February 2012
6 posts
8 tips for new entrepreneurs
Jeff Richards, entrepreneur turned VC recently shared his thoughts on what he’d recommend to entrepreneurs now looking from the other side. It struck such a core with me that I’m going to post it here, it’s thoughtful and true.
1) Keep your options open. The smartest second- and third-time entrepreneurs I see raise capital in a very focused and efficient manner. They...
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Offline shopping how it should be. Apple does it...
I’m in Palo Alto, and I needed something for my iPad, I walk into the apple store and have the perfect retail experience. Here’s how retail should be:
I immediately get approached by one of the many assistants, all friendly. One was an old man which I love since technology shouldn’t just be for young people and geeks.
The thing I want isn’t in the shelves but the...
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Create like a God, command like a king, work like...
Quote of the day. This could just about be the recipe for succes as a startup founders and CEOs in general.
Photo credits Harold Edgerton, from here
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Curated collections: The new place to find...
Contextual commerce is going to be a game changer.
I believe it will change how we select things to buy online. For years we’ve been talking about online to offline, now here a way to do that in a simple, natural and meaningful way.
Pinterest is the best example right now, here’s a section from an excellent Mashable article, which you really should read.
“Shoppers are...
January 2012
5 posts
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WHAT DO THE BEST USE TO MANAGE WORKFLOW?
A major part of succeeding is having tight operations, adhering to ambitious schedules and keeping the workflow optimized. But what’s the best tools for this?
I am a part of a close network of 150 tech CEO and CTO and the likes in London. We’ve just had a long knowledge share about what we all use to manage this. This is what these successful companies use (my own categorizations,...
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Can you use Instagram images, legally?
Following my hunt for good images you’re allowed to use commercially to “prettify” products and websites, I’ve been looking into Instagram.
So they offer an API which gives access to the images. But they also state that essentially the images by default are ´All Rights Reserved´. As far as I can think, that mean you get access to the images, but basically not the...
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You're allowed to use Flickr photos
This is an important question for many of us, especially when you’re building services which integrate a lot of photos. We need to protect our companies against potentially infringing on others’ right, but also because most of us actually want to do the right thing.
It’s something I was reading up on tonight and I found this excellent post by Skelliewag.org called A Complete...
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WatchTo all you wonderful adventurous spirits out there. Who change the world as you live it. Watch this, you deserve it.
(credits to Rockstart Accelerator)
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2012 is the year of social curation
UPDATED: I’ve received feedback which demonstrate I should explain myself better:)
(To me) social curation is not simply reposting or retweeting. While this provides a social filter to content it only solves part of the problem. In order for content to be truly relevant services need to enable people to set up further filtering themselves, so you only receive certain information from...
December 2011
7 posts
1 tag
WatchMy first interview showing nipple. ha ha. Go to 7min 43 seconds. From The Europas Awards held by TechCrunch in London. Although Everplaces is in closed beta and not doing press, there is a snippet of info about it here.
Thanks to the wonderful @romylondon for this excellent video of TheEuropas: You can see the full story on http://daretoask.tumblr.com/
Credit to Redg Snodgrass, @redgsnodgrass,...
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RULES FOR BUILDING STRONG TEAMS
I am totally passionate about building team culture. I like to think of it as building a tribe. I believe it is our strongest competitive asset as a startup, so it’s a core skill CEOs need to acquire.
Sadly, many CEO’s actions are driven by their own ego and need for recognition, which is often counter productive for the company. To clarify, all CEO are driven by a need to...
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Most app downloads are in the weekend
When should you release your app? Perhaps in the weekend if you want high download figures. According to this chart at least…
While the the Android marketplace and Apple’s App Store may have different user bases, both Distimo and Google show that the busiest time for app downloads is the weekend.
The most popular time for users to download Android apps is Sunday at 9:00 pm.
...
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Saving the planet in small little steps...
If my grandmother was president, then we wouldn’t have climate problems. Global warming would be a distant rumour and landfills wouldn’t be overflowing. Because my grandmother, like many others in her generation, doest think big fluffy thoughts about conservation, she acts green by instinct.
Today I asked for wrapping paper, and she produced a huge pile of reused paper. When anyone...
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HOW ENTREPRENEURS THINK DIFFERENTLY
Why can entrepreneurs achieve big results with little ressources? And why can they do stuff faster than much larger companies?
It’s because entrepreneurs think differently…
Big corps and business school teach us to achieve success by setting goal. You set the goal. Then you work to achieve it in a linear fashion.
Entrepreneurs think totally different. We think; this is the...
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Winning the talent war
Attracting talent is the key challenge for any company. All other results stem from this. Brilliant products, service and concepts are created by brilliant people, so you are who you hire.
Here’s an interesting info graphic on the talent war between some of the giants.
Top Prospect (who did the analysis) broke it down into a ratio to compare how many new people were hired for each...
November 2011
8 posts
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It's a world of opportunity!
Seen at Gatwick Airport’s HSBC billboards.
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Old giants beat Apple in China
Many smartphone manufactorers reported strong sales in China this year. And the old giants are still in the lead.
24 million smartphone units were shipped to China in Q3 2011. Nokia has 28% of the sales with its mishmash of operating systems and Samsung 17%. China accounted for 12% of Apples total sales in 2011, up from 2% in 2009. But Apple still doen’t even get it’s own listing...
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Should you be thinking China?
This week China surpassed the US in amount of smartphones distributed. 24 million units were shipped to China in Q3, more than the 23.3 million shipped to the US
This creates opportunities in apps, mobile commerce and mobile distribution models for the fast thinking entrepreneur.
My thinking is that mobile entrepreneurs and businesses should be throwing a lot of energy into understanding the...
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Facebook on doing business
Today we had a nice visit from Facebook here at Founders House. Here’s the best from the talk:
John Ndege is from their New York department. He was at Founders House talking about how to work best with Facebook if you’re a startup or a developer. He also shared some fun anecdotes of how its been being at the company from when they had 8m users to the 800m users they have today. Here...
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Fact: Foreigners are good for your economy (stats)
As many other liberals and humanists I am sad about the last decade’s growing negativity towards foreigners in my country.
All over Europe right wing parties are voted into parliament, often to fight “foreigners from taking our jobs and benefits”. Here’s some facts which proves exactly the opposite:
Ian Goldwin from Oxford University has researched how much of the...
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WatchWatch and weep. Excellent video about how forward-thinking media companies should interact with their communities. The days of old media are gone.
In this video you can hear the head of social media at Al Jezeera. Whose use and understanding throughly impressed. Basically the collect, verify and publish journalistic information via the crowd - this is journalism 2.0.
The 50min long video is...
HEAT MAP OF WONDERFUL PLACES
everplaces:
Here’s our first heat map! These are the locations Everplaces users are saving because they find the remarkable, noteworthy or interesting.
It’s the first heat map we’ve produced since we opened for users last Tuesday. We’ll keep them coming, we love infographics!
We are even looking at incorporating a live heat map on our landing page so you can see what’s being saved right...
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Great tools for startups - Updated
Updated list! Yesterday we started the beta release of Everplaces. We’re drip feeding access to be able to improve continously with all the feedback we get in every round. Every round is about a day and we give 350 people access per day.
Below are some tool that enable us to do this, perhaps they could help your team too?
New: Zendesk. We started testing Zendesk, we love the guys behind...
October 2011
9 posts
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Excellent tool for measuring website effectiveness
Everyone wants to know how well their websites are optimized and what could be done to improve its page rank in Google. I just found a tool that tell you exactly that. In an organised and detailed form. For free! (no, I do not own shares in this company:))
So I put Everplaces through websitegrader linking our website to one of our competitors so I had...
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Funded entrepreneurs see competitors everywhere,...
“Many entrepreneurs who have already secured venture capital view every company within a hundred miles of their business as competitive.
Many entrepreneurs who haven’t secured funding don’t think anything is directly competitive.”
Famous VC Fred Wilson says this today in a casual comment. I think it is worth a thought - how peculiar that the perception of your surroundings change like...
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How to use Angel List to raise money
I read an excellent post on Boost Innovation on how to use the Angel list to raise money if you’re a startup. Here is some practical, hands on advice from an entrepreneurs who did it himself. Matt Thazhom, CEO of PowerInbox
BI: How long did it take to raise your seed round? MT: We got our first commitment within a week of posting on AngelList. It then took about 3 months to get to our...
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One-night-stands rock for your long tail business...
This morning was the Rugby World Cup final. I would have been more than happy to pay to watch it, but ended up following it on my mobile because the local channels made it too hard to purchase. Long tail starts with what I call The One-Night-Stand buying behavior, and if you get that, then you have lots of chance to sell more.
In Denmark where I live Rugby is not broadcast. But after some...
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Amazing chart of what Amazon has released this...
Everybody is talking about lean product development, agile development, short release cycles and frequent smaller product launches. And here it is. Here’s someone who’ve actually managed that. Above is a chart of which products Amazon launched last year. Pretty impressive with the chaos having 15,000 engineers to coordinate automatically brings.
I realize you probably cant read the...
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Governments do not build startups!
Yesterday one of the organisers of yet another government programme for “accelerating the growth of growth tech startups” came to see me. Thinking that perhaps I could tell him which startups they should select for a new programme for startups.
But here is the thing. They should select none. They should cancel the whole bloody idea. Because it is yet another hopeless initiative that...
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WatchWhy and how Amazon built AWS. Here’s the video with @werner - father of the cloud.
Quite interesting insights on: - Long tail businesses - Scaling - Amazon’s Strategy
I posted more stuff on this topic a few weeks ago, in case you want to hear more scroll down. Thanks for @HackFwd for the video, you can see more of their videos here
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How to test your product for market fit fast and...
Fast product development based on hard user data, rather than gut instinct, is all the rage in software development these days. Lean Startup, The Startup Genome and just about every self respecting CTO is hailing it as the new black.
Personally I agree and have there been looking into which forms of testing Everplaces can do fast and cheaply. We’d love to share them with you:
- Write the...
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Why more is less when it comes to notifications
Twice recently have I signed up for services where the company seems to think they the more they email me the more I will like the product. The reality is, not surprisingly, almost directly the opposite.
There is a very fine line between staying “front of mind” and just being plain annoying.
An example, two weeks ago I was on the jury of the excellent Arctic15 event a new launch...
September 2011
7 posts
3 tags
Watch
How to write a killer deck to get funded
Your presentation is one of the first steps to articulating your idea, so whether your a startup looking to raise capital, a company wanting to form partnerships or an employee trying to persuade your company to go with your ideas building a strong deck is a core skill.
I stumbled upon this clear and clean presentation on how to build a deck by...
Insight: How and why AWS was built
The other day I had the pleasure of meeting Amazon CTO Werner, the man
behind Amazon’s cloud service. As the father of the cloud I was curious to learn more about why and how he built AWS. Luckily he was
happy to share:-)
The first insight is that Amazon built the cloud hosting service to
deal with their own scaling problems. They quickly figured that if
they could solve their...
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How to succeed - Key learnings from Startup Genome...
In the last few years we’ve started getting data on how to build a startup. We now have quantitative data which founders can use to improve, tweak and accelerate their progress. Personally I am immensely interested in everything that can get us one step closer to success, and I think all founders should be focussed on working on their business instead of just in it.
Yesterday I met with...
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WatchHow do cyborg anthropologist see technology evolving?
Here’s Amber Case on Cyborg Anthropology and the Future of the Interface. This was one of the top talks at The Conference in Sweden. If you’re into web, trends, users and technology this is well worth the 50 minutes! Really. This woman just takes things two steps further.
Bio: Amber Case is a cyborg anthropologist and user...
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Success - first step is turning up
I went to Seedcamp week this week. As I am turning up to tons of other events over the next months. London is always summing with energy and opportunity as lots of Europe’s key investors, founders and new talent converge. Being there provides opportunity in itself as you meet so many useful business contacts.
My point is, that the first step in succeeding is simply turning up. Visibility and...
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The six weapons of influence for a launch strategy
According to Robert Caildini six weapons of influence exists. I’ve been looking at them as we’re deciding how to launch Everplaces. Here they are, in order of importance for launch strategies. As I see it anyway.
Social Proof - People will do things that they see other people are doing. So, all your friends are using it then you’re probably...
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Babyboomers - the next demographic layer in...
My mum got a kindle today. And my dad an iphone. They are totally non-techies. Is this a sign that we’ve hit the the next wave in user adoption of tablets and smartphones?
It made me ponder whether we have reached the tipping point of these two technologies. And marvel at how fast this happened. I mean, when 50-something, retired, middle class people with no technical skills or tech...
August 2011
11 posts
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WatchI was so lucky to do a shared talk with Naveen Selvadurai, co-founder of Foursquare, on How to find Business Opportunities by Thinking Disruptively last week at TheConference.
Here is Naveen’s talk about how FourSquare was started by two guys part time and now have more than 10million users - all because they disrupted the market.
On Twitter:naveen @mediaev
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WatchHow to find Business Opportunities with Disruption. My talk from Media Evolution’s The Conference in Sweden this week.
Key points from the talk:
- “If I’d asked people what they wanted they would have said faster horses!” - “If your grandmother understands it, then you are being too conservative” - Which companies are good examples for disruptive...
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Don't let your startup do one-night stands! What...
We recently made a bold decision in Everplaces not to do one-night stands. As a company I mean. Let me explain.
We’ve been looking at strategies for spreading the product when it is launching in September, and had a number of ways we felt we could get users fast. For a short while this was tantalizing until we looked each other in the eyes and reaffirmed that we want to build an excellent...
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Watch
Related to the post above, here’s Eric Ries on the advantages of learning from a small number of early customers to improve and perfect your product before exposing it to a wider audience. “Don’t be in a rush to get big,” he sums up at the end, “be in a rush to have a great product.”
Ries argues that an entrepreneur’s greatest advantage is their obscurity. If your first product sucks, at...
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How to make your pitch memorable
I was just reminded of an excellent technique to make your pitch structured and memorable, the 4 Things technique. Here’s how:
So, before you start creating your slides, you write down the four major points you want to get across to the investor (or client, or partner etc). These are the overall things you want him to think about you after your meeting.
An example. Here are my 4 Things...
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Where you are located matters. How location...
If you want to create a place where entrepreneurship thrive then dont forget space. A close proximity to other entrepreneurs is a vital part of building a strong startup.
“One of the most important, and underrated, aspects of entrepreneurship clusters is location. Entrepreneurs don’t need “teaching” so much as space. A place to gather, share ideas, experiment, fail, and...