Mobile document service Soonr gets more collaborative
Soonr, a company that gives users access to their documents (including Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, PDFs and PowerPoints, among others) on their mobile phones, is launching version 3.0 of its application today, which adds collaboration and premium services to the mix.
We wrote about Soonr’s iPhone application back in January, when we said it “nails the desktop to cloud to iPhone connection.” Soonr is only one of many services that lets you backup your documents … Continue Reading
The king of customer development starts a blog (and tweets too)
Steve Blank, the king of customer development, has started a blog at steveblank.com. And he’s on Twitter too: @sgblank. Steve is one of the great startup mentors of all time and he is using his blog to share 30 years of Silicon Valley war stories. Start at the beginning, and read every word he writes.
According to his book, Four Steps to the Epiphany, Steve is a “retired entrepreneur who… has been in 8 startups … Continue Reading
What is the minimum viable product?
Eric Ries and I recently sat down to talk about minimum viable products: the product with just the necessary features to get money and feedback from early adopters.
The minimum viable product (MVP) is often an ad on Google. Or a PowerPoint slide. Or a dialog box. Or a landing page. You can often build it in a day or a week.
I recorded the interview and synchronized it with some simple slides below. That’s … Continue Reading
Opening board meetings to the entire company
In the second part of my interview with Eric Ries, we discuss (1) acquiring customers without launching and (2) opening up board meetings to the entire company.
At IMVU, Eric and the management opened up board meetings to the entire company. Why?
To give people the information they need to do their jobs.
To teach everyone in the company to think like the CEO.
To prevent employees from gossiping about board meetings.
And more!
I’ve … Continue Reading
Sell it before you build it
Fliggo does it right:
Fliggo Pro is a minimum viable product in action. MVPs reduce time to market. It’s a good sign when people sign up to be notified. And if nobody signs up, you build the next iteration and see if that’s the minimum viable product.
How would you modify this MVP to collect credit card numbers? Could you promise to not charge customers until Fliggo Pro is delivered? Could you give customers a … Continue Reading
It’s very easy to underprice your product
What’s the right price for your product? According to Steve Blank, it’s apparently $0. And it’s also $1 million. What?
Listen to this wonderful story to learn how Steve uses these two prices to create a bounding box around the highest price customers will pay for a product. And see why he thinks “It’s very easy to underprice your product… particularly if you’re an engineer.”
Audio: It’s very easy to underprice your product (mp3)
Steve’s … Continue Reading
How we encourage word of mouth for Pitching Hacks
We released Pitching Hacks about 30 days ago. Since then, we’ve sold 280 copies, brought in $4272 of revenue (including almost $1000 from beta testers), and received lots of positive reviews on Twitter. Thanks to everyone who bought the book and spread the word!
Encouraging word-of-mouth
We give everyone who buys the book a $5 discount code to encourage them to tell their friends about Pitching Hacks. It works: you can see people sharing the … Continue Reading
We teach entrepreneurship like every vertical market has the same set of rules
Steve Blank: “What I began to realize is that we teach entrepreneurship like every vertical market and industry has the same set of rules. So the first heuristic I want to offer is that — even in this class — there really is no common ‘these rules work’ for all vertical markets and industries.”
Listen to this excerpt from the second class of Steve’s customer development course for the rest of this wonderful lesson.
Audio: … Continue Reading
Blog company Automattic buys Blo.gs
Automattic, the company that runs the popular WordPress blogging software, has acquired the Blo.gs pinging and blog trackback technology from Yahoo.
Services like Blo.gs give bloggers a way to quickly “ping,” or alert search engines and RSS readers when their new content gets posted. Especially for competitive news blogs like VentureBeat, speed is a necessity, because we can sometimes break a story, but we may not be credited with it if we don’t get the … Continue Reading
Katalyst and Slide tap into video-sharing on Facebook
Videos haven’t been a prominent part of Facebook for most of its five year history — the tools for sharing videos haven’t been obvious, and people have already been busy using the site for things like sharing photos. But Facebook and outside companies have been working on some fruitful ways of improving video-sharing on the site.
Lately, application developer Slide, along with Ashton Kutcher-led digital content company Katalyst, have been experimenting with a way of … Continue Reading
Roundup: Spreadtweet, Windows Live, and more
Here’s the latest action:
Tungle launches web service for scheduling meetings — More on Web Worker Daily.
App lets Tweeters fake a work ethic – What’s better than scheduling meetings online? Tricking your boss into thinking you’re working on an Excel spreadsheet when you’re really using Twitter! This productivity feigning app looks like columns and rows, but it’s really a stream of Tweets. Paul Boutin has a closer look at this new app, cleverly named… … Continue Reading
Can casual game Virtual Families take a chunk out of The Sims?
Last Day of Work is launching a new casual web game dubbed Virtual Families today. It’s a family simulation game that hopes to carve out a market in the shadow of the giant Electronic Arts franchise, The Sims, which has sold more than 100 million copies and which launches its third version in June.
Arthur Humphrey, co-founder and lead designer of Last Day of Work, says he isn’t intimidated by the comparison because Virtual Families … Continue Reading
Peanut butter manifesto scribe seeking to raise $150M venture fund?
Update: Brad Garlinghouse has gotten in touch and given us his new email address, which has SilverLake Partners in the domain name, implying he has some sort of job at that private equity firm. He wouldn’t comment on his exact position. He did say the article below is inaccurate, but wouldn’t elaborate much. This may suggest any such plans to raise a fund may have been put off. He wouldn’t comment on whether he’d worked … Continue Reading
Trackle brings personal updates to any website
Trackle, the surprisingly useful service that sends you personalized alerts from around the web, is now extending its technology to other web sites with new “Trackle It” buttons.
The concept sounds a little dodgy at first. Updates? You mean like RSS feeds, or maybe Google Alerts? Well, kind of — but much more tailored to your interests and needs. For example, let’s say I wanted to keep up-to-date on crime in Noe Valley, my neighborhood … Continue Reading
Your health on the iPhone!
For my entire life, I’ve relied on habit. I wake up when my eyes open in the morning (sometimes prompted by the alarm clock), eat when my tummy says its time, exercise in the mornings, and fall asleep when I’m dead tired.
But the applications being built for the latest “3.0″ version of the iPhone operating system — and likely soon for a number of other smartphones — promise to monitor my every step, my … Continue Reading
Study finds file-sharers buy ten times more music
A new report from BI Norwegian School of Management shows illegal file-sharers are more likely to purchase music from legitimate sources than other web users.
I know, I know. The whole thing sounds questionable, but here’s how it comes together: Ars Technica reports that researchers monitored the music download habits of 1,900 web users age 15 and above. Over time, the study found that users who downloaded music illegally from P2P file-sharing sites like BitTorrent … Continue Reading
Report: Interest in online video up, channel loyalty down
Maybe Hulu’s expensive Superbowl ad wasn’t such a bad idea. Consumer interest in computer-based television viewing is on the rise, according to a recent study from consulting firm Accenture. Furthermore, as the number of ways to watch TV expands, consumers are caring less about channel loyalty and more about ease of access for their favorite shows.
Overall, Accenture’s report found that television viewership is quickly splintering across a number of platforms like computers, phones, and … Continue Reading
AMD reports wider loss in first quarter, lacks Intel's bullishness
While Intel said last week that the recession was bottoming out, Advanced Micro Devices continued to have problems in its first quarter.
The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based chip maker said it lost $416 million, or 66 cents a share, compared to a loss of $364 million, or 60 cents a share, a year earlier. While bad, the loss was not as bad as feared. The loss would have been 62 cents a share without one-time charges. Analysts … Continue Reading
How much will Skype pay EU carriers for the success of its iPhone app?
Skype’s iPhone application, which lets users make cheap or free calls over their phone data plans, is a raging success. Barely a week after its release at the end of March, 2 million users had downloaded the application, representing almost 10 percent of iPhone users.
But phone carriers, fearing the service will eat into their already declining voice revenues, have either restricted its use over Wi-Fi networks (AT&T has), or banned it (T-Mobile in Germany). … Continue Reading
Google Profiles give you (a little) control over how people see you in search
Updated
It can be awfully frustrating that people’s first impressions of you will probably be determined by what shows up at your search results in Google — something that’s largely out of your control, until now. But the search giant just announced it’s giving you a (small) amount of control over that first page of results, by inserting your Google profile at the bottom.
Basically, this means that when people search for your name on … Continue Reading
