Is Mobile the Trojan Horse of Social-Email Integration?
There has been plenty of discourse on “mobile-email” and “social-email” integration, but are marketers taking full advantage of the opportunity to tightly integrate all three? As our infographic from March 2013 revealed, as many as 69% of B2C enterprise email marketing campaigns are viewed on smartphones or tablets, with desktop ...
Google+ Meets Voxy - The Next Step to Integrating Language Learning into Daily Life
Voxy is pleased to announce that it is bringing Google+ to its millions of language learners worldwide to provide them with a seamless experience as they learn from content that is relevant to their interests and goals. Our learners will now have the ability to sign-in, interact, and take One-on-One Live Tutoring Sessions powered by Google+ and Google+ Hangouts.
Ryan's Dating Secrets Revealed: HowAboutWe Couples
After a while, I started hearing rumblings of a HowAboutWe for Couples, a sort of subscription date service. I’ll admit, at first I was skeptical. One, I just didn’t think I needed help coming up with fun dates, and two, I foresaw looking cheap during the dreaded coupon exchange...
Preparing a Pitch to POTUS
Every entrepreneur experiences highs and lows as we work to launch and grow our companies. Last week was one of the highest highs.
President Obama kick-started a series of quick “job and opportunity” tours showcasing what works in places like Austin, Texas. His message: if Congress primed the pump, the good stuff like the creation of quality tech and manufacturing jobs happening in Austin could trickle up to the rest of America.
Ditch your keychain for the Kwikset Kēvo – turns your smarphone into an electronic key!
Bringing cutting edge technology to the residential lock market has been a part of UniKey’s vision from the beginning. I’ve enjoyed this journey of responding to the needs of homeowners. We knew right away that we wanted to be different than other deadbolt locks that require keys....
Splice data scientist DNA into your existing team
I recently spoke with renowned data scientist DJ Patil, who pointed out that a “data scientist” is “one part hacker, one part analyst, and a whole lot of curiosity.” To turn a business analyst into a data scientist, the trick is to connect with their natural curiosity to motivate them to hone hacking skills:
Tip 1:Ask if they want to learn how to hack. If not, then pair them with a hacker.
Search is Changing: Bing’s Klout Experts Program
I have to say: I am thoroughly excited that Search just became interesting again.
American Airlines’ Admirals Club Welcomes Klout Users in Nearly 40 Locations
We think we’ve found another way to top ourselves…
Startups and Domain Names: Three Factors to Consider
A good domain name can catch attention, biasing people to prefer your company over competitors, and making it easy to reach the website if and when they decide to use it. A bad domain name can sink you. Like a storefront and location in the offline world, your domain name is the very first vehicle by which potential investors/customers/employees evaluate your company before they even engage.
4 Unconventional Recruiting Tools That Every Startup Can Use
There’s a war for young talent raging among America’s startups right now. All the best companies have booths at college job fairs, and help-wanted postings are sprouting like daisies on career websites. What this means is easy: if a startup wants to attract “A-list” candidates, it’s going to need the best recruiting tools around. The problem, of course, is that every other small business in America is using them too.
Playdek Is Serious About Play
Founding a new video game publisher is a daunting task. Every day the video game industry gathers momentum in its headlong dash to the “social mobile” space and the old guard of what we knew as the video game business are being left behind. Or they are disappearing altogether. At Playdek we have noticed and we’ve taken the trend very seriously...
Don’t Look Now, Your Costs are Showing: Cost of Goods Sold in SaaS Companies
Accounting. Accruals. GAAP. These words are probably not the first things that pop up in the mind of a startup founder as he or she assembles a team, develops a product, acquires customers and runs a business. As CPAs, though, we believe that these and other related issues a should be treated as critically as any other business decision.
Co-working spaces for companies, not consultants
We started Centzy in June 2011 with two people. Centzy is now six people and will be at eight in May. Between joining an incubator, traveling, being displaced by Hurricane Sandy, and general moving around as we grow, we've now worked out of over a dozen different co-working spaces over the last two years. We are currently based in WeWork Labs in West Soho and love it here.
Pros and Cons of Performance Pay for Journalists
Gawker’s Big Board, which hangs prominently in the Gawker’s headquarters tracking the top performing stories, has long been lauded as a key to the success of Nick Denton’s publishing empire. Even old school publishers like Forbes have embraced performance pay... So does performance pay make sense for brand publishing? Let’s examine some of the pros and cons.
New Director of Communications at ff VC
Last week, I joined ff Venture Capital in a newly-created role as Director of Communications. I will be handling the public relations and communications strategy in-house for ff and will be working closely over time with our 60+ portfolio companies.
Intern at a breakout startup this summer--or a VC firm!
Do you hack fast and break stuff? Do you eat, sleep, and breathe startups? If so, we would love to speak to you.
Deep Linking in Email Marketing: How it Works, and Why it Rocks!
The beauty of deep linking is that it eliminates extra clicks, brings content closer to consumers, and enables people to more easily take the actions they intend on taking. This eliminates friction from the process of taking action (for example, launching and using a mobile app), resulting in more people actually taking the action that you’d like them to.
ESPN Athletes With Serious Klout
What do comedy and sportsmanship have in common? A few athletes profiled on ESPN love using social media to show their wit.
Helping startups hit a home run, VC Style
Lots of venture capitalists claim to add value to the companies in which they invest. But how do they do it? And does it really produce better returns for their investors?
Your Idea is Only 5% of the Journey (Part 1 of 2)
When we first started Distil, we knew we had a great idea. The problem is that being an entrepreneur isn’t about ideas as much as it is execution. There are millions of great ideas in the world, but if you can’t successfully build or execute on them, they stay just that...
The Spring 2013 ffVC Interns
Justine is a current MBA student at the Yale School of Management, entering as a Silver Scholar. She graduated from NYU Stern with a BSc. in Finance and Economics and spent her undergraduate summers in Indonesia working in rural banks and learning rudimentary Bahasa Indonesia. Justine also previously worked at ...
Is this the Future of Language Learning?
Google debuted their mysterious “Glass” device just last year, and since then it’s garnered attention across the tech scene and even the fashion industry. Now with even more details being exposed at SXSW, it’s even more clear that Glass and wearable computing are the next “big thing.” Glass is meant to be additive to our lives by giving us an implicit and novel interface through which we can filter our experiences and access ...
Part Three: To Yahoo Or Not To Yahoo (How To Tell If Telecommuting Jobs Will Work For You)
So we saw a few valid arguments for and against telecommuting jobs, but everything still comes down to individual cases. You must ask a few honest questions of your employees and company as a whole. You may learn that your company could happily support telecommuting jobs after all. Or, you may reinforce your belief that it would doom your business like Yahoo.
Part Two: Fully Distributed Teams: are they viable?
It has become increasingly common for technology companies to run as Fully Distributed teams. That is, teams that collaborate primarily over the web rather than using informal, face-to-face communication as the main means of collaborating.
High Returns On A Small Fund Challenge Low Returns On A Big Fund
Let’s say you decide to invest in a VC fund. Congratulations: you’re now supporting the least unpopular part of the investing industry. That said, how do you avoid suffering the poor median returns the industry is known for? Assuming you have a large amount of capital to invest, the relatively easy decision is to invest in one of the brand-name, multi-billion dollar VCs. However, the conventional wisdom is that small VC funds have ...
Part One: How Working Remotely Empowers Employees and Fails to Make Business Sense
There has been some interesting controversy recently with regarding to remote work. Let me sum it up by putting it in two camps: “Marissa Meyer is wrong, remote work is empowering brilliant employees who wouldn’t be in the workforce otherwise” and “Marissa Meyer is right, because she is energizing the company by getting people physically and mentally together”.
ff MASSIVE Party Lineup Announced
Coming to ff MASSIVE?? - Well we have some special annoumcents about our MASSIVE party! RSVP now at ffMASSIVE.com!! ff MASSIVE Party Control Room - 604 E. 7th Street & Red River 7pm - 1am Beverage Sponsors: Music Lineup: St. Lucia (11:00pm) French Horn Rebellion (10:00pm) ...
No-one Aspires to be a Great Manager Any More
I was on a panel of the New York chapter of the Startup Leadership Program that was discussing Leadership, Management and Culture at a venture. I chose to cover “Management”. Before I started, I asked the group how many of the 20 or so participants aspired to be great at ...
An Insider’s Guide to SXSW Interactive
South by Southwest Interactive is only a few weeks away, and the buzz is building about an event that showcases Austin, TX as a tech mecca. More than 25,000 entrepreneurs, innovators, geeks and investors from around the world will crowd into downtown Austin for a week’s worth of panel discussions, speakers, competitions, networking events and more. You can see the full conference schedule here.
March 3-6, Birmingham, AL: Alternative Investing Conference
This conference is an evolution of the Alternative Investment Roundup that the executives at SSBC designed, developed and ran each February in Arizona from 1997 through 2008. Each year the Arizona event attracted more than 130 Institutional Investors representing over $2 Trillion in investable assets.
How a Hypothetical Founder just saved $3 million in Federal Taxes
I have written before about the tax benefit to investors from investing in a Qualified Small Business. The fact sometimes gets lost, but a company founder is also eligible for the tax benefit of excluding a portion of his QSB gain when he sells his interest. (State and local tax rates vary.) Because the law places limits on the tax benefit, careful planning by a founder is required.
ff MASSIVE: ffVC at SXSW
Join us at SXSW on Saturday March 9th for ff MASSIVE. This year at SXSW ff Venture Capital is hosting a full day of off campus networking and meetups followed by the most MASSIVE party SXSW has seen, ff MASSIVE. The meetups will feature 20+ ff Venture Capital portfolio companies incluing, Social ...
![What Are The Hardest Languages To Learn? [INFOGRAPHIC]](/uploads/uploads/zinnia/110329-VOXY-HARDLANGUAGES-FINAL-WIDE.png)
What Are The Hardest Languages To Learn? [INFOGRAPHIC]
Learning a new language can be difficult, but some languages can be trickier than others. For native English speakers, the difficulty level of a new language depends on a variety of factors. So which are the most difficult to learn? And which languages would you be able to master in under a year? View the infographic below to learn more.
The Power of Saying NO!
I did not come up with this phrase; I read it many years ago in a Harvard Business Review paper and remember it well. Many of my colleagues have heard me mention it over the years.
Automating the Design Process at Voxy
As a company, we decided to take a look at 20-year old industry practices to see if we could find ways to improve upon them. Over the last couple of months, by using a mix of new ideas from other companies, as well as some of our very own ideas, we are doing just that. How are we doing it? Glad you asked.
The biggest challenge of a startup founder
Everyone knows that startups are sexy. You make the rules, you get the money, glory and fame, press coverage, you name it. And while you have to work hard for this to happen — well, even harder than you ever thought you would — all is good in the end. Until it’s not.
Convertibles: great cars, bad vehicles
Convertible notes (converts, convertibles) are a popular, but poor vehicle for the first investment round for a company. Many disagree. From an investor’s point of view, however, convertible notes rarely make sense, except to bridge to an existing investment at an inflection point into a much larger round.
Contently and Parse.ly selected for 2013 NYC Venture Fellows
Two ff Portfolio company founders, Sachin Kamdar, CEO of Parse.ly, and Shane Snow, CCO of Contently, have been selected for the 3rd class of NYC Venture Fellows, joining fellows from 28 other startups including Codeacademy, SideTour and Pencils of Promise. The highly-selective NYC Venture Fellows program is a collaboration between ...
Mobile Advertising: Engagement Then Click-Throughs
Dan Grigovici of AdMobius wrote an interesting article for AdExchanger recently that talked about the emergence of engagement. His article was written in response to the IAB’s newest report on Digital Ad Engagement and raised an interesting theory on the topic of measurement and optimization.
Four Things Congress Must Do To Fix America's Immigration Mess
There is broad bipartisan agreement that America needs a legislative solution for our immigration policy that is truly “comprehensive.” Administrative “stroke of the pen” solutions from the executive branch can only go so far. The legislative arm of government can and should play the major role in immigration reform.
Is The Government Telling The Truth When It Says Your Data Is Secure?
(David previously published this at Techcrunch.) Modern encryption systems are, in theory, exceptionally secure. The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), for example, is so sophisticated that all known attacks are considered computationally infeasible. It is no surprise then, that the NSA considers 256-bit AES safe for storing top-secret data. What is ...
Should CEOs Review Every New Hire?
Marissa Mayer seems to be single-handedly turning the corporate hiring world on its head. First, the new Yahoo! CEO made national headlines when she became one of the only pregnant women in history to be promoted to a top-level executive position at a publicly traded company. Now, she’s sent another shock wave through the HR industry with her announcement that she will personally be reviewing every new hire that Yahoo! makes.
The Price of Staying Connected
This immediately reminded me of a great talk(1) famed security researcher Moxie Marlinspike likes to give on the topic of using mobile phones and the “No Network Effect”. It boils down to the fact that it’s not a choice of whether or not you want to use a mobile phone but ...
A Closer Look At The Quality Of Angel Returns Data
Every major study conducted to date has placed angel investors’ IRR between 18 and 38 percent, as summarized by my Partner John Frankel and Professor Robert Wiltbank in prior Techcrunch articles. The bad news: the data on angel returns has historically been difficult to obtain, analyze, verify, and therefore rely upon.
Realizing Agile Email Marketing: The Future of Video, Content, and Context
Movable Ink was featured in ClickZ today. In an interview with veteran email marketing industry analyst David Daniels, our VP of Marketing Jordan Cohen explained the benefits of Agile Email Marketing, Movable Ink’s new Video in Email solution, and the impact of mobile on email marketing campaigns. Agile email marketing ...
Taxation of Qualified Small Business Stock: Congress Offers a Large Benefit, if You Can Squeeze into a Small Window
While tax planning should not be the determining factor in making an investment, it certainly should be a factor. That is why, for at least the past 18 months, we have considered the qualifying small business status of a company in which we are looking to invest. Two tax planning ...
It’s All About (the) Customer Service
At Phone.com we are in a very competitive business environment and one which is also a very fast moving and changing market. Yes the product and the service that we put out is extremely important. We have to remain cutting edge, offer the best features and apps and keep innovating. We do a pretty darn good job at this and we have some nice accolades to support it.
VolunteerSpot’s Karen Bantuveris to New Entrepreneurs: ASK Questions!
We Are Austin Tech, a weekly video segment featuring Austin’s technology industry movers and shakers, has released its latest video featuring Karen Bantuveris, founder and CEO of VolunteerSpot, a ffVC portfolio company.
Tuesday, Jan. 22: John Frankel presenting at HBS
The HBS Entrepreneurship Club is hosting John Frankel presenting on “How Your Startup Can Exploit the Current Technology Super Cycle” this Tuesday, January 22, 6 pm, at Harvard Business School, Aldrich Hall (Room TBD), Boston, MA. He’ll also join some students for a private dinner afterwards.
Livefyre NewsHub Navigates the CES Social Storm
Each year, hundreds of thousands of people flock to Las Vegas for the International CES. The enormous trade show showcases the latest and greatest innovations in the consumer electronics industry in every category, from TV's to Electric Toothbrushes.In recent years, the number of attendees have exploded, along with the content ...
Interaxon and Muse’s Brainwave Health System Prepare Your Mind for Whatever Life Throws At You and Are On Display at CES
Muse’s Brain Health system simultaneously strengthens the cognitive and emotional parts of your brain. This fun and easy-to-use system helps you focus more at work, maintain composure in stressful situations, feel less anxiety and reduce the negative thoughts that undermine your potential.
How VCs Deploy Operating Talent To Build Better Startups
Drew Hansen just posted a very interesting piece on Forbes on, “How VCs Deploy Operating Talent To Build Better Startups”. He draws on the research study my coauthors and I are about to publish on best practices in how venture capitalists increase the odds of company success through operational assistance. ...
