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26.Sep.07 Web Design Read more Comments (0)

Startup Weekends Take Off Around the Globe

You may recall the first startup weekend adventure that took place out in Boulder, CO. The launch of their project, Vosnap is now in private beta and moving towards an official launch.

In the past three weeks, an open invite from Andrew Hyde, Startup Weekend Founder, came across the net inviting other cities to participate. I’m happy to announce, as of this writing, there are officially six cities with weekends in the works:

• Toronto: Sept 14-16
• NYC: Sept 21-23
• Houston: Sept 28-30
• West Lafayette: Oct 12 - 14
• Boston: Oct 18-21
• DC: Oct 26-28

More weekends are continuing to be added. Startup Weekend is:

… an idea, an experiment, a chance gather the tech community and create a company over one jam packed weekend.

Check out a weekend near you. Each blog will keep people posted about the great things coming out of these weekends. These free events will create some great products for the world to use! In interest of full disclosure, I’m helping plan the DC weekend, which I’m excited to see some of you at.

As these weekends begin happening, I’ll keep you posted with the late breaking news and hopeful grand successes!

26.Jul.07 Business, Web Development Read more Comments (264)

How do Twitter and other Web 2.0 services plan to make money?

In case you’ve been asleep at the wheel, burned out on new web services, or not reading the paper very often you’ve probably heard of the new “presence broadcasting ” market front-run by twitter.com. For something really cool, you should check out twittervision to see the type of messages that are being broadcasted around the world in real time.

So, how do these guys make money?

You would think that the short answer is targeted ads. Twitter will likely build to an even bigger critical mass, then you can them to start layering in advertisements throughout the experience. Notice on Facebook that ads are coming in big numbers and they are turning big traffic into reasonable profits this year (estimated at $100 million), followed by massive profits next year. Word on the street is that their graphical ads are performing poorly for advertisers, as members like to stay locked into the Facebook experience.

Facebook has already started with ‘flyers’ which are posted in members mini-feeds, which are a brilliant way to combine an advertorial message that people will respond to while they use the site. Twitter could do this all day long, posting into peoples’ twitter streams for contextual targeted ads. Twitterers will be up in arms for a few days and then it will be back to normal. The tricky part is that Twitter would likely have to suppress the IM notifications on this, because a user would be pretty mad to receive the ad when they have to pay for receiving the SMS.

Twitter has another interesting possible angle. Active twitterers you’ll notice that CNN and other businesses are on twitter. So when you “follow” users run by businesses, such as CNN. You then get CNN updates which include things like breaking news. In theory this will become a massive infrastructure play where businesses would pay Twitter for the privilege of accessing the Twitter user base. This model has already been validated on MySpace, where businesses can pay sponsorship fees and work with MySpace to maximize eyeballs on their profiles. The smart companies will pay.

Twitter is likely to be bought which provides investor returns, and an acquiror will run through the same strategy as above. Getting bought is not a revenue model, as an equity return has nothing to do with a revenue and profit model. Unless you are fortunate enough to be able to turn out one success after the next and continuously flip them, which could become a business model in the future (Jeff Pulver and Martin Varsavsky come to mind, and Max Levchin is well on his way). No one I know has been able to pull this off, consistently enough, to call it a business model. Serial entrepreneurship will likely grow and expand with the social web.

So the acquiror then builds a fancy spreadsheet, plugs it into their existing revenue model that would be some combination of ads and/or a paid version, and then they apply that business model to the acquired asset. It’s no different than network television, when you have people glued to your environment, advertisers pay to reach them.

The only business model Twitter currently has in place really seems to be generating expense. In the US, the receiver pays to receive SMS, so my phone tells me I’m paying a nickel for each Twitter I receive. My phone in Europe, and for phones in Asia and Australia, is the opposite where the sender is actually the one incurring the expense. So people in Australia use Twitter to send SMS text messages to their friends for free. They send a message, or a direct message in twitter lingo, the person turns on their SMS notification, and they receive the message on their phone via SMS. Of course the sender needs to be in front of their computer to do it, but it hits the receiver’s phone and Twitter pays for it. It’s pretty likely that Twitter, since they are doing so much volume, are paying for the delivery of the messages in the US, even if it is an ultra-low fraction of a penny per message bulk pricing.

For an interesting discussion on this, take a look at Steve Rubels blog at Micropersuasion where an interesting comment discussion follows his post. Phil Wainright at ZDNet takes it a step further and can’t believe that Twitter is NOT making money from the SMS service. If Twitter was able to turn this premium side of their business on, they could make an enormous amount of money.

Look for a follow-on post to examine the new Facebook economy, of the race of developers to put new and interesting applications on the Facebook platform. It’s early and amazing, and we’ll try to dig in deeper to see who is really making money (or might someday).

26.Jul.07 Articles, Opinion, Tech Deals, Marketing Read more Comments (0)

Hold the Technology

It’s been over 150 years since the telegraph was invented and messages started flowing across America and Europe. It’s been over 130 years since the telephone was invented. Both monumental feats not just because of what they accomplished, but the context in which they were accomplished. Consider. Today, if you have a great new technological idea, your chances of being supported, financially or otherwise, are good. Even if it is not a commercially successful idea, the research labs are just as likely to support it as well. You are rarely alone.

But that was not the case then. The rise of technology was slow from a science point of view but also from a social - commercial point of view. Skepticism about new ideas was much stronger 100 years ago because new ideas were rare and hard to prove. And radical new ideas were either too hard to understand, like the theory of thermodynamics, or to controversial and easily misinterpreted, like the theory of evolution.

Then again, if you had a new idea and the public accepted it, could you explain everything about it? Take electricity. Even after Faraday, and Maxwell explained it, and Edison harnessed it, could ordinary people understand it? Heck, scientists didn’t even understand it, because it took the theory of the atom and quantum mechanics to fully explain what was happening to make electricity work.

Lots of things had to change for a theory to be understood. It is possible to have it accepted before it is understood, like relativity. And some theories even if understood, like evolution, may not be accepted.

So where are we at now?

Well we have the Internet. Now at a mature 39 years old. It is well understood. But where will it be in 15 years? Well it is being expanded with the Internet2 model. And this will change the way companies, research labs, and ordinary people work. How is that? Well let’s look at some of the features that make up this new technology.

First there are 13,000 miles of dedicated optical fiber backbone already in place (see map link below.) There is a 100-gigabit capacity along the entire network. Scalability by frequency is unlimited, that is since the backbone is fiber optics, and the transmission occurs on frequency wavelength modulation, this is very different from the current cable technology system. You get higher bandwidth and more frequency transmission, without jitter, crosstalk or any other signal detracting elements. And it runs on Ipv6. Finally Internet2 will be deployable to the same commercial class centers as the current Internet.

So what does the telegram say? It says that commercially speaking the way businesses operate now will be different. The service industry will change because information will be a kiosk away. Instant updates.

New ideas will be the currency of the time. Threshold research will be common and commonly appreciated; again instant updates.

Even manufacturing will be different. By adding high bandwidth systems to the shop floor, information to process or fabricate a device will be handled in ways not in use today.

Thus the Internet of tomorrow will be as different as the Internet of today is to the telegraph system of history. 

The Internet2 current deployment map (2007): http://www.internet2.edu/network/images/network_map.png

19.Jul.07 Articles, Technology/Gadgetry Read more Comments (1081)

Pick a Winner. Top 5 Inside Tricks to Selecting a Winning Domain.

Here are some serious resources to help you consider all of the bases you should try to cover on selecting a great domain name. You should consider all aspects of your online brand in the selection of the name, such as SEO, recall-ability (what was the name of that site?) and applicability to what you do. Hopefully someone using these will come up with the next twitter.com, flickr.com or youtube.com.

1. 
   

   Bust a Domain

   I love this site. You add in the keywords you’d like to see in your final domain, then you select what you would like to happen automagically to your selected keywords. Bust a name will combine two words, add a prefix such as “my”, a suffix such as “ly” or pluralize and drop the last vowel (flickr is an example). These suggested domains can then be sorted by length and you can also quickly buy the domains.

2. 
   

   Enom

   Bust a domain will only search .com, .net and .org. How about all the other international domains?

   When you search on this page, change the “Recommend Additional Domains” to 80 and check the “Check All Domain Extensions (TLD’s)”. This will return all international domain possibilities, some of which require a physical presence in their country and many of which do not. In addition to checking international domains, the enom suggestion tool is outstanding. Using a combination of thesaurus, keyword frequency and other smart algorithms enom will suggest other useful domain possibilities. Particularly when many of the great domains seem to be already taken, this is an outstanding tool to add to your bag of tricks.

3. Rightway Gate

   
   This is a little more obscure of a site but highly useful. Can you buy a .io if you don’t have an office in the Indian Ocean? Choose the “Select Domain Extension” drop down for the international domain extension for a complete rundown on whether that domain requires a physical presence. Keep in mind that you can find cheaper prices than listed on this site, on a quick glance through the major TLDs they struck me as expensive.

4. 
   

   Google Keyword Selector

   You should be smart about what specific keywords people will be entering into the search box when they should find your site. Google Keywords will only give you a sense of what is low volume and high volume. One important thing to note for smaller sites is that you won’t be likely to win on the first page of a single key word in a highly competitive keyword, such as “domains” or “hosting”, but you could instead focus on tail-end keywords that are less competitive that have two or more keywords in the domain name.

5. 
   

   Overture Keyword Selection

   This is still a pretty useful tool for getting some sense of the average monthly volumes of searches on specific keywords, along with suggestions of other related keywords. You don’t necessarily want the highest volume keyword in highly competitive keywords, so the suggest feature might give you some additional ideas on what keywords you could include in the domain for your hot new web property.

Some of the best domains have absolutely no rhyme and reason and they are wildly successful. Yelp.com came about because a friend of the founder thought it sounded good. It’s a member contributed local reviews site, so later they figured out it was a nice shortened version of “Yellow Pages”. If you get stuck, turn to your friend, your mom or someone you just met. You never know where that inspiration might strike! Then you can use these tips and tools to help you to select and evaluate your domains.

Send any comments for other useful resources you’ve found in the domain selection process, and feel free to post a link in the comments to domains you’ve bought using these insider tips. Have fun, and consider buying and developing domains as a great business to be in.

16.Jul.07 Articles, Hot Lists, Marketing, Tutorials, Web Design Read more Comment (1)

Nice Tie: Office Pranks

SlonkyBlog would like to introduce Nice Tie; a web comic showing the life of a Web Designer named Jay. In this week’s strip, Jay talks with his girlfriend about his first day of work and the pranks he and Marty pulled!

Click to Enlarge

Characters (in order of appearance): Jay, Amanda
Strip #0002

16.Jul.07 Nice Tie: Web Comic Read more Comments (11)

How-To: Stop Google from Stealing Your iPhone and Mobile Traffic

I read today that Google is testing Google Adsense for Mobile. So that’s great. Now (or soon) if you run a mobile website or a mobile version of your full website, you’ll be able to make a little cash. There are already many companies in this space such as Admob that have been doing this, but it’s good to see Google arriving to the party, possibly pushing it mainstream.

I have also noticed, with the coming of the iPhone, that a lot of people are now designing mobile friendly sites.

But how will people find your made-for-mobile site?

Google’s Mobile Search is a great and popular way to find what you’re searching for when you are using your phone. Google’s Mobile Search includes the regular web index. Meaning if you have a website meant to be viewed on a monitor, searching for the site on Google’s Mobile Search will turn up results for your site.

But, Google transcodes the site to a size that’ll fit on a mobile screen. This is great for users, as they’ll get the content from the sites they need, when they want it on their phones. But, if you run a mobile website serving mobile ads, you definitely do not want people finding your full size website on Google’s Mobile Search. Why?

Google Strips Out Most Ads!

Adsense and other javascript ads are stripped from the content when displayed with Google’s Mobile Transcoder. This is terrible for the website owner, because they are getting very targeted mobile traffic but when their site is displayed, it’s shown without any of the ads. (Try for yourself here. Notice the transcoded slashdot contains no ads, while the mobile version below the first link has a mobile ad) Why would a user go to your mobile site and have to view ads, when Google will transcode your full site and strip out all the ads?

So what do you do?

1. Build your mobile or iPhone website with mobile friendly data (small chunks work best) or mirroring your existing website in a mobile friendly way.

2. Up until recently, you had to email Google and ask to be excluded from the transcoding service, but now, apparently, you can just add a line to the <head> section of your html page that will redirect the transcoder to the mobile version of the page. See: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35312&query=35312&topic=&type=

3. Wait for Adsense for Mobile, or go with an existing ad server. Throw your ads on your mobile site and rake in the money!

To me, it seems like this is a lot of work, just to stop google from stealing your mobile ad revenue. Maybe when surfing on mobile devices becomes more mainstream, enough content providers will realize that this is occurring and demand Google put a stop to it.

13.Jul.07 Mobile, Articles, Web Development, Web Design Read more Comments (4)

Self Induced Content Inspiration

One of the hardest things about running a web site is keeping it fresh. If you have new interesting content on your site at a daily or near daily frequency, visitors have a reason to come back often. More visitors usually mean more money, so this is a good thing. Plus on a side note, this is great for SEO. The only problem is where do you find the inspiration to do all this writing?

Content development can be difficult and time consuming, especially if you have no idea what to write about. As it turns out, if you are running any kind of analytics program or PPC account you have a tons of possible ideas just waiting for you. The stats in these accounts will tell you what words and themes are most popular on your site and on the web. This is great inspiration because it allows you to see real searches, not just what you think would be popular.

The first place to look for content inspiration is your analytics account. If you don’t have one in place, Google Analytics is a free and easily implemented option. What you want to do in Analytics is find your traffic sources, and then search engines. You should be able to access a list of keywords used to visit your website. There will be a lot of words that make sense to you in there, some relevant surprises, and some that are completely out of left field. One of my clients that does general contracting and clean up had a number of searches on how to clean egg off of windows, cars, and driveways. It’s on the very edge of what they do, but it might be worth writing about seeing as a good number of people are interested. However if a phrase or keyword doesn’t make any sense just disregard it.

Now start really looking at this list. Are there predominant words, phrases, and ideas? And are these themes relevant to your business? If they are, you’ve just found some great possible content development ideas. Make sure you scour this list for any potential topics, you have a lot of content to create and every relevant little bit helps.

Now your other content goldmine is your PPC account. This is a collection of words and phrases you want people to use to get to your site. The best part about this is you can see the total number of searches done even if they didn’t result in a visit to your site. So say you sell fruit and you get 40 visits a day for ‘apples.’ ‘Oranges’ only gets 4. If you’re only looking at analytics ‘apples’ is clearly more popular and content development should be focused there. But before you start your research into the wild world of applesauce, check out your PPC account. There’s a chance that ‘oranges’ is searched far more often than ‘apples,’ you’re just not getting a proportional piece of the traffic. Always keep an eye on which words get the most impressions.

Now that you have a better idea of what you should write about, make a plan. As I get ideas I write them all down in the same place. Then I try to figure out what topics have priority and how to best space them out. You don’t necessarily want to ride one topic at a time. If you run 2 weeks of articles on the same topic and you have some regular readers that like your site but not the current topic you’re riding at the moment, you might break their daily reader habit.

So in short, keep it fresh, keep it interesting, keep it relevant, and don’t forget all the inspiration you need is right under your nose!

13.Jul.07 Articles, Business, Marketing Read more Comments (0)

Startup Weekend Came and Past

With hundreds of posts coming out of a first-time event in Boulder, Colorado, Startup Weekend is officially over. With 72 participants, the event invited people to come together for a free weekend with the simple goal of creating and launching an entire business operation in the course of a weekend. By the end of the Friday night, the final product was chosen and named Vosnap.

Though currently not live (one of the major disappoints coming out of the weekend), Vosnap promises to be the next way to make decisions online. Users can post polls to their friends and people can reply via email or SMS, with results being sent instantly through the same modules. The idea for Startup Weekend created by: Andrew Hyde, David Cohen, Kevin Cawley, Danny Newman, Joe Scharf, Alex Kin, and many more according to the site. David is currently the only reviewer of the weekend as a whole and said it was a great networking opportunity, but problems came when the development team not pulling through on deadlines to get the project running. Rumor has that Vosnap (proposed by Joe Scharf) is 80% complete and is stalled in the final stages. People are requesting the working version be posted, but until then here are some black and white visuals they’ve shared:

User Interface

Confirmation Screen

Aside from these photos, we haven’t seen much.

According to the developers, a team has taken over the final development, but it’s unclear when the final product will be ready for use. You can leave your email on the Vosnap site.

For those interested in starting a Startup Weekend (of which 5 cities have shown an interest as of the end of last weekend — including the Nova/DC area), you can send an email to Andrew with your interest.

We’re still waiting to hear from more of the participants about the overall experience, but currently the word going around is: good idea, implementation needs some tuning.

12.Jul.07 Articles, Business, Web Development Read more Comments (4)

The One-Deal-a-Day Gimmick

One deal a day web sites are popping up seemingly daily throughout the Internet.  These sites specialize in feeding hungry shoppers with a single item for sale each day at a supposed discounted rate.  Sites many of us have come to scan daily, like woot!, Yugster, and Chegg are out there; but sites like Amazon and Buy.com are hopping on the deal-a-day train as well.

These sites, no doubt, include new items daily at a discount off retail price… but how?  And how worth it are the products some of these sites sell?  Is it worth it?

If you are the type that enjoys witty one-liners, goofy product descriptions and an interesting site personality, it may actually be worth it to purchase regularly from these sites.  But if you want quality products at an amazingly low price, you won’t necessarily find them at sites like woot! and Yugster.

Often times, I locate what I see is a pretty damn good deal; maybe a set of headphones for $2, an XBOX 360 Premium for $300 or a set of golf clubs for $100.  But after ordering blindly, I’ve realized I’ve got what I paid for with the headphones – cheap, easily broken, uncomfortable and… discontinued.

If you don’t mind a refurbished product, the XBOX 360 Premium at $300 might be a good deal.  And those golf clubs I bought; I found later that almost every golf retailer on the web had them for the same price as the one-deal-a-day site – some were even cheaper.

It is a gimmick.  It is human nature to be curious.  These sites pique our attention because every day we know there’s going to be something new.  Whether the price is actually discounted or cheaper there than anywhere else, we don’t care.  The sites are witty, fun, social, popular, and appear to be throwing us some amazing deal — never mind that the products are almost always discontinued, overstock, refurbished, or just plain junk.

I won’t even get into their “grab bags” or “mystery boxes”…  I’ll just say:  read the fine print, don’t get sucked in and if you do hop on board the one-deal-a-day gravy train, do a little research before clicking the “I want one!” button.

11.Jul.07 Articles, Tech Deals Read more Comments (190)