SportsWrap had a post reach #1 on Digg's homepage... And this is the result:
The Cubicle Turns 40 Years Old... Design of the Cubicle 2.0?
This week marked the 40th anniversary of the Cubicle.
A momentous event that Time Magazine called a birthday celebration of "the soul-destroying workspace we call the modern cubicle."
Design firm IDEO and Dilbert Creator Scott Adams teamed up to design Cubicle 2.0 - perhaps the vision of cubicle life for the next 40 years? CNN has complete details of the launch event, which occurred on Pier 28 in San Francisco:
: Scott Adams inspects what may be the most popular amenity of Dilbert's ideal cubicle. It's a "snap hammock." You pull it from one wall module, hook it to another module across the cube -- and keep one eye on your "boss monitor" while you take a little siesta. Sweet dreams.
Battling for the Homepage: What is your Start Page?
I've had a few interesting email exchanges in the past week about start pages. One friend of mine recently converted to Netvibes - the other switched to iGoogle... and both made the switch from a single news service (ESPN.com and WashingtonPost.com respectively) to the multi-content aggregator. When asked what my start page is, I have a long-winded response:
- I don't really have a start page because my browser is always running and Firefox resumes all of your tabs when you restart
- I have 4 computers and have 4 different homepages depending on the primary use of that system / location
- I have a Netvibes page that runs 20 Widgetbox Blidgets from my favorite content / feeds... but I find myself going there only a few times a day
Instead, I rely on Firefox, email and rss. Those are my navigational pivots for the web.
I have customized my FF toolbar with hotlinks to my favorite pages, blogs, sites, etc. I use this throughout the day.
I set my FF navigation box to accept inputs that directly go to frequently visited destinations: g 'query' --> takes me to a google search for that query e 'query' --> goes to ebay a 'query' --> goes to amazon
Similar things are built for searches on stocks (f), yahoo (y), msn (m), berecruited (b), widgetbox (w), etc.
For content browsing, much of my navigation starts with email - it's how I find must-read articles and news (thanks to friends who fill my inbox). I use Digg for social news browsing (I have a Digg screensaver and commit to clicking and reading at least one article every time I return to my article). And I live by RSS - both as a publisher and a consumer.
Speaking of RSS feeds - if you're a high-volume feed user, you'll enjoy Josh Kopelman's latest post.
beRecruited Player Card Widget Launches
Exciting news - beRecruited has launched an interactive widget for athletes and fans. The Player Card enables athletes to showcase their profile, stats, photos, and videos in a customizable widget that can be embedded and shared throughout the web. The Fan Widget displays news, photos and videos from your favorite teams and players. There are 7 styles for each widget - so users can pick what color scheme works best with their website / profile page. This is an exciting opportunity for athletes to showcase themselves by embedding their beRecruited profiles throughout the web - enabling them to more effectively reach coaches, teammates and peers.
The Player Widget in black:
The Player Widget in white:
The Fan Widget in blue:
Happier Days on Wall Street (And How to Celebrate April 15th)
I've gotten too many emails in the last 72 hours from friends saying that the markets have caused havoc their New York / Chicago lives... Then Amazon sent me a merchandising email that reminded me that "Greed is Good" and that Wall Street is available on Blu-Ray. One of my favorite films. Another one of my favorite movies comes out April 15th and I will certainly be 'celebrating' tax day with Arnold Scwharzenegger and Carl Weathers on Blu-Ray (Rumors also suggest that Conan comes out on the 15th as well).
MOJO HD... MOJO is Almost Awesome
After hearing rave reviews from many friends, I gave MOJO HD a shot (a new all-HD TV channel)... and you know what? It's really good. The programming is v smart, different than anything that's available elsewhere and is all available in HD.
My favorite show is Start-Up Junkies - which follows Ron Wiener and Earth Class Mail (an intriguing Seattle start up that Russell has raved about since launch). Wall Street Warriors and Bobby G: Adventure Capitalist are also great.
... But, for a brand that is selling itself as intelligent and cutting-edge, MOJO ironically doesn't cooperate with DVRs - see MOJO doesn't tag their programs with episode-level data....
resulting in Comcast's inability to decipher what episodes are new / reruns... causing my DVR to record *every* MOJO show... causing my DVR to overwrite all my other non-MOJO programming...
Come on MOJO! You record all of your content in HD and you make all of your online content embeddable. Clearly you are tech savvy... so start tagging your programs as either "new" or "reruns". I beg you!
Yahoo Buzz Has Ability to Out Muscle Digg By Delivering Greater Traffic
A week after Yahoo Buzz launched, I suggested that Digg shouldn't have reason to be nervous unless Yahoo took advantage of their ability to deliver greater traffic to publishers: "...Yahoo has an opportunity to out-muscle Digg by delivering top content-providers more traffic than any other web property (and rumors are that Yahoo is willing to float top articles on Yahoo.com’s front door)."
Today, three weeks after Buzz launched, Michael Arrington suggests that Yahoo is in fact capable of this:
Yesterday we were linked from the Yahoo home page as well, for this story by Duncan Riley on Japanese ISPs blocking file sharers (see image above, click for larger view of how the links look). The link went live at 5:45 PM PST as one of the bottom four links in the news box (these send less traffic) and was up through the day. Despite the fact that yesterday was a Saturday (slowest traffic day of the week) and that it was up only 1/4 of the day, we had our highest traffic day ever and over 1,000 comments were left on the post.
While Yahoo Buzz fails in many key (but fixable) ways... this is scary news for Digg because their ecosystem is predicated on driving traffic to the publisher. Digg is successful in large part because blogs embed the Digg widget on every post and content creators submit their own content in the hopes of acquiring free traffic.
If
1. Yahoo Buzz opens itself up to all publishers (my single biggest complaint as I don't understand how a social news site can also be a closed community) 2. And Yahoo allows content from all publishers to reach the front door
We might see users flock to Buzz in hopes of seeing the sorts of traffic that TechCrunch saw... enough to take down the average server and enough to out-muscle anything Digg can provide.
An aside, Yahoo's ability to drive such tremendous traffic from its front door is precisely why they are still a massively valuable company, an under-utilized property and attractive to Microsoft...
Bootstrapping Your Startup – 12 Rules of Bootstrapping
One of the memes I’ve enjoyed following this past week started with Jason Calacanis’s How to Save Money Running a Start Up article (later followed by Michael Arrington, Mark Cuban, Duncan Riley, Signal vs Noise). All great read. In a similar style - here’s my take, based on my experience with beRecruited (and now sfEntrepreneurs), on bootstrapping your start up. 1. Love the idea. Mark Cuban started his list this way, and he’s absolutely right. You’ll be pouring time and energy into it – if you don’t love the concept and the product two things will happen: You’ll lose the passion required to run it and you’ll be an ineffective salesperson.
A friend of mine made his living selling Herbal Life and required all of his salespeople to use the products before selling them. They typically only sold the products they enjoyed / used regularly - and that made them excited, knowledgeable and effective salespeople.
2. Make sure the idea solves a problem / fills a need. There are a lot of ‘me too’ sites and ideas. Make sure there is a real need / calling for yours. Even when beRecruited was very young and very small, it was easy to communicate with potential users and partners because the value statement was simple and obvious: connect high school athletes with NCAA coaches. It also helped that we were the only players in this space.
3. Release and innovate. I am a firm believer that small companies are best served by continually releasing and innovating. I think it’s different if you’re building at high-touch product for Google or MSN – but as a bootstrapped startup, it enables you to build a user-base and learn from them. It also makes product releases more efficient (having major product launches undoubtedly takes longer than intended and consumers more resources than expected).
4. Know your users. Who are your users? What are their needs? Who are you marketing to? Understand this upfront – but capture all of the data to actually identify your users, their onsite behaviors, and where/when you can target them. I guarantee that your definition of a ‘user’ will change from the first business plan… capturing the data enables you to understand how and why.
5. Promote, promote, promote. Sell, sell, sell. As a bootstrapped startup, it’s all grass roots marketing. I must have passed out 100,000+ fliers at local sporting events (and employed my sisters to do the same). I wore beRecruited swim caps at national meets. I wrote articles (for free) for major industry publications like Swimming World. I always carried 50 business cards in my pocket (which didn’t even have my name on them, just the company’s and a coupon code) and kept a box of 500 VistaPrint promotional fliers in my glovebox. Hell, the back of my SUV has a “beRecruited.com, Free NCAA Recruiting” decal on it.
I used every free moment to talk about the site. Don’t be embarrassed – be proud.
Use the web to market. Get on Twitter and follow JasonCalacanis, LoicLemur, and Scoble to see how it’s done. The web makes marketing cheap and easy. Vistaprint, blogs, forums, Linked In, Twitter, etc.
6. ABG: Always be growing. One of the great movie lines is Alec Baldwin’s “always be closing” rant. For bootstrappers, I believe that it’s “ABG: Always Be Growing.” It’s easy to chase revenue to offset costs - but those are often short-term revenues that ultimately will be insignificant and are potentially distracting (from an operational perspective).
As a small startup, your traffic probably isn’t significant enough to make substantial money from AdSense. Is it worth interfering with the user-experience for <$1,000 / month? Grow the users and the pageviews. Use your time to release new features… chase revenues after you’ve solidified the product and secured a strong user-base.
7. Be efficient. Sounds obvious. Sounds easy.
But it’s neither. As a bootstrapper, you’re short on time and money. That means that efficiency is key. Before engaging in any single task, ask yourself (and/or your team) if this is worthwhile and priority #1.
8. Set partner expectations. Again – it sounds obvious, but it’s often overlooked. I’ve been on both sides of this – as the bootstrapped company working with large organizations and as part of eBay working with two-person start ups.
Set expectations about needs, constraints, timing, etc. I’ve worked with moonlighting developers who have said not to contact them between normal business hours. Great – by declaring that up front, I was a more effective partner and managed my time (and his) far better.
9. Attract great people – but not too many. Build a tight, smart and energetic team. Understand everyone’s skills and roles – and be very clear about responsibilities. Having too many people can be distracting and inefficient. The goal with any team is to achieve greatness, collaborate and move quickly - avoiding headaches, redundancies and wasted time is equally important.
Be sure that your partners are invested in the idea and the company.
10. Get great at email. This is particularly important for moonlight entrepreneurs who run their business and communications after hours… Email then becomes your communication medium with the team, your partners and your users. Realize that partners will likely read your email first thing in the morning (along with dozens of others) - so your message needs to be focused and clear. Email exchanges in normal business operations are often inefficient: lots of back-and-forth exchanges. When moonlighting, you normally have one exchange a day – so you either have to make it worthwhile or waste a day’s progress.
Email is also particularly important when the team lives in different locations (or is without a home office). Don’t litter inboxes because staying organized is critical - and everyone knows that organization is already near-impossible with a light mail flow.
11. Use a management system like Google Docs or Trac. Management platforms like Google Docs and Trac are lifesavers. We use Trac for sfEntrepreneurs and it’s an effective way to communicate between the business and development teams. It also is useful for managing documents, bugs and product roadmaps. We use Google Docs at beRecruited and it’s effective at managing content and data.
Find one that works for you and make sure that everyone uses it routinely. Make sure that the team is receiving all system updates and subscribes to the RSS alerts. These products don’t work if not actively used.
12. Buy your team Blackberries. The efficiency gain of having everyone connected will pay off the cost instantly.
12A. Drink a lot of coffee. Jason Calacanis’s point about espresso… dead on. Learn to enjoy it!
ESPN Knows Online – ESPN360 and ESPN Podcasts
I think ESPN and their online efforts go overlooked - mostly because they are so dominant on television and radio. But I have been *very* impressed with their online efforts recently:
Podcasts: The have the best podcasts on iTunes – by quantity and quality. ESPN podcasts are updated daily. Production quality is high. In my queue:
- Pardon the Interruption with Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon - Around the Horn video - The Thundering Herd with Colin Cowherd - The Best of Mike and Mike - ESPN Fantasy Focus - The BS Report with Bill Simmons - Stephen A Smith Show
Notice anything about this list? Most of the content is available on traditional format (television and radio) – yet ESPN is glad to give it away for free online (with ad support and sponsorship). Seems simple - but few other major brands are doing this.
ESPN360.com: Love it. If you haven’t used ESPN360.com – try it out. Streaming, real-time games for all ESPN network games. It’s phenomenal and, on some late work nights, it’s allowed me to watch Duke games. The quality is great and, like their podcasts, it’s groundbreaking in that no other networks stream all of their on-air content…. Live!
