between “MVP” and “very well” lie?  How do you know when you’ve reached your MVP?  It’s a hard question to answer, but in my experience everyone always overshoots it by a mile.  A great example of a business that didn’t overshoot it is CloudApp.  It has a very limited feature set but executes on it super well.  I just checked, and I’ve used CloudApp 48 times today.  Just unbelievable that I use it so much — and I don’t know how I survived before I had it (I had to email the screenshot as an attachment? gasp!).  And everyone in our office uses CloudApp all the time as well.  Just one sorely needed feature — the ability to communicate a picture I see to someone else (via a screenshot), executed flawlessly.

So when Shane emailed me today, I was thrilled.  He wrote:

From: Shane

Subject: JOYRIDE Shifting Into HiGear and Doing It "Lean"

Daniel,

I want you to know that you've been part of the inspiration for a rework of

JOYRIDE. Leaner. Smaller product. But launching in 90 days. And our offices

have been reworked since my first trip to San Fran. Our landlord knocked

down two offices to make a large co-working space (pic attached). Prior

to this we were split into 5 offices.

Thanks bro. Keep in touch.

Shane

PS Shane — I think it’s especially cool that you knocked the walls down.  I’d love to hear how you feel about that decision after a few weeks — was it the best thing to happen to your office, the worst thing, or no big change?  Of course I’m hoping it leads to more collaboration, but let me know if that’s not the case.  I’ve found that Ikea sells some great, inexpensive partitions, which you can find here, if you need to restore some semblance of privacy, especially for people who need to be on the phone a lot.

I’ll be following Shane’s progress on Joyride as he launches, encouraging him to guest post on my blog if he wants to, and I’ll be posting my own updates.  I’d also love to hear about your experiences paring your product down so you can launch sooner, and if you’re happy you took that approach.  I’d especially like to know if you feel that you launched too early, before your product was ready.

This is all fresh in my mind as well, as we just launched the Socialize SDK for iOS and Android (see TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb coverage) and we’ve been iterating like crazy to get the SDK to a point where developers are excited to integrate it (the good news — just got our first live app, an Android app, running Socialize!)

Want to see a bit more eye candy?  Check out the JOYRIDE offices and many of their sweet rides they use for marketing and shooting drives around the world:  Click here for a full photo gallery.

If you’re fundraising, or thinking about it, there are a lot of places to turn.  This blog post is a great place to begin for advice on an angel or Series A raise.

While many entrepreneurs are ‘too busy to blog,’ others take the time to share the knowledge they’ve amassed.  I’ve created a “bundle” of the top RSS feeds of entrepreneurs who blog, as well as a “bundle” of the top RSS feeds for angels and VCs who blog.  Subscribe to them both.  Included are blogs from the likes of Chris Dixon, Brad Feld, VentureHacks (Nivi & Naval), Dave McClure, Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz and others — basically all rock stars for geeks.

I’ve also written a series of blog posts about our experience raising $1MM for AppMakr.  The raise took us 14 weeks, and my goal is to help other entrepreneurs do it more quickly and efficiently.  You can read my “Fundraising Cribsheet Manifesto” here.   Also useful might be the Founder Conference 2010 and Founder Conference 2011 videos I captured.

I’d also encourage you to ask me for the free VentureHacks bible material.   More on that here.

Click to read my review on Amazon

But lastly, there’s a great new book by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson called Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist.  It’s a must read if you’re thinking about fundraising or currently fundraising.  You can see my full review of the book on the Amazon page.  I generally encourage you to get all the free material you can (and even strike deals with folks like VentureHacks to bring you their normally not-free material for free) but in this case, the book’s cost is minimal and will pay for itself many times over.  I can’t recommend this book highly enough.  It’ll make your fundraising process more successful, and it’ll make you fluent in the language that VCs speak, giving you access to more deals and faster results.  Like Bob Nelson, a great advisor of ours once said, “You’re only as good as your second-best term sheet.”  This book will help you get into that position.

Anyone who knows me knows I really stress being able to play a computer like an instrument (and if you think you can, then prove it).  Us geeky types are in front of our computers for 12+ (often 16+) hours per day, so every loss of efficiency translates into a huge cost in time — and time is the most precious asset of any hardcore entrepreneur.

One thing I’ve done is to really customize my Google Apps email pane, with functionality from Rapportive (THANK YOU for the Highrise raplet, guys!), Boomerang, TwitterGadget, Gmail Auto BCC, Labs custom keyboard shortcuts, Send & Archive, etc.  I’ve also found some great Chrome extensions, including 1Password, Bit.ly, Awesome Screenshot, and by far my favorite — a Basecamp text auto save extension that saves what I’ve written in Basecamp when the page is closed.

You might also like my blogs on playing a computer like an instrument, cloud app + vanity URL, and switching to Gmail from Mail.app.

Here’s what my email pane looks like, with a detailed video below that walking you through how I use everything.

My favorite feature?  The awesome picture of my wife, of course!  If I’m going to be looking at email for hours each day, I might as well make it enjoyable!  I just replaced the standard Gmail logo with a custom image.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now That's what I'm talkin' about!

Taking a break from tech for a blog post about coffee (but if you’re in San Francisco, you seriously have to check out StartupHouse).

Specifically, I’m exploring how to make great coffee.

The thing about making great coffee is that it means something different to everyone.  Here’s what it means to me:  The coffee is dark and flavorful.  It doesn’t taste like it’s watered down.  It has a great aroma and makes me smile when I drink it.  I guess this blog is really about how to maximize the ‘smile’ factor.

Luwak coffee goes in raw, comes out... flavored

I’m no coffee pro or snob.  Just a guy who wants better-than-average coffee.  My colleague Jeremia, who knows a heck of a lot more about coffee than I do, just informed me the other day that the lighter blends actually have more caffeine than darker blends, because the caffeine is roasted out of coffee the longer it roasts.  Now there’s a guy who knows his coffee.  To thank him for that pearl of knowledge, I just bought him some raw Luwak coffee, straight from Indonesia.  We’ll see what he does with that bad boy.

Today I tested three burr coffee grinders to figure out which one was best: the Capresso 560 Infinity Conical Burr Grinder , Bodum Bistro Electric Burr Coffee Grinder, and Mr. Coffee BVMC-BMH23 Automatic Burr Mill Grinder .  Previously we had been using the Capresso 464.05 CoffeeTeam GS 10-Cup Digital Coffeemaker with Conical Burr Grinder but the coffee just wasn’t coming out with enough flavor.

The Bodum was the winner

So here’s the new plan: Test these 3 burr grinders, pick the one that grinds the best coffee, and then use a Zojirushi Premium Thermal 1.85 liter Carafe, Brushed Stainless Steel carafe along with a No. 6 filter size plastic filter cone (which fits perfectly inside that model carafe) and boil water on the stove to run through it.  (My guess is that the CoffeeTeam GS didn’t make “high smile factor coffee” because it didn’t ge the water hot enough.  Just speculation on my part though, all I can say is that it wasn’t as good).

Coffee cone + Carafe

This new plan is actually going back to the old plan — my wife and I were boiling water and running it through the filter cone + carafe before with great “smile factor” results, but the burr grinder we had been using, the Black & Decker CBM210 Stainless Steel Burr Coffee Mill/Grinder , was a pain because we had to hold the button down while it was grinding.  It also made inconsistent sized grounds. So after trying the CoffeeTeam GS because I thought it’d be easier (wake up timer!) I’m back to the manual original burr grinder + boiling water + filter cone + carafe approach.  This time, hopefully, with a better burr grinder.

The winner for me was the Bodum Bistro Electric Burr Coffee Grinder because of its hardened steel burr grinding mechanism, ability to easily turn it on & off, and glass holder receptacle.  The  Capresso 560 Infinity Conical Burr Grinder was quieter, but annoyingly, the timer can’t be stopped — you have to wait for it to time out.  The Mr. Coffee BVMC-BMH23 Automatic Burr Mill Grinder was a total fail because of its inferior burr grinder design.

The final coffee setup

Please leave your own opinions and comments below!  Especially if you have tips on how to make higher smile factor coffee.  Oh and by the way, I put agave sweetener in my coffee instead of sugar (available at Costco).  Lower glycemic index = happier body.

Here’s a video where I put the three grinders through the test:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Some great pictures of the Socialize crew!

Dan, Alessandro and Champ outside the Socialize offices in downtown San Franicsco, CA

Trey, Harp, Champ, Alessandro and Daniel at the Giants game, courtesy of SVB

Fawad, Alessandro, Dan and Hunter in San Francisco, CA

Alessandro, Trey, Hunter and other Socialize employees (backs turned) at the Rib Whip BBQ Truck

Sean, Trey, Daniel, Hunter, Alessandro, Sue, Isaac, Champ, Dan, Christine and Fawad at the Rib Whip

Click to enlarge: Massive open space on the first floor is great for events. It'll be a shared co-working space.

I just got a preview of a hot new coworking space that’s brand new (literally weeks old) in downtown San Francisco.  The address is 880 Harrison street.  Here’s a video I just did of the space.

If you’re interested in leasing space here for your startup (or would like to do an event in this space or inquire about the Hacker Hostel), please leave a comment below and I’ll introduce you to the people running it.

The space is going to be called “Startup House.” It’s three levels, with offices on the 2nd and 3rd floors.  The lower level is a HUGE open space, where they’re going to put co-working desks (and the rumor is, maybe some exotic cars sprinkled around — you know, for character).

There’s also a separate part behind the main building where the owners are considering putting a “Hacker Hostel” for out of town developers (or just those who need a place to crash).  The embassy of New Zealand is going to be putting a launch pad space in the building.  Thanks to Elias (the guy behind StartupBus) for showing me around the space

Here are some pics.  More pics below the video.

Click to enlarge: 3rd floor office/communal space

Click to enlarge: Absolutely *massive* roof deck

The outside of the building from Harrison St.

And here’s a six minute video I just took of the space:

Click To Enlarge

I’ll be the first to tell you that I don’t know all that much about the state of mobile advertising today, which is the first thing I said on the panel I was just on at VentureBeat’s MobileBeat conference.  I have a perspective as a developer of apps from my past life running a mobile consulting business (which we’ve since sold), and as a publisher of over 7,000 apps through our AppMakr platform, which integrates AdMob, Millennial Media, Medialets and custom ad units.

I have, however, been getting deep into the world of DSPs, SSPs and RTB (here’s a great article about how those crazy acronyms work), and with Socialize, we’re building a next-generation Interest Graph out of thousands of mobile apps.  This will provide deep user data for advertisers, which is why I participated on this panel, along with:

• Jim Payne, CEO of Mopub
• David Williams, VP of Mobile Product Management at AT&T Interactive
• Zephrin Lasker, CEO of Pontiflex
• Jon Phenix, VP of Publisher Services at Nexage
• Krishna Subramanian, Co-Founder of Mobclix

Devindra Hardawar, the lead MobileBeat Writer for VentureBeat led the discussion focusing on the past, present, and future waves of mobile advertising, as well as an overview of where mobile advertising is headed.

Here’s a video of the panel (sorry audio is so low — crank it up!):

Click here to view the embedded video.

There’s no question about it, Facebook is cleaning up with its Social Graph.  Representing your real-life friendships in a digital manner, and helping you find new friends by trusting those you know makes a lot of sense.

But something interesting has happened along the way:  Facebook has blinded many of us to a plain truth:  The Social Graph is just one component of the Interest Graph. Or to put it another way, Facebook has created a $70+ Billion company by connecting us through friendships.  But incredibly, there’s a much larger opportunity lurking under the surface — the Interest Graph.

Let me tell you about what the Interest Graph is, why this is true, and how many people have missed it.

First, let’s talk about interests.  Each of us as human beings can be defined as a collection of our interests.  Let’s just peg the number at 3,000 interests.  Let’s say that each of us has around 3,000 interests.  Those interests may include our gender, race, nationality, place of employment, language, favorite wine, favorite city, favorite designer brand, and the list goes on.  For example, everyone who works at the same company shares an interest. Never will everyone who works together be friends. Friendship is just a proxy representing some number of shared interests (enough to want to be “friends”) in this long list of interests that binds us together.  Some of these interests may be very temporal:  For example, this week, I might love a certain type of music or band.  Next week, I might have moved on to a different interest.  Some interests may only last minutes, or even seconds:  When the sun hits my eyes, I have an interest in sunglasses.

And at any moment in time, there are probably many thousands of people around the world who are interested in sunglasses at the same time.  Human interests ebb and flow together:  When there’s a moment of national unity, like after a natural disaster, the interests of many of us align more greatly than would otherwise be the case.

And the funny thing is, we’re all intimately familiar with the Interest Graph.  If you’ve ever been to a stadium, rooting for a team, the Interest Graph is obvious to you:  Not everyone in that stadium is a friend, but many share a deep passion for the same team for a few hours.  Then everyone leaves the stadium and goes on with their lives.

And therein lies the problem:  Whether we’re talking about long-term interests, like nationality, race or gender, or short-term temporal interests, like wanting sunglasses or rooting for a team, although we all intuitively know and understand the Interest Graph, we’ve never been able to efficiently quantify, measure and leverage the Interest Graph.

Facebook has done the best job, because friendship is a type of proxy for the Interest Graph:  When you friend someone on Facebook, you’re basically saying “this person shares enough interests with me that I’m willing to consider them a friend.”

We interact on a regular basis with people who aren’t our friends, though, and for anyone who’s really a power user on Facebook, you know the awkward feeling when someone ‘friends’ you who isn’t really your friend.  You only have two options:  Accept their not-so-real friendship, or ignore them completely.

Google+ has taken a more segmented approach to the friend problem with Circles.  You can define different levels of friendship around interest-based groups by creating various circles.  But still, this is like threading a needle using thick gloves:  All of these approaches are clumsy, because they require the user to take action to define their interest-based groups.  And most of us are not likely to spend copious amounts of time defining circles for all of our interests, and obviously there’s no way that 100,000 people at a stadium are ever going to create a circle with each other for a 3 hour game.

The net result has actually been a very lonely experience.  For example, if you were on a mountain biking website or in a mountain biking mobile app, you’d share an interest with everyone else who’s also on the site or has downloaded the app, but today there’s no way to talk to those people.  It’s like you’re all in a big room together, but the lights are off.  Although there may be 1,000 people on the same website as you at the same time you are, or there may be 1,000,000 people who have downloaded the same app as you have, you don’t know who any of them are, and you’re not interacting with any of them.  And to be clear, these aren’t your friends on Facebook, these are just people that share one specific interest with you — mountain biking.

And even more significantly, brands that are trying to ‘connect’ with users using tools like Facebook Connect are missing a huge, key point:  While they are getting all of their users to connect with their ‘friends,’ the brand is missing out on the opportunity to connect all their users with each other, i.e., the people who all actually share an interest in the brand.

When you zoom out and look at this problem from a macro perspective, you end up with a graphic like the one at the right.  Everyone is connecting with their social graph, while there is no way to connect users with a shared passion together.

And it’s incredible that 1) this is happening, and 2) this is not obvious to brands.  Once I show brands how they are missing out on a huge opportunity to connect with everyone who shares an interest in their brand, regardless of ‘friendship,’ a light bulb typically goes off.  An easy way to illustrate this is by using mobile apps as an example:  ”If a million people download your mobile app, they will never all be friends on Facebook.  But they all care about your brand, because they downloaded the app.  How do they talk to each other today?”  (Typical answer:  they can’t.)

Focusing more deeply on mobile apps for a second, this also makes empirical sense to most people: How many apps have you downloaded to your smartphone, used once, and never used again?   And no wonder — it’s a very lonely experience right now.  When you open an app, you can interact with the content of the brand, but you can’t really interact with the other million people who also are interested in the brand.  So if the app’s content doesn’t grab your attention every time you open the app, you don’t have a reason to stay in the app.

But humans are social creatures!  We enjoy engaging with others who share an interest with us.  We enjoy being around people that share a language, or a culture, or an interest in the same types of wine.  We like to hear tips about the best mountain biking trails, or learn a new skill.  Humans use shared interests to connect.  Downloading an app where you can’t do that is like walking through life without ever talking to anyone.  It’s simply not natural.

My co-founders and I started Socialize to solve just this problem.  How do we quantify, measure and leverage the Interest Graph in a way that will allow brands to connect with users who share an interest, sometimes a very temporal one, but aren’t necessarily friends?

We’ve created a social, cloud-based API service that connects users with shared interests.  Unless you’re super geeky, that probably won’t make a lot of sense to you — but the effect will be obvious:  When you’re in a mobile app, you should be able to share your opinions about the content of that app with everyone else who has also downloaded the app.  We make that happen through a set of social features, including comments, sharing and likes.  We allow a user to make a comment on a story in an app, and every other user who has that app can read and respond to that comment, regardless of their Facebook status.

The beauty of this approach, starting with mobile apps, is that mobile is very intimate.  People pretty much always carry their phones with them, and they download apps that represent their interests.  Think of the apps you have on your phone as a digital representation of who you are as an individual (we call this your ‘Socialize Genome.’)

Furthermore, we can leverage best-in-class social networks like Facebook and Twitter, by allowing a user to authenticate with those systems.  So if you’re in a mountain biking app, for example, and you make a comment, not only can we let everyone else who has the app see that comment, but we can use Facebook to export that comment out to your circle of friends — your social graph — many of whom probably don’t have the app.  In this way, Facebook fulfills more of a marketing role, while Socialize is the glue that binds users together and increases engagement within the app by connecting the existing community.

In this way, via our social API service and the iOS and Android SDKs we’re creating, Socialize is creating an Interest Graph across thousands of mobile apps.  Unleashing a community of users within one specific app is great for that app’s developer and that group of users.  But even better, the net effect at a macro level is that Socialize is creating a brand new type of interest-based network across thousands of apps.  And we can start to do some really amazing things with that network.

One simple example is what we call Interest Gravity.  While as an analog human being, I might not know what interests I share with someone I’m riding in the subway with, or I’m walking past, if I have Socialize running in enough apps on my phone, Socialize can form a pretty complete profile of my interests as a user.  And if Socialize is doing that on enough phones, we can use that network to calculate the number of shared interests between two phones (well really, between the two people carrying those phones).  That’s the Interest Gravity between those two people.  If they have many identical or similar apps, we know they have a number of shared passions.  We’ve created algorithms to go pretty far down the rabbit hole based on this concept.

At this point a light bulb may be going off in your head, and you may be thinking, ‘can Socialize know too much about me?!’  And you’re right — like SpiderMan says, “with great power, comes great responsibility.”  One of the main tenants of this Interest Graph approach is that we build it in a very responsible way, keeping the user in control.

If you’d like to learn more about Socialize, or the Interest Graph in general, I’d suggest you read the braindump on Socialize.  We’re also hiring, and offering a $10,000 referral fee for senior hires.  Socialize is based in San Francisco, CA.  If you really want to dig in, watch my 45 minute screencast on why I believe that mobile is way bigger than most people realize.

And I invite you to post your comments below — whether you agree or disagree with anything I’ve written here.  Specifically, I’d like to know if you believe that quantifying the Interest Graph is as big a deal as I do.inter

Click to Visit Jess3 Blog

Thanks to Chris and the JESS3 crew for making me into an ingredient in their Startup Mixology techcocktail infographic (bottom left of the image).

This was in response to the Mixology panel I was on in DC on fundrasing from entrepreneur, angel and VC perspectives.

Enjoy the cocktail!

I’ve written before about our challenges using Basecamp as we grow.   To me, Basecamp is akin to Democracy:  It’s not great, but it’s the best thing out there. (If anyone knows of better project management solutions, please post them as comments on the other thread — Basecamp is getting very long in the tooth and while I’m hoping for a significant overhaul, I’d switch to something else if I could find another solution that addressed our pain points, as 37 Signals hasn’t given any indication that one is coming.)

In response to a comment on that post, I’m posting below the “How To Basecamp” guide we’ve created for our employees.  This guide was created by Christine, our Wordsmithstress at Socialize, so thank you Christine for putting this together.

Note: there are some videos & screenshots in the internal document we use that are private and aren’t in here.  I’ve done my best to replace them with blurred out versions.

About Basecamp:

Basecamp's Opening Screen -- Click to Enlarge

Basecamp is a project management tool created by 37signals that creates an accessible digital trail that email can’t. There’s a bit of a learning curve with Basecamp, but you’ll soon get comfortable with the system the more you use it.

Once you’ve made an account, to access Basecamp, you can login at http://[your_domain_here].basecamphq.com. We recommend that you bookmark your to-do page (and choose the timeframe—this week, today, in the past, etc.—that works the best for you). With that bookmark, you’ll always enter Basecamp through the view that’s most important to you: all the tasks you have to do!

Keep in mind that Basecamp will remember your navigation. What does that mean? Well, if you were previously looking at Christine’s to-do’s for the week, the next time you click on “To-Dos” on the Basecamp navbar, you’ll see Christine’s to-do’s. You can navigate out of this view by changing the parameters in the right hand corner. Keep in mind that Basecamp will also remember your navigation through projects. To switch out of a certain project, you can click on “Switch to a different project” to change project views or head back to the dashboard to shake it clean (y’know, like an Etch A Sketch).

Organization:

Sometimes the terminology can be a bit confusing. Here’s a rundown of Basecamp’s different levels of organization.

• Dashboard: The bird’s-eye view of Basecamp. From here you can see what everyone is working on and access a list of projects you’re privy to (right-hand column). Keep in mind that your activity will show up on the dashboard view, so people will be able to see your comments and such.
• Projects: Sometimes pertaining to a specific department, projects are a high-level view of the big columns that prop up Socialize, Inc. Since these often coincide with the organization of the company itself, they should be created sparingly—think of projects as very broad and large-scale.
• Milestones (now part of the ‘Calendar’ tab): A mid-level view of department goals. These are what we’d call “projects” outside of the Basecamp world. For example, an in-house Socialized app launch would be a milestone.  Every milestone should have a due-date and an owner, even if the due-date is an arbitrary date two years out.
• To-Do Lists (“Buckets”): A lower level view that breaks down what needs to happen in order for us to reach our milestones. If we’re launching the Socialized app, one bucket could be “Generate Buzz.”
• To-Dos (these live inside the To-Do List buckets): The micro view, all the little steps you need to accomplish on a (usually) day-to-day basis. A to-do can only be assigned to one person as a time. Under the bucket “Generate Buzz,” we might task Jeremia with demo-ing our Socialized app at a tech schmoozing event.

To-Do’s 101

Cool Basecamp feature: The ability to create a threaded comment discussion around a to-do. Click to enlarge.

To-do’s are the building blocks of Basecamp’s project management system—these are your day-to-day tasks.

If you would like someone else to take on a task, you must create a to-do for them. The task creator is responsible for making sure the task is created properly. The to-do must fulfill the three following requirements: (1) it is a separate to-do (not a comment in another to-do/task), (2) it has an owner (the person responsible for accomplishing the task), and (3) it has a due date. If you task someone in a comment thread of anothe rto-do, they will not be able to find this task under their to-do list. Create a separate to-do (and even link the original conversation) so that they can easily find the task.

To create a to-do, you must be within the desired project. From the dashboard, find the appropriate parent project. From this page you can either add a to-do to an existing to-do list or create a new list as the to-do’s home.

Sometimes, a task is ongoing and has no real due date. In this case, the task can become a to-do list or it can be labeled as ongoing (e.g. “[O]” as a type of recognizable nomenclature). Try not to use the messages functionality, as for some reason Basecamp implemented messages in a way that doesn’t allow people to be added/removed in later comment threads– very annlying. Ideally, you want to-do’s to be both measurable and actionable. Meaning that it’s hard to measure the success and endpoint of a to-do like ”comment on blogs”—a more quantitative to-do would read “comment on 5 blogs” and be dated for a week away.

It’s possible to hack the system a little bit. Basecamp is great for managing various deadlines and tasks, but sometimes you want a repository for suggestions or ideas. 37signals offers other tools for this purpose (like Campfire), but you can manipulate Basecamp for this purpose as well. Create and designate a to-do list for messages and ideas. As these items become actionable, they can be dragged into a different list to become real to-do’s with owners and dates.

Tl;dr? Here’s the basic gist:
1.    Task creators are responsible for assigning the to-do on Basecamp.
2.    Don’t task someone in a comment.
3.    All to-do’s need a owner and a date.
4.    Don’t use the messages functionality.

Searching

It can be hard to search on Basecamp, and there’s no advanced search option/filters either. This video is an overview of searching (spoiler alert: use shortcut Cmd+F to help you find the keyword in question).We suggest searching through projects (rather than across all of Basecamp) to narrow down your scope. And, you know, you can always admit defeat and just search through your email as well since Basecamp will always email you when you’ve been tasked or included in a comment.

Tips and Tricks

• If you’re using Google Apps, add their Google ShortLink Labs feature so you can make short links (e.g. “go.getsocialize.com/mother” to access The Mother) to frequently used Basecamp buckets, to-dos, etc.
• “Tag” a bucket or to-do with unique keywords to facilitate searching. For example, tag a website-related task with “Charlotte” (get it—Charlotte’s Web?) so that you can search for that keyword rather than the ubiquitous “website.”
• When something is marked “private” in Basecamp it means that it’s private to your company (i.e. ALL of Socialize, Inc. employees). It does NOT mean it is private to only the people active/included in the bucket list.
• Tired of checking off 5 people’s names every time you make a new comment on a task? Create an email distro list for that team and grant Basecamp access to that email address. Keep in mind, though, that tasks should be assigned to individuals and never to a distro list.
• FAQs
• If a milestone has a due date, then does every task also need to have a due date?  Or if a task doesn’t have a due date, but is in a task list that has a related milestone, do we just assume the corresponding task is due when the milestone is due?
• Every task needs a due date. Why? Tasks are the little steps we take to reach a specific milestone. Sometimes, tasks need to be completed in a certain order. Because Basecamp offers several levels of organization, you may see or access the task without seeing the milestone due date. Adding that due date will ensure that you can keep yourself accountable to getting the task done on time.

Do you have other tips on “How To Baescamp?”  Please post them as comments below.  I’m especially interested in any 3rd party services that address some of the main pain points we’ve been having.

Daniel on the cover of WSJ, 2004

I have several amazing service provider resources in my life, including an outsourced HR professional that is stellar, a personal trainer that’s ripped, and a patent attorney that seems to know how to patent or trademark just about anything with value.  I also know the services world intimately well, as I used to run a real estate brokerage as well as a mobile consulting company.   I got a lot of press for those companies, including writeups or quotes in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Washington Biz Journal, CNN, TLC, Newsweek, Discovery, BBC, The Washington Post and others.

That’s why it drives me crazy when service providers say things like “blogging my knowledge-base isn’t consistent with my business model.”  So, being true to writing a blog about something when I’m passionate about it, I’m going to make an argument that as a service provider, providing free and full access to the amazing knowledge you have in your head will actually turn you into a superstar vs. killing your business.  It will actually allow you to make way more money with way less effort.

First, let me acknowledge that it’s a hard argument to accept when your entire livelihood hinges on the knowledge you have in your head.  You’re not selling any product.  You’re just selling your time, and your expertise.  But the reason I’m right is a fundamental truth about human nature:  People love attention.  And they want to be around those that have it.

It goes deeper than that, of course.  But really, that’s what this is about.  Either people are attracted to you for some reason, or they’re not.

The reasons vary — in my blog about applying social media, I talked about the Angelina Jolie effect.  In a similar vein, I just watched the Never Say Never movie about Justin Bieber in which pre-teenage girls go berserk about him (I know he’s only 16 but seriously, it’s a very inspiring movie no matter how old you are — watch it!).

Another reason people might be attracted to you is because of your beautiful mind.  You may have domain-specific knowledge that nobody else in the world has.  Knowledge that you can command a lot of money for.  In fact, as I say in my blog about social media, I argue that the sharing of SME (subject matter expertise) actually forms the foundation of successful social media initiatives.

These concepts form the foundation of my argument:  By sharing what you know, you attract people to you.  People that have the types of problems you can solve.  And because of social media tools like blogging, you can share that knowledge in new ways — ways that literally didn’t exist just 10 years ago — that are very efficient with your time.  And if you’re a service provider, you know how valuable your time is, because it’s your primary monetizing mechanism.

And so that brings me to the part that’s not so obvious:  The natural reaction of service providers is that by giving their extremely valuable SME out for free, they will lose the ability to monetize it.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  The reality is actually the exact opposite: By sharing what you know freely, you attract to you the people that have the problems you can solve instead of you having to go out and find them.  And importantly, since everyone’s problems are specific to their situations, while your audience may be able to apply some of what you know to their situation, they won’t be able to apply it completely to their situation.  They will still need you, even if you blog about everything you know.  In fact, the more open you are, the larger the audience that will respond to you.

That truth actually creates a virtuous cycle.  You blog about something only you know or have figured out, and your audience tries applying it.  They may see some benefit from the effort, and yes you lose the ability to monetize on that part.  But almost 100% of the time, they either will a) know that you could solve their problem more completely than they can, b) know that they don’t have time time to apply the solution themselves, or c) try to not use you, apply the knowledge themselves, fail miserably, and then be even more desperate to retain you.

And the beauty is that you’ve created a situation akin to the sirens of Greek mythology: Customers come to you because they feel like they already know you from reading your blogs, and they already know you can help them.  You don’t have to sell them on you and your expertise.

As a service provider, finding new clients is typically very difficult and consumes a large portion of your time — precious time you could spend monetizing.

However, if you’re at the top of your game, it’s even worse, because you have a good pipeline of business from existing customers, which feels good, and you have a strong referral base that keeps new customers coming.  Pretty good life, right?

But here’s the problem:  All those customers know that the more people they refer to you, the less attention you’ll be able to give them, so they refer cautiously.  It’s you service providers that are on the top of your game with a strong pipeline that are missing the most by not blogging, because you’re missing on an opportunity to catapult yourselves into the stratosphere.

Because your pricing mechanisms must be based on the laws of supply and demand for you to have parity (not be overwhelmed vs. not have any clients), it’s only by greatly increasing demand that you can give yourself access to the options that will make you not just rich, but wealthy.

Just look at service-based superstars like Oprah, or motivational speakers like Tony Robbins, or musicians, or movie stars.  Their service-providing talents are so in-demand that they can make products out of them.  Think about that for a second:  Productizing and packaging your expertise.  There are plenty of other examples — writing books, or making audio/DVD programs (think P90X).

Most service providers never get to this point, and many don’t care to.  That’s OK — believe me, when I write this blog I’m fully aware that I’m doing myself a disservice by encouraging any of you whose services I rely on to spend your time publicizing and then productizing your expertise so you can sit on the beach drinking MaiTais instead of spending time with me.

But even if you don’t want to productize your expertise, you have another option (which is still detrimental to me, but here goes):  Just raise your rates.  The more in-demand you are, the less you have to work to maintain the same income.  And who doesn’t want more free time?

I moderated a stellar group of panelists at yesterday’s Digital Media Conference in Arlington, VA, where we talked about the iPad’s disruptive effect on media (speaking of disruption, check out the Disruptathon event the night before DMC).  Here are the panel details:

PANEL: Media on the iPad and Tablets
(Digital Media and Mobile Tracks)

Panelists
Matt Jones, VP Mobile Strategy & Operations, Gannett
Rob Pegoraro, Tech Writer/ Former Washington Post Tech Columnist
Martin Ringlein, Co-founder & Senior Consultant, nclud
Jeff Tennery, SVP, Publisher Services, Millennial Media
Moderator: Daniel Odio, CEO & Co-founder, Socialize Inc.

I also captured keynotes by Steve Case & John Trimble, a panel by VCs, and research analysts discussing digital trends.

Here is video of the panel, and the Twitter stream is below that:

Click here to view the embedded video.

I captured a panel of VCs at yesterday’s phenomenal Digital Media Conference.  On a related note, I’ve written a series of blog posts about our experience raising $1MM for AppMakr.  The raise took us 14 weeks, and my goal is to help other entrepreneurs do it more quickly and efficiently.  You can read about my “Fundraising Cribsheet Manifesto” here.  Hope it’s helpful.

PANEL: Investing in Digital Media: VCs Speak
(Digital Media Track)

Panelists
Philip Bronner, General Partner, Novak Biddle Venture Partners
Don Rainey, General Partner, Grotech Ventures
Tige Savage, Managing Director & EVP, Revolution LLC
Thanasis Delistathis, Managing Partner, New Atlantic Ventures
Moderator: Paul Sherman, Editor-in-Chief, Potomac Tech Wire

I also captured keynotes by Steve Case & John Trimble, a panel by research analysts on digital media trends, and I did a panel on the iPad + Media.

Here is video of the panel, and the Twitter stream is below that:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Steve Case was interviewed by Paul Sherman at yesterday’s Digital Media Conference in Arlington, VA.

I also captured a panel by research analysts on digital media trends, a panel by VCs, and I did a panel on the iPad + Media.

I asked Steve a question about focus, saying that as an entrepreneur I had to be extremely focused, but I saw him doing many things (he’s Chairman of Revolution, StartupAmerica and The Case Foundation) and I asked him if the need for extreme focus lessened when one has many resources at his disposal.  He said ‘no,’ but then said his focus is on entrepreneurship, which didn’t make a lot of sense to me.  I could, for example, say that my focus is on entrepreneurship too, or that my focus is on being a human.  Saying one has focus at too macro a level seems to cheapen the value of focus and render it meaningless.  Or, maybe I just don’t understand his position because I don’t have access to the kind of wealth he does to execute his vision.  What’s your opinion?  I’d love to hear your comments below.

Here’s Steve’s interview.

Click here to view the embedded video.

A little bonus — John Trimble, the Chief Revenue Officer of Pandora, gave a keynote right after Steve, and I captured that one too:

Click here to view the embedded video.

And here’s the Twitter stream:

Yesterday’s phenomenal Digital Media Conference kicked off with research briefs by analysts from Comscore, Parks Associates and CEA.  Here was the panel title:

Research Presentations: Top Digital Media Trends
Shawn DuBravac, Chief Economist & Director of Research, CEA
Elise Neel, VP, comScore Marketing Solutions, Director, comScore
Heather Way, Research Analyst, Parks Associates

Two highlights include that Google Android growth continues to beat Apple’s, and that 1mm smartphones being added per week.

I also captured keynotes by Steve Case & John Trimble, a panel by VCs, and I did a panel on the iPad + Media.

Here is video of the panel, and the Twitter stream is below that:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Props to Frank Gruber and his entire TechCocktail crew for a great event in DC last week called the Startup Mixology conference.

Steve Case gave the keynote, followed by a variety of panels and presentations.

I was on a fundraising panel that explored various aspects of raising money for a startup. You can find the live blog transcript of the panel here.  On a related note, I’ve written a series of blog posts about our experience raising $1MM for AppMakr.  The raise took us 14 weeks, and my goal is to help other entrepreneurs do it more quickly and efficiently.  You can read about my “Fundraising Cribsheet Manifesto” here.  Hope it’s helpful.

Here’s a video of the panel:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Disruptathon is a unique event, largely because the audience votes for the winners in realtime via a mobile app, but also because it focuses on disruption.

Last night I presented Socialize in the Disruptathon competition which took place at Gannett’s headquarters.  ReadWriteWeb, which covered the event, had this to say:

Socialize was proclaimed the winner by the crowd, which voted on special iPod Touches that were handed out to the audience and returned to tabulate the final results. Socialize provides websites with a software developer kit (SDK) intended to “quantify the interest graph.” Of the eight companies that took the stage, Socialize was the company with the clearest technological vision and most potential to be integrated on a large scale within media apps. CEO Daniel R. Odio described it as “unleashing the community that is hiding in your app.”

Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about!  Here’s Disruptathon’s press release.

You can watch the seven minute video here:

Click here to view the embedded video.

And you can see the awards ceremony here:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Thanks to Pete Erickson for his fantastic work, and to the Socialize team for building such an amazing company with me.  Pete, we want to see Disruptathon come to Silicon Valley!

I’ll be in DC for three events on June 16 and June 17.  If you’d like to meet up, drop me a comment below!

	I’ll be on a panel called The Realities of Funding at 1:25pm on Thursday June 16th.  Here are details: 1:25 – The Realities of Funding - David Steinberg, Jill Stelfox, Daniel Odio, Christopher M. Schroeder, Bobby Ocampo, John May
	Socialize was selected as one of eight finalists to present at the Disruptathon – Media event.  Here’s more about the event, Thursday evening, June 16th:   “What are you doing to stay up with the rapidly changing world of media? Welcome to the Disruptathon Media Event where we’ve done the hard work for you. After a national search of more than 100 companies and a competitive down select process, our team of media industry judges have narrowed the field down to 8 businesses the media industry should know about.” Event is at the Gannett building in McLean, VA.
	I’ll be moderating a panel at this year’s Digital Media Conference at 11:40am on Friday June 17th:   PANEL: Media on the iPad and Tablets (Digital Media and Mobile Tracks)  Panelists Matt Jones, VP Mobile Strategy & Operations, Gannett Rob Pegoraro, Tech Writer/ Former Washington Post Tech Columnist David Katz, Executive Director, Digital Media, Starz Media Martin Ringlein, Co-founder & Senior Consultant, nclud Jeff Tennery, SVP, Publisher Services, Millennial Media Mario Armstrong, Tech Commentator Moderator: Daniel Odio, CEO & Co-founder, Socialize Inc.