Simeon Simeonov is founder of Swoop.

The coverage of Google I/O 2013 developer conference has focused on Google’s plans for world domination through an increasingly more interrelated and stickier set of consumer services. What’s gone unnoticed is Google’s radical developer ecosystem management strategy. The company has made a fateful choice that may leave Google with an exposed flank at a critical time.

Consider the following: in 2012 95 percent of Google’s revenue (a cool $43 billion) came from advertising. Yet, at this year’s Google I/O conference the Google Ads track has only five sessions — a mere 2.5 percent of the conference topics. And the number of sessions related to search advertising, where the majority of Google’s ad revenue comes from? Zero.

Out of curiosity, I checked out the sessions for last year’s I/O conference. It didn’t even have an ads track. If this doesn’t seem surprising to you, think about Apple’s WWDC event not covering OS X and iOS; Microsoft’s Build event ignoring Windows, Office, and Xbox; or Oracle’s OpenWorld event without sessions on databases, middleware, and applications.

The lack of sessions on ads is clearly a strategic decision made at the very top. The unedited version of the pitch goes like this: “Dear developers, please help us grow market share where we don’t make much money: Android, Chrome OS, cloud, apps, social, etc. We are fighting on too many fronts and we can’t win without you. At the same time, please do not concern yourself about all the money we make through advertising. We got that covered. There is nothing for you there, except for maybe paying us to advertise your apps.”

This ballsy move may turn out to be brilliant. Google is fighting a five-front war with Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and web publishers as a whole. By leveraging its tech cool and focusing developers on the key platform battles Google needs to win to extend its control of consumer services and advertising, the company may end up perfectly positioned for the long game. At the same time, Google is taking a big risk by closely and independently managing the advertising portion of its business.

Successful platform companies rely on strong and vibrant vendor ecosystems, whose combined revenues often far exceed the revenue of the platform companies. Microsoft did it by making Windows the dominant desktop OS but staying away from most types of infrastructure and apps for a long time. Oracle did it by creating products that required tons of customization and ongoing service & support. Apple did it by creating market-dominating devices with great developer tools while leaving the apps space wide open. These companies deeply understood the importance of bringing third party developers close to the very core of their revenue engines because developers, while they may be hard to win, tend to stick with what they know. They provide stability and support for platform companies when hard times come.

Some people on the Google Developer Relations team are trying to change things from the inside by associating organizational success metrics to the revenues of Google ecosystem partners. So far they have been unable to convince the powers that be that the financial success of Google partners is worth focusing on.

Google’s developer ecosystem positioning adds to the growing consensus that the company doesn’t like to share where it counts. Its moves to disintermediate publishers in a broad range of user tasks are another prime example. This fact is not lost on some of its large competitors as well as many of its publisher & advertising partners, who’d like to see more innovation and choice. Google may be helping publishers and agencies make billions but there is no deep allegiance there and no real stickiness. There are significant opportunities for startups and investors bold-enough to ignore the “we’ve got it covered” message from Google.

Simeon Simeonov is founder of Swoop, which extends search advertising to content, and Evidon, which brings transparency to online advertising. A lifetime ago  his first startup built the first large web developer community. Sim tweets @simeons and blogs at blog.simeonov.com.

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Neil Parker is VP of product marketing at Vision Critical.

“The Chief Customer Officer is a powerful asset that can help resolve chronic customer issues, create sustainable competitive advantage, help retain profitable customers, and drive profitable customer behavior through the effective customer strategy…Creating the role is a serious undertaking and executives must be firmly committed to supporting the role vocally and visibly to ensure the CCO has the authority and credibility that is necessary for success.” – Chief Customer Officer Council

In 2011, Forrester boldly called the era we’re in the age of the customer, a time when focus on the customer matters more than ever before. In this era, Forrester argues that companies need to start treating customer experience as a business discipline instead of a cliché.

The age of the customer has rightfully put the spotlight on the buyer experience—and ultimately the arrival of the chief customer officer.

The role of CCO (which also sometimes stands for chief client officer) has been around for some time, and originally grew organically out of frustrations with organizations who realized no one person in the organization owned the end-to-end customer experience. In most organizations, multiple departments share the responsibility for customer experience. Marketing, sales, professional services, account managers, customer support, training, legal, and accounting are just some of the departments that have some touch points with customers.

During the Gartner Customer 360 Summit this year, it was revealed that there are more than 2,000 companies who have a chief customer officer now.  This number is growing, but it’s a small number in comparison to other C-suite roles.

You may wonder – does your company need a CCO? In my opinion, CEOs thinking of adding this role might want to pause and think about the following challenges.

1) The role is still poorly defined.

As a relatively new position in many companies, the CCO’s day-to-day tasks are broad—and also very vague.

The CCO responsibilities typically include customer service, customer acquisition and retention, and most importantly, customer advocacy.  While many organizations have a customer reference program, customer advisory councils and customer retention programs, customer advocacy is often sorely lacking.

CCOs centralize the ownership of the customer relationship; they ensure long-term value is created in the relationship between the brand and the customer: a two-way street benefiting both parties.

Essentially, the CCO is expected to form deep personal relationships with the company’s customers to truly understand them. This broad description sometimes discourages companies from hiring a CCO.

2) CCOs are difficult to find and difficult to keep

CCOs need to have depth in various practices across the organization—a leadership characteristic that isn’t easy to find.  CCOs typically bring marketing, sales, distribution, customer service and support experience to their role.

Because of the depth of expertise required for the position, bringing a CCO from outside the organization isn’t easy. In fact, 55 percent of CCOs are internal hires with a median time at their firms of more than seven years.

Successful CCOs orchestrate organization-wide change, a difficult task that requires collaborating with a wide range of employees and partners in the company.  This shift in culture requires leadership skills, but also influence and trust.

With an average tenure of only 26 months, the CCO role is the most fragile in the c-suite. As the Chief Customer Officer Council notes, many new CCOs are relatively new at their jobs. The CCO’s role is stressful with an extreme scope and a massive potential for error and scrutiny. Picking the right person for the job is no easy task.

3) The need for CCOs signals deeper issues

Before hiring a CCO, a logical question from the CEO is this: why do I need one in the first place? Is it because our culture has forgotten the importance of the customer? Is it because the voice of the customer is silenced in our internal meetings, or given mere lip service?

If your executives and rank and file are so separated from the values of—and the voice of—your customers, you may have a systemic problem. Without addressing these tough issues first, hiring a CCO is nothing but a Band-Aid solution.

Before adding a CCO to your team, it is worthwhile to get a holistic view of your business. Are you building a customer-centric organization from the top down? Are you listening to your customers on social media? Are your customer touch points being recorded, measured and improved? Are you measuring the right things to determine how consumers perceive your brand? Do you have a community of customers who will honestly tell you when things aren’t working?

The transition to a truly customer-centric organization is no easy task. While adding a CCO to your team is a good way to drive change, it shouldn’t be an attempt to result your organization’s complete failure to serve customers well. If you’d like to learn more about this role, I recommend Chief Customer Officer by Jeannie Bliss, a book she wrote based on her 25-year experience as a CCO.

Happy customers art via Shutterstock

Neil Parker is VP of product marketing at Vision Critical. He’s enjoyed the last 17 years of his career in Product Management and Marketing, including senior roles at Glenayre (paging infrastructure), Infowave (wireless software), Sierra Wireless (mobile devices and software), and most recently, Contigo Systems (wireless location-based services). He has held a variety of leadership roles, and has managed product, engineering, customer service and sales teams. Neil has enjoyed bringing customer-ready solutions to market for wireless network operators, infrastructure manufacturers, enterprises, and consumers alike.

This is a guest post by Andrew Smith Lewis, executive chairman at Cerego.

Why is it that so many people who opine on matters of education do so by espousing an “either or” position, reducing their argument to a zero sum game, thereby forcing readers to take sides?

Isn’t that the exact opposite of what education and learning are supposed to be all about?

Take, for instance, the recent Washington Post piece by Sabrina Joy Stevens, a teacher-turned-education activist based in Washington D.C, who wrote an opinion-editorial piece for the paper criticizing personalized learning tools. 

In her piece, Stevens propagates common misconceptions about personalized learning tools. But as the executive chairman of a company focused on personalized learning, who works closely with great teachers to find a balance between technology and instruction, I am compelled to point out how misguided — and misleading — her arguments are.

First of all, I take issue with her basic definition of personalized learning, which betrays a few bad assumptions. Stevens believes that personalized learning tools are nothing more than a patch for a broken education system, suggesting that the promise of personalized learning is built around a goal of “digitized, standardized learning.”

It is an error to think that personalized learning is just set of digitized practice problems. We’re not talking about old multiplication tables in newly digitized form, where students get increasingly difficult questions until they get one wrong, then get easier problems until they get them right again. Those kinds of tools are trivial, and they’re not oriented to change outcomes. Digitized drill-and-kill is not revolutionary, nor is it personalized.

The fact that any learning tool is digital is simply table stakes these days. Digital is a condition of modern living and learning — nothing more, and nothing less.

Second, true personalization is the exact opposite of standardization. True personalization accepts that we all learn differently and at different paces, and that what actually makes it into our brain can vary drastically from student to student. The desired outcomes may be standardized, but the path to that outcome, and the goal of increasing the speed and likelihood of reaching positive outcomes is precisely the goal of some of the most innovative companies leading the personalized learning charge.

But the argument that irks me most is the suggestion that personalized learning tools are trying to be a replacement for teachers.

Personalized learning tools are not replacing teachers. They don’t seek to replace personal interaction, either.  Any argument to such effect is fear-mongering fabrication.

The truth of the matter is, personalized learning tools are a way for teachers to learn more about their students, and a way for students to learn at their own pace. These tools are designed to be a powerful supplement for teachers, not a replacement. They give teachers more context, and more data upon which to make pedagogical and intervention decisions.

Embrace this idea:  humans are wonderful at certain tasks, and decidedly less than wonderful at others. The most stubborn among us may resist this truth, but the most stubborn among us have also resisted nearly every positive technological change since…forever.

Personalized learning tools are not created to subtract something from the classroom as Stevens suggests. Rather, they aspire to be additive and empowering. They free up teachers to spend more time interacting with students on an individual basis, foregoing the rote call-and-response of yore. Any honest teacher will admit that when it comes to certain aspects of her profession, she may as well be a machine, and that’s bad for everyone.

Teachers should not be charged with transferring knowledge to students in bulk, playing to the median, the mean, or in many cases the lowest common denominator. Personalized learning tools can fundamentally improve the quality of student-teacher interactions by stratifying roles and enabling more frequent, bespoke, high-intensity, and high-functioning engagement.

The role of teachers is shifting from “sage on the stage” to the “guide on the side.” That’s a fact. Modern, forward-thinking teachers can be more effective with their talents when they are enabled to cater to each student’s own trajectory, rather than preaching to tuned-out masses. We should be empowering students to explore self-directed learning paths. And we should enable teachers enrich that journey, helping a student move forward if and when they get stuck.

Personalized learning tools, in the hands of savvy teachers, make those teachers more effective, and improve student learning outcomes non-trivially. They build on what teachers already do best.

I will continue to fight for one of education’s biggest and most important ideas, and I know that many others will too. Substance needs to win over self-preservation and ignorance. We need to summon enough courage to recognize that attacking individual weaknesses and playing to individual strengths is nothing short of necessary.

Andrew Smith Lewis heads Cerego’s US operations and runs Cerego’s Advisory Board, which is an international group of experts and practitioners in scientific, technological, and commercial areas directly relevant to the company’s activities.

Currently based in Palo Alto, Andrew lived in Japan for 25 years and is fluent in Japanese.

Top image via Shutterstock

Austin Hallock is CEO of Clay.io, provider of developer tools and distribution for HTML5 game developers.

I am often asked: What the are the best HTML5 game engines? The most popular HTML5 games to date? The best libraries for HTML5 games? I have answers for those questions, but until now, I had just based them on educated guesses, not raw metrics.

To get a more concrete overlook of the HTML5 gaming industry, I built a spider that crawls the web in search of HTML5 games. Right now, it has found 1,319 games, and there are likely to be many more that the spider wasn’t able to find. To make it easier on the bot, it’s looking for <canvas> games rather those that use the DOM. These are also just the games that are on the web — many HTML5 games are only available on the iOS and Android App Store or just the Windows App Store.

Here’s what the spider found.

The 10 most popular HTML5 games

For each HTML5 game, tweets and Facebook likes are tracked to determine the list of most popular. Here are the top 10:

Most-used game engines

If we look at all games, an overwhelming number were built with Construct 2* (52 percent). Narrowing that down to the top 250 games, top 100, top 50 and top 10 (based on popularity) results in a more reasonable distribution.

 
GameMaker and Construct 2 lower the barrier to entry for developing games — you don’t need to know JavaScript to do so, which is why you see each of these with a large number of overall games but also a large drop-off once it’s narrowed down to just the most popular. ImpactJS has a higher percentage of “quality” games, but both Construct 2 and ImpactJS have produced roughly the same number of top 50 games. See This Is Not Sparta for an example of a Construct 2 game, and Z-Type for an ImpactJS game.

Some game companies that have raised large rounds of capital are notably missing from this list: GameClosure and GameSalad. This is because they primarily focus on the mobile market and release games that are developed with HTML5 tech in the various native app stores.

Most-used game-related tools

These are tools that offer features like user accounts, high scores, analytics, etc. They’re equivalents of Game Center, OpenFeint, and Scoreloop for HTML5 games.

Great things are on the horizon for HTML5 games: Firefox OS, WebGL in IE11, and continued improvement of JavaScript engines (especially on mobile). It’s still a wide open market, and we should start to see more of a land grab — both for tools and distribution — in the coming months.

* Construct 2 and ImpactJS both have active forums where members show off their games, which is likely why more links were found. Scirra (developers of Construct 2) also has an arcade on their site that hosts just Construct 2 games, again skewing the results for all games. These results are not perfect by any means.

** Clay.io is both a marketplace and API, so naturally, many of the games on the marketplace use the API (though neither is required for the other). Same goes for Kongregate.

Full disclosure: I am a co-founder of Clay.io. We’ve tracked that 550 games have used Clay.io — some of those are test games, but you can see that a large number of games were missed by the spider.

Austin Hallock is the 21-year-old cofounder and CEO of Clay.io, a platform for HTML5 games that provides high level tools to developers and a marketplace that works on any device. Despite his young age, he has still managed to rack up 9 years of web development experience. Prior to Clay.io he worked at Vigil Games, a triple-A game developer, and IntenseDebate, a blog commenting solution that was acquired by Automattic. 

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Eric Peacock is the co-founder and CEO of MyHealthTeams.

A recent statistic from the CDC reported that 1 in 50 kids in America will be diagnosed with autism. Chances are, someone in your life will be affected by it – perhaps your friend’s son or a daughter of an employee in your company or even your own child. By the end of this decade, more than a half a million of these kids with autism will become adults with autism. Unfortunately, our health care system is woefully unprepared to handle this epidemic growth.

The bigger problem is that autism is just one of about 50 chronic conditions overwhelming the healthcare system. One in two Americans has a chronic condition right now. Autism, breast cancer, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, psoriasis, and depression are just a start of the long list.

If you’re one of the people diagnosed with a chronic condition, this is probably what you’ll do:

1. Drink from fire hose – You Google like you’ve never googled before to learn everything you can about autism
2. Piece together some semblance of an action plan – Based on your Googling, you’ll write down a laundry list of critical (and maybe not so critical) to-do’s. For a child with autism, it would include: speech therapy, occupational therapy, behavioral analysis, experimenting with diet, getting into the right school districts, negotiating the right services, finding the right insurance, and so on.
3. Try to find others who have been in your shoes – Instincts set in and you say, “Why does it feel like I’m reinventing the wheel here? I want to find other people who have been in this situation and learn from them.” You want perspective and validation from those people – not just your doctors.

Providing the right information and regular support for patients is something the health care system will never, ever be able to do on its own. A big part of the solution will come from startups like us, but probably not from the likes of Facebook. Here’s why:

People expect mass market functionality for niche market needs

We’ve launched MyAutismTeam – a social network for parents of kids with autism, MyBCTeam (for women diagnosed with breast cancer), and MyMSTeam (for people with multiple sclerosis), and a lot of members signing up came from Facebook groups. Why? On Facebook they couldn’t refine their search beyond just folks with autism, or women with breast cancer. The 32-year old woman with stage 2 invasive lobular breast cancer who was thinking about how to have kids after chemotherapy wanted to find 20 or 30, even 100 young women just like her – not every woman with breast cancer. People expect to be able to find others just like them and learn from them. They expect it to be as easy as finding an old high-school friend on Facebook.

Your Facebook friends aren’t who you need

Facebook is good at connecting us with people we already know. Your Facebook friends probably don’t know the first thing about parenting a child with autism or dealing with multiple sclerosis. The social networking paradigm needs to be changed to make it easier for you to connect with total strangers who just happen to have exactly the same health condition as you.

People don’t want to share their health details with everyone on Facebook

Women with breast cancer don’t want to debate the pros and cons of a tram versus flap breast reconstruction on a site where the guy they dated in high school could potentially read it. Of course, Facebook groups offers some protection from just anyone dropping in, but it’s not enough to really address the concerns of these women. The plain fact is that people want to do social networking about their condition with other folks who get what they are going through.

If you build it, they will come (after a lot of effort and continuous iteration)

People facing a chronic condition are busy. In addition to an already busy home life and career, they now have appointments and treatments galore, with very real side effects slowing them down. You just can’t expect these people to find you, so you need to reach out to them using every scrappy marketing tool you can think of to rise above the clutter.

Once they find you, they’ll become loyal, raving fans of your social network – as long as you listen to what they have to say. My company MyHealthTeams releases a new version of each of our sites about every week,based on feedback from our users. And we’ve gone so far as to make sure we launch a separate social network for every condition we address. That kind of focus is tough for a mass-market player to pull off., but I’m happy to say that when you do, the rewards are great.

Original doctor photo via Shutterstock; Illustration by Tom Cheredar

Eric Peacock is the co-founder and CEO of MyHealthTeams. MyHealthTeams believes that if you are diagnosed with a chronic health condition, it should be easy to find the best people around to help you. To date, they have launched MyAutismTeam (for parents of kids with autism), MyBCTeam (women with breast cancer), and most recently MyMSTeam (individuals with multiple sclerosis).

Mitchell Fox is a Co-Founder of GoodApril.

Why is it that each spring, so many of us cringe, cross our fingers, and start filing our taxes without knowing what we’re in for?

What’s worse, we rarely feel confident that we’ve achieved the best possible outcome for ourselves when it comes to taxes – and with good reason.  Back in 2002, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimated that people were overpaying their taxes by nearly $1B a year. (And they only looked at one of many ways to mess up – with the real number of overpaid taxes likely much higher).

Even more striking is that these problems affect most Americans regardless of whether they’re firing up tax filing software, working with an accountant, or filling out IRS forms by hand.

So, what will tax filing be like five years from now if technologies continue to advance and consumers demand better tax policies and better software solutions? Will this process be easier or the same? Lets take a look:

You will already know your outcome

While tax rules are complicated, they are well defined.  A majority of the things that affect the average taxpayer’s return are already digital and available online: paychecks, investment gains and losses, mortgage payments, and the like.

Five years from now, this data will be collected, organized, and crunched on your behalf, in near real-time.  You will know whether you’re going to owe the IRS or get a big refund at any point during the year.  That job change, stock market windfall, or new home will have been considered as they happened, and your forecast adjusted.

Tax law changes, like this year’s Taxpayer Relief Act (the “Fiscal Cliff” deal) and Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”), will have been analyzed in the context of your financial situation, and their impact explained and accounted for.

You won’t owe a dime

If you can already know your tax outcome, then why shouldn’t the tax withholdings on your paycheck (or estimated tax payments if you’re self-employed) have been adjusted automatically to ensure you have paid only what you owe?

Started a freelance gig on the side, or purchased a house? Your tax software should detect that and guide you to make the appropriate adjustments to keep your tax bill as close to $0 as possible. A small refund is probably always in store, but the days of big tax refunds and tax bills should be over.

Your data will be waiting for you

Why is it necessary for me to wait for tax documents to arrive in the mail in order to file my taxes?  While tax prep software providers are making tremendous strides toward financial data aggregation, it’s still a gruesome process of individually looking up each account, digging up long-forgotten passwords, and cursing when the connection invariably fails.

As financial institutions get better at providing secure data connections, and software providers get better at extracting and interpreting it, your tax data should already be loaded when it comes time to file your taxes.

The experience of filing your return should be a lot more like checking out your Amazon shopping cart – clicking to confirm the numbers are accurate and as-expected – rather than an epic weekend of wrangling 1099s, W2s, and 1098s.

You will only pay your fair share

The tax code is full of incentives that taxpayers can use to their advantage to pay less in taxes and get access to services at lower cost.  Getting a college education, home ownership, and paying for childcare are just some of the many activities that are tax advantaged.  The IRS also gives you a break when your expenses pile up: supporting a dependent parent, for instance, or paying excessive medical bills.

You should know what tax benefits are available to you, and what actions you could be taking to pay less.

In order to only pay your fair share, tax software must be watching out for your best interests throughout the entire year, and be presenting this analysis and advice to you in a timely and easily understood way.

You will have access to your own history

You probably have filing folders of tax documents for the last few years somewhere in your house.  If you’re more tech savvy, maybe those are PDFs.  But that data is not stored in a way that you can use it for your own analysis, nor is there an easy way to share it, for instance with a loan underwriter trying to decide whether you can afford to repay that mortgage.  Today you’re still stuck opening or sending the actual tax filing documents, and manually extracting the data.

Your historical tax data should be yours to consume not just as documents, but as bits.  While your tax return provider ought to be giving you access to this data, it’s the IRS that should not only be collecting that data each year, but making it available to you and the financial institutions you authorize.

Your taxes will be simpler

Technology can’t solve every part of what makes taxes so painful.  A big part of the blame lays with policy makers who, with the best intentions of rewarding “good” behaviors (like donating to charity or investing in retirement or getting health insurance), create a spaghetti code of tax law so confusing that less than 10% of taxpayers are brave enough to even try to do their taxes without the assistance of software or a professional.  Even the IRS’ own National Taxpayer Advocate called the complexity of the tax code the “#1 most serious problem facing taxpayers.”

In 2005, the GAO estimated that the cost of complying with tax policies, in the form of time and money spent on this like tax planning, preparation, and filing, cost our nation at least $100B annually and projections by the Tax Foundation estimate that by 2015 the cost will reach nearly $500B.

Five years from now, let’s hope that we have done our part as the end-consumers of that tax code to have advocated for simpler, easier to use tax policies that the average American can understand, comply with, and get back to their lives.

Where innovation should come from

Even without tax reform, however, as I hope I have shown, smarter technology can make taxes easier for the average consumer.

The most obvious place where these innovations should arise is within one or both of the consumer tax software powerhouses: Intuit (TurboTax) or H&R Block.

Another possibility is through one of the personal financial management platforms that consumers use today to get a complete perspective on their finances: Mint (also owned by Intuit), PageOnce, Personal Capital, and most recently, Credit Karma.

Additionally, there is an emerging crop of financial planning startups that could develop to include tax capabilities: for instance FutureAdvisor (investments), LearnVest (wealth planning), Ready for Zero (debt), and PlanWise (goals). And yes, my own company, GoodApril, is working on these problems as well, and look forward to collaborating with other financial innovators to realize this vision for pain-free taxes.

Here’s to a future where our taxes are no longer a surprise, and we have confidence that we’re only paying our fair share to Uncle Sam.

Image via Warner Bros.; Illustration by Tom Cheredar

Mitchell Fox is a Co-Founder of GoodApril, an online tax planning startup for consumers. Follow him and GoodApril on Twitter @mitchellwfox and @goodapril.

Habib Kairouz is a managing partner of Rho Capital Partners and Rho Ventures.

The days of passively watching TV with just a remote control may be numbered.

Interactive programming is shaping the new face of TV. Thanks to “American Idol,” we’re all now familiar with the concept. The show marked an important gateway by raking in an average of 23 million viewers, most of whom grab their second screen at the end of every show to vote for their favorite contestant. This year’s Super Bowl triggered yet another milestone in social TV, hitting an all-time record with more than 30 million social comments (tweets, Facebook updates and GetGlue check-ins), according to data from Bluefin Labs (Discloser: GetGlue is a Rho Ventures portfolio company).

Innovative devices have always fueled new application ecosystmes. The software industry was enabled by the WinTel PC platform; and hundreds of thousands of websites were built once the PCs became “connected.” In the last few years, we have witnessed the same trend in mobile; more than 700,000 apps have been created for Web-enabled phones. We’ll soon see connected TVs fueling a similar ecosystem of interactive programming and native apps. With nearly a quarter of all U.S. households currently using connected TVs (according to eMarketer), we have reached the tipping point of mass adoption.

As opposed to the disastrous impact the Internet had on the print industry, I see the innovation of the connected TV market as a tremendous, yet accretive, evolution as opposed to a threat. Here’s why:

Interactivity will be format specific

Traditional TV will not go away and viewers will continue to passively watch drama and comedy, but new interactivity features will be embedded into formats such as gaming contests, reality TV, awards, sports, political debates, news and others. When reports swirled that Zynga’s popular mobile game “Draw Something” might be adapted into a TV show, interest spiked around the cross platform opportunity of Web, mobile and TV content. Industry incumbents and lean startups alike are racing to define this burgeoning new arena of content, and create the winning combination that attracts viewers.

Native apps will emerge

Similar to what we’ve seen in the mobile sector, new applications will emerge that will be native to the form factor of the TV screen. We have yet to scratch the surface on this front as most of what one finds on the connected TV today is VOD, gaming and personal media. In the mobile world, native apps such as Instagram, Shazam and Foursquare created tremendous adoption off the unique form factor of the connected mobile phone. TV will be no different as we are now starting to see unique apps such as GetGlue emerge to complement the traditional TV viewing.

Any way you look at it, the TV viewing experience is changing. Audiences may currently view interaction with TV shows as a novelty, but once it becomes mainstream, programmers will have to adapt. Programmers and advertisers have only now begun to test the potential of this vast opportunity that is entering an exciting period of disruption, innovation and creativity.

Connected TV image via Shutterstock

Habib Kairouz is a managing partner of Rho Capital Partners and Rho Ventures as well as a member of the Investment Committees of Rho Canada Ventures and Rho Fund Investors. He has more than 20 years of experience in venture capital, and focuses on new media, information technology and communications companies at various stages of development, from seed stage to growth equity. You can follow him on Twitter here and GetGlue here.

Cameron Yuill is the Founder and CEO of AdGent Digital.

Video advertising will double approximately every two years until all online ads will be video ads. That’s right — all online ads will be video.

I am calling this prediction “Cam’s Law” (after moi) with due respect and deep regard to Intel Founder Gordon E. Moore, who in 1965 predicted that the number of transistors on integrated circuits would double every two years thereby exponentially increasing computing power.

Trust me, it does not take a genius to see the trends. My prediction is firmly guided by data. comScore’s recently reported that Americans watched 11.3 billion video ads in December, setting a new peak, and a sharp 10% rise from November’s 10.3 billion. December 2012 ad views were twice as many as in January 2012, representing 59% year-over-year growth. Video ads accounted for 22.6% of all videos viewed in December, and 1.9% of time spent viewing video online.

But That Was Last Year

Now three months into 2013, I feel ever more confident about Cam’s Law given the astronomical speed at which video advertising has grown in popularity. All signs point to the death of banner and static ads. Here’s why:

1. Consumers love video; not just cat MEMEs, but original content. And they watch a lot of video online. Nielsen says Americans spent more than 360 billion minutes online in December 2012 and streamed 24.6 billion videos.

2. Consumers watch video ads. After 60 years of television we have learned to watch the ads to get to the content. Yes, we know you want to get to your show, but often the ads are entertaining, visual and mercifully brief – and getting more interactive by the day.

3. Advertisers like video ads because consumers watch them. From August this year, market research company Nielsen will validate the astronomical shift to online video by including video viewed on tablet and mobile devices in their ratings measures. This will provide advertisers the data they need to shift their spend to online video in even greater numbers.

4. Consumers are buying (lots of) tablets. The global market for tablet computers surged 78.4 percent last year, according to research firm IDC, and sales are on schedule to pass PCs by 2017.

5. Tablets & smart phones make watching video easy in the bedroom, train, couch, park bench, and, ahem, bathroom.

6. Tablets make shopping easy and you can bet your last dollar that online retailers took notice last Thanksgiving and Christmas, so expect a monumental change in online sales strategies this year and increased consumer purchases via mobile and tablet.

7. If consumers are buying on their tablets, guess where advertisers will want to run their ads?

8. 4G will make watching video anywhere seamless. Did someone say “conversation killer?”

9. Banner ads do not work, but you already knew that.

Advertisers can’t ignore the numbers

As advertisers are beginning to embrace tablet advertising, in virtually every case they want video in their ad units. Consumers are watching those video ads hundreds of times more than they are clicking on banner ads.

While display and banner advertising were yesterday’s stepping stones for advertisers to enter the digital market, video is where the real action is.

Watch this space.

In 2014, we will review Cam’s Law to see where the market is; and we’ll do it via video because we know you will watch that. On your tablet.

Original TV image via Shutterstock

Cameron Yuill is the Founder and CEO of AdGent Digital, the company behind AdTouch™, a patent-pending HTML5 tablet ad platform for the creation, management and analysis of ad units on tablets for the mobile web.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Igor Faletski is CEO of Mobify.

Until recently, almost everyone who accessed the web used the same device: a desktop computer. In 2006, just two screen sizes accounted for 77% of all web usage. If designers were building bridges instead of web sites, in 2006 they only had to plan for Ford Model T’s.

As you know, this paradigm has completely shifted. Our research found that today, eight screen sizes—various laptops, smartphones, tablets, monitors, web-enabled TVs, and netbooks—account for 77% of web usage. What’s more, no one screen size has more than 20% of the market share. Today, we must plan for all sorts of vehicles crossing bridges, from the slowest scooter to speedy Ferraris to enormous Mac trucks.

The fix for today’s multi-screen world where smartphone and tablet users expect as rich and graceful a web experience as desktop users is responsive design. Responsive has become the darling of web designers and developers, and is fast becoming the dominant approach to building new websites. With good reason, too. A responsive design workflow is one of the most effective ways to build tailored web experiences for different screen sizes.

But responsive isn’t a magic bullet. It may solve the problem of screen size layout, but there are inherent problems with the responsive approach that many developers gloss over. Here are four common mistakes that could plague your responsive project.

Mistake #1: Your responsive site is over resourced

At Mobify, we analysed responsive websites for 15 top e-commerce vendors. The data revealed that the average homepage uses 87.2 resources, consisting of 1.9 MB of data. The reason those numbers are so high is because together they dictate how web pages must render on a whole range of different devices and screen sizes. What happens when your responsive site needs to load 87 resources before your site renders? It slows down.

It goes without saying, we all hate waiting for websites to load. When smartphone customers are forced to wait an extra second, conversion rates drop by an additional 3.5%. By the three second mark, 57% of users will have left your site.

To improve responsive website performance, make sure only necessary resources are sent to customers’ smartphones, tablets and desktops. You can compress and concatenate JavaScript and CSS resources with tools like SASS for CSS compression and Uglify for JavaScript compression, or with Mobify’s automated JavaScript and CSS acceleration tool.

Mistake #2: Your images are bloated

Images pose a major responsive design problem. Since a responsive website uses a single markup across devices, how do you make sure that only big, beautiful images are served to Retina iPad displays, while old smartphones get smaller low-resolution images that will load quickly?

For image-rich websites, page performance on mobile can tank along with conversion rates. Plus, the wasted bandwidth costs of sending weighty images to the wrong devices is practically throwing money away.

The good news is that several solutions exist for dynamically optimizing your images for all screen sizes and resolutions, including an automated tool we created. This means you can always send the right images to the right devices.

Mistake #3: Mobile doesn’t mean “lite”

When it comes to content, responsive designers currently have two choices. They can choose to load all the existing desktop content, or load specific content for small, mobile screens. We used to think that accessing the web via a small screen meant that users wanted a “lite” experience. Not true. According to Google, 90% of web users move between devices to accomplish a goal. That means someone accessing your website from a smartphone likely wants to perform the same actions—like buying your product—as someone from the desktop.

Truly sophisticated websites will need to move past responsive layout and take content—not just context—into account. That could mean more thoughtfully creating additional content, structure and metadata that works across all screens.

Mistake #4: You broke the bank

Shoehorning an existing website design into a responsive framework that works on every browser and will degrade gracefully in older, legacy browsers is complicated and expensive. Try rebuilding a site from the ground up instead of manipulating existing design—it’s generally cheaper and easier.

Another option is to use adaptive templates rather than a single responsive design. Adaptive templating lets you break up the design into multiple responsive templates that are targeted to different device screen sizes and resolutions. This solution lets you test and launch iteratively, bringing down the time, development and quality assurance costs of going responsive.

Responsive design is indeed a big step forward in solving the multi-screen conundrum. But it’s still a nascent approach and requires thoughtful implementation to deliver top-notch customer experiences in today’s post-PC world where 31% of all traffic to US e-commerce sites already comes from smartphones and tablets.

Mobile design image via Shutterstock

Igor Faletski is CEO of Mobify.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Joseph Vito DeLuca is marketing manager at mobile ad platform SponsorPay.

While mobile applications are one of today’s fastest growing digital sectors, many developers are continuing to struggle with finding monetary successes for their work. Then there are the few, that launch an app which yields a high ROI, but are then confronted with an even more daunting task of being successful across multiple platforms. Few developers have made a smooth transition from Android to iOS or vice versa. The select few that have crossed over prosperously have endured a number of hurdles on their path to mass distribution and efficient monetization. Here, we’ll examine the major roadblocks, look at a few successful cross-platform apps and best practices.

1. User acquisition strategies

The biggest difference between the two operating systems is that Apple doesn’t allow for incentivized installs within the in-app environment. They are very strict about maintaining the integrity of their top ranking apps lists. They have actually barred several developers from the App Store because of what they consider questionable distribution tactics.

The Android platform is a lot more flexible and thus a lot friendlier when it comes to distribution and monetization strategies. Developers are able to incentivize installs in order to move up in the app rankings. Where iOS has a distinct advantage is that it only has one piece of hardware, where the Android platform is on several different devices from several manufacturers. Because of this, it is a lot more difficult to develop an app on Android compared to iOS.

2. Retention rates

Although it may be easier to acquire users on Android, findings point out that it’s easier to retain users on iOS. Findings from Localytics tell us that retention rates are 52% higher on iOS than they are on Android. Furthermore, 35% of iOS users opened an app more than 10 times, compared to 23% on Android.

Also adding to higher retention rates found on iOS is the fact the iPhone itself has a 94% retention rate to just 47% on Android devices. When users stick with the same phone or at least same line of phone, they are far more likely to transfer or re-download preexisting apps.

3. Best practices

The likes of Electronic Arts, OutFit7, Nordeus, and Creative Mobile have all had top-grossing apps on both iOS and Android with titles including Talking Tom Cat, Drag Racing, Top Eleven, and Real Racing. They were successful because of their ability to understand each operating system and their ability to devise not only efficient user acquisition strategies, but also effective retention and engagement triggers.

Creative Mobile was able to monetize its Drag Racing game by leveraging value-exchange advertising. They implemented a customized offer feed and offer banners that gave users the opportunity to engage with ads and trial other apps in exchange for their virtual currency, Respect Points. Through this tactic, they were able to double in-app revenues on its way to becoming one of the highest grossing apps of all-time while also rising up the iOS charts.

A newly emerging user-acquisition tactic is the use of app trailers, which highlight the key features and then give users the opportunity to install the app. This is especially useful on iOS, as only a completed video view is required for the user to receive the reward, thus circumventing the incentivized install ban. This leverages the growing mobile video sector. More than 25 million mobile owners stream at least 4 hours of video per month, as mobile video rises at a compound annual growth rate of 28% over the next 5 years, according to a study by Dancast.

4. Trigger happy developers

One of the biggest pitfalls for many publishers is that they don’t consider user retention and engagement during development. The most successful games are the ones built with timely in-game triggers that function on both platforms, keeping users both engaged in their current session and coming back and opening the app frequently and consistently.

A prime example of an app with great gaming mechanics is MADFINGER Games’ first-person zombie shooter, Dead Trigger. Users are automatically rewarded for logging in daily to the app with gold to be used to purchase additional items and with casino chips that can be used in a slot machine, giving players the opportunity to earn additional rewards. Furthermore, additional daily quests are presented to give users the chance to earn additional cash and experience points.

Having effective in-game triggers can also have a direct impact on in-app purchases (IAP). Imangi Studios’ Temple Run 2 does a great job leveraging this opportunity. When a user’s run has come to an end from falling, running into something, etc., an opportunity is presented to use gems which revives the character and prolongs the run. If the user doesn’t have any gems, they still have the opportunity to obtain them by making a direct payment right on the spot. This can be a very tempting proposition for someone about to reach a new high score or build upon a newly reached high score.

Although monetization is one of the biggest obstacles to success for freemium apps, the market is certainly ripe with opportunity. By incorporating the appropriate tactics — both in technical development and business development — users can effectively and efficiently be both acquired and monetized.

Photo Credit: Blake Patterson/Flickr

Joseph Vito DeLuca is marketing manager at mobile ad platform SponsorPay.

We are working with UK Trade & Investment to showcase the United Kingdom's thriving start-up and investment scene through a series of posts and video interviews at SXSW. Check out all of the coverage here. As always, VentureBeat is adamant about maintaining editorial objectivity.

Tyler Arnold is co-founder & CEO of SimplySocial.

“Dude you gotta go. It’s like GOAP (Geeks on a Plane) x 1,000. You’ll love it.”

With that note, Antony McGregor Dey (founder of link.me) convinced me to go to South by Southwest (SXSW) a mere four days before the start of the Interactive portion of the conference. And having missed the hugely popular event the last two years, I didn’t feel like missing out on a third.

I never quite understood the value of going, nor did I have any expectations. I figured I had little to lose — although tickets, as you can imagine, were a fortune. That said, there are some things I wish I’d known heading into my first South by. So, below are some helpful tips for first-time SXSW’er:

Lesson #1: Flight and accommodation will be expensive.

Most of the tech world descends upon Austin for a single weekend a year and the city certainly makes the most of it. Flights and hotels are expensive, so just be prepared to pay the piper.

Hilariously, I was able to finagle last-minute accommodation with Kiip.com, a company we’re co-located with in San Francisco. They had done their SXSW planning properly by renting out a house months before.

But the house was full, so, they offered an air mattress — In a tent, in the garage.

Lesson #2: Take what’s given to you. You’ll need it.

Growing up in Alaska, the juxtaposition of “tent camping” at a tech conference actually sounded exciting. Being in a garage instead of outside in the rain (which I’ve done too many times) was a luxury I could appreciate.

It turns out that a dark and quiet place like this was the most appealing thing ever after 20 hours of South by mingling. As a friend described the experience, “SXSW is just all of Silicon Valley concentrated in a single place, with Vegas mixed in.”

Upon landing on Friday, I exited the airport to stand in the one-hour taxi line. The line was just a fact of life as floods of techies break into the city.

Lesson #3: You’re a guest, and there’s a lot of you.

Despite the crowds, you don’t have to stand in line at SXSW  to have fun. There are always plenty of events going on, and some of the best ones fly under the radar. However, when it comes to transportation, it isn’t always easy to get around.

It’s also worth noting that there are lots individuals with a hell of a lot more money than you. One late night had the Kiip crew and I looking for a taxi in the rain at 5am. We felt we were being generous offering $30-40 to be driven a mile up the road.

A group in front of us offered $100 instead, for a shorter journey.

Wow.

Lesson #4: SXSW is all about spontaneity.

I arrived in downtown Austin with a group of friends at an event going on in the middle of 6th Street, where a lot of the action takes place. For the first 30 minutes, I wondered what the heck I got myself into. Why was I here? I was over thinking things. I hadn’t had a game changing moment within the first half hour and it felt like… a waste.

Soon enough, we were up and mingling with the crowd and I began understanding the value of SXSW. I started running into executives at top-tier companies, getting feedback on our product, and meeting tech luminaries that also live in the SF Bay area.

I started collecting business cards, planning follow-ups, and eventually began looking for the next thing.

Lesson #5 Serendipity can be engineered.

Saturday was somewhat of a blah day. After a late start (it happens), I didn’t make it into downtown until 2 p.m. I was told you didn’t need a badge to network, so I never ended up getting one. I think the only time I would participate in the actual convention center events was if I was involved with a panel, but I’ll withhold judgement until I get to cash in on that experience.

After meetings and dinner in the city, I headed over to the Four Seasons. As I sat down, two gentlemen instantly invited me into their conversation. They both lived in the city, and after swapping backgrounds (“What do you do?” is asked more here in a weekend then everywhere else in a year) they introduced me to their friend Susan.

Susan, awesome as she was, ended up inviting me to the Founder’s Fund event on Monday night. I got to meet Peter Thiel.

Thiel, Facebook’s first investor and PayPal co-founder, has been someone I’ve looked up to since before I had a driver’s license. Equally great, however, were some of the people he surrounded himself with. I had a chance to chat with a number of individuals working to drive changes in education, aerospace (SpaceX), and healthcare.

Even as I settled into my seat on the bus to the Founders Fund party, one guy next to me was thanking the woman he was sitting next to for “getting (him) on NPR today.”

“This is the right crowd,” I thought to myself.

Those two people turned out to be Dylan Tweney of VentureBeat and Laura Sydell of NPR.

Lesson #6: There are two main segments to SXSW: The Casual Crew and The Partiers.

The SXSW magic really came alive when it turned a blah Saturday into an invitation to socialize with some of tech’s greatest names. Networking at the Four Seasons made me realize there are two distinct groups that come to Austin: those who network and those who party.

The Four Seasons crowd certainly seemed like the casual networking group and yielded a lot of interesting connections. Others, however, just descend on Austin to unwind from work and party with colleagues.

Both groups have their place here. I’ve always been more a networker by choice, so I let a lot of the “Vegas-like” parts of the event pass me by. Both the Vegas and spontaneity pieces were highlighted for me when one night, at the Kiip house, I saw Coolio (#gangstasparadise) making spaghetti after performing at their party earlier that evening.

This type of stuff only happens here.

Lesson #7: Value the intangible.

A number of individuals have asked me, “What did you get out of SXSW?” The answer, after having a number of experiences (not all outlined above), is hard to give.

First off, it yields a lot of great relationships. As a people-oriented entrepreneur, I value those connections greatly and don’t underestimate the value they could provide in the future.

There’s sort of a Burning Man/TED-like quality to SXSW. There aren’t a lot of hierarchies, gate-keepers, or egos that prevent you from reaching the key contacts you want to talk to. You can brainstorm ideas with top minds in tech. You can discuss journalism with correspondents from NPR. You can pitch your product to huge customers. It’s casual, it’s easy, and it’s fun.

Will it result in business? I don’t know — ask me in 30 days.

Will it result in investors? I don’t know — ask me in five years.

Will it results in friends? I don’t know — ask me in a lifetime.

But it certainly doesn’t hurt. In today’s digital world there’s so much noise. More emphasis is placed on relationships and key connections with folks you know. Trust is more monetizable now than ever before. People want to work with people they trust, and meeting them here is a great place to start.

Tyler Arnold is cofounder & CEO of SimplySocial, founded in October of 2011 with the idea that every organization should be empowered with the tools they need to tell their own story on social media. He previously founded Purlize and Tyler Systems. He has spoken at numerous events, including TEDx, and in 2011 won the Small Business Administration’s Young Entrepreneur of the Year award.

top photo credit: Lotus Carroll via photopin cc

Cliff McKinney is CEO of Work for Pie.

Having talked to lots of companies about recruiting, I know that most struggle with some version of the same gripe: Hiring great developers is hard, and it’s getting harder by the day.

Most blame external forces for the difficulty like the talent shortage, or how all the best developers get swallowed up by competitors with deeper pockets. But in my experiences, very few people point the finger where it truly belongs, which is right back at themselves.

Recruiting is one of those things that most people talk a lot about, but that few do with any kind of real effort. It’s one of those important but not urgent tasks that never quite gets fully addressed. But hiring isn’t getting any easier, and you should know that your lack of success — despite all those alledged external factors — is decidedly your fault.

Still, there’s hope for people who really want to learn from past mistakes and get better at recruiting awesome developers over time. And if you have a great company, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to find plenty of great people to come work for you. Here’s how to start:

Think proactively

Most people look at recruiting and hiring as a reactive activity. An employee leaves, so it’s time to start looking for her replacement. Best case, this approach means more work for your existing employees, and worst case it means that you give up and settle for a warm body rather than the ideal candidate.

Reactive recruiting is the wrong approach. You know your company is going to grow, and you know that folks are going to leave from time to time. Plan for it. Think about recruiting before you have to recruit. Recruit the best candidates year round, regardless of whether you have positions available for them. The time will come when you do, and if you’ve taken the time to build a genuine relationship in advance, chances are much better that they’ll be there waiting.

Proactive recruiting does one thing that puts those who do it miles ahead of other companies: it eliminates perfect timing as a part of the recruiting equation. There are lots of great candidates out there, but not all of them are going to be searching for a new job at the exact time you have a new job available. Understand that and address it by recruiting them when they’re looking, not necessarily when you are.

Understand that the best outcome is not a job application

Think back to the last time you changed jobs. There’s a good chance you hit up giantjobboard.com (not a real site), entered something like keyword: “Ruby on Rails”, location: San Francisco, spent all of two seconds on most of the posts, and flagged a few that seemed interesting. If you’re like most of us, you did not apply, even for the positions that seemed interesting. The job board was only the first step.

Changing jobs is a big, potentially life-changing thing. It’s not a decision that’s made in a few seconds. Candidates do research. They visit company websites, they look for pictures of the office, they read the blog, they search for interview tips, and they do a million other things before they even decide to apply.

The initial goal in proactive recruiting is not to have candidates apply to your open position. The initial goal is to become a part of the conversation the candidate is going to have with her friends, her spouse, and herself. You know job candidates are going to research your company. Your job is to make sure they’re not learning all of that stuff from sources you don’t control. So that’s where the work comes in.

Here are some tips for get started:

• Write blog posts about your work environment, your interview process, and how you work. Just once or twice a month is enough to keep the content fresh. See Zach Holman’s excellent “How Github Works” series for inspiration.
• Make sure that your social profiles are up to date and have relevant information for potential employees. Make sure the URLs match something a candidate will actually search for. Otherwise, Googling doesn’t help.
• Spend time (and yes, even money) on your careers page. Include pictures and avoid boilerplate. Job candidates are humans. Treat the copy on your careers page accordingly. See the awesome AirBnB jobs site for inspiration.
• If your office is awesome, then make sure pictures of it are all over the place. Put them on Facebook, Tumblr, Instragram, etc.
• If your team is awesome, then show them off. Let them guest post to your blog. Send them to meetups and conferences on your dime. Get them out into the world advocating for your (their) company.

That’s it — or at the very least this should give you a good start. Remember, proactive hiring is not about a transaction — either I apply or I don’t — it’s about building a relationship. And building a relationship means being a part of the conversation first.

Cliff McKinney is CEO of Work for Pie, a startup that hopes to greatly improve the process of recruiting technical talent by increasing transparency and communication between developers and companies. This Spring, they’ll be launching Kufikia, a service designed to help seasoned developers learn new technology and find better jobs.

We are working with UK Trade & Investment to showcase the United Kingdom's thriving start-up and investment scene through a series of posts and video interviews at SXSW. Check out all of the coverage here. As always, VentureBeat is adamant about maintaining editorial objectivity.

John Boitnott is Senior Account Manager at Viralheat

Whether you think of it as some sort of bloated travesty, or what some call the Super Bowl of technology gatherings, SXSW is in no way like what it once was just 5 years ago.

Former Austin resident Anne Ahola Ward knew it well. She’s now an internet marketing specialist in San Francisco but was there when SXSW Interactive barely filled a quarter of the convention center exhibit hall.

“I started working for my first dot-com as a designer/developer in ‘99,” Ward said. “It was a very disorganized group of people speaking about technology and philosophy. Nobody announced it or what they were doing, sometimes there didn’t seem to be a moderator. Only a very small crowd showed interest locally. In the early days, SXSW Interactive gave us techies a homecoming (dance) and a summit where great minds would meet. SXSW interactive lost its momentum after the dot bust.  I remember offering tickets to people and they’d just shrug and say “so what.” None of my friends wanted to go.”

Every geek’s SXSW story is different. The first time I ever saw the festival, or Austin itself for that matter, my old boss flew me out to interview for a job right in the middle of the music portion back in 2008. I took a day off work, flew all the way to Texas from San Francisco and arrived in the middle of the concert and party sponsored by the company (still one of the biggest parties at SXSW). I went back stage, wearing a suit and expecting some kind of formal interview. My soon-to-be boss walked up, laughed, and said, “Good God man get changed into something more casual!” A quick change of clothes and stop by the bar later, I was interviewing for what would become my job for the next year and a half.

How could I not leave behind my stagnant office job for a life of travel, music, fun and happiness that the party represented — with SXSW as the backdrop. I knew if I took the job, these types of scenes would be a part of my future. It was intoxicating. Through a half a dozen social media jobs since, I’ve come back to Austin every year.

Things obviously changed as the years went by. In 2007 came what Anne calls “the colossal splash of Twitter,” when the site truly became a communication tool for hundreds of geeks who had primarily only been using the likes of AIM or ICQ. Things were about to change rapidly in the coming years, to the point where the entire festival has now become overshadowed by the once-tiny Interactive portion. As hundreds of tech companies, large and small, realized SXSW was a perfect place to market themselves, the atmosphere of the whole thing changed.

One of the biggest official festival events, TechKaraoke, is no more because of what some people call too much “SXSW Inc.” The ever-growing price of tickets, the lack of hotel rooms and sheer mass of people clogging the streets during Interactive, have not only obliterated the “dot-com” feel of the early aughts, but have caused some people to give up going altogether, or to not buy tickets to the actual conference. Instead, many folks attend the parties, and nothing else.

It’s increasingly common for me to hear people saying that they are attending, but then qualify it as ‘without buying a pass,’” said Ward. “You don’t need a pass if you’re just pitching your ideas. The talent of the festival is all around you and they’re quite ready to get out of the convention center.”

To bring back some of the home-town vibe, Ward started a contest called “PitchMyHouse.com,” in which she gave out rooms at her 1970s Austin ranch house to geeks who gave her the best ideas for building awareness around her mobile marketing blog mobilefomo.com.

One of the festival’s formerly biggest sponsors, Techkaraoke, canceled their party this year because it is “too expensive to be an official SXSW event,” Ward said. “Their cancellation signals proof of this change. People are openly defying SXSW, Inc.”

Ward says the TechKaraoke cancellation was inspiration for her in trying to bring back a bit of the small town feel that was once a part of the festival, by starting “PitchMyHouse.com.”

“Hotel rooms in Austin during the festival are always in such short supply,” she said. “Pitchmyhouse.com felt like a return to Austin’s roots. SXSW used to be a meeting of the minds, where ideas would just flow. Now it has become a place to hawk your wares. The festival has lost that sense of community and spark of innovation. I wanted to mobilize a team of talented people and really have fun this year,” said Ward.

She may have done just that. Ward recently announced that the team from Funny or Die won the contest, and will be occupying the house. “I am so excited to be hosting some of the Funny or Die folks at my house. Their pitch was by far the best… Let’s just say the pitch is so good that I will not spoil it by sharing it here.”

Old School image via DreamWorks

John is Senior Account Manager at Viralheat, where he helps people utilize that company’s social media monitoring and engagement products. He worked as a journalist for 15 years for NBC and the Village Voice among others. He wrote for VentureBeat on a regular basis back in 2010 and ’11. John started using social media to help bring visitors to web sites back in 2007 and has been doing it ever since.

Malcolm CasSelle is CEO of MediaPass.

In the nearly 20 years that the Internet has grown into a mostly commercialized entity, many smaller media companies haven’t bothered to test whether an ad-supported business model is the most lucrative way to monetize their content.

But if your company isn’t one of the largest web publishers in the world, you may want to consider monetizing your content by *gasp* charging people for it.

The reality is that 90 percent of advertising revenues are concentrated in the top 50 publishers. So, if you’re Arianna Huffington, Harvey Levin, Henry Blodget or Perez Hilton, you’re probably doing okay. But if you’re not converting millions of eyeballs into millions of dollars in ad revenue, the traditional ad-supported free content model simply isn’t going to work.

Source: IAB

Image Credit: IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report – first half 2012 (PDF)

Venture capitalist Mary Meeker’s influential annual Internet trends report has relayed other sobering statistics when it comes to online advertising.

Effective advertising rates are $3.50 CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions) on desktop, and a fraction of that number on mobile. Meanwhile ad revenue for newspapers — the bellwether for the health of traditional advertising — was surpassed by online advertising, according to Meeker’s report. The problem is, these newspapers are fighting for scraps of revenues with digital-only publications by the thousands.

Worse yet, both performance-based ads and real-time ad exchanges drive down the average cost-per-click (CPC), and the traditional gold standard for the industry itself, Google’s CPC , has declined 15 percent year-over-year for the past three years. With the move to mobile apps that deliver even less revenue per user, the current method for making money via ads  is an apparition at best for the overwhelming majority of site owners.

On the other hand, charging for content is a business model that consistently beats revenue on a per page basis, sometimes by an order of magnitude. Site subscriptions and a per-article fee is akin to paying for an all-you-can-eat Rdio subscription (after trying for free), or on a per-song basis like iTunes. These two models work not just for the top 50 sites, but for most sites that bother to do it. Smaller sites with targeted, loyal audiences see effective advertising rates of $ $20 CPM or more. To that end, newspaper after newspaper has been forced to go to a subscription model to stay afloat financially.

Image Credit: Mary Meeker, KPCB

YouTube recently announced premium channels that could eventually offer its content partners the ability to charge a subscription for access. Netflix has always followed the paid subscriptions model, and now has the resources to invest in original content like House of Cards. It stands to reason that many other video sites will soon follow suit. There is value in charging for access, and content providers that don’t will fall behind their competitors in terms of revenue. And with fewer revenues, those providers won’t be able to cover the costs of acquiring (or creating) the most popular content.

And for smaller publishers with quality content, charging for access is hardly impossible.

If you ask someone why they would buy a subscription to blog, video, or news site, I often hear it is partially because the price is comparable to something a cup of coffee. And that low price is well worth it because site does its job by keeping them dutifully entertained. This is an even easier sell when you consider that the majority of digital media consumers have a shrinking attention span and devoted less time to consuming information through traditional channels like newspapers and broadcast news outlets.

People are willing to pay for the content that relays information efficiently and effectively – it must be poignant, timely, or unique. Monetizing a content service in this way becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy: people pay for content, and that money goes back into making the overall content even better.

Eye photo via Gilmanshin/Shutterstock

Malcolm CasSelle is the CEO of MediaPass, a leading, easy-to-use paywall solution for online content. Malcolm earned his BS in Computer Science from MIT and MS in Computer Science from Stanford.

Christopher Kaminski is the founder and CEO of Deluxis.

Cablevision is suing Viacom because Viacom is allegedly forcing Cablevision to buy channels it doesn’t want. But that doesn’t mean the company is working hard to lower your monthly bill, or even help lessen the number of unwanted channels you have access to.

In fact, Cablevision probably wants to continue forcing their customers to buy channels they don’t want. Allow me to explain why.

Here’s a little inside baseball on the television industry. Both cable companies and big media companies enjoy selling bundles because it provides a stable revenue stream. Content bundles can serve as a hedge against the dip in ratings of one channel, and help defray the risk of launching new channels. It’s the same basic theory that governs why investors have portfolios of investments, and why your mother told you not to put all your eggs in one basket.

If Cablevision were to prevail in this case, it is very likely that nothing positive would happen for the cable customer. Cablevision is not going to stop carrying Nickelodeon or MTV. They are only concerned about “niche” channels like Nicktoons and MTV Tr3s. A ruling in favor of Cablevision means people who actually watch these smaller channels would lose access to them, while the people who don’t tune in would probably not see a smaller monthly bill.

These smaller channels cost about $0.02 each per subscriber every month. Even a dozen of these little channels would add up to about one shiny quarter. That kind of savings would probably go unnoticed on a cable bill that now averages $86 per month. Of course that assumes that Cablevision would even pass the cost reduction to their customer. And any kind of cost reduction assumes that Viacom wouldn’t raise the price of Nickelodeon to offset the loss of Nicktoons.

Cablevision, like any cable or satellite company, is very unlikely to ever offer their customers the ability to pick and choose individual channels. Doing so would require millions of dollars in capital expenditure to upgrade the software on set-top boxes, re-engineering their billing system, and other associated infrastructure improvements.

And what would be their reward for all that hard work? Customers could pay them less money every month. A la carte could result in a lower and more unstable revenue stream for these companies. It seems extremely unlikely that anyone at Cablevision (who wants to keep their job) would champion such a cause.

Original TV image art via Shutterstock

Christopher is the co-founder and CEO of Deluxis, a new online television service featuring individual channel subscriptions. He is also a producer whose works include award-winning video games such as Valkyria Chronicles and MadWorld. He contributed to games published by Sega, Activision, Disney, Konami, and Turner/Cartoon Network. He is an active member of the Producers Guild of America, and held a board member position in the Northwest Chapter. Christopher previously maintained transcontinental fiber optic networks and gathered technology intelligence for the phone company.

Nicholas Holland is founder of Populr. The following post is a rebuttal to Jon Soberg’s guest post “Why hiring B employees will kill your startup.”

Regardless of their level of experience or expertise, most entrepreneurs can agree that unicorns are majestic, magical creatures that absolutely do not exist — never have and never will.

So, it seems a little ridiculous when I hear people talk about stacking their startup’s roster with only unicorns — aka A Players — while completely dismissing anyone for employment that’s considered a ‘B player.’ Those people need a reality check when it comes to hiring.

I’m a three-time entrepreneur and I’ve hired over a hundred people — often under duress because my small company was light on work one day and overloaded the next. Moreover, I usually find myself looking for tech talent that is hotly pursued by companies much larger than mine. I don’t think this an uncommon practice for startup founders.

It’s also common to hear advice like “only hire the BEST!” and “seek only A Players” when looking for new employees — something that always makes me laugh. I wonder which entrepreneurs these sage advice-givers think they’re saving from failure. Is there someone out there who purposely chooses a sub-par team-mate? (The short answer is no.)

Worst, the cliché of ‘hiring A Players’ creates an atmosphere that lets the business always blame the employee if they don’t work out. “Ah snap! Jody didn’t work out… Guess she wasn’t an A Player”. This lets the entrepreneur off the hook and often keeps them from self-reflection.

Truth be told, it’s incredibly simplistic to define someone as “The BEST!” or as an “A Player.” I’ve had employees that are absolutely brilliant in one area, and terrible in another. What does that make them … a C? Or what about employees that do exactly what you say, but don’t take any initiative. Are they A Players for the leader that leads them, but F players for the entrepreneur who depends on ‘self starting’ as a crutch for their lack of management skills? What about A Players that are loaded up with B Player work and never get a chance to shine? Do they get downgraded?

Before you start looking for your sparkly horned beauties, consider some of these points:

The downsides to searching for the Unicorn employee:

• It greatly extends the search process, and in the meantime, the work is piling up. Consider finding someone who meets the minimum expectations and then get back to work. You’d be surprise how much more productive your startup will be if you aren’t waiting around for someone who matches your dedication and work ethic.

• Even the most skilled hiring techniques can’t guarantee you’ll hire a Unicorn, so be careful about analysis paralysis that leads to even more delays in your growth.

• If you have problems with someone after you’ve hired, writing them off as B-Players means you get all the joys of firing, losing money with turnover, and decreased team morale (which is terrible for your business). Instead, own the responsibility of helping that employee be successful. Forge them into “only the BEST!” or A Players.

• Last, avoid the trap of assuming that A Players are always leaders. Some of your best people will crave your leadership and will follow you to the ends of the earth. But, they won’t be leaders. And that’s OK.

Always seek the best employees you can get, but be mindful that you have limitations to balance. It makes people uncomfortable to accept a “good enough” version of anything, but that is often what you’ll get when you’re faced with other business factors. Plus, there are a million factors that go into making an employee successful — more than I can share in this post.

So take some personal responsibility and check yourself before you whip out the trusty “B Player” card when things don’t work out with one of your employees.

Top unicorn image via Sari ONeal/Shutterstock; Batmanicorn art via Unicorns Rock

Nicholas Holland is the founder of CentreSource interactive agency, mentor for Nashville, Tenn.-based startup incubator JumpStart Foundry and a seasoned entrepreneur. His latest startup Populr, a service that enables customers to easily create and publish POPs (published one pagers), recently made its public launch. Follow him on twitter @nicholasholland.

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Marc Price is Openet’s CTO for the Americas.

In today’s day and age, consumers like personalization. From tailored music selections on MP3 players to customized ringtones, people know what they want when it comes to digital content, and how they want to enjoy it.

It won’t be long before television is no different from music services, either. In fact, it’s already happening. An everyday task like watching TV will soon become personalized with the introduction of technological advancements such as flexible ad insertion systems that personalize TV commercials, and new TV platforms, like Airplay via Apple TV, that deliver “long-tail” video content to all screens – the big screen, tablets, smartphones, and more.

Here’s why consumers will embrace a personalized TV experience:

An enhanced user experience

Soon, you’ll be able to request that your TV turn off commercials you despise and instead, play commercials you may actually want to watch, tailored to interests you choose to share. If you don’t have a cat, do you really want to watch ads for cat food? This applies to both live TV and time-shifted TV, where sometimes ads are no longer appropriate to recorded content. Imagine watching a show on your DVR, and being able to decide you don’t want to watch a commercial for a “sale on cars this weekend only” when the show was recorded last week. Gracenote is already set to bring this level of personalization into your living room, having debuted its ad replacement system at CES this year and is expected to ship hardware by the end of 2013.

Better service

Consumers distrust big brother when they don’t understand, or have control over, what data is being used, or how. Personalized TV services will take off when there are clear details around opt in and opt out mechanisms regarding how consumer data is to be collected and leveraged in creating a better service experience. For example, details have emerged on Intel’s smart TV platform that is said to display targeted ads based on facial recognition, gender, age range, etc. Although it won’t capture information down to the individual level, the general concept still has people skeptical. The more opt in and opt out elements that are placed under users’ control, the more they will be used, to the benefit of the consumer and the industry alike.

Consumers will be in the personalization driver’s seat

It will soon be possible for consumers to set up their own TV viewer profiles based on what they care about. And this is not just for ads! Consumers will be able to change their TV viewing experience around the electronic programming guide, recommendations, and even how search works and prioritizes responses. Apps like NextGuide from Dijit are currently available that enable users to find and browse shows on TV and online that are relevant to their interests. This concept, and the current apps available, will make content discovery of more relevant programming easier, as well as improve relevant advertising.

Tailored delivery of ads based on specific devices

As consumers add more devices, the personalized TV experience will make it possible for tailored ads to be delivered in customized ways to each of these devices. Consumers’ appetite for ads on mobile devices is not the same as for the living room TV. Mobile, despite rapid growth, accounts for just 1 percent of total ad spending worldwide, according to eMarketer. Advertisers will gain a channel to more devices, as opt-in mechanisms enable more sophisticated users to decide what is acceptable to achieve the right service experience at the right price. At the same time, measurement across devices can be centralized. Tailored delivery will ultimately improve the user experience, reducing total ad time, and reducing or eliminating ads that aren’t relevant. This also provides value for service providers, enabling ads on platforms beyond the living room TV, and enabling comprehensive measurement – inclusive of broadband/online and mobile channels – an elusive goal today. Inevitably, consumers will soon be able to interact with brands on the devices of their choice.

Final word

Personalized TV is better TV, as the concept enables you to find and enjoy the content you want, on the devices you want, and with more relevant advertising when you want it. Soon, the days of six straight commercials focused on medications for seniors’ ailments during the 6 o’clock news will be a distant memory. Technology allows us to live in a world where one size does not fit all, and that includes television.

Original TV Image via zayats-and-zayats/Shutterstock; Illustration by Tom Cheredar

Marc Price is the chief technical officer for the Americas at Openet, and has more than 20 years of experience working extensively with customers to define strategies and deploy world-class solutions for mediation, charging, rating, billing, and policy. He has helped some of the largest North American and European service providers to achieve business success. Before joining Openet, Marc was the lead software architect for a market-leading convergent real-time rating and billing system for service providers. Marc holds degrees in mechanical engineering and international relations from the University of Pennsylvania.

Marcus Whitney is CTO of Moontoast

I had heard the logic behind Facebook’s defensibility many times before, consistently pointing to the fact that on Facebook, people are their ‘real selves’, not an anonymous troll posting for the community’s enjoyment like on Twitter and Reddit. But it wasn’t until listening to various industry insiders arguing on NPR, on the day of Facebook’s IPO, that had I heard the term that so succinctly describes what they have built, and what anyone who wants to challenge their long-term viability must build: The Identity Infrastructure.

So, when Facebook announced to the world two weeks ago that its Social Graph would now be searchable via Graph Search, it makes the power of Social by Design much more obvious. Sure, Google has added +1 to our searches to add some social context, but Facebook can tell us about our society in dimensions that no other internet company can even begin to. And with each innovation that Facebook releases, marketers and advertisers are watching more closely, understanding that while somewhat raw today, this is undoubtedly the future of marketing and advertising, because of the Identity Infrastructure.

Advertising is just beginning to get disrupted by social — Facebook, especially. Here are three key reasons why social advertising is going to dominate the next decade of online advertising:

1) Identity + attribution

When you combine the ability to know someone completely through a permission based marketing system like Facebook Open Graph Apps, with the new models of attribution tracking that Facebook has recently released, you have a method of ROI calculation that doesn’t have an equal in the traditional online advertising world. The life time value of a purchasing Facebook fan, whom you have access to their graph, is a combined dataset and consumer profile that pre-Facebook would be impossible to create.

2) Mobile

Facebook login runs mobile (Twitter cleans up what Facebook doesn’t own). They don’t need to do a phone. They’re already connected to all our mobile activities, and have the No. 1 mobile app in the world. Facebook was also estimated to have led display mobile advertising with a whopping 18.6% (eMarketer) of the market in revenue. That trend will continue and combining that with the under-evolved state of the mobile advertising market, there is huge upside for Facebook as mobile continues its march to become the primary user experience of consumers.

3) Unmatched targeting

You’ve seen all the hyped up posts about the wacky Graph Searches that people are performing. Can you imaging the type of searches that ad platforms (programmed by Ph.Ds) can do for targeting impressions against the Facebook Graph? Seriously, what ad platform is going to compare to that?

So, while you’re thinking about all the creepy searches you’re gonna do (or hide from in privacy settings) when Graph Search goes live, think about the much larger play… Facebook is just starting to leverage their Identity Infrastructure to completely revolutionize online advertising, bringing about the biggest market disruption since the iPhone.

Social Ad original image via leedsn/Shutterstock

Marcus Whitney is currently the CTO of Boston-based social commerce platform Moontoast, which offers musicians, celebrities, brands and companies a way to turn their social media presence into a source of revenue. He’s founded four startups to date and somehow managed to maintain a love affair with his family, friends and hip-hop. He is a cyborg innovator in Social and Music Startups and a student of Founder Happiness.

This guest post was written by entrepreneur Elli Sharef.

A recent study by my company HireArt, a Y-Combinator-backed recruiting business, showed that startup employees often get fired or quit because they are not a good fit for the company. Part of the reason why that is the case is that working for a startup can be a bit different than working for larger companies.

Here are five things people should know before trying to work for a startup:

1. Working for a startup means having ownership over your work and doing something that you really believe in, but it also means doing whatever is needed of you.

Be aware that working at a startup also involves “grunt work,” well below what you might do at a larger corporation. Expect to do whatever is needed of you. Sometimes this will mean building a revolutionary feature to your product and sometimes it’ll mean making phone calls, signing for deliveries, or other tasks you may think are outside of your job description.

2. We all hope for a big exit a la Instagram. However, you should understand the risks and be aware of how rare startup success really is.

A recent Harvard study notes that 75 percent of startups fail. Will your next employer be a success or a failure? Even if everyone is working extremely hard at building a life-changing product, the reality is that it doesn’t always work out and many startups go out of business within a year. Understand what that would mean for your career progression — having too many “short stints” on your resume is a big no-no.

3. While getting equity is a big plus and many startups have yummy snacks and fun perks, expect a lower salary and fewer benefits.

Startups are usually more strapped for cash than other companies. This means that many of them may not be able to offer comparable salaries or benefits to other opportunities you might have. We recently had candidates for marketing positions asking for $150,000 –- note that while this might be doable at a large company, startups, in our experience, pay about 70 percent of what you might get at a larger organization.

4. You’ll have lots of exposure to founders at a small startup, but you may get less mentoring than you need.

The team atmosphere of startups is what makes it irresistible to many of us — working in a small group to achieve a big goal is energizing and feels like you’re back in college. But your managers are busy and often don’t give you the kind of formal mentorship you might get elsewhere. Don’t forget that your managers are often less experienced than you are in a given field, so it’s up to you to learn on your own. If you’re the only marketing hire at a start-up, you’ll get much less mentorship than if you worked at, let’s say Proctor and Gamble, where people with tons of years of marketing experience can teach you the tricks of the trade.

5. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, while startups are a lot of fun, the pressure can be much higher than at other types of companies.

The pressure to achieve results, hit metrics, achieve growth, and get more traction can be overwhelming for many. We’ve seen lots of people quit startups because they realized the emotional pressures were simply too much for them. It’s awesome to know your work can help make or break the business, but with great opportunity comes great responsibility!

Overall, we still think startups are amazing –- working at one will change your life, how you see the world, and what you think is possible. You’ll become a doer and fixer overnight and things that seemed overwhelming will seem like a piece of cake after a while. You’ll learn more about yourself and about how a business ought to be run than anywhere else. But the risks, discomforts, and drawbacks should not be ignored.

Elli Sharef is co-founder of HireArt, a jobs marketplace that uses online challenge-based interviews to vet job applicants. She began HireArt to fix a broken hiring and interview process and get people hired based on skills, not connections. Since starting HireArt, Elli and her team have placed hundreds of candidates in sales, service, and marketing jobs at dozens of employers. Prior to HireArt, she worked as a Business Analyst at McKinsey and Director of Strategy at the University of Phoenix.

Young businessman photo via Kiselev Andrey Valerevich/Shutterstock

This is a guest post by entrepreneur Bernard Moon

An important factor for new entrepreneurs is the ability and willingness to change your business model or product mid-stream. Most successful startups have pivoted, but it’s not as easy as it sounds.

It’s a humbling experience to admit your original vision and product was off or something went wrong. An entrepreneur might reflect on how they spent their investors’ money or their life’s savings into a black hole and revisit the highs and lows of their journey. Some entrepreneurs don’t reach this point because they are blinded by the same fierce determination that brought them there or have a hope that things will turn around.

Related: Check out Steve Blank’s suggestions for when to pivot, and when to hold the line

As a reference, here are some successful startups that pivoted:

• Burbn, a location-based HTML5 app –> Instagram.
• Game Neverending, an online video game (MMORPG) –> Flickr.
• Tune In Hook Up, a video dating site –> YouTube.
• PDA payments (Palm) –> Paypal’s web payments.
• Odeo, a podcasting platform –> Twitter.
• Animation tools–> Pixar’s animation studio.
• Memory chips –> Intel’s microprocessors.

It is difficult to decide whether your company should pivot or not. How do you know when’s the right time? I’m assuming a company is beyond the testing and tweaking stages and fully committed down a specific product strategy and design for over six months — or even longer.  There isn’t an algorithm or some magic formula for you to use, but it is important to keep an open mind and watch for these four signs:

1. You are constantly educating the market

During my last startup, GoingOn Networks, we were constantly educating potential clients on the benefits of social networking and open communications with customers. It was a B2B, white-label social networking and publishing platform that was a few years too early. I became burned out after three years of evangelizing (2004-2007) about the coming days of social media and two-way communications. GoingOn eventually focused on the education market and gained traction within this space.

There is a fuzzy line between being a first mover and capturing a new market and being chum for sharks in the ocean depths. If you’re constantly educating your target users and trying to create a market, then you’re probably too early. This is a long and arduous process that should lead you to pivot.

2. Your beta users don’t like your product

Listening to your potential users is good thing.  Ninety-nine point nine percent of us are not Steve Jobs, so you can’t say, “Focus Groups? Feedback? Who needs user feedback when I know what people want?!”

Being passionate about your product is one thing, but being hard of hearing and fiercely stubborn can lead you to the startup deadpool. If a vast majority of your users don’t like your product or don’t find value in it or just don’t get it, then pivot.

3. Investors you meet aren’t buying it

After dozens and dozens of investor meetings and dozens of rejections, if the feedback is negative on the product or target market, you should consider a pivot. The story might be different if they say you need to get traction first, that you’re missing a key team member, or that they don’t invest in that space, but if it is repeated feedback that your product isn’t compelling enough or the market is too small, then consider pivoting.

There are outlier stories of incredible perseverance, such as Pandora’s Tim Westergren, who was rejected by over 300 venture capitalists and suffered through two-and-a-half years of being broke, but for most people, the outcome will not be pretty. As my father once said, “”Bernard, business is like poker. You have to know when to fold.”

4. You’re being everything to everyone

This not so much a sign for your company, but more of a forewarning. Most startups that try to be everything to everyone fail because they are burning their engineering resources on developing products that are bigger than they should be. Focus is a good thing. Pick one target market and user base.

Going after everyone or almost everyone might confuse your users. Do they want me? Do they like me? Is this product for me? I learned this the hard way during my second startup, HeyAnita Korea. We created a voice portal service that tried to be a voice-guided information service for everyone (weather, news, stock information, sports, and so on). After some soul-searching, the company pivoted on entertainment news targeted towards teens, and this new focus led HeyAnita to profitability.

Passion, excellent execution, and a strong vision should be balanced with the ability to listen well, the flexibility to recognize better opportunities, and the willingness to pivot your company onto a more successful path.

Bernard Moon is the co-founder and CEO of web conferencing and sales platform Vidquik and co-founder of SparkLabs, a recently launched startup accelerator in Seoul, Korea.

[Top image credit: olly/Shutterstock]

If there is any weakness in security, you can guarantee the criminals will try to exploit it. And if a cyber criminal discovers a weakness in one community, it won’t be long before that isolated crime turns into a trend. The commercialization of malware is rapidly becoming a well-organized and highly lucrative business.

So what can we expect in 2013? Based on what crimes we are seeing around the globe, here is a list of the top six emerging cyber security threats we will likely see in 2013.

Criminals will enter your home using smart TVs – Smart TVs are extremely vulnerable to attacks especially as app stores for TVs become more prevalent. Hundreds of applications are becoming available for users to download, and an attacker needs to exploit vulnerabilities in just one of these apps to enter people’s homes. In 2013, the attacks may be geared more towards stealing content, like movies and games, but as Smart TVs become more sophisticated and integrated into home networks, you can be assured cyber criminals will find new ways to exploit this new avenue inside the home.

Virtual kidnapping of cellphones – Scarlett Johansson, Olivia Munn, Christina Hendricks, and Rihanna were just a few celebrities who got their phones hacked in 2012. Next year, you can expect this crime to go from celebrities to consumers. TopPatch has already seen hackers hold phones for ransom. It is a virtual form of hijacking your cell phone and we are expecting more of these crimes to hit the global consumer in 2013 as smartphone use continues to increase.

Attacks using bloggers will increase - Many content management systems that bloggers use, and the ad servers they are integrated with, don’t have enough security measures to protect content created by writers and bloggers, or the ad units served by advertisers. In 2013, hackers will exploit these security weaknesses further to spread viruses, conduct phishing attacks, and steal data from the audiences who visit these websites.

Virtual attacks end in human death - Nation-state attackers will target critical infrastructure networks such as power grids at unprecedented scale in 2013, resulting in human casualties from a cyber attack. Violent extremist groups have already attacked nuclear reactors, hospitals and assembly lines at automobile companies. These types of attacks are growing more sophisticated, and will soon enough lead to the loss of human life at an unprecedented scale.

Rogue regimes use cyberterrorism to attack their governments – In 2012 we already saw numerous government-sponsored cyber attacks, but next year we will see rogue regimes utilize the skills they have developed to attack their own governments.

Attacks will follow natural disasters - Cyber criminals like to attack when people are most vulnerable. Many networks go down during natural disasters, leaving security gaps for cyber criminals. With the rise of natural disasters in 2013, we can expect more systems to become vulnerable, leaving more opportunities for cyber criminals to exploit. If global warming leads to more hurricanes and weather changes, you can expect the opportunities for cyber criminals to grow during these down times.

Chiranjeev Bordoloi is the CEO of TopPatch. He has consulted government agencies, financial institutions and Fortune 500 companies on cyber security for more than 20 years. TopPatch was the first cyber security company to develop a patent-pending Peer-to-Peer Security Patch Management Software that exponentially improves on the “old” way of securing computers, which required all security to go through one server.

Cyber security photo via alexskopje/Shutterstock

This is a guest post by Jon Siegal, founder and CEO of Fan Appz.

As the Great Facebook Debate over the past few months has made clear, in 2013, reaching your fans and followers at scale will require paid promotion.

Meanwhile, the thrill of counting likes, comments, and retweets has faded, and businesses want to see a real return on their investment. Marketers everywhere are asking how much they should continue to invest in building out and engaging with their social audiences.

Here’s the deal: You can’t invest to maintain your social reach unless you are netting a positive return that delivers meaningful business value to your company.

Social media is rapidly evolving into a data-centric and performance-driven marketing discipline. While it will always revolve around compelling content, when you are paying for impressions, you will be called to defend your budget.

As a marketer, your challenge now is to:

• Figure out what you are getting in return for your investment in social today. Define your social KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) so that you can benchmark your performance and measure it over time.
• Ask how many people in your social audience “convert” — however you just defined that for your particular business — and then determine the value of those conversions now and over time.
• For everyone else in your social audience, find ways to extract meaningful and lasting business value from their connection to your social profiles.

The key to success on all three of these fronts is to collect relevant, actionable data about your fans and then use it to inform your ad buys, optimize your social profiles, and, ultimately improve the targeting, personalization, and performance of all of your marketing efforts.

So stop panicking about this or that reach algorithm, and start taking control of your brand’s social destiny. Here are the three essential steps.

Step 1: Get a data ROI

Wherever you go to connect with prospects and customers, and whatever you do there, collect the data. If you are engaging in social and failing to either convert or capture data, you are wasting time and money.

Gather actionable, relevant data about each fan, along with permission to use it, according to the terms of service of each social network.

• Ask for contact information (such as email addresses), along with permission to use it through your own channels wherever possible.
• Gather behavioral data based on the actions people take, and ask for direct data inputs, such as fans’ ranked favorites across relevant product or service categories.
• Use social authentications to get permission to access fans’ interests, demographics, follows, and likes.

Step 2: Analyze with intent to personalize

Organize your social data such that it is easy to analyze for insights and filter into targeted segments. Integrate it with your customer and transactional data when possible, for greater context on how to personalize your approach to each fan, be they a new prospect or existing customer.

Why? Because people like to be treated as individuals. Personalization works:

• According to Econsultancy, 6 percent of marketers are already using social graph data for website personalization, and 88 percent of those say it has a high impact on both ROI and engagement.
• McKinsey partner Josh Leibowitz says research shows that personalization in retail can deliver five to eight times the ROI on marketing spend and lift sales 10 percent or more.
• Meanwhile, nearly two-thirds of online shoppers say they would trade increased privacy for more personalized offers from retailers, according to Accenture.

Step 3: Put the data to work

Use your social data insights to improve the targeting, personalization, and performance of all of your marketing and communications efforts. Specifically, use this robust, personal, and relevant data set to:

• Target your social ad campaigns to individuals for greater click-through and conversion.
• Personalize your emails with relevant content and offers that drive open rates and sales.
• Tailor your website with personalized offers and promotions that increase average order value.
• Use aggregate data, such as favorite features, colors, etc., to inform offline and in-store creative.
• Mine likes and follows (brand preferences) to identify new partners, sponsors, and advertisers.

For example, one of our retail clients used our platform to ask mothers on Facebook and Twitter to rank which items they most wanted for Mother’s Day. Our client then used that data to create a multi-channel marketing campaign across its social, email, and print catalog efforts, as well as online advertising, website, and in-store promotions.

The campaign drove a significant increase in sales of the items the moms picked for that season.

You can get great results and build lasting value for your business if you start asking the right kinds of questions and then really listening to — and remembering — what your fans are sharing on social channels.

A veteran of the CRM Software industry, Jon Siegal launched Fan Appz as a second-generation social media marketing solution to help brands leverage engagement for social data capture. You can follow him on Twitter: @jonsiegal.

Social media concept vector via venimo/Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

This is a guest post by Joe Andrews, director of product marketing at VMware.

Gartner predicts worldwide IT spending in 2013 will top $3.7 trillion. Coupled with IDC’s prediction that there will be over $25 billion in acquisitions as cloud services become the centerpiece of more and more vendor’s offerings, you can see that enterprise IT customers will have many more choices in front of them when it comes to acquiring technology and services in 2013.

A 2012 Enterprise Strategy Group study of 243 IT and business professionals further solidifies this trend towards the cloud. The study found that 80 percent of companies are beginning to feel more comfortable with the public cloud as they move beyond the test and development phase of their public cloud deployments and on to production workloads.

So as the new year approaches and IT dollars start getting allocated, what criteria do you need met and what questions do you need to ask a potential service provider if you are evaluating a public cloud?

Through interviews with enterprise IT customers, as well as service providers, we have identified the top areas and questions businesses should ask when considering a move to the cloud:

1. Performance and availability service level agreement: What level of guaranteed uptime and recovery targets does the service provider offer for your applications? Will the service enable you to reserve compute resources and allow you to easily add them on demand?

2. Data security and compliance : Where is your data actually being stored? Is it encrypted? Who has access? Can you get audit controls for regulatory compliance like ISO 27001, SSAE 16, and SOC 2?

3. Hybrid cloud management and application portability: Does the service allow you to bring your existing virtual machines into the service? Is it compatible with your existing on-premise infrastructure? Can you easily get your virtual machines out if you need to? Does the service offer a single pane of glass to manage workloads between private and public cloud environments?

4. Support policy: What will the response time be for any issues should your instance go down or be impacted in some way? What is the escalation path in such situations? Do you have a dedicated support contact?

5. Type of service payment models: Is the service pay-as-you-go to start? Does it offer resource pools to get more capacity at a predictable price point and dedicated instances should your application require physical isolation?

While this process can be daunting, you must consider and weigh the importance of these criteria and evaluate how each service provider meets them. Companies can reap huge business benefits by adopting a private, public, or hybrid cloud computing strategy, including cost savings, disaster recovery, improved operational efficiency, and more.

So before you move your company’s mission-critical workloads to the cloud, make sure your potential service provider passes the test.

Joe Andrews is director of product marketing at VMware and is responsible for marketing VMware’s cloud solutions. He has 20 years of experience in technology marketing, sales, and IT business operations. Previously at VMware, he led virtualization marketing initiatives targeting the Small and Medium Business (SMB) segment. Prior to VMware, he worked at Intuit and iMarket, a software division of Dun and Bradstreet, in various product, channel, and field marketing roles as well as IT business consulting.

Top photo via Karsun Designs/Flickr

While it may seem like a great idea, focusing all your attention to build a presence on a single social network could actually be a huge risk. Regardless of how it happens, a social network has the power to delete your account with no warning or explanation, thus erasing all hard work and attention you’ve put in over the years. It may not happen often, but it does happen. And if it does, you’ll wonder why you didn’t spread your presence more evenly across the social web.

In August, 2008, I was eagerly attempting to log in to Twitter to catch up with my friends. It was still early days, and the excitement of connecting on the growing “micro-blogging” site was contagious. I had regular interactions with hundreds of people. Suddenly, the unthinkable happened.

My account was suspended. There was no explanation why Twitter decided to lock my account, and there was little I could do about it. For the record, I did not break any written (or unwritten) rules.

It was simply an error.

It was shocking to consider that for many people I conversed with, Twitter was my only way to contact them. I didn’t have their phone numbers or email addresses. There was no backup of my Twitter followers. It was as if someone stole your address book.

Today I reflect on the experience, which ended up lasting for an entire weekend. When I work with clients on social media strategies, I emphasize the importance of your email list. Email is more important than any social network, because you own your list.

I will give credit where credit is due, and throw two thumbs up in LinkedIn’s direction. If you scroll beneath your connections, you will discover that you can export the list. That’s right, you can back it up. Go do it now.

I am not suggesting that social networking sites are to be ignored. Anyone who knows me knows that I am the last person to write this. However, you must always consider why you should not put all of your eggs in one basket. What if the basket breaks?

Remember that the services we use and depend on so much are usually free. I cringe when I hear so-called social media experts recommend that businesses turn from their blogs and sites to depend solely on their Facebook pages. It’s nuts!

Don’t spread yourself thin online, but always try to find a way to keep connected to your friends, clients and customers, just in case that basket’s bottom drops out.

How are you making sure you keep connected?

Broken eggs photo via sashas/Shutterstock

Dave Delaney is President of Delaney Digital Marketing Consulting in Nashville, TN. He writes frequently about new and traditional methods of business networking at New Networking on his blog. Dave is also the founder of Geek Breakfast, a multi-city tech meetup where locals congregate over bacon, eggs, and plenty of coffee once a month to discuss topics like social media, digital marketing, design, programming, and ways to better their communities.

This guest post is written by Mitchell Reichgut, CEO of opt-in video platform Jun Group.

In the 2013 online video advertising marketplace, companies will need to adapt to an increasingly educated and empowered consumer. A multi-screen, app-heavy Internet means even less tolerance for interruptions, and users will demand more freedom to consume videos online without ads. Next year, advertisers that respect and adapt to their consumers’ needs will be the most successful. This is a drastic change on many levels.

Below are five key predictions about what this new dynamic will mean for the online advertising industry over the next twelve months.

1. The rise of business over buzz

Many advertisers have experimented with social media for a few years now, and they have reached a point where they expect more tangible results. Earlier this year, we released a report, that demonstrated advertisers’ inclination to drive traffic toward their own sites, rather than Facebook. The shift from “generating buzz” through social media to generating ROI will increase in 2013, as brands grow more sophisticated in their use of online video ads. Consumers will also take the direct route to a brand’s website to learn more about the company, find a store, download a coupon or make a purchase.

2. Bigger is better: Long-form ad content will increase

Despite conventional wisdom in the advertising industry that shorter is better, the numbers tell a different story. Recent evidence shows that better ad targeting and more diverse ad formats make it possible for advertisers to successfully move beyond simple :15 and :30 second pre-roll spots. As advertisers grow more comfortable with rewards-based, opt-in formats, we think you’ll see a significant increase in long-form ads in 2013.

3. The debate over native advertising will intensify

So called “native” video ads, which are made to look like editorial or entertainment content, have been a hot topic of conversation this year. After an initial frenzy in the online advertising industry, we’ve seen some backlash among consumers. A recent survey, for example, showed that 86% of viewers found these ads misleading. Moreover, 85% found the units either negatively impacted or had no influence on their perception of the brand. As online video advertisers gain more experience, their perception about what makes an effective campaign will change. I predict that display-oriented placements will give way to units that deliver better engagement and post-view performance. Not everyone sees it this way, of course, so look for the controversy to continue into next year.

4. Pre-roll ads won’t cut it for mobile

Last year, pre-roll advertising maintained its long-standing position as the unit of choice for online video ads. In the coming year, however, this trend may begin to reverse itself in the emerging mobile marketplace. In the mobile environment, users are less tolerant of interruptions that use precious bandwidth and take time to load. Ads that allow consumers to opt in provide publishers with a more respectful and often more lucrative way to monetize their traffic. For these reasons, I foresee pre-roll’s influence declining in the mobile space, while rewards-based, opt-in ad formats take off.

5. Advertisers will get savvier in targeting non-English speakers

Last year, the Hispanic population became the largest minority group in the United States – and the mainstream media is beginning to take notice. CNN recently announced plans to woo bilingual speakers — and ad dollars — with a Spanish-language lifestyle block tailored to broadcast stations. As video advertisers across multiple platforms increase their ability to target a more relevant audience, Spanish language speakers – and other minority groups – will become a key focus.

The coming year is primed to see a number of changes in the online video marketplace, including an evolution of how individuals view content, the ways in which advertisers reach their audiences, and how those audiences react.

As video advertising continues to evolve from a nice-to-have to a must-have, marketers are experimenting with new tools and strategies, and they are demanding more accountability. The end result is positive in that it challenges the players in this space to innovate and evolve.

Crystal ball photo via Simone van den Berg/Shutterstock

Mitchell Reichgut has worked in the advertising industry for two decades on both the creative and agency sides of advertising. Prior to founding opt-in video platform Jun Group, he headed up the interactive division of Bates Worldwide Advertising. Earlier, as Creative Director of the New York office of Think New Ideas, he supervised Web development for clients such as Budweiser, Chrysler, Sony, and Continental Airlines.

Over the last several weeks, reviewers, analysts and reporters seem to have forgotten the very raison d’être for being in the technology industry in the first place – “to go boldly where no man has gone before.” This is especially true when it comes to Windows 8′s user interface.

Certainly, the Windows 8 UI is a very distinctive departure from the previous versions. However, Microsoft was very clear about why it undertook such an initiative. The company wanted to bring the world of mobile, touch and traditional clients closer together. And this new “modern UI,” as I understand is the proper nomenclature for the new interface, achieves Microsoft’s goal very well.

First of all, Windows 8 finally legitimizes the poor Windows key that has sat mostly in the proverbial wilderness of the 104 keys on a keyboard for over 17 years. It operates much in the same aspect as the Windows key on a Windows 8 Phone, the home key on an Android-based phone or tablet, and the home key on an iPhone or iPad. This is smart!

While I must admit that the left-to-right scrolling of the Start screen takes a little getting used to, it’s not exactly taxing my cerebral capabilities. That said, the outcry from critics over the loss of the Start button is a mere distraction. Essentially, the Start screen is the first true progression in the Windows user interface since 1985, when the original Microsoft Windows was first introduced.

And if the absent Start button is the only thing critics can gripe about, then frankly, Microsoft has done a magnificent job. For those die-hard needy users who won’t use their computers without a Start button, there are solutions. Microsoft has generously promoted a cottage industry and micro economy for Start button replacement applications to be developed.

I encourage everyone to try the new interface for a couple of days, and then go back to Windows 7 or XP (or Vista – ugh!) for a couple of days before writing off Windows 8 — which is what I did. And although I have been accused (and probably rightly so) of being a power user, the way I utilize my computer is not much different than most other people. My primary applications are the Microsoft Office applications (namely Word and Excel), web browsers, email clients, instant messaging clients, and Evernote.

For me, Windows 8 has a very careful balance between those of us who prefer the use of a keyboard rather than a mouse, as well as those who are progressing toward using tablets and touchscreens more often. I found the upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 8 completely seamless. Some of the personalization applications that I have installed to make my life easier have no issues running in Windows 8. All my peripherals such as webcams, printers, etc. all work without modification or fuss.

Do I question some of the UI decisions Microsoft made? Yes! However, it is a case of getting used to the new interface. I like the Windows Store concept Windows 8 employs, which aligns very closely to the way I use my tablet and smartphone.

In fact, as a result of Windows 8, I have been able to uninstall several applications because the functions are now native to Windows 8. These included my full disk encryption application as Windows 8 Pro comes with BitLocker — a program that I encourage everyone to use.

I have barely scratched the surface of Windows 8, and there are many more things to get used to. But this is absolutely no different than getting a new laptop and adjusting to the new configuration of the Home/End, PgUp/PgDn, Insert/Delete keys. It is no different to adjusting between a touchpad, a pencil eraser top-style mouse on a laptop, or a new shape of a mouse.

Once more, to all the reviewers, analysts, and reporters out there, this is a call to action for you to help users evolve and progress. I want to understand how to take advantage of Windows 8, not read multiple pages of rhetoric of why Microsoft ruined your life because you can’t find the Windows button on keyboard.

Hulk artwork via el-grimlock/deviantart

Benjamin Woo is the founder and Managing Director of Neuralytix, Inc. He frequently speaks at industry and customer events worldwide and is often quoted by leading business and technology press. Prior to founding Neuralytix, he was the Program Vice President of IDC’s Worldwide Storage Systems Research, where he led a team of analysts responsible for advising clients on the evolution and trends related to data storage system.

What does “live” mean when we talk about content on the Web? We think of most Web content in terms of on-demand rather than live, but that is really more of a false holdover from how we consider our traditional media consumption. If we shift our perspective, we can see in the Live Web one of the most substantial opportunities for content publishers and consumers since the initial rise of mobile.

Traditional TV and radio are “live” because when you turn on the device, you instantly receive a video and an audio stream, respectively.  The Live Web is similar, except that it is composed of any content or experience that has first been made available to the user at a singular point in time.  To narrow it in more practical terms, I define the Live Web as consisting of content that goes through three stages – being upcoming, then live and finally on-demand (or off the Web such as sales or live stream only events on ESPN3.com).

While the most visible components of the Live Web are live streamed video events, such as an MMA fight on Ustream.tv, the live simulcast on Bloomberg or the presidential debates on multiple sites, the Live Web is also an auction on eBay, an audio session on ESPN Live, and a chat session with editors of Travel and Leisure on Facebook.  Much like TV, wherein a lot of the content is actually pre-recorded content that is made available at a certain point of time, the Live Web also has content such as the articles on this site or an on-demand video on Hulu that was pre-prepared and then goes live on the Web at some point – they are all part of the Live Web.

The big difference from traditional television is that a lot of the Live Web isn’t scheduled or, if scheduled, hasn’t formally instituted a schedule.  So, the Live Web is all around us.  We just usually aren’t aware of it because it hasn’t been surfaced for us – we don’t know what we don’t know we’re missing.

The Live Web is the new ‘TV’

The Live Web represents the next frontier of content and technology convergence – the Live Web is the new TV (and by TV I mean traditional broadcast consumed via a unifunctional TV screen).

We are moving from a world where the classic definition of TV being a static device with access controlled by a set top box (STB)/antenna is changing to a digital environment of connected screens where the users can determine what content is displayed on the screen.  It’s a shift from passive to active media consumption.

Is the Live Web bigger than TV?  Absolutely.  First off, the continued progression of TV Everywhere, whereby authenticated subscribers to cable or satellite services have access to their cable video content on most connected devices, is going to result in TV becoming a virtual subset of the Live Web.  This will happen within the next two years.

Now add to that all of the content outside of the traditional broadcast providers –  such as Felix Baumgartner’s record breaking skydive on Oct 14, which at 8 million concurrent live streams on YouTube represents a massive live audience, and with very little advance promotion.  Classic TV programmers would kill for that type of audience in the current broadcast environment.  Finally, add in all the non-video content examples from above and you see that there are millions of daily events on the Live Web.

Visible progress of the Live Web can be seen in the YouTube Live initiative whereby they set aside $100 million for original content creation.  It’s the first step to seed what could ultimately be a new online programming wheel with YouTube as the distribution platform.

The current cable/satellite infrastructure is limited in the number of channels it can accommodate and you have terms such as “rollouts” and “carriage agreements” to get to increasing levels of household penetration.  There are about 100 million US households and even 100% penetration of them does not mean you get 100% of the household’s time. Compare that to YouTube users who can access YouTube content 100% of the time via their cell phones, tablets, computers and connected TVs due to the ubiquity of connectivity today and the lack of geoblocking or windowing on most of its content.

Maker Studios and Machinima have hundreds of “channels” – they couldn’t do that on the traditional cable platform.  Hence, it’s clear to see the Live Web will eventually accommodate thousands of channels as a subset of these YouTube channels adopt a linear format for a segment of their content (more on why they will do that later in this post).  As John Chambers of Cisco said, “there will be one million TV stations in the U.S.” because the Internet-connected mobile devices enable easier video production and consumption.

Sites ranging from Facebook to Huffington Post are making “Live” a standout item across their main navigation. Likewise, CNN Live and ESPN3 are examples of leading mainstream Web and traditional platforms making significant forays into the Live Web.  Ustream has more video streamed per minute than YouTube has uploaded per minute.  eBay has millions of ongoing auctions at any point in time, while we have seen the growth of scheduled sale sites like Gilt Group and Vente Prive.

Back in 2000, Gemstar-TV Guide bought SkyMall because it saw an opportunity in emerging T-commerce as a result of its position on digital TV with the Interactive Programming Guide (IPG).  Fast forward to today and you can see how T-commerce will play out on screens – except that it should be called C-Commerce for connected screen commerce.

It’s the natural outcome of exposing contextually relevant options while the user is consuming content – in this case on a connected screen.  It’s all a part of the Live Web.  Whereas TV and radio are for the most part stand alone platforms, the Live Web provides the true choice to the digital consumer – what they want, when they want it and how (where?) they want it.

Why does time matter on the web?

The Web can be, and is, both on-demand and live/real-time. Asynchronous content consumption by consumers is the current norm. And in the foreseeable future that will be continue to be the case.  However, all content isn’t created equal and there is a segment of content that lends itself especially to live consumption.

Certain content can only be consumed live, such as an auction or sale – once it’s over, it’s over – or content that is time or quantity limited (e.g. a live streamed concert that is not available on demand and for which only a certain number of “tickets” are sold).  You have to be there live.  There is other content for which the consumption experience is degraded ipso facto, much like a bottle of red wine once opened.  Sports and, to a lesser extent, news are the two classic content categories that are hard to time shift.

The recent outcries over the Summer Olympics in London are a prime (time) example of the problems and possibilities opened by the Live Web.  Though the events in London were taking place throughout the day, prime time schedules here in the U.S. dictated when they would shown on television and, to a large extent, their “official” access to viewers on the Web.

For those of us even marginally connected online during the day, however, preserving the suspense and drama of waiting to watch the events on television became an Olympic feat in its own right.  Medals were celebrated on news sites, controversies debated on social networks and memes arose and disappeared all before the actual events had made it to their prime-time airing.

When the content doesn’t automatically speak to Live, Web publishers would do well to take a chapter from the producers of American Idol or The Voice and convert passive consumption to active engagement. American Idol created faux interactivity on a one-way medium to create a live ratings juggernaut.  The live experience is significantly enhanced when there is any measure of interactivity and that is a key advantage of the two-way capability of the Web to traditional unidirectional content broadcasting. We have seen what it can do for entertainment; imagine the use cases in education, medicine, and commerce.

The other significant macro factor that has amplified the importance of time on the Web is the ubiquity of connectivity. According to an October Pew study, 50 percent of U.S. adults now have a smartphone or tablet, and tablet ownership alone has doubled since last year to 22 percent.  Global estimates put smartphone penetration at 10 to 15% and growing, while news consumption is growing as 43% of the users reported increased overall consumption.

In other words, the user is no longer tethered to a TV or PC to consume content, and likewise, content is all around us.  I, the user, can finally consume content when I want to (the where is irrelevant and the what is simple – everything).  It’s my choice, and I want the option to consume live if I want to.  Which means that publishers need to provide us with the options so we can determine if we want to time shift any content.

Finally, the “digital watercooler” makes almost all content a now experience.  You can’t wait until tomorrow for the spoiler alert in the office.  Pausing the live stream of the Presidential debates meant having to forgo reading Bill Maher’s tweets or the rest of the Twitter #debate comments in order to avoid spoiling the live experience, and precluded actively participating in the then current conversation.  Being one minute behind prevents one from getting the most out of the two or three screen experience.

For significant live events, the two-screen consumption experience (TV and tablet or smartphone) is becoming more commonplace, creating a digital watercooler of immediate response and reactions so that events such as the landing of the Mars rover, Curiosity, take on a new urgency and excitement online — could Bobak Ferdowsi’s mohawk have made him such a sensation without that live and instantaneous reaction?!

Why the main participants should care

All of these elements of the Live Web have significantly impacted the way we think about content as consumers, yet publishers of online content are frequently still struggling with these notions.

The ubiquity of connectivity now means that publishers and producers have not only a much larger potential audience around the globe, but as importantly, have a much larger addressable time with those audiences. While we often get distracted by the number of potential users that the Web opens for content, time is the truly revolutionary shift that the Live Web precipitates.

Advertisers will pay a higher CPM for an audience delivered at a certain point in time. It’s why the networks fight so hard for shows like American Idol and why they get such a premium.  Controlling messaging by time can be even more important for the Web because you can actually “day part” a user.  A particular user is more likely to purchase content at a certain point of time just as they are more likely to consume video during lunch time or at the end of the work day.

When I was at TV Guide, we would see major spikes in traffic on TVguide.com before and around 5pm EST and PST as people checked the TV listings online to determine what was going to be on TV later that night before they left work.  Similarly, the scrolling guide on the TV Guide Channel would see spikes in traffic a few minutes before the top and bottom of the hour as people clicked over to it to see what was going to be available for the next thirty-minute slot or at the end of an hour long show. That’s why it was so important to reach viewers at the point of decision making during that time slot, and what gave rise to in-grid advertising on the IPG.

Similarly, if you can provide an audience to an advertiser at a certain point in time when they may be more likely to undertake a desired action, the advertiser will pay a premium.  Just as all content and audiences aren’t created equal, neither are audiences at certain points in time.

Online publishers are still largely locked into conceptions of Web content within the context of on-demand, and thus are missing the opportunities that lie in recognizing content’s preceding facets.

In an age where established online content publishers and producers are struggling to build viable businesses and generate the kind of residual value of content that television forged, the opportunities that arise from the Live Web, from understanding the importance of time, really can’t be ignored.

Understanding the Live Web would allows publishers to create digital prime time for their content, create an outlet for content that can’t find a place in their traditional programming wheel, and create a direct and recurring connection with their users instead of leaving the discovery of their content to search.

And that’s valuable to us as consumers as well. When our options for discovering great new content are left to proactively finding what we already know about, or limited to the top links of an online search, we don’t know what we’re missing.

TV image via B-A-C-O/Shutterstock

Sanjay Reddy is CEO of OVGuide. Previously, he was CEO and Co-Founder of Live Matrix and served as head of business development, strategy and M&A for Gemstar-TV Guide International. Sanjay is a digital media expert who has advised a range of new media companies including MyDamnChannel; Pixsy; BuddyTV and TVersity; and has served as a member of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences’ Interactive Media Peer Group’s executive committee.

Online education is hot these days. A perfect storm of record-level student debt, stagnating job growth, and soaring tuition prices has forced a knee-jerk reaction among universities now scrambling to offer free courses online, either through their own platforms or partnerships with startups like Coursera and Udacity. Professors, college administrators, and policymakers have expressed sharply divided views over what this shift means for an institutional learning model that has persisted for hundreds of years. But amidst the debate, lost is the voice of the student.

After all, why should anyone care what we think? Teaching is a profession that society accepts as inherently paternalistic. Conventional wisdom says the student must be told how and what to study. Schools dictate degree requirements and mandate class attendance. But the increasing number of unemployed college graduates shows that these traditional approaches must evolve because they are failing to adequately equip students with the skills they need to be successful. The great promise of online education is that it facilitates the transition to a model that gives students greater input into how they learn and challenges instructors to reflect on what students really need. Here are three reasons why universities must adopt online education to remain relevant:

Limited access to on-campus classes

Much discussion around the benefits of online education has centered on enabling access for students who would otherwise be unable to afford or attend college. But a parallel problem exists today: students currently enrolled at colleges can’t get into classes that they need or want to take. Budget cuts at schools have resulted in fewer instructors and oversubscribed classes, causing students to fall short of fulfilling academic requirements and delaying their graduation dates. Lotteries for classes are common, leaving students literally begging administrators to open more spots. The problem extends to elite universities as well. The implicit promise made to prospective students that they will get to learn from marquee professors often goes unfulfilled. Frustration over paying more than $50,000 per year to attend a school without access to the best classes is today mostly confined to students venting amongst themselves. But if costs continue to rise, there will come a day where students, and their parents, say enough is enough. Online platforms are a low-cost way for universities to support, rather than hinder, students’ learning in light of the resource constraints that schools face.

Lack of customized programs

The traditional classroom model also largely ignores the fact that students learn at different speeds. Students who are already familiar with some of the course material are unable to skip ahead, resulting in wasteful repetition. Students who do not grasp concepts taught during class are left to figure them out through a combination of office hours and peer support, often struggling to recall, “What did the professor say about X?” Online classes mean that students can learn at the pace that’s right for them, which translates into better learning overall.

Restricted innovation in course content

Moving classes online also means that content and teaching materials can be distributed on a recurring basis at very low cost, freeing up instructors’ time to further develop new content. Today a professor may spend a few years developing a body of course materials that eventually gets “recycled” in a particular course, year in and year out, for the next decade without much further modification. This model of repetitive teaching is highly inefficient. It consumes time that could be better spent developing new content or engaging with students in a manner that supplements lectures that only need to be recorded once, not recreated in a classroom every year. Online education will drive new, hybrid learning methods and push teachers to create innovative content instead of rehashing what they have already done before.

The value of emerging online platforms today lies in their ability to distribute content to anyone who wants to learn. Of course the value of the traditional university model goes far beyond access to content. Equally, or perhaps even more, important is who we learn with, especially when surrounded by a peer group that is smarter, diverse, and collaborative. It is this community aspect that online platforms will find difficult to replicate, but we should not underestimate their ability to figure it out. The Internet is social by nature and will inevitably invent new ways to implement collaborative learning. Universities must respond to the needs of their students by moving online or risk turning their backs on the very sort of innovative ideas that they are meant to foster.

Online Education image via mtkang/Shutterstock

This guest post was written by Wei Lien Dang, currently a JD/MBA student at Harvard University. He previously attended the California Institute of Technology, Imperial College London, and University of Cambridge, where he was a Marshall Scholar.

[Disclosure: VentureBeat has a contract with Erin Ryan via Hasai for social media work.]

Many businesses are looking below their shared articles and wondering why their “reach” (now called “people who saw this”) is so low on their Facebook page when a decent number of people have “liked” their page.

First and foremost, if you’re using any kind of tool to inflate the number of “likes” you get on Facebook, you should reconsider. Social signals — the actions taken on various social sites — are becoming more relevant in search. So social networking activities need to be natural, even if that means your numbers decrease.

With that said, let’s take a look at what “people who saw this” means under a post on Facebook. You can easily see yours by hovering over it with your mouse. I’ll tell you why you should increase it and how.

What does “People who saw this” post mean?

Facebook determines the popularity of a post on your Facebook page in two ways:

1. Organic – The number of people who saw your post on your newsfeed, in their ticker, or on the wall of your Facebook Page.

2. Viral – The number of people who saw your Page’s story from a friend, in other words creating an action such as a “like”, comment, or share.

Facebook calculates the popularity of each post using a variety of factors. In this case, “natural posts” tend to have a higher reach.

What is a Natural Facebook Post?
A natural Facebook post is defined as doing anything via Facebook without the use of outside tools or services that don’t require you to interact with Facebook directly. Tools also generally allow you to spend less time on Facebook, and they are  a contributing factor for why your reach (aka “people who saw this”) is lower.

Example: Let’s say you have a page that has a little over 400 organic “likes,” but only 19 people saw the post. That may leave you scratching your head.

If you look over the details of this particular post, you’ll see that a tool was used. In this example, the tool used is “Buffer,” an app that lets you schedule posts to go out on various social networks (kind of like Hootsuite). It’s handy, but how useful is it if it’s decreasing the number of people who actually see those scheduled posts?

Upon further investigation, you may notice that the number of “people who saw this” is different when comparing posts that were made using tools and posts that you shared manually to Facebook. The posts that were manually added to Facebook have a higher number of “people who saw this.”

How to gain more exposure on a Facebook Page in 4 easy steps
If you want to increase the reach of your Facebook posts, you need to use Facebook naturally. That means reducing the usage of tools that manage your Facebook page.  Additionally, you’ll have to start spending more time on Facebook manually posting things.

Here are four easy ways you can increase your chances of being seen more on Facebook.

1. Ask a question using Facebook’s question feature
2. Upload a photo
3. Upload a video directly to Facebook
4. Prior to sharing a link, upload the associated photo first and then add the link along with the title (make sure the chosen photo is “likeable” or “catchy”).

Like everything on the Internet, Facebook uses an algorithm to place updates within your news feed, which is based on what you “like”, who you “like,” your interests, and how you share. This placement process is called EdgeRank, and it will determine how many people will see your activity on Facebook.

So to recap, If you want better exposure of your activity on Facebook, you need to spend more time manually posting on Facebook. Literally, just use Facebook more!

Share Button with Internet Hand image via Crystal Eye Studio/Shutterstock

Erin Ryan is a Social Media Promotional Director for the Social Media Firm Hasai Inc. Erin is an avid writer for various Social Media and Tech Blogs and is Editor of the Social Media Guide, Socialeyezer.

Did you know a cup of coffee can get you a job or a new client? It’s true.

When I was a student in Toronto, I worked diligently at networking so that I could jumpstart my career in marketing. I would look on websites and read marketing trade publications to try to determine who I needed to speak with. I would then cold call the companies and ask to speak with the person who I hoped would hire me. It wasn’t easy, but I was persistent. Today it is easier.

In Toronto, I met a great person who offered me an un-paid internship, which I couldn’t afford to take. Years later at a different company and in a more senior position, he reached out again and hired me.

10 Steps to Using a Coffee to Get a Job

1. Research the companies you want to work for in your city. Then visit their LinkedIn page or site to determine who the person is you need to meet. For me, it was CMOs and Presidents of companies, but it depends on what type of position you are looking for. Be sure to check their social profiles, so you can learn more about the individual.
2. Rehearse your honest story. Who are you? Why are you calling? Perhaps you are a student interested in the industry, or maybe you are new to the city. Regardless, you are calling to schedule an in-person, casual chat.  You are not asking for a job. You want to learn more about the industry.
3. Call the company, and ask to speak with the person. Chances are likely that you will end up speaking with his or her assistant (or a receptionist). Be nice. They are the ones who will decide whether to connect you or not. The assistant’s job is to vet the calls, so be courteous and polite.
4. Don’t be too persistent, but do your best to follow up if you haven’t heard back. Also know when to give up if the person won’t give you the time. They aren’t worth working for anyway.
5. Set up the meeting. Promise two things about the meeting: 1. You won’t take more than 15 minutes of their time. 2. You will bring them a coffee.
6. The meeting: Bring them the coffee, and don’t forget the creamers and sugar. They will remember you, because you actually brought them the coffee. Have questions prepared about the industry you are interested in. Ask them questions about how they got started at their company, where they are from, etc. You will discover that 15 minutes can easily become an hour. People like to talk about themselves, it’s human nature. Listen carefully.
7. Thank them for their time. Be sure to thank the assistant if he or she is nearby as you leave.
8. Send a Thank You email (a card works well too). In the email, ask them who else they recommend you speak with in the industry. They will likely offer to introduce you. You can also politely ask them to let you know of any open positions please.
9. Send them a request to connect on LinkedIn. Don’t send them the generic invite. Write something original.
10. Follow up. Once you land on your feet with a new job, be sure to write them to let them know. Don’t forget to thank them again for their time and assistance.

Bonus: A little later down the road, invite the person for a coffee, or offer to bring them one again. Nobody will keep the same job they have today for their entire career, so keep connected to your network as you grow it.

Coffee photo via Ohmega1982 /Shutterstock

Dave Delaney is President of Delaney Digital Marketing Consulting in Nashville, TN. He writes frequently about new and traditional methods of business networking at New Networking on his blog. Dave is also the founder of Geek Breakfast, a multi-city tech meetup where locals congregate over bacon, eggs, and plenty of coffee once a month to discuss topics like social media, digital marketing, design, programming, and ways to better their communities.