The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘customer’

Scout Labs, a SaaS dashboard that makes it easy to keep track of what people across the internet are saying about particular topics or brands, is releasing a new version of its realtime, user-friendly dashboard.

Scout Labs has added several new collaboration features such as new ticketing and assignments notifications. So a user could see an important Tweet and assign and send the mention to another employee for follow-up. The new version also integrates more data, including forums, discussion boards, news sources, Twitter, to be analyzed in realtime. The release also includes more powerful graphing capabilities to break out data.

Scout Labs not only imports a large volume of social media data to track, but also take a deep look at this data to score for sentiment, identify trends, extract customer rants, raves, wishes, caveats, issues, comparisons and more. The dashboard will also identify new memes of conversation and filter content for spam and porn. And the product features real-time focus groups.

The startup’s offering is also attractive because its pricing is basic. Companies pay a simple one-time fee to use the service, with an unlimited amount of users. The dashboard costs $199 per month for unlimited search results. Scout Labs doesn’t charge a fee per seat or per result. We initially reviewed Scout Labs’ product in 2007 and are big fans of tracking dashboard. But the real verdict lies in the eyes of the customer, and young startup has a number of big-name clients using its social media dashboard, including Coca-Cola, Netflix, McDonalds and Disney.

This time last week I rattled off the world’s laziest column. I was struggling against my book deadline which expired 24 hours later and I simply didn’t have time to write anything else. This week should have been different; I should have finished the book days ago and now be sitting on a beach in the Caribbean, sipping a Diet Coke martini and lazily writing a long, well-thought-out column about some vital issue of the day. Why it’s inadvisable to write a mea culpa in the passive voice (otherwise it’s just a ‘culpa’). Something like that.

And yet, and yet – the fact that, seven days later, I’m still sitting at my desk and I still haven’t delivered the manuscript to my publisher, should give a hint to how perilous things are right now. I’m Wile E. Coyote about five seconds after he looks down and realises he’s overshot the cliff. And yet despite my urge to sack off this week’s column and focus on lessening the size of crater I’m about to leave in the desert floor, there’s something on which I can’t remain silent on any longer. Four words which I’ve been seeing again and again all week, and which threaten to drive me mad…

“A victory for authors.”

That’s how some people are describing Amazon’s capitulation to Macmillan over the pricing of ebooks. They say it in the same tone as people describe more expensive milk as “a victory for farmers” or subsidies for domestic cars as “a victory for American auto workers”, which is to say the same tone as you might use to pity a cat with three legs.

Poor authors, after all, need all the help they can get. They work for years on their Great Novel, probably subsisting on stale cheese and rats’ milk as they do so, and what thanks do they get? A measly royalty, chipped away at by heavy discounting in book stores. Thank God then for Macmillan taking a stand against Amazon and its aggressive discounting. And thank Jesus for all of the other publishers bravely following them.

Oh please.

First a few facts, in the form of a disclosure statement. I am an author. Before that I was a publisher. Although my publisher is now Hachette, I’ve been published in the past by Macmillan, both in the UK and the US. Macmillan were a partner of the publishing house I co-founded, and were responsible for distributing all of our titles. Richard Charkin, the former CEO of Macmillan, was an advisor. I like Macmillan. I feel, then, somewhat qualified to call bullshit on the claim that this deal is good for anyone – including Macmillan and especially including authors.

Much like the monarchy, Macmillan started life in Britain even though it’s now controlled by Germans. Its British roots go to the very heart of their negotiations with Amazon. In America, books have always been available at a discount – with book stores relatively free to set prices as they wished. Of course, publishers still choose their wholesale price, but there’s nothing to stop, say, Borders from heavily discounting bestsellers to get people through the door. Publishers didn’t necessarily like this as it led to booksellers demanding more aggressive discounting (sometimes more than 60% off the cover price), but they didn’t have much of a choice but to accept. The fact is that publishers couldn’t justify opening up their own stores, so if they wanted readers to be able to actually read their books, they had to keep bookstores happy.

But that’s not how things used to work in the UK.

In the UK, way back in 1900, publishers corralled retailers into the Net Book Agreement (NBA); an agreement between British publishers and booksellers that books would be sold at the price specified on the cover. If a bookseller offered so much as a penny discount, then the publisher would simply withdraw all of their books from that bookseller and encourage other publishers to do the same. The arrangement suited everyone; book shops were the only place to buy new books and the NBA meant they didn’t have to worry about rivals undercutting them; this particularly benefited independent bookshops. For their part, publishers knew exactly how much they’d be getting for each title and authors knew how much of that would form their royalty.

It took until the late 90s for the Restrictive Practices Court to declare that the Net Book Agreement was anti-competitive and should be scrapped. Shortly afterwards, Borders entered the UK market, hundreds of UK independent bookshops went bankrupt and publishers decided to change their contracts with authors. Now, instead of being based on the cover price of a book, the author’s royalty would be based on ‘net receipts’, which is to say the price that publishers actually received from bookshops.

Since 1997, that’s how things have stayed. Authors learned to adjust pretty quickly, especially as fewer than 20% of titles actually ever earn back their advance and start paying royalties. But publishers have remained annoyed. Deep discounting cuts directly into their profits. There was one area, though, where publishers could still make a killing on every sale: hardback books. The fact is that printing a hardback book, as opposed to a paperback, costs a matter of pennies more. But there is a perception amongst book buyers that they are far more expensive, a perception that it has been in no one’s interest to correct as it allows them to be sold for twice the price of paperbacks. Even with booksellers demanding deep discounts, the publishers still make a ton of profit on each hardback sale. By releasing the hardback book months before the paperback, publishers can subsidise a huge amount of their business from hardback sales, while booksellers can still discount highly to get people through the door.

And then along came the Kindle and everything went to hell.

Before e-readers, publishers didn’t care about ebooks. You could tell this by the fact that they gave authors really generous royalties on their electronic sales. It was an easy item to appear generous over – so they could fuck you on the paperback royalty. No one read books on their computer so it was no huge loss. For the same reason, publishers were happy to release ebooks at the same time as hardbacks – it wasn’t like the sales of the former were cannibalizing the latter.

But now, with ebook sales soaring, and with the iPad looking to make them soar even higher, publishers are panicking. Thanks in part to deep ebook discounting by Amazon, but also because the same people who can afford hardback books are the same people who can afford e-readers, people are starting to buy ebooks where they once bought hardbacks. The only cash-cow remaining in publishing is disappearing, like CD sales for music, and DVD sales for movies.

The publishers’ answer to this? A de facto return to the Net Book Agreement, for the whole world. Publishers don’t need booksellers as much as they used to. If an ebook isn’t available from one place – Amazon, say – it will be from somewhere that’s just a click away. Amazon on the other hand, can’t sell Kindles if a huge chunk of popular books aren’t available on it. Furthermore, thanks to the ease of distributing an ebook directly to the customer, there’s nothing stopping a publisher – or group of publishers – from creating their own store. Most sell ebooks directly online already. The balance of power has swung back to publishers, and they’re making the most of it, especially when then know they can play Amazon off against Apple.

For the first time in the UK since 1997, and ever in the US, publishers are able to set – and enforce- their own prices on ebooks. And they will; not to make a fair return on ebooks but rather to cripple their sales in order to protect early hardback book sales. They’ve admitted as much themselves, saying that prices will start high on hardback release, before dropping steadily over time.

The idea that this benefits anyone, least of all authors, is laughable. Every day, thousands more book lovers move to ebooks. These are people who devour books, and who are attracted by the convenience of getting new releases delivered instantly. Yes, there’s a chance that they’ll keep buying hardback books if ebooks go up in price. But now they’ve already invested in ereaders so there’s even more of a chance that they’ll simply turn to piracy to get their fix. It’s like if record labels had tried to encourage people to keep buying CDs by raising the price of mp3 downloads (or slapping restrictive DRM on them). All that would likely have done is drive even more people to Limewire.

Piracy isn’t an industry-killing problem for publishers yet, and if they can keep prices low enough and delivery mechanisms convenient enough, it could even stay that way. Macmillan’s attempt to bring back the NBA though, while it might result in a few more hardback sales in the short term, can only end in disaster for everyone concerned.

As an author, I don’t see a pricing strategy that encourages piracy as a victory. I see it as a backwards-looking quick fix that will do far more long-term harm than short-term good.

Youa culpa, Macmillan.

PayPal isn’t working properly in India. eBay’s electronic payment juggernaut appears to be blocking personal transactions to or from accounts of India-based users. It is reversing personal transactions; transactions involving businesses are still allowed.

A reader checked in with us yesterday to let us know PayPal notified him that the company had stopped allowing personal payments to be sent to or from India (full e-mail can be found below).

This does not appear to be an isolated incident: see here, here and here for more reports, although we gather commercial payment transactions are unaffected at this point.

This is the standard notification e-mail people are receiving in their inbox:

Hello XXXX,

Your payment of xx has been sent back to the sender of the payment.

We reversed this payment because we have stopped allowing personal payments to be sent to or from India.

If this was a payment for a purchase of goods or services, and not a personal payment, then you may contact the buyer and have him or her resend the payment as follows: (a) click the Send Money tab, (b) select “Goods,” and (c) provide a shipping address.

If this payment was a personal payment such as a gift, then we have requested that the sender find another payment method until we restore personal payments to and from India.

We are trying to resolve this issue as quickly as possible and we’re sorry for any inconvenience.

Thank you,
PayPal

Asked for more information, Binary Turf received a meatier but equally vague response from the customer service department:

Dear ,

Thank you for contacting PayPal.

I understand that you want to know why the payment you received for $ USD from is reversed. This payment was sent as Personal. We have stopped allowing Personal Payments to be sent to and from India. We are aware of this issue and I sincerely regret the inconvenience it has caused you. We are trying to resolve this as soon as possible. Below are the details:

Personal Payment – Send Money for India Accounts

· India customers are no longer able to see the option to send a Personal payment on the Send Money page · They can continue to use other payment options, such as eBay checkout.

If this was a payment for a purchase of goods or services, and not a personal payment, then you may contact the buyer and have him or her resend the payment as follows: (a) click the Send Money tab, (b) select ‘Goods’, and (c) provide a shipping address.

If this payment was a personal payment, such as a gift to a friend or family member, then we request that you find another payment method until we restore personal payments to and from India.

Although India customers are unable to send Personal payments, they are still receiving Personal payments from Non India customers.

· In order to stop ALL Personal payments TO and FROM India accounts, we have started reversing Personal payments sent by Non India customers starting today. (the only exception will be in cases where the buyer has included a shipping address – we don’t want to delay any shipment of goods) · Emails will be sent to both sender and recipient to let them know why the money was returned and what options they have to proceed forward. (see attached for examples)

· We are also in the process of implementing a change on the website to automatically stop the payment from processing, rather than waiting to reverse the payment. We will send you additional updates as soon as we have more details.

The Personal payment option on the International Send Money page has been updated and India has been removed from the ‘select a country’ drop down list.

· If the payment was for a purchase of goods or services, and not a personal payment, then the buyer may resend the payment to the seller by following these steps on the PayPal website: (a) click the Send Money tab, (b) select ‘Goods’, and (c) provide a shipping address.

I’ll be glad to hear from you if you need clarification, please email us again and we will try our best to give you immediate answers. Thank you for choosing PayPal for your online payment needs. We appreciate your business.

The wording seems to suggest that this is a temporary decision, but it’s still unclear why the company decided to take such drastic measures with no prior warning on policy changes whatsoever, and why this appears to be occurring in India only.

We’ve contacted PayPal and will update when and if we hear back.

(Hat tips to Jitendra Agrawal and Mahendra Palsule)

It wasn’t too long ago that our own Nicholas Deleon was detained and manhandled at a Best Buy . Today, we hear reports of someone who, for the crime of having some trouble with gift cards, was handcuffed, frisked, and put in a holding cell at the station. The bright side of this story is that the person this happened to should feel free to sue the hell out of Best Buy and the NYPD

Read the rest here: 
Oh Best Buy, only you could get away with having someone arrested for gift card issues

Integrated marketing services provider Alterian today released the results of their seventh annual survey on social media marketing adoption.

The survey covered 1068 marketing professionals worldwide (actually, it was 98% North America and Europe and only 2% Asia Pacific and other regions).

Alterian found that 66 percent of respondents will be investing in social media marketing (SMM) in 2010. Of those, 40 percent said they would be shifting more than a fifth of their traditional direct marketing budget towards funding their SMM activities.

The survey also found more than a third (36 percent) of respondents are investing in social media monitoring and analysis tools.

Nearly half of respondents (42 percent), however, said they don’t currently incorporate clickstream and web analytics data into their customer and e-mail database.

The research also found that over half of respondents (51 percent) are placing a ‘fair’ or ‘significant’ amount of effort on moving from a campaign-centric direct marketing model towards multichannel customer engagement – in fact only 7 percent make no effort at all.

To get a copy of the full report of the Alterian Annual Survey results, sign up here.

It’s official: the European Commission has granted regulatory approval for Oracle to acquire Sun Microsystems for approximately $7.4 billion, without further conditions. In a statement released moments ago, Oracle says it expects unconditional approval from China and Russia as well and intends to close the transaction shortly.

Oracle will host an all-day live event for customers, partners, press and analysts on January 27th, 2010 at 9:00 AM Pacific time at its headquarters in Redwood Shores, California.

Just in case you weren’t planning on attending or following the major Apple event.

The approval comes after an in-depth antitrust investigation opened in September amid concerns that Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL would stifle competition in the database market. In August 2009, the Departement of Justice had already given the deal green light.

From the press release:

The Commission’s in-depth investigation showed that although MySQL and Oracle compete in certain parts of the database market, they are not close competitors in others, such as the high-end segment.

Given the open source nature of MySQL, the Commission also assessed Oracle’s ability and incentive to remove the constraint exerted by MySQL after the merger and the extent to which this constraint could, if necessary, be replaced by other actors on the database market.

“I am now satisfied that competition and innovation will be preserved on all the markets concerned. Oracle’s acquisition of Sun has the potential to revitalize important assets and create new and innovative products,” said Neelie Kroes, the European antitrust commissioner.

The database market is highly concentrated with the three main proprietary database vendors – Oracle, IBM and Microsoft – accounting for approximately 85% of the market in terms of revenue, the commission added.

Google is releasing information about a “highly sophisticated and targeted attack” on their corporate infrastructure that occurred last month. The attack originated in China and resulted in the “theft of intellectual property from Google.” In light of the attack Google is making sweeping changes to its Chinese operations.

Google is releasing some information about these attacks to the public. The company says that a minimal amount of user information was compromised, but has come to the alarming conclusion that the attacks were targeting the information of Chinese human rights activists. Google found that these attacks were not just going after Google’s data, but were also targeting at least twenty other major companies spanning sectors including Internet, finance, chemicals, and more. Google has also discovered that phishing attacks have been used to compromise the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists around the world.

In light of the attacks, and after attempts by the Chinese government to further restrict free speech on the web, Google has decided it will deploy a fully uncensored version of its search engine in China. This is a major change: since January 2006, Google has made concessions to the Chinese government and offered a censored (and highly controversial) version of its search engine at Google.cn. Google isn’t playing that game any longer. Should the Chinese government decide that an uncensored engine is illegal, then Google may cease operations in China entirely.  We have included Google’s blog posts about the decision in their entirety below.

Like many other well-known organizations, we face cyber attacks of varying degrees on a regular basis. In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident–albeit a significant one–was something quite different.

First, this attack was not just on Google. As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses–including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors–have been similarly targeted. We are currently in the process of notifying those companies, and we are also working with the relevant U.S. authorities.

Second, we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective. Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves.

Third, as part of this investigation but independent of the attack on Google, we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users’ computers.

We have already used information gained from this attack to make infrastructure and architectural improvements that enhance security for Google and for our users. In terms of individual users, we would advise people to deploy reputable anti-virus and anti-spyware programs on their computers, to install patches for their operating systems and to update their web browsers. Always be cautious when clicking on links appearing in instant messages and emails, or when asked to share personal information like passwords online. You can read more here about our cyber-security recommendations. People interested wanting to learn more about these kinds of attacks can read this U.S. government report (PDF), Nart Villeneuve’s blog and this presentation on the GhostNet spying incident.

We have taken the unusual step of sharing information about these attacks with a broad audience not just because of the security and human rights implications of what we have unearthed, but also because this information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech. In the last two decades, China’s economic reform programs and its citizens’ entrepreneurial flair have lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese people out of poverty. Indeed, this great nation is at the heart of much economic progress and development in the world today.

We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that “we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China.”

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

The decision to review our business operations in China has been incredibly hard, and we know that it will have potentially far-reaching consequences. We want to make clear that this move was driven by our executives in the United States, without the knowledge or involvement of our employees in China who have worked incredibly hard to make Google.cn the success it is today. We are committed to working responsibly to resolve the very difficult issues raised.

Posted by David Drummond, SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer

Here’s a second post, from the Google Enterprise Blog:

Many corporations and consumers regularly come under cyber attack, and Google is no exception. We recently detected a cyber attack targeting our infrastructure and that of at least 20 other publicly listed companies. This incident was particularly notable for its high degree of sophistication. We believe Google Apps and related customer data were not affected by this incident. Please read more about our public response on the Official Google Blog.

This attack may understandably raise some questions, so we wanted to take this opportunity to share some additional information and assure you that Google is introducing additional security measures to help ensure the safety of your data.

This was not an assault on cloud computing. It was an attack on the technology infrastructure of major corporations in sectors as diverse as finance, technology, media, and chemical. The route the attackers used was malicious software used to infect personal computers. Any computer connected to the Internet can fall victim to such attacks. While some intellectual property on our corporate network was compromised, we believe our customer cloud-based data remains secure.

While any company can be subject to such an attack, those who use our cloud services benefit from our data security capabilities. At Google, we invest massive amounts of time and money in security. Nothing is more important to us. Our response to this attack shows that we are dedicated to protecting the businesses and users who have entrusted us with their sensitive email and document information. We are telling you this because we are committed to transparency, accountability, and maintaining your trust.

Posted by Dave Girouard, President, Google Enterprise

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Although there is no shortage of businesses large and small making great use of Twitter, many are still trying to make heads-and-tales of how to harness its power to communicate with existing and prospective clients. CoTweet and HootSuite are trying to meet this opportunity with feature-rich CRM applications, but for businesses who are Twitter newbies, these apps can be daunting.

Followbase saw this opportunity-within-an-opportunity and designed a simple, bare-bones Twitter CRM app that could form as a stepping stone to the more heavy-duty apps.

All you need to do to get started with Followbase is to connect it with a Twitter account. Twitter’s standard 3rd-party OAuth approval is used here to ensure the user is the actual account owner. Followbase then begins scanning the stream and funnels tweets into four customer service oriented topics: Mention, Ideas, Problems and Questions.

Tweets under each topic column are displayed with threaded replies as well as highlighting for the main account and additional team members. The columns are formed automatically, based on the usage of the “?” operator and keywords found in the body of the tweets. Examples include: idea, feature, suggestion, bug, issue, fail, etc.

Followbase attempts to deal with false positives in sense that phrases such as “any idea…” or “no idea…” do not end up classified under the Ideas column. If a tweet was accidentally mis-categorized, it can then be moved manually.

If you’re wondering whether there are any semantic or sentiment analyses, the answer is no. Nir Buschi, who leads Followbase, says that a 3rd party semantic engine could be integrated down the road but right now the focus is on keeping the entire experience as simple as possible for newbies.

Additional features expected to be rolled out in the near future include domain aliasing, customization of look & feel, custom search lists, and issue management.

Followbase is currently a free service, but I can certainly see it scale into a freemium model where it could charge small and medium businesses $10-20 per month.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Editor’s Note: In this guest post, Raj Kapoor gives entreprenuers advice on how to pitch VCs. Kapoor knows both sides of the equation. For the past five years, he’s been a VC at the Mayfield Fund. Before that he founded the photo site Snapfish, which he sold to Hewlett-Packard.

Its been almost five years now that I’ve been in venture capital.  I finally know what i don’t know.

The one thing I do know is how to give better advice on pitching VCs now that I’ve sat through hundreds of pitches and made 8 investments.  I gave some advice in an earlier post—this one builds on it at a deeper level (three years later)

I’ve mentioned in the past that there are some key things you should include in your presentation when you are pitching a VC.  David Cowan’s post on what to include is a great starting point.  I thought I would expand on this and add some of the nuances within each section. This may not apply to all types of companies but I think it works for internet-related businesses.

Also, I’ve found that if all the informoation below is addressed succinctly in an executive summary or first pitch deck, it can help us make a much faster decision —which is what the entrepreneur wants and so do we.  If we believe the story is lacking in too many areas, sometimes we just pass as there is too much else going on. At the same time, providing too much information is a problem as, like you, we are time-strapped and attention-starved.  I think most of the points below can be addressed in a few compelling sentences or slides.

1. What Do You Do? The first thing we want to understand is what you do, very simply.   What’s the problem/solution or what’s the new experience that you think is exciting?  Why is this important to your customers?  For mass-market internet businesses we want to understand if this appeals to a wide or narrow audience and if it’s a frequent (daily) habit or something done once in a while (which is tougher to build a brand in the consumers mind).  Don’t talk vision or market at this point.  Zero in on what you are about.
2. Reveal Your End Game. VCs typically don’t invest in just the first product or service being the end game or in a company’s whose biggest goal in life is to be a feature of a platform or “add-on” acquisition.  We want to understand that your product has really big potential and could be a platform possibly for others—like Facebook or Twitter.  Don’t be afraid to dream a bit.  Here’s an example from one of my companies -  “Rubicon Project will start solving the sharp pain point of optimizing ad networks for publishers and will leverage this position to be the trusted platform to help monetize all inventory for a publisher – the Control HQ for all revenue for web publishers”.  You won’t be penalized for having audacious goals.
3. What Is The True Size Of Your Market?  No, Really.  The important point here is whether it’s a big enough market to be interesting to a VC.   Too often entrepreneurs simply state the size of the online ad market for an internet content business or the size of a retail category for e-commerce sectors.   We’re less interested in the top down market sizing and more focused on your Total Addressable Market (TAM).  If you sell widgets, how many customers are really out there that are interested in your widget (segment the market) times what price you get for your widget.  The more thoughtful and realistic you are about how you define the customer set, the faster we can make a decision.  We don’t mind getting surprised on the upside later on.
4. The Secret Ingredient Is People.  Teams are critical and too little time is spent on them in pitches.  Don’t just include where you’ve worked but include in your slide or exec summary why this team is the best for this opportunity.  In many businesses, domain expertise matters a lot, so highlight that.  In some consumer businesses, its less about experience and more about product insight and relentless execution—highlight why you have that.  In other words, figure out what’s most important to the task at hand and make sure to tell us how each person will help accomplish that—not just where everyone worked and went to school.  In an early stage deal, Team and Market are the most important factors as everything else will change and a great team with wind at their backs will make it happen.  Also, be upfront about your holes/weaknesses in the team (and your own weaknesses) and if and when you believe you will need a new CEO.  Self awareness is one of the most important traits we look for in leaders.
5. Go-To-Market Strategy.   This is often ignored or not given enough thought.  What is the path of least resistance that you can take in terms of customers (be specific here), channels, and initial product focus.  Your go-to-market strategy should ideally be in your control (versus reliant on big, unproven partnerships) and take as much risk off the table as possible in the least amount of time.  You need to go through customer acquisition economics if you pay for customers (lifetime value vs CPA) and why you will spread for free if you don’t require marketing.   Address how you will make it as painless as possible for consumers to adopt the solution and how you will build on top of that.  Also, your go-to-market focus should not force you into a niche that’s hard to maneuver out of.
6. Be Honest About What Stage You Are At.  We need to understand what stage your company is at.  Are you at the idea stage or pre-traction in terms of customers and momentum?  Do you have momentum but are still working out the business model?  Or do you have both momentum and a solid understanding and proof behind the model.  The clearer you are about where you are, the faster we can make a decision.  Be upfront and honest on the risks and how you will deal with them.  If you have momentum, show graphs of key metrics over time (not just a snapshot of where you are)—we want to understand the shape of your growth curves and how your key metrics are performing against your expectations.
7. Your Real Competitive Advantage is Being Different In The Long Term.  On the internet, there are at least 25 companies that are or can compete with you on almost anything you do.  Often times, it’s all about execution but we want to see if there are fundamental factors which will help you outdo your competition—very hard technology/IP, network effects in your business that will make it hard for others to catch up (such as with Wikipedia, Google AdSense, Facebook, Twitter) or a fundamentally different business model that will be hard for an incumbent to change (for instance, it wouldn’t be easy for Electronic Arts to cannibalize its retail games with free to play online versions).  While we want you to list all your competitors (be exhaustive otherwise we won’t have confidence you know your business and have done your homework), its not useful to only show a chart of your competitors comparing features or positioning on a 2
   

We’ve just gotten our first look at Assistly, a new startup that’s looking to provide businesses with a robust platform for engaging customers on everything from Email to Facebook and Twitter. We first caught wind of Assistly back in October when its founding members left AOL in tandem, but until now the company remained firmly in stealth. Today it’s launching a new ’sneak preview’ version of its site at Assistly.com, and they’ve given us a handful of screenshots to showcase some of the features we can expect. The company is also announcing that Mark Cuban and David Liu are officially coming on as advisors.

CEO Alex Bard says that Assistly looking to capitalize on some key trends: first, that more and more businesses are establishing themselves on the web, and that consumers now have louder voices than ever with their presences on Twitter, Facebook, and blogs which makes customer service more important than ever. Bard says that existing customer service solutions are either old and difficult to use, or are new and easier to manage but lack much depth. Bard says that Assistly is looking to provide a platform that combines the best of both worlds, offering a robust customer service with self-service ease of use. You can see some of the upcoming features, including engaging with a customer on Twitter and managing multiple customer service tickets, in the screenshots below.

We still have’t gotten a chance to try out Assistly for ourselves, but the team behind it is enough to make us optimistic about its potential. The site was founded by Alex Bard, Gary Benitt, Jeremy Suriel, and Brad Birnbaum, each of whom previously worked together in building customer service-based companies back in the 90’s. The first, called eShare, was acquired in 1999; the second, called eAssist Global Solutions, was eventually acquired in 2004 after stumbling through the dot com bubble burst. Following the eAssist acquisition three of the team members left the space to start Goowy, a Flash widget maker that later sold to AOL. Now all four are reuniting as they return to the customer service space.

Bard says that Assistly is targeting an early 2010 public launch.

Other startups looking to help businesses interact with customers via social media include BuzzGain, PeopleBrowsr, Viralheat, and Scout Lab.

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