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Posts Tagged ‘unique’

The Linux Foundation, the non-profit that supports the growth of the Linux kernel, has launched a merchandise store where people can purchase a newly launched line of original T-shirts, hats, mugs and other items that reflect “geek culture.”

According a release sent out by the Foundation, merchandise available in the Linux.com store is “designed to reflect the unique and varied culture associated with Linux” and will support the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds. For example, t-shirts contain phrases like “Free The Code,” “FSCK the Establishment,” and “Fork You.” All revenue generated from the store will go directly towards Linux Foundation activities, initiatives and events.

In conjunction with the launch of the store, Linux is holding a t-shirt design contest. Design submissions are due on the store’s site by April 11, 2010. The top five designs will be available for community vote at Linux.com through June 6, 2010 and the winning design will be included on T-shirts available for purchase in the Linux.com Store. The lucky designer will be awarded with travel to Boston to attend the Foundation’s annual conference LinuxCon in August.

The Linus Foundation has launched a number of unique initiatives to help raise funds for the organization and its open source initiatives. Last year, the Linux Foundation launched a branded Visa credit card.

About the Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux. Founded in 2007, the Linux Foundation sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds and is supported by leading Linux and open source companies and developers from around the world. The Linux Foundation promotes, protects and standardizes Linux by hosting important workgroups, events and online resources such as Linux.com. For more information, please visit www.linuxfoundation.org.

Yesterday, I wrote that location was going to be this year’s Twitter at SXSW. Today, my inbox exploded.

It seems that just about every company, advertiser, and even plenty of users associated with the location space emailed me with pitches, ideas, thoughts, etc. To say that space is red-hot right now, is putting it mildly. One of the companies that reached out to me was Brightkite, one of the earliest hot location players.

CMO and co-founder Rob Lawson admits that the network has been “pretty quiet for a while,” but hints at some exciting stuff coming up for March (yes, around the time of SXSW). But he also wanted to share some things they’re working on right now, and a few interesting bits of data.

Notably, Brightkite has over 2 million active users currently around the world. While that might seem small compared to the bigger social networks like Facebook and Twitter, that’s actually four times the size of the newer rival Foursquare, that is getting much of the hype these days. Another interesting tidbit: Brightkite has had localized promotions in place for some time now, and they’re seeing strong usage.

What users of Foursquare may know as check-in or mayor special, Brightkite calls Local Promotions. And they have a page on the site where local businesses can sign up for free. On that page, they note:

We would love to help your bar, cafe, coffee shop, or business reach out to the local community through local promotions. We’ll let nearby Brightkite folk know your business gives them preferential treatment, and that they should stop in for a visit. Fill out the form below to get started.

Brightkite says these promotions are seeing a lot of interest from all types of brands. And usage is strong with over 100 brands including big ones like Gap, Ben & Jerry’s and Time Warner Cable, seeing over two percent response rates when these notifications are inserted into users stream. And the best ones are seeing five to ten percent. When compared to more traditional ads, those numbers are very solid.

Like Foursquare check-in and mayor specials, the Brightkite deals offer things like free (or heavily discounted) drinks and meals, but also extend to things like discounted hotel rooms, car rentals, and even dry cleaning.

So is Brightkite making any money off of these? Yes. While many of the smaller local businesses use the service for free or close to free (to both prove the model and drive growth), Lawson notes that some of the big national brands are spending some big time money to advertise locally. These campaigns range from $10,000 to $200,000, Lawson says.

Something else that interests me about Brightkite is their unique approach to social relationships. When it started, Brightkite had a symmetrical model, much like Facebook and Foursquare, which requires users to accept each other as friends. But late last year, the company switched the model to be an asymmetrical one, like Twitter, where one party can follow another without permission.

This may seem like a horrible idea for a location-based service given the privacy implications, but Brightkite’s is a bit different of an asymmetrical model. “Our model is asymmetrical (like Twitter), but reversed. With Twitter, you decide who to follow but anyone can see your content.  With Brightkite, you decide who to share your content with, but you can only see others if they decide to share with you,” Lawson notes. He continues, “We are convinced this is the right model for location based services – people want to be in control of who knows where they are. We turned away from the handshake model (Facebook, Foursquare) because we found users didn’t like the social pressure of having to accept a friend request. Just because you are happy to share your location with me, doesn’t mean I want to share mine with you, even though we want to maintain a relationship.“

As someone who has dealt with this many times before, I see his point. Lawson says that generally Brightkite users have been receptive to the changes, but says that some older users liked some of the more advanced features of the old model better — and Brightkite is working to get some best-of-both-worlds options for them.

Brightkite merged with another location-based network, Limbo, last year and raised some new funding. They face a battle in warding off the fast-charging hot location networks like Foursquare and Gowalla (not to mention Yelp and the new Google Buzz), but all of them appear to be benefiting from brand interest in the local advertising space.

Big day for augmented reality startup Layar today. I’m here at the Mobile Premier Awards ceremony in Barcelona, where the company just announced on stage that they have struck a global distribution deal with a major handset manufacturer.

Layar has opened up a sort of app store or augmented reality experience delivered on top of its platform.

Also, the Dutch startup is announcing that it has crossed the 1 million user mark, and that two European investors have stepped up to inject €2.5 million ($3.4 million) of capital into the venture in a series A investment. The investors are Sunstone Capital and Prime Technology Ventures.

We’ve been covering Layar and its evolving platform since it debuted last summer.

WiFi is fairly spotty here at the venue, unfortunately, so we’ll get into the specifics of the platform play at a later stage. For now, here’s this bit straight from the press release:

The Layar platform allows brands, game developers, publishers and producers to engage with customers through the creation of rich immersive real world experiences. Already 375 layers have been published, with over 1200 layers in development. More than 2000 organizations in 70 countries are benefiting from the unique capabilities of the Layar platform, developing great content.

As of mid March 2010, all Layar producers and publishers will be able to generate a return from their investment in AR. They can offer both free and paid content through the Layar platform. Layar will facilitate global mobile payment processing and distribution in all currencies. Producers can fully focus on content – without having to worry about mass market distribution, developing for multiple mobile platforms, or financial administration.

Layar didn’t specify which global handset manufacturer they have reached an agreement with, but they say it is one of the top 3, and that the deal will enable tens of millions of people to experience Layar AR content on their mobile phones in 2010.

Calvin Chin is an American entrepreneur who lives in Shanghai. He founded Qifang, a P2P lending site for Chinese student loans. You can read more about Qifang here. He attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland this last week, where China was the center of attention. We asked him to write this guest post and share his unique perspective as an American building a startup in the heart of China.

Here at Davos it seems China keeps coming up in two ways – neither of them positive. One, with the worst of the crisis behind us, people are turning from last year’s hopes of China as economic savior to China as free-rider keeping its currency cheap, bullying its minorities and shirking its responsibilities in Copenhagen. Two, in the tech community, seems everyone is talking about Google, Chinese government hackers and censorship.

My view, and I think it’s one that many in China would probably share, is that while free access to information and the rest of the world is inherently a good thing, so is political stability. The Chinese government has earned a lot of slack for raising hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, and if things did go out of control a heck of a lot of people would get hurt. So even if they want China to be plugged in to the rest of the world to encourage innovation and Chinese tech entrepreneurship (which I think they do), they’d put that priority after getting most Chinese people better lives.

It’s kind of the same deal that Chinese startups all make, to try to do build cool stuff but while working within the system. So Tudou and Youku screen their videos and the fastest growing microblogging service is run by a portal that has the infrastructure from screening blogs to be able to screen tweets. All these companies are making the same decision that Google made to enter China in 2004 too (and stay for now), but for Chinese entrepreneurs they don’t have the option of not being in the China market. It’s what they know and where they have their best shot at success. And I’m sure if you’d ask them, they’d sincerely agree that eliminating poverty and keeping things stable comes way before access to a few articles in a foreign language about events that don’t mean much to them. I don’t think many non-Chinese would like the aggressively patriotic and self-important China that would probably be the outcome of democracy there today anyways.

The Chinese market for startups is growing so fast, is so competitive and is characterized by so many unfair advantages for the big players, that local entrepreneurs just keep their heads down and roll with the political and market changes. Take Digu for instance, they launched as a pretty simple copy of Twitter that focused on celebrity accounts, then pivoted to a social game model when all the startup microblogging platforms got shutdown and Sina (with a lock on celebrity blogs) launched Weibo, and are now back to straight microblogging with a better ability to keep the tweet streams “harmonized.” Digu didn’t whine, they just sucked it up and forged ahead.

This is typical for Chinese startups. Whether they are localizing an international hit, copy-2-china style, at a much cheaper price and a better UI like Kuukie. Or they’re a fit for Chinese net culture with a product that you don’t see elsewhere like Douban’s social network for talking about books (and now other media).

The thing is while the majority of Chinese netizens really don’t care that much about what’s going on outside of China, the ones who do care, people who would start companies, people who want international news, all know workarounds to use services they like or read about sensitive topics from other perspectives. They use Twitter clients like Bage or free (http://hotspotshield.com/) or paid VPNs. So much so that Twitter won in the grassroots Chinamode awards.

So actually, the Chinese government kinda gets the best of all worlds: most Chinese netizens are sufficiently inconvenienced so they’ll never stumble into places they shouldn’t, motivated innovators still find out about, get to, and can track any going on globally, and international companies that would otherwise compete for local market share get locked out.

Ion Audio’s latest creation in a rather unique take on the pocket camcorder. The Twin Video has two cameras in it, allowing you to record not just what you are seeing, but what your reaction is to what you are seeing. I don’t really see the point behind having two cameras built in the device, other than for the “2 girls one cup” style reaction shots

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Twin Video: pocket camera for the narcissist

Earlier today, The Rumpus published a very revealing interview with someone claiming to be a Facebook employee. The interview covers a variety of subjects, including privacy restrictions at the world’s largest social network and some of the technological hurdles the site has to deal with. The biggest revelations? That Facebook collects more data about your habits than you may realize, and that there was once a ‘master password’ that would grant employees access to anyone’s Facebook profile — a password that some employees abused.

The interview wasn’t authorized by Facebook, and there are many who are doubting its authenticity. We’ve heard some rumors that the interview is legit, and The Rumpus’ editor stands behind it. For what it’s worth, much of it rings true to me — none of the ‘facts’ revealed are surprising or difficult to believe. Here are some of the highlights:

• Facebook is recording data on everything you do on the site. Everything. And not just the messages you’ve written and received either: it knows how many times you’ve clicked on your friend’s profile, which photos you’ve viewed, and more. Using this data it can establish who your best friends are, which helps it generate interesting stories in your News Feed. According to the interview, this data has recently been used to streamline search (your best friends show up first as your type in your query, rather than an alphabetical list).
• There was a master password that granted Facebook employees access to any account, if they knew it. The interviewee describes a password that would allow a Facebook employee to view anyone’s profile simply by typing in their unique user ID and the password (the password itself was a variation on ‘Chuck Norris’). This password was used primarily for engineering purposes, but other employees could find it “if they knew where to look”. To use the password, you would have to be accessing Facebook from the company’s ISP (in other words, there was no risk of it leaking to the web at large). The employee says that this power has been abused on at least two occasions, explaining that she is aware of two relating firings.
• The employee says that even the use of a master password is unneeded if you’re looking to access private data, because employees can simply query the database:
  

  See, the thing is — and I don’t know how much you know about it — it’s all stored in a database on the backend. Literally everything. Your messages are stored in a database, whether deleted or not. So we can just query the database, and easily look at it without every logging into your account. That’s what most people don’t understand.

• Finally, while the interviewee says the ‘master password’ has been deprecated, employees can still access your profile through a special tool, but they need to provide a reason for why they’re doing it. If they get audited down the line and fail to provide an explanation, they can be fired.

The rest of the interview is well worth reading. It covers Facebook’s international expansion, the efforts of one developer to create ‘Hyper-PHP”, and more.

Could the whole interview be a hoax? Sure. The interviewee apparently got some of their stats wrong, but frankly I doubt many Facebook employees can spout off the site’s membership and data storage figures off the top of their head. Here’s the statement Facebook gave us:

“This piece contains the kind of inaccuracies and misrepresentations you would expect from something sourced “anonymously”, and we’ll leave it at that.”

Reading between the lines, if Facebook was able flatly deny the claims made in the interview I suspect they would have. Instead it is trying to undermine the credibility of the article without pointing out any facts that were incorrect. And even if the interview itself is fake, I still think much of what was discussed rings true.

I’ve heard multiple times that Facebook employees can access your profile for security reasons, and they face the threat of being fired should they abuse that privilege. And it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the restrictions around these tools were much laxer a few years ago. These ‘Big Brother’ tools are very common at the social sites around the web, so Facebook would hardly be an anomaly in this case.

One final note: if the interview is legitimate, I suspect many of the facts were fabricated to conceal the identity of the interviewee. The article’s author, Phil Wong, has apparently only contributed a single post to The Rumpus (he may well not exist). The article says that Wong visited Facebook headquarters, which means that the company would certainly have a record of who he was there to visit, which would likely reveal the source’s identity. If the interview ever took place, Wong has either done a bad job covering his tracks or some of these details have been made up.

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This guest post is written by Matt Bell, VP of Sales and Business Development for Azaleos. Azaleos is a company focused on putting the things in the cloud that make the most sense for large enterprise; application management. Matt offers appealing insight because he has grown sales for companies during both of the last two economic meltdowns. This post expands on Vivek Wadhwa’s post It’s All About Selling for Survival earlier this month.

Technology blogs are full of advice for startups: where to start a company, how to raise capital, what kind of culture to build, whom to hire. But we hardly ever talk about what makes strategic decisions meaningful: sales.

A company with strong sales can build a great culture, hire anyone and take the time to figure out its strategy. Without sales, nothing else matters.

There are a thousand books on how to sell everything from used cars to aluminum siding. But most never talk about the unique problem faced by startups: getting one crazy customer to spend money on a company that has a 50-50 shot at going out of business by year end.

I have run sales organizations that couldn’t sell diddly, and others that grew to $20 million. What I learned from both experiences is that even when the product works and plenty of people could use it, you can still fail if you don’t get ferocious about finding your first customers.

1. Be mutantly flexible: The biggest advantage you have when competing with giants is just giving customers exactly what they want. Promise the moon then break down your CEO’s door to make sure your customer gets it. Engineers can complain all they want after the fact, but most actually prefer rallying for a paying customer. Large competitors have to stick to rigid guidelines, satisfy dozens of constituencies in the install-base and within their own organization, and optimize for the masses. A startup’s essential promise isn’t to be like Hertz, which gets everything exactly right, but to be like Avis: we try harder.

2. Juice the comp plan: if you want capable, blood-thirsty reps, build a comp plan short on guarantees and big on incentives. High base salaries are for IBM’s order-takers, not true hunters. You know you’ve got it right when the rest of the management team is worried about a success-disaster: if we make our numbers, won’t all the sales reps all get rich? That’s a good problem to have. Verdiem’s Jim Flatley taught me this at Plumtree: he fought to get early reps 15% of every sale, but after we made our numbers for the first time ever, nobody wanted to pay them less. Even after the bubble burst and every other technology company took a blood-bath, Jim kept delivering results.

3. Value speed in everything you do: performance isn’t just a characteristic of a technology; it’s a characteristic of your entire organization, beginning with how quickly you respond to an inquiry or follow up on a presentation. If your argument is that your competitors are big, slow dinosaurs makes them look that way at every opportunity: whenever a prospect makes a request to you and your competitors, be the one who answers first.

4. Plant landmines: go first in customer presentations so you can set the terms of the debate. Prepare a list of questions for customers to ask your customers. Customers won’t trust whatever claims you make about yourself, and they don’t like it when you attack competitors directly, but if you let them dig into competitors’ weaknesses for themselves, it works. When selling a $3-million deal to Boeing, I included the questions to ask our competitors in a hand-out. Who knows what happened to that hand-out, but we came from far behind to win.

5. Move in after the first date: your first customers are your best sales people, so after the deal closes, you as a sales-person have to move in with that customer — not move on. Every customer who took a crazy risk on your little company has to be completely vindicated in that decision, enough so that he convinces the next customer to ignore the obvious risk of doing business with you. Most customers understand that their career depends on your ability to convince new customers to make the same decision they did, and so they are usually eager to help you out. References can also limit the scope of a startup’s greatest sales enemy: proofs-of-concept. If references establish that the product generally works, you can focus the PoC on very specific concerns. At Azaleos, we have a customer who likes to brag that his team went out for drinks during a go-live rather than watching nervously from a server room.

6. Stand tall: Even if you have no right, work from the premise the customer needs you as much as you need the customer. If you don’t have confidence in your solution, who will? Half of what a sales person brings to a start up is a little swagger. As long as you aren’t obnoxious, customers like to buy from confident companies, and their procurement officers are trained to smell weakness. Riding up the elevator toward a negotiation with one of the world’s largest banks, I decided to raise our walk-away price by $1 million. Everyone argued for a lower number to avoid jeopardizing the deal, but the higher number actually increased our chances. We got the deal for 30% above our walk-away price.

7. Partner up: No one gets fired for hiring IBM, so get IBM on your side. Find out which potential partners have a vested interest in your success and sell to them before you sell to the customer. In any deal with a customer employing more than 5,000 employees, you need to find a partner the customer trusts or lower your forecast probability by 50%. Finding a partner isn’t so hard. A victory for you is almost always a victory for a larger company: Google, Amazon, Microsoft, SAP, IBM. When trying to get in the door for an enterprise deal with a major transportation company, I spent nearly a month trying to convince ‘em that a startup could handle a multi-million dollar project. Rightfully so, the customer said no way, until I reached out to Microsoft. Together, we got the deal.

8. Involve everyone: get as many of your executives, founders, engineers, product managers, and customer-service folks involved in the sales process as possible. You get better perspectives on the deal – a customer will level with an engineer in a way he might not with you – and it makes your company seem bigger to the customer. The customer develops relationships with people throughout your startup, and realizes there’s more at stake than a greedy sales-person’s commission. Focus on how much your whole startup cares about the individual customer; make your small size work for you by developing intimacy between your startup and the customer. This tactic works with large or small customers. I recommend having the CEO or another member of the executive staff make a personal phone call during the final decision process to pledge their commitment to the customer’s success.

9. Hire slow, fire fast: you’ll hire some folks who don’t work out. If you wait to fire them, you’ll run out of money, demoralize your top performers, and lose credibility. Three months after hiring a rep I asked him “how long are you going to be comfortable not selling anything”? His answer, “Don’t worry Matt, I can go several quarters without selling anything before I’d start looking for a new job.” We let him got the next day.

10. Focus the sales pitch: technology start ups are mostly driven by engineers in the early days. On hiring you, they’ll expect you to start cold-calling the whole phonebook. And the truth is, you have to love cold-calling. After all these years, I still love it. But just like Dutch in Predator before the final battle, you have to be able to answer only one question about your target before you start: where they are. A sales force needs to know what kind of companies to call on and the title of the person to call within those companies. Then he needs a pitch that a ten year-old could understand.

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Guest columnist Lydia Leavitt writes about sex and, oddly enough, social media. For more information on the latest intimate technology as well as the full interview with Kim Airs, check out 69adget.com . Click through to read the NSFW article.

Read the original here: 
Scientists study mental orgasms through MRIs

Apparently, I’m not the only one who thinks there is a social paradox in the location space. A new service, Rally, believes the power of location lies in less rather than more. That is to say, fewer social connections rather than more of them.

It’s an idea that you don’t hear a lot of social networks talking about these days as each tries to build a social graph that’s as sprawling as possible. But the team behind Rally is taking this different approach largely due to their past experience. Much of the team is the same one that built 12seconds, one of the video platforms that rose as Twitter began to become popular. And eventually, 12seconds started relying heavily on Twitter’s large social graph for its own service. But co-founder Sol Lipman isn’t convinced that’s the right way for services going forward.

So he pulled together a team with the idea of building a dead-simple location service from scratch. There is no option to pull in your friends from Twitter. No option to pull in your friends from Facebook. That’s ballsy, and risky, but it could pay off in the form of a location service that people use just with their actual friends. To put it another way, “friending becomes a virus that ruins your application,” Lipman says.

If you’ve used a location service such as Foursquare or Gowalla, Rally will feel familiar to you. Like those services, the core concept is to “check-in” at various venues around a city. But Rally does things a little differently. One thing is that they place an emphasis on tagging a check-in with a picture. You don’t have to do this, but Rally has a very nice stream UI that will highlight check-ins with pictures from those people you follow.

Another unique concept is the idea of checking in at “Home.” While plenty of users create venues on Foursquare and Gowalla for their homes, Lipman realizes that many people aren’t comfortable putting their addresses on these services. So the “home” location in Rally is a non-geotagged place that still allows you to check-in so that your real friends know that you are home. And since they are your actual friends, they will likely already know what that location is.

Rally also has a feature that allows you to make temporary locations. This is the perfect solution for creating a spot that is only going to last for a set amount of time, such as a conference or a party. These temporary spots automatically expire 12 hours after the last person checks-in there.

Leaving behind comments at venues, and the aforementioned picture functionality also gives the app an almost Yelp-like quality.

As with Foursquare, badges are also an important part of Rally. However, whereas Foursquare’s collection is pretty limited, Rally plans to gives users a ton of them for various activities (including a number of potentially racy ones).

Like Gowalla, much of the location data in Rally (such as venue names) will be crowd-sourced. They’re also working on some deals to get some pre-populated location information around the world. Until they do that, they are restricting the service to the Santa Cruz, CA area, where Lipman and his team mainly reside. Once they’re ready, likely in a few weeks, they plan to open it up to everyone.

So how does Rally make money? “With location-based services, you don’t have to rely on anyone else to make your money. Location is the Holy Grail of advertising,” Lipman notes. And he plans to use what they’ve learned from partnering with brands on 12seconds to inject a model into Rally.

An early build of Rally is actually available in the App Store right now as a free download. Eventually, the plan is to make a web version, and extend it to other mobile platforms. But for now the focus remains the iPhone, Lipman says.

A final differentiating factor to note between Rally and the other location services is that they’re decidedly not focusing on gaming elements. Lipman says they’ve talked to various groups of people who feel that these types of gaming elements are simply a gimmick. “Games have winners and loser, we just want to build a very clean service,” Lipman notes.

While Rally may not rely on Facebook or Twitter for its social graph, Lipman says that they may use Facebook Connect to help spread its data to your real friends on that network. He does not foresee them using Twitter, at all. In terms of how else they’ll spread the word about the service, Lipman says that have some other interesting ideas in the works, but declined to say what. The key will remain making sure that these are people you actually know and want to share your location information with, he says.

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We’re big fans of Outright, a free and drop-dead simple online bookkeeping service. Today, the startup has revealed that it is tracking over $1 billion self employed and micro-business transactions, which Outright says is a sign that the freelance, contract labor, and self-employment marketplace is strong.

Outright.com’s platform manages all business finances, tracks income and expenses, and automates tax preparation. The site is now launching a new automated W-9 management service today. A W-9 tax form is required for anyone outside of employees to whom you pay money (i.e. contractors, freelancers), to ensure you properly file a 1099.

Outright strips the W-9 form from confusing IRS jargon and simplifies the language so both business owners and contract workers can easily understand how to fill the forms out. Contract workers fill out the W-9 online, business owner tracks W-9 status online and Outright assures that all information is transferred safely and securely. Outright will then track the status of W-9s for business owners to make sure all IRS deadlines are met, and penalties are avoided.

Launched earlier this year, the startup recently raised $5 million in funding and previously raised $2 million in seed funding. It’s not surprising that Outright has been able to gain traction as a popular bookkeeping application; it’s easy to use and it has integrations that are useful for the self-employed, such as a plug-in with FreshBooks, Expensify and Shoeboxed.

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