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Do Kids Read Blogs? New Study Aims to Confuse

cgseo — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 15:13:59 +0000

A new study released earlier this month seems to contradict findings from Pew Internet Project's February report on the declining blog authorship and blog readership among the youngest generation of online users. Instead of seeing a downward trend in blogging, the latest research appears, at first glance, to have us questioning those prior reports. According to the latest study, this one from BlogHer and iVillage (red flag?) and co-sponsored by Ketchum and The Nielsen Company , young adults known as "millenials" are the top demographic group in both reading and writing blogs with nearly one-third reporting they read blogs and just over 40% saying they blog themselves. So was the earlier study - the one claiming "kids don't blog" anymore - wrong? Sponsor Odd Demographics Studied In the new study, the focus was on four age groups: millenials (ages 18-25), Gen X/Y (26-42), Boomers (43-61) and Seniors (62-76). This is a confusing segmentation of demographic groups because they've lumped in some of the millenials with the the "Gen X" group to create a hybrid group called "Gen X/Y." The term "millenials," however, is often used interchangeably with "Gen Y," so it's unclear why they've decided to break up that demographic group in this way. To boost Gen X's numbers, perhaps? We can't be sure. Ignoring Those Under 18 More importantly, the study simply ignores the youngest generation, the one we like to call "generation I" or the "iGeneration" (you can guess why), which was a major focus of Pew's study. In fact, Pew's study showed that only 14% of tweens and teens ages 12 to 17 now report that they blog , down from 25% only four years ago . And only 52% reporting reading and commenting on their friends' blog, down from over three-quarters back in 2006. In other words, the Internet's newest users aren't blogging or all that interested in reading blogs. Instead, they prefer Facebook, said the study. It's their method of communication between friends and for getting the latest news. Yes, sigh, Facebook is the new Internet. And the social network's latest moves will only further solidify that position with the launch of the universal "like" button for the entire web, the "instant personalization" provided by websites like Pandora and Yelp (to start), the "sign in with Facebook" boxes that appear on seemingly every site now and so on. How this youngest online generation uses the Internet is an important trend to watch. Although their habits may change over time, it's worth considering that their general disinterest in sharing their thoughts, feelings, news and ideas via blogging is a trend that will continue as they age. After all, who needs to blog when you have Facebook? BlogHer/iVillage's Findings For what it's worth, the BlogHer/iVillage study found that those 18-25 were the group most likely to write or read blogs, with 40.4% reporting the write blogs and 30.3% reporting they read them . The mysterious Gen X/Y group was a close second with 28.1% of the group saying they were blog authors and 29.3% saying they were blog readers. Some of the other numbers are questionable, although we have no way of proving their legitimacy or lack thereof. But really: 12.8% of bloggers are seniors? This is perhaps the most shocking number of them all. Nothing against seniors, of course, but I live in a state filled with them , and I have yet to meet a single senior who even knows what a blog is, much less authors one. At the end of the day, the study's numbers just feel a little too bullish on this whole blogging thing for my tastes. Plus, there's little info about the methodology included in the report and, then there's the fact that BlogHer, a blogging community for women, is, in part, behind the research. The truth of the matter is that neither this latest study nor Pew's research is likely painting an entirely accurate picture of the blogging landscape. We've questioned Pew's methodology many times in the past and we're skeptical of positive studies put out by those who would benefit from the news.

The Modigliani Test for Linked Data: Results

cgseo — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 09:56:34 +0000

In a recent post, I outlined a kind of layman's test for the Semantic Web . I wrote that the tipping point for the Semantic Web may be when anyone can query a set of data about a historical figure and get a long list of structured results in return. I called this 'The Modigliani Test,' after my favorite artist Amedeo Modigliani. To pass this test, you must deliver - using Linked Data - a comprehensive list of locations of original Modigliani art works around the world. A developer named Atanas Kiryakov gave the test a good crack. In doing so, he illustrated the core issues facing the Semantic Web currently. Sponsor The challenge of this test is that there isn't currently enough linked data on the Web about Modigliani. Also the key data in this test is the locations of art works, which probably isn't one of the main data fields for art data when it's uploaded to the Web (artist name and art work title would be the two key data fields). Kiryakov wasn't the only person who attempted to pass the test; and in fact his results mirror what can be found already on the popular open database Freebase . However Kiryakov, who is the Executive Director of Bulgarian Semantic Technology company Ontotext AD , did a great job of explaining his methodology and noting the issues he faced. The Current State of Linked Data Queries The result of Kiryakov's attempt is a relatively short list of locations of Modigliani paintings around the world. He admits that the list isn't long enough, but says that it's the closest he could get - not just because of the limited amount of data in the Linked Data Web, but because it's "hard to query and use today." Essentially Kiryakov created code to query a few known Linked Data sets, with custom manipulations to output location data. This is what he came up with: PREFIX fb: PREFIX dbpedia: PREFIX dbp-prop: PREFIX dbp-ont: PREFIX umbel-sc: PREFIX rdf: PREFIX ot: SELECT DISTINCT ?painting_l ?owner_l ?city_fb_con ?city_db_loc ?city_db_cit WHERE ?p fb:visual_art.artwork.artist dbpedia:Amedeo_Modigliani ; fb:visual_art.artwork.owners [ fb:visual_art.artwork_owner_relationship.owner ?ow ] ; ot:preferredLabel ?painting_l. ?ow ot:preferredLabel ?owner_l . OPTIONAL { ?ow fb:location.location.containedby [ ot:preferredLabel ?city_fb_con ] . OPTIONAL ?ow dbp-prop:location ?loc. ?loc rdf:type umbel-sc:City ; ot:preferredLabel ?city_db_loc OPTIONAL ?ow dbp-ont:city [ ot:preferredLabel ?city_db_cit ] } That query was executed in a tool called LDSR , a "Linked Data Semantic Repository" created by Kiryakov's company Ontotext. He calls LDSR a "search engine for part of the linked data web." Ontotext's LDSR includes data from existing Linked Data repositories such as DBPedia, Freebase, Geonames, UMBEL and Wordnet. Here is a screenshot of Atanas Kiryakov's attempt to pass the Modigliani Test. He spent over an hour formulating the code used to generate this result. As you can see, the resulting list was just 8 items long and most of the locations are in major U.S. cities. This falls well short of a comprehensive list of Modigliani art work locations. For example, there's no data about Modigliani paintings in Europe - where Modigliani lived all his life. Other Sources of Modiglidata Kiryakov wrote that most of the data returned in the Modigliani example came from Freebase . Indeed, as RWW commenter Brian Karlak pointed out in our original post, you can get much the same result within Freebase itself . Another commenter, Michael, pointed to a non-technical results page . Kiryakov's result has a little more data, but not much more. However the point of Kiryakov's attempt and blog post was to point out the difficulty of passing the Modigliani Test right now. He noted that "getting useful information from LOD [Linked Open Data] quite often requires a lot of efforts to analyze and post-process them in order to get reasonable answers to structured queries." In other words, it's much more than just inputting a natural language query (note that the Freebase example was provided by a user there named masouras , so it's not something an average user could do). I should also mention that in the comments to the previous post, Bruce Wayne pointed to his company Factoetum's effort to pass the test - which had 7 results, including some different ones to Ontotext/Freebase. Like Kiryakov, Wayne noted that it's "nearly impossible" for non technical people to use the current solutions. Finally, to address an issue that some commenters raised in the previous post: yes it would be possible to pass the Modigliani Test with some manual human effort to track down location data. But that's cheating - we want to see this done using Linked Data. And not just for Modigliani works, but for any other artist. Much Work to Be Done Atanas Kiryakov concluded that "there is still a lot of work to be done, because we cannot expect wide usage and interest in the Semantic Web if writing such a query takes more than an hour and a lot of technical knowledge." While that's true, I thank Atanas for giving the Modigliani Test a crack. At least now I know to visit the Museum of Modern Art when I next go to New York! Let us know your thoughts on the Modigliani Test in the comments. Or perhaps you're a developer willing to take on this challenge? Discuss

If Location Apps are Games, How’s the Gameplay?

cgseo — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 03:45:00 +0000

One of the motifs you keep coming across when reading about Foursquare and Gowalla, the mobile location apps, is that they are games, and the games are fun. The most important thing when it comes to gaming is the most subjective, whether the players are having fun. But it's not the whole story. Were these apps structured to have gameplay, a through-line with obstacles and rewards? Are Foursquare and Gowalla, and apps like them, games by design? And if so, is the gameplay good? Sponsor If you're unfamiliar with the applications, users visit various real-world locations and check in via mobile device. On Foursquare, they score "badges" for visits and, if they've visited a given location more than any other place, they become the "Mayor" of that locale. "Parents often make chores a game to get their kids to do them," said Dylan Romero, Community Manager for The Great Game Experiment. "They hit the part of the brain dealing with achievement and reward to get more desirable results. I think Foursquare is more a game in this sense. If you want to incentivize customers, videogame or not, give them something to shoot for." "The game mechanics are designed to lead people through the experience of using the product," said Dennis Crowley, co-founder of Foursquare. In other words, gameplay is not in service to the game, but in service to the product. "The 'game' for me is to see if I can get a response or, even better, a perk out if it," Klavars, a Foursquare user, Tweeted. Although there is currently no reward, other than regard among the Foursquare community, presumably, some venues offer specials to Foursquare users. Gowalla differs in some important respects from Foursquare. Gowalla uses a series of icon-based rewards called stamps. Given that Gowalla was born from a design company, it's no surprise that the symbols are very attractive. Likewise its "items." Locations are sometimes tied to items that show up when you've checked in. You can hold the items or drop them off elsewhere, which means a given place may have more items than it had originally. The scoring of these items seems more traditionally game-oriented than Foursquare's simple badges. Gowalla also has the equivalent of badges in its pins which can be strung together into itineraries for trips.gowallaferry.png Gowalla also has the equivalent of badges in its pins which can be strung together into itineraries for trips. However, according to Gowalla's Josh Williams, the company doesn't see it as a game at all. "While there is certainly an element of entertainment and fun to be had while using Gowalla," he told us, "we view it first and foremost as a social networking service." "The iconic items are a bit of an experiment for us. Can we lay a transient piece of data across the service and allow people to interact with it by moving it from place to place, attaching meta-data to it (like a digital message in a bottle), or even attaching real world value to it, as in the case of the NBA tickets given away to a Nets basketball game last week. They're simply another way to interact with the world around you." Gowalla requires GPS and that's how a user checks in. Foursquare only requires you enter the address, which has led to cheating. However, gaming is not just in the rules but in the expectations. With Foursquare, the unwritten expectation is that if you check in at a place, you will be there for some time. Here the location app aspect of Foursquare creates an expectation in its gameplay. On Gowalla it is perfectly acceptable to check in to a place you can't really stay, like a landmark. It seems, then, that neither company has consciously designed their services to be games. But much in the same way that a kid finds a baseball diamond in a clearing in the woods, perhaps the users are the ones who've identified and acted upon, the latent gameplay. Because although Foursquare and Gowalla may not be games, there is a game that is being played with them. Gowalla, in requiring GPS and requiring no any real relationship to the place, might be less appealing on the location side of things. Playing Foursquare is also arguably simpler, and therefor more appealing to more people. I think it's fair to say that people with higher gameplay expectations will probably find Gowalla more appealing, regardless of creator intent. People who want quick fun with more of a social aspect may favor Foursquare. Discuss

What Twitter Annotations Mean

cgseo — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 01:42:30 +0000

I love to sit on the beach. One of the coolest things about the beach is the number of layers of visual depth. Look at the sand and it's beautiful, but zoom your eyes in closer and you'll see a whole layer of life running around on the sand that you didn't see before. Look even closer and you can see individual grains of sand, water and light dancing between them. Look closer still and you see that each grain of sand is a unique object with its own texture. If your eyes are strong enough, or you have a machine to help you, you can see even more layers by looking closer still. That's what Twitter is going to be like with the launch of Twitter Annotations this Summer. It's a beautiful vision, with huge potential, but there's another way to look at this analogy: you don't build on the beach sand because it shifts too much. Will Annotations live up to its incredible promise? Sponsor What Annotations Are Last week Twitter announced a forthcoming feature called Twitter Annotations: it's a system for almost any metadata to be connected to any Twitter message when it's published. Inside every Tweet is now a space where you could put or find anything, including links out to further instructions or larger bodies of information. That's always been the case with the 140 characters of content - but now we're talking about systematic metadata intended for machines, to augment the content. The idea is dripping with potential, but also some risk. Isn't much of life's meaning found in the play between limits and the infinite? Twitter has been considering adding Annotations for at least two years, according to Platform Team member Raffi Krikorian. That's a relatively large portion of the company's young life. Every time a new bit of metadata was added to Tweets, like geolocation information was last Fall, the company would ask itself "should we be doing this, or should we just open up the platform for and and all metadata?" Now the company has decided to do just that. Twitter publishing tools can now add a description to any tweet their users publish, not as a part of the 140 character message, but as a small machine-readable metadata field that travels along with the content. What might this look like? We could see Annotations fields like: Link to a media file, like podcast enclosures, photos linked to, etc. Context about the Tweet like where was the author when it was published, maybe what the weather was like there at the time. Your Twitter publishing interface could offer you a special option to write reviews of movies, books, or links you're sharing. The ISBN of the book, a link to a preview of the movie and the number of stars in your rating could be included in the Tweet Annotations. Any way you can classify, describe, append or otherwise enrich a Tweet with words or numbers can be included in Annotations. You Tweet, you attach a characteristic or quality, you define the characteristic and then you provide a value of how or what that Tweet did relative to the quality being referenced. Twitter clients like Seesmic, Tweetdeck and more will make it easy for users to add these annotations. Yes, this is meaningful in large part because of the 140 character limit on Twitter messages themselves, but isn't much of life's meaning found in the play between limits and the infinite? From Annotations Come Analysis Annotating a single Tweet is uninteresting, it's when you hit the Twitter databases and gather together all the Tweets that share a characteristic that thinks get exciting. When those selected Tweets can then be cross-referenced with other sets of data from outside Twitter - that's when the word fecund starts feeling inadequate. Show me all the Tweets from my friends that have links to music and play me those songs. Twitter clients like Seesmic, Tweetdeck and others are going to make viewing that kind of data a whole lot easier. Tweetmeme's Nick Halstead believes that Annotations will be used most extensively to communicate webhooks, links to instructions for a Twitter client to follow. He thinks it will enable game play and help Twitter start acquiring more users again. "Because of the size of the data you can put in the annotations, I think people will come up with links to offsite resources. Seesmic is building their own platform for Windows to support plug-ins, but this reaches much further, but this lets Twitter clients augment a tweet with other services. Sf you were Stocktweets, you could attach a link in the namespace that's in stocktweets, Seesmic could follow that link back to Stocktweets and ask it how to render it. So you could put a chart and any other associated information. It's like FBML [Facebook Markup Language], the ability to embed applications inside the Twitter clients. Maybe threaded conversations. A game of Scrabble where the link points at a currently rendered scrabble board, so other people could look at the board and join in playing it. Annotations and webhooks would allow gaming to start happening on Twitter." Halstead believes an Alpha version of Annotations could be made available to developers in a month. How about showing me all the Tweets from anyone that are referencing the President of the United States (subject: POTUS?), analyze the sentiment in the messages, show me where those Twitter users were located and tell me how those local sentiments change over time. Send me an alert when one of those starts to shift radically. Show me all the Tweets by people in their 20's and in their 50's (imagine an author age tag in Annotations, why not?), living near the site of a disastrous event. How do those discussions differ? There are all kinds of interesting questions that could be tackled when the developer world's imagination runs wild on the terms of description applied to our messages. Of course it will be tempting to draw all kinds of conclusions from this rich data. We'll surely be able to draw a whole lot of value from it. "You can learn something from almost anything," Big Data cruncher and 80Legs CEO Shion Deysarkar says. "Just give me enough data, I'll figure out something." But let's keep in mind the words of social network scientist danah boyd, who wrote the following on her blog this morning: Time and time again, I see computational scientists mistake behavioral traces for cultural logic...Big Data creates tremendous opportunities for those who know how to assess the context of the data and ask the right questions into it. But mucking with Big Data alone is not research. And seeing patterns in Big Data is not the same as hypothesis testing. Patterns invite more questions than they answer. Tweet Power Politics Twitter's Krikorian says the site will probably list "trending annotations" just like it lists trending topics today. There will probably be a wiki where anyone can find out what namespaces are being used for what purposes. Really though, the classification system is going to be determined by the market. That's something that worries a lot of people. "People who believe in building standards are conerned about our blase attitude about how we want to run annotations," Krikorian says. He believes that the developer community will work things out for itself, just as it has in the past. "There has been a lot of emergent behavior around how to relate to tweets anyway, without our imposing much structure around it. The Twitter platform is continuously evolving - the developers will figure it out. Twitter developers iterate in public." That's likely to be cold comfort for people focused on the power of structured data standards. Many people are calling for Twitter to embrace the well-built efforts of the Semantic Web community. Krikorian says that 90% of Twitter developers don't know what the Semantic Web is but that there's certainly room for standards lovers to work within the Annotations scheme. Still, the absence of standard terminology could really be a problem. Annotations can't be changed retroactively, either. Krikorian says that major players will dominate the obvious use cases for Annotations and the company will monitor and highlight really innovative Annotations developed by people on the margins. We'll see how well that will work. Imagination will make the sky the limit for this publishing platform used easily by more than 100 million people around the world. But a shortage of forethought, planning and agreed-upon standards may bring that platform's aspirations back down to earth quickly in the future. Time will tell. Discuss

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What Twitter Annotations Mean

The Art of the Elevator Pitch: 10 Great Tips

cgseo — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 03:00:33 +0000

The elevator door opens. And there stands your ideal investor. It's the chance of a lifetime. But that chance only lasts as long as the elevator ride - you have less than a minute to make an impression. Hopefully, you've got a well-crafted elevator pitch ready to give. The elevator pitch is not the hurried presentation of a full-blown business plan. It's an introduction, an overview and a pitch - and a short one at that - meant to capture the attention of a potential investor. Of course, an elevator ride is a short one. Guides for elevator speeches that say you have one minute surely overestimate the amount of time it takes for an elevator to move from floor to floor. Of course, an elevator speech isn't restricted to elevators. Rather, it comes in handy for any occasion where a concise presentation is appropriate. Sponsor When crafting your pitch there are two key things to keep in mind: its content and its form. In other words, it's not just what you say but how you say it. Here are a 10 tips to keep in mind as you craft your elevator pitch. 1. Keep it short . Be succinct. According to Wikipedia , an adult's attention span is eight seconds, so be sure to give just enough information (and more importantly perhaps the right information) so that after only hearing a sentence or two, someone knows what you do - and if it's a pitch, what you need. 2. Have a hook. As Mel Pirchesky advises , "The objective of the first ten or fifteen seconds is to have your prospective investors want to listen to the next forty-five or fifty seconds differently, more intently than they would have otherwise." 3. Pitch yourself, not your ideas. As Chris Dixon writes , "The reality is ideas don't matter that much. First of all, in almost all startups, the idea changes - often dramatically - over time. Secondly, ideas are relatively abundant." Instead of talking about ideas, highlight what you've done - the concrete accomplishments or skills - rather than some intangible concept or a future goal. 4. Don't forget the pitch. It's easy to get so caught up in the details of who you are that you neglect to mention what you need. What amount of financing are you seeking, for example? 5. Don't overwhelm with technical or statistical terminology . While being able to tout one or two amazing and memorable phrases or figures can be useful, don't fill your elevator speech with numbers or jargon. 6. Practice . Rehearse your elevator pitch so that when the opportunity to give it comes, you can deliver it smoothly. 7. Use the same tactics for print. You can hone your elevator skills by practicing them in writing. Babak Nivi describes the email elevator pitch here . 8. Revise. As your startup moves through various stages, be sure to update and refresh your pitch. 9. Be involved in the startup community before you pitch. Business Insider suggests "Engaging in online discussions, writing insightful blog posts, and participating in the relatively small startup community can earn you a 'strong presence' that gets you noticed by potential investors." Building relationships with investors before pitching to them will help your success. 10. Listen. When seeking to build strong networks, remember it can be just as important to listen as it is to talk. Do you have any other suggestions on crafting an elevator pitch? Feel free to add your tips in the comments below. Discuss

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The Art of the Elevator Pitch: 10 Great Tips

The Modigliani Test: The Semantic Web’s Tipping Point

cgseo — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 08:06:00 +0000

In our recent posts about Structured Data , we've emphasized that most of the current initiatives have been around uploading new data to the Web - whatever the format. The U.S. and U.K. governments have led the way with their 'open data' websites, but much of that data isn't 'linked' yet . In other words, it's online - but siloed. So how do we get to the next stage of the Semantic Web, linking disparate data sets together so that people can begin to use that data? The tipping point for the long-awaited Semantic Web may be when you can query a set of data about someone not too famous, and get a long list of structured results in return. I've decided to term this 'The Modigliani Test.' Sponsor Amedeo Modigliani is one of my favorite artists. He was moderately famous during the early 20th century and has something of a cult following nowadays. But he's not Da Vinci or Picasso famous. What I'd like to do in a Semantic Web is type the following query into a search engine and get back a large list of results: tell me the locations of all the original paintings of Modigliani. As of today, there's no place to type that query in and get a list of structured data . The closest I can find to doing that is the Artcyclopedia entry for Modigliani, which has a list of locations for Modigliani artworks. It's great that they have the location data listed on one web page. However it's not structured data, so we can't query it. There's also not much order to the data, we have no idea if this is a comprehensive list, it's not verified data, and so on. In summary, there's a lot of data on the Web about the location of original art works - but much of it is in traditional 'document' web pages. What we're after is a giant database of art works, which anybody can query and re-use. Here's an early, overly geeky view at what a Linked Data of painting locations would look like (hat-tip @dakoller ): The above is a far from comprehensive list of art works by Hieronymus Bosch (a search for Modigliani, by the way, brought up zero results). Plus of course we need a much more intuitive UI, so that non-geeks can use it too. What do you think, when will The Modigliani Test be passed on the Web? Discuss

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The Modigliani Test: The Semantic Web's Tipping Point

Your Inbox as Platform: Google Calendar More Closely Integrated With Gmail

cgseo — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 17:29:37 +0000

Email may be old fashioned, but it's still where we spend a lot of our time online. Today Google announced that it's webmail service Gmail is becoming all the richer with the inclusion of support for sending Google Calendar invitations inside the email composition window. In addition to being able to insert invitations, you can also cross reference your calendar availability with the availability of anyone included in your email thread that you have permission to see the Google Calendar for. It's not a perfect system, but it's pretty neat and it demonstrates the potential for building cool new features on top of our email inboxes. Sponsor Mashups and platforms are all about cross referencing multiple sources of data or functionality, as in this case: email plus calendar. We wrote earlier this Spring about a startup called Rapportive that cross references email and social media data about an email's sender (see also competitor Etacts ) and earlier this month we discussed the incredible potential in Google's announcement of a way to give developers secure access to the contents of your emails for analysis and the creation of innovative services. Yahoo has been calling this kind of approach Inbox 2.0 and has been working on it for more than two years. Here's what we wrote in November, 2007 coverage of Yahoo's vision - how do you think it's worked out? ( Yahoo Says the Future Will Be Modeled on Facebook ) The social network of the future will be populated by the RSS feeds of the activities of your friends and your friends will be determined by email. The big players won't put a major push into building a new social network. "It is much easier to extend an existing habit than to create a brand," are the words Google's Joe Krause. Your email account isn't valuable because it's got the email adresses of other people who could be solicited commercially - it's valuable because it articulates who in the world is able to command your attention. It contains analyzable, direct communication between you and the people most important to you. [Yahoo's] Garlinghouse says that in the future email and IM will be prioritized depending on the importance to you of the people who send it to you. We're not talking about the number of times people email you - we're talking about the percentage of times you open those emails, the keywords used in them relative to your personal/work profile, there are metrics so crazy we can hardly imagine that are available for determining the importance of people in your life. In your email. Facebook's people-search uses some similar math already. Various Ways Email Gets Innovated On Clearly there are all kinds of different levels of sophistication that can come with these sorts of developments. In fact, two plus years after Yahoo's call to action, things still seem relatively elementary. Rapportive displays data uniquely well but Etacts displays more data. This new Google Calendar integration with Gmail offers some visibility into your and your contacts' availability, but it doesn't tell you what you've got scheduled at a given time. Etacts offers inferior invitation sending but has a whole set of reminder and follow up features that Gmail doesn't offer natively. And Yahoo Mail more closely ties in Facebook than any other email, something millions of people are sure to enjoy. So while all the kids rant and rave about Twitter, Facebook, Augmented Reality, iPads and location based social networking, don't let them deny: email can still be very exciting. Discuss

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Your Inbox as Platform: Google Calendar More Closely Integrated With Gmail

Do VCs Like Games? Gaming Startups and Investors

cgseo — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 05:00:00 +0000

The gaming industry continues to see phenomenal growth - from console systems to social games. The 12 million subscribers of Blizzard's World of Warcraft - once the giant of gaming - now seems small compared to the 80 million Farmville players. Farmville's maker, Zynga was recently estimated to be worth $5 billion - a valuation that appears to bode well for investors and for startups. But are games good buys? Can gaming startups attract the investment they need? Sponsor Gaming industry consultant Nicholas Lovell recently wrote a post on the blog Gamasutra where he suggested "Four Reasons Why VCs Won't Fund Game Companies." Lovell's arguments are as follows 1. VCs don't invest in projects Lovell contends that game developers are good at creating (and even at pitching) projects, but that VCs don't necessarily care what makes a good project - in other words, what makes a good game. "Investors care about businesses; developers show them projects." 2. Investors want to see a running business, not an idea 3. VCs want sustainable businesses Lowell writes, "Traditional games developers are really difficult for any investor to fund. They look like quite late-stage businesses: they may have hundreds of staff, millions in turnover and a proven track record. But fundamentally, they are always just one deal away from bankruptcy. They look like startups from a risk perspective but are like late stage investments from a reward perspective." 4. History sucks The history of the gaming industry is full of failed businesses, and as such VCs find the investment there to be risky. Arguably, investors' opinions might be changing, particularly given the rapidly increasing popularity of social games. While traditional console games and MMORPGs require significant investment and substantial development time before a game is "live," social games are, arguably, "lighter." With the growth in virtual goods and virtual currency, even "free" social games, as Farmville and the like have demonstrated, can become vastly popular and very profitable. Discuss

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Do VCs Like Games? Gaming Startups and Investors

What Can Startups Learn from Last Week’s Twitter Announcements?

cgseo — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 21:00:42 +0000

Last week brought two major announcements from Twitter. On Thursday, the company announced an official application for BlackBerry. On Friday, Twitter announced that it had purchased Atebits, the makers of the iPhone app Tweetie . Over the weekend, there was substantial discussion and a fair amount of hand-wringing by third-party developers, many expressing their frustrations about the company's direction. Attempting to reassure developers in advance of next week's Chirp conference, Twitter API lead Ryan Sarver responded by email to some of these concerns. Sponsor Certainly Twitter isn't the only company at the center of debates about control of a platform (Apple, Google, and Microsoft come to mind), but in light of the flurry of responses to Twitter's moves, it is worth considering some of the (perhaps contradictory) lessons for startups that can be gleaned from the past week's events. Find your niche : Much of the third-party development on Twitter has served to address gaps in the original product: mobile clients, URL shorteners, photo sharing, and search for example. As VC and Twitter investor Fred Wilson argued in a blog post early last week that tipped the hand, perhaps, to where Twitter was headed, there is still room for the development of "killer apps" in social gaming, enterprise, and analytics. Innovate and adapt : Find your niche, but then be prepared to innovate and adapt. Some have suggested that Twitter's acquisition of Tweetie might not bode well for other Twitter clients like Seesmic and Tweetdeck , unless the two can continue to innovate. By adding new features unavailable via the Twitter website, and by linking streams from Facebook and LinkedIn, they have established themselves as more than just a Twitter client - but the pressure is certainly on for these to continue to distinguish themselves from the official Twitter applications. "Of course we're hole fillers," Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur admits , explaining that while that's a good place to start, it isn't the right place to end. Look beyond the platform : As Mark Suster writes of both Twitter and the iPhone, it is important to think beyond the platform, contending that startups should not think of Twitter "as a business but rather as a channel." In other words, a platform like Twitter should be a used as a way to reach customers but, unless you're Twitter, should not be the vehicle itself. If this is the " inflection point " for Twitter, the tasks for startups will be to learn the lessons from this critical juncture in the platform's history, balancing the sometimes contradictory needs for specificity and flexibility and innovation and stability. Discuss

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What Can Startups Learn from Last Week's Twitter Announcements?

Startup Strategy Roundtable: Web 3.0 and E-commerce

cgseo — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 00:15:00 +0000

As part of my ongoing Online Strategy Roundtables , this morning I worked with three new entrepreneurs, each at a different stage of validating who their customers are and building their businesses accordingly. Two have e-commerce businesses, which I love. In fact, my Forbes column tomorrow will discuss the shift from brick and mortar shops to e-commerce and how such businesses are so well poised for Web 3.0. Main Street America is changing as small business owners move online and get rid of the expensive real estate costs. Sponsor Sramana Mitra is a technology entrepreneur and strategy consultant in Silicon Valley. She has founded three companies and writes a business blog, Sramana Mitra on Strategy . She has a masters degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her three books, Entrepreneur Journeys , Bootstrapping, Weapon Of Mass Reconstruction , and Positioning: How To Test, Validate, and Bring Your Idea To Market are all available from Amazon. Her new book Vision India 2020 was recently released. Mitra is also a columnist for Forbes and runs the 1M/1M initiative. Up first was Ellen Sinreich and her company Green Edge Workshops . Ellen is a consultant with expertise in sustainability and real estate. Based on her practice, she has designed some workshops that enable employees to develop strategies that will drive down a company's carbon footprint. She is looking to reach mid market companies in her geographic region (New York), but to date has no customers. Clearly this is a business that has yet to be validated. I believe Ellen is trying to reach too broad a market based on her experience. I recommended she narrows her value proposition to align better with her expertise by targeting companies that deal with facilities and building issues. She asked for advice on finding clients and unfortunately there is no obvious way to find clients when you are a consultant. What worked for me early on was using my personal network for referrals and I suggest she does the same to connect with her target market. Later on, while discussing the Entrepreneur Journeys methodology, I also suggested that folks should read the Finisar case study in Entrepreneur Journeys Volume One to get a good feel for what it takes to get a business off the ground through consulting, and then build a product company through that process by getting close to customers, while generating cashflow all along. Finisar, for those of you who don't know, went public in 2001 at a $5 billion market cap, and was largely a bootstrapped case study. Danny Wong presented Blank-Label , an e-commerce site that allows men to co-create and custom design dress shirts at affordable prices. This site was launched five months ago and has seen a steady increase in sales but has not yet hit its stride. While Danny is well-versed in SEO traffic optimization, he needs to narrow his market to target the exact psychographic interested in being this involved in buying shirts- in other words, style conscious men. I recommend he target his PPC campaigns to the more fashionable zip codes across the country and to go slowly. I believe focusing all their efforts on the correct psychographic will make all the difference. This is a business for a small niche market, but definitely worth building. Catherine Wood Hill gave a heart-felt presentation of La Grande Dame , an e-boutique for plus-sized women that she started with her mom. Having launched a year ago, and with thousands of customers already, this business has been well validated. Their target is women between the ages of 30 and 55 who are looking for high-end designer clothes in sizes 14 and up. I like it when a business is so tightly focused. This allows you to do so many things inexpensively through the Web. We discussed ways to fine tune customer acquisition so the business can scale faster. She said their PPC advertising has never yielded a good return on investment, so I suggested that she targets the most affluent zip codes in the country. I also suggest she continues to do more PR and all the SEO marketing, blogging, Tweeting, etc., that she is already doing to reach more customers. I believe this has the potential to become a very large business. I did research on this segment myself when I ran Uuma, my personalized fashion company for busy, professional women which Ralph Lauren was interested in acquiring in 1999. The roundtables are the cornerstone programming of a global initiative that I have started called One Million by One Million ( 1M/1M ). Its mission is to help a million entrepreneurs globally to reach $1 million in revenue and beyond, build $1 trillion in sustainable global GDP, and create 10 million jobs. In 1M/1M, I teach the EJ Methodology which is based on my Entrepreneur Journeys research, and emphasize bootstrapping, idea validation, and crisp positioning as some of the core principles of building strong fundamentals in early stage ventures. You can find the recording of this roundtable session here . Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here . You can register for the next roundtable here . Photo by Svilen Milev . Discuss

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Startup Strategy Roundtable: Web 3.0 and E-commerce