Archive for the “Business” Category

Someone build this please.

The Idea: A system that acts as a tweet router. The first application; Micro Press Releases.

On one side, Business owners would sign up with their twitter accounts and supply some basic information about their business.

• Name
• City
• Date Founded
• Industry ex. Tech-Web-Social Network
• Stage ex. Pre-seed, funded, established
• Number of empoyees range
• Annual Revenue range

On the other side, anyone can sign up with their twitter account and select the types of companies they would like to receive news about. ex. I would pick all tech startups in Ottawa and Toronto, Digg, Google, and Apple by name, as well as any alternative fuel companies.

Click to enlarge screenshot

Let’s assume this venture is called TwitterWire. The domain is taken, but nothing is hosted there. I already checked.

You would then follow user twitterwire on Twitter and automatically receive all twitter wire news releases that meet the criteria you selected. This makes for a great way to keep up to date with all the happenings in the business/startup world.

To the right is a screenshot with a mockup of how the tweets could be displayed. These two tweets from Devshop and Shopify(1st and 5th tweets) would appear because they matched the criteria I selected, without me having to discover and follow them myself. At the top is how you would submit your own micro press release.

Step 1: Build the site to allow twitter users to submit their business and subscribe to other business’ feeds. Build a system that follows everyone who has registered and upon receiving a tweet from them, fire it off to anyone who’s listening criteria matches the tweeter company.  Twitter wire tweets would be nothing more than a headline and a link.

Getting startups to sign up first would be a great starting point. There’s nobody more willing to share information about their company.

Business’ get to broadcast their news. Everyone gets to easily keep up to date with what’s going on. Everybody wins.

Step 3: Profit

My fiance’s name is Guisselle. She’s a hair dresser at an upscale salon and spa.

An interesting story about gaining a new client via word of mouth.

A lady sees her neighbour’s new hairdo and says “I really like your hair. Where did you get it done?”. The reply is “This girl Guisselle, over at The Spa”.

A couple of days later, the same lady notices a co-worker’s hairdo and asks the same question. The reply is “My hairdresser Guisselle, at The Spa”.

The very same week, she asks yet another co-worker about her hairdo. The reply is “This girl at The Spa, …”. The lady interrupts with “Let me guess. Guisselle?”. “Yes! How did you know?”.

It was at this point the lady decides to make an appointment with Guisselle.

It took seeing Guisselle’s work three times and seeing how happy her customers were before this lady decided to go ahead and try her services out for herself.

How many satisfied customers do you need to have out there willing to talk about your product or service before your reputation reaches that tipping point? This is the point at which all your hard work pleasing customers starts to really pay off. Your reputation for quality precedes you and not just because one person is happy, but many.

This lady may very well not really trust the opinion of any one of those people individually, but after all of them express the same opinion, she can’t help but try Guisselle’s service out for herself.

I’m afraid I don’t think there’s a short cut to reaching this tipping point. There’s nothing marketing or a new software feature will do to build that reputation.

A lot of hard work and making sure every customer is happy. That’s the only way.

Guisselle has put in the hard work and is now at the top of the scale from one to awesome.

Starting a company is like running the 100 meter dash blind folded. You don’t know if you’re opponents are behind you or ahead. You don’t even know if they exist.

One thing is for sure. You have to sprint as fast as you can.

In a perfect world my cell phone, regardless of carrier or manufacturer would know every song that was playing around me over the course of the day. It would let me purchase it immediately and listen to it on the way home or at the very least, I could mark it for purchase or review later.

The Idea

A platform to give musicians circulation in coffee shops, elevators, waiting rooms, retails stores and other public places. This platforms ties to a standard implemented by all phone companies(manufacturers and providers) allowing any phone to know what song is currently playing and providing the means for the consumer to purchase the song.

Money Flow: Consumer -> Venture -> Stores, Carriers & Musicians

Step 1: Develop the platform. Build the standard. Sell the products to the various locations. These are nothing more than web enabled mp3 players with some business logic. Develop the website for musicians to upload music. Handle the sales transactions and take a piece off the top. Musicians and labels earn money and get more circulation. Cell carriers earn a portion of every song sold, as well as benefit from increased data usage. The shops earn a portion of every song sold from their location. Consumers get easy access to an abundant music supply. Everybody wins.

Step 3: Profit

Ever since Digg exploded in popularity, many online companies have tried to turn their brand name into a verb.

I don’t think people want to  “prop it”, “mixx it”, “stumble it” or [any brand name here] it.

Few brand names have become synonymous with the product or service they offer. Kleenex, Styrofoam, and Q-Tip are a few off the top of my head. Even fewer have become a verb. Google, Digg, Rollerblade and Xerox are good examples, although I don’t remember the last time somebody said “Xerox a document”, and I certainly don’t HP it.

What does it take to earn a place in common vocabulary? I think there are two main elements. The first is being recognized as the dominant, if not only provider of the product or service. The second is making sense in the spoken vocabulary.

With regards to dominating the market you’re in, I don’t mean just have a majority market share. You have to seriously own the segment. Your customers can’t even know your competition exists, and preferably there isn’t any. While I don’t know the complete history of the tissue, packaging material, and ear cleaning tool(?) industries, I’ll wager Kleenex, Styrofoam and Q-Tip were the first to mass market their respective products. Xerox, Rollerblade and Digg certainly were.

Next the brand name needs to flow in spoken dialog and be at least eventually understood by others. Whether you’re Xeroxing a document, going rollerblading, filling a box with styrofoam or using a Q-Tip, all brand name uses there sound like common nouns or verbs. They simply flow nicely and don’t conflict with existing words.

Digg and Rollerblade need to be highlighted because I feel they had two elements that really contributed to their brand name success. They were the only product that existed at the onset of their market segment. That is because they where the ones to create it. They grew very quickly before future competitors were even thinking about those products. Secondly, their brand names also actually fit in the English language. Digg is a no brainer. “I dig it” is a common term. There’s no explanation required to those that are introduced to the site. Contrasting this is mixx.com, another social bookmarking site. They want you to “Mixx it”. That has no meaning in the context they are trying to use it in. When I find a website, do I want to mix it? What does that mean?

On RaceDV’s site, we made our vote buttons say just that. “Vote”. Its English. Its exactly what you’re doing. Voting or promoting. Being a race track videos website, we thought about “Rev it”,”Floor it” and probably a few other lame verbs, but decided against them. When I speak about it internally though, I use the term “dig it”. Why? Digg certainly seeded that use in my brain, but what’s the main reason it stuck? Probably because its just English.

Rollerblade isn’t as clean cut, but I think the point still applies. They created an activity called rollerblading(inline skating really). What do you go rollerblading with? Rollerblades. Makes sense. Everyone I know that goes inline skating says they’re going rollerblading, even when the brand of their inline skates is Bauer or whatever else.

Google seems to be the exception to all of this. Other search engines existed before them and they’re name sounds pretty ridiculous. Perhaps you could argue being the first useful search tool is the same as being the first. After all, a hammer that doesn’t drive a nail isn’t really a hammer is it? Perhaps the brand name overcame its silliness on its way to becoming a verb because it was just that. A silly word. People think its cute.

In the end, all of these companies have one major strategy in common. They weren’t trying to force their way into your vocabulary. At least they weren’t being obvious about it.  Being the fifth social bookmarking site and trying to get your users to say “mixx it” and “stumble it” just screams “me too”. Nobody cares for unoriginality, especially when its clear you’re jumping up and down like Donkey on the Shrek DVD menu.

Its time for my morning coffee now. Am I going to Folgers it? Not likely.

Once in a while, an idea comes along that is such a perfect application of a technology, it makes you think whoever came up with that is truly a genius.

The latest I’ve seen is reCAPTCHA. There’s a good writeup about it over at arstechnica.

Photo by Lin Pernille

In short, reCAPTCHA is a standard CAPTCHA with the source for the images coming from old hard copy documents that need to be digitized.

Why is this truly genius? It solves two problems in one shot and everybody wins. On one side there is a group of people that are trying to digitize old printed text, much of which is too damaged to use OCR scanning technology.

On the other side, images for CAPTCHA need to be generated. I know this is an automated task and no longer an very difficult issue, but nonetheless, new images are needed.

So we’ve got a source of images, and a need for images. Apply a bit of technology to take care of the details and you’ve got a pretty good solution.

Now books are digitized at a faster pace, and the cost of all the man hours is saved. According to the article over 100 million CAPTCHA’s of all types are handled annually. Imagine the savings! So far forty thousand sites have the free reCAPTCHA tool. I’d love to see reCAPTCHA’s own stats on how many words have been process in the year they’ve been live.

Simple and everybody wins. Genius.

I’ve installed the reCAPTCHA Wordpress plugin on this site. Check it out below in the comments.

Imagine the challenge of a large scale roll out like the new Apple iPhone, app store, iTunes and MobileMe all at once. Well, you don’t have to. Apple rolled out all those new releases at once and we saw what happened. Phones couldn’t be activated, people using .mac weren’t able to access email for up to 8 hours and so many of the applications on the app store were and still are buggy.

With a failure this epic, how would you expect a company CEO(or any leaders in the company for that matter) to react? I have to give credit to Steve Jobs. His memo to the company is pure class.

At a time when you think execs would be tearing a strip off of managers(who knows, maybe Steve did behind closed doors), he managed to get the perfect message across to the company as a whole. – We screwed up, we have the potential to get it right. Let’s do it. -

He let everyone know that what happened was a terrible mistake without coming across too harsh, and without minimizing his disappointment either. He then summed up the mistakes they made, how they plan to prevent them from happening again, then finished off by providing the motivation to inspire everyone to make things right.

Hats off to Steve Jobs for a handling a negative situation in a very positive way.