Earlier today at Facebook’s headquarters in Palo Alto, CA, venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers unveiled their latest massive fund: the sFund. This $250 million fund has one mission: to find the best startups in the social space out there and fund them. But Kleiner Perkins partner John Doerr has a better way of putting it: “I’m thinking of it like it’s a quarter-billion dollar party.”
Fair enough.
I sat down with Doerr after the announcement and subsequent press conference with partners Facebook, Zynga, and Amazon, to talk a bit about the new fund. Doerr noted that the fund itself bubbled up from an idea he put out there at our own TechCrunch Disrupt conference this past May: the “Third Wave“. That is, Doerr believes that the “First Wave” was in the early 1980s with the microchip and the PC. The “Second Wave” was in the mid-1990s when the web came along. Now it’s time for this Third Wave: social, mobile, the cloud, and commerce all coming together.
Prior to this sFund, Kleiner Perkins launched the iFund (and subsequently doubled-down on it), the mobile part of this equation. More specifically, that fund was aimed at the iPhone and later the iPad. But Doerr is quick to note that the intention is not to tell entrepreneurs what to do with these funds. That’s why this sFund is not called the “fFund” or the “fbFund” (obviously, for Facebook), he says.
I also asked about Android. Might we see an “aFund”? Again, Doerr sort of danced around this question by saying again that the goal is just to help entrepreneurs here, not to tell them what they should be working on. The implication there is that as long as the startup is focused on social, Kleiner Perkins doesn’t care which platform they’re working on.
At the same time, Doerr notes that the key to all of this is mobile. “The Internet is moving mobile. And that’s where all the action is,” he says as we discuss our shared love for the iPad.
Another thing he wants to make very clear: “We’re just getting started. This is the early innings, if you will, of social and I can’t wait to see how far it goes over the next decade.” Play ball.
Below, find the video of Charlie Roose's interview with John Doerr at TechCrunch Disrupt.mov in San Francisco.
COMMENTARY: There are very few technology visionaries around anymore, John Doerr from Kleiner Perkins is one, Steve Jobs is another. I am still not sure about Zuck. Doerr's right when he says that the Social Web is the third wave -- the intersection of several technologies: mobile devices, the internet, social networks, location-based social networks, social games, social coupons and mobile apps. All of them have converged and it makes you wonder what kind of new technologies will emerge from this technological soup.
Traditional media is being disrupted by social media and location-based check-in services. My greatest fear is that from these technological soup will emerge a toxic social monster that will penetrate our everyday lives like never before. The evidence is inescapable. Facebook, Google, Myspace, social media gamers like Zynga and Rapleaf and others have all recently admitted to committing atrocious violations of our privacy in the pursuit of the almighty advertising pie and gaining a competitive edge.
I noticed that John Doerr did not elaborate where this technological soup would take us 15 years from now. He says, "We are just in the early innings". I have already credited him with being a technological visionary, but is he being just a bit too naive, not to see the where these new technolgies might end. I am not totally convinced that social media is for the social good of all mankind, but rather a prelude to something more sinister, the disruption of our social lives. The Big Brother we have all dreaded, that Steve Jobs warned us about, that he has become. Then there's that freckled-faced redhead Zuck.
Here's a very interesting YouTube video entitled "Social Media Revolution 2 (Refresh)" that pretty much gives the big picture of what has happened to society with the advent of social media.
Courtesy of an article dated October 21, 2010 appearing in TechCrunch
Companies that let customers design their own products are becoming the next big thing. Just three months ago, I wrote that this trend of “customer co-creation” was one to watch. But it may prove even hotter than I thought. Since publishing the story, I’ve seen quite a bit of new funding activity in the space.
Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures probably explains this phenomenon of mass customization the best: “We’re pretty convinced that mass-market consumer products are now so cheap and widely available that they’ve lost a lot of their appeal. We think people are looking for something unique and customizable. We’re interested in the social fabric — bringing people together that design things, and people who want to buy them. Mass produced goods are dominated by a few large brands. But everywhere you look there are movements seeking to bypass those brands, whether it’s the locavore movement in food, or something such as NikeID, which has seen double-digit growth year over year.”
Mass customization ventures are attractive to VCs not just because they’re seeing tremendous growth. As it turns out, a scalable build-to-order supply chain model is also very cost-effective — sometimes even more so than a conventional mass production model. And because co-creation sites are seeing viral growth, they promise low customer-acquisition costs.
Here are some examples of recent VC-funded mass customization companies, as well as a few that have shown impressive traction in the past few years:
Gemvara Gemvara lets you custom build jewelry online. Earlier this year Gemvara received $5.2 million in a funding round. Its revenue has doubled each month since its launch in February 2010, and it expects to close the year with more than a $10 million run rate.
Fashion Playtes
Fashion Playtes, a web store that lets girls aged 6-12 design their own clothes online, just raised $4 million in its first institutional round of funding led by Fairhaven Capital Partners. The service’s popularity with the tween market has grown by more than 600 percent in the past year: The site had 5,700 unique visitors in August of 2009 and is averaging 35,000 visitors a month today. Investor Scott Johnson explains, “Fashion Playtes’ mass customization strategy brings the power of social networks, multiplayer games, and modern custom manufacturing to the $11B+ tween apparel market.”
Shapeways Union Squares Ventures and Index Ventures were part of a $5 million investment into mass customization company Shapeways this year. This Dutch company lets buyers customize 3-D printed wares — and hopes to be the Kinko’s of 3-D printing.
Chocri Major chocolate maker Ritter says it invested in “the low seven figures” in Germany’s Chocri, a site that enables the co-creation of chocolate bars. You design it using a product configuration tool on their site, and Chocri mails it to you from Europe. The cash infusion will help Chocri scale its operation by optimizing its fulfillment process.
Polyvore Polyvore’s design tool serves as a virtual styling tool, letting you mix and match clothing products from your favorite online stores to display your own “outfit” to the world. Polyvore’s tagline is “Clip + Create + Shop + Share = Polyvore.” Other users vote on the outfits with as many as 400,000 “likes” added daily. With 30,000 style sets being created every day, Polyvore now contains 20 million sets in its database. The company has raised $8.7 million in funding since 2007. (Incidentally, Polyvore recently underwent a management reshuffle. CEO Sukhinder Singh Cassidy resigned last month over disagreements about the company’s direction, and cofounder Pasha Sadri has taken on the chief executive position.)
Zazzle Kleiner Perkins led Zazzle’s $16 million first round in 2005. This mass customization vendor lets you design your own bumper stickers, T-shirts, mugs and posters that you or others can buy (see image at top). Zazzle reports that it has 20 million unique visitors per month, 31 billion unique products available, and has grown 1,600% in traffic and 900% in sales in the past four years.
CafePress Zazzle competitor CafePress also lets customers build their own bumper stickers, T-shirts, mugs and posters. A profitable company, it doesn’t depend on venture funding. It received a second round of funding in 2005, the last serious investment in the company, according to a timeline on its Web site. Available merchandise surpassed the 150 million mark in 2008.
Threadless In October, crowd-sourcing T-shirt site Threadless.com celebrated 10 years of giving artists the opportunity to design shirts and have them scored by the Threadless community. Winning designs are sold through the online store. The company generated $30 million last year.
With growth rates like 17,000 percent over three years, it’s not a huge surprise that VCs would see the writing on the wall and invest heavily in the mass customization model.
COMMENTARY: Checkout my post on Fashion Playtes, and the do-it-yourself mobile app service craze with companies like AppMakr, App Builder and App Inventor (Google). You can save thousands by doing it yourself.
Courtesy of an article dated October 25, 2010 appearing in VentureBeat
She’s never attended business school, nor does she have a history of entrepreneurship. While it is easy to question her outlandish costumes, her repetitive child-like lyrics, and her over-the-top media stunts, it is hard to ignore her obvious musical talent and her ability to be at the right place at the right time with the right tune.
Whether you love Lady Gaga or hate her (and 99% of you are definitely in one camp or another), you can’t ignore the tremendous achievements of this branding genius.
Less than 18 months ago, she was virtually unknown – and today she has two platinum selling albums and is the envy of artists that have been in the business for decades.
How did she do it?
Think about it: in an industry cluttered with talented artists and interesting material, somehow she has managed to rise above almost everyone else and command our undivided attention. From her meteoric rise, we can glean seven simple, yet powerful, secrets that any business can use to create raving fans and dominate their market niche.
Secret #1: Be Memorable
Every newspaper, radio station and TV program in the world reported and talked about the “meat dress” that Lady GaGa wore to the 2010 MTV Music awards.
To be frank, it was so bizarre and scandalous, you could not help but notice her.
Business is all about grabbing attention – about creating anticipation, capturing awareness and making customers notice your products and services. The aim is to inspire customers and potential clients stop in their tracks and pay attention to your offer, service, product, or information.
In order to achieve this, you need to ask yourself what it is about your offering (tangible or intangible) that will capture attention?
If you’re not truly memorable in business, it means you will have to work harder to get the sale. And every time you have to work harder, it costs you time and money.
Does anybody even remember (or care) what Miley Cyrus or Britney Spears wore to the MTV awards?
No. That is exactly my point. The first lesson is to be memorable.
Secret #2: Repeat Repeat Repeat
Lady Gaga has got some really interesting songs but when you actually look at the lyrics — they are incredibly child-like and simple. In fact, she often repeats the same words or sounds over and over again.
“Rah, rah, ah, ah, ah Roma, roma, ma Gaga, ooh la la Want your bad romance
I want your ugly, I want your disease I want your everything as long as it’s free I want your love Love, love, love, I want your love”
OK, we get it already, you want our love. And, to her, love is likely to mean huge album sales or money, money, money! After all, didn’t ABBA teach us in the 70s that it’s a rich man’s world?
So we all know that repetition works in music. But why is it so powerful in business?
Each and every day, your target audience is bombarded with hundreds of thousands of marketing messages. In order to cut through and present a clear and coherent brand message, your message has to be the same every single time someone experiences it. To be effective, you cannot afford to be all things to all people. In this case, you actually want to be a broken record – “tell them what you are going to tell them; then, tell them; and finally tell them what you have just told them.”
Once you have determined what your unique message is, the key is to repeat it over and over and over again – in your telephone greeting, brochures, business cards, website, Twitter account, Facebook page, Linkedin profile, press releases, thank you cards, customer feedback surveys, etc.
Rarely will a customer act on your message the first time they see it. If you want to earn their love and their business, you need to ask over and over again.
Secret #3: Cultivate Excellence
If what you do is “just OK”, you might as well forget about being truly successful. Technical competence is the cornerstone of every thriving business.
Even Lady Gaga – as strange as she may seem – is a technical genius in her area. At the age of four she learned to play the piano by ear. By age 14, she’d written her first ballad and played at open mike nights in various New York clubs. At age 20 (long before her own debut album was released) she had already written songs for many other well known artists.
Think about the most successful businesses and brand names in the world – Apple, Microsoft, Toyota, Proctor and Gamble, GE and 3M. They all place a huge emphasis on technical expertise and acumen. When what you do is superior to your competitors in terms of quality, service, aesthetics and durability, customers will flock to your business and price will not be the determining factor in their decision to purchase from you.
Secret #4: Encourage Fanatics
Lady Gaga initially focused on and won over the gay community and turned them into brand evangelists. Her music has now gained mass appeal with people of all ages and all walks of life.
Her strategy mirrored that of another well known brand icon that most people are very familiar with: Apple.
If you think back a few years, Apple was very specific about who they were targeting: graphic designers, technical specialists, the music industry, etc. Few people outside this narrow scope even considered owning one because it was thought to be more difficult than a PC to operate. Now with the domination of other Apple products like the iPhone, iTunes, iPad and the iPod, almost every one of us has bought or used something that Apple produces.
If you want your business to be successful and endure the test of time, you will need to choose your demographic wisely and cultivate their fanaticism vigilantly.
Secret #5: Focus
Are you clear about how your product/service makes life better for your customer?
It’s not enough to focus on being the Number One Provider of this or that or the largest producer of X or Y. Success is less about size and more about companies who put the needs of their customers first. Focus first on what you can be best in the world at doing. Then, second on how you can deliver that world-class product or service to your clients. There’s no point being bigger if what you do just isn’t that great in the first place.
As strange and outlandish as Lady Gaga is, it’s pretty clear what her focus is – delivering catchy dance tunes and simple, memorable melodies. There is no tricky math here – she’s not trying to deliver deeply profound political statements or become the world’s most prolific artist. She’s just trying to do one thing, to be memorable and infectious, and she does that one thing very well.
Secret #6: Package Wisely
I have no idea how much time and effort would be spent producing the tracks that Lady Gaga releases but I would hazard a guess that almost as much is invested in developing her elaborate costumes. We all know that in life, “size matters.”
Likewise, in business, “packaging matters.” In fact, some brands have such distinctive packaging that they have changed the way that the entire industry displays its wares.
Think about how McDonald’s switched from Styrofoam boxes to plain wrap paper back in the early 90s and the rest of the industry followed suit. And what about the clean, vivid, minimalistic and colorful packaging of Apple? Haven’t many electronics competitors tried to mimic that highly compelling look and feel?
When is the last time that you took a step back and really looked at your packaging? Does it present your goods and services in the best light possible? If you changed its fit, shape, size, color, directness or ease of use, could it make it easier for your customers and lift sales?
Secret # 7: Be Relentless
There are very few one-hit wonders in the music industry.
However, the world is littered with businesses that have had initial success with a product/service and then failed to do much of anything else. The advent of the internet and global trading has meant that competition is fierce in most industries and the market is inundated with new products and innovations. In order to be successful, businesses must constantly improve what they do and move forward, not only to thrive, but also to survive. To do this, you need to constantly ask yourself: “What do we need to do today in order to wowour customers and maintain their loyalty?”
Lady Gaga does continuous improvement better than anyone. Just when one of her hits starts to taper off, she is quick to introduce us to another song that we just can’t seem to get out of our heads. In order to keep her name and brand on our minds, she carefully and consistently plans to release a new song every three to four months.
Let’s be frank, I doubt Lady Gaga will ever be invited to lecture at an Ivy League school on business success but these seven secrets – that she does better than almost anyone else – apply to any and all businesses looking to be successful in today’s highly challenging and demanding marketplace.
COMMENTARY: Lady Gaga is the product, packaging, and buzz all rolled into one. Lady GaGa wears the most outrageous and attention-grabbing hair, dresses, jewelry and shoes. The famous "Meat Dress" that she wore to the Video Music Awards shocked everybody. No problem for Lady Gaga. She is the Queen of Shock. You never know what you can expect from her. I thought that Madonna was the standard of outrageous voyerism and sexiness, bye bye Madonna. Lady GaGa has dethroned her.
Lady GaGa is a social media marketing maven that understands the power of social networks and viral marketing. She has a YouTube video with nearly 300 million views (Her videos just exceeded over 1 billion views) and millions of followers and friends on Facebook and Twitter. I wouldn't say that I am a Lady GaGa fanatic, or anywhere close to it, but she is just amazing. I follow her antics on Twitter she calls her over 6 million followers her "little devils".
Courtesy of an article dated October 25, 2010 appearing in Australian Anthill
(Reuters) - Anybody could tell right away that the Louis Vuitton shoulder bag was fake because it was delivered in a recycled box that once shipped batteries.
Warnings printed on the inside of the box read: "Danger Contains Sulfuric Acid" and "Poison - Causes Severe Burns" -- not the sort of messages that would normally accompany a product from one of the world's most iconic luxury brands.
But it sure looked real. It was dark brown, sported a braided strap with brass fittings and the Louis Vuitton monogram stamped all across the bag.
I had ordered the bag from a website called www.ericwhy.com for this special report, which explores the growing problem of counterfeit merchandise sold over the Internet.
Reuters wanted to trace the problem from a consumer in Washington D.C. to the shadowy producers based in Guangzhou China, where my colleague Melanie Lee found the illicit workshops and markets.
Ericwhy, based in Guangzhou, calls its stuff "designer-inspired alternative to actual Louis Vuitton" in a disclaimer on its website. "We assume no civil or criminal liability for the actions of those who buy our products."
Yet, U.S. law enforcement officials say this website and many others that offer a dazzling array of goods online -- clothes, electronics, footwear, watches, medicines -- are outlaws, and they plan to go after them hard.
Counterfeit commerce over the Internet has soared in the past couple of years, turning what had been an irritant to businesses into a serious competitive threat, the officials say.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates the amount of counterfeit goods and pirated copyrights in world trade grew from about $100 billion in 2001 to about $250 billion in 2007, the last year for which they have made an estimate. While there are no separate estimates for how much of that is sold on the Internet, authorities say it is considerable.
"The Internet has just completely changed the face of the problem, made it more complicated and more pervasive," says John Morton, assistant secretary in charge of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). "Whole industries now have been attacked, not from the street, but from the Internet."
Visitors to www.ericwhy.com can choose from more than 1,800 imitation Louis Vuitton bags, ranging from a pink shoulder tote and a tiger-colored "Whisper bag" to a simple bright red clutch.
The one I ordered cost $122 with a $40 shipping fee, so by my definition it was not exactly cheap. But comparable bags sold at a local Louis Vuitton retail store were $1,000 or more.
I entered my Washington D.C. address and credit card information, and instantly got an email from my credit card company warning of possible fraud on my account. Soon, I received a second email, this one a receipt with a Worldwide Express Mail Service (EMS) tracking number so I could follow my package.
The bag left Guangzhou, China on September 14 and arrived on my desk by the 20th. It was wrapped in a yellow sheath with the Louis Vuitton logo and smelled strongly of leather.
But in another sign something was not quite right, the English instructions that came with it read: "Louis Vuitton has created for you prestigious glazed leather" -- the sentence ending abruptly without the word "bag."
I took the bag to a Louis Vuitton store in Chevy Chase, Maryland to see how it compared with the real article. The store clerk, a tall man in a stylish suit, was restrained. "We only talk about our own products," he said icily, adding "we don't have any bags like that."
That Louis Vuitton doesn't want its store personnel to talk about how easily their products can be copied is perhaps understandable. If word got around fake bags were on the street, then people might begin to wonder if their own bags were real. Part of the brand's cachet is its exclusivity, which easily available counterfeits devalue.
Last year, U.S. customs and other law enforcement agents made nearly 15,000 seizures of counterfeit goods, 80 percent of which came from China. Handbags were third on the list, behind consumer electronics and footwear -- the top item for four consecutive years.
"They aren't just selling counterfeit clothing or electronics," U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder told an intellectual property conference in Hong Kong last week.
"They're selling defective and dangerous imitations of critical components, like brake pads, or everyday consumer goods, like toothpaste. They're conducting corporate espionage. They're pirating music, movies, games, software and other copyrighted works -- both on our cities' streets and online. And the consequences are devastating."
When it comes to making counterfeit goods and pirating brands, China is the counterfeit "workshop of the world." Along with a relentlessly widening U.S. trade deficit, which Washington blames on China's undervalued currency, rampant piracy is stoking economic tensions between two of the world's biggest economies.
SHADY FACTORIES
The grubby town of Shiling, an hour's drive from the southern port of Guangzhou, has the biggest leatherworking industry in China. In the 1980s, multinationals from various industries began outsourcing production to factories in the coastal provinces. In this part of Guangdong province, it was leather.
By the late 1990s, low-budget workshops in inconspicuous neighborhoods near the outsourcing factories had sprung up making fake versions of the products. Today, much of Shiling's leather goods are destined for the counterfeit trade.
At one such workshop near Shiling Secondary School, women and their young daughters could be seen cutting and sewing leather by the windows. Lanky men loitered on the ground floor by a "help wanted" poster seeking leather workers, serving as lookouts.
These places are occasionally targeted for police raids.
Zhou She, a private investigator whose job is to sniff out illicit hives of counterfeiting operations, told us about this cluster of workshops, but we must act discreetly, he says.
Walking gingerly around the three-storey shop-house factories and watching men and women pound metal hardware into leather in the back alleys, it feels like we are in a pirates' lair.
Police officials say organized crime gangs, sometimes called triads in this part of China, are deeply involved, given their extensive underground networks. "Of course they are involved. It is very low risk for them," Zhou said.
He works the detective gumshoe routine, spending hours trailing trucks carrying suspected cargo in and out of Shiling, conducting camera surveillance and interviews.
A former Peoples' Liberation Army intelligence officer, Zhou, who has been in the industry for 12 years, has the tanned, leathery skin and sharp crew cut of a military man. His austere presence is betrayed only by a brown, expensive-looking leather purse, which he showed off proudly -- a gift from an Italian client after he found a counterfeit workshop for them.
NOTE: TO READ THE REMAINDER OF THIS ARTICLE CLICK ON THE LINK BELOW
COMMENTARY: A friend of mine just received a knock-off of the unlocked Apple iPhone 2 from China. He pulled the SIM card out of his old phone, dropped it into the knockoff Apple iPhone 2 and voila. It works like a charm. He paid $42.00 including shipping. It took a month, but he says it was worth it. I also know of individuals in LA and Miami who sell Gucci, Fendi and Louis Vuitton handbags that are nearly undicernible from the real thing.
Greed is good, Knock-offs are good, the real thing is over-priced, and you are stupid to pay $500 to $1,000 for a genuine handbag when a knock-off will cost $75 to $150. Screw Louis.
Courtesy of an article dated October 28, 2010 appearing in Reuters
Twenty-year-old entrepreneur Jessica Mah, freshly graduated from the University of California, Berkley, has just closed a $1.2 million round of angel financing for her startup software firm, InDinero. A simple online finance management tool, InDinero aims to do for small businesses what Intuit’s Mint.com online finance manager does for individuals — bring fiscal order out of chaos.
This is the not Mah’s first waltz around the floor at the entrepreneur’s ball; she started her first company selling website templates on eBay when she was 13, two years before she graduated from high school. And she founded two more while an undergraduate studying computer science at Berkley.
Like many innovations, InDinero came about when Mah recognized she had a problem with finances at her first company.
“I didn’t know how much I was making or spending,” she told BusinessNewsDaily.
Her dilemma was not uncommon. Most small business owners try to measure the financial health of their company by scanning Excel files and bank statements and listening to their bookkeeper, if they have one. The results are usually spotty, at best.
There was no solution at the time that allowed for her to automatically monitor her company's finances. The problem gestated in Mah’s mind for six years. In 2009 she and a partner, Andy Su, began cobbling together a solution that would use data from bank statements and credit card companies to create an application that would let business owners know how they were doing.
InDinero provides small business owners a dashboard that lets them track, model and forecast their finances in real time. Unlike Intuit’s Quickbooks application for small business, InDinero can instantly project a company’s income and spending based on past patterns and serve as an early warning alarm for cash-flow-sensitive companies that may be on the brink of heading into the red.
The goal for Mah and Su was to produce a lower-cost application that would be a more intuitive and accessible alternative to QuickBooks. They were aiming directly at business owners, not their accountants.
“Intuit’s secret sauce is the accountant,” Mah said. “InDinero’s secret sauce is the entrepreneur.”
InDinero is rapidly gaining attraction with small business owners. Today, InDinero has a user base of 5,000, up from 2,000 only a month ago. Most of the customers use the free 50-transactions-per-month plan, she said, but the company has also found a number of takers who have opted for a 500-transaction-per month plan for $29.95 and an unlimited transactions plan for $99.95 a month.
For the time being, Mah thinks that her entrepreneurial roaming may be over and that she will call InDinero her professional home for the foreseeable future. Cashing in and selling the company, a well-worn path that many software entrepreneurs have gone down, is not on her radar.
“My hope is to stay with InDinero forever,” she said. “If we got bought out any time soon, I don’t have confidence that the new owners would finish solving the problem. It’s not just a single problem.”
The recent infusion of angel capital has put the five-person operation on sound financial footing, Mah said.
“It’s very likely we won’t have to have another round of funding,” she said. “We’re ramen profitable.”
COMMENTARY: I quickly reviewed InDinero's small business financial dashboard, and it's really slick, but with only 5,000 users (the majority using the free service), Jessica Mah has her work cutout for her with heavy competition from some very well established behemoths in small business accounting and financial management software:
Mint - 3,000,000 users worldwide
Intuit Quickbooks - 3.5 million users worldwide (300,000 online users)
Intuit Quicken - 10 million users worldwide
For my money, I recommend WorkingPoint, an SaaS accounting service founded by two former Intuit executives that charges $10 per month and you get accounting, invoicing, expense management, import/export, financial reporting, tax reporting, contact management, inventory management, cash management, online company profile and a dashboard. WorkingPoint also includes firewall protection, SSL encryption, data backups, unlimited users, unlimited customers, payment collections through PayPal and recurring invoicing plans.
Courtesy of an article dated October 24, 2010 appearing in Business News Daily
Visible Technologiesplans to release social and search tools that allow marketers to support online campaigns. More than a year in the making at a cost of about a million dollars, Visible Intelligence organizes searches and analyzes massive amounts of data through what the company calls a "search-and-relevance engine" built on similar technology to Google.
Counting hashtags and Facebook fans no longer works because businesses need to sift through the spam and elevenths signals to capture real, actionable information to support key initiatives. So, Kelly Pennock, who moved into the CEO role at Visible from chief technology officer earlier this year, spearheaded the project and built the vision for the new platform and company.
Pennock says available technology has not kept pace with the opportunity to integrate social and search, so it requires a leap beyond existing social monitoring tools.
Data and system integration tools allow users to integrate the platform with customer relationship management (CRM) tools and business intelligence (BI) systems to tap into social data across enterprise business applications. The platform also provides the ability to share data and easily engage among users and departments to create more meaningful and targeted customer experiences.
Information is processed and returned to users in about 30 seconds, compared with about 20 minutes for other platforms, according to Debbie DeGabrielle, CMO at Visible Technologies.
About a dozen Visible clients have been testing the platform since early September. The platform goes out and collects brand mentions in the form of data from a variety of social sites across the Web. It mines the data to look for specific mentions of a campaign or spokesperson.
Wading through data that offers no value to the campaign can cost big bucks. So, aside from the ability to pull in data from a variety of social sites like publicly available information on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, Visible built in sorting capabilities, language support, and analytics to measure the campaign. It also provides sentiment score, media type and geography.
There were plenty of challenges to building the platform because it identifies word order, proximity of two words to each other, type of media, and length of document. It also supports multiple languages and offers insight into sentiment. It sorts through an "overwhelming amount" of data to determine whether someone searching on the word "cruise" means Tom Cruise, cruise missiles or cruise ship.
COMMENTARY: According to Visible Technologies, their Visible Intelligence™ is built on a data platform architected like Google and Yahoo!, designed for performance and reliability with cloud-like scalability to stay ahead of the business needs of Global 2000 companies. The Visible Intelligence™ platform is designed to meet the needs of future Social Intelligence.
Visible Intelligence search engine harnesses the universe of social data by first crawling the entire public Internet, collecting social data from around the globe from hundreds of millions of websites. Then the data is cleansed, processed, enriched with additional attributes like sentiment and made available through a powerful querying engine, business analytics and custom dashboards.
Visible Intelligence™ makes it easy and allows marketer's unlimited search queries for all of their social media monitoring needs.
Customized metrics and views of the important social conversations also help marketer's leverage data to discover insights and find actionable opportunities to make the right business decisions. Visualizing them all in one place allows them to do this faster. Being able to change them on the fly allows you to stay flexible, nimble and creative.
With 25 built-in views and unlimited search queries to choose from, research, monitoring and reporting options are unlimited with Visible Intelligence. Visible Intelligence's Custom Dashboards enable Marketer's and their teams to quickly create the summary views that matter most. User's can quickly tell the difference between meaningful data and useless information when it comes to making business decisions.
Users can look at all of their data visually, allowing them to monitor industry trends, track how sentiment and volumes shift over time, catch volume spike. Users can dynamically drill into data points on a chart or graph to understand what drove those changes at the detailed post level.
Every single piece of data in Visible Intelligence™ has been cleansed, validated, evaluated and enriched with additional metadata including auto-sentiment for advanced filtering, sorting, enhanced reporting, topic discovery and insights.
If users are looking for something specific, Visible Intelligence™ has an extremely intuitive filter bar to help them find it. Narrow their searches by filtering on any individual filter or any combination of filters for unlimited control and precision tuning of their data:
Date (back to 2005)
Media type
Author or group of authors
Site or group of sites
Sentiment (positive, negative, neutral and mixed)
User defined and assigned tags
Visible Intelligence™ has the industry’s most accurate auto-scored sentiment. Visible Intelligence's auto-scoring capability has been fine-tuned for accuracy with the aid of the world’s largest database of manually scored social media content, which gives them a distinct advantage for optimizing their proprietary scoring algorithms.
Visible Technologies is presently field testing their Visible Intelligence™ platform. It will be interesting to learn if their social intelligence platform is everything they say on their site.
The Visible Technologies blog they announced two downloadable white papers as follows
SOUTH BEND, IN, Sep 29, 2010 -- Kraig Biocraft Laboratories, (OTCBB: KBLB ) is very pleased to announce that the following release was made by the University of Notre Dame moments ago.
Notre Dame and University of Wyoming scientists genetically engineer silkworms to produce artificial spider silk
A research and development effort by the University of Notre Dame, the University of Wyoming, and Kraig Biocraft Laboratories, Inc. has succeeded in producing transgenic silkworms capable of spinning artificial spider silks.
"This research represents a significant breakthrough in the development of superior silk fibers for both medical and non-medical applications," said Malcolm J. Fraser Jr., a Notre Dame professor of biological sciences. "The generation of silk fibers having the properties of spider silks has been one of the important goals in materials science."
Natural spider silks have a number of unusual physical properties, including significantly higher tensile strength and elasticity than naturally spun silkworm fibers. The artificial spider silks produced in these transgenic silkworms have similar properties of strength and flexibility to native spider silk.
Silk fibers have many current and possible future biomedical applications, such as use as fine suture materials, improved wound healing bandages, or natural scaffolds for tendon and ligament repair or replacement. Spider silk-like fibers may also have applications beyond biomedical uses, such as in bulletproof vests, strong and lightweight structural fabrics, a new generation athletic clothing and improved automobile airbags.
Until this breakthrough, only very small quantities of artificial spider silk had ever been produced in laboratories, but there was no commercially viable way to produce and spin these artificial silk proteins. Kraig Biocraft believed these limitations could be overcome by using recombinant DNA to develop a bio-technological approach for the production of silk fibers with a much broader range of physical properties or with pre-determined properties, optimized for specific biomedical or other applications.
The firm entered into a research agreement with Fraser, who discovered and patented a powerful and unique genetic engineering tool called "piggyBac." PiggyBac is a piece of DNA -- known as a transposon that can insert itself into the genetic machinery of a cell.
"Several years ago, we discovered that the piggyBac transposon could be useful for genetic engineering of the silkworm, and the possibilities for using this commercial protein production platform began to become apparent."
Fraser, with the assistance of University of Wyoming researcher Randy Lewis, a biochemist who is one of the world's foremost authorities on spider silk, and Don Jarvis, a noted molecular geneticist who specializes in insect protein production, genetically engineered silkworms in which they incorporated specific DNAs taken from spiders. When these transgenic silkworms spin their cocoons, the silk produced is not ordinary silkworm silk, but, rather, a combination of silkworm silk and spider silk. The genetically engineered silk protein produced by the transgenic silkworms has markedly improved elasticity and strength approaching that of native spider silk.
"We've also made strides in improving the process of genetic engineering of these animals so that the development of additional transgenics is facilitated," Fraser said. "This will allow us to more rapidly assess the effectiveness of our gene manipulations in continued development of specialized silk fibers."
Since silkworms are already a commercially viable silk production platform, these genetically engineered silkworms effectively solve the problem of large scale production of engineered protein fibers in an economically practical way.
"Using this entirely unique approach, we have confirmed that transgenic silkworms can be a potentially viable commercial platform for production of genetically engineered silk proteins having customizable properties of strength and elasticity," Fraser said. "We may even be able to genetically engineer fibers that exceed the remarkable properties of native spider silk."
The genetic engineering breakthrough was announced today (Sept. 29) by Dr. Fraser, Dr. Lewis and Kraig Biocraft CEO Kim Thompson at a press conference on the Notre Dame campus.
For more information on Kraig Biocraft Laboratories please visit the Company's web site: http://www.KraigLabs.com
COMMENTARY: I am amazed that it took 70 Madagascar worker's over four years to collect the silk from one million spiders to produce the spider silk fibers in that yarn over 100 years ago. I bet that feat is in Ripley's Believe It or Not.
Kraig Biocraft Laboratories' breakthrough technology to produce artificial spider silk faces further challenges before the process is commercially viable and any yarn is produced. I have a feeling we won't be waiting too long. Bullet-proof chest protectors produced from yarn made from spider silk.
The Groupon website offers coupons for nearly 200 promotions a day in the United States and Canada. These coupons provide big discounts at local businesses, but with a simple catch: a certain number of people have to sign up within an allotted time limit for the deal to work.
Groupon users are encouraged to spread the word about an offer to their friends, often through social networking services like Twitter and Facebook. And companies are attracted by the promise of getting a large influx of new customers, and having those customers do their marketing for them. But a recent study questions how profitable such promotions really are for the businesses that get involved.
"If things continue the way they are, I would be very surprised if it's sustainable," saysUtpal Dholakia, an associate professor of management at Rice University, who led the study. He surveyed 150 businesses that had run promotions through Groupon between summer 2009 and summer 2010. Although the majority of Groupon's business customers said they were satisfied with their promotion, Dholakia found that about a third hadn't turned a profit as a result of offering a deal, and just under half said they would not repeat the experiment. He argues that the problems experienced by these firms mean that changes need to be made if such social promotions are going to survive in the long term.
Dholakia and colleagues surveyed how many Groupons were distributed through a business's promotion, how many new customers the promotion attracted, and how many of them became returning customers. The researchers also looked at whether businesses turned a profit as a result, and how satisfied the business's owners and employees were with the experience.
Dholakia found that businesses that sold more than 1,000 Groupons were less likely to have profitable promotions. This suggests that, at a certain point, a promotion can overwhelm a business and block existing customers who are paying full price. With unprofitable promotions involving restaurants, he found that employees were often unhappy that deal-chasers had not tipped enough. Dholakia speculates that some businesses simply did not prepare well for the sudden influx of new customers.
Businesses that had unprofitable experiences reported that only about 25 percent of Groupon users spent money beyond the value of the Groupon, and only about 15 percent came back for a second visit. Certain types of businesses seem more vulnerable to such problems. Spas tended to have successful promotions (82 percent were profitable through a promotion), but the restaurants surveyed fared less well (about 58 percent were profitable through a promotion).
Dholakia says many companies did not know how to get the most out of a Groupon. For example, many failed to sign new customers up to e-mail lists so that they could be encouraged to return to a store. "A vast majority of these businesses do not have a plan in place," he says. "They just go with the flow."
Julie Mossler, a spokesperson for Groupon, makes a similar point. "The merchants who have the best Groupon experience follow our suggestions in deal structure and use the tools we provide to adequately prepare their business and staff for their Groupon," she says.
Peter Zubcsek, an assistant professor in the marketing department at the University of Florida, who researches social networks, says Groupon has shown that social media can spread the word about a deal very efficiently but adds: "For any marketer planning to promote their business with the help of Groupon, it is important to realize the limits to how much loss leader sales they can afford to remain profitable."
Zubscek says he wouldn't be surprised if digital industries, like online games, turned out to be the best venue for social deals, since they're already prepared for efficient scaling. However, Zubscek questions whether such companies would need a third party like Groupon to facilitate such promotions.
Dholakia says radical changes may be needed to give businesses a better chance of doing well from social-media-driven promotions. He says that businesses could structure offers to entice customers to return, for example by offering $10 off on each of three visits to a restaurant. Or they could offer discounts for particular products, such as food only, while leaving drinks at full price. For social promotion sites to work in the long-term, Dholakia says, they need to go beyond taking advantage of the marketing value of new customers' online relationships--they need to encourage those customers to form relationships with the businesses they try out.
COMMENTARY: I have to admit that I registered on Groupon several months ago, and receive a daily discount offer from them. I am very disappointed that not a single one of those discount offers was of any interest to me. The majority of the offers were for neighborhood restaurants, retailers and small service companies.
Groupon charges a very hefty 50% commission on each discount coupon sold which makes it very difficult for a merchant to make a profit off the additional customer traffic. Isn't this supposed to be a win-win situation. From appearances, Groupon is taking very little of the risk and making all of the money. Nice people.
I did a quick online search, and there doesn't appear to be any shortage of complaints and lawsuit filed against Groupon That is certainly not good news for a company that recently raised $100 million in venture capital and plans on an IPO in the near future.
Courtesy of an article dated October 25, 2010 appearing in Technology Review
From its beginning as a sailboat equipment company to its success in capturing the admiration and loyalty of legions of landlubbers, Lands’ End has stayed true to its famous mantra, “Guaranteed.Period.®” In addition to the company’s focus on quality, they have kept their eyes on their customer. In 2008 they were named to the NRFF-AMEX Top Ten for consistent excellence in customer service and retained that standing in 2009. To find out how this predominately catalog and Internet retailer continues to win accolades from consumers the world over, we caught up with Nick Coe, President of Lands’ End. You’ll find “quality” resonates through the answers of this top exec, who fell in love with retailing when he was intrigued by quality in “great tailoring or a perfect pair of jeans” – products he couldn’t afford.
In the five years NRF Foundation and American Express have conducted the Customers’ Choice survey, Lands’ End has consistently been ranked in the top ten. How do you continue to delight your customers year after year?
We certainly don’t rest on our laurels — we continue to relentlessly focus on making great products at a fantastic value and deliver them with friendly, knowledgeable service season after season, year after year, one customer at a time. It’s an honest, straight-forward mission and it’s created a bond of trust with our customers unlike any other retailer. We don’t just strive to satisfy customers, we strive to exceed their expectations.
One of our founding Principles of Doing Business at Lands’ End reads, “What is best for our customer is best for all of us.” Everyone here understands that concept. It is simply understood and an integral part of our DNA. Quality, value, service— it’s pretty well summed up in our straightforward two-word promise— Guaranteed. Period.®
How has Lands’ End changed the way it communicates with the customer over the years?
Lands’ End has always told an engaging product story, from the search for the ultimate cashmere sweaters made of fiber combed from Kashmir sheep in Inner Mongolia to the kid-friendly features built into outerwear that guarantee warmth and dryness. What began as a two-way dialog with a catalog and an 800 number is now seamlessly integrated with landsend.com, Lands’ End Shop Kiosks, email as well as Facebook and Twitter. Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have allowed us to evolve our two-way dialog into a three-way dialog, giving our customers the opportunity to engage with us as well as with each other.
We’re always looking for additional ways to connect with customers through new technology, but it’s the human connection that stays constant. For instance, we recently launched Lands’ End Live, an exclusive new video chat tool that allows us to bring the personal shopping experience to our landsend.com users, wherever they may be. It’s a terrific example of our commitment to connecting with our customers. Pairing state-of-the-art technology with top-notch customer service, our landsend.com users are able to see and talk to our personal shoppers through their computer screen. With literally thousands of product samples at their fingertips, our personal shoppers can demonstrate product features and show details about merchandise colors and patterns. The launch makes Lands’ End the first apparel retailer nationwide to offer customers this video chat option and it’s something we are extremely proud of.
What are some of the ways Lands’ End goes the extra mile for customers?
I think that having a culture that is entirely focused on the customer, and one that empowers our employees to always do what’s best for the customer has allowed us to consistently go the extra mile. Customer service is something that everyone in the company owns, from our Customer Care Specialists to our merchants and design teams. And when we can pitch in to surprise and delight one of our customers, we do it.
I think it’s also about listening to our customer. Really listening with an open mind, and answering with a smart solution.
With this customer-focused, can-do attitude, we have designed many unique features and benefits into our products. From “Grow-A-Long” features in kids’ outerwear to stylish mastectomy swimwear, we take great pride in offering our customers practical advantages. And of course, the stories are endless about how our Customer Care Specialists go the extra mile every day.
Let’s not forget about the little touches, like the handwritten thank-you notes we send to our new Lands’ End Canvas™ customers. And how we aim to always answer the phone with a live voice – often on the first ring.
Please share your favorite example of an extraordinary customer experience that truly reflects your employees’ commitment to customer service.
Here’s a fantastic example of how we rally around the customer. While browsing our Lands’ End Facebook page, one of our employees found a post from a customer who had a difficult time finding gloves that fit her 8-year-old son because he was born with only four fingers. Our merchants, sourcing and design teams worked with the customer to produce a pair of specially designed gloves that fit, well, just like a glove.
Here’s another great one — recently a mom called hoping to buy Lands’ End swimsuits for her daughter’s Barbie and American Girl dolls. While we don’t make swimsuits for dolls, two of our Customer Care Specialists caught wind of the request and offered to make some swimsuits for the dolls out of swimsuit fabric from our warehouse. I know we offer a wide range of sizes, but this is extraordinary! Just one of the countless examples of the high level of personal service we provide every day.
What kind of challenges do you face as you strive to maintain your standing with customers, as well as your reputation for quality customer service?
It’s certainly a challenge to stay in touch with our customers as lives and communication channels get busier and more fragmented every day. That’s why it’s so important to stay relevant. Remaining connected to the customer by anticipating their needs and providing the services Lands’ End has become known for – in ways that are most convenient for them – is key to building valuable relationships. So whether it is through social media, our call centers or online, we stay the course of being true to our heritage—to be the real, honest, approachable brand that made us trusted by so many customers.
How do you expect your approach to customer service will change in the coming years?
Our approach to customer service will continue to evolve and complement our customers and their busy lifestyle. We will adapt to changes in technology, but it will never depart from the fundamental principle at Lands’ End. What’s best for the customer is best for all of us.
COMMENTARY: Companies with a continuous reputation for offering great customer service do this by creating a customer-centric culture. Nordstrom's, FedEx, Southwest Airlines, Panera Bread, etc.
Lands' End's reputation for great customer service is epitomized in Principles for Doing Business:
Principle 1. We do everything we can to make our products better. We improve material, and add back features and construction details that others have taken out over the years. We never reduce the quality of a product to make it cheaper.
Principle 2. We price our products fairly and honestly. We do not, have not, and will not participate in the common retailing practice of inflating mark-ups to set up a future phony "sale."
Principle 3. We accept any return for any reason, at any time. Our products are guaranteed. No fine print. No arguments. We mean exactly what we say: GUARANTEED. PERIOD.®
Principle 4. We ship faster than anyone we know of. We ship items in stock the day after we receive the order. At the height of the last Christmas season the longest time an order was in the house was 36 hours, excepting monograms which took another 12 hours.
Principle 5. We believe that what is best for our customer is best for all of us. Everyone here understands that concept. Our sales and service people are trained to know our products, and to be friendly and helpful. They are urged to take all the time necessary to take care of you. We even pay for your call, for whatever reason you call.
Principle 6. We are able to sell at lower prices because we have eliminated middlemen; because we don't buy branded merchandise with high protected mark-ups; and because we have placed our contracts with manufacturers who have proven that they are cost conscious and efficient.
Principle 7. We are able to sell at lower prices because we operate efficiently. Our people are hard-working, intelligent, and share in the success of the company.
Principle 8. We encourage our customers to shop for our products in whatever way they find most convenient. Whether it is through our catalogs, our Web site, or in retail stores, we offer the same quality products at the same honest prices, with the same unconditional promise to stand by everything we sell.
I hate shopping and going to shopping malls. It gets worst during Christmas. I just hate it. Land's End is perfect for a customer like me. I like their products, quality and customer service. I love their product guarantee and return policy.
On one occasion I received a garment I had ordered from Land's End's catalog, but the sleeves were too short, so I called their customer service (the 800 number was right on the packaging), and the problem was resolved very quickly and satisfactorily. I returned the product in the same packaging and affixed a UPS return shipping label which peels off of the same package. Land's End contacted UPS and it was picked up that afternoon. A replacement garment was shipped out that same day, and I received it the very next day. I also received an email confirming that I had received the replacement. Wow, what great customer service.
The Great Recession has put a lot of catalog companies in a financial blind, several have gone out of business, but Land's End is an exception. It's not just the products, the great customer service, but the total shopping experience that they offer. These guys never miss a beat, and that I feel, is the reason for their longevity.
Courtesy of an article dated October 29, 2010 appearing in the National Retail Federation's Retail's BIG Blog
The etiquette for interacting with a customer who walks through the door of your business is pretty clear. In most cases, you greet them with a warm welcome and ask them what you can help them with.
But what about the times when a customer walks into your business through one of the many new social-network doors? Do you greet them there as well?
More and more smartphone-carrying customers are checking in on social, location-aware services such as Foursquare, Yelp, Gowalla and now Facebook Places. While these services are primarily consumer-focused, room exists for the business owner to step in and engage customers. While you don’t have to use every location-based application out there, it’s important to know what each one offers business owners.
Foursquare — reward loyal customers: Foursquare offers awards to users who check in frequently to places, in the form of points and badges. The person who checks in most frequently at the local coffee shop, for instance, becomes “The Mayor” of that coffee shop.
As a business owner, you can offer specials to those users: your “Mayor” ought to be recognized — but you might also want to acknowledge first-timers, or people who checked in 25 times. Offer them a discount, a free drink, whatever — it’s up to you. Just like the oft-seen frequent-buyer card, you also reward loyalty.
Yelp — interact with your critics: Yelp recently added the ability for users to check in to all of the businesses listed on its vast review site. As business owners, you can see all the check-ins (at least on the mobile app), yet there is no way to really engage a person who has checked in.
The main way a business owner interacts with their Yelp customers is through the reviews, but cross-referencing the check-ins with the reviews could provide some interesting information. Gowalla — put yourself in the game: Similar to Foursquare, Gowalla rewards users with pins — the Gowalla equivalent of Foursquare’s badges — according to how often and where they check-in. Gowalla also adds a geocaching element for users — they can look for, pick up and leave behind virtual items in the places they check-in to.
Business recently got the ability to claim their listing on Gowalla. The business can control the info on their location’ page and configure a welcome message users see when they check-in.
That’s it for now, but Gowalla promises more features are on the horizon. The network is expected to do more with its geocaching capabilities, allowing businesses to offer users custom stamps to collect — a feature that is currently available in San Francisco, New York City and Austin, Texas. Facebook Places — fish where the fish are: Facebook Places extends the functionality of Facebook’s “business pages,” where businesses can connect with customers and post information about themselves and events. Like other services on this list, users check-in to your business and the mobile app shows them who else from the Facebook universe is there (or has been there).
Currently, Facebook Places does not offer a way to fully engage with checked-in users — as you can with Foursquare — but Facebook might be waiting for third-party developers to build those kinds of tools on their platform. One such tool, called Context Optional, shows you a leaderboard for all your customers who have checked in the most. It’s a small step towards engagement, but a sign that Facebook Places has potential.
For now, Foursquare is a business owner’s best way to engage customers in the virtual world of geolocation-aware social networks. It offers you a way to reward (and thus acknowledge) those who are showing up and checking in. Have you had experiences engaging or interacting with customers through these location-aware social networks? Do you think it’s worth a business owner’s time to use them?
COMMENTARY: The latest Myxer BoomBox report on location-based social networks found that only 11% of respondents claim to use location-based services, with leading services differing greatly from those that get the most publicity.
According to Myxer's BoomBox 'check-in' report, of the 11% of respondents that do use location-based services, consumers heavily favored Booyah's' MyTown, which claimed 56% of those polled, while Loopt came in second place at 12%. Surprisingly, two of the more 'popular' services, Gowalla and Foursquare, trailed far behind MyTown, only capturing 8% percent each.
The study also revealed some surprising trends as they relate to preferences by those who use these services. 77% of respondents said they check into their network at home, more often than checking in from other venues.
For those who don't use the services, only 14% claimed privacy as the reason, while 56% claimed lack of interest, and nearly a quarter (23%) reported that their phone doesn't have the capability.
Of the 11% who reported using these networks, they appear to be increasingly active, with 73% citing an increase in their use of these services and only 27% reporting a decrease. And in terms of frequency, 31% said they check in at least once a day, and 26% said they check-in every hour, giving hope to a potential of high-engagement from a marketing perspective.
Additionally, among those polled who do use location-based social networks, 55% said that they have used location based social networks to attend a venue. Of those who attended venues using LBS, music events were most popular at 36%, followed by restaurants at 28% and bar/clubs at 19%.
"Our check-in report demonstrates that location-based social networks are growing but not mainstream yet," said Myk Willis, CEO of Myxer. "Suprisingly Booyah's MyTown seems to have the early lead in the space and most consumers check-in at home. We believe the success of such services hinges on the passive gaming element which may supercede true online-to-offline event discovery."
Since 2005, Myxer has cataloged various data points: age, gender, geographic location, phone model, manufacturer, carrier, as well as the operating system of each handset that initiated a download from its delivery platform that now supports more than seven million monthly unique visitors downloading over 80 million content items from Myxer each month. For this month's report, Myxer used PollDaddy, an online polling and survey tool, which gathered responses from more than 1,500 Myxer users.
This obviously does not bode very well for location-based check-in services when only 11% are actively using the service. Makes you wonder why?
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