Why Facebook Plugged Heroku Into Parse
If you want to attract developers, then you need to make their lives as easy as possible: Coding apps is challenging enough without spending time on testing, maintenance, scaling and other tasks that go along with it. We've just seen Twitter add Fastline integration to its Fabric platform, and Facebook made a counter move last week by plugging Heroku into Parse.
See also: Facebook’s New Parse Tools Aim For Pro Internet Of Things Developers
Parse is the app development toolkit acquired by Facebook back in April 2013. The obvious aim was to make it easier for developers to code apps that run on top of the social network. Adding Heroku support moves the mobile "back-end-as-a-service" further along that same road.
Dynamic Duo
Heroku and Parse have previously been able to work together, but now there's much less effort required by developers. The processes of creating and deploying a Heroku app, bookkeeping between Heroku and Parse apps, and registering webhooks can all be handled automatically by Parse from now on.
"If you like Parse's Cloud Code but wish you had a full Node.js environment, this is a great solution," Parse's Pavan Athivarapu wrote on the Parse blog. "We've created a smooth experience for you to run code on either Heroku or the Parse Cloud and we're very excited about the opportunities this combination has to offer."
Heroku's Matt Creager described the new integration as "the best of both worlds"—a solution that combines "the flexibility and customization of the Heroku platform and the convenience of Parse's cross-platform SDKs."
Where once developers would choose Heroku for power and flexibility or Parse for ease-of-use and speed, now they can have both together.
Casting The Developer Net
Like the Fastlane suite of tools acquired by Twitter, Heroku has a loyal set of fans behind it, and the new features could make Parse even more appealing to developers thinking about building on top of Facebook. Unlike Twitter's Fabric, Parse does include a "platform-as-a-service" component, so there's no need for a separate platform to run apps on.
Heroku will also make it easier for developers to bridge the gap between Parse's own Cloud Code and the Node.js engine, which Parse also supports as of last month. It offers a new level of scalability and maintenance management for apps of almost any size—covering everything from mobile apps to the growing Internet of Things.
A good week then for developers who want to concentrate on coding their apps with a minimum number of extra integrations or features to worry about. As for how many new developers Facebook can tempt into the fold, we'll have to wait and see.
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How Wearables Will Revolutionize the Workplace
Guest author Lindsey Irvine is the director of business development and strategic partnerships at Salesforce and heads up its Salesforce Wear developer platform.
We’ve been hearing a lot of buzz around how wearables will continue to enhance our everyday lives. From steps and calories, to sleep and diet, wearables are starting to show their influence on our personal lives. But what about the business opportunity and benefits to our professional lives?
This year alone, we’ve seen the introduction of everything from smart rings, watches and connected headbands. As exciting as they may seem for individuals, it’s actually the business implications of wearable devices that have many of us in the enterprise taking note.
See also: The Greatest Potential—And Obstacle—For Wearables At Work
According to the International Data Corporation’s (IDC) recent Worldwide Quarterly Wearable Device Tracker, it is estimated that 72.1 million wearable devices will be shipped in 2015, up 173.3 percent from 2014. Additionally, a study by Salesforce Research found that not only do wearable users experience an improvement in their business performance, but 79 percent agree that wearables are, or will be, strategic to their company’s future business success and 86 percent plan to increase their wearable investment.
These growth projections signify that it’s no longer a question of “if” but “when” the disruptive potential of wearable technologies will become more mainstream. When it happens, the biggest beneficiaries of the technology will be businesses in a variety of verticals.
Wearables Are About To Strap Themselves To Our Work
Wearables for work provide an opportunity to significantly improve productivity, efficiency and even safety, creating tremendous opportunities for those taking advantage...and notable risk for those not preparing a strategic response.
Here are just a few important ways that the wearables revolution for business is well underway, and some observations regarding what’s needed to drive the next phase of growth:
Intelligent Apps
At the moment, much of the wearable discussion is centered on the hardware devices themselves. Talk of the apps that will make those devices intelligent, workflow-enabled and truly disruptive is still in its early stages.
However, a focus on wearable apps—apps that will change the way we work and help bring complex business processes to life in a new, simple, visually compelling, action-oriented way—will take these devices from gadgets to valuable tools for the business. By 2017, Gartner predicts that wearable devices will drive 50% of total app interactions.
As wearable momentum grows, we see incredible parallels to the early days of the smartphone. Apps were instrumental in the proliferation of the smartphone and its ubiquitous usage, and now industries are being transformed based on the model. At Salesforce, we believe an expanding enterprise app ecosystem will fuel wearable tech adoption and help drive transformations in how we live and work.
Context in the Cloud
Wearables will enable teams to be more connected to the digital world while being more present in the real world.
Checking a mobile phone or opening a laptop during a meeting, or while out in the field, can be a distraction and a little time consuming. But by glancing at a connected smartwatch or peering through connected eyewear, a sales rep or field service technician can quickly and discretely access critical information, all while being hands free. The key will be to assure that wearable technology and enterprise wearable applications are able to leverage business data to highlight the right information, at the right time, to drive the right business action.
Tapping into a complete 360-degree view of your customers via data that your company has added to its CRM, will drive the relevant business actions, insights and workflow that are needed to accelerate improved efficiency and productivity. The potential here is incredible.
BYOW (Bring Your Own Wearable)
When people fully embrace new connected technology, they want to use it in their personal and professional lives. Forward-thinking employers recognize that an employee’s use of personal technology can increase operational efficiency and productivity. This presents a tremendous opportunity for software developers to build business applications that IT organizations can push down to employees’ devices, including wearables.
Some partners and developers are already doing just that: for example, Alpine Metrics offers a data analytics app for smartwatches called Intelligent Forecasting, which allows sales professionals to get a quick and consistent view of their trending sales. NewVoiceMedia has created a smartwatch app that takes caller ID to the next level, and Vlocity has given sales and service professionals within communications and media companies new ways to identify sales opportunities and provide better customer service, right from your wrist.
Companies that are implementing pilot programs for wearables are seeing early successes. By getting ahead of the latest technologies, early adopters are able to provide input and help shape the future of wearable technologies, making them smarter, faster, more functional and more tightly integrated with daily business operations. The possibilities for wearables in the workplace are truly endless and we can’t wait to see what the next chapter has in store.
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Amazon's Cloud Business Is Worth At Least $70 Billion
Two years ago VMware president Carl Eschenbach snidely suggested that he found it "really hard to believe that we cannot ... beat a company that sells books."
Two years later, the truth has become blindingly clear: He can't.
In fact, two years later and an amazing quarter later, it's equally clear that Amazon is increasingly "a computing company with books," as Quentin Hardy tweeted:
What's less obvious is just how big Amazon Web Services has become, in terms of overall value of the business. Logging $2.09 billion in its latest quarter, AWS is on a $8 billion run-rate, booming 78% year over year. So, if AWS were a standalone company, what would it be worth?
Roughly $70 billion.
$70 Billion Might Be The Conservative Estimate
That number comes from The Wall Street Journal's financial editor, Dennis Berman:
But, it's worth noting, it could be much, much higher.
As EchoSign co-founder Jason Lemkin notes, Buddy Media, a cloudy SaaS ("software as a service") company growing at roughly the same pace as Amazon (albeit on much lower revenues), was acquired at a 20X valuation multiple. That would put AWS' valuation at $160 billion. Pretty heady stuff.
Closer to earth, SAP acquired SaaS company Successfactors at a roughly 10X valuation multiple. That would put AWS at $80 billion.
See also: Amazon To Everyone: You're Toast
If we leave the enterprise software (SaaS or otherwise) world behind, and focus on companies that get a big multiple based on their potential to grow fast and completely change industries and the world, we get companies like Facebook (24X, putting AWS at $192 billion) and Twitter (14X, or $114 billion in AWS valuation terms).
The actual valuation for Amazon doesn't matter that much. What's much more interesting is how much value Amazon is giving its customers.
Why Amazon Is Winning
Two years ago VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger declared, "We all lose if they end up in these commodity public clouds." But it's clear the only losers are the companies that persist in trying to "extend our franchise from the private cloud into the public cloud and uniquely enable our customers with the benefits of both," as Gelsinger went on to say.
Those companies include Oracle, IBM, and other legacy heavyweights with mountains of cash to fund a shift to cloud, yet with very little to show for their investments. They blame currency fluctuations and other "headwinds," but Amazon deals with those same headwinds and has grown at a torrid pace.
It would be easy to lamely say, as these companies have, that "change is hard!" But Microsoft, with tens of billions of cash at stake in its legacy businesses, is seeing soaring demand for its Azure public cloud, which saw Azure revenue and compute usage double year over year.
Because, you know, Microsoft isn't just trying to stick a cloud label on its legacy business. It's actually building a serious rival to AWS, and in the process has more than doubled the cloud platform progress of Oracle, SAP, HP, and IBM.
It's All Public Cloud
Let me make this clear: Public cloud is winning, and in a massive way. Only AWS and Microsoft Azure are credible contenders today, because they're the only two building serious public clouds designed for developer productivity rather than ways to keep customers tied to their outdated and outmoded products.
Today AWS is worth close to half the value of IBM's ($141 billion) or Oracle's ($161 billion) entire businesses, will shortly displace SAP ($92 billion), and already exceeds that of HP ($53 billion).
It's only going to get worse for these titans, because AWS promises a different, better way to think about enterprise software. But for customers and developers, things are just going to keep getting better.
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New Mandatory Drone Registration: The Worst-Case Scenarios
This post appears courtesy of the Ferenstein Wire, a syndicated news service. Publishing partners may edit posts. For inquiries, please email author and publisher Gregory Ferenstein.
Federal regulators are eyeing the drone industry.
Earlier this week, the U.S. Department of Transportation announced a task force charged with setting the new rules around mandatory registration for some commercial drones. The yet-to-be-determined rules have drone enthusiasts and lobbyists worried about what regulations could do to the nascent industry.
Reports indicate that mandatory registration is created primarily so that law enforcement can hunt down operators who cause public safety violations, like recent drone crashes at sporting events or those buzzing dangerously close to commercial airliners. If a drone is recovered at a crash site, a registration number will make it easier to find the culprit.
So, what's to worry about simple registration? I asked experts about the worst-case scenario, to see if all the handwringing was justified. They mentioned several.
Burdening Consumers And Manufacturers
One of the consensus concerns was overburdening consumers. Make it too cumbersome for a parent to buy their child a flying toy, and they'll just buy something else.
"There is the risk that this a federal registry could be bad for the industry overall by being overly broad, e.g. requiring every kid with a toy drone to be on a federal list," said Daniel Castro, vice president of industry lobby The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation. "If we make it too hard for users to have these devices, they won't buy them."
Similarly, the rules are supposed to come out by the winter, which is especially worrisome for manufacturers who make much of their money during the holidays. "The task force is expected to complete its work a month from now in order to have a program in place for the holiday shopping season," said Doug Johnson, VP of technology for the Consumer Electronics Association.
Given the tight timeline, one expert worries if agencies will even have the capacity to handle such an operation. "I'm not sure how an agency that is already getting extra manpower just to make regulations about drones in the first place is going to successfully get the bureaucracy to process registrations set up, much less operate efficiently," said Jeremy Gillula of civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Curtailing Free Speech And Privacy
"A national registry has serious implications for privacy," Castro argued. "Journalists may want to use drone photography to investigate government or industry corruption, or citizen journalists may want to use drones as part of a protest."
He urges lawmakers to come up with rules that still protect legitimate anonymous actions where possible.
The EFF is especially concerned that the feds are overstepping their authority and not permitting the usual democratic process to take place.
"The bigger issue is that they seem to be completely ignoring normal federal procedures for enacting new regulations," warned Gillula. "They haven't issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking."
An FAA spokesperson responded by saying that drones qualify as aircraft, which are already subject to regulation: "By statute all aircraft are required to be registered. Congress has defined 'aircraft' to include UAS [unmanned aircraft system], regardless of whether they are operated for commercial purposes or by modelers and hobbyists. No rule is necessary to implement this statutory obligation."
So, whatever the rules, the feds clearly think they are writing regulations within their legal mandate.
The public will know more in the coming months. But, it seems that experts do have legitimate concerns—especially with the busy holiday season fast approaching.
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The Scoop On Continuous Delivery Of Software Releases
Guest author Edith Harbaugh is CEO and cofounder of LaunchDarkly, a firm that specializes in "dark launches” or “canary deployment" for companies, so they can deliver features to some users and gauge their reaction before rolling them out to everyone.
Today, the smartest companies are releasing software thousands of times a day in an approach called “continuous delivery,” a software-development practice of continuously releasing functionality in small chunks.
When I first started in the software industry in the 1990s, Microsoft was on a five-year release cycle, SAP three years, and Salesforce was just beginning to get traction. I worked at a Java groundbreaker called Epicentric, whose one-year release cycles were considered "blazing fast.” We even had big “release parties” to celebrate them. Now yearly releases are considered quaint. Now my own company, LaunchDarkly, releases “even on Friday afternoon”—traditionally a no fly zone.
What’s fueling the spread of continuous delivery is supporting technologies like SaaS, Continuous Integration, as well as business needs like user expectations, lean startups, and most interestingly, employee satisfaction.
User Expectations
It used to be enough to release a new version of Windows every four years. Then companies like Facebook set the bar high with software that continually evolves.
The Facebook of 2015 is different than the Facebook of 2010, and the Facebook of 2020 will be even more different. It’s not enough to ship a piece of software and call it “done.” Acompli, a mobile-first mail app, faced an uphill battle in a very crowded field.
“We had to earn every single user, by building a products that was both ‘loved by users and trusted by IT,” said Kevin Henrikson, partner director of engineering at Microsoft and previously co-founder of Acompli.
Mobile has traditionally been tricky territory for continuous delivery, as Apple requires a review of all apps before they push live to customers. Even so, fast-moving companies like Accompli continuously delivered to beta users, who downloaded builds directly. Now a part of Microsoft, Acompli formed the basis for its Outlook app, which is used by billions worldwide.
Lean Startup
Companies want to break value into smaller and smaller chunks to see if they’re delivering value to their customers. It’s devastating for a company to work for two years on a huge release, only to find they’ve completely missed the market.
Smart companies like Yammer deliberately engineer their process to get as fast feedback as possible. "You’ll always have imperfect information, so you have to move quickly with the facts you have, so that you can get more data,” said Kris Gale, VP of engineering at Yammer and now CTO at Clover Health. "You’ll always know more tomorrow, but that doesn’t mean you can be paralyzed today.”
Employee Satisfaction
Engineers want to see their work out in the world. From their perspective, the worst thing is to spend years on a product that never sees the light of day.
Duke Nukem Forever, the followup to the hit game Duke Nukem 3D, took an extraordinary 15 years to develop value. "If an engineer hears in an interview that it’ll take them months to ship something, they don’t want to join the company,” said Will Aldrich, VP of product at SurveyMonkey.
With continuous delivery, engineers can quickly see their hard work go out to real-life users. What has changed the game is the rise of “Software as a Service” (SaaS), which allows users to access functionality over a web browser or mobile app, rather than downloading software application. That makes deployment faster and simpler; if a user has to physically install software, it’s impossible to do true continuous delivery.
All software used to be physically installed on customers' machines. When I was engineering manager at Vignette, we had a “Supported Platform Matrix” to let us know which databases and application servers our software could be installed on.
It was an ever moving arms race—Oracle would add 10, and we’d have to retest it with BEA WebLogic. Given the complexities, customers generally didn’t want to update more than once a quarter (if even that—some customers clung to Oracle 6 long after even Oracle had shelved it).
Now, with the rise of the cloud, customers no longer feel the pain of installation. They just log into a web browser on their desktops or phone apps, and get the functionality they want.
Continuous Integration
Formerly, developers would code on their local machines, checking code in. When a branch was stable enough, it would be given to Quality Assurance testers to find any issues.
Microsoft had a 2-1 QA to developer ratio, since it was imperative that their software be bulletproof. The back and forth between developers and QA could stretch out, as bugs had to be re-verified on each build.
Now, with continuous integration, unit tests can be run in minutes, to better ensure quality. Companies like Rainforest QA can quickly verify within minutes basic functionality, in real time. If every feature needs a two to one QA to developer ratio with deep thorough manual testing, continuous delivery stretches out.
Continuous delivery is a virtuous circle—by delivering features quicker to end users, both employees and customers are happier.
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How To Evaluate Your Digital Marketing Campaign
Guest author Stephen Moyers is an online marketer, designer, avid tech-savvy blogger. Associated with Los Angeles–based SPINX Digital Agency, he writes about online marketing, web design, development, social media marketing and more.
Each marketing strategy is unique, but every marketing strategy should include evaluation. No matter what business you are in, be certain that you aren’t throwing good money after bad by continuing a strategy that is not performing.
Some companies act like digital marketing is a magic tonic with an immediate effect that just continues on. When they fail, others think it’s because they were using standards designed for traditional marketing.
Both are common problems, and they can be solved by understanding the similarities and differences between digital and traditional campaigns.
Identify Your Goals
Every marketing strategy should have a specific goal, so you can ultimately distinguish between success and failure. It’s also impossible to achieve a meaningful measure of return on investment (ROI), which relies on having a concrete expectation to match the actual returns to.
Goals must be concrete. You can't perform ROI calculations without some measure of what you're looking for. And it may not always be sales. While the traditional way to calculate ROI is by counting the money acquired compared to money spent, that doesn’t work for Facebook likes, retweets, or other some other measure of customer interaction. Whatever you're looking for, it’s easier to find non-monetary indicators online than through traditional business models.
See also: The Biggest Digital Marketing Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make
There’s a better way: First, determine how much effort you spent—whether that was time spent, number of posts, or amount of money spent on a campaign, the investment must be defined. For the returns, you need a numerical value, such as number of likes or the number of people referred to your webpage. Once you figure out what to measure, then you can perform a ratio calculation. The number might not be as convenient as the traditional ROI formula, but it will give you a base to work with.
Identify Your Customer Base
Although you may consider a campaign successful based on numbers alone, you could be missing the bigger picture. That same campaign may have been a failure on demographics, which can be critical. To truly evaluate its success, focus on identifying your customer base. It will give you a better idea of how effective your targeting was.
If you reached an unexpected demographic, be prepared to analyze it further—whether you reached your goal numbers or not. You could have inadvertently reached a broader range of people than you expected, or grabbed a different group than you wanted. Be sure to check the relative proportions of your demographic. Whatever you learn, take it and apply it to the next one.
An effective digital presence can influence areas far outside the physical geographic scope of a company, no matter its actual size. Smaller companies can have results many times larger than their size would allow otherwise, thanks to the intimacy their small size brings to the table. Though larger companies may never feel as personal to their users as startups can, they have many more resources.
The responsiveness of the web can have a huge impact on a company’s digital presence, both positive and negative, and its effects can extend to all areas of the business. Companies should take care, because a mishap in one web campaign can have major repercussions.
Examine your ROI and other sources to determine the effects of your digital presence. With large ROI and good levels of influence, you shouldn’t have to change any part of your marketing plan. If ROIs are less than expected, take a look at your demographics and campaign strategy. You may have inadvertently alienated your core demographics. Make certain your message is consistent across all platforms. If all else fails, look at what companies succeeding in this area are doing and mirror them.
Evaluate Your Strategy, And Then Expand
No strategy is perfect. Even the most successful marketing campaigns have areas for improvement. In the evaluation phase, consider the previous sections and any potential flaws in the process.
For an extra set of eyes, hiring a professional digital marketing analyst can be an important investment. They are trained in evaluating marketing strategies and can offer invaluable assistance, regardless of whether your campaign met its goals or not. if your strategy didn’t work, they can help identify what went wrong and how to fix the problem. If it did, they can help you identify your next steps.
A successful marketing plan usually leads to another, in an effort to expand the business. No matter what population you are expanding into, you need to evaluate the new demographic and pinpoint the differences between it and your current audience. If enough of your target audience has changed, you need to approach it like an entirely new demographic. Never assume that you know how your target group will react to your campaign.
Be sure to test your ideas before launching the new campaign, even if the type of target users appears to be the same. Already established audiences can change over time.
If you’re expanding beyond your country’s borders, the move can bring both new risks and opportunities. An international audience often comes with cultural differences that should factor into your strategy. Don’t hesitate to hire experts in all aspects of the target culture, if necessary. You don’t want clashes or misunderstandings coming back to haunt you.
No matter how far you seek to expand, you’ll want to test your audience, and never make assumptions about how people will receive your campaign. Ad remember: There’s something to learn from both successes and failures that can help your digital marketing strategies evolve.
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From Idea to Entrepreneur In 30 days: An Engineer’s Insights Into Crowdfunding
Guest author Daniel Daoura is CEO and cofounder of Pebblebee, and a former Boeing engineer with experience running several successful crowdfunding campaigns.
Historically, independent engineers and developers have two options when looking to start a company: bootstrapping with their own funds or approaching angel investors or venture capitalists. Now for the past 6 years, platforms like KickStarter, IndieGoGo, Kiva, Peerbackers, and Fundable have been offering a less risky way for startups and independent developers to break into the market.
Many startups have tapped into the power of the public to fuel their launch or growth. Crowdfunding can be very rewarding, but also fraught with challenges—not just in product development, but also for the personal development of the engineers and other staffers. It’s a natural part of the process.
See also: 9 Unexpected Pitfalls of Raising Capital (And How to Avoid Them)
I’ve run three very successful campaigns and gathered several insights into the journey. Here are a few that crowdfunding hopefuls should be aware of and prepared for.
Guidance Into The Unknown
No one at our company had marketing experience when we started our first crowdfunding campaign. By the end of it, we had all cut our teeth in a wide variety of marketing techniques and learned a great deal on the entire product release cycle.
The reason we approached crowdfunding, aside from generating investment, was to test the market, learn who would be interested in our product, and how much demand there would be. It also gave us more efficient product development. Instead of releasing something we could only hope that consumers would like, we gathered feedback from potential users along the way and created new iterations until we met their expectations.
We also learned how crowdfunding platforms like IndieGoGo operate. Crowdfunding sites are similar to a pre-order shopping cart that takes a fee for helping to generate traffic. To maximize their earnings, crowdfunding sites take the campaigns that they see are generating rapid momentum and push them to the front of the website in hopes that they gain more.
We took into account the “momentum” metric to increase our odds of success, carefully preparing email lists to drive a high volume of initial contributions quickly. The site noticed and gave it a high profile by putting our project on the front page. That valuable real estate allows campaigns to really take off. In our latest campaign, we aimed to raise $30,000 to help pay for tooling and the first round of manufacturing for our new product. We ended up raising $91,000—300% of our goal—from about 1,700 contributors.
Getting Social Validation
Social validation means confirming demand for the product. According to a survey of startup founders by Fortune, the biggest reason that startups fail is due to a lack of real need for the product on the market. Pitching your concept to the general public is a low-risk, but very helpful way of ensuring that you’re building a product that meets a market need.
A successful campaign gives you credibility that is backed up by real numbers. With our latest, we were able to show that 17,000 people with $90,000 believed in our product. This validation has put us on a much better foot in investor negotiations with venture capitalists.
VCs invested a record-breaking $17.5 billion in 1,189 deals in the second quarter of 2015, according to the MoneyTree Report, which sounds promising. But, with 543,000 new businesses opening in the U.S. alone each month, there is plenty of competition out there.
In other words, if you want to stand out, then crowdfund.
Expanding Your Team
By the time you launch your campaign, you’ve probably already put in hours developing your product, perhaps alone in a darkened room straight out of Frankenstein. But with crowdfunding, you don’t have to go it alone anymore. You can easily expand your team by the thousands.
We received loads of feedback about all aspects of the product, particularly for design and functionality. Your crowdfunding team can collect thousands of opinions for free, allowing a drastic reduction in the time spent on research and product design, since you can avoid building out features that won’t get used.
If you're strategic, you can even enlist your backers to help in other ways—like spreading the word and providing support. (One way to turn big fans into promoters is with a referral system, in which they get some sort of benefit for backers or customers your way.) Generate enough support, and the “team” may even act like a free customer service department, helping each other by answering questions on the forum. These suggestions and answers can have even more value coming from another backer, rather than you.
So without hiring anyone or paying a dime, you have at least grown your marketing, research and design, and customer service departments. That frees you to run the business and offers a good example to emulate, once your project is finished.
The Overall Experience
There a lot of benefits to crowdfunding, but there are also pitfalls. Working within this bubble, you're allowed to project your unfinished business plan and even make some mistakes. But those aren’t the real standards if you were, for instance, approaching a VC for investment.
Things still aren’t perfect, even in the best-case scenario of meeting or blasting through your campaign goal. A Kickstarter or IndieGoGo hit doesn't guarantee long-term success. Many companies slide away into obscurity afterward due to lack of visibility, ineffective PR management or other reasons.
However, in my experience, the potential benefits of crowdfunding massively outweigh the negative. Here are some of the top takeaways from our campaigns:
- Preparing a reliable email list is critical. When launching a new product specifically in crowdfunding an extensive, strong email list is critical because the first 24-48 hours are crucial to gaining at least 30% of your overall goal and getting pushed to the crowdfunding site’s front page. For example, if your goal is to raise $30,000, you need to raise $10,000 in 24-48 hours. That means you need to have 8,000 emails with .5 conversion rate (which is on the high end) that give a $25 contribution each on average.
- Press is paramount. Crowdfunding sites are attractive because they generate lots of traffic to your campaign organically, however, they aren’t enough to reach the numbers you need to start a business from the ground up. If you are doing things right you have media attention.
- A successful crowdfunding campaign is only 1% of the battle. Maybe you’ve spent months prepping for the 45 actual days of fundraising. But the next step could take up to the rest of your life, if you’re committed to growing a company.
Whether you meet your financial goals or not, you will never finish a crowdfunding campaign with less than with what you started with. Because the true value of crowdfunding is not just the money raised; it’s the process.
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12 Ways to Get an Industry Rock Star to Join Your Startup
Guest author Scott Gerber is the founder of the Young Entrepreneur Council.
When you're a young entrepreneur, you might be excited to start something with your peers. However, you likely also recognize that more experienced talent would help you out. If you don't have years of industry experience, you're probably making more than a few rookie mistakes. The right talent, especially on your senior leadership team, can help you make better decisions as you grow.
So how do you convince more experienced folks to join your team, especially when your startup is relatively unproven? Twelve young entrepreneurs from YEC share the tactics they used to convince industry rock stars to sign on.
Let Them Make A Difference
In my experience, the best more-experienced hires tend to be the executives with big-company experience who appreciate the difference they can make in a smaller environment with much faster decision-making. Someone who led a sales or product development team can make more independent decisions and have a much bigger impact in a startup environment. In a meritocracy, the standout performers will be recognized and acknowledged, creating a very positive feedback loop. —Elliot Bohm, CardCash
Focus On Vision And Challenges To Solve
In the current market environment, talented senior people have a huge number of opportunities. As a startup, you will not be able to compete on compensation, and if you do attract someone because you're the highest bidder, be ready to lose them when someone else inevitably has more money. Focus your recruiting on what problems you're trying to solve and what your bigger vision is. We recently brought on a technical lead who'd spent the previous four years at a high-growth startup. He was passionate about our vision, but also loved the culture of our company. Make someone happy with their team and fulfilled in their projects, and you'll have a great long-term partner. —Aaron Schwartz, Modify Watches
Make It Exciting
Many people love the idea of a startup, but personal situations do not always allow them to start something from scratch on their own. If they can plug themselves into a startup that is a bit more established and use their expertise and skill to make it better, that can be an exciting change for their career. They are no longer just a cog in a machine, and can truly make a difference. Letting them participate in the financial upside when the company is a success also makes it more compelling, and makes them feel like they are part of something. —Jay Johnson, Small Lot Wine
Always Be Improving
We were told by a veteran in the industry that one of the most exciting parts of our organization is the sense that we are "tinkering"—innovating by looking under the hood of the model and striving for creative ways to make it better. For more experienced folks, the lure of being able to "tinker," to try new things and break out of more firmly rooted ways of thinking, can be appealing. —Lindsay Tanne, LogicPrep
Have Them Talk To Founders And Early Employees
The proof is in the pudding for more experienced professionals. Have them connect with your cofounders and early employees, and hear directly from them why they left their previous jobs to work with you. The people on your team can tell the story of why it's worth it to work at your startup from a different perspective, one that's not as invested in the outcome of recruiting as yours. Potential new hires with more experience will also appreciate this as a sign of confidence that the people already on your team are happy with their work and enjoy themselves at your startup. Make sure to connect these potential experienced new hires with people within your company who have a similar background and history to their own, so it'll be easier for them to relate to each other. —Dave Nevogt, Hubstaff
Match Their Purpose
We recently hired a VP with more than 20 years of experience who had an offer from us (a fast-growing but midsize PR firm) and an offer from a publicly traded powerhouse company. There's no way we could have competed on stock options, perks, 401K, salary, and so forth. What it came down to for her was that we had a need that perfectly aligned with the purpose she was pursing in her career. In her former position, she was hired for one roll, but the company truly needed her to do something else (which she did). Now she's with us, doing exactly what we said we needed, which is what she wanted all along, and she's flourishing. —Beck Bamberger, BAM Communications
Bring Them On As A Cofounder
I met my current cofounder when he reached out to me via LinkedIn. We're both from the same city and when we met to discuss further, I was very impressed by his honesty and willingness to build something together. We needed to figure out if we were a good fit, and also how much of our own money we were willing to put up for bootstrapping our company. Because he met me with a spirit of collaboration and sharing, I was much more willing to be open about my own finances. We settled on an equal contribution of startup capital that was feasible for us both, committed to sharing equity 50-50 and haven't looked back since. I was an experienced entrepreneur and software development consultant at that point, but I was willing to come on board because I was treated fairly, as an equal. —Jared Brown, Hubstaff
Show Them Your Plan For Success
Do not just convince, but show the individual where you are going and how you are going to get there. Allow them to believe they are an integral piece of the plan. A potential employee will want to join something they feel like they are a part of, and also something that is headed in the right direction. —Jayna Cooke, Eventup
Let Your Product Speak For Itself
My company, Uassist.me, has some really amazing partnerships right now. You really don’t have to do a lot of convincing if your service or product speaks for itself. For us, it’s been a matter of having a person sign up to work with one of our virtual assistants, and after working with us for a while, coming to realize they want to be part of our team and what we’re building. —Alfredo Atanacio, Uassist.me
Make It Easy To Say Yes
Everyone has different motivations and desires. Try to determine why each candidate is interested in your company, and then focus on the important items. This could be responsibility, prestige, money or a hundred different things. If you can identify their true desires then you can make your best effort to give them an offer they can't refuse. When we made a key C-level hire we faced this exact problem. As a small company we did not have the bank balance to compete on straight salary, but the individual placed huge value on flexibility, responsibility and a feeling of ownership. These were things we could easily accommodate while other, more cash-rich companies could not. The result has been fantastic, and we got to add some much needed "grey hair." —Douglas Hutchings, Picasolar
Develop Experienced Executives As Advisors
One approach to getting the best people in the world excited about your business is to develop them as advocates, and to be less concerned initially about the specific role they could potentially play. A lower commitment advisory role is a great way for someone to get to know you and the business, see the trajectory of your business first hand and get excited about what you’re doing. —Katrina Lake, Stitch Fix
Showcase Your Own Background
"Startup" can be a dirty word to some people in sectors like real estate and finance, so it's important to build a strong bridge between expertise and opportunity. Let potential senior hires know how your own background and experiences shaped your outlook and led you to your current venture. —Heather Schwarz-Lopes, EarlyShares
Photo by Jonathan Kos-Read
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The White House Doesn't Need To Spend $700K On "Standing Desks"
This post appears courtesy of the Ferenstein Wire, a syndicated news service. Publishing partners may edit posts. For inquiries, please email author and publisher Gregory Ferenstein.
The White House reportedly wants to shell out a whopping $700,000 for standing desks. While it's true that sitting all day long has debilitating health effects, and it's smart business to keep employees healthy, it's an extraordinary amount of money to pay for something that can be recreated with a free cardboard box. Additionally, the research on standing desks (as opposed to treadmill walking desks) is far less clear about the actual impacts on health.
See also: Why Silicon Valley Will Care About The Republican Race For Speaker
Standing desks have become a trend in modern offices, as businesses rage against the dangers of prolonged sitting. An entire cottage industry of fancy standing desks, which range from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand, have raced to fill the void. The higher end standing desks automatically raise and lower with the touch of a button.
But is it really worth the splurge for D.C. (or anyone, really) to fork over nearly three-quarters of a million dollars?
Standing Out
Fortunately, for most employers, few people need a desk specifically designed for standing. Any old desk can be converted to a standing desk for cheap. The former CEO of Hulu.com once showed me how he constructed his own standing desks out old candy boxes. I do the same thing at my workplace: I use stacks of books or boxes lying around. It's free, and it can work just as well.
If the CEO of a major tech company can use a cheap low-tech solution, so can most everyone else. I simply place my laptop on top of the box when I need to stand, and take it off to sit. It's really that simple.
The thing about workplace health is less about sitting, but prolonged time in any position. Standing or walking for prolonged periods of time come with their own detrimental health impacts. The goal is, generally speaking, to hold many positions throughout the day, transitioning between sitting, walking, standing and even working out.
Moreover, the benefits of standing desks aren't entirely clear. A recent meta-analysis (study of studies) found that standing desks had mild benefits for weight loss and cholesterol, but could also induce discomfort. Working at a standing desk requires (very) good posture sustained over a long period of time, which can be difficult without training.
If the White House really wanted to shell out some money for something that would have a huge impact, treadmill desks would be the way to go. Treadmill desks help people lose weight, be active, and improve productivity.
There are exceptions, of course. A worker who has to use multiple large screen monitors all day long might need a standing desk (it's hard to move around a big screen throughout the day). And, standing desks are especially good for obese workers, who can benefit a lot from minor amounts of exercise.
But, other than those exceptions, the White House could have just asked its staffers to stack some old books and save taxpayers a lot of money.
*For more stories like this, subscribe to the Ferenstein Wire newsletter here.
Lead photo by Tom Lohdan
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Developers Are The New Conductors
Guest author Matthew Baier is the COO of Built.io.
There's a scene in the new Steve Jobs movie where Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak, the engineering genius who worked on the hardware and software of Apple's earliest computers, confronts Jobs and asks, "What do you do?"
"Musicians play their instruments," Aaron Sorkin's fictionalized Jobs answers, comparing himself to a conductor. "I play the orchestra."
Of all the flaws in Sorkin's movie, this may be the biggest. The metaphor of creator as conductor is on the mark. But he assumes a dichotomy between Woz, the developer, and Jobs, the product czar.
In fact, developers are becoming more like conductors than ever. Now you can aspire to be both Woz and Jobs. And you should.
Let The Music Play
Steve Wozniak wrote the BASIC software that popularized the Apple ][ in binary code—that's a first-generation programming language. We're now on to fourth- and fifth-generation programming languages, all built on higher layers of abstraction so we can spend less time with the mechanics of code and more with the problems we want to solve. Likewise, we've seen the rise of integrated development environments and drag-and-drop development tools. The barriers to creating full-featured applications has never been lower.
As a result, fewer and fewer developers are in the business of actually building applications from the ground up. I saw this as a visible trend at the recent API World and Integrate 2015 conferences, which attracted thousands of developers and fueled an active discussion on this very topic.
Developers not building applications—at least in the traditional sense—isn't as absurd as it sounds. Borrowing from a musical analogy, developers today act less like Woz, patiently typing 1s and 0s for hours at a time, and more like Jobs—pulling together pieces of software created by others into a cohesive whole.
The role of a conductor is, in essence, the orchestration of musical "services" contributed by different instruments. The goal is to assemble all the individual musical components into a package that can be appreciated and consumed by the intended audience.
Here's why this is exciting for developers: Conductors often don't play an instrument themselves, but that doesn't stop them from teasing out a magnum opus from the players seated before them. Similarly, developers can create an application masterpiece by tapping into the expertise of their virtuoso peers, foregoing the need to learn and build every single part from scratch.
O Brave New World, That Has Such Apps In't!
Developers today have plenty of options when it comes to choosing their "instruments": ubiquitous REST APIs, composable microservices, mobile backend-as-a-service, among many other tools.
Of course developers aren't the only ones benefitting here. Companies can develop applications much more quickly and realize far more ambitious technology projects, without having to track down an army of highly skilled experts.
This brave new world of composing applications, instead of constructing them, isn't without its challenges. As developers worry less about creating complicated functionality from scratch, they inherit the mandate to closely examine the source of the components they're planning to integrate. They must further think about the connective tissue and the methods of integration.
Fundamental concerns about security get more complicated as data traverses multiple systems. Similarly, scaling becomes a lot less trivial as overall application performance may be dependent on several third party services and the responsiveness of their corresponding APIs.
For anyone developing software for enterprises, this approach will trigger questions around procurement and support, not to mention the need to ensure that legal restrictions and policies are complied with across all the different parts of the solution. (This is where the truly Jobsian conductor might get frustrated.)
Selected thoughtfully, however, the right tools combined with a complimentary architecture can do much more than just lower your cost and time to market: It can make you future-proof. The problem with a monolithic, handcrafted stack is that it becomes difficult to swap out pieces of it without impacting the entire application. By contrast, assembling autonomous services preserves the option to upgrade individual components and continuously improve the whole system.
Software mashups aren't a new concept, but it seems that they are finally moving into the mainstream. Large companies and startups alike are looking to take advantage of the plethora of new services and capabilities available through mobile technology and the Internet of Things—and they're no longer just relying on highly trained specialists to make this happen.
Instead, tomorrow's most sought-after developers may end up being the conductors who are able to create an app symphony using software they didn't invent and code they didn't write. For that, you need someone who brings the best of Woz and Jobs together.
Photo via Steve Jobs
Editor's note: While Built.io is currently a sponsor of ReadWrite's Code section, Baier submitted this post independently through ReadWrite's established guest-post program. As an editorial program, our guest posts are separate from our advertising programs.
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Why The Legacy Carmakers Can't Beat Tesla Or Apple
As Ricardo Reyes, Tesla's head of communications, told Wired:
In other cars, all the systems work separately—there are different processors for different parts: the safety system here, the cruise control here. And that’s the evolution of building cars in stages, whereas our car has a central operating system, more like what your phone has.
The legacy car manufacturers, in other words, still think of cars as, well, cars. They're in the Windows 95 era, when HP made the desktop, Microsoft built the operating system, and everyone else made apps.
We don't live in that world anymore.
See also: The Road Ahead For Connected Cars
Instead we live in the world of Apple, with seamlessly integrated hardware and software. Sure, other people also build apps for such platforms, but the essential machine—hardware and software—is controlled by just one company.
Connect Me, Please
Part of this integration of hardware and software includes an always-on connection to the Internet. For my Honda Pilot, every year or so, the company makes me pay for them to ship me a CD with a map update.
Think for a moment how archaic that is.
What could be more central to the driving experience than maps? What could be more important to the future of driving than the ability for those maps to be intelligent, built into the driving experience to help me and the machine get where I want to go?
And yet—a CD. Shipped to me ... if I pay $150 for it.
Tesla's model is very, very different. Wired quotes Elon Musk as saying:
Car-makers need to think of their cars as connected devices, that the way a car should operate, like your cell phone or laptop so you can do improvements over the air....It’s important for safety and functionality that car-makers move to a connected philosophy....It’s kind of odd to have a computing device that’s not connected.
Between the lack of an integrated design methodology and the disconnected nature of their cars, it's a long shot that Ford, GM, and other traditional automobile manufacturers are going to dominate the future of cars.
But Apple and Tesla? Definite possibility.
The Driveable Computer
Apple has reportedly hired hundreds of engineers to work on Project Titan, an electric car that may look like a minivan, but will be deeply integrated into the overall Apple experience.
Think Siri meets over-the-air updates meets beautiful interfaces meets where-does-the-hardware-end-and-the-software-begin? elegance.
Some of us have already felt what a glaring difference a little integration can make. Take, for example, my Pilot. While it has mapping functionality straight out of the 1800s, at least it offers Bluetooth for solid integration with my iPhone.
Not so for my wife's Volvo, which seems to take pride in its retro interface. She quickly gravitated to the Pilot, rather than jack in her phone every time she wanted to listen to music. She wants a connected car, and decides on a daily basis not to drive the more expensive, ostensibly nicer car, because it's stuck in a different era.
That may just be anecdotal evidence, but it's not exactly an uncommon scenario. More of us are putting our mobile devices at the center of our lives. Today, nearly two-thirds of Americans own a smartphone. Which is why, ironically, Apple and Tesla have a better chance of building the future of the automobile industry than Chevy, BMW, or any of yesterday's manufacturers with yesterday's bolt-together, disconnected approach.
Yes, they have decades more experience building cars. And, yes, they're trying to get savvier about software, even opening an ever-growing number of software jobs at Ford and elsewhere.
What they critically lack, however, is experience building computers. And that is what we want to drive—deeply integrated, completely connected computers.
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The Web Vs. Native Debate Comes To Virtual Reality
Guest author Abi Mandelbaum is co-founder and chief executive officer of YouVisit, a multimedia company that creates virtual tours for diverse industries.
With the adoption of any new technology come debates on how to best implement and use it. For whatever reason, people naturally like picking sides. The world of virtual reality is no different, having already been home to heated discussion on topics including Oculus versus Vive, gaming versus real-world experiences, and eye-tracking versus hand controls. However, one interminable debate that previously dominated the mobile ecosystem for years has followed developers into the VR space: native versus web applications.
Initially developed as web apps, we have seen virtual reality shift to more native apps as the adoption of the technology grows. However, nativeÃs domination of the market will be fleeting as the growth of VR tests its limits and makes the need for web apps more apparent. HereÃs why.
How Web And Native Apps Differ
To start, let’s break down the competition. Native apps are available through a device’s app store, be it Google Play or Apple’s App Store, and are built with a single device in mind. With the ability to take advantage of that device’s specific hardware (accelerometers, cameras, etc.), and work when the device is offline, users commonly leverage these types of apps for everyday activities.
By contrast, web apps are accessed through any web browser available on a device. Web apps typically can only function when the device is online; however, users can work around this by leveraging the app cache and device’s local storage. While web apps are often designed to look like a native app, they are typically built with HTML5, and can be accessed with any mobile device available to consumers.
Commonly, native is the more popular choice for VR app development. This is in part due to the applicationÃs ability to form-fit to the phone, so that the user feels like they are getting the optimal experience. In many cases, mobile users and developers turn to native applications, because they feel that web apps provide a more generic experience. However, when it comes to VR, web apps offer a number of functions that will ultimately make this the more optimal option for users and developers alike.
The Benefits Of Web Apps
Unlike native apps, a web app offers cross-platform availability and will work on nearly all devices. This enables developers to ensure the consistent performance of VR content across all platforms.
While native applications may be customized based on a particular device, they may also give an unfair advantage to users who use a faster device with a better graphics card. Web applications let businesses have control over the quality of their VR content, regardless of how their audience chooses to view it.
Contrary to popular opinion, web apps are also fast—as they are built with JavaScript, and use WebGL for rendering interactive graphics. Since WebGL uses the graphics card to perform its calculations, rather than the CPU, web apps are able to bring more of the processing power needed to make a virtual reality experience truly immersive.
For companies consistently producing VR content for a broad audience, web apps also enable developers to have control over what specific content is available to view. With native applications, businesses can run into situations where a user downloads an application, but does update it.
For every user that chooses not to update, a business runs the risks of becoming increasingly disconnected with their audience. Instead, by controlling VR applications through a web-based interface, businesses are able to instantly update content and better manage what viewers see.
Pervasiveness of the software is also an important benefit to manufacturers. With HTML and JavaScript being standard tools for all web development, developers aren’t forced to constantly retrain to meet the needs of each new deviceÃs operating system.
The Limits Of Web Apps
Of course, web apps aren’t without disadvantages. The need for a connection is an obvious concern and can often limit where and when a VR app is used. In the age of accessibility, this can be a serious drawback for consumers. However, this limitation can be addressed by leveraging HTML5, which has the capacity to make mobile web app content available in offline mode. As we continue to become more mobile, this will also be a minor limitation as the availability of Wi-FI connections becomes commonplace across the U.S.
Accessing device hardware can also be a challenge. For example, virtual reality applications need access to a mobile deviceÃs accelerometer to collect orientation data, which tracks location, head movement, etc. Some mobile browsers, however, are still not reporting this data, and standards have yet to be adopted for browsers to be able to pass accelerometer data from device to browser. The end result is that device tracking may work perfectly well on one phone, while another still has some tracking issues.
In order for virtual reality to really become a commonplace technology, we need to examine the ecosystem we are trying to integrate it in. Ensuring consumers have things like consistent Wi-Fi and improved browser capabilities will not only make web apps more applicable, but create a more open environment for developers to continue to innovate and drive technology forward.
So Who Will Really Win?
Challenges aside, one significant fact points to web apps eventually winning the debate—companies are putting more resources and attention into their browsers. As systems like Flash or Silverlight decline, developers are looking for new ways to build applications with simply the browser and HTML.
With the continued diversification of mobile devices, developing specific applications for every available device may soon also become impossible. This is where web-based apps will also shine, especially as browser capabilities catch up with native app functionality. A great example of this already occurring is the Unity 5 engine, which now allows its code to be converted to HTML5 ñ a strong indicator that in the future, VR content may be created in-browser.
Although the debate still continues on which direction virtual reality experiences and other products should go, the diversification of devices in conjunction with the high volume of new content will drive web apps to be recognized by the market as the dominant platform. The benefits to users, designers and businesses alike overshadow device-specific options. As browsers move toward becoming the OS of the future, designing VR experiences to meet that market will be the smart play.
Lead photo courtesy of Shutterstock
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Which Came First—Product Utility Or Design?
All design should be about utility. What makes a product have great design is how your customer feels when they use it. Some of that feel comes from how the product looks, but so much more comes from how usable and frictionless the product experience is.
When looking at industrial design, there’s been a lot of debate about which philosophy is better: Do you design first, and then make engineering fit that design, or do you get the engineering down first, and then make the industrial design fit the guts of the product?
Design-First Thinking
The classic example of the design-first mentality is Apple. Apple is well known for their emphasis on design, and there are boundless stories of the industrial-design department driving engineering requirements, allowing little pushback from engineering. This practice has resulted in some gorgeous products, and Apple (almost singlehandedly) has created a huge consumer appreciation for good design.
The opposite point of view is the engineering-first mentality that a product should be engineered to work first, and then incorporate industrial design after. The engineering team will create a “black box” (the size, shape, dimensions and other constraints) that the industrial design team has to work around.
For any company that doesn’t have hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, the “eng-first" mentality is more likely to lead to success. The reason for that is utility. The number one focus of any design should be utility—creating a usable, functional and frictionless product. You can have the most beautiful design in the world, but if it doesn’t function well, no one will buy it.
An example of this was the first Jambox. It was the most beautiful and sleek Bluetooth speaker of its time. However, having metal housing meant that it only worked if your phone was directly in front or behind it because the Bluetooth signal couldn’t pass through the metal sides. Beautiful design, but not very functional.
Hardware startups will pitch a beautiful design, sell a ton of product on Kickstarter, and then a year (or two or three) later ship a product that looks nothing like the original design. In many cases, this is because the hardware and engineering “guts” weren’t locked in before the industrial design was created. In other cases, the product design changes because the original design wasn’t manufacturable because the cost was too high, or a combination of these factors. Unfortunately, startups can't manufacture like Apple does.
However, startups can avoid problems like these by focusing first on making the product work and then on adding in beautiful industrial design. Keeping a healthy tension between design and engineering is key. There should be some push and pull. A good industrial design firm should take your engineering “black box” and give some pushback, see where they can tweak and find out how they can modify what you have into something better.
A good engineering team should allow the ID firm to create a vision of what the ideal product could be, and then feed constraints, realities of manufacturing and cost concerns to the ID firm until a balance is achieved to create an amazing final product.
Set The Groundwork
Before starting to work with an industrial-design firm, it’s important to internally align on what the product vision is. A company can ask itself questions like "What are three adjectives that describe the product?" (Elegant, magical, and sleek would lead to a very different industrial design than energetic, rugged, and utilitarian.) Or: "If a car personified the product, what would it be?" (Tesla Model S vs. Audi A4 vs. Subaru Impreza will all give the design team very different direction.)
It’s also very important to align on how the team will make decisions and who the final product owner is. Design by committee does not work. One person has to be responsible for design decisions, and that person has to be trusted by the team to take into account everyone’s feedback, the user’s perspective and engineering constraints.
IDing The Right ID Firm
Finding the right industrial-design firm can be a challenge. Again, this will come down to what is right for each specific product and each specific team. Some ID firms are very research-focused. They’ll spend weeks interviewing users, building a customer/marketing requirements document and really understanding what the user wants. Other firms will be more aspirational. They’ll do some research to understand the user, but their perspective may be the user doesn’t really know what they want, and it’s up for the designers to tell them (as Henry Ford said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”) And some firms will sit in between those two extremes. In the end, it’s up to the management and product team to decide what is right for your organization.
Once a company has found a list of industrial-design firms they want to consider, they must pitch that design firm. Signing on a top-tier industrial-design firm is like pitching an investor. You have to sell them on your vision. You have to sell them on your market. You have to make them believe that you and your team can make this a reality. They have limited personnel and limited time, so they want to make sure they’re working on products that are winners and will help build their brand as well.
Budgeting By—And For—Design
In order to raise a seed round of financing, investors often want to see the vision for the final product. There’s no better way to show that vision than to have a beautiful “looks like” (non-functional, but cosmetically accurate) prototype. This prototype might cost $25,000 to $100,000 for the design work and $2,000 to $10,000 for the model itself.
Great industrial design doesn’t come cheap. Startups have to be prepared to spend money where it matters and design is a place that matters. A full engagement with an industrial-design firm (from concept through cosmetic checks in manufacturing) can cost $200,000 to $500,000.
To conserve cash, startups have another lever to pull—equity. Many industrial design firms or contractors will accept some percentage of their fee in equity. Some won’t, but it doesn’t hurt to ask. Equity also has the nice benefit of aligning incentives further. When your ID firm is an investor in your company, their leadership is even more incentivized to go above and beyond to help your product and company succeed.
Ultimately, the decision is yours whether to start with utility or design, but with these guidelines, you can create a product that is not only slick, but functional and user-friendly to boot.
Image courtesy of Neptune
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Seven Ways To Make Your Wearable Stand Out
Guest author Heather Andrus is senior vice president and general manager of product innovation at Radius Product Development.
The wearables market is poised for a meteoric rise fueled by rapid technology advancements, a burgeoning Internet of Things ecosystem, and evolving consumer trends. According to IDC, 72 million wearable devices will be shipped this year, up more than 173 percent from 2014. Shipment volumes are expected to grow at at an annual rate of 43 percent over five years to reach 156 million by 2019.
See also: The Wearables Market Is Exploding, And Apple Is Stealing The Show
As demand intensifies for consumer lifestyle and healthcare innovations, expect a wave of new products to flood the market. Will yours be one of them?
I believe the most successful vendors, app developers, and accessory makers are integrating one or more of the following attributes into their formulas for winning wearables.
An Emerging Ecosystem
Companies that take advantage of a hardware-software ecosystem to deliver end-to-end solutions are gaining momentum. Today, the Disney Magic Band shines in this category for its ability to connect visitors effortlessly with every part of their experience at Walt Disney World Resort. The all-in-one device can be used to enter the park, unlock your hotel room, as well as buy food and merchandise—even jump a ride line with FastPass+. This piece of Disney magic is enabled by an RF network and hardware connectivity grid that links visitors with the vacation itinerary selected online.
Look for similar applications on cruise ships and other resort destinations. We might also expect to see them in smart cities, as major municipalities, urban business centers, and retail shopping districts debut heightened ways to connect people, places and things.
Data Analytics
Some of the most interesting wearables today analyze massive amounts of sensor-generated data using proprietary algorithms to generate meaningful, actionable insights. Such is the case with the Lumo Lift, which tracks, collects and correlates data on your posture and then reminds you to stand up straight, so your mother doesn’t have to.
Data Visualization
With clear, concise data visualization, companies can turn data into valuable knowledge. Jawbone does a great job with its easy-to-understand dashboard of insights from activity, sleep and food tracking. Additionally, Jawbone’s Smart Coach gives consumers personalized tips and advice that become more relevant and tailored over time as sensors gather more personalized information.
Data Community
Community is important, especially among users of fitness wearables. Sharing goals, milestones and roadblocks with other users can motivate and inspire. Runtastic not only provides the prerequisite activity trackers, it connects consumers with an internal community and integrates with various social networks.
With fitness and healthcare wearables, community is proving to be a powerful catalyst for change. Fitness enthusiasts can cheer on each other and rally around those who are seeking to improve their health.
Sensor Convergence
The Apple Watch is probably the highest-profile converged wearable. So far, analysts have found what appear to be a minimum of 10 different sensors. What matters less than the number of sensors is how their data is blended together. Linking different kinds of sensors produces rich, contextual data and new associations between variables.
Peerbridge Health is developing the next generation of wearable wireless vital-sign monitoring technology. Sensor-generated data for monitoring ECG heart rate and rhythm is combined with respiratory rate data to draw correlations and associations. As more sensors come together, new insights are gained.
New Sensors, New Uses
You can drive innovation by adding new sensors. Or you can use existing sensors in new ways. For instance, BSX Insight is an athletic training device that measures lactate thresholds using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) sensors to measure oxygenation of the blood. This data then is mapped to lactate levels to look at a new type of data—lactate threshold—and how it factors into measuring an athlete’s performance and fitness levels.
Attachment Types and Locations
Why do wearables have to be on our wrists or our faces? Expect new places to attach wearables, and new ways. Athos, a pioneer in smart fitness apparel, has created workout shirts and shorts embedded with 22 EMG sensors to measure muscle activity, heart rate and respiration—all in real time.
Traditionally, EMG machines were reserved for elite athletes as they cost upward of $15,000. Not only is Athos putting this technology within consumers’ reach; they’re introducing a new caliber of “smart” workout clothes.
Don't Just Think Different—Be Different
Companies that will emerge as frontrunners in the white-hot wearables market must be multitaskers. It won’t be enough to just innovate on one plane. As the race to market escalates, I'm confident that products embodying combinations of the aforementioned attributes will stand out in a sea of wearables.
Photo courtesy of iStock
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4 Steps For Creating Happy Customer Experiences
Guest author Doron Reveni is CEO and co-founder of Applause, a software-testing company based in New England.
When the topic of customer service comes up, names like Amazon, Zappos and American Express often spring to mind. They should—these companies invest deeply in customer service, listening to their patrons, asking what makes them happy, and truly listening when to the answers. They treat their customers like gold, because they literally are. They're the lifeblood of a company.
See also: Want To Keep Customers? Integrate Tech With A Personal Touch
Relying solely on focus groups and user experience experts alone is old school and wholly insufficient. It’s too slow, too expensive, comes with too many biases. It starts with access to usage stats and user sentiment, letting users drive the bus to provide constructive feedback. That’s a challenge for companies that must be nimble in perfecting their customer journey.
Here are four steps for creating a smarter strategy that can help you boost your customer experience.
Getting And Using Feedback: The Key To Happy Customers
Successful customers experiences are never an accident. A unified and informed approach to consumer engagement is a necessity, especially when it comes to the omni-channel brand experience.
The distinction between online and offline has blurred. The border between web, mobile & wearables never (should have) existed. Consumers interact with companies on their own terms—on the couch, on the street, in the store, in the car—and on their own time, day or night.
The apps economy has increased the importance of protecting your brand, from the awareness stage to the research stage to the purchase decision and beyond. This is the cost of making customers your biggest fans.
Dominos, for example, is a company doing customer engagement right. The pizza company recently added a voice-over, order-ahead feature to their app, allowing customers to directly engage with the company. Customers can easily place orders on their mobile devices without having to stumble across tiny keyboards or thumb through contact lists for the number of their local Dominos location.
1. Be intentional and integrated in all aspects of the customer experience.
You need mechanisms in place for interacting with your digital properties, your physical properties, your products, and your employees.
There are many different solutions that can help. It’s incredibly important to have a solid CRM solution in place that integrates your various properties. ZenDesk helps businesses streamline their customer service requests, for instance.
2. Provide customers with a means for two-way communications with your company.
You’d be surprised how many businesses stop after the first step. It is critical to ask yourself questions about how you interact: Is your company really accessible? Do you go beyond reactive customer service and provide proactive support at every turn? Do customers feel like they are talking to an empty room or, worse, a machine?
Make sure there are numerous channels for them to provide feedback, and go beyond a customer service hotline, support email and web forms. Encourage feedback on social networks and review sites. Engage directly on a monthly basis with VIP customers to make sure they are happy and their voices are heard. If you bring them to the table, they will appreciate your product or services even more.
But, what is the point of having all these channels for feedback if you don’t even interact with—and learn from—them? This is a real opportunity to gain important insights and inform the lifecycle of your product or service.
There are services and tools to help you “listen”—they can collect the feedback, sort it, cull it, and synthesize it for you. These services can cull app store reviews, dive deep into social networks and provide sentiment analysis online. At the in-store or voice level, they can analyze your customer service requests and your staff’s feedback.
Lithium, Engagor and SocialBakers all provide tools to help you understand and act upon social media activity with customers. Offering a live chat option like LivePerson is another way to foster a good online experience with your prospects and clients. This is crucial in getting over the listening hump and getting you to step three.
Make sure all parts of your organization hear what is being said, and challenge your team to present and debate solutions. In other words, listen to the feedback and act on it.
3. Show you’re listening by acting on feedback.
It’s important to act upon the feedback you receive from your most important stakeholders—not let internal blame-shifting take hold. It may be tempting to tell customers they’re wrong or to work on merely changing their perception, but you need to resist. You want genuinely happy customers, and that’s no way to get them.
Take Taco Bell as an example. They heard the call from their customers to add an order-ahead feature to its mobile app. The result: A huge positive swing in consumer sentiment, as measured through app ratings and reviews.
The key takeaway: If users are continually commenting that your site is slow, or that your app crashes, or that your stores are poorly lit, it’s on you to fix the problem.
If the service provided by an employee is truly sub-par, you need to train and re-train those employees to deliver on your company’s promises. If your marketing content is annoying or inelegant, it’s time to go back to the drawing board. Reply to the feedback and let them know how the problem is being solved. Then reach out again when the solution is in place, and invite further feedback.
4. Keep the feedback loop going, and find out how you are doing.
Customer satisfaction surveys can tell you if your revised approaches are working, and it shows your customers that, at various touch points—such as after a sale or after you resolve an issue—that you still care.
In the app community, users often see their voices are being heard when new updates include bug fixes they wanted. For other aspects of your business, and with apps as well, it’s also important to have a good marketing and PR program that communicates those changes and improvements, and thanks customers for the recommendations.
In other words, collect feedback, act on it, and then make sure to show how you’re acting on it. Incorporate these insights and data into your everyday operations. If you make changes that customers requested, show your commitment to always improving and continue to ask for input along the way. Use tools that help you go beyond just asking, tools that allow you to discover whether you’ve made a difference—usage analytics, sentiment analysis, surveys, heat mapping—and prove to your team that you’re paying more than just lip service. Show them that you won’t stop until you’re creating positive customer experiences.
With this wealth of knowledge, developers, designers, marketers, sales and support teams no longer have to be siloed and create disjointed, fragmented customer experiences. They can treat user feedback as an opportunity, rather than an annoyance.
Lead photo courtesy of Shutterstock
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The Smart Home’s Bumpy Adolescence Is Nearing An End
Guest author Kent Dickson is the CEO and cofounder of Yonomi, maker of a smart-home app.
Last month saw the sad news that Quirky has filed for bankruptcy. Its sister company, Wink, is on the auction block and has an uncertain future. The pair have been among the boldest and most prominent players in the early stage of the smart-home market: Quirky raised enormous amounts of money from key investors like General Electric and signed big distribution deals with Home Depot. Quirky and Wink had great designers and a talented engineering team.
What happened? Is this an indicator that the smart-home market is failing?
No. It’s merely the bumpy adolescence stage that each technology wave muddles through on the way to adulthood.
Searching For Tech History
For those of you not old enough to recall the mid-’90s, here’s a little history lesson. Grunge music was hot and the consumer Web was just getting underway. There were also several high-profile startups trying to search the Web.
Possibly the most prominent search engine of the era was AltaVista. It was an outfit full of smart people with innovative ideas, funded by one of the most successful IT companies of that age, DEC. AltaVista was visionary, but we all know the outcome. Despite its early prominence, it lost a lot of money and eventually landed in Yahoo's hands through a series of sales. (Yahoo finally shut it down in 2013.)
Google went on to win the Web-search race and is now one of the most valuable corporations the world has ever known.
It wasn’t exactly that AltaVista was too early. It’s just that the early stages of new markets require a lot of experimentation. Even if one has the right idea—“search engines are critically important to the Web”—you still have to get all of the technology, form factor, marketing, and business-model bits working exactly right. Sometimes the early entrants serve as the laboratory from which everyone learns.
Other examples abound. Remember eToys and Broadcast.com? Would current-day giants Amazon and Netflix be where they are today without those early pioneers? Probably not.
Growing Pains
Did AltaVista’s high-profile failure mean that the consumer Web was not a viable market or that the search engines weren't a foundational component of that market?
Of course not. Consumers are fickle and, although they probably can’t tell you exactly what they want, once they see it they flock to it (and away from the others). The differences can be subtle on paper but dramatic in the marketplace.
The startup world may be tumultuous and indeed painful, but it plays a critical role in making these new transformative markets happen. Missteps and failures here contribute to critical learnings that eventually unleash massive consumer benefits and enormous value creation.
The Smart Home Is Happening
Despite Quirky and Wink’s misfortune, the smart-home transformation is well underway. This incident will not slow the rapid rate of Nest, Sonos, and Philips Hue installations. The time is near when you’ll find it difficult to buy an appliance—maybe even a light bulb—that doesn’t have a wireless radio embedded in it. That moment has already happened for TVs. Amazing new products are constantly appearing on the scene, like the Amazon Echo voice assistant that continue to refine and redefine what is the smart home.
The smart home is happening despite its typically rough adolescence. We’re about to see it blossom into young adulthood, and it will be awesome.
As Gartner has taught us, the “Trough of Disillusionment” (the culmination of hype driven by early disappointments) is followed by the “Slope of Enlightenment” (the prolonged, uninterrupted growth stage). This is where we’re now headed, and there’s no turning back.
Photo courtesy of Shutterstock
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A Half-Century Later, We Can't Forget Conway's Law
Guest author Sarah Novotny is a technical evangelist and community manager for Nginx.
A wise person once said that you build what you know, and you know what you build. While these weren’t the exact words uttered by computer programmer Melvin Conway in 1968, the sentiment is there.
His sociological observation, dubbed Conway’s law, posited that any organization that designs a system will inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communications structure.
Fast forward to 2015: Many organizations are staring at monolithic applications and architectures, and are wondering how they got there. And, perhaps more importantly, where do they go from here?
I’m a firm believer that very few technological problems are actually related to the technology. Whether you want to evolve from a monolithic and vendor-dependent model, or are ready to embrace microservices, it’s time to take a look at how your internal culture, people, and systems are impacting application development speed and performance.
Here are five ideas to get you started.
Put A Cap On Your Pizza Order: Create Small Teams
Many organizations fall into the trap that the more people on a team, the better. In the early 2000s at Amazon, founder and CEO Jeff Bezos challenged teams to work more efficiently, communicate better, and move faster. He believed that a team shouldn’t be larger than two pizzas can feed, creating what is now known as the “two-pizza team rule.”
The idea is to have small and agile teams that work together through strong agreements—such as requirements documents and APIs. This empowers teams to make needed changes to pieces of code, as long as they don’t violate the contracts that bind the teams and the code together.
Technologies such as microservices are one extension of this idea. In the microservices model, complex applications are composed of small, independent components. This modular approach to development decreases the chances that an issue with any one service would cause the whole application to fail to meet the expectations of its end user or consumer—or more formally, a service-level agreement (SLA). Designing for failure makes for a more positive customer experience, a better developer experience, and internal teams that move more freely and rapidly.
Identify And Empower Pioneers
Even moving a single service out of a monolithic application can create major cultural challenges. Indeed, while it’s important to build small teams across the organization, start, well, small.
Begin with a single pioneering team before you go broad. Select individuals who are natural leaders, who have an innate sense of curiosity and problem-solving abilities, and who have a very low tolerance for lack of clarity. You want employees who aren’t afraid to say, “It’s not clear right now how we will accomplish this particular task, but I’ll figure out a way to figure it out.”
Keep in mind that it’s ideal to anoint pioneers with diverse experience. You want a team that includes people with deep backgrounds in existing monolithic architectures; some who come from the outside with fresh eyes and perspectives; and others with less experience but the confidence to ask the “dumb” questions about why development is moving in the current direction. But make sure it is a team that has the ability to work together without personality clash!
Reinforce The Mission
Take care not only in selecting those who will serve on your pioneering team, but also in communicating with those who were not selected. Reinforce with all stakeholders that the new team is a model for the way that everyone in the organization will eventually build, conceive of, and deliver software. Involving the whole organization in the transformation, if only through early “field reports” from the pioneers, will help increase buy-in and encourage transparency as a weapon against the risk of new and different siloing behaviors.
Be careful, though: This is where the potential danger of having the team dragged into the company’s traditional monolith lies.
Build A High-Trust Culture
Along these same lines, it’s important to develop a culture of failing and sharing. In the transition to this new model, not everything will go smoothly. You need to encourage individuals to learn from the inevitable mishaps and challenges, and to feed that learning back into the development cycle. Be proactive about building an introspective culture—one in which the team can feel empowered to take risks and to acknowledge mistakes without placing blame.
Take It Slow
Underestimating the amount of social change needed is a common trap I’ve seen among organizations. After all, you’re not just changing code but how the organization works—from top to bottom.
It may be that a major change isn’t right for your organization. It’s too much for some organizations to make multiple cultural and technology changes in a rapid manner; perhaps you simply don’t have enough space or capacity or sense of prioritization to take such change on right now. For example, if going from one big application to 100 small ones in a 12-month period is unrealistic, it may be better for your organization to break out code and services into little groups, piece by piece by piece.
In order to break the cycle of constrained processes, and formalized, top-down command and control that leads to rigid, monolithic apps, borrow practices from the original pioneers. Go back to the days of chopping wood and carrying water in order to create a shared journey and a sense of growth. Have fun with it, trust your people, and remember Conway’s Law. Aim to create a flexible, powerful, and autonomous organizational structure—with software to match.
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