This is our blog where we talk about all the interesting stuff that's going on at HackFwd. Learn more about us on HackFwd.com or watch one of our speakers at PassionMeetsMomentum.com . var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-9755992-2']); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); (function() { var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })();
In January 2013, we launched Dropify with the intention of presenting quality free downloads in beautiful and engaging fashion, while helping our publishers get more fans on Facebook. Social integration has always been a key component since day one. However, despite numerous great success...
In this short and punchy talk Sean Seton-Rogers of PROFounders explains how the investment market is responding to todayās lean startups.
PROFounders Capital is based in London and currently has made 17 investments throughout Europe, including Tweetdeck and Made.com. PROFounders has an early stage focus tailored to fit closely with the lean startup way of running a business (check Alex Barrera for a summary of lean startups).
Sean explains that the āold schoolā venture model was a āstaircaseā ā three discontinuous stages of funding from the initial āfriends, family and foolsā pool, to the Series A/B/C funders, to the late stage private or initial public offering. This model worked fine for companies that needed several stages of investment, and that could demonstrate traction at each stage. But, says Sean, the lean startup has blown that model out of the water.
Products are now built with small, tight teams. Marketing can be achieved through social media platforms and pay per click advertising. Cloud computing, open source software and powerful platforms like Facebook and Twitter now mean that a company can launch with one tenth of the āold schoolā level of investment.
The arc of a lean startup is very different from the stage-by-stage growth of a traditional startup. It can be relatively cheap to prove initial traction, and revenue starts coming in early, but there is a sudden steep acceleration in the need for investment around the time that the company matures into a large organisation. The old three stage investment model doesnāt work anymore.
Greg says you should only hire developers who are smart and get things done. Talent is a lot like real estate ā even if you know what you need and what you are willing to give in exchange, the talent may not be available. With the people you may want to hire, the situation is similar, and you just have to keep an eye on them. Startups often start by hiring friends but that is very different from hiring strangers. When hiring friends or people you already have a relation with, you want to make their joining as easy as possible and reduce obstacles.
When hiring strangers, you have to attract people. Figure out your strengths, internal and external. Do you use cool technologies in your startup? Highlight that. Does the job offer perks, even if it's a cool location or flexible schedule? Mention that.
Greg runs Codility, which tests coders, administering short programming tests and checking whether solutions are rock solid. In addition to testing coding, Greg recommends a few other things to test. (Starting atĀ 12:50Ā Greg goes into detail about testing coders and examining code.)
Ask the candidate to pitch you something difficult. Maybe an idea they have, or maybe their final thesis. If they are able to communicate, they are likelier able to work with others.
Estimation or market sizing questions where the candidate has to think aloud and arrive at a ballpark result, preferable within the right order of magnitude. Examples are questions like "how many international flights depart from Heathrow every day" or "how many liters/gallons of petrol are used in the US daily". In questions like this, hearing the candidates logic is more important than the answer itself.
Greg finishes off with a number of tips for recruiting and hiring that are worth watching.
Filmed at HackFwd Build 0.8 - Berlin December 2011
Paulina spoke about the virtue of building communities before content in here early (9:05 AM) talk, opening the program for the Saturday of the last Build event.
INENSU are focusing on two platforms that cover two inherently social interests: music and fashion. SuperFan, on the Facebook platform, encourages users to share artist-related activity in their timelines. Closet Swap, with Channel 4, encourages users to share their real clothes via virtual wardrobes as part of a campaign to highlight sustainability issues in fashion.
Paulina says that INENSU wants to break free of the ācontent scheduleā model and demonstrates how this can be done. āIt would be amazing if we didnāt need a content schedule and we could just think about building the infrastructure to let users entertain each other,ā she says. She contrasts the ācontent scheduleā model with the āfeature scheduleā model that is followed by the defining platforms of our time like YouTube and Facebook. These platforms are so successful, she believes, because they put communities rather than content at the heart of the platform.
She stresses that the idea of social networking is not new, and that we have always turned to friends for recommendations and ideas. The online social network has a stubborn ratio of content creators, curators and lurkers, however. She estimates that around 70% of users are still passive consumers of content (lurkers), 20% are active sharers of content, only 10% actually create content and only 1% create content actively.
The challenge, as she sees it, is to build in easy ways for lurkers to become curators, and for curators to share more. She highlights Tumblrās āreblogā facility and Facebookās ālikeā button as examples of āeasy user generated contentā. She also explains how the Facebook Open Graph API is opening up new possibilities for āshare momentsā and the possibilities that this opens up for custom interactions.
āItās hard not to go back to Facebook and to think about how to use [its] social plumbing and architecture to maximise our own services,ā says Paulina. In this talks she identifies what āviralityā means on Facebook now, which channels are working for content dissemination, and why fan pages arenāt the be all and end all of user engagement.
Watch the video to find out how INENSU designs its platforms to maximise āshare momentsā in order to engage, not just the minority who create content, but also the vast majority who curate and consume it.
There is a lot of negative buzz surrounding the redesign of iOS7. And yes, we didnāt like what we saw at first glance either. Such a fundamentally different approach can only come shocking at first, but letās not waste further time to discuss those weird new homescreen icons. Letās rather...
Great stuff by Kenny Suleimanagich. A few things of note. First:
At its peak, in 1996, Kodak was rated the fourth-most-valuable global brand. That year, the company had about two-thirds of the global photo market, annual revenues of $16 billion, and a market capitalization of $31 billion.
Today, Kodak trades around twelve cents a share. Its market cap is roughly $32 million. Yes, āmillionā with an āmā.
How will it be saved going forward?:
Among other things, Kodak CEO Antonio M. Perez is betting his commercial-printing business on high-volume customers who need a lot of ink, like product-packaging manufacturers. Even if this latest āpivotā is successful ā and a lot of people think itās a stretch ā the company would be reduced to helping other people make the boxes used to ship the devices that will take the photographs of the future.
Sad.
In the 1980s, one Kodak engineer, impressed by the then-new Macintosh II computer, began making proposals for Kodak to move into the digital realm. By the late 80s, the company had already made a four megapixel sensor ā and did nothing with it. Why? As former Wired editor Chris Anderson puts it:
āWho could afford that?ā Anderson fired back, unimpressed. āMacs were really expensive. Computing technology couldnāt have kept up until much later.ā
Finally, as a reminder that some of the most transformative things start as pure gimmicks, consider the original George Eastman patent from the late 1800s:
In his original patent, he wrote that his improvements applied to āthat class of photographic apparatus known as ādetective cameras,ā ā ā concealed and disguised devices, made possible by a new wave of miniaturization, that were used mostly for a lowbrow entertainment: snapping pictures of people unaware. Cameras equipped with single-use chemical plates were hidden in opera glasses, umbrellas, and other everyday objects, and sharing the surreptitious, random, and sometimes compromising photos that resulted became a popular fad. Eastman, in other words, was obsessively tinkering with what many people at the time would have considered a cheap novelty or a toy. Like Netflix in its early days, Kodak relied on the U.S. Postal Service: Customers sent their spent cameras to Rochester, where the film was removed, processed, and cut into frames; the resulting negatives and prints, along with the camera, reloaded with a fresh roll of film, were returned to the sender. Suddenly it was easy for anyone to take lots of pictures, and Eastmanās new business became a juggernaut almost overnight.
You know what drives me crazy? Itās all these people talking about how great technology is, and how it saves all this time. But, what good is saved time, if nobody uses it? If it just turns into more busy work. You never hear somebody say, āWith the time Iāve saved by using my word processor, Iām gonna go to a Zen monastery and hang out.ā I mean, you never hear that.
Jesse (Ethan Hawke) in Before Sunrise. (via parislemon)
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