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Five tips for a Web 2.0 start-up

by on Sep 18, 2008 (0) Comments

I’ve talked to a lot of Web 2.0 companies in the past month, some big and some small. A few themes have developed in how to make a successful Web 2.0 company – here’s a few ideas.

1. Build a real team. There are so many Web 2.0 companies that are either run in a virtual environment or with just a few people in a basement somewhere. It’s not a good strategy because any ideas that could germinate with a larger team – and I mean about 5-8 people or so — will be stagnated with just one or two employees. If you can’t afford a real team that includes a developers and designers, folks in marketing and accounting, and a sales agent or two, you might just have an idea, not a company. It reminds me of my experience this week with a rental car company staffed by just a couple of people. (Yes, I was trying to save a buck.) One of the employees was out sick, so that left one person to transport people to and from the airport, do the paperwork, and deal with frustrations. In the same way, one person can write a blog, but it takes a company to make a real Web 2.0 product that actually does something.

Shockweb aggregator Fark.com feeds our link lust

by on Sep 16, 2008 (0) Comments

A friend of mine asked me to write about Fark.com, the famously shocking news aggregator that has even more loyal followers now that they don’t include porn links. I usually avoid the site, not because of the shock value, but because I don’t want to burn up an hour learning about the so-called Obama race war, violent crime rates in Detroit, and the abysmal US economy. And those are the more serious links. Usually, headlines are more like “Ike survivors may have to wait weeks for baths. France shrugs” which is just cheeky enough to get you to click on it, even though the actual report has nothing to do with France (a pet topic for the site owner). It’s what I call a force-pull headline, one that you just can’t help clicking on.

How Social Media Can Help Your PR Efforts

by on Sep 16, 2008 (0) Comments

The emergence of social media has been a game-changer for newspapers and magazines. On the one hand, they have seen their print numbers continue to drop as more and more people turn to the internet to get their news and information. On the other hand, they (the smart ones) have seen that by embracing social media and leveraging the different opportunities it offers, they can drive more traffic to their sites, engage in open dialogues and react quicker. So what does this mean for you? More opportunities than ever for you to build relationships and get publicity. Here are a few things to keep in mind when trying to leverage social media for PR purposes — and that’s PR as in public relations, not PageRank!

Start Small

Many times when people think about getting publicity for their business, their wishlist goes something like this:

Umbraco Full Trust Hosting – Yes it’s FULL TRUST

by on Sep 16, 2008 (1) Comments

We finally did it. We have an environment setup for Umbraco Full Trust hosting and we have our first customer. If you are a frequent reader of this blog, you already know our frustration, trying to find a good hosting provider for Umbraco. So we went ahead and created our own and we are offering [...]

LiveBar Adds A Little Strip Of Community To Any Site

by on Sep 16, 2008 (0) Comments

LiveWorld is a publicly traded company that’s been around since 1996 and is best known for its white labeled social networks. These are online communities that LiveWorld helps clients build up around their existing brands, and they often take a good deal more time and effort to set up than communities created on top of self-service platforms like Ning or KickApps.

However, LiveWorld is making a significant foray into “out-of-the-box” communities with the release of LiveBar, a widget-like site addition that brings community features to any website using only one line of JavaScript.

Bill Gates/Jerry Seinfeld Microsoft Commercials

by on Sep 12, 2008 (0) Comments

A lot of people seem to be confused about the commercials. I see a lot of blog posts complaining about them, but this is exactly what Microsoft wants. They want people to start talking about Microsoft again. For the longest time there was no Public Relations effort from Microsoft. Out of Sight, Out of Mind. [...]

Marissa Mayer Clarifies: Search Is Only 10% Done, Not 90%

by on Sep 10, 2008 (0) Comments

I spoke to Google’s Marissa Mayer at TechCrunch50 on Monday (a little after she we celebrated Google’s 10th birthday with cupcakes) and asked her about the search is “90-95%” solved story over the weekend. She said she’d be posting a clarification on the Google blog. That clarification just went up, here.

In the original article, published in the LA Times, Marissa says search is “90 to 95%” solved:

Search is an unsolved problem. We have a good 90 to 95% of the solution, but there is a lot to go in the remaining 10%. How do we monetize new forms of content as they come online such as video, maps and books. How do we help content providers transition their businesses online and build healthy businesses.

Today Marissa clarifies, suggesting that her real point is that the first 90% of the search problem is solved, but that was the easy part. The last 10% will actually be 90% of the real work, she says, and it will take decades or longer to complete it. She also compares search today to the fiields of biology and physics in the 1500s or 1600s.