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Tech Bowl: Best Buy Spotlights Mobile Innovators, Founders In Super Bowl Spot

Achilles — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 06:48:33 +0000

Every year, Best Buy runs a big Super Bowl spot, and traditionally they go the route of hiring a big celebrity to hawk their brand message. Last year, it was “the Biebs” and Ozzy Osbourne. This year, Best Buy has opted for something a bit different, choosing to highlight innovators and give more than a nod to geeks in its tech-focused Super Bowl ad. Drew Panayiotou, Best Buy’s U.S. marketing chief, told Bloomberg that the company had initially planned to continue down the celebrity track, but the outpouring of affection for Steve Jobs after the Apple CEO passed away was strong evidence that “Silicon Valley inventors are today’s stars.” So, this year’s Super Bowl ad opens with Philippe Kahn , the current CEO of Fullpower Technologies and the guy credited with inventing the camera phone, next there’s author, inventor, and futurist Ray Kurzweil , who shows himself the father of text-to-speech synthesis. The ad also features the key characters behind Instagram , like Kevin Systrom, Square, Shazam , and Words With Friends . It’s the most Silicon Valley/startup founders together in one advertisement we’ve seen, ever? Best Buy has been struggling over the last year, and many see the company as a foundering ship, so buoying itself on the back of inventors and innovators is certainly an interesting play. Best Buy needs to prove it can go toe-to-toe with Walmart et al, and the idea is to present the idea that the Best Buyers in blue shirts are some of the most knowledgeable geeks in the business. So knowledgeable, in fact, that all these inventors want to line up to back their brand in a Super Bowl ad. Of course, implied is the heaps of cash they were offered to join in on turning Best Buy’s brand around. ( Read more about Best Buy’s future here. ) As for the promo itself, Best Buy is giving a $50 gift card to anyone who volunteers to upgrade their phones from one of four national carriers at a Best Buy store near you. It was good to see Words of Friends founders/brothers Paul and David Bettner poking fun at Alec Baldwin’s now infamous cellphone on a plane incident, in which he refused to turn off his phone, because he was, of course, playing Scrabble With Friends. Pop culture, celebrities, and technology, all together in one weird self-referential celebration. Unsettling, yet geek-tastic.

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Tech Bowl: Best Buy Spotlights Mobile Innovators, Founders In Super Bowl Spot

An Arab Spring For IT

ACMAir — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 00:00:56 +0000

Editor’s note: Alan S. Cohen is Vice President of Marketing at Nicira . A 20-year IT veteran, Alan has held executive positions at Cisco, Airespace, Tahoe Networks, IBM, US WEST, Coopers & Lybrand, and the Department of Energy. Change in the air. It’s palpable. Those of us in the technology world are witnessing a transformation: A buyer-led revolution in how information technology is both produced and consumed. Smartphones and tablets are upsetting the PC order; social applications are impinging on traditional “workforce productivity” and communications applications. And the infrastructure, the underlying electronic “institutions” that make all of this happen, are also undergoing a transformation that promises to reshape the boundary conditions of all the participations. The wave of disruption powered by virtualization, and now, cloud, is rapidly and dramatically reshaping how companies and organizations of all sizes purchase IT and who sells it to us. Said simply, for the first time in a generation, information technology’s supply chain is in the state of serious disruption. It truly is an “Arab Spring” for the IT world and when it’s over, there will be a host of new companies driving enterprise technology. Don’t believe me? Let’s establish some historical context. Most revolutions take time. There are always early revolutionaries who pave the way for the change in the system. Although we chart the Arab Spring to events in Tunisia just over a year ago, the underlying currents driving change in the Middle East are decades in the making. In our industry, the antecedents are also more than a decade old. VMware, the early power player in compute virtualization, was founded in 1998. Salesforce, the first big SaaS player, was founded in 1999. The iPod, the progenitor of the contemporary smartphone, was revealed publicly in 2001. For those tuned in to IT’s golden oldies channel, there was a transformative revolution in the 1970s. It was called the PC. At the center of these revolutions and disruptions, you will find end users who have a simple mantra: “We want what we want, when we want it, to get our jobs done.” Employers have to meet these goals. Yet their job can be doubly difficult: Companies and organizations are frequently locked into existing IT approaches and are now told to do more with less. Business leaders around the world are demanding that the current model of IT, one that has led to a multi-trillion dollar per year industry, become more responsive to their twin goals of business velocity and efficiency. But today, at the beginning of what historians will someday call the “as-a-service” era of technology, there is a new mantra for Enterprise IT: Faster, cheaper, and pay only for what you use. If IT providers do not supply what the end users want, the latter, like the brave individuals who took the streets of Cairo, Tunis, and Tripoli, will take matters into their own hands. Most often, the initial transformation happens as “shadow” IT. Bring your own device is shadow IT. Most SaaS applications start by bypassing IT and going directly to functional groups (managing sales through Salesforce or sharing through Box.net). Think about it: Less than five years ago, people were questioning whether the iPhone was ready for the enterprise . In 2012, Apple is expected to sell $19 billion worth of iPhones and iPads to the enterprise, making iot the 25th largest IT vendor in the world. How’s that for a shadow IT movement? Now it’s time for infrastructure. If IT does not provide the end user with the infrastructure they need, the latter can rent it, by the hour or month from companies like Rackspace or Amazon. All you need is a credit card and no approval from IT. What is powering this change? Software. Software will be the new hardware. Like the Arab Spring, traditional powers in IT clearly know about the change that is underway. However, as with so many Middle Eastern heads of state, half-measures toward meeting end user requirements will not be enough. Adding a cool interface to onerous applications or a software stub to a piece of stubborn “iron” will not appease the end users. In our world, it’s change or lose your franchise. Maybe that’s why Andy Grove knew only the paranoid survive . Embracing rapid change is not the usual modus operandi for many IT superpowers. The need for top and bottom line growth, and the scrutiny of public markets, does not make changing your business model on-the-fly the easiest task. If you are a multi-billion dollar IT player, how do you explain to your installed base, “Guess what, everything is going to change?” But if you are in IT, you have to ask yourself: What side of history will you wind up on?

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An Arab Spring For IT

Docstoc Releases New iPad Apps Focused On Helping SMBs Streamline Their Businesses

Administrator — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 22:00:27 +0000

DocStoc , a document sharing site has been focusing on providing bundles of premium professional documents for businesses for some time now. But today, the startup is expanding to producing articles and videos related to starting and running a business, providing more than just form documents for professionals. Docstoc has launched four iPad apps: Legal and Copyright Small Business Toolkit ; Sales Techniques and Training Secrets ; Adwords and SEO Secrets ; and HR & Employee Management Advice to help businesses streamline operations, sales and more. As CEO Jason Nazar explains, in addition to becoming the go-to destination for documents for small businesses, Docstoc also wants to be a content resource as well. In addition to the four released this week, the startup will be releasing 30 “Teaching and Training” Apps for Small Business in Q1 of 2012. All the apps are free and include original video content with SMB and startup experts as well as articles and access to premium documents for free (for a limited time, Nazar says). Eventually, Docstoc will expand these apps to Android. Nazar explains, “We want to create a high quality Khan Academy for small businesses.” Currently, Docstoc sees around 20 million unique visitors per month and has almost 30 million registered users, with the highest concentration being small business owners and operators. Nazar says that Docstoc’s revenue has been growing 100% each year for the past three years and has been profitable for last 2 years.

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Docstoc Releases New iPad Apps Focused On Helping SMBs Streamline Their Businesses

CardSpring Raises $10 Million To Connect Payments To The Web

Administrator — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 22:00:33 +0000

We measure every last click when it comes to the Web, but there remains a gulf between online and the real world. Yet the online world increasingly drives behavior offline, especially when it comes to purchasing habits. How many times have you researched something online or on your mobile phone before buying it? Yet when you go to a store to buy it, everything you did online might as well disappear as far as the merchant is concerned. It doesn’t have to be that way. The last mile in local commerce is really only the last few inches between the credit card in your outstretched hand and the card swipe at the register. That terminal is the gateway to the payment network, which today isn’t really connected to the Internet for most practical purposes. The payment networks is archaic and operates based on its own closed standards. But what if it was as easy to connect to the payment network as it is to develop an application on the Web? That is the question a group of former Netscape engineers and executives are trying to answer with a new startup called CardSpring launching in private beta today. Cardspring is creating an application platform that will allow Web and mobile developers to write applications for credit cards and other types of payments. Cardspring attaches itself to the payment network in a secure fashion on one side, and on the other it presents itself as a platform for developers to create payment apps via Web-standard APIs. It is a bridge between the two networks. These applications could include things like electronic coupons, loyalty cards, virtual currencies, or yet-to-be-imagined commerce apps. For example, you could get a $10 off coupon online, enter your credit card number, and then when you go to a store and pay with that card, the payment network would recognize the card and give you the $10 credit. Or you could swipe your card and it could email you the receipt. Or it could check in for you. Swiping the card would trigger an application. What you see is a piece of plastic. What the network sees is an application. If this sounds a little bit like what Groupon, LivingSocial , Foursquare , Square or Google are trying to do, it is because they’ve all been trying to crack this nut in different ways. They all want to close the redemption loop between digital offers and in-store payments. “Groupon threaded the needle with coupons,” says CEO Eckart Walther , but in his eyes daily deals are no more than a “wonderful one-off solution—We are literally inside the payment network.” Walther once ran Netscape’s platform group. He later went to TellMe Networks, Yahoo search, LiveOps, and ended up as an EIR at Accel . The company’s CTO is Jeff Winner , who was the head crypto guy at Netscape. He is helped come up with SSL (the standard security layer in the browser), among other things. Cardspring already raised $10 million from Accel and Greylock in a Series A (Andrew Braccia from Accel and James Slavet from Greylock are the partners on the deal). Other investors include SV Angel (which is a big believer in the Online2Offline trend), Morado Ventures, Felicis Ventures, and Maynard Webb’s investment vehicle, WIN. Groupon isn’t the only attempt at a one-off solution. Foursquare links its merchant specials to American Express card purchases , but not every card. Google Wallet is trying to put payment apps into your phone. It’s too fragmented. “Every day, a mini-platform is trying to launch.” he says. Instead, CardSpring is attacking the problem just like you’d expect a bunch of Netscape engineers would: at the network level. “What if we could bring the browser platform to the payment network?’ asks Walther. Try to wrap your brain around that for a second. Your plastic credit card can trigger different applications—coupons, loyalty rewards, reminders, check-ins, you name it. All of it is secure and based on permissions you allowed each application to have (in return for some benefit). “One of the Internet’s fundamental challenges is its inability to effectively capture the economic value it creates for business in the physical world,” notes Braccia. “CardSpring’s platform enables offline stores to easily measure the impact of the web on their business.” There is a huge need for this type of payments platform. Groupon could use it to finally track redemptions of its coupons without having to ship iPads with special software to bars and restaurants. Foursquare could tie it into its specials and actually capture the purchase data and then show that to merchants in their dashboards. So could LivingSocial. And that’s just for starters. Imagine cost-per-action ads where the action is an in-store purchase. The possibilities are endless. Not only that, but any website or mobile app that takes credit card information will now have the opportunity to append data to those purchases, and to read and write data to the payment network. It is not just about moving money, but moving payment-related data. In the end, the data may turn out to be more valuable. The difficult part will be to convince consumers to hand over their credit card numbers in order for these applications to work. To the extent that the initial websites and apps already hold consumers’ credit card information, like Groupon or LivingSocial do, that shouldn’t be an issue. But when unknown sites or businesses start asking for that information, it might not be as forthcoming. Still, there is a lot of low-hanging fruit here and Cardspring brings a clever approach to a difficult problem. It is not asking much of consumers or merchants. They do not need any new technology or fancy NFC-powered phones or terminals. All they need is their credit card. The network will do the rest.

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CardSpring Raises $10 Million To Connect Payments To The Web

You Stopped SOPA. Now Let’s Startup America

A D M I N — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 21:55:04 +0000

Note from the editor: This is a guest post from Steve Case , the co-founder of AOL (which owns TechCrunch) and founder of Revolution. Case is the chairman of the Startup America Partnership and sits on the White House Jobs Council. In recent weeks, Americans from all walks of life came together to stop SOPA from advancing through Congress, demonstrating the power of the Internet to rally people around an important cause. In the weeks ahead, we have reason to rally again. This time, the goal is not stopping something bad, but starting something good. Specifically, ensuring that America builds on its legacy of innovation, and remains the world’s most entrepreneurial nation. Earlier today, President Obama unveiled his Startup America legislative agenda and called on Congress to pass it quickly, so he can sign it promptly. It’s a very positive first step. Let’s capitalize on this moment, and call on our elected representatives to quickly pass this legislative agenda that helps entrepreneurs start and scale the companies that can change the world while creating jobs, jumpstarting our economy, and increasing our competitiveness globally. Here’s why you should join me – now – in rallying behind the President’s proposed Startup America legislation: Young high-growth companies have created 40 million American jobs in the past three decades thirty years – and accounted for all of the net new jobs produced during that period. America’s entrepreneurial economy has been the envy of the world for decades. But other nations now recognize that entrepreneurship has been America’s secret sauce, and they are now racing to replicate it. Just as we’re seeing the globalization of manufacturing, we’re also now seeing the globalization of entrepreneurship. Meanwhile, outside of some sectors (like social media) and some regions (like Silicon Valley), America’s entrepreneurial economy is sputtering. Indeed, start-ups are down 23% since 2007. The rest of the world is accelerating, while America is slowing. But we still have time to act. Enter the President’s Startup America legislative agenda. The proposed legislation, released this morning by the White House, builds on the great work that Republicans and Democrats in the Senate and the House have initiated in recent months. Here’s a short primer on some of the measures included in the President’s Startup America legislative agenda: Crowdfunding – The legislative package will allow entrepreneurs to leverage online platforms to raise small amounts of capital from a large number of people. The benefits of creating an efficient and transparent marketplace to raise capital have been established by successful platforms such as Kickstarter and IndieGoGo, and this new legislation will extend the reach of these platforms to help fund entrepreneurial companies. IPO on ramp – Well-intentioned regulations to protect investors have contributed to a decline in IPOs. The cost and complexity of initial public offerings has resulted in fewer companies going public, and more companies being sold. Public offerings of less than $50 million were 80% of IPOs in the 1990s, but only 20% in the 2000s. Sadly, IPOs typically lead to accelerated job growth – 90% of job creation typically occurs after a company goes public – while acquisitions often lead to job-deceleration. The President is embracing the recommendations of the IPO Task Force and his Jobs Council by calling for a smart, phase-in for emerging growth companies, so that they can adjust to the most costly and complex requirements of going public. Winning the global battle for talent – America is great at attracting talented immigrants to its universities, but then forces most to leave and return to their countries – taking their educations with them, and all too often creating companies in other countries that end up competing with ours. This is a critical issue that will require more attention, but the Startup America legislative package takes a positive first step by allowing more highly-skilled immigrants to stay, build companies in the U.S., and create American jobs. Investment incentives – The proposed legislation provides a capital gains tax cut when an investment is kept in a business for at least five years, incentivizing investors to put their cash behind entrepreneurs who are focused on building lasting companies. In addition, the package adds investment incentives by raising the limit for “mini-offerings” from $5 million to $50 million and increasing the Small Business Investment Company program by $1 billion. Incentives to Encourage Growth and Reinvestment – The Startup America legislative agenda would make permanent certain tax cuts for small businesses, so that once a new firm gets up and running, it has more capital available to re-invest in growing the company. The package also includes a 10% income tax credit for new small business hires, a doubling of the tax deduction for startup expenses, and an extension of the 100 percent depreciation for property through this year. I was honored to chair the high growth enterprises subcommittee of the President’s Council on Jobs & Competitiveness. (Other members included John Doerr of KPCB and Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook.) We met with the President in October and presented a series of recommendations on steps both the private and public sector should take to improve the environment for entrepreneurs. Since then, nearly a dozen bills have been introduced in Congress. The AGREE Act was introduced by Senators Rubio (R-FL) and Coons (D-DE) and the Startup Act was introduced by Senators Warner (D-VA) and Moran (R-KS). Now, the President has stepped forward with his own proposal, the Startup America legislative agenda. I’m encouraged to see our nation’s leaders focus their attention on entrepreneurship – and issue legislative proposals that will help us innovate, grow our economy, create jobs, and strengthen our competitiveness. This is a moment. While the partisan bickering in Washington is intense, and will heat up further as we head towards the November election, we can – and must – rally the entrepreneurial community to support pro-entrepreneurship legislation. It might seem as though Washington isn’t listening, but the successful effort to stop SOPA in its track proved that we can have an impact. That was about stopping misguided legislation. This is about promoting a positive Startup Agenda that moves us in the right direction. Is it a perfect package for entrepreneurs? No, but there is no such thing as perfect legislation – and we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. So join the cause and tweet your support with the #StartupAmerica hashtag. Now is the time to rally together and pass a Startup America legislative agenda!

LivingSocial CEO: Lumping Us With Groupon Is Like Lumping eBay With Amazon

user — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 11:32:25 +0000

The local commerce industry as represented by daily deal sites like Groupon and LivingSocial is still barely learning to walk, even though Groupon has 10,000 employees and LivingSocial has 5,000 . While the two companies look nearly identical today, don’t be surprised if they diverge. LivingSocial CEO Tim O’Shaughnessy reminded me in a conversation last week that “a lot of people lumped eBay and Amazon together 10 years ago” because they both were “ecommerce” companies. And while there were plenty of similarities and direct competition, each one ended up taking a different path. He suggests the same thing will happen with local commerce between Groupon and LivingSocial. “Fundamentally, I am sure we don’t think about things exactly the same way,” he says, “so we will have different strategies.” And just as it would have been foolish to define Amazon as nothing more than an online bookseller in the mid-1990s, thinking of LivingSocial or Groupon as only daily deal sites is too limiting. “Where do you go to search?” asks O’Shaughnessy. “The answer for most people is Google.” Where do you share things with your friends online? The answer is Facebook or Twitter. “Where do I go to interact with local merchants in my city?” he continues. There is no default answer yet. “Daily deals can clearly be part of that equation, but they are not sufficient to answer that question. It is the start,” says O’Shaughnessy, “what allows us to build and scale a substantive member base and base of merchants. There are a host of opportunities where we can be that catalyst between our members and merchants.” Which opportunities is he planning to go after? He wants LivingSocial to “be viewed much more as the local commerce platform.” Imagine more dashboards and tools for local merchants which help them figure out things like the lifetime value of a customer or their retention rate. ” You need automated closed-loop capabilities to do that,” he says. ( Closing the redemption loop is the big challenge right now in local commerce—how do you track offers all the way through to payment?) The offline component of the business is just as important as the online. “We are an online to offline business,” he points out. “People focus on the online portion, not the offline portion. Over the course of the year that will be an area of emphasis, real touch points. Something physical and real can be more emotive than a click.” Photo credit: Fortune Brainstorm

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LivingSocial CEO: Lumping Us With Groupon Is Like Lumping eBay With Amazon

Why Every Entrepreneur Should Self-Publish a Book

bestcbstore — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 19:00:32 +0000

I’ve published eight books in the past seven years, five with traditional publishers (Wiley, Penguin, HarperCollins), one comic book, and the last two I’ve self-published. In this post I give the specific details of all of my sales numbers and advances with the traditional publishers. Although the jury is still out on my self-published books, “How to be the Luckiest Man Alive” and ”I Was Blind But Now I See” I can tell you these two have already sold more than my five books with traditional publishers, combined. If you, the entrepreneur, self-publish a book you will stand out, you will make more money, you will kick your competitors right in the XX, and you will look amazingly cool at cocktail parties. I know this because I am seldom cool but at cocktail parties, with my very own comic book, I can basically have sex with anyone in the room. But don’t believe me, it costs you nothing and almost no time to try it yourself. The rest of this article is really three discussions: Why self-publish rather than use a traditional publisher, why entrepreneurs should self-publish, and finally, HOW does one go about self-publishing. WHY: A) Advances are going to zero. Book publishers are getting more and more squeezed by declining booksellers so they, in turn, have to squeeze the writers. Because of so much free content on the Internet, the value per unit of content is going to zero unless you are already an established name-brand author. B) Lag time. When you self-publish, you can have your book up and running on Amazon, paperback and kindle, within days. When you publish with a traditional publisher its a grueling process: book proposal, agents, lawyers, meetings, edits, packaging, catalogs, etc that ensures that your book doesn’t actually get published until a year later. Literally, as I write this a friend of mine just IMed me the details of his book deal he just got with a mainstream publisher. Publication date: 2014. C) Marketing. Publishers claim they do a lot of marketing for you. That’s laughable. I’ll give you a very specific story. When I published with Penguin they then met with a friend of mine whose book they wanted to publish. They didn’t realize she was my friend. She asked them, “what marketing did you do for James Altucher’s book”. They said, “well, we got him a review in The Financial Times and we got a segment about his book on CNBC and an excerpt in thestreet.com” Here’s what’s so funny. I had a weekly column in The Financial Times. I WROTE my own review. As a joke. For CNBC, I had a weekly segment on CNBC. So naturally I spoke about my book during my regular segment. And for thestreet.com excerpt, I had just sold my last company to thestreet.com. So instead of doing my usual article for them I did an excerpt. In other words, the publisher did NOTHING, but took credit for EVERYTHING . Ultimately, authors (unless you are Stephen King, etc) have to do their own marketing for books. The first question publishers ask, even, before they look at your proposal is, “How big is your platform?” They want to know how you can market the book and if they can make money on just your own marketing efforts. D) Better royalties . i.e. when I self-publish I make about a 70% royalty instead of a 15% royalty with a traditional publisher. I also own 100% of the foreign rights instead of 50%. I hired someone to sell the foreign rights and they get 20% (and no upfront fee). E) More control over content and design. Look at this cover for “SuperCash” designed by a traditional publisher for me (this was my third book). It’s hideous. Now look at the cover for my last book (self-published), “I Was Blind But Now I See”. You may or may not like it but it’s exactly what I wanted. Publishers even include in the contract that they have final say over the cover and this is one detail they will not negotiate. You also don’t have any teenage interns sending you editorial comments back that you completely disagree with. YOU control your own content. Now, WHY SHOULD ENTREPRENEURS SELF-PUBLISH A) You have content. I have enough material in my blog right now (including my “Drafts” folder which has 75 unpublished posts in it) to publish five more books over the next year. And I’m sure that number will increase over the next year as I write more posts. You’re an entrepreneur because you feel you have a product or an idea or a vision that stands out among your competitors (if you don’t stand out, pack it in and come up with a new idea). You know how to do something better than anyone else in the world. How do let the world know that you are better? A business card won’t cut it. People will throw it away. And everyone’s got a website with an “About” button. Give away part (or all) of your ideas in a book. You’re a brand new social media agency? How should social media work? Write it down. You’re a new CRM software package? How should CRM be better? Tell me. How should online dating services work? Tell some stories. Heck, make them as sexy as possible. Don’t have time to write it. Then tell it to a ghostwriter you outsource to for almost no money. You don’t need 60,000 words. Do it in 20,000 words. Throw some pictures in. Just do it. Then when you meet someone and they ask for your business card, how cool will it be when you can say, “here, take my book instead.” B) You have more to say. More and more companies have blogs. Many of the posts on the blog are “evergreen”. i.e. they last forever and are not time specific. If you just take the posts (mentioned in the point above) and publish them people will say, “he’s just publishing a collection of posts”. A couple of comments on that. 1. So what? It’s ok if you are curating what you feel your best posts are. And for a small price people can get that curation and read it in a different format.There’s value there. 2. Don’t just take a collection of your posts. A blog post is typically 500-2000 words. Usually closer to 500. Do a bit more research for each post. Do intros and outros for each post. Make the chapters 3000-4000 words. Make a bigger arc to the book by using original material to explain WHY this book, with these chapters, presented in this manner is a different read than the blog. Have a chapter specifically explaining how the book is different from the blog. With my last book, “I Was Blind But Now I See” I had original material in each chapter and several chapters that were completely original. Instead of it being a collection of posts, the overall book was about how we have been brainwashed in society, and how uncovering the brainwashing and using the techniques I describe can bring happiness. This was covered in a much more detailed fashion than the blog ever could even though the material was inspired by several of my posts. C) Amazon is an extra platform for you to market your blog. Or vice versa. You won’t make a million dollars on your book (well, maybe you will – never say never) but just being able to say, “I’m a published author” extends your credibility as a writer/speaker/enterpreneur when you go out there now to sell your book, syndicate your blog elsewhere or to get speaking engagements, etc. And when you do a speaking engagement, you can now hand something out – your book! So Amazon and publishing become a powerful marketing platform for your overall writing/speaking/consulting career. D) Nobody cares. Some people want the credibility of saying “Penguin published me”. I can tell you from experience – nobody ever asked me who was my publisher when Penguin was my publisher. And, by the way, Penguin was the worst publisher I ever had. E) How will I get in bookstores? I don’t know. How will you? Traditional publishers can’t get you there either. Often bookstores will look at what’s hot on Amazon and then order the books wholesale from the publishers. In many cases, tradtional publishers will take their most-known writers (so if you are in that category, congrats!) and pay to have them featured at a bookstore. As for my experience, my traditional publishers would get a few copies of my books in the bookstores of major cities (i.e. NYC and that’s it) but nothing more. OK, I’M CONVINCED. HOW DO I SELF-PUBLISH There’s lots of ways to do it but I’ll tell you my experience. A) First write the book. For my last two self-published books, as mentioned above, I took some blog posts, rewrote parts of them, added original material, added new chapters, and provided an overall arc as to what the BOOK was about as opposed to it just being a random collection of posts. But, that said, you probably already have the basic material already. B) Createspace.com. I used createspace because they are owned by Amazon and have excellent customer service. They let you pick the size of your book and then have Microsoft Word templates that you download to format your book within. For my first book I did this by myself, for my second book, for a small fee, I hired Alexanderbecker.net to format the book, create the book design, and create the final PDF that I uploaded. He also checked grammar, made proactive suggestions on font (sans serif instead of serif) and was extremely helpful. C) Upload the PDF. Createspace approves it, picks an ISBN number, sends you a proof, and then you approve the proof. D) Within days its available on Amazon. It’s print-on-demand as a paperback. And by the way, your total costs at this point: $0. Or whatever you used to design your cover. E) Kindle. All of the above (from Createspace) was free. If I didn’t hire Alex to make the cover I could’ve used over 1mm of Createspace’s possible covers (I did that for my first book) and the entire publishing in paperback would be free. But with Kindle, Createspace charges $70 and they take care of everything until it’s uploaded to the Kindle store. Now you are available in paperback and kindle. F) Marketing. 1. Readers of my blog who asked for it got the first 20 copies or so for free from me. Many of them then posted good reviews on Amazon to get the ball rolling. 2. I’ve been handing out the books at speaking engagements. Altogether, I’ll do around 10 speaking engagements handing my latest book out. 3. I write a blog post about how the bo0k is different from the blog and why I chose to go this route. 4. Writing guests posts for blogs like Techcrunch helps and I’m very grateful. 5. Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Google+ are also very helpful. G) Promotions . You’re in charge of your own promotions (as opposed to a book publisher.). For instance, in a recent blog post I discussed the differences between my latest book and my blog and I also offered a promotion on how to get my next self-published book (“Bad Behavior”, expected in Q1 2012) for free. Entrepreneurs are always looking for ways to stand out, promote their service, and get validation for their offerings. Writing a book makes you an expert in the field. At the very least, when you hand someone a book you wrote, it’s more impressive than handing a business card. It shows that you have enough expertise to write the book. It also shows you value the relationship with the potential customer enough that you are willing to give him something of value. Something you created. And you can’t say the excuse “I don’t have time, I’m running a business.” Entrepreneurs make time. And they have the ideas so, again, at the very least you can use elance.com to hire a ghostwriter. Over the next year I have five different books planned. All on different topics. I’m super-excited about them because I’m allowed to push the barrier in every area I’m interested in and there’s nobody to stop me. There’s nobody I need validation from. I get to pick myself. You can do this also. And now, you should do it. There’s no more excuses in this environment. Good luck and feel free to write me with any questions. – Follow me on Twitter Also, see 33 Unusual Ways to Become a Great Writer

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Why Every Entrepreneur Should Self-Publish a Book

(Founder Stories) SoftTech VC’s Clavier: An Investor’s Role Isn’t To Give Orders

vertical8 — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 22:09:39 +0000

SoftTech VC’s , Jeff Clavier has edged his way from a true Silicon Valley outsider (born and raised in France) to the ultimate insider. Since moving to the valley a decade ago, Clavier has launched three funds and invested in more than 100 companies, the likes of which include Mint, FitBit, and Fab,. Not bad for a guy who claims to have jumped “into venture by accident.” Having just raised $55 million for his third fund, which will invest on average “$400,000″ per startup, Clavier sat down with Founder Stories host, Chris Dixon to discuss how he built his business. Clavier tells Dixon by 2004 it had become financially feasible to back “customer internet companies.” He says what used to cost $5-million had been reduced to half-a-million. So, “for three-and-a-half-years I sort of built my dealflow, and sort of my footprint in Silicon Valley by doing angel investments.” While not a major player at the time, he notes, “I was still a VC and I could help entrepreneurs with the financing and figure out how to structure an investment, how to look at term sheets, how to pitch and so on and so forth, and so slowly but surely I sort of built that initial presence in the valley.” Having helped guide the growth of scores companies and learning just as many lessons along the way, Clavier tells Dixon “you can’t have any pride as an investor because you need to be able to help in anything you can.” He concludes, “you are not running the company, you are just supporting it, the point of view is you don’t give orders.” Episode II of this interview is coming up. Past Founder Stories episodes featuring leaders of ZocDoc, TripAdvisor, Charity: Water, Turntable.fm, Bump and many other startups are here .

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(Founder Stories) SoftTech VC’s Clavier: An Investor’s Role Isn’t To Give Orders

NewsFlash For iOS Proves That An Anti-UX Can Be A Great UX

kram412 — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 20:55:59 +0000

Our industry lauds cutting-edge UX. Look no further than the exceptional work of Path. One either swoons over it, or one is blind. But what if that sends a wrong signal? Don’t get me wrong, I feel very strongly about the importance of UX , but since I’ve played around with NewsFlash, a feature-stripped free news app for iOS (iTunes link), I’ve asked myself whether more often than not users work for the UX, instead of the other way around. NewsFlash puts the ‘dead simple’ in ‘dead simple’… Swipe-scroll for a category, tap one, and boom, you get a feed of relevant news items. Swipe-scroll past the categories and you get to languages. Tap, and boom, same category, different language. Included are all the standard news categories, such as Sports, Business, Politics and Tech. And the app has built-in support for these six languages: English, German, Italian, Japanese, French and Hebrew. News sources change from language-to-language. For English, NewsFlash sources from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The LA Times, Reuters, AP and more. Also, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that the app fetches the news items really quickly. Definitely one of the more responsive apps I’ve ever seen. Remember the point I made earlier about working for the UX? Well, try NewsFlash, then try Flipboard for iPhone. Sure, they’re different experiences so we’re not talking about an apples-to-apples comparison. That said, it takes user effort (the flipping) to go through news items. Fun at first, but I find it exhaustive to use (speaking only about the iPhone version, the iPad version is a home run). NewsFlash’s UX is the complete opposite. One could argue it even looks outdated. And yet, it does exactly what it’s supposed to in the easiest way possible, meaning, with neither bells nor whistles. So if you’re a news junkie and want the UX to work for you instead of the other way around, NewsFlash is certainly worth a visit to the App Store.

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NewsFlash For iOS Proves That An Anti-UX Can Be A Great UX

SittingAround Launches Service To Help Parents Find & Schedule Trusted Sitters

Achilles — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 20:15:07 +0000

SittingAround , a new service that allows parents to quickly and more easily find and schedule a babysitter, is launching today. The business is the creation of CEO Erica Zidel, a former management consultant in the Boston area (and mom) and CTO Ted Tieken, who, like Zidel, is a Harvard grad. What’s unique about SittingAround is how it leverages users’ social networking connections – like those on Facebook – in order to build trusted relationships between parents and sitters. If you’ve ever used a traditional childcare-finding service, like Care.com , for example, or even Craigslist, you know the feeling of having to wade through dozens of listings, without really knowing which caregivers are better than others. Who have your friends used? Did they like them? Traditional sites can’t tell you. However, on SittingAround , the site pulls in data from popular social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn, to help you immediately see who your friends would use and recommend. “Babysitting is a complex and unique problem. You have a need that is irregular, generally, but you also want a high level of trust,” explains Zidel. “What we do is we allow people to see how they’re connected to each other, including the people in their community, the sitters that they use, and how the sitters are connected to each other, to really pass trust along the social graph. You’re able to form your own network of sitters.” SittingAround, which grew out of an earlier site that helped parents find local babysitting co-ops (parents who trade sitting duties with each other), doesn’t just help you find a sitter – it also helps you schedule them. Using the site’s free tools, parents can send out a single message to their network of sitters when they’re in need. To reach sitters not on SittingAround, the site supports entering email addresses, to save you time. The sitters themselves can also maintain their own schedules on the site with calendars showing their availability, allowing parents to quickly see whether their favorite sitters are free that day or not. While those are the main points, SittingAround has many other notable features that give it a unique edge. For example, it has partnered with a service to provide free background checks to sitters and parents alike, which will help immediately weed out less desirable quotient. (After all, if it’s free, why wouldn’t someone do the background check?) They’re also working on curating daily deals for select areas, to provide a source for “date night deals,” which could help SittingAround expand from just a care-finding resource to an entire “night out” planning tool. For now, SittingAround is a freemium service. For $15/year, you can eliminate ads and have access to priority support. But the business model is still in the experimental phase. SittingAround’s initial product, a babysitting coop, now has 3,000 families in 6 countries trading care with each other. The sitter-finding aspect to the service, meanwhile, is launching now in New York, Boston, D.C., Philadelphia, Chicago and Seattle, where it has a waitlist in over 1,000 sitters. While not officially live in other locations yet, the Sitter Marketplace is open and available for anyone interested to sign up. The service will launch both a mobile web version and mobile apps (Android first) in early 2012. The company is currently in due diligence with angels in the Boston area, while raising a $600,000 round of funding with a targeted close in February.

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SittingAround Launches Service To Help Parents Find & Schedule Trusted Sitters