July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Andrew Dowling is founder of Tapestry.net.

Parenthood isn’t a common topic of discussion among entrepreneurs, because conventional wisdom says that the two simply don’t mix. B

eing an entrepreneur and being a parent are both such all-consuming pursuits that it’s apparently impossible to do a good job of both. This idea is further reinforced by the stereotype of successful startup founders as young, single twenty-somethings.

Like most stereotypes, this is a load of hogwash. More than 80 percent of successful startup founders these days are actually over thirty-five, and there are a ton of reasons why having a little bit more life and business experience can greatly improve a startup founder’s chances of success.

But what about parenthood itself?

I know what you’re thinking: “Okay, experience can help, but surely parenthood can only hinder an entrepreneur’s chances of success?”

I think there are a number of ways that being a parent can actually make you a better entrepreneur. Here are my top reasons:

1. Patience

If there’s one thing being a parent teaches you, it’s patience. Prior to parenthood, many of us get used to the idea that we can control the pace at which our lives run. When things take too long, we make them go faster. We rush, we push, and we pay more: we do whatever it takes to make things happen how we want, when we want.

After kids come along, we are forced to learn that this doesn’t always work. Some things simply take time. Sometimes you just have to sit back and let time do its thing.

It’s the same with startups. Sure, some things need to be rushed like crazy, when velocity and time to market mean everything. But some things simply take time and need to develop according to their own schedule. Unless you’ve got a well-developed reservoir of patience, you’re going to seriously mess things up by trying to rush something that shouldn’t be rushed.

2. Relationships

A lot of people exaggerate how much marriage changes your life. Sometimes it does, sure, but it is by no means guaranteed. I know plenty of married couples that live their lives no differently to the way they did before marriage.

Being a parent, on the other hand, is pretty much guaranteed to make things change big time. Together you and your partner are thrown into a crazy new reality where you need to work together on tasks you were totally unprepared for. Inevitably, you learn a lot about how to manage interpersonal relationships. You’re tired, you’re exhausted, sometimes you don’t even know which way is up; but you still learn how to find a way to hang together as a team.

Sounds a lot like the relationship between startup co-founders, doesn’t it? Co-founders share responsibility for a troublesome, demanding, and attention-seeking baby known as the business. They’d better know how to manage their relationship darn well if they want to stay together as their baby grows up.

You’re tired, you’re exhausted, sometimes you don’t even know which way is up; but you still learn how to find a way to hang together as a team.

3. Perspective

Living life in the crucible of a startup can make you believe that nothing else in the world matters quite as much as the success of your business. You’re on a roller coaster where the highs are euphoric, but the lows can make you feel as if your world is about to end.

Kids have an amazing way of giving you a sense of perspective. They keep you on an even keel and are a great reminder of what’s important to worry about, and what’s not.

4. Dealing with chaos

Parenthood is almost totally non-linear. Nothing goes quite according to plan. Stuff happens. You deal with it. And you get very good at dealing with the unexpected.

Life in a startup is almost exactly the same.

5. Responsibility

When you’re a parent, the buck stops with you. There is nobody more senior you can defer to, nobody else you can shift responsibility to. When someone has to make the tough decisions, it’s you.

What better description of life as an entrepreneur could you get?

6. Adapting expectations

When you’re a parent, it’s very easy to get swept up into great ideas of what your kids will do, what they’ll enjoy and also what they’ll become — and quite often what we expected is very different from the outcome.

Parenthood teaches us to support the path that your children taking, even if it’s not what you had expected; it’s much better than trying to push them into a direction they’re not prepared to take.

Startups are much the same. You can stick to your original vision, come hell or high water, and often go down with the ship; or you can embrace reality, see that your expectations were off, and pivot.

7. Handling change

Anyone launching themselves into a new business quickly finds they’re dealing with lots of things which are unfamiliar to them. Legal issues, technologies, marketing strategy, governance — sometimes it feels as if everyone is trying to talk to you in a different language. And everything is constantly changing.

From the moment you discover you’re going to become a parent, your trajectory is remarkably similar. Your life suddenly changes in a big way forever. You find yourself dealing with concepts and terminology you’ve never had an interest in before. And once your kids are born, you’d better get used to dealing with change, because that’s what your life is going to consist of for the next couple of decades.

What better preparation for life in a startup could there possibly be?

Image credit: marknye/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Craig Palli is vice president of business development at Fiksu.

Last September, Apple introduced the Advertising Identifier (IDFA), a new technology for mobile ad tracking. Months later, the company officially stopped accepting new apps using the UDID (Unique Device Identifier), the technology it had previously used for its devices. So how have app marketers adapted to the post-UDID world? In my opinion, the industry is much better off. Here’s why.

There’s a new standard in town

With UDID gone, app marketers have a number of alternative tracking technologies to support, making attribution complicated. These include Mac addresses, HTML5, and digital fingerprinting – each of which has its pros and cons. Fortunately, the market has largely settled on IDFA as the dominant standard for tracking. In the last 30 days, according to my estimates, there’s been a pronounced shift away from UDID, with approximately 90 percent of all impressions served today using some form of non-UDID tracking, up from roughly 65-70 percent one month ago.

VentureBeat will be taking an in-depth look at the future of mobile advertising in our “Brands and agencies: Mobile advertising hell — or heaven” track at the MobileBeat conference, coming up July 9-10.

Publishers, advertisers and ad networks are on board

Because IDFA does away with privacy concerns, app publishers can now directly attribute advertising to return-on-investment (ROI) without running afoul of privacy regulations or user preferences. The majority of app publishers and advertisers have transitioned to IDFA, though there are still pockets of support for the other tracking technologies.

This isn’t a bad thing. In fact, it’s the opposite. Best practices in mobile app marketing call for supporting multiple types of marketing attribution. This flexibility helps marketers in two ways. First, it helps marketers reach more consumers more efficiently. IDFA is app-centric and is not compatible with the mobile web and Facebook mobile app installs. Supporting many forms of attribution allows marketers to reach the broadest spectrum of users across the entire mobile ecosystem. Second, it allows marketers to adapt to changing market conditions such as new guidelines, consumer preferences, or new sources of advertising inventory.

Furthermore, the majority of ad networks have updated their SDKs to support IDFA. But a few are still transitioning, with the majority of traffic currently supported by IDFA alternatives. Advertisers need to be aware of this as they plan their media buys.

Soaring inventory

With IDFA in place, ad buyers can worry less about how much inventory is available for each flavor of tracking. We are now seeing a significant increase in attributable advertising inventory, in the tens of billions of impressions per month (a conservative estimate). This surge is coming from app publishers like Pandora who, until now, hadn’t used identifiers like the UDID or MAC Address due to privacy concerns. Now, with IDFA, they’re comfortable opening up their apps for in-app advertising.

Despite the volume, we are not currently seeing ad costs coming down meaningfully because much of this new inventory volume is from high-value apps. We expect some networks will let inventory go unsold rather than discounting. Still, it’s worth noting that mobile app advertising is distinctly cheaper than other digital advertising vehicles.

Opting-out

Before we celebrate, mobile marketers need to understand some limitations. Notably, that IDFA allows iPhone users the option to opt-out, rendering them untrackable. Also, 5-10 percent of iOS traffic comes from devices using iOS 4 and 5. Since they don’t support the IDFA, this inventory is also unavailable to advertisers.

The world is a better place

Hats off to the industry for managing the May 1 deadline and the transition to IDFA well. IDFA does a great job of balancing the needs of all parties in the mobile app advertising ecosystem. It has dispelled the negativity that swirled around UDID and has opened up new traffic channels for advertisers. This means more choices and security for advertisers, more control for consumers, and greater revenue potential for publishers. In short, we are all better off.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Caine Moss and Alon Rotem work for international law firm Goodwin Procter.

Congratulations! A big-name serial acquirer is preparing a term sheet to purchase your company. While your attention may naturally focus on negotiating the purchase price and closing the deal immediately, here are 6 things you can do before signing the term sheet to streamline the deal process and maximize the return for your investors and your team.

1. Why are you selling? Why are they buying?

These are threshold questions that will drive the entire M&A process. You and your board should contemplate if now is a good time to sell your business (and at what price). Achieving alignment between founders and investors before the company receives a term sheet is one of the most important things you can do to reduce friction during the term sheet stage. Once you and your board agree on the parameters and timing for a sale, consider establishing a strategic committee comprised of a subset of directors to work with management and your stockholders. This committee will be closest to the deal negotiations, will liaise with the legal team and advisors on behalf of the board, and (ideally) will be able to make decisions quickly to maintain deal momentum.

Whether the buyer is looking to acquire your company because of its killer IP, strategic value, customer base or engineering talent (aka an “acqui-hire”), understanding a buyer’s motivation will inform how the deal is structured. For example, in an acqui-hire, a buyer want to may allocate a significant portion of the deal consideration to employment retention packages with merely token consideration leftover for investors. Conversely, a buyer targeting your strategic value is less likely to optimize around retention but instead may serve up incentive-laden earn-outs tying the purchase price to the achievement of future milestones.

2. Have you conducted a market check?

Try to get a sense of what your company is worth before the term sheet is signed to ensure you are maximizing value for your company’s shareholders. Depending on the dynamics of your market and the time you have to negotiate your term sheet, you may want to engage an investment banker to spearhead the process. Conversely, if your company is in a concentrated space where all the major players are known, you may decide to conduct a market check yourself. But if your product offering straddles different markets, it could be attractive to buyers in different market segments (for example, a fintech or healthcare IT company) and in this case a banker can be helpful. There are many good bankers out there who specialize in market sub-segments and add significant value by creating a market for your deal and enhancing process efficiencies.

3. Should you establish a Management Bonus Plan?

If you have gone through several rounds of financing, the liquidation preference of your investors may be higher than the enterprise value of your company on an exit. Since its equity stake would be worthless in a sale, management may not be motivated to drive toward a sale transaction merely for the benefit of the investors. One way to re-balance the incentives of the management team is to implement a management bonus plan (MBP), which contractually allocates a portion of the sale proceeds to the management team before anything is paid out to the stakeholders. While some investors may balk at a perceived land grab by the management team in some contexts, these plans can be an effective tool to get management to drive toward an exit and support the sale process.

4. Are your employees coming along?

If the acquirer values your key employees, then its critical to make sure the terms are acceptable to them. Does your company’s culture mesh with that of the acquirer’s? How long will the acquirer expect them to stay? Under these circumstances, it’s likely that a significant portion of the proceeds will be held back for employee retention purposes. Additionally, to retain competitive advantage and to reduce post-merger attrition, buyers typically impose non-competes on key employees which can last several years after the acquisition. Employees are also customarily asked to sign release agreements to protect the buyer from employment law skeletons that may be hidden in your company’s closet. Try to get out in front of these issues with management and with the acquirer, because the longer these issues remain unresolved in a sale transaction, the less leverage a seller has to negotiate a desired outcome.

5. Corporate housekeeping

After your company receives a the term sheet, it may be limited in its ability to make option grants because of potential tax implications associated with your existing strike price. Accordingly, try to deal with capitalization table issues (like clearing out a back log of option grants and formally terminating stale advisor relationships) before a formal offer comes in the door. This will serve the added benefit of increasing the acquirer’s confidence in your corporate governance and HR practices.

Likewise, you will want to clean up any outstanding intellectual property issues. Now is the time to settle or resolve any open disputes with third parties so you are able make clean representations regarding your IP in the definitive agreement. At a minimum, ensure that all patent filings are current and confirm that all of your employees and consultants (current and, if possible, former) have entered into inventions assignment agreements. Just like being able to present a clean capitalization table, having a handle on your IP affairs will affirm that your house is in order – which can pay dividends by shortening the due diligence period in a sale.

6. Lawyer up

Sophisticated buyers use every tool and tactic in the M&A playbook when making acquisitions. To optimize your outcome, you will need a seasoned M&A attorney who is an expert in deal strategy and who knows the market for deal terms – both what to fight for and what to concede.

Caine Moss is a partner in Goodwin Procter’s Business Law Department and a member of the Technology Companies Group. Mr. Moss has significant experience working with software, telecommunications, Internet, and financial services companies through all stages of their growth. In addition, he has broad transactional expertise, particularly in the areas of venture capital, public and private mergers and acquisitions, and representation of issuers and underwriters in public equity offerings.

Alon Rotem, an associate at Goodwin Procter. Alon practices in the Technology Companies Group and represents clients in a variety of corporate transactions, including mergers and acquisitions, securities offerings and other general corporate and securities matters, as well as in intellectual property transactional and commercial matters.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Caleb Sima is CEO and co-founder of Bluebox. We will be exploring all aspects of mobile, from data to design, at our MobileBeat conference July 9-1o in San Francisco, Calif.

The simultaneous explosion of enterprise mobility and cloud adoption has resulted in a “perfect storm” for IT. It’s the “everywhere data” side effect created by bring your own device (BYOD) programs — data is now coming from anywhere and everywhere, making it hard for IT departments to keep up.

Data traveling from corporate servers to unsecured personal devices to apps and into the cloud leaves a digital paper trail of copies everywhere along its route. Gartner vice president David Willis recently highlighted this phenomenon saying, “Some mobile devices are designed to share data in the cloud and have no general purpose file system for applications to share, increasing the potential for data to be easily duplicated between applications and moved between applications and the cloud.”

Mobile data presents a unique challenge to IT security teams. These teams previously built data security models to prevent data leakage, which is unfortunately like shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted. Even before enterprises are able to launch a formal BYOD program, their data has already leaked everywhere. In reality, BYOD programs present the first opportunity for IT to formally implement approaches that tackle data security properly.

When looking at a mobile security solution, you need to consider not just the lessons you’ve learned from previous leaks, but also the fact that your employees will not tolerate heavy IT endpoint software on their agile personal devices.

Let’s look at five approaches for securing mobile data:

Device-level containers or personas

This class of solution invokes the notion that with a “bring your own” device, business and personal use should be separated like “church and state.” To that end, IT can apply a separate zone on the user’s device within which some corporate apps and data can reside. In this way, policy controls apply only to what’s in the container, rather than to the entire device. This model works well for organizations that have previously implemented separation approaches for corporate-owned endpoints.

Application Management

Another approach to data security is to secure company information indirectly through application management (mobile application management or MAM). Unlike mobile device management (MDM), which focuses on device activation, enrollment, and provisioning, MAM focuses on software delivery. This approach allows IT to present a catalog of corporate developed apps and vetted third-party business productivity apps that employees can use for work. A benefit to MAM is that it gives administrators the ability to update and potentially remove apps without having to physically touch the device.

The challenge for someone investigating these solutions is teasing out the features tied to data security from those tied to pure app management. Data security within these models generally comes through the whitelisting or blacklisting of apps.

Data lockers

Data lockers, also referred to as content lockers, invoke the classic “walled garden” approach to data security. Data lockers are often sold as add-on solutions to MAMs or containers with the purpose of channeling data into a central secure storage repository. Data lockers give end-users access to the corporate data within an IT-owned framework, keeping administrators in control of a broad array of data.

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)

VDI gained traction as a solution shaking up how desktop PCs are delivered, but it’s also viewed as an option for BYOD. “Hosting” a desktop virtual machine on a shared server that is then accessed by a “client” device like a tablet can be a very useful approach for mobile users to securely access corporate apps. Data security comes into the picture because all corporate data sits safely within the confines of the corporate data center no matter where the client device is. You can use existing data security solutions with this model as well. It is worth noting that this approach will only cover the apps that reside on the desktop not apps natively designed for mobile.

Data-centric security

Once data makes its way outside the bounds of the enterprise, IT needs to begin viewing data security as the first line of defense, not the last line. A newer philosophy is the so-called “data-centric security” approach, that provides IT with visibility into which data has crossed the bounds of the enterprise and where it has gone.

As Gartner’s Willis explained, “We’re finally reaching the point where IT officially recognizes [that] people use their business device for non-work purposes.”

Now with visibility into its everywhere data, IT can make informed decisions about control policies. Moreover, because controls are directly tied to the data, the mechanisms of enforcement have no impact on a user’s native device and app experience.

All five of the data-security approaches outlined here are backed by products on the market and should be aligned with the BYOD goals of your organization. The right approach will ultimately be the one (or a combination of solutions) that fosters the secure flow of corporate data while supporting IT and enabling employees to use the devices and applications they need to optimize productivity.

Caleb Sima is CEO of Bluebox Security. Engaged in the Internet security arena since 1996, Caleb is a member of ISSA and is one of the founding visionaries of the Application Vulnerability Description Language (AVDL) standard within OASIS, as well as a founding member of the Web Application Security Consortium (WASC). He is also a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) in Visual Developer Security. Prior to co-founding Bluebox, Caleb held leadership positions at Armorize Technologies, SPI Dynamics, and the HP Application Security Center.

Data leak image via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

In two weeks, tens of thousands of people will fill the streets of Toronto for the seventh annual Luminato Festival to see beautiful works of art, hear great music, and enjoy the sights of a world-class city. They’ll also make history by participating in a first-of-its-kind augmented reality exhibition.

After downloading an app for the event, attendees can point their phones at different places around David Pecaut Square to see a “virtual gallery” not visible to the human eye.  Augmented reality works by displaying layers of computer-generated information on top of a view of the physical world. In this case, as they point their phones at different places around the square, they can see works of art on their screens that they can interact with, share, and discuss with others. As people explore the virtual art pieces, a heat-map will be created displaying where they are and what they are looking at.

When the event is over and people are done using the app, what they will leave behind is an entirely new type of digital art: a giant, crowdsourced version of the iconic Lancôme rose spanning the length of an entire city square. It will be an enormous, virtual mural of sorts that each person has individually contributed to, just by participating.  And it will be the world’s first “human heat-map logo.”

Find out more about the future of mobile advertising in the “Mobile Advertising Armageddon or Heaven” track of VentureBeat’s HealthBeat 2013 conference, July 9-10.

This will all be made possible by the groundbreaking work of a San Francisco-based, three-year-old startup by the name of CrowdOptic.

Led by serial-entrepreneur Jon Fisher, the company has created a technology that is able to take the GPS, accelerometer, and compass data from multiple phones to see what people are focusing on. Instead of just recording a phone’s location, CrowdOptic is able to compare the information from different phones with one another. The company can tell where different people in a situation are pointing their devices and so measure what they are paying attention to.

One of the most unique things about CrowdOptic’s technology is that, unlike modelling software, it takes an analytics-based approach, so it can track an object as it moves. This allows things like being able to see the vital stats of an athlete mid-game when you point your phone at them — what Fisher calls a “personal jumbotron.” Another usage is seeing the social media hashtag and discussion of an event as it is occurring;  if this can really work the way it is intended, it will have huge ramifications for citizen journalists and emergency management.

The use of augmented reality in marketing and entertainment isn’t itself a new development. Many companies have created apps around product-themed outings, like Stella Artois’ “Le Bar Guide” app, which allows customers to find the closest Stella-serving bar and figure out how to get there and how to get a cab home. Other uses have been to let a customer see what a product is like without having to purchase it first – Maybelline made an app that lets customers see how 30 different nail polish colors would look on their hands without actually having to put them on. These apps may have a “cool” factor, but so far, there hasn’t been much depth to them.

Most uses to date have also been meant for one person to experience, but CrowdOptic takes augmented reality to the next level of engagement. Fisher draws a parallel here between Web 1.0 and 2.0. Whereas early augmented reality was about “taking us into our own world,” the future will be about “group and collaborative experiences.” To him, the possibilities are endless — everything from media and entertainment, to “war fighters collaborating for missile strikes or police officers collaborating to catch criminals or crowds collaborating to collectively navigate a disaster.”

However amazing the potential uses for this technology, not everyone is a fan. Fisher described how on a recent visit to an elementary and middle school, after he explained what his company is able to do, some of the students told him they found the technology to be scary.

Augmented reality has come a long way in the last few years, and while it still has a long way to go, we are starting to see it enter the mainstream discourse, especially lately with discussions about Google Glass. The tech media has churned out countless articles obsessing over the features, rumors, and rumored features of what Google Glass might be able to do.  However, there has been far less discussion of what the larger societal impact of these devices might be.

Today it seems that everyone is hooked to their phones, obsessing over the momentary pleasures that the data streams that comprise our digital lives provide us. But this has so far been confined to the small screens we carry in our pocket or bag. Google Glass will remove these boundaries altogether. A few versions down the line, when the technology is more sophisticated, the market is crowded with competitors, and the use cases are more established, we won’t just be mentally “living in our own worlds,” we will be physically seeing different ones.

Source: CrowdOptic

An example of how augmented reality can be used to learn more about real-time events.

Augmented reality is a technology that alters the perception of reality by distorting it, allowing escape from it, and enhancing it — all at the same time.

These outcomes are not necessarily in conflict with each other. What technology like CrowdOptic’s shows us is that there is an entire space for shared experiences, it doesn’t have to be that we’re stuck in our own narrow field of vision — there are broader possibilities. But even with that said, once there is a widely used technology capable of measuring focus and tracking attention, the relationship between you and the devices around you changes for good.

In the meantime, we can all stand to gain from improving the way we share our experiences together. The “like” button is an incredibly shallow tool for expressing the complex appreciation, desire, and fondness we have for what we pay attention to. Instead of making us further removed from the world around us, augmented reality can build on it, leading to deeper, richer, and more personalized experiences – experiences that we can take part in together.

Tarun Wadhwa is a writer, researcher, and entrepreneur working at the intersection of technology and public policy. You can follow him on Twitter – @twadhwa – or contact him directly at VB@tarunwadhwa.com. Also, check out his upcoming book, Identified, which will be out later this year. 

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Intrapreneurship (entrepreneurship within a larger company) is taking off as companies look to innovate and experiment with new products. For startups, the idea of devoting time to such projects might feel like a distraction; but if done right, these small, scrappy efforts can offer big rewards.

Is intrapreneurship something your startup should consider? Here’s what you need to know.

Why intrapreneurship needs to happen

The most obvious reason to foster intrapreneurship is to pursue more opportunities. With these projects, you can try new ideas and test the boundaries without risking negative effects on your core business or user base. It becomes possible to experiment with offshoot products and technologies to see if you can turn a new concept into reality.

You’re also able to respond quickly to competitive threats by having a small team in place to rapidly launch products and turn out new features.

The less obvious reason for intrapreneurship is to keep your culture innovative. Most startups have been around for a while and soon enough those companies can become stale and corporate. Too many companies fall into this trap and then lose their leadership position during the next technology wave (e.g., mobile).

Intrapreneurship helps continue the startup vibe and energy from “the early days” and infects the entire team. And while there are other ways to encourage this mentality, intrapreneurship allows for hands-on innovation like nothing else I’ve seen before. Companies like Zappos have used this approach to harness their intrapreneurship roots. Zappos’ San Francisco-based team, known as Zappos Labs, is completely dedicated to creating and testing new ways for consumers to shop Zappos.com.

How intrapreneurship happens

In order to kickstart an intrapreneur program, you first need some ideas — and the secret is, those can come from anywhere.

Lyft is a great example of an internal idea that ultimately turned into its parent company, Zimride’s, main business. Hackathons have also become a popular way to solicit new ideas, and you can go a step beyond this by accepting ideas from anywhere in the company.

Find a way to manage the ideation process and get approval from your leadership team in a way that works for your company culture and flow. You want to cast a wide net to get lots of ideas to choose from, and involve the entire team in this culture of innovation.

Second, you need a small team (or teams) that is excited to work on something new and speculative. This typically consists of product managers, designers, and engineers, but could include other roles like analysts and community managers.

Pick people who are excited to build something from scratch and iterate toward product-market fit, even though their work is experimental and may eventually only amount to a fun learning experience.

At my company, everyone is part of the larger organization; but internally, we have smaller teams dedicated to different intrapreneurial products. Projects such as our Sidewalk and Swoon apps allow brilliant minds the opportunity to experiment on smaller mobile initiatives. Ultimately, these intrapreneurs will get to experience the benefits of a startup (small team, no legacy code, etc.) without the disadvantages of having to raise money or be concerned with the administrative burdens of running a company.

Finally, you will need to support the team and at the same time give them autonomy (e.g., “supportive autonomy”). Once you agree on vision, give the team space to make decisions on how to build and iterate toward that vision, but be there to give advice whenever asked. Consider offering but not requiring the company’s other resources such as network operations, analytics, and PR. The important thing is these are all offered as options, not required as obligations.

Ready, go

Intrapreneurship programs make sense for lots of growing startups and can be hugely effective for building innovation if they map back to your business’ bigger-picture mission and goals. Who knows, one of these little projects could be the next big thing.

Greg Tseng is CEO and co-founder of Tagged.

Image credit: Zurijeta/Shutterstock

Abinash Tripathy is cofounder and CEO of mobile customer service help desk Helpshift.

Mobile devices have created an entirely new way for people to interact with businesses. The good news for businesses is that millions of Americans can now download your app and make purchases on their smartphones and tablets every day.

The bad news is, if your customers service isn’t robust and flexible enough to deal with this fast-growing channel, your mobile customers will write negative app reviews, vent on social media, or abandon your app (and your business) altogether.

If your business doesn’t yet have a direct channel of communication within your mobile application itself — and instead you’re diverting questions and complaints to your email or web-based customer service — you’re leaving yourself vulnerable. In-app customer service lets you respond to tickets faster and more effectively, get customer feedback, and boost the lifetime value of every customer.

The big help desk companies are already adapting to the requirements of in-app customer service — Salesforce with its Desk.com and Zendesk with its Zendesk for Mobile — and we’ll see native, mobile centric customer service technologies emerging to take these capabilities deeper. My company Helpshift’s native help desk, for example, can auto-generate diagnostic information to help with device-specific issues. And it can also auto-generate a lot of data about the customer in question — such as their purchase history and other account information — so the customer doesn’t need to provide it. That customer data doesn’t just help you answer tickets more effectively, you can also use it to create a more comprehensive profile over time so that each interaction gets easier and more meaningful.

And since native mobile customer service even lets you chat with mobile customers, in real-time, right in the app, cutting down on your response time and endless email chains and/or phone hold music.

VentureBeat will be exploring the theme “Commerce: Mobile Experience Determines whether you Live or Die” at our MobileBeat conference, July 9-10.

In fact, native integrations can prevent support tickets altogether. By empowering loyal mobile users who, for example, are struggling with a new version of an app to navigate to an in-app help section where the answer to their question is front and center, along with a searchable knowledgebase in their language, you can pre-empt support tickets.

It’s easy to understand why mobile users love instant, meaningful customer support: It helps them solve their problems as quickly, easily, and painlessly as possible. Rather than waiting for a rep to respond to an email with yet more questions, or worse, deleting the app altogether and leaving a negative review in the app store, we’re back to using the apps we love. Most importantly, we’re happier users — and when customers are happy, businesses are happier, too. But bridging the mobile customer service divide has clear business benefits as well.

One company, popular mobile productivity app maker Astrid, which was recently acquired by Yahoo, has been able to cut the time spent on managing support tickets by more than half. [Disclosure: Astrid is a customer of my company.]

Other mobile applications, like Talk to Myself and Spokn, have told us they’re able to answer mobile users’ questions before they become tickets, so they can service tens of thousands of mobile users much more efficiently.

Any business with a mobile application and a growing user base needs to consider how they are providing service and support to mobile customers—and how they intend to provide the same level of excellence as the user base grows. In-app customer support makes scaling radically easier and more cost-efficient by helping you:

1. Reduce support costs and overhead – By eliminating redundant questioning and closing email exchange loops, app developers can dramatically reduce ticket volume as well as the time needed to respond to tickets. This enables companies to respond to more service tickets per rep and require fewer reps as the business grows.
2. Reduce customer churn and increase customer lifetime value – Happy, engaged customers don’t leave. In fact, they often spend more. A better user experience results in increased customer engagement and customer retention.
3. Increase brand advocacy and sales — The world’s most popular brands are successful because they have more than just customers; they have loyal fans and brand ambassadors. A delightful customer experience fosters brand advocacy and word-of-mouth marketing.

In the near future, we can expect larger companies to leverage this new in-app communication channel to provide service and support to even greater numbers of mobile customers. Imagine being able to communicate with a support representative from Comcast, Walmart, Target, Amazon, or Starbucks, in real time while you’re on the go? Imagine instantly sharing a screenshot of an error message — or a picture of a messy retail store — with a company representative and receiving an immediate reply. For forward-thinking businesses, this customer-centric future is not far off.

[Top image credit: Warren Goldswain/Shutterstock]

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Listening to startup people speak can either be exciting and inspirational… or it can make you do a little gag. It’s hard not to poke fun at self-righteous entrepreneurial types that pepper their language with buzzwords and act as if they got their Ph.D. in passion – so here’s our pick of the best startup spoofs.

1) Nonstartr

If you know a couple of people who need an idea for their startup, or some confused founders who are ready to pivot – you should direct them to Nonstartr, a pitch generator. Because who knows, maybe your cool startup friends will give you some eProps for inspiring them to build the next Airbnb for puppeteers and picnics.

2) Vooza

Believe it or not, Vooza, which describes itself as “a video comic strip about the startup world”, is a real startup. But unlike all the other tech companies trying their hand at humour, Vooza’s parodies on modern startup culture are pretty accurate… and entertaining. The team has spoofed everything from productivity porn to founder philosophy.

3) When you work at a startup

Okay, we get it – working at your startup has a bunch of cushy benefits. But it’s not all beanbags and motivational posters, at least not according to this Tumblr, which reveals a more realistic snapshot of daily startup life in typical internet fashion – the animated GIF.

4) Startup is the New Hipster

Although this comparison between Hipster (left) and Startup (right) – which was first posted in the epoch before iPhone5 – is a little dated, this must-see graphic is one of the earliest virtual records of the startup-hipster association. And in case you’re still unsure about the dichotomy, make sure to read this list.

5) Startup Hipster

Lucky for us, we’re *always* in the loop with the latest startup trends and entrepreneurshipismness. How? You might ask.

Well, my young padawan, mostly because the Startup Hipster –  founder, CEO, BBC and WC of “eBay for minerals” startup Dirtdig – has given us all the tools on how to out-cool our peers with startup lingo, office decor and style.

6) Lean startup parody

There are now almost as many Lean Startup fanboys as Steve Jobs worshippers out there… So we couldn’t resist a pair of Xtranormal animated bears saying lines like “my market is junkies who can’t survive six hours without my product or their brains implode” and “if you want to be a lean startup ninja pirate rockstar like me, you have to employ continuous agile scrum customer development iteration to drive market development”.

7) Wannapreneur

Because you’re probably friends with a few (or 12) of them.

8) Sh*t entrepreneurs say

This sh*t isn’t even funny – it just made our ears bleed. The next time we hear an entrepreneur describe their startup as “It’s like product X, but for market Y” or say the word pivot, we’re going to stare them silent and show them this GIF, which we saved on our phone specifically to respond to those situations.

9) Fake Grimlock

It’s unfortunate that we live in a world where 6,561 people have funded an Indiegogo campaign (run by Gawker) to acquire a video of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford smoking crack cocaine and 1131 people have supported a Kickstarter campaign for a book by a Fake Grimlock – imagine if we used the combined total of $234,941 for something that actually mattered?

The latter is slightly more justifiable, but only because the Fake Grimlock – a giant robot startup dinosaur that has contributed to VentureBeat, The Next Web and ReadWrite – is on a mission: “TO DESTROY SUCK ON INTERNET, REPLACE WITH AWESOME!”

10) Rebecca Black Parody

So you wanna create your own startup spoof? Hint: Do the opposite of everything that you see in this First Round Capital Holiday Video that’s supposed to be a “Rebecca Black Parody”. From the clipart-y intro to the pencil sketch video filters that we didn’t even know people used to contrived group dance sequences, we’ve cringed more watching this “parody” than we did watching the Exorcist.

What are your favourite startup spoofs or entrepreneurial pet peeves? Let us know in the comments below…

Image credits: Featured image via Vooza’s Facebook page. Fake Grimlock photo: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat. Other screenshots via their respective websites.

This post originally appeared on VentureVillage, one of VentureBeat’s editorial partners.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

The US is a global leader in Internet and smartphone penetration and use, but the rest of the world is catching up fast.  With a good part of the growth for consumer products happening abroad, the question isn’t if you should go global with your startup, but how and when.

Europe may be a good place to start — if we combine the top 6 countries in Europe, they have a higher GDP than North America — but as you can see from the growth charts of some popular US tech companies serving international markets, a huge number of users are coming from farther afield.

WordPress.com

Tumblr

LinkedIn.com

The traditional US-first launch has worked for a number of companies, but we’ll be seeing many more global-first startups in the coming months. Just.me is one of the first to do so; it launched with 32 languages and in 155 countries.

My company Betable is global-first. We operate in multiple global markets and are always expanding to more, so I’ve gotten a good inside view of both the risks and rewards of this kind of strategy.

The advantages of going global first are that it lets you:

• Quickly lock up markets
• Unlock unexpected growth in markets you may not have launched in otherwise
• Uncover unexpected use cases of your product
• Run cheaper testing and learning experiments in foreign markets
• Save costs dramatically, compared to a later international expansion
• Avoid local copycats

Regardless of when you’re going global, here are a number of things you should keep in mind:

Not everyone knows English

Internationalization isn’t just the process of translating a website or an app, but this should definitely be the first step. Americans might think that English is understood by mostly everyone in the world, but the reality is that most people in foreign countries don’t speak English and, even if they do, greatly prefer native language applications and websites to English ones.

Fortunately, crowdsourcing tools are making app and website translation much easier and cheaper.

People search on Google in their native language

Adding dedicated local websites doesn’t only improve the experience for users, but actually gets you more of them. People search in their native languages, so without native-language versions of your site or app, all your SEO efforts are going to be completely worthless in foreign markets.

Distribution channels are different

Every country will greatly differ in their performance across the various distribution channels. Don’t assume that Facebook traffic will perform badly on your site abroad because that’s what you’re seeing in the US. When launching in a new market, you should erase almost all your previous thinking about distribution and marketing, start with a new clean slate, and run all the testing from scratch.

Payment methods are different

Credit cards might be ubiquitous in the US and a handful number of European countries, but a large number of Internet users don’t have access to or don’t feel safe using them online. When expanding, keep in mind the prevailing payment methods in each country, which can include carrier billing, local payments, and prepaid options.

Latency matters

It’s no secret that speed matters, and having requests and responses going back and forth around the world takes time. Getting servers all around the world or at least a global CDN to host your static content should be a priority.

Hire international people

Distributed teams or not, having diverse people in your team is mandatory. On top of helping the company being more creative and efficient, you will gain a broader understanding of the ways of life and cultural forces in different parts of the world.

Partner with someone on the ground

Joint ventures are usually a very bad idea, but partnerships are a great way to land in new markets, particularly closed ones such as Germany or China.

If you’re doing consumer Internet or mobile, you need to be thinking about your global strategy. If you’re just starting out, considering going global-first. Chances are you won’t regret it.

Stefano Bernardi is on the founding team of Betable, a VC-funded startup where he heads Customer Development. Previously, he worked in venture capital in Europe. He is a part-time hacker, angel investor, and product advisor, and was selected from more than 300 people to “shadow” Dave McClure at 500 Startups. Check out his blog and follow him on Twitter.

Top photo credit: Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Debbie Landa is CEO of Dealmaker Media/Under the Radar.

With the Under the Radar conference coming up this week, I’ve been speaking to a lot of startups about how they’re managing to get their messages out to business decision makers. The conference is all about how the consumerization of IT is changing how startups design and market their products. And most recently I spoke to Aubrey Sabala (pictured, VP of marketing for “smart data” company Sailthru, to find out how she’s experiencing this change, both as the marketing lead of a startup and as a buyer of technology from other startups. Sabala (pictured below) pulls from quite a bit of experience — she’s previously worked on innovative marketing programs for some of the largest brands in technology, including Google, Facebook, Digg, and AOL and helped lead Facebook’s Consumer Marketing Team, serving as the executive producer for Facebook Live.

Here’s what she had to say.

Debbie Landa: We’ve heard from the likes of Gartner and others that CMOs are quickly outpacing CIOs in terms of technology spending. What types of technologies are you looking for today?

Aubrey Sabala: We’re very data driven here at Sailthru. We want to ensure that our marketing spend is going to the right place and that leads have been qualified. Software that can give us a very informed picture of how our marketing campaigns are converting, or who’s landing on our website — more than Google Analytics — is worth investing in. Our top priority is very accurately quantifying the success of the campaigns we’re working on. Of course, we also leverage Sailthru ourselves, which provides a lot of actionable insight.

Landa: How much of your overall budget is tied to technology purchases?

Aubrey Sabala, Sailthru

Sabala: Because we create a marketing solution, we fall on the lower end, maybe 10-15% — but we expect that to increase. My guess is that the average CMO would say about 30%.

Landa: Do you find yourself competing with your CIO for IT budget?

Sabala: To date, no. It’s more of a challenge at other companies, but we’re spared from some of that drama because many of our tools are built in-house. One thing is true regardless: You need to be able to justify technology purchases. In B2C companies, that’s harder because consumer marketers build out social channels, which is not tied to sales acquisition in a direct or measurable way.

Landa: If you could wave a magic wand and solve specific business problems with technology, what would those be? Where should tomorrow’s entrepreneurs be putting their energy?

Sabala: Today there are many different touchpoints, channels, and data sources that businesses need to connect in order to understand customers. Integrating them is really challenging, and getting insights from them to inform your marketing efforts is even more difficult. However, it’s worth it for organizations of every size and it’s the very challenge we’re solving with Smart Data. I’d also love turnkey customized landing pages that tie into Salesforce so that we could go out and market directly. I’d also love to optimize the sales funnel even further so that we can really identify the best qualified leads — at the right time — so that we can turn them into sales.

Landa: How long does the typical buying process take, from initial pitch to deployment, and what does your vetting process look like?

Sabala: We want to make sure we’re investing wisely, so we ask a lot of questions and always ask for customer testimonials, referrals, case studies, etc., all of which adds time to the process. We want to know if we have the infrastructure in place, that the value outweighs the cost, that it’s solving a real pain, and that we’re buying solutions that will still work in the long-term. We always ask to speak with vendors’ customers to ask the pivotal question: “When you approach the time to renew and you’re evaluating your budget, would you renew or look elsewhere?” All that said, we’re typically able to deploy technology in a month or so.

Landa: What are the biggest challenges associated with choosing new startups to work with?

Sabala: Vendors need to be able to show that they’re proven; that means more data points and more case studies— as a vendor, it’s a challenge we face as well. Vendors should strive not to pitch, but to build trust and credibility. Both vendors and customers should be asking the right questions, connecting the dots with other customers with similar challenges, and diving deeper.

Landa: Many businesses make major purchasing decisions by looking at analyst reports and benchmarks. How important are those reports — like Gartner magic quadrants, Forrester Waves, etc. — in your buying decision?

Sabala: I take them into consideration, but it really depends on the size of the company. Many worthwhile startups don’t make the cut because they’re not big enough. I look at it like hiring an employee: Everything that’s on paper gives you a starting point, but the real story is in the backchannel conversations. Don’t stop at the standard, traditional sources like analyst houses — be proactive with technology exploration! When you think about adopting a technology solution, you want to be able to scale and invest in the long haul. Think more about the problems you’ll have in a year or two and evaluate solutions that solve those problems.

Landa: Why do you attend events like Under the Radar?

Sabala: I think that if you’re not looking at the future of these technologies, you’re already two steps behind. It’s a forward-thinking challenge to participate with entrepreneurs that are innovating in various spaces. I always leave these types of events thinking, “Wow, we will have some very cool tools in our toolbox in the near future!” 

Meet Aubrey Sabala and hear how technology factors into her marketing strategies at Under the Radar 2013, May 22-23, in San Francisco. Register today using special discount code VentureBeatVIP.

For more insight from our Under the Radar series, see our previous stories:

• 12 enterprise mobility startups to watch
• Rackspace CMO to vendors: ‘Be smarter than me’
• How to get a top 10 website to pay attention to your startup
• How to capture Cisco’s attention: An exclusive interview with Biren Gandhi

Top photo of a nervous businessman from Shutterstock.

Tomer Shoval is co-founder and CEO of medical bill tracking service Simplee. Shoval will be speaking at HealthBeat event next week, which deals with how IT is driving change in health care.

Mobile billing and payments have seen extraordinary growth in almost every consumer industry, from utility bills to lattes. However, the healthcare industry has been slow to adopt mobile billing and payments. A number of factors are converging to make 2013 a year of rapid growth in mobile payment options for medical providers and patients.

Healthcare is a slow-moving, highly-regulated industry that historically has been resistant to adopting non-care related changes. As pressures on hospital and physician revenue mount, medical providers are increasingly forced to take on new billing options. Here are three reasons why mobile medical billing and payments will expand in 2013:

1) Multiple Payment Scenarios and Options

There are two general types of mobile payment options: point-of-sale purchases and bill pay. To date, much of the mobile payments buzz has centered around quick and easy point-of-sale transactions. The partnership of Starbucks and Square to make coffee purchases faster and easier and the recent expansion of the PayPal mobile wallet to thousands of retail stores are perfect examples of this application.

Mobile bill pay has also been quietly gaining momentum. According to Fiserv, mobile bill pay has grown 41% among smartphone users since 2011. Further, a Western Union survey found that 39% of respondents intend to pay more bills online this year and 12% will pay more bills with their smartphone.

The good news for healthcare is that patients frequently make both types of payments – either at the doctor’s office as a point-of-sale purchase or through a cost share with insurance. There is a unique opportunity for medical providers to shorten the payments cycle, increase revenue, and decrease collection costs across the entire billing spectrum, all while providing patients with a much greater degree of control and convenience.

2) Healthcare Bills are Complex

Anyone who has visited a doctor or filled a prescription can attest to the complicated nature of medical bills and insurers’ explanation of benefits. In the past, this has translated into lengthy and often overlapping paper billing statements from multiple sources. It can be difficult to determine how much a patient owes, to whom, and by when.

By the very nature of the platform, online and mobile bill pay has the power to clearly and concisely deliver a simplified medical bill. As more providers begin to explore new billing practices, patients are eager to adopt them. According to a 2012 Billing Household Survey, 76% of customers who use a smartphone to manage utility, phone, and other household bills would also like to pay their medical bills this way. Patients do not want to spread statements out on the kitchen table and use a calculator and checkbook to pay these bills. They expect a better way. As soon as providers begin to offer these options, that demand will only intensify.

3) Providers and Patients are Aligned

By taking a cue from other industries, mobile medical billing and payments is likely to benefit both medical providers and their patients.

The Biller Mobile Bill Pay Benchmark Study by Fiserv found that service providers use mobile billing and payments to improve customer service and reduce costs, and patients use it to save time and improve convenience.

For the healthcare industry, the benefits of mobile billing and payments are even more immediate. Provider revenues are being squeezed on all sides, and patient payments are a rare area of potential growth. Mobile billing and payments has the potential to give patients clarity and convenience when and where they need it most and to enable medical providers to eliminate overhead, shorten time to payment, and increase patient engagement.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Sid Espinosa is Microsoft’s director of corporate citizenship, Silicon Valley.

As I’ve been preparing for Geek 2 Chic, a charity event that will bring together over 25 Bay Area companies and universities to benefit the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship, I got to thinking about the role corporate citizenship plays in companies large and small – and how there are certain universal principles that can be applied regardless of company size.

A recent study from the Reputation Institute shows that increasing local community engagement is one of the most effective means by which a company can improve its overall reputation and, ultimately, bottom line. For those of us in the field of corporate philanthropy this research comes as no surprise. We see a myriad of examples of how companies do well by doing good. It is high time for people to stop thinking of these values (philanthropy versus profit) as competing or mutually exclusive. In fact, they are often symbiotic.

According to the Reputation Institute study, positive perception of philanthropy and corporate citizenship initiatives is directly correlated with overall business value.  A ten percent improvement in perceived corporate citizenship, the study showed, can translate to an 11 percent improvement in overall reputation, and up to a 14 percent improvement in a company’s market value.

Let me be clear that I’m not advocating that companies do philanthropy because it will better their brand or increase their profits.  Rather, all companies should work to address their community’s social problems because the companies are, in fact, important and influential members of that community.  A company’s employees, customers, services and products impact that community in both positive and negative ways.  Solving social issues in any community is done best through cross-sector partnerships and companies should strive to be part of the solution.  The fact that these engagements can lead to positive business growth is great, but it should not be the driving factor.

How should companies structure their community engagement programs?  What are the keys to effectiveness?  What are the metrics for success?  A company’s approach will vary greatly based on its size, culture, location, employee base, industry and so forth, but here are a few commonalities among successful corporate citizenship initiatives:

Create programs that are aligned with your business. A technology company, for instance, will likely want to focus on philanthropic or volunteer opportunities that promote science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). It’s thus no surprise that companies in Silicon Valley are known in part for their dedicated corporate citizenship initiatives that foster STEM-centric initiatives.

Microsoft also employs a similar approach as part of its broader corporate citizenship program, via its YouthSpark campaign – which promotes greater access to education and employment for young people. One such YouthSpark partner is the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE), an organization that provides training programs to help at-risk youth recognize business opportunities and plan for successful futures.

Focus both inside and outside of your company. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a growing field as all companies realize it’s important to act in a way that is socially responsibility.  Whether it be privacy policies, environmentalism, ethics, supply chain, human rights, or good governance, it is critical that companies take meaningful action in this field.

Missteps can have a major, long-term brand impact – just ask BP, which was perhaps the poster child for ineffective CSR in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe in 2010. Conversely, companies like The Body Shop and Nike have experienced extremely positive impacts on their respective brands in recent years because of engaging, proactive CSR campaigns.

Engage and leverage your employees, customers and partners. The best way to encourage volunteerism and employee giving is to develop a culture of proactive giving from the top down.  Ideally, companies should balance efforts between a focus area and actively encouraging employees to follow their own passions.

Establish deep and meaningful partnerships with causes. Look to take an active and transparent role in maximizing your company’s interaction with – and understanding of – a given initiative. Rather than passively handing out grants to check off an obligatory philanthropy box, focus on actively engaging with an organization to build an impactful, long-term partnership. Take an active role in developing the policy that dictates the relationship. Help with product gifts, volunteerism, employee giving, event hosting, and visibility opportunities (to name a few) to ensure that yours is a fruitful partnership.

Do something different. Be innovative. Have fun. This is important work, but it should also be fun. Be creative and strive to think outside the box in developing corporate citizenship initiatives.

On a final note, if you’ll be in the San Francisco Bay Area on May 15, please do consider joining us at Bloomingdale’s in downtown San Francisco for Geek 2 Chic, a self-proclaimed “geek fashion show” – for which 100% of proceeds will benefit the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship.

You can purchase tickets here.

[Top image credit: 1stclassphoto/Shutterstock]

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Dorrian Porter is founder of Northern Imagination.

On January 1, 1999, I immigrated to Silicon Valley from Canada to work as a corporate attorney for Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. I watched in amazement as 400 companies went public that year (about a quarter of them through my law firm), and in March 2000 I felt compelled to leave the firm and start a company called HigherMarkets. It was around the same day that the Nasdaq peaked at 5132.52.

The experience and timing of my departure — and the name of my first company — sadly signified a tight connection for me between money and entrepreneurship.

Money has a nasty habit of invading the definition of entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley, where we tend to measure success by funding rounds, valuations, and liquidity events. I often run with a definition of an entrepreneur defined by money: People who don’t know your financial situation think you’re rich, and people who do think you’re crazy. An entrepreneur can be a person spending $10,000 to open a shop or $100 million to build a new kind of car.

Long before the car company, there was an inventor named Nikola Tesla who navigated choices of money and entrepreneurship as we all do in the Silicon Valley. Tesla immigrated to the east coast of the United States in 1884, initially to work alongside Thomas Edison. That relationship didn’t last, but Tesla is credited with the inventions that fueled the rise of electric company Westinghouse and made alternating current the standard of electricity we rely on today.

Larry Page of Google, who mentioned Nikola Tesla on a recent earnings call and describes him as one of the greatest inventors ever, has said you might want to be more like Edison than Tesla. In fact that comparison may only be true in textbooks.

A closer study of the events of the 1890s, for example, reveals that Edison faced similar entrepreneurial challenges to Tesla: Edison was kicked aside from General Electric, the successor company to his own, leading him to swear off the same financial backers for the next 30 years. Tesla, on the other hand, generously allowed Westinghouse to renegotiate a patent deal that enabled the financially strapped company to establish the electricity standard we rely on today.

Tesla made it clear that being a great entrepreneur — one who commercialized a critical standard that powers innovation 125 years later — isn’t necessarily about the money.

Despite the fact that I couldn’t live without two famous early inventions of Edison’s — photography and film — Tesla’s contributions are the ones that can spark Silicon Valley’s imagination on an even bigger scale now. Tesla made a commitment to the study of wireless energy and wireless information transmission beginning in the 1880s that led him to explore communication with other planets, to evaluate ways to transmit energy wirelessly around earth, and to care about taking advantage of the sun’s radiation and earth’s vibrations to prevent the squandering of natural resources that was occurring rapidly around him.

Sound useful today?

I love Instagram as much as anyone, but my nine-year-old daughter points out that less time on my iPhone can equal more time on things that really matter. Tesla focused on discovery in areas that really mattered, and he faced a great deal of ridicule — and no doubt financial impact — for it.

As the need to invite more immigrants to the Silicon Valley only increases, we need to send the message more than ever that our love for creative invention and a focus on the biggest challenges are more valued than money. There are some outstanding financial backers in the Silicon Valley, but the majority of venture capitalists face their own short-term problems that don’t always allow them to live up to the long-term horizons mentioned on their websites.

Whether you’ve just helped fund a startup or raised money for one, or whether you’re running a big company or working at one, we all need to be looking for ways to hail the inventors around us regardless of financial outcome. We don’t necessarily need to shift our models of capital allocation or stock grants to do it, but we do need to change where we spend our time celebrating. I’ve heard a lot of lip service paid to words like innovation and creativity in the Silicon Valley. It’s up to each of us to defend those words in a way that means something more than the next acquisition.

The free exchange of information and affordable access to sustainable energy — both issues worked on by Nikola Tesla in his time — have the potential to solve critical issues of poverty and education, and inspire peace, around the world. Wireless information transmission and energy remain two of the Silicon Valley’s biggest opportunities.

Hail to the inventors who are working on those challenges today without regard to financial outcomes. Hail to Nikola Tesla.

Dorrian Porter organized Northern Imagination in 2013, a company that seeks to positively impact the wellbeing and happiness of people via creative projects, ideas, and inventions.  He just launched a Kickstarter campaign to build a statue of Nikola Tesla in the Silicon Valley to fuel creativity on the big issues of energy and wireless. You can watch a short video and participate in the campaign here:  
http://kck.st/ZWLzgG
.

photo credit: Recuerdos de Pandora via photopin cc

Nothing’s more seductive to a hip business owner than the next “big thing” in marketing (remember QR codes?) and lately, everyone’s been abuzz over app store Optimization (ASO). However, it’s pretty clear that ASO is more than just a pretty face. With over 700,000 apps in both Google Play and the Apple App Store, luck and hope are no longer enough to get your app found. While studies find that word of mouth and being “featured” are still the top ways apps get discovered, 63 percent of Android and iOS users have found apps by “organic search” within the app store.

The tricky part of ASO, like with any good marketing campaign, is that getting results requires playing both artist and scientist.

Here are the five little-known arts of app store optimization.

Know your app stores

App Store Optimization is not one size fits all. While iTunes and Google Play are dominating the apps scene, others are strong outside the US, like AppChina. Most notably, Amazon’s appstore for Android devices and Kindle is growing quickly.

If you have limited resources, focus on the giants, and take advantage of their key differences:

iTunes: The keyword field allows you to associate your app with certain terms. Make sure not to stuff or repeat too many variations of the same word which might trigger spammy signals.

(Many thanks to Jigl for this image)

Google Play: This apps tore has the benefit of the largest search engine algorithm in the world, which means efforts reap quick results. Optimizing the app name (see below) is especially important here.

Amazon: Unlike the other app stores, Amazon invites you to apply to get featured on their “storefront,” which means lots of views with little effort. The application can be found here.

Your app name is everything!

If you’re going to do only one thing, optimize your app name. Much like a page title for SEO, the app name serves as a relevancy signal to the app store “algorithms”, and it’s a strong one.

First, make sure your app name is actually in the title. Remember you want to have a strong presence as a brand, so people need to know your name, not just what your app does!

Next, describe your app properly. Moovit, a transit tracker includes ‘transit’ in its name and ranks third for the term.

Which means you need to…

Conduct some kick -ass keyword research

Though ASO tools are still pretty limited in comparison to the vast resources  available to SEOs, you can conduct your own tests. Ask yourself these questions:

• Which words describe your app?
• Brainstorm and then evaluate, do they support your brand narrative? Which of these words are most relevant?
• Get an objective feel for relevancy by searching for your keywords in the app store and seeing who is ranking for these terms.
• Which words are your competitors using?
• Be inspired but don’t be a copycat. Being unique will help you get traffic your competitors aren’t getting.
• Are there any related terms (and estimated volume) in Google Adwords?

The Google Adwords Keyword Tool won’t give you exact search volume within the appstore, but you can get an idea of term popularity by looking at stats for Google.com searches.

Choose your category, change your category

Choosing a category may not be very easy when your app has several utilities since it may fall into more than one.

Analyze your competitive landscape and make an informed decision regarding whether you want to take your competitors head on by being in the same list or if you want to maximize potential by going after a less crowded category.

Which brings me to my final point.

Don’t be afraid

Don’t be afraid to experiment. While iTunes only lets you change your page every time you release and upload an update to the app file, Google Play and Amazon allow you to continually edit your titles, descriptions, and categories. Take advantage of this and track your changes and their effects. Find your sweet spot and invite your customers to find you.

Denisse Dubrovsky has worked in the mobile space in both the nonprofit and for profit sectors for several years. Her experience ranges from research and support for a national government app development contest to helping great brands increase their audience and conversions within the app store through creative and forward thinking ASO. Denisse is currently an SEO Associate at Kahena Digital and specializes in ASO. You can follow her on Twitter @Deni_ssita.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Advertisers are infamous for their relentless attempt to learn even the most mundane details about your life in the hopes of selling you something.  But there is one thing that’s always eluded them: your physical reaction to their efforts.  Whether a billboard, banner, or mobile ad, advertisers have had to rely on other indicators to know whether they’ve successfully grabbed your attention.

Unfortunately, this may be coming to an end.  Advances in eye tracking technologies will soon make it possible for the ads you look at to watch you right back. As the next generation of computing turns to the eyes, a whole new world of interaction and control is becoming possible – along with entirely new methods of invasive data collection and tracking.

The same technologies that will make playing Fruit Ninja with your eyes a reality will also allow advertisers to monitor and measure everything you look at. As UCLA Professor John Villasenor explained in his piece on the issue for Slate, “Today, when we read something online, our thoughts are still our own. We should enjoy it while it lasts.”

Once a set of technologies used for assisting the disabled, eye tracking is quickly moving from the lab to mainstream applications. In its most high profile, albeit gimmicky, release yet, the new Samsung Galaxy S4 comes with “Smart Scroll” and “Smart Pause” features that let you (somewhat) move the screen up and down and pause videos with the movement of your eyes.  Reviews of the phone haven’t been great – but there seems to be a lot of interest in the feature itself.

Although advanced eye tracking is still years away from mainstream deployment, in the last year alone there have been some incredible advancements in usability and accuracy.

Later this year, Tobii is will release a limited edition of “REX,” a small USB-connected bar that will let you control your desktop with your eyes. PredictGaze has developed a technology that can be used on ordinary cameras, work in different types of lighting, and supposedly function at distances of up to 12 feet. It is capable of performing facial recognition on shoppers to gauge how they react to different products and to determine which demographic groups they belong to.

In perhaps the most startling development, researchers have developed a product called Sideways that can also work on ordinary cameras – except it doesn’t need to calibrate to each user and can even measure multiple people at once. In one instance, “14 people of various heights, ages, and eye colors, who interacted with it simply by looking at a series of CD covers on a screen” were tracked at the same time.

The technology still has a long way to go, and by itself, eye tracking data wouldn’t be nearly useful enough for informing a serious business decision. But in practice, this information would be paired with other data sets. Retailers, for example, have recently started to embrace methods more traditionally synonymous with surveillance. Traditional loyalty card programs have now entered the age of big data, and some malls are even using your cell phone location data to attempt to determine what products you are looking at. In the cutthroat world of retail, success or failure can depend on knowing more about what your customer wants than your competition.

Jay Stanley, ACLU Senior Policy Analyst, points out that there has already been extensive research into what we can learn about people from tracking where they look, and the results are worrisome. To varying degrees of accuracy, eye tracking can possibly reveal certain cognitive disorders, the use of drugs and alcohol, mental and psychological illness, deceitfulness, and even sexual orientation. This is not to suggest that any of these inferences are currently actionable. But if any of these measurements even come close to revealing your behaviors or traits, you can be sure somebody will collect and sell this information.

The hype surrounding the release of Google Glass has sparked intense debates over what limits should be placed on recording devices in public. Many of its fanboys have been cheering for the eradication of whatever minimal semblance of privacy in public we have left. They evoke the dangerous and intellectually-lazy falsehood that those with nothing to hide have nothing to worry about. What was once a common-sense observation about there being no expectation of privacy in public has now been perverted into an excuse for law enforcement and advertisers to gather as much data as possible.

Naturally, when you walk down a street, your face is visible to those around you – this is the justification given for the use of facial recognition and behavior detection systems in public.  Does this same reasoning apply to eye movements? If your attention can be quantified, should you have any rights or control over how that information is used?

As technologies enable us to measure things that once were inconceivable, there will constantly be new classes of data, and we’ll have to evaluate them and determine their worth to us.  Hopefully, by then, we will have learned our lessons from the Do Not Track fiasco and the “cost” of social media. We live in a digital environment where we own little, but everything seems free – where the real price we pay in personal information to advertisers is not immediately visible, and we’re told that in order to participate, we have no choice but to oblige.

Consider for a moment the type of future that Moti Krispil, CEO of eye tracking startup Umoove, describes (and warns about): “If you see a picture of Adele somewhere in an article, when you’re looking at her for more than 2 seconds, an Amazon ad could pop up suggesting you buy her latest record now.” For advertisers, this is a goldmine – there’s an enormous amount of value in knowing what groups of people pay attention to which types of ads. But what exactly do consumers stand to gain from this?

Tarun Wadhwa is a writer, researcher, and entrepreneur working at the intersection of technology and public policy. You can follow him on Twitter – @twadhwa – or contact him directly at VB@tarunwadhwa.com. Also, check out his upcoming book, Identified, which will be out later this year. 

Photo: Flickr/Dolbs

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

This post is written by Bob Ackerman, founder and managing director of Allegis Capital.

So you’ve selected your investors, negotiated the financing documents, closed the funding round and deposited the check.  Now the real work begins.  You’ve sold your vision to investors who now expect you to deliver on the promise of your plan and to build a viable, growing and eventually, a profitable business.  The first steps you take with your new investment partners will set the tone for your future relationship and how you work together through the challenges that inevitably lie ahead.  The road from start-up concept through to your destination of a successful and viable business is akin to running through a mine field at night.   You will improve your odds of success (both as a business and as an executive) by making your investors and board members true partners – leveraging their experience and resources – and bringing them into your inner circle of trust.

To be fair, the board of directors, representing your investors and perhaps outside industry expertise, does not want to manage the business “for you” or even “with you.” Rather, they want to partner with you to achieve success.  As the company leader, your job is to set and manage the framework for that collaboration. In the first 90 days after the financing:

• Set a board meeting schedule for the next year.  As simple as it seems, taking the lead here sends a message about your desire to engage your board.  While busy schedules make this process a challenge, I usually advocate for monthly meetings early on.  If possible, schedule a board dinner prior to the board meeting so that the folks sitting around your table will get to know each other on a more casual footing.  This is a chance to build the bonds upon which your future relationships will be based.

• Schedule a full-day offsite meeting for your third board meeting.  This gives you an opportunity to learn your board’s interests and pressure points at the first two meetings and then incorporate that knowledge into your offsite session.  The goal of the offsite board meeting should be to 1) develop a common understanding of your business amongst the participants, 2) agree to the strategic framework around which you will develop and business the business, 3) identify and articulate the critical business metrics around which you will measure the progress of the business, and 4) agree to the level of reporting and the associated framework around which you and the board will discuss the progress of the business.  Bring your executive team in for key segments of this meeting – give them some face time with the board to reinforce access and accountability.  This is your opportunity to demonstrate mastery of the key business drivers while developing an atmosphere of “we” at the board level.  CEOs that are disconnected from their board often find themselves disconnected from their company.

The first 90 days is not the end of the process of building effective board relationships, it is the beginning of a process that requires continually cultivation:

• Meet with your board members on a regular basis outside of the board meeting.  Board meetings are great opportunities to “sync” management and the board, but many times critical questions are not asked in this environment.  You want those questions on the table and in the open so that they can be addressed.  One-on-one is a great way to do this.  These meetings also provide a great opportunity to ask for assistance and/or guidance from your board members or brainstorm.  Again, you are building relationships based upon trust and respect that you will need down the road.

• Organize your board meetings so that there is time to tackle one significant business or strategic issue as part of the agenda.  Use the directors as a sounding board for making better decisions around these issues.  Present the question/problem, the considerations and constraints, and potential alternative approaches.  This pulls the board into decision and develops a sense of shared ownership for the eventual outcome.  The guiding principle with these types of decisions is “no surprises”.

• When there is BAD NEWS (and there will be) – get ahead of it.  Effective leaders are proactive in acknowledging problems and attacking them.  Experienced board members understand there will be problems on the road to success – a good board will become part of the solution if you give them the opportunity.  What they don’t like are surprises.  Transparency engenders trust, and trust is the key to navigating through troubled waters.

• Incorporate your management team in board meetings.  This allows the board to calibrate your team while also developing a sense of accountability to the board for members of your executive team.  Experienced board members can often identify team members that may be challenged as a team and an enterprise grow.  Performance and scaling are about people – your board can be an “early warning” system if and when you begin to grow through the experience and capabilities of a member of your team.

Time is your most precious commodity – at least when you have money in the bank.  Developing a strong and supportive board relationship may not have the immediate payback and satisfaction that you get from extinguishing a fire within a critical account or jump starting a stalled product development process, but the time will come when your personal and business success are likely to come down to the relationship you have with your board.  If you delay in building the trust and confidence that underlie a strong partnership, you do so at the peril of your business and your career as an entrepreneur.  No one plans for failure, but they are a fact of life in startups. Should you join the legions of entrepreneurs that fail in one of your outings, strong relationships and recommendations from your board can often become the foundation for your next startup.

Bob Ackerman is the Founder and Managing Director of Allegis Capital and formerly a successful serial entrepreneur. In his spare time, Bob teaches New Venture Finance at the University of California, Berkeley in the MBA program and is active in the non-profit world, focusing on education and the arts.

Top photo credit: Shutterstock

This is a guest post by Chris Crowell, president and CEO of Enterasys.

The rate at which doctors are choosing to bring mobile devices to work continues to rise at an alarming rate. In fact, a recent study from Jackson & Coker found that four out of five physicians regularly use their mobile devices for medical purposes.

At the same time, patients and guests are also increasing their use of personal wireless devices in hospitals and healthcare facilities. While there are proven benefits in these situations, such as quicker access to patient records, the influx of devices also has some serious drawbacks.

Most often, those looking at the negatives are quick to point out patient privacy issues and the fact that patient information could be jeopardized. But a host of other concerns are also associated with this movement, such as the enormous burden it puts on the network and IT resources.

To help alleviate the side effects from the transition to mobile, hospital IT organizations across the globe are beginning to deploy bring-your-own-device (BYOD) strategies. In order to provide the flexible resources required to manage a comprehensive BYOD strategy that maintains costs, control, and security, IT must be prepared to face the following five issues head on.

Network support

A recent report from Spyglass Consulting Group found that 69 percent of surveyed hospital nurses use smartphones for personal and clinical communications while on the job. That, added to the statistic above about physicians, equals a huge strain on the hospital’s network.

With the influx of end-user devices accessing the hospital network comes the demand for consistent, reliable, and continuously available connectivity, especially on the hospital wireless LAN. Federal standards call for institutions to deploy a single network to handle the needs of the medical devices as well as provide a standard of interoperability for securing all data on the clinical wireless LAN. Moving forward, hospital IT professionals must explore next-generation networking solutions that are highly available, scalable, and ubiquitous.

Lost devices

If you work for a company where you’re given a mobile device, the assumption is that IT bears the responsibility for the tracking and replacement of those that go missing. Healthcare organizations must rethink this traditional model as more devices brought into the workplace are personally, not company, owned.

Mobile device management (MDM) of personal devices is something that has historically kept health IT professionals up, yet most are only doing the bare minimum at best to control it. There must be a balance in strategy that takes into account the need to be noninvasive, yet law abiding. When dealing with patient information, anything that contains data covered by HIPAA needs to be secured, and those devices need to be able to be wiped clean.

Mixing personal and professional use of mobile devices

In the near future, mobile computing devices in clinical environments will be just as common as they are in real life. Those devices will serve a dual purpose, as doctors and other professionals use the same mobile phone to call/text home as they do to access patient information.

We’re already hearing concerns from clinicians about BYOD around the loss of privacy for personal communications, the idea that personal devices may compromise professional behavior, and the concern that procedures may not be clear around professional vs. personal use on personal devices. BYOD in this environment requires a shift in culture that revolves around transparency. Without it, policy-makers and users will butt heads and neither side will achieve what they’re after.

Application deployment

Currently, there are more than 20,000 mHealth applications in the marketplace, and that number is growing across all mobile platforms. Most hospitals are using application layer firewall and unified threat management in order to deploy and monitor applications safely and securely, and remain in compliance with HIPAA.

These strategies have proved to be beneficial when it comes to personally owned devices. However, they also raise concerns about performance degradation and scalability. Deploying and supporting diverse applications can be troublesome, especially with the magnitude of devices involved. IT and the mobile workforce must have the same goal in mind — patient safety and protection. From there, they can put clear policies in place.

Ruggedized devices

Hospitals are not the safest place for a mobile device. There are fluids and other harsh operating conditions that can be challenging. The conditions are drastically different from those of a standard office. At the same time, it’s unlikely that clinicians have the safeguards in place to protect their devices from cross-contamination from hospital to hospital.

The question is, should the responsibility of the sanitation and hardening of the personal device fall on IT, or should the clinician assume responsibility when deciding to use their own device in the treatment of patients? This factor cannot be ignored when deploying a BYOD strategy.

Final thoughts

BYOD isn’t a passing fad. It’s here to stay, and organizations need to establish strategies and best practices to handle this ever-changing landscape. The organizations that successfully deploy BYOD initiatives have the ability to transform clinical workflows, streamline processes, improve physician access to information, and improve overall patient care.

Chris Crowell is President and CEO of Enterasys. He works with several healthcare organizations looking to expand WiFi for BYOD. Some notable customers include Henry Ford Health System and Western Maryland Health System.

Doctor using tablet via rangizzz/Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

All it took was a couple of hours for high-school sophomore Salah Barhoum to have his entire world turned upside down. Up until the New York Post featured him on their cover as a person of interest in the Boston Marathon bombing, he was best known for being a standout athlete. But suddenly, through no fault of his own, he was being followed by strange men convinced that he was responsible for the heinous bombings at the Boston Marathon that happened just days earlier.  The FBI had not named any suspects yet, but the New York Post hadn’t got its information from the FBI; it had picked up Barhoum’s name from anonymous online commenters.

Barhoum and well over a dozen others were victims of shoddy online detective work. Their identities were broadcast publicly, and they were accused of crimes they had nothing to do with and maligned by the national media as terrorists. In reality, they weren’t even being investigated by the authorities involved with the case. Instead, the’d been commenters on Reddit and 4Chan, who believed they were guilty based upon their clothes and appearance. What started as an atypical request from the FBI to the public, asking people to send in any photos and videos they had of the bomb scene, quickly morphed into an ugly digital witch hunt; one where the crowd’s fears, prejudices, and suspicions were given credence, while guilt and innocence were doled out based on shreds of circumstantial evidence.

In the four days, three hours, and nine minutes between the detonation of the first bomb and the Boston Police Department tweeting that the final suspect had been captured, a new approach for conducting crowdsourced investigations was established.

Although media outlets have been quick to lump all of the crowdsourced efforts together, there were two very different processes occurring, which proved to have drastically different outcomes: Crowdsourced intelligence gathering — a massive success — and crowdsourced crime solving — an abysmal failure. The FBI only ever asked for the first, but both happened simultaneously. They each offer important glimpses into major issues surrounding the future of law enforcement, justice, and surveillance.

In many ways, the Boston Marathon provided one of the most compelling cases for crowd involvement, ever. It’s one of the largest athletic events in the world (event planners estimate upwards of 500,000 people attend each year); the vast majority of attendees have smartphones, and a sizeable portion of those were actively taking pictures and videos throughout the event. Surveillance cameras have become ubiquitous, but they are fixed in place and have large blind spots. People, on the other hand, can provide deep context and multiple points of view of the same situation. For that reason, it’s a natural fit for Big Brother to look to tens of thousands of “Little Brothers” for help in gathering intelligence. After all, there is no police snooping network that could rival the surveillance regime of our smartphone lifestyles.

But regardless what the FBI wants, it can’t stop people from trying to conduct their own investigations. Events now play out in real time. The ability for a person sitting at home to have access to rich, detailed information about an event, as it happens, is magnitudes greater than what was available in the past. It is unlikely that this trend will reverse. Human beings love to speculate and gossip; now, we just do it together publicly. We’ve been empowered with communication and collaborative tools far more powerful than our own understanding of them.

When Richard Jewell, the security guard/hero of the 1996 Olympic Bombings, had his life and reputation destroyed by false accusations from the media, he was able to sue them for compensation. But when Sunil Tripathi, a student at Brown University who has been missing for the last month, was declared to be a vicious murderer because somebody misheard a police scanner, all his grieving family received was an anonymous apology. One of the largest questions these events raise involves defining what free speech online is. Is a person allowed to make a deeply damning accusation about somebody based on suspicion if others are doing it also and they believe it to be in the public interest?

The traditional media could play an enormously valuable role here by separating fact from fiction and providing verified, trustworthy information. Instead, most outlets just repeated false claims made online — providing a megaphone to statements that should never have seen the light of day.

The opening of investigations to the public is going to happen, and law enforcement groups have no choice but to embrace and try to get ahead of this trend. Even in this investigation, the crowd’s own efforts forced the FBI to release information earlier than it had planned. The FBI made the wise decision to set up a page where people could upload potential evidence, but before it even got around to creating this, citizens had already set up their own page. The medium on which this case was discussed made a difference in the quality of discourse as well; for example, Reddit fared better than 4Chan because of a system where true information could be “upvoted” and false information could be “downvoted.” Where the conversation about the next case takes place will directly shape how it plays out.

Despite its failings in this case, the crowd has proved itself to be an important force for public safety in the past. Like with many crowdsourcing-related activities, individuals are good at providing information or reporting events, but it is the next stage — taking action — where things often fall apart. The more passive their role, the more effective they have been. Seattle’s Police Department runs a program where citizens can receive tweets about and report when they spot stolen cars. German police have experimented with posting sketches of wanted criminals on Facebook, where citizens’ identifications have already led to several arrests. In another example, a Broward County Sheriff has leveraged his 10,000 Facebook friends to successfully track down stolen goods.

We now live in a world where information moves faster than we can assess its value… this is especially true in times of panic, disaster, and crisis. While an active terrorist investigation might not be the best place to allow wannabe detectives with no training, there are certainly situations where they can be helpful. We each have the potential to play a role in being guardians of public safety, but this requires from us a large degree of focus, caution, and care. Ultimately, these are the things that separate an empowered crowd from a raging mob.

Tarun Wadhwa is a research associate at Singularity University researching how advancing technologies can be used to solve public policy issues. 

Follow him on Twitter @twadhwa

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

This post comes via Parham Aarabi, the CEO of ModiFace.

Technology has significantly changed the nature of marketing, or so we are told. Local, social, real-time, and mobile are more and more on the minds of marketing managers, though the return on investment and best practices are both far from certain.

Within this context, marketers are trying new experimental methods, with some interesting results and lessons. These innovative experiments span multiple industries and often combine elements of mobile, local and/or social, but they often share an element of personalization (i.e., making the marketing message about the individual, their friends, their photos, their location, etc.). One way of achieving a personalized marketing message has been through the use of facial recognition technology.

Facial recognition is often associated with security and defense applications. However, elements of the technology consisting of facial detection and modeling are being used more widely in industries like medicine, beauty, and even finance.

Beauty

In the beauty industry, facial modeling and simulation has been widely used for virtual makeovers and virtual product try-ons. An example of this is VOGUE’s Makeup Simulation application, which recently launched in Japan. This app lets users download and try on makeup from brands like Clinique on their own photo (with facial detection and modeling being used to create a photorealistic rendering of the makeup on the user’s image). Another example is Johnson & Johnson’s ROC Skincare, which recently launched a Skin Correxion Tool to simulate the effects of their anti-aging products.

Throughout the beauty industry, facial detection and simulation is letting consumers interact with beauty products and brands on a more personal level. In the next few years, it would not be surprising to see interactive ads that use online photos to preview products (i.e., where each user is the model), or to recommend products based on the user’s custom profile.

Medicine

In a similar way, facial recognition is making an impact on marketing for medical and dental clinics. Facial modeling of dental and cosmetic procedures is becoming more commonplace, giving doctors the ability to discuss potential procedures with patients in a more interactive fashion. An example of this is in the recent launch of the Restylane Imagine iPad app in Canada, where potential patients can preview the effects of Restylane on their own photo, or in a more likely scenario, doctors can show and discuss anti-aging procedures interactively on an iPad in the clinic. This digitization of clinics and medicine in general has only began to gain adoption, and will likely continue at a faster pace going forward.

Finance

The impact of facial recognition and modeling on finance may not be very clear, and so far there are very few examples to show. One recent example that garnered significant media and customer interest was Merrill Edge’s Face Retirement application, which was created  to entice customers to save for retirement.

The basis of the app was a study from Stanford University that argued that if people were shown a photo of their older selves, they would be more likely to think about their retirement. As you can see in the photo above, Merrill Edge uses facial recognition and modeling to take a user’s photo to show them how they would look at 50, 60, 70, and all the way to 100.

Although this is a relatively newer marketing campaign, early indications suggest it has been very successful in its quest to highlight the need to save for retirement.

Mobile Devices

Samsung recently introduced their La Fleur collection of mobile phones (versions of their popular mobile phones geared primarily to women). These phones, aside from aesthetic design enhancements, include a collection of customized apps geared towards women. These include fitness and beauty tips apps, along with a facial cosmetics simulation app that lets people paint  cosmetics on their virtual faces. This application has been widely used in the marketing for the La Fleur phones.

Facial recognition usage in mobile devices will certainly become more prevalent, from intelligence cameras to facial gesture recognition —  all of which will give a marketing edge to device manufacturers. Still, their level of adoption by consumers remains to be seen.

Sports

Just as Samsung used a facial makeup simulation app to better market to women, Verizon recently used facial simulation as a way to better connect with NFL fans on Facebook. Through the creation of the GamePaint application, users could virtually paint their faces in their favorite NFL team colors and could then share the results on Facebook to create buzz and reaction among their friends. By making their customers start social conversations about their favorite NFL teams and the GamePaint colors that would best suit them, Verizon was able to tap into the energy and passion of NFL fans.

The key common element in the above examples is personalization. By initiating a conversation about the user’s image (instead of a model), it is far more likely to gain people’s attention, and more likely to lead to increased social engagement.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Mike Reiners is the co-founder and CEO of NOMAD.

As of February 2013, 4.5 million iPads had been purchased for use in the U.S. K-12 academic environment. One million of these purchases happened in Q2 of 2012 alone, which represented more than the total number of K-12 iPads purchased up to that point. The growth rate is staggering, and doesn’t show signs of slowing anytime soon. But are our schools ready for the iSwarm?

They think they are. Nearly every day, you see another story about a school making a large iPad purchase. First, it was schools testing the waters by buying a class set of 30 to be usable by multiple teachers or assigned to one tech-forward pilot classroom. That quickly became full school rollouts, 1:1 iPad programs, private school recruiting tools, and even rolling kindergarten implementations. But keeping up with the Joneses does not constitute preparedness.

Now, this might seem like a self-defeating premise coming from a guy who makes his living building and selling apps, most of them with some kind of educational bent. Don’t get me wrong: I’d love it if even 10 percent of iPad-active elementary classrooms used my company’s apps, AWEsum! or AWEsum Plus, to build our children’s core abstract reasoning skills.

Furthermore, be assured that I don’t have anything against the iPad as a product, nor am I opposed to its use in schools. I’m simply imploring that we resist our very American tendency to rush to action, at least long enough to consider the following points:

1. Teaching requires planning. And planning requires time. Poll 100 teachers, and 99 of them will tell you they don’t have the time available to do their jobs as well as they’d like. (And save the cracks about “done at 3 pm” and “3 months vacation”; between undercompensated supervision of extracurricular activities, faculty committees, late nights spent correcting papers and summers of planning & fundraising, the average teacher makes less than $15/hour.)

When schools/districts are considering adopting a new textbook series, the curriculum committee may meet for a year or more to evaluate, decide, plan, and implement. The iPad isn’t just new curriculum for one subject; it’s an entirely new educational content delivery method. Yet we’re making snap purchase decisions, often coming from the administration level where the political/PR splash value is greatest, and not spending the time necessary to evaluate the overwhelming library of apps, iTunes U content, and iBooks.

Consider this: the most common iPad implementation plan (term used loosely) that I’ve encountered is to give each teacher a $X-per-student annual app budget, with virtually no oversight or coordinated collaboration.

2. Consider where we’re spending our education dollars. I have a number of good friends who were teachers, but have left the classroom for corporate positions. Oftentimes, these positions still have some connection to academic roots (e.g. educational sales, textbook curriculum development, or education consulting), but they carry two to three times the salary. Many of these friends were considered among the best teachers at their schools, and this is the point: We’re losing our best teachers.

For all the money that’s been spent on education reform in this country, the solution is not going to come from Santa showing up with a bag full of shiny new hardware, nor from tax referenda that rescue a few sports and activities. You want the best students? Make sure they’re being taught by the best.

Let’s say a high school of 1,000 students decides to purchase an iPad for each of its students. That’s a minimum of a half-million-dollar investment. Suppose instead the school invested $100,000 apiece in salary and benefits to retain (or recruit!) five outstanding teachers, who probably love the art of teaching, as they weigh their options and their future ability to support a family.

Think of what happens to an NFL football team and its surrounding fan base when it signs five high-powered free agents, all of whom are instantly among the team’s top ten overall players. Isn’t the successful education of our children at least as important?

3. The iPad is primarily a consumption device. A major buzzword in US education circles for the past few years has been STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics). We lament that we are losing so many prominent U.S. tech jobs to foreign-born scientists, engineers, and programmers. There is essentially universal agreement that we need to invest heavily in STEM education, particularly from a human resource standpoint. Well, guess what: Handing a student an iPad won’t inspire them to build it or program it. You’d be better off giving them a graphing calculator or a cheap computer and teaching them to code.

If you think the device is inspirational in and of itself, walk into a school that has a BYOD policy, then lift any content or usage restrictions and see how students spend their time. A few exceptional kids might surprise you, but for the most part, you’ll find a gaggle of Facebook and Twitter posts and some really high Temple Run scores.

Teach a man to fish, eh? Give a kid an app and you inspire her for a day; teach a kid to make apps and you inspire her for a lifetime.

4. Our students should be mobile multilingual. Android device sales now outpace iOS device sales by 8 percentage points in our country, and the gap is growing. Who decided Apple should be the sole delivery platform? Personally, I’ve been a Mac-vs.-PC agnostic for years, and I currently own an Android phone, Android tablet, and iPad as my everyday mobile devices.

We all know that the Apple ecosystem is designed to work well within itself, and struggles (intentionally?) to support multi-platform users. We’re potentially doing our children a great disservice by forcing them into mastery of only one OS environment and its support of learning structures – and I’d say the same thing about Android if it were the beneficiary of a crowd mentality artificial monopoly.

In summary, let’s think about what we’re doing. Blind, quick-trigger actions in education, especially expensive and invasive ones, have historically disastrous results. What’s needed now is a lot of conversation across sectors, a lot of focused training, and a commitment to keeping the teacher-student educational relationship at the forefront.

Mike Reiners is the co-founder and CEO of NOMAD, an app development startup based in St. Paul, Minnesota. He is also a 17-year veteran high school mathematics teacher (still actively teaching). Mike lives in the Twin Cities with his wife and three young beta testers.

Photo credit: Northern Ireland Executive/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Greg Gretsch is a partner at early-stage VC firm Sigma West.

Once a year at Sigma we bring together our portfolio CEOs to discuss current trends in technology, business models, Silicon Valley, and the markets and to share war-stories. After each event we hear from the participants how valuable it was for them to learn from their peers.

The life of a startup is about maximizing the number of good decisions and minimizing the number of bad ones. If you can learn what worked and what didn’t from someone else who has recently traveled the same road as you, you can save critical time and increase your venture’s chance of success.

At our most recent conclave one of the main topics covered was the strategies companies use to successfully grow while maintaining a culture of innovation. What emerged from the discussion was a clear understanding of two key characteristics of successful “innovation cultures.” The job of innovation belongs to everyone in the company and it requires taking risks.

First, innovation is everyone’s job! To paraphrase Ratatouille food critic Anton Ego, not everyone can be a great innovator, but great innovations can come from anywhere. One classic mistake larger companies fall victim to is creating “innovation teams.” This is a great way to demoralize everyone not on the team.

Another big mistake, often made by technology companies, is that innovation is an engineering problem. When I think about the successes in Silicon Valley, many of the most enduring were business model innovations – think AdWords from Google or SaaS as a way to deliver and sell enterprise software. Yes, there were technologies involved in those successes, but I would argue that the disruption they caused and their durability has as much to do with the business model innovation as with any particular technology innovation.

Second, innovation involves risk. It reminds me of the disclaimer at the end of almost every commercial for a financial or investment service: “Investment involves risk including the risk of loss…” The same is most certainly true of innovation. Don’t innovate and you are sure to die, but as you innovate you will make mistakes. As Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of YouSendIt so eloquently put it, “Innovation is the result of a culture that encourages risk and is tolerant of failure.”

The companies that are the most successful at maintaining cultures of innovation understand that sometimes – nay, many times – innovations fail. Those companies accept the risk of that failure and have a culture that allows for failures and encourages risk taking.

Jon Carder, CEO of MOGL, shared an interesting approach that MOGL uses to foster a culture of innovation.  (Disclosure: YouSendIt and MOGL are Sigma portfolio companies.) Not surprisingly, MOGL’s approach strongly embraces the two stated characteristics of successful cultures of innovation.

MOGL has three top goals that are well beaten into everyone at the company on a regular basis: more users, more restaurants, and more kiosks. Once a month the company holds a “Growth Hacker” meeting that is open to any employee that wants to participate. At the meeting anyone who has an idea for an initiative to drive one of the key goals gets to present his or her idea. They must present in PowerPoint: hypothesis, execution plan, and dollars needed. Everyone in the meeting votes via smartphone and the winner gets the dollars they need. They report back results at the next monthly meeting.

At one meeting a product recommendation based on feedback a sales rep had received from a restaurant was pitched, won, and then tested. That product, known as “2 cents”, allows a MOGL member to send private feedback to a restaurant owner after the member makes a purchase at the restaurant. It’s now the most liked feature of the entire MOGL product suite for restaurants.

The number of ideas/products from these meetings that fail is around 80 percent, but many times those failures eventually lead to a breakthrough. The key is to continue to “pivot” the idea until it sticks and keep the innovative ideas coming.

What I see in YouSendIt and MOGL is that innovation comes from everyone and in every area of the business.  For that to happen the culture must encourage taking risks.

Greg joined Sigma in 2000 after 20 years in the tech industry, where he was the founder of three successful companies: Connectify, GiftONE, and Vicarious. Early in his career, Greg was in product marketing at Apple.

Top photo credit: Michael Cardus/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Jan Beckers is founder and CEO of HitFox Group.

Monetization is survival.

If free-to-play game publishers have made it to the top of the app stores’ grossing charts, it’s for one good reason: Monetizing efficiently was not a choice. Indeed, the free-to-play business model forced publishers to develop and implement the mechanics allowing for successful monetization right from the start.

The good news is, in the process they developed some great practices for the mobile industry as a whole.

As competition continues to heat up in the mobile space, with close to 800,000 apps available on the App Store and as many on Google Play, here’s how all app marketers can learn from them.

Changing the Game

Free-to-play has revolutionized the monetization model in gaming by charging players based on their willingness to pay, instead of displaying one set price for all. Indeed, through a dynamic pricing scheme for in-app purchase items, free-to-play has enabled game publishers to monetize the whole of the price/demand curve.

By removing the lower price limit and allowing a vast majority of users to play the game entirely for free, it has triggered two positive effects:  On the one hand, it enabled the generation of high volumes of players, and on the other, it made it possible to monetize part of the long tail of users, either because they are ready to pay smaller amounts, or by showing them ad offers.

By removing the upper price limit, it also made it possible for the most committed players to spend an unlimited amount of money in the game, therefore unleashing an enormous monetization potential. Aeria Games, for example, the publisher of the card-battle game Monster Paradise, recently reported that its ARPPU (Average Revenue Per Paying User) had seen peaks of $90 and above over the holiday season.

Understanding mobile

The most striking realization of Free-to-Play’s potential on mobile is the rise of mid-core games, such as Supercell’s Clash of Clans (which is reported to make $1 million a day, along with the company’s other title, Hay Day). The success of the mid-core genre stands as a strong example of how mobile audiences should be approached: by addressing as many users as possible, but also by understanding and taking advantage of the great variety of mobile usage patterns.

Whether your app is used a couple minutes here and there, 30 minutes during the daily commute, or the whole weekend long, it should be structured in a way that offers (at least) the value that every user expects from it.

Learning from the challenges of free

The free-to-play model, while offering a whole new perspective on monetization, also brought along some major challenges.

First, acquiring users was no longer synonymous with monetizing them. For players to be converted into payers, they also had to be retained and engaged. So publishers had to develop a thorough understanding of the behaviors and usage patterns at play within their game. This was achieved through the implementation of in-app analytics.

For instance, Struan Robertson of NaturalMotion, the successful publisher of free-to-play hits MyHorse and CSR Racing, explained that you should spend time each day looking at your dashboard of stats.

Then, as the cost of acquiring users kept soaring, it became vital for game publishers to know at which price they could buy additional players in order to remain profitable. Sho Masuda, the VP of user acquisition at Japanese publisher Gree, reported that the company used the large amount of data collected over time to forecast what the value of an install for a particular game is going to be.

Finally, quality of players can vary greatly across the traffic sources employed for user acquisition. This in turn strongly enforced the need to accurately track in-app user activity to determine which sources perform best so you can fine-tune the ad spend and optimize the marketing budgets.

Calling all app marketers

To make the most out of their monetization potential — even if survival is not immediately at stake — all app marketers can benefit from the lessons of free:

1. Understand, consider and engage all your users.
2. Unleash the monetization potential of your biggest fans.
3. Understand and take advantage of mobile behaviors and usage patterns through in-app analytics.
4. Continuously track your promotion channels’ performance and optimize your advertising spend.

Game on!

photo credit: E-Plus Gruppe Fotostream via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Updated at 1:00 p.m. PT with details from SugarCRM.

Popular customer relationship management service SugarCRM has disclosed $15.1 million in stock option grants given to employees over several years, according to a Form D filed today with the SEC.

Originally we believed it be a funding filing, but SugarCRM reached out to clarify that it was required to file this Form D as a disclosure for stock option grants.

“It is an administrative filing related to standard stock option grants previously made to our employees and directors from our stock option plan,” SugarCRM communications head Jay Mejia told VentureBeat.

SugarCRM offers a variety of cloud-based software and mobile apps for customer management and fostering leads for sales teams. Trying to compete with Salesforce and other CRM solutions, SugarCRM uses a freemium approach and gives away an open-source version of its software to more than 800,000 customers while it charges more than 200,000 customers for a version with more features. The company’s latest growth report said total revenue growth had increased by 60 percent from 2011 to 2012.

SugarCRM last raised $33 million in capital about a year ago from New Enterprise Associates, Silicon Valley Bank, and Gold Hill Capital. To date, the company has raised about $80 million in VC funding.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Charles Armstrong is founder and CEO of TourWrist, “the YouTube of panoramas.”

Running a mobile-centric platform, I’m completely inspired by technology’s present metamorphosis. More than ever, our devices are becoming human, tailored to our lives and empowering us with new opportunities to connect and learn. So where will this leave us after today’s tweeters and Angry Birds have left the nest? Here’s a look at my vision through the eyes of a twentysomething in the year 2020.

The brief tune of Marimba. Not “a marimba,” but “Marimba.” It should be pleasant. It was pleasant at one point, but now it just signals a daily transition for Lucy. A connecting of flights between her dreams and reality.

Alarm off. Facebook open. Last night, Lucy posted much of her recent trip to Greece. She’d had a great time. Athens was almost obligatory, but her favorite leg was hopping among the Aegean Islands. While in Thasos, she was able to partake in the annual carnival. Later, while reliving the moment, she concluded that the festivity’s jubilant music and colors best epitomize the richness of Greece. She marked that moment as a cover for the entire Greece chapter of her lifepath.

Like nearly everyone in this not too distant future, Lucy records a copy of the world just about everywhere she goes. “Copy” is an appropriate term because unlike photos or video, her saved moments are complete. The spheres she records capture every detail, in all directions, at once. They capture other things too, like the time, location, and various forms of contextual personal, chronological and social data. Seemingly overnight, we found ourselves with access to an endless volume of recorded lifepaths, defying the cardinal rules of space and time by giving mankind the ability to re–navigate the world and events, on demand.

So what did Lucy’s friends say about Greece? Well, she got a lot of Likes. Mom and Dad relived every moment she shared. A dozen of her friends had a Hangout in one of her moments — a beautiful sunset from the roof of her Panagia hotel. And Becky says Lucy “should just ditch the whole admin thing and be the next Anthony Bourdain.”

Lucy moves onto the next content stream in her morning lineup …Wait, what’s this? SeoulMama09. A couple of taps later, and Lucy is enamored. This woman has a particularly interesting view of Korea — one that surprises Lucy. Seoul… hmmm. She decides to load up the most popular moment from SeoulMama’s lifepath. Instantly, Lucy’s tablet is transformed into a window — like a periscope — through space time. As she points her device up/down/left/right, its screen reveals a corresponding angle from SeoulMama’s view. It’s as if she has joined SeoulMama in experiencing the city.

The area looks a bit like Shibuya, Lucy observes. At this moment she is standing in the middle of an X-shaped crosswalk. Tall buildings surround her on all sides. Bright lights are everywhere, some flashing. Instead of feeling overwhelmed, though, Lucy gets swept up in the moment. She enjoys the cacophony of foreign voices. Everyone is rushing somewhere, even at this dark hour. Somehow, they’re all very stylish — much more so than what she’s used to at home.

Lucy is easily influenced by vibrant shopping districts at night. In fact, some analysis engines have already recognized that this disproportionately influences her travel decisions. But beyond travel, this technology influences Lucy’s fashion preferences too. It enriches her appreciation of foods, further immerses her in many forms of entertainment, and deepens her appreciation of many things on both local and global scales.

Okay, onto other social platforms… Nope. Out of time.

Cold floor. The sun has just come up. Ah, the soft rug in front of her TV.

The weather looks nice as she views a live moment from the Golden Gate Bridge. She walks up close for a broader view through the motion–tracking window that is her TV. Not too close to leave the shag rug though. The fog is clearing out as it always does. The overlaid forecast suggests today will be beautiful. As she leans left, peering around the frame of her TV, she sees and hears a group of tourists. Leaning right reveals a group of runners already seizing the day. Aaaallllrrriight. She flips to news while she gets ready.

In the background, Lucy hears about some new dance move that’s sweeping YouTube. It sounds absolutely ridiculous. … Yup, it is.

Piano Riff. Funny how it deflates Ari’s serious tone before he’s even had a chance to speak. “Hi Ari.”

“Morning, Lucy. So I was just told about a place in Pac Heights that might be perfect for next month’s office party. Mind taking a look?”

Back to reality. “Sure. What is it?”

“Some sort of coffee shop that you can rent out for events. Take a look…” Ari taps a button on his phone, and instantly Lucy’s smartphone is transformed into a movable portal to the coffee shop. Through it, she observes that she’s standing just inside the doorway. Light is flooding in. Behind her, the world outside looks inviting. In front of her, the cafe seems like a dirty cave, despite an average of 4 thumbs–up as dynamically applied to the front door. “Hmmm. Looks kind of dingy,” she points out.

“Maybe, but that’s just one, brief moment. I found some others that were better, but that’s before the building was converted to a coffee shop. It used to be some sort of boutique import store. Perhaps you can swing by before coming in? It’s on Fillmore.”

“Okay, I’ll let you know what I think of it.”

End. TV off. Backpack on. Wait, where’s her Glass? Nightstand. No time for breakfast. Will have to grab something on the way in.

In the car, Lucy tunes into NPR. It’s not that she’s a radio gal. But if she isn’t going with Spotify this morning, she might as well enlighten herself.

Something about North Korea. The Euro’s getting stronger. Apparently Brazil’s economy really benefitted from the 2016 Olympics. That’s cool. As she’s driving, Lucy asks Siri to flag Brazil.

Alright, parallel parking. Mini Cooper or not, there’s barely enough space.

Half these shops are calling to her. “Lucy, come inside. We have really cool stuff in here.” Her heads up display shows a 360º interior of each shop (which she briefly scans by turning her head). But she doesn’t stop. If she’s really motivated, she can always power through the shops remotely, even loading those items that she’d like to examine from different angles.

Nice! A gluten-free bakery, she discovers. Smells good. Mentally noted.

Aaaaaannnnd, here’s the coffee shop. Okay, not as dingy.

Actually, it’s pretty decent inside. Walking through to the back. Ooooh, the strung up lights are a nice touch! Lucy can imagine the effect at nighttime. Better yet, she long-presses to see what others have recorded here.

Yup, just as suspected. It’s enchanting. Even as a boutique import shop, the previous occupants understood how cool this patio was.

Walking through the cafe, the hemispherical lenses on each side of Lucy’s eyewear capture everything, stitching and saving the resulting, spherical recordings instantly to her lifepath. Some people prefer to use their smartphones like wands (having advanced a lot in the past 10 years), while still others use dedicated spherical recording devices. Once Lucy’s made a quick pass through the venue, she calls Ari so that he can explore her experience too.

“Hey, what do you think?” she asks.

Ari beams in. Old hardwood floors. High, exposed–beam ceilings. A modern–day nomad playing music in the corner. The artwork on the walls isn’t his style, but overall, the place has a fun vibe. He turns around again and walks ahead to fast–forward down the hall. At the back of the cafe, he’s treated to a big, open room. It’s nicer than the front of the cafe, and would be perfect for a company soirée.

“Yeah, this’ll work,” he surmises. “What do you think?”

“I like it,” she says. “Especially the courtyard. Let me show you.”

With a grab and pull gesture, Lucy directs Ari to present time in her path, where he sees what she’s talking about. There’s an old fountain to his left, mismatched tables just beyond. He flicks his smartphone forward to take a closer look. Somehow, despite the sense of abandon this place carries, it’s still very comfortable — just the sort of relaxed environment one might seek out to unwind. Just the sort of venue he’s looking for.

“It’s got a very bohemian feel,” he says. “Okay, I’ll work with them on the price. Thanks.”

“Alright, I’ll be in in 30,” she says. Time for some breakfast.

As she’s leaving, Lucy decides to try out the bakery next door. Amazing; it seems you can have anything in “gluten free” these days. She orders a muffin and a latte.

After exploring 4 lifepaths around Rio de Janeiro for 6.5 minutes, they bring her the latte and some information about their ingredients. Tapioca. Rice. Quinoa. That’s a new one. Apparently it originated in the Peruvian Andes, it reads. Her Glass hyperlinks the location. Lucy already knows that selecting it will reveal the most representative moment as curated by Wikipedia’s ever–helpful community of contributors.

Gorgeous! Suddenly Lucy’s standing atop a mountain. It’s no Fuji, but her vantage point is high enough to see the world below on just about all sides. For a moment, she’s truly there. Quinoa and coffee. Sun rising over the Andes. It’s exhilarating. South America scores a second point.

Tonight, back among dreamscapes, she may find even more inspiration. These days when anywhere, anytime is accessible on demand, Lucy’s imagination has become the only limit to her voyages — real or otherwise. For now though, it’s off to work.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

This is a guest post by Cimarron Buser, vice president of business development at Apperian.

Many companies have begun to embrace the concept of “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD). This starts with the agreement that your company’s email, calendar, and contacts can be used on an employee’s personal device and you may reimburse the employee via a stipend. But this is the easy part.

The challenge begins when companies want to move business processes to mobile apps or enable the sharing of corporate data out to a mobile end-point. Now, security issues take a sharper focus, and the mobile device management (MDM) solution that might have been installed a few years ago that allowed IT to check off the box for compliance is not enough. Device wipe and restricting users to specific apps doesn’t work.

So, how do businesses provide real, usable, and fun (yes, fun is important) apps to employees while securing corporate data? There are many solutions pitched today, and while each approach offers benefits there is probably no “one size fits all” approach as new technology evolves.

The latest approach to gain buzz is “dual personality,” which can be seen in the recent BlackBerry announcements, and will be launched soon by Samsung with its KNOX initiative. VMWare, Enterproid, and others have solutions in the market, but the trend towards building in the dual persona into the hardware stack and OS is likely going to raise the stakes.

The challenge for these systems lies in the heterogeneous nature of mobile: you can’t expect every employee and user to use the same hardware or OS. Another challenge is that the dual personality model chafes against the user who has been conditioned (let’s just say “iPhoned”) to a simple, elegant model where all apps run seamlessly together in the same environment. The user never has to remember which mode they are in, and sending mail or making calendar appointments just work.

If the jury is out (both in terms of market adoption and technology approach) on the dual personality solution, what else can a business do? Another approach is to treat each app and its data as an individual, secure “container,” thus making sure that personal and business apps and data are separate. However, from the user viewpoint, the apps are easily accessible and the experience is familiar. There are several ways to do this, but the most prevalent is “app wrapping” where policies such as authentication, copy-and-paste restrictions, integrated VPNs, and data-at-rest encryption can be applied to any app with the click of a check box.

Adding to the fun is that beyond iOS and Android (still the dominant platforms when it comes to the new enterprise app ecosystem), we will see BlackBerry and Windows Phone entering the fray. Any solution that needs to be applied to all your company devices needs to play well across the board. This is an additional challenge to the dual persona model, where unless everyone is using the same technology it may not be feasible to have universal policies, and training and support costs increase. We sometimes forget why we’re all building apps for employees in the first place. It’s all about employee productivity, convenience, and ultimately ROI for the business.

Apps — and their security model — should be easy to use. User engagement should be encouraged, and include consumer-like features such as app rating, comments, crowd-sourcing for new ideas, and even the (future) ability to build your own app with corporate data. Ultimately, security issues should be handled in a way which is seamless and based on user roles.

We still need to deal with lost devices or the circumstances when an employee leaves the company. However, security policy must be combined with employee education and forward-thinking companies make sure employees buy into the solutions, and not try to do workarounds to get their jobs done because no solution is offered.

Businesses have a great opportunity today to make all their employees more effective with these fancy gadgets, and industry leaders have already seen multi-million dollar ROIs on mobility investments.

The good news is that enterprise mobility works.

Cimarron Buser leads Apperian’s products and marketing for enterprise solutions. He has worked in technology for over 20 years, providing creative and visionary leadership for products and services in the technology, web and mobile arena.

Businessman using tablet via ollyy/Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Raising venture capital has more in common with computer gaming than you might think – and Sitar Teli, a partner at Connect Ventures, early investor in SoundCloud and an avid gamer, did a brilliant job joining the dots during the weekend’s Startup Camp Berlin.

Addressing a packed-out crowd, and following a keynote from German Technology Minister Philipp Rösler earlier that day, she shared a humorous and frank take on fundraising dubbed by the MC as a top talk of the day.

Caveat: Raising VC funds isn’t for everyone – and giving up equity for cash is probably the most expensive way to get it. For the small subset of companies who should be raising venture capital, though, here are nine cheats and tips to keep in mind:

1. Fundraising is social

First and foremost: “In a social game, the larger a network you have the better you do in the game,” Teli said. Fundraising works in a similar way. “There’s a good reason for this. VCs see lots and lots of deals. Last year, we were a completely new VC fund. No-one knew we existed and we still saw about 800 deals.”

Enter the network: While some of Teli’s contacts are more likely to refer good companies than others, she’s likely to take any referral more seriously than a blind email. “A blind email, to me, says the entrepreneur isn’t trying very hard.”

2. Viral loops are highly effective

Creating buzz around you and your product is another way to cut through the noise. Say a VC spots a mention in a tech blog – then, even better, somebody gives your company a referral. “Now you have what might be a buzz around you – it’s a viral loop.”

Getting the good word out works with nightclubs and restaurants, and it works with startups. This doesn’t necessarily mean constantly pitching TechCrunch’s Mike Butcher or VentureVillage, she added. “Using your network is again a very good way of trying to create that buzz.”

3. Check your heads-up display 

If you’ve launched your product, you should know your numbers cold – that includes numbers of active users, how fast the company is growing per day and what specific acts convert people to active users. “If you don’t have those numbers, you should be talking to a specific type of VC, probably a seed VC, or someone who looks at companies pre-launch rather than growing companies with traction.”

4. Know your gamer 

“My background is in consumer and social – I now also work with some SME B2B companies and freemium models,” Teli explained. “If you’re an infrastructure company, I could sit down for three hours and I wouldn’t know anything about your company at the end of it – I’d know what you told me, but I wouldn’t understand it.”

She’d be unlikely to put money in – and, even if she did, she’d probably be less helpful to the company than a partner who is an established expert in the field.

Warning – a VC who knows he or she isn’t a good fit might still take the meeting. “Don’t assume that you will talk to the right person and everyone’s gong to be good and say ‘I’m not the right one, you should talk to this partner’,” she said. Instead, get the right meeting from the start.

5. Practice builds skills 

You should be able to explain their company in 30 seconds, three minutes and 30 minutes: “If you can’t take a 30 minute pitch and condense it to a few sentences of why it’s interesting, you’re going to need to get a first meeting just to get people interested.”

Practise various time lengths and various pitch angles: product angle, business angle, marketing strategy – all the core functions and areas you’ll need to succeed.

6. Get ready for the boss level

With most VC funds, after a partner has spoken to a company a few times, he or she will bring the company up with the partership, Teli said. “If they’re interested, the entrepreneur or the founding team will then meet with all of the partners.”

This is the equivalent of a boss level. Both have a pretty high death rate but there are ways to get through it more easily. First: “If you made it to this level, it means at least one of the partners in the fund really likes you.”

Talk to the person championing you in advance and get to know who’ll be in the room – and especially who will be the key decision-makers. “What kinds of questions are they likely to ask? Who asks the toughest questions? Who can you ignore?”

Ask your champion to review your pitch before you give it. And, old advice but something not many people actually follow, ask entrepreneurs who’ve already raised money from the fund for advice on how to play it.

7. Don’t play the game – play the player

You could play the game and talk to every VC on the planet. The catch: “If everyone says no, you’ve basically got 40 ‘no’s – and the more you get, the less likely you are to get money.” There are exceptions: when Teli invested in SoundCloud, while an associate at Doughty Hanson, “they’d been raising money for months and everyone said no,” she said. “We still said yes just because we really liked the team and we really liked what they were doing.”

In general, though, it’s better to play the player: figure out and target exactly who you want to have on your board.

Another tip: look for partners on their way up within a firm, the ones who’ve done a few deals but haven’t had a big hit yet. “They’re still hungry,” Teli pointed out – and therefore more likely to invest than someone who’s seen it all.”

8. Know the cheat codes 

In other words, do as much as you can to educate and prepare yourself. Teli recommended Venture Hacks – a “fantastic resource” though not updated much and based in the U.S. “Read some of Brad Feld’s books on how to raise money and be smarter than your lawyer,” she added.

9. Failure is normal

Only a very few companies manage to raise venture capital money every year. Even those that do will still probably fail – and all of this is OK: “Failure is part of entrepreneurship, part of being a startup. The worst thing you can do is not try again…”

Check out the original slide set from Startup Camp Berlin over at Slideshare. 

Image credits: Sitar Teli: provided by Sitar Teli; FarmVille: via Zynga; World of Tanks: via World of Tanks; SuperTux boss level: via Wikipedia; Pacman: flickr user rogerimp 

This post originally appeared on VentureVillage, VentureBeat’s content partner in Germany.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Rocket Internet chief Oliver Samwer, his brother Marc, and former Delivery Hero co-CEO Fabian Siegel are teaming up to start Global Founders Capital: a new €150 million ($194 million) fund for high-potential Internet businesses.

Global Founders Capital, headquartered in Munich, Germany, lists the three above as partners and will invest from a €150 million fund provided by unknown “various successful Internet entrepreneurs.” It will be “stage-agnostic,” providing anything from seed to late-stage funding to businesses with the potential to become very large in one or multiple markets.

The new fund will be location-agnostic too – although, given Rocket Internet’s recent flurry of activity in Africa, southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, it wouldn’t surprise if those locations are of particular interest.

Rocket Internet, founded by the three Samwer brothers Oliver, Alexander, and Marc in 2007, spans over 50 portfolio companies in 40 markets and is especially known for large-scale eCommerce ventures, including copycats of Amazon, eBay, and Zappos.

The new fund, according to German online magazine Gründerszene, will operate separately from Rocket Internet.

Siegel, who appears to be the first contact point for the new fund, stepped down from Delivery Hero, the global online food ordering platform he co-founded, late last year. In a statement today, he pledged Global Founders Capital would be “fast, pragmatic, and fair” in its dealings with entrepreneurs.

The new fund has yet to announce any investments. Past investments made by its partners, as listed on its website, include Delivery Hero and a selection of companies (Facebook, LinkedIn, HomeAway) backed by the Samwers’ pre-Rocket European Founders Fund.

Image credits: via Global Founders Capital 

[This story originally appeared on Venture Village, VentureBeat's Germany-based syndication partner.]

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

The UK is one of the hottest landing spots for overseas companies that want to make an entrance into the European Union. Why? It has an unparalleled combination of talent — and easy access to customers and clients.

Let’s start with talent — and that starts with education. According a recent ranking by the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, UK universities took six of the top 10 spots among European universities for engineering and technology. Worldwide, in the same ranking, UK institutions took two of the top 10 worldwide spots.

The UK also attracts top tech talent from all over the European Union, as it’s one of the best places to start a new business. According to Doingbusiness.org — a site powered by data from the World Bank — the UK ranks seventh worldwide for the overall ease of doing business.

In addition, Tech City — a cluster of startups in East London — is a fast-growing hub for startups and the tech talent that comes along with them. Google has set up a campus in Tech City to engage with the start-up community, and U.S. venture-backed, high-potential companies like Airbnb and Yammer are based there.

But it’s not just talent: Companies come to the UK because of the ease of finding customers and clients here. As one of the world’s major financial capitals, London is where the world comes to do business.

And London is well-situated as a location for a company’s European headquarters, given its proximity to the Continent. London has many more European HQs for companies outside the EU than any other city in Europe, according to theEuropean Investment Monitor.

UK Trade & Investment (UKTI) works with UK-based businesses to ensure their success in international markets, and to encourage the best overseas companies to look to the UK as their global partner of choice.

UKTI has professional advisers both within the UK and across more than 100 international markets. It’s got a variety of services to help startups and investors interested in the UK market:

1. Value Chain access
2. Roadshows for talent for corporations who need to recruit the best
3. Cluster knowledge: Where to find talent across the tech and design fields
4. University introductions: Who is producing the best grads and doing the most relevant research in UK?

We’re working with UKTI at SXSW to showcase the United Kingdom’s thriving start-up and investment scene via a series of quick hit video interviews with cool UK-based entrepreneurs and investors. If you couldn’t make it down to Austin this year, you can follow all of our SXSW coverage here. And make sure to join the Twitter conversation.

Photo credit: Anirudh Koul via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

The UK has always been a hotbed of technical innovation — the world’s first computer was developed in Manchester and the UK’’s Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, without which most of the companies that are at SXSW would simply not exist. Now the UK is rapidly becoming a place where not just the innovators can excel but also the entrepreneurs can succeed.

You might not think so, given that most hot tech startups to date have tended to come from other areas: Silicon Valley, New York, and other parts of the world. But the UK government has focused a lot of its support measures on the tech sector and R&D activity, and that’s rapidly making a big difference to the startup climate here.

Whether that’s direct grant funding for new products and services, R&D tax credits, Patent Box legislation, or simply putting universities and companies together to foster more innovation, the UK government has a wealth of ways to support young tech companies.

Overseas tech companies are finding that the UK is a great gateway to the U.S. as well as the rest of Europe. Many companies are using the UK as a testbed to launch their services and see how they play with an English-speaking audience before taking them to the bigger U.S. and EU markets.

UK Trade & Investment (UKTI) works with UK-based businesses to ensure their success in international markets, and encourage the best overseas companies to look to the UK as their global partner of choice.

UKTI has professional advisers both within the UK and across more than 100 international markets. It’s got a variety of services to help startups and investors interested in the UK market:

1. UKTI can act as a partner finder, helping you locate appropriate local contacts for likely partnerships.
2. UKTI can help U.S. companies plug into the UK’’s research community, both in Universities and Companies.
3. The Global Entrepreneurs Programme provides access to VCs and angels in the UK for start-ups.
4. London’s Tech City, a cluster of start-ups in East London, is the fastest growing tech cluster in the European Union, and one of a number of tech-related clusters in London and rest of the UK.
5. TSB can help startups with accessing UK research grants for product development.

VentureBeat is working with UKTI at SXSW to showcase the United Kingdom’s thriving start-up and investment scene via a series of quick hit video interviews with cool UK-based entrepreneurs and investors who will be at the show. We’ll also have plenty of other coverage of the news from South By, so if you can’t make it down to Austin this year, you can follow all of our SXSW coverage here. And make sure to join the Twitter conversation.

Photo credit: John Keogh/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

South by Southwest Interactive, an annual rite of inspiration, information, barbecue, booze, and #humblebrags, starts tomorrow.

As hipsters descend upon Austin, Texas, a huge flood of tech startups will be angling for attention. How do you rise above the noise? We’ve got a way: Enter our unofficial, awesome, tongue-in-cheek, yet very practical #WinSXSW contest, hosted by VentureBeat and Fandrop.

The rules are simple: Go to WinSXSW.com and sign up. Then look for the #WinSXSW video crew at the Austin Hilton, every day from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. Central, or tweet at us using @WinSXSW and the hashtag #WinSXSW. Give our camera crew your 30-second pitch, and we’ll post it on the website.

That’s all you get: 30 seconds to make your case.

Then the fun begins. Get your friends to share your 30-second video pitch via Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, Google+, or Pinterest. Every share counts as a vote, as long as you do it through the #WinSXSW site. Whoever has the most votes on March 15 wins.

We’ll be writing about the top startups right here on VentureBeat. In addition, we’ve lined up some great prizes, including cash and services worth more than $100,000.

So get your startup registered! Look for us at SXSW — and may the best company win.

Find more SXSW coverage here.

Photo credit: David Berkowitz/Flickr