Crazy For Tech - Gadgets,Cell Phones,Cameras » user

Marketing Lessons Startups Need to Learn from Google’s Project Glass Concept Video

user — Sat, 19 May 2012 19:00:09 +0000

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Neil Patel, co-founder of KISSmetrics and blogger at QuickSprout.com . You may have seen it by now… Google’s concept video about its new Project Glass . These glasses will do what your smart phone will do only without having to hold anything…you actually see your options at the side of your view. You can get directions, send and receive texts, make calls, schedule tasks and even share your view with another person. It’s a really exciting idea…especially if you love technology. But the actual product is easily years out from becoming a reality. Was Google wise to release an idea so early ? And should startups do the same? Concept videos give you constructive criticism At this stage Project Glass is nothing but a video…and may not be a reality for a long time. Augmented reality experts point out that there are huge hurdles the Google has to overcome . So why did Google unveil so early? It all boils down to the fact that they wanted feedback on the product. Google wanted to learn the good and bad things people had to say about the glasses. The video currently has gotten over 15 million views which suggests that there is a lot of curiosity in the product… but not necessarily interested buyers. It’s just like when Drew Houston released his Dropbox video . There was no coding…just a screen cast of how Dropbox would work. While Dropbox was certainly fishing for feedback on how to improve its product more importantly it was looking for how many people would adopt and use it. The Digg community responded : But more importantly, there were thousands of people who signed up to be notified for the release of the actual product on the first day of the video’s release. And then thousands more after that. Clearly Drew learned that there was a huge need out there that DropBox could fulfill. Concept videos gauge interest You’ll more than likely get in-depth comments from the innovators and early adopters . The early and late majority will typically just vote up or down on it. While the input from the first group is critical for building a better product…hearing from the second group is critical to knowing if you are creating a product that will have mass adoption. But don’t get discouraged if you only hear from the first group during the first round of your prototype video. While keeping costs low, make the suggested changes from the first group to the product and then release a second video. However, if you don’t hear from the second group the second time around…then you may have a product that nobody wants. Concept videos build your brand Another reason for doing a concept video is to make your company look like it’s a company that is on the cutting edge and is doing cool things in secret. The concept video is a powerful marketing strategy for companies that have long production time tables between products…like cars or iPads. Apple will release concept videos like this one on the iPad 3 that keep people in anticipation of the real product. Otherwise they may fade into the background and no longer seem like the cool technology company it is. This is also why Google released their concept video. Remember, however, that this strategy doesn’t always work with small businesses. It’s a lot more risky for a startup to engage in a concept video if the technology is years out from entering the market. The startup without an established reputation or brand is better off just building a superior product behind closed doors . A concept video that gets a poor reception could easily sink their reputation. When should a startup use a concept video? A concept video is a great idea for a startup when two conditions are met: You can keep costs down – Google’s Project Glass video is a high-quality production that probably cost thousands to produce from the sheer man hours alone. Your video doesn’t have to be that slick. Drew Houston achieved his results with something a whole heck of a lot cheaper. You want feedback from focus group – If you are a startup building a killer product behind closed doors you will definitely at some point want to get feedback from real live users and learn from their suggestions . You can do this with a concept video that you only share in private. This will protect you from premature scrutiny from the public. Make sure though you use testers who you trust and can be confident they won’t leak your product early. So how do you create a successful concept video? Here are some tips. Involve the viewers In my opinion the genius of the Google Glasses concept video was in that it shows you exactly what the product could do for you by putting the viewer into the lead role of the video. From the start of the video the camera moves around like it is you looking out from these glasses. This is a great example of allowing someone to demo a product without actually having the product! Highlight the benefits of the features The basic purpose of a concept video is to show potential users how its features will make the life of the user better. This means you have to give examples of ways your product can make the user smarter, more efficient or happier. The DropBox video gave tons of examples on stuff people could store. But then it went on to give scenarios of how DropBox could be used to solve common storage problems people have. Isolate the new features If you have an existing product like the iPad…then how can a concept video help you? In this case most people will be familiar with the general features of the product. What Apple’s concept video needed to do was show off the new features. This could be done without any narration as the action communicated clearly what a person could do with new features like connecting two iPads together, a holograph display of movies and an augmented reality keyboard. Tell a story Another reason the Google video was a success is that it told a story. It was a simple story of a day in someone’s life. It showed him eating breakfast, trying to catch the subway, meeting a friend for coffee and playing the ukulele for his girlfriend…and how Google Glasses was involved the whole time. That narrative…and how seamless Google Glasses fit into that narrative…keeps you glued to the screen! It’s critical to understand that your product must fit seamlessly into the story. If it feels crammed or out of place then this approach won’t work. Create a mechanism to capture leads Finally, if you are going to create a concept video then you need to create a way to capture the leads that you generate, which usually involves driving them to a unique landing page… This is what I think was Google’s biggest failure. They missed…and are missing…an opportunity to capture something like 14 million possible leads of interest. If anything by capturing leads with a basic field that allows someone to join a list of updates on Project Glass will help them to see how many potential customers there are, which would give you quantifiable data to determine if it will be a profitable market. For the startup who doesn’t have the financial resources that a Google has, this is an absolute must. Create a mechanism to capture an email address. Final thoughts The concept video is a wonderful marketing tool on some many levels. However, it may not be the best approach for every startup. You need to evaluate your needs, your resources and what you are trying to accomplishing before jumping in with both feet. However, if and when you do decide, I truly believe that it’s a great way to help you save money and reputation…leading to a killer product in the end! What other advantages are there to using a concept video?

Here is the original:
Marketing Lessons Startups Need to Learn from Google’s Project Glass Concept Video

Newspaper Attacks UK Government For Its ‘Closeness’ To Google

blogger — Sat, 19 May 2012 18:39:33 +0000

UK tabloid newspaper The Daily Mail, has decided to raise the issue of Google’s influence on the UK government, after uncovering the fact that Conservative Party ministers have held meetings with Google an average of once a month since the General Election two years ago. There have been 23 meetings between Tory ministers and Google since June 2010, with Prime Minister David Cameron meeting Google three times and George Osborne – who as Chancellor of the Exchequer is supposed to meet with business leaders – four times in two years. The story needs to be a seen in a wider context. The Conservatives have recently come under fire for having too close a relationship to another powerful entity, News Corporation (as did the Labour party during its tenure). A huge inquiry into Press standards has in large part focused on the ties between Rupert Murdoch’s media giant and the Conservatives. But what the report buries way down in the article, is the number of times the newspaper itself has met with the Government. A Google spokesperson told us: “It’s absolutely right that governments speak with companies about issues that affect their citizens. The British Government makes the list of those meetings publicly available – including the Daily Mail’s 34 meetings over the same period.” In other words, the Daily Mail has met with the Government almost one and a half times a month (on average) since they entered office – that’s quite a bit more than Google has. It’s likely those were high-level meetings, not editorial ones. That said, the issue does raise the question of Google’s closeness to the UK government and its ability to grab the ear of the Government on a number of topics. It’s the kind of access a lot of companies would be envious of. Culture minister Ed Vaizey has met the firm seven times. Culture Secretary boss Jeremy Hunt has held four meetings. In David Cameron’s first months as party leader in 2006 and 2007 (though not yet Prime Minister), he spoke to the annual Google Zeitgeist conference. Three senior figures have moved between the Tories and Google in the last few years. Rachel Whetstone is Global head of communications and public policy at Google and is married to David Cameron’s former chief of staff, Steve Hilton. Naomi Gummer was formerly adviser to Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt, but is now a public policy adviser to Google. Amy Fisher Was a press officer for Google, and is now a special adviser to the Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman. On Hilton, the right wing Daily Mail newspaper has rarely missed an opportunity to attack his more radical attempts to shake up government thinking about technology and its effect on society. But it’s more likely that the Conservatives – in part driven by Hilton’s thinking – have realised that the world has moved away from the green-screen, big-IT projects which used to fill the coffers of the likes of EDS and others, towards embracing a more open standards approach. On the ground this has fed into attempts to open up government data, and led also the innovative project known as Gov.uk , which is taking a startup approach to government online, employing many of the UK’s best engineers and tech stars. It’s also quite something to see a sentence describing Hilton as the “shaven-headed son of Hungarian immigrants” – a phrase which betrays the Mail’s antipathy to alternative thinking. In March it was announced that Mr. Hilton was going to take an academic post at Stanford University in California to be near his wife who works at Google. He plans to return next year, though it’s not yet clear whether he will re-join the government. Of course, back in the real world, these West Wing-like moves of advisers between big business and governments go on literally all the time. We don’t currently have the equivalent figures for meetings with Microsoft or Cisco, or Facebook, IBM or other companies, but I’d be amazed if there were not similar factoids waiting to scurry forth if someone someone decided to lift a few rocks. Indeed, Microsoft, Cisco and many other large tech companies have appeared several times at the government’s ‘Tech City’ meetings. So quite why the Daily Mail has decided to home in on this issue is a little bit of a mystery. It may be that the story was placed as an attack by the Labour Party. Their health IT scheme to store patients’ records failed spectacularly just before they left office, so they would have smarted at the suggestion by Cameron that a company like Google could probably do a better job. The newspaper quotes Helen Goodman, Labour’s media spokesman, who says “Of course it is important for ministers to listen to business, but a meeting with Google every month does look like the sort of privileged access that small businesses can only dream of.” Unfortunately, she neglects to mention the numerous tiny tech startups that have been invited to Number 10 Downing Street over the last couple of years as part of the government’s Tech City initiative, and its purchase of an entire building – Campus London – in East London which is housing small tech startups that have have nothing to do with Google. (As disclosure, I’m co-founder of a co-working space that’s a tenant in that building, but frankly, I’d point this out even if it wasn’t). Then again, Google doesn’t help its own cause. In Europe it does not have a great record on tax. As Goodman points out: “Ministers must disclose what they discussed. Did they challenge Google over their repellent tax avoidance, which was uncovered by the Daily Mail?” It’s here that criticism could land a big punch. Google has been oft criticised for paying tax on less than a quarter of its UK income. In 2010 it generated £2.1 billion in the UK but with its international operations based Ireland, where corporation tax is much lower than the UK, it escapes a great deal of tax. And Google hasn’t always helped its own cause. Last month Google executive Naomi Gummer, until recently a Conservative minister’s political adviser, caused a furore in the press when she implied (not unreasonably?) that it was the job of parents to stop children seeing adult content online, not Internet companies. Currently a debate rages in the UK about creating an ‘off switch’ at ISP level to block porn, allowing parents baffled by content settings or Net Nanny software to simply order a ‘clean’ version of the Internet direct from their ISP. A Conservative Party spokesman told the Mail: “All these meetings have been properly declared and it is normal for relevant ministers to meet with a company of this size.” Ultimately the Mail’s story does raise questions of perceptions over-all but as a major UK tech player, it would be extremely odd for it not to meet with whoever was in power fairly regularly. Neither Facebook not Twitter, for instance, have anything like the huge engineering bases and offices Google has in the UK. Do we want our politicians to remain in a worldview of tech dominated by the desktop and ‘licenses’ or one where developers, startups and apps can thrive? I’d hazard not.

Go here to see the original:
Newspaper Attacks UK Government For Its ‘Closeness’ To Google

Personalization Is Not A Feature

bestcbstore — Sat, 19 May 2012 11:00:56 +0000

Editor’s note: Scott Brave is the CTO and co-founder, Baynote . We’ve all watched from the sidelines as companies have come out in a burst of glory, and then, two years later, spent their venture capital, lost their user base, and failed to monetize. This begs the question – what are the factors that drive a company’s survival, differentiate it, and ultimately make it a winner? In today’s online world, personalization is increasingly making or breaking companies. The companies that win are the ones making personalization a key company value – not just a feature. In the early days of the web, consumers were happy just to gain access to information. However, as technology became more sophisticated, and as more consumers and companies came online, we quickly moved out of the access age and into a state of information overload, often leaving consumers frustrated and confused. Companies that helped consumers cut through the clutter to reveal relevant information had a critical and sustainable competitive advantage in their respective areas. The concept of relevance is critical to the success of Google, for example. Personalization is not new. Popularized by Amazon and Netflix more than a decade ago, personalization is the practice of tailoring information to people based on what they are looking for, what they have found interesting in the past, what their friends have engaged with, or based on explicit inputs like their interests. Personalization has gotten a lot of positive attention recently because it can be used to great effect to organize the web’s information overflow into relevant, meaningful experiences. Winning companies approach personalization as a core value of how they do business – a “customer-centric” philosophy – rather than an add-on “feature.” As proof, here are some examples of companies that have built their businesses around personalization and the competition that they left in their wake. News: Flipboard vs. Yahoo! News In 2001, Yahoo! launched Yahoo! News , providing a repository for news articles that became the first-ever most-emailed page on the web. However, Yahoo! News neglected to treat personalization as a core value – and in so doing missed out on the opportunity to tap into the social graph of personal information to personalize and curate content for users based on their interests. With Yahoo! treating personalization as a feature and not a core value, by 2010, consumers moved on to new, more personalized content curation services that were specifically designed for consuming media. One example of such a personalized news source is Flipboard , which works across Apple devices, and allows users to “flip” through their social networking feeds and feeds from partner websites to find the news articles that are most interesting to them. Within a year of its founding, Flipboard had amassed a $200 million valuation. Today, the company’s valuation and user base continues to skyrocket, while Yahoo!’s continues to hemorrhage. Flipboard won because it applied personalization to consumer choice for news articles that other news providers hadn’t accounted for, sparking the beginning of the content curation boom. Interestingly, Yahoo! recently announced plans to eliminate many of its online properties in order to focus on its most popular ones and make the content on those sites personalized to the user. It seems Yahoo! has finally caught on to the fact that users like personalized content and will engage with brands and services that provide content tailored to their interests. Music: Pandora vs. Internet radio This example seems counter-intuitive – wouldn’t people want to listen to their favorite radio station online? This just never took off. Why? Internet radio contained way too much content – it wasn’t focused or specific enough. Consumers had to work too hard to find the music they liked. Once consumers were introduced to a better way to curate and listen to music, they were never going back. When Pandora allowed users to input their music preferences through both explicit selections and implicit actions to help shape their content stream, it changed the listening experience. Pandora made listening to music online personal. After Pandora, just listening to the radio online seemed like a waste of time. Dining: Alfred (Google) vs. Opentable OpenTable provides a free service that lets users make reservations online. The company first came on the scene in 1998, and has steadily built up its business – today over 25,000 restaurants are signed up with the service. While OpenTable provides restaurant recommendations along the side of the screen based on location, it is a feature rather than being core to the experience. Alfred, on the other hand, is a mobile app developed by Clever Sense (purchased by Google in December) that delivers dining recommendations based exclusively on your inputs and your Facebook check-ins and profile. By offering recommendations for restaurants that are personalized to consumer’s inputs and behavior Google could become a leading provider of time-critical dining data, and a big player in the multi-billion dollar restaurant industry. These examples have all shown how companies that embrace personalization as a core value, and not just a feature can win. In today’s consumer-driven society companies that don’t pay attention to what people want most at any given moment risk losing significant market share to competitors that have built a culture around delighting customers with a highly personalized experience at every turn.

The rest is here:
Personalization Is Not A Feature

Zuckerberg Receives Hoodie, Says “Our Mission Isn’t To Be A Public Company” In Pre-IPO Remarks

bestcbstore — Fri, 18 May 2012 21:42:06 +0000

Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg received a commemorative hoodie from the NASDAQ CEO Bob Greifeld and thanked his site’s users in opening remarks recorded before he rang the NASDAQ opening bell this morning. In his short speech that just aired on Bloomberg TV which you can watch below, Zuckerberg said: “I just want to say a few things, and then we’ll ring this bell and we’ll get back to work. Right now this all seems like a big deal. Going public is an important milestone in our history. But here’s the thing: our mission isn’t to be a public company. Our mission is to make the world more open and connected. In the past eight years, all of you out there have built the largest community in the history of the world. You’ve done amazing things that we never would have dreamed of and I can’t wait to see what you’re all going to do going forward. So on this special day, on behalf of everyone at Facebook, I just want to say to all the people out there who use Facebook and our products, thank you. So let’s do this! [Rings bell] This is an awesome moment. Remember, stay focused and keep shipping” Zuckerberg’s remarks about the mission of the company could worry investors that Zuckerberg isn’t focused on building revenues to a point that justifies its $104 billion IPO valuation. With Facebook beginning trading at a valuation around 100x its trailing earnings, it will need to implement bold new revenue streams such as an offsite ad network or bigger, glossier ads to satisfy Wall Street. That Greifeld would present Zuck with a hoodie after the young visionary was criticized for his immature fashion choices may show that even NASDAQ’s CEO doesn’t take Facebook’s founder seriously as a businessman. The statement echoed Zuckerberg’s letter to investors that was included with the S-1. In the letter he said: “ Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected. We think it’s important that everyone who invests in Facebook understands what this mission means to us.” Despite this morning’s speech, Zuckerberg has tried to assure investors he’s working for them, and not just for the users he wishes to connect: “We don’t wake up in the morning with the primary goal of making money, but we understand that the best way to achieve our mission is to build a strong and valuable company. This is how we think about our IPO as well. We’re going public for our employees and our investors. We made a commitment to them when we gave them equity that we’d work hard to make it worth a lot and make it liquid, and this IPO is fulfilling our commitment. As we become a public company, we’re making a similar commitment to our new investors and we will work just as hard to fulfill it.” But the fact is that Mark Zuckerberg does run a public company now. He may plan to continue favoring the user experience over advertisers in the short-term to make sure Facebook has years to honor its investors. That’s probably the best strategy. It’s going to be hard to convince investors to wait around until then if he keeps making statements like these, though.

Go here to see the original:
Zuckerberg Receives Hoodie, Says “Our Mission Isn’t To Be A Public Company” In Pre-IPO Remarks

Spotting The Next Facebook: Why Emotions Are Big Business

Administrator — Fri, 18 May 2012 09:52:22 +0000

Editor’s Note: Nir Eyal is the founder of two acquired startups and an advisor to several Bay Area companies and incubators. Nir blogs about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business at NirAndFar.com . Follow him on Twitter @nireyal . Tomorrow Facebook will sell shares in one of the biggest tech IPOs in history. New investors will gobble up the stock to get a piece of the global phenomenon famously started in Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room in 2004. But while owning the stock will have quantifiable value when it trades on the open market, few buyers will be able to say truthfully that they understood the value of the company just a few years ago. Ask yourself candidly, what did you think of Facebook the first time you landed on its homepage? Where you blown away? Could you see how it would fill a gaping need in the lives of nearly a billion people? If you’re honest with yourself, and you’re not Peter Thiel , your answer is probably, “No, not really.” Don’t feel bad. Like many of the astoundingly successful web companies of the last decade, it was hard to appreciate the value of Facebook at first glance. But one person who “got Facebook” early on was Noah Kagan , who in October of 2005 joined the company as one of its first product managers. In 2006, Noah was the source for an analysis of Facebook written by Nisan Gabbay. The essay identified one of the most important reasons for the company’s ascent to Internet glory and offers a prescient description of opportunities still to come: “The Facebook success story is most interesting to me because of how daily offline social behavior drove usage of the site. There are plenty of activities in our daily life that could benefit from a complementary online product … Facebook demonstrates you have a great Internet service if offline behaviors can drive nearly daily usage online.” The analysis was spot on. Facebook succeeded because it built new online habits around frequent offline behaviors. Originally, Facebook was designed to replace the physical face books undergraduates received their first week of school. The printed collection of classmates’ names and photographs was an indispensable artifact of college life and was referenced for everything from study group formation to late-night hookups. TheFacebook.com, as it was originally known, offered users a digital way to feel connected to others throughout the day and from anywhere they could access the web. The power of this universal human need for social acceptance and connection helps explain how the company grew well beyond college campuses and now touches one in eight people on the planet. The Need To Feel Ask a devoted Facebook user why they log-in to the site several times per day and they’ll describe features they love and provide examples of how they use the service. They’ll tell you it’s a great way to share photos or keep up with their friends. But below the surface is the need for emotional gratification. Though we can all shift our emotional states ourselves, it’s not easy. Instead of going through the hard work of consciously changing the way we feel, we use ready-made solutions to do it for us. Using products or services for emotional gratification is nothing new; some of the most valued things on earth are those that have the ability to transport us quickly from pain to pleasure. For example, we laud the ability of painters or musicians to “move us” with their art. We shower athletes with millions for their ability to transform the gloomy start of the workweek into the excitement of Monday Night Football. Facebook, and the companies like it, are the new tools we use to quickly elevate our moods. This “emotion arbitrage” is the differential in work between having to create our desired physiological state ourselves versus utilizing a product or service to help do it for us. Facebook won’t be the last company to help us feel good fast. The next web phenom to fulfill our emotional needs will likely contain the following traits: Cued By Frequent Feelings The most successful consumer web companies cater to our most basic and powerful emotions. People may feel emotions differently, but we all feel the same spectrum in varying degrees. The most valuable services create internal triggers in the user, activating desire to use the site whenever experiencing a particular sensation. These cues prompt users to come back to the site unaided by external messages. The site becomes the default solution to satiate their emotional needs. The key is how often we feel the emotional cue. In fact, the market potential for a new company is a function of the frequency of how often the emotion it addresses is felt. As Gabbay correctly noted in his 2006 article, early Facebook users felt the need to connect to the site on a daily basis. Likewise, companies that successfully address frequently experienced emotions stand to reap huge rewards. Pain Relief When we feel negative emotions we seek out experiences to bring us back to more positive mental states. Products that can alleviate powerful negative feelings – like fear, sadness, rejection, anxiousness, inferiority, and uncertainty – even temporarily, can be a major draw for consumers. Odds are that if you’ve felt restless during your day, you’ve visited Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest or one of the other top 25 websites to lift you out of your funk. However, positive feelings fade over time, and when we find ourselves in a negative emotional state again, the cycle continues. The chemistry of the brain ensures this is so. With Facebook, it’s often loneliness that cues a visit to the site. Twitter is cued when the user fears being out of the loop about what’s happening. Pinterest users feel the urge to capture and collect visual scraps of the web, worried they’ll lose the image lest they pin it. Specific Solutions To Fuzzy Needs You may be thinking that to claim websites are used to satiate unpleasant emotions is a stretch. Clearly, no one logs into Facebook after saying, “I’m seeking to be taken out of a state of loneliness. Let’s check my timeline!” Yet, it’s undeniable that the mind compels us to do everything we do as it endlessly searches for rewards and avoids pain. So how does a consumer technology company communicate what their product is for, without actually stating what the product is for? Obviously, no one would have signed-up for Twitter with the tagline, “Twitter alleviates your anxiety of social rejection.” Instead, the company made the value of the service concrete with the tagline, “Find out what’s happening, right now, with the people and organizations you care about.” Yet, in Twitter’s early days even this messaging was still too opaque. So Twitter had to be even more specific about the value of the service. As Josh Elman, an early product manager who led the Growth Team at Twitter, explained to me, “We had to more actively tell the story and came up with use cases around knowing what was happening. One great example is when Conan O’Brien tweeted he was going on tour and sold it out quickly. We told the story as, ‘if you are a fan of Conan O’Brian and were on Twitter the morning of Thursday, March 11, you may have seen the tweet announcing his tour and quickly bought tickets. If you weren’t checking Twitter then, you missed out.’” Same message delivered, but with a specific example to drive the point home. Things To Come With the imminent Facebook IPO, Instagram’s recent billion dollar sale, and unprecedented new sources of capital funding seed-stage investments, a new tide of entrepreneurs will answer the enticing call of opportunity and pursue their Silicon Valley dreams. Though almost all will fail, a tiny few will create products, which will touch the lives of not just millions, but billions of people. Those entrepreneurs will have a firm understanding of human behavior and their products will be grounded in fundamental emotional needs.

Read the rest here:
Spotting The Next Facebook: Why Emotions Are Big Business

Vizibility Launches Its NFC-Enabled Business Cards

bestcbstore — Fri, 18 May 2012 01:43:31 +0000

Love’em or hate’em, despite the best efforts of Bump and others, traditional business cards aren’t going away anytime soon. At least, though, some companies are trying to bridge the gap between paper cards and efforts like Bump. New York-based Vizibility first announced its NFC-enabled businesses cards during SXSW earlier this year. Now, the online identity management platform for professionals, is ready to take this project out of beta and is making it widely available as a standard feature for its paying subscribers and for a one-time fee of $15 for users with free accounts. With these cards, Vizibility promises, users will be able to wirelessly exchange contact information and share “hand-picked profiles, video bios, verified Google results and more.” Given that many phones, including the current generation iPhone, don’t yet support NFC, Vizibility is also printing a QR code on the front of the card as well. Vizibility users can also buy additional QR stickers and business cards and allows users to track when and where their cards were scanned. Once scanned, the user’s browser will open up a mobile-optimized microsite with the contact’s information. The site lets you download you contact’s vCard and will also show mutual LinkedIn and Facebook friends. According to Vizibility, its cards are “the first commercially available mobile business card using QR code and NFC technologies.” Vizibility has raised about $2.6 million since it was founded in 2009. The company’s latest funding round was a $1.3 million round last August that was led by Launchpad Venture Group of Boston.

Go here to read the rest:
Vizibility Launches Its NFC-Enabled Business Cards

Facebook Will Have The Biggest Tech IPO Ever, Raising $16 Billion With $38 Share Price

jos — Fri, 18 May 2012 01:15:15 +0000

Facebook shares will start trading at $38 tomorrow, the company confirmed in a release , giving it a valuation of $104.12 billion. Facebook and its early shareholders will raise just over $16 billion in tomorrow’s much anticipated IPO. At a $104 billion valuation, Facebook is worth more than any other tech IPO candidate at the time of its offering. It also perfectly matches what Facebook shares have been trading at in secondary markets over the last several months. Google was worth $23 billion at the time of its very unusual Dutch auction IPO back in 2004. As of tomorrow Facebook will be worth about half of what Google is worth now. The proceeds of the sale are actually split between Facebook and early shareholders like Peter Thiel, DST and Accel Partners. Facebook is only selling 180 million shares while the other stockholders are parting ways with 241,233, 615 shares. On top of that Facebook has given the investment banks underwriting the IPO the 30-day option of selling up to 63,185,042 extra shares. At final pricing, that would be worth $2.4 billion, but it’s likely that Facebook stock will pop a bit tomorrow. Because Facebook priced at the higher end of its $34 to $38 price range, this suggests that there will unsurprisingly be a lot of demand tomorrow. Bankers will want to price the deal so that there’s a bit of a pop for good publicity, but Facebook won’t want to underprice the deal so much that they leave billions of dollars on the table. Accel Partners, the first venture firm that backed Facebook, will walk away with $1.9 billion from the sale of its shares. Goldman Sachs will take away $1.1 billion after its late stage investment in the company last year. Facebook will have the third largest IPO in U.S. history . Only Visa and Italian electric utility ENEL raised more in their IPOs. It’s valuation would also make Facebook worth slightly more than Amazon, which has a $98 billion market cap. A $104 billion market capitalization puts Facebook at more than 100 times its trailing earnings. That’s a big multiple to live up to, and it will likely need to add bold new revenue streams to justify the mammoth valuation. Shares will begin trading tomorrow at 8am Eastern Time after Mark Zuckerberg remotely rings the NASDAQ opening bell from Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters. Zuckerberg is expected to give a speech or at least a few remarks from Facebook HQ courtyard tomorrow morning, and preparations for the ceremony are already underway.

Continued here:
Facebook Will Have The Biggest Tech IPO Ever, Raising $16 Billion With $38 Share Price

StrayBoots CEO Discusses Making $12 Per Game, And It’s Only On SMS!

vertical8 — Mon, 14 May 2012 05:00:02 +0000

Very rarely do we see gaming startups launch on the rather limited platform of SMS. Mobile games are all about the graphics, the functionality, and the ability to leverage the very best of technology through an app. But StrayBoots , a real-world scavenger hunt via text, has managed to generate $200,000 in revenue over the past 12 months, with nearly 50,000 paying customers. Oh, and did I mention that it’s all through SMS? The margins must be incredible, considering that CEO Avi Millman explained that each two- to three-hour scavenger hunt costs the user between $6 and $12 and it’s currently only available on one phone per game. The company also has deals in place with Time Out, Serious Eats, MyCityWay, and Leisure Pass North America, wherein the partnerships will create co-branded nightlife and food games that are to be promoted by both parties. It works rather simply: just go to the StrayBoots website and choose a city and a game category, like restaurants or museums. You’ll then be emailed a code for your game, and once you’re in the specified starting point, just text the code in to StrayBoots. You can go at whatever pace you’d like, and play on a team, against a team, or by yourself. The game currently supports walking tours in the following cities: New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Washington D.C., Seattle, Boston, Los Angeles, Nashville, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Portland, San Diego, and the U.K. iOS and Android apps are in the works.

Go here to read the rest:
StrayBoots CEO Discusses Making $12 Per Game, And It’s Only On SMS!

Pay To “Highlight” Your Facebook Status Updates To More Friends – A Reckless New Ads Test

Administrator — Fri, 11 May 2012 07:11:36 +0000

Only 12% of your friends see your average status update, but Facebook is testing an option called “Highlight” that lets you pay a few dollars to have one of your posts appear to more friends. Highlight lets the average user, not Pages or businesses, select an “important post” and “make sure friends see this”, but not color it yellow as Stuff wrote when it first spotted the feature. A tiny percentage of the user base is now seeing tests of a paid version of Highlight, but there’s also a free one designed to check if users are at all interested in the option. Highlight could show Facebook’s willingness to try more aggressive ways of making money, which should delight potential investors. But Facebook is playing with fire here. The service has always been free for users, and a pay-for-popularity feature could be a huge turn off, especially to its younger and less financially equipped users who couldn’t afford such narcissism. The official statement from Facebook on this is: “We’re constantly testing new features across the site. This particular test is simply to gauge people’s interest in this method of sharing with their friends.” I doubt Facebook is going to see positive reactions to Highlight, but if it did it could turn into an unpredicted revenue stream. Just the fact that Facebook would test this could bolster confidence for potential IPO investors. They want to know the company wil interested in striking a more advertiser-friendly balance between a pure user experience and the goals of advertisers. That’s especially important now, as yesterday Facebook had to warn investors that its ad business is in jeopardy as more users access via mobile where it doesn’t show nearly as many ads. Here’s how Highlight works. If you’re in the test group and post a status update, you’ll see the “Highlight” option next to the Like and comment buttons below it. If clicked you’re shown the prompt above. Depending on what version of the test you’re seeing you’ll either get a free Highlight, or have to pay a dollar or two for the extra news feed prevalence. Facebook’s testing different price points, but users always pay with a credit card or PayPal, never with its virtual currency Credits. Highlighted posts may appear higher in the news feed, stay visible for longer, and appear to more friends. However, they’re not colored differently to make them stand out. And to be clear, this is not like Twitter’s Promoted Tweets or Tumblr’s new ad product, which are both designed for businesses. Facebook Highlight is for the end-user. Luckily Facebook doesn’t seem to be betting the farm on Highlight, since the user who leaked the test was in New Zealand — a more isolated but English-speaking location Facebook where Facebook seems test features it doesn’t want too many people to know about. That’s smart because it could erode the site’s sense of community. On Facebook what’s supposed to matter is how interesting your posts are, not how deep your wallet is.

Continued here:
Pay To “Highlight” Your Facebook Status Updates To More Friends – A Reckless New Ads Test

Wi-Fi Alliance Pushes Passpoint As A Solution For Customer And Carrier Data Woes

admin — Tue, 08 May 2012 17:00:23 +0000

Smartphone and tablets owners are clamoring for access to more Wi-Fi on the go, or so a new study from the Wi-Fi Alliance claims. Out of 1,000 US-based smartphone and tablet owners, 87% of them indicated that they wanted greater Wi-Fi availability for their mobile devices, and 85% said they preferred Wi-Fi over cellular data “for at least one common online activity.” That’s all well and good (and not a surprise in the slightest), but what would these people actually do in order to gain access to more Wi-Fi hotspots? Well, 72% of respondents said they would be willing to pay their wireless service providers more and 70% said they would switch providers just to get access to them. With carriers pushing smartphones and the wireless data access that accompanies them like crazy, network congestion and management issues can lead to some downright flaky user experiences. That’s where the Wi-Fi Alliance’s Passpoint program comes into play. Simply put, the Passpoint program (which the working group announced last February ) aims to make the process of transitioning from a mobile network to a Wi-Fi access point as frictionless as possible, most notably by stripping out the need for users to whip out their login credentials. Instead, a user’s mobile device will be able to connect to a secure Passpoint-friendly network without the user having to lift a finger thanks to some nifty authentication techniques. There’s a pretty extensive list, but some of them (like SIM authentification) seem to have drawn more attention than others. The idea of a Wi-Fi network allowing access because of a device’s SIM card is not only thoughtful, it also helps to blur the line between that Wi-Fi connection and the carrier’s own wireless data network. Assuming the hand-off works without a hitch, users get a better data experience without having to do anything, although plenty of the specifics (how users are billed, when carrier partners will implement Passpoint, etc.) are still up in the air. Of course, the carriers get something out of this too. The more users they’re able to offload onto their privately-owned or authorized Wi-Fi hotspots means they’ll be able to ease the strain on their own wireless data networks. Beyond that, there’s some more concrete financial gains to be had — carriers could more easily bolster their the strength of their offerings by lighting up new Wi-Fi hotspots in needed areas, not to mention the possibility of inking roaming deals with other Wi-Fi networks that could be pitched subscribers with the promise of quick and easy access. The Wi-Fi Alliance is expected to kick things off more officially in June with the launch of their certification program for mobile devices and wireless infrastructure equipment.

See the original post:
Wi-Fi Alliance Pushes Passpoint As A Solution For Customer And Carrier Data Woes