The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘sales’

Yep, Marantz, makers of high end A/V equipment have a deal where if you buy one of their high performance Blu-ray players, they’ll give a free Roku Play via mail-in-rebate. If you want to take advantage of this, you have until March 31st. Details (and press release) after the jump

Here is the original post: 
Marantz wants to Roku you for free (with purchase)

Kamyple , maker of a user feedback analytics platform, is finally confirming a round of financing it closed in 2009. I had a chance to sit down with Kampyle CEO Ariel Finkelstein who officially confirmed that Carmel Ventures led the company’s $1M Series A round, closed back in January 2009. He also shared with me that the company has begun beta testing a new feedback product for downloadable applications.

Last year was a pivotal one in the life of Kampyle, which complemented its round of financing with a blow-out year across all KPI’s. Customer growth rate surged 600%, up 25,000 for a total of 35,000 (although Finkelstein did not share how many of these are paying customers).

On average, 19 users saw a Kampyle feedback button every second, ultimately converting to a total of 8M feedbacks processed. Interestingly, 57% of users who provided feedback included their real email address, thereby expressing their desire for a follow-up by the website owners or software providers that implemented the feedback form.

Kampyle is enhancing its current feedback products, one for websites, the other for software install/uninstall, with ‘Kampyle for Applications’. Currently being beta-tested, the new product is designed to solicit user feedback regarding people’s actual usage of the applications.

With this third product, and integrations with SalesForce, Omniture, NedStat and Google Analytics, Kampyle believes it’s able to provide the holistic, end-to-end view software developers require to effectively understand their user flow—from the initial user visit to their website, through the installation phase, to the user’s actual usage and possible uninstall.

Kamyple is extending a special 20% discount on all its premium packages to the first 50 TechCrunch readers that use the following coupon code: ‘techcrunch’.

Opera Software today released Opera 10.50, which it touts as “the fastest Web browser thus-far produced for Windows computers” (which, in turn, calls for a comprehensive speed test – anyone?). The desktop browser has also been given a completely new design, adopting some of the style elements Google Chrome users will be familiar with.

Additionally, Opera 10.50 comes with a private browsing feature that enables people to browse for porn surprise gifts for their partners without leaving any traces.

The desktop browser, which is free to use, lands on Windows at a time when Microsoft has just rolling out its ballot screen for European users of the OS, presenting them with a choice in browsers (supposedly random, but not in reality, as we pointed out last week).

The Norwegian software maker calls Opera 10.50 the fastest browser they’ve ever produced, courtesy of a brand new JavaScript engine (Carakan) and a graphics library (Vega). The browser is also said to include improved standards support for HTML5 and CSS3.

For Windows 7 and Vista users, there are some more goodies: Opera now fully supports Aero Glass, Aero Peek and Jump Lists. You can easily access your Speed Dials, tabs and more from the Taskbar.

Opera 10.50 is available for Windows in 42 different languages – Mac and Linux versions are “coming soon”.

Silicon Valley investors often have a picture in their heads of the type of person who is worthy of funding: young, brash, stubborn, and arrogant. They believe that successful entrepreneurs come from entrepreneurial families and that they start their entrepreneurial journey by selling lemonade while in grade school. Angel investor and entrepreneur, Jason Calacanis said as much in his recent talk to Penn State students. And after meeting Wharton students, VC Fred Wilson expressed shock when a professor told him that you could teach people to be entrepreneurs. Wilson wrote, “I’ve been working with entrepreneurs for almost 25 years now and it is ingrained in my mind that someone is either born an entrepreneur or is not.”

Jason, Fred, and Silicon Valley VCs, I’ve got news for you: you’ve got it all wrong. Entrepreneurs aren’t born, they’re made. And they aren’t anything like you think they are. My team surveyed 549 successful entrepreneurs. We found that the majority didn’t have entrepreneurial parents. They didn’t even have entrepreneurial aspirations while going to school. They simply got tired of working for others, had a great idea they wanted to commercialize, or woke up one day with an urgent desire to build wealth before they retired. So they took the big leap.

We found that 52% of the successful entrepreneurs were the first in their immediate families to start a business — just like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergei Brin, and Russell Simons (Def Jam founder). Their parents were academics, lawyers, factory workers, priests, bureaucrats, etc. About 39% had an entrepreneurial father, and 7% had an entrepreneurial mother. (Some had both.)

Only a quarter caught the entrepreneurial bug when in college. Half didn’t even think about entrepreneurship, and they had little interest in it when in school.

There was no significant difference between the success factors or hurdles faced by entrepreneurs who were extremely interested in entrepreneurship in school (and who likely set up the lemonade stands) and the ones who lacked interest. But entrepreneurs with extreme interest started more companies and did it sooner. Of the 24.5% who indicated that they were “extremely interested” in becoming entrepreneurs during college, 47.1% went on to start more than two companies (as compared with 32.9% of the overall sample). Sixty-nine percent started their companies within 10 years of working for someone else (as compared to 46.8% of the rest of the sample population).

What did affect their successes?  Education — but not the college they graduate from. In a different study of the 652 CEOs and CTOs of 502 tech companies, we researched the correlation between education and the sales and headcount of companies founded. We learned that the there was a significant difference between companies started by founders with just high-school diplomas and the rest. Education provided a huge advantage. But there wasn’t a big difference between firms founded by Ivy-league graduates and the graduates of other universities.

The education and training of entrepreneurs is something that the Kauffman Foundation has been researching extensively. Over the last six years, it has invested around $50 million on academic research to understand what makes entrepreneurs tick and what policies are most conducive to entrepreneurship and to construct data bases to permit analyses of these subjects. (Kauffman has also funded some of my research at Duke, UC-Berkeley, and Harvard.) Its VP of Research, Bob Litan, says that Kauffman has learnt conclusively that entrepreneurship can be taught. The key is to provide education at “teachable moments” — when the entrepreneur is thinking about starting a venture or ready to scale it. What entrepreneurs need isn’t the type of abstract course they teach in business schools, but practical, relevant knowledge.  That’s why Kauffman created a program called Fast Trac, which has trained 300,000 entrepreneurs so far.

One of the findings of Kauffman research is that of the appx. 600,000 businesses that are started every year, less than a fraction of 1% become high-growth “scale” businesses. These new firms, especially the “scale” firms, have added all of the net incremental jobs to U.S. economy since 1980 (about 40 million), and probably account for about 1/3 of GDP growth since then. So the key to boosting economic growth is to increase the number of successful high-growth startups.  After all, the growth rate of our economy is nothing more than the aggregation of the growth of our firms.

That is why Kauffman (which has a $2 billion endowment) is investing heavily in an ambitious new program called Kauffman Labs.  This aims to dramatically increase the ability of small businesses to become big businesses. The Labs program is built around a novel idea: that highly motivated individuals with “scalable ideas” can be recruited to be entrepreneurs and to be made successful, by surrounding them with a network of other experienced entrepreneurs; sources of money; and mentors. The goal is to educate entrepreneurs and surround them with a powerful network. This is like a Y Combinator on steroids.

Anecdotal evidence also shows that there are many more factors at play than that of genes. Note this BusinessWeek article about waves of spinoffs from Google. I doubt that all of these Google employees who are starting successful businesses were born with entrepreneurial genes. VC and former entrepreneur Brad Feld also blogged about how many of his frat buddies at MIT had become successful entrepreneurs. Were all of these people born to be entrepreneurs as well? I don’t think so. It is probably education, exposure to entrepreneurship, and networks that led these people to pursue the entrepreneurial path — which means that Kauffman Foundation may have hit on the right idea with Kauffman Labs.

The reason this topic is really important is that, as Wilson writes, “Venture Capital is a lot about pattern recognition”. The reality is that VCs like him make quick judgments about people based on the stereotypes in their minds. So, like the women that I wrote about in my previous posts, we may be disadvantaging another important segment of our population – a segment that is older, more humble, more sensible, and more realistic than the population that is getting all the attention (and the money).

Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.

Our best buddy, Scott, he of ScottEVest , just started its massive 40%-off sale. They have plenty of great stuff including the Quantum and Evolution jackets and my favorite, the cotton hoodie

Go here to read the rest: 
CrunchDeals: 40% off all ScottEVest Goodness

Allergic to Apple Stores, like me? Not to worry. Tim Cook, COO at Apple, has said (though there is no direct quote at the moment) that Apple will indeed be selling the iPad at places like Best Buy and other partners

See the original post here: 
Don’t worry, they’ll sell iPads at Best Buy

These clever little German kids toys from Kaufladen cost about $400 and are pretty silly but I think the best part is when DaddyTypes writes: Kids in the US get play kitchens. Kids in Germany get play sales kiosks. Which country has a childhood obesity problem and which one has already pulled out of the recession?

More here:
Kaufladen $500 fruit stands for kids

For startups, the idea of creating a sales proposal is often a nightmare. While they’re vital to a business, they’re not exactly the easiest things in the world to create and manage. A new service launching today, Proposable, aims to simplify the process, and bring it to the web with some nice features.

Proposable is a web-based app that allows you to create, deliver, and get insight into your sales proposals in minutes (if they’re short enough). It does this with its proposal-building tools and templates that offer a combination of customization and standardization. Perhaps more importantly though, they offer a set of tools to get feedback on the proposals, and look at information about what’s working at what’s not.

For example, one of Proposable’s features allows for recipients to add comments to the side of any proposal. And because this is all online, if a client gives you some feedback on something they’ve liked changed, you can do so on the web and have it updated in realtime. That combined with the service’s notifications (via email or SMS), really does make the process a realtime one.

So what does Proposable cost? There are three options. For $19.99 a month, you get the ability to deliver up to 15 proposals and 1 GB on online storage. For $29.99 a month you get an unlimited number of proposals and 4 GB of storage. Or, if you want to use this with a larger team, the biggest plan is $79.99 a month, and you get 10 GB of storage and the ability to add 3 users (with additional ones being $15 a month extra). Each plan also comes with a free 30 day trial.

There are no shortage of sales proposals sites out there, such as the aptly named Salesproposals.com, but Proposable’s overall look and feel is far superior. The startup is the latest to launch out of Sproutbox, the Indiana-based incubator.

Comic from the great NatalieDee The Grube talks about an Apple-less MacWorld and how it will be a pretty sad show without the regular one-ring circus that is the Steve Jobs keynote but that it won’t be absolutely horrible, with smaller companies actually getting some attention this time. My thinking?

Read more:
Can MacWorld – or any tech conference – survive the next decade?

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.