fintech, social media and entrepreneurship
Search results for youtube
Traffic hacks: Growing your user base at someone else’s expense
Jul 15th
Most startup entrepreneurs are obsessed – rightly so – with figuring out the magic formula to get their product to go viral. But few are able to launch a product which goes viral completely on its own. Very often, successful products early on have gotten a boost by latching onto another company with more users, money or both. Here are some examples:
Hitching a ride
- Despite still not being a monetization success, Youtube has been very successful at optimizing for retention and virality. But when Youtube first launched, their founders had to literally beg people to post videos. Is was not until Youtube enabled embedding and users started posting their Youtube videos on Myspace that the service really took off.
- Location-based games Foursquare and Gowalla are seeing viral growth due in large part to very tight integration with their users’ Facebook and Twitter streams.
- Without a doubt the most successful company built entirely on top of another social network is Zynga, through their brilliant (but often annoying) deep integration of Farmville and other games with Facebook in a way which enabled them to grow faster than if they had to build their own social graph from scratch.
- Before Google was what it is today, they powered search on Yahoo!
- BillShrink scored a marketing coup last year by convincing T-Mobile to plug the site’s cell plan picker because T-Mobile objectively came out on top most of the time. What are the chances the startup would have otherwise afforded a national ad campaign featuring Catherine Zeta-Jones? (See the video at the top of this post.)
There’s nothing wrong with being a plug-in to someone else who can increase your distribution early on. But pinning everything on one partner is a recipe for certain death, which is why all the companies above used their opportunities as a springboard – they embraced, extended and then evolved.
Case in point: When Facebook limited Zynga’s ability to talk to their users directly, and wanted them to migrate to Facebook Credits as a payment platform, they promptly decided to create their own game network. (And it didn’t take long for rumors to circulate about Google investing $100 million into Zynga and planning the launch of Google Games.)
What are some of your favorite traffic hacks? Share them in the comments below.
Special thanks to Peter Pham for previewing and providing feedback on this post.
Video interview with Stuart MacDonald of Tripharbour.com – Founders and Funders part 2 of 3
Jun 19th
This is the second installment in a series of video recaps of the second Founders and Funders event in Toronto. In part one, we talked with one of the organizers. In this second installment, we talk to one of the entrepreneurs who was at the event.
Stuart MacDonald is the founder of Tripharbor.com (Tripharbour.ca for Canadians), a recently launched vertical search engine for cruise ship vacations. Besides just letting you compare details and prices, Tripharbour also features some cool community features that let you read trip and destination reviews and make friends with others who have similar interests.
Stuart knows the online travel industry well, having previously served as SVP Packages and Chief Marketing Officer for travel behemoth Expedia. Cruise vacations is a $24 billion industry in North America, and he’s aiming for a piece of the action.
Founders and Funders Toronto video recap (Part 1 of 3)
Jun 11th
The second Toronto edition of Founders and Funders event took place last week, on June 4th. The event is organized by David Crow and Jevon McDonald.
Rather than write up a big long report, I decided to continue my experiments with video by bringing a camera along to give people who did not have the chance to attend a bit of a feel what what the event if like.
In today’s interview, David Crow introduces the idea behind Founders and Funders.
Stay tuned: This Friday I’ll be posting part two of the series, where we get to hear from one of the entrepreneurs who was at the event.
Montreal Tech Events for January
Jan 8th
January’s a busy month for Montreal techno-geeks. Here are some of the events going on:
- January 8: Montreal Tech Entrepreneur Breakfast
- January 8: MySQL Montreal meetup by Morgan Tocker of MySQL (7pm at our offices)
- January 9: Yulblog, a casual get-together of Montreal bloggers (
6pm8pm at La Quincaillerie on Mont-Royal) - January 15: Montreal On Rails
- January 23: StartupCamp Montreal
- January 28-30: Demo ’08. Okay, this is not actually happening in Montreal, but Montreal startup StandoutJobs will be launching there.
Speaking of web building, here’s a video about just that subject:
Synthasite demo, Vinny Lingham on entrepreneurship at TechCrunch40
Oct 21st
Here’s a video interview I did with Vinny Lingham in the DemoPit at the TechCrunch40 conference last month. Vinny was at the conference demoing Synthasite, a web-based web site builder.
I also asked Vinny, whose company is based in South Africa, about some of the challenges of building a tech company outside of Silicon Valley:
The US is not the only market in this world. You’ve got 6 billion people in this world. Focus on multiple languages, multiple currencies in your application. Really try to globalize your business, because in that way you’re not dependent on one particular market to make your business a success.
Synthasite launches its beta on November 5th.
Realius – fantasy real estate game TechCrunch40 demo
Sep 24th
I had the pleasure of sharing the TechCrunch40 DemoPit floor with Chuck Teller from Realius. (Let me say that being placed next to cool people makes all the difference when spending 14 hours on your feet.) Realius develops fantasy real estate games and their first game, Price me now, awards users with points and real prizes for guessing the listing price on homes.
The property and pricing information comes from real MLS data. Realius’ business model will be to advertise real world real estate services to people playing the game. Here’s a demo:
Red Herring Canada 2007 roundup
Sep 10th
Red Herring’s inaugural Canadian event, Innovation Illuminated, took place September 5-7th in Montreal. The event took place against the backdrop of persistent rumours of financial problems at Red Herring.
Some key trends based on observations from the conference:
- China rising (and India, too): These are big markets and only going to get bigger. The US market is no longer the sole destination for tech firms from Canada and elsewhere.
- The emergence of Israel as an innovation hub: The level of technology innovation coming out of Israel is by any measure way disproportionate to their population size. Israeli venture capitalist Orna Berry shared some interesting insight, arguing that while the stereotype of Israel excelling in the security area (witness CheckPoint Software), they also do well in other technology sectors due to their having practically no natural resources.
- Cleantech: Lots of presentations, but these company founders clearly have little experience pitching investors. Please don’t make me sit through 10 minutes and 15 slides talking about how your energy conservation system is manufactured before showing the slide on how you tested it in a real office building and reduced their power consumption by 2/3. This sector is still dependant on the regulatory environment and I don’t see it really taking off until a cap and trade market is finally instituted – which will happen eventually. Still, until governments wake up and do it, investors will be placing their chips and making some early bets in this sector.
Feedback on the conference organization itself:
- The good
- Company presentations: You don’t go to conferences for the boring talks, do you? My personal favourites were Mobivox and EQO, both mobile plays
- Red Herring CEO Alex Vieux’s ego: He’s not shy to ask direct questions and push his presenters. From “When will you reach $100M?” to “Will Israel ever make peace with the Palestinians?” nothing is taboo.
The bad:
- Disappearing speakers: You could not find a better disappearing act even if it were put on by the Cirque du Soleil. Gérard Lopez (of Mangrove Partners) was scheduled to give a “fireside chat.” Alas, there was no fire, and no chat. Salman Ullah (Director of Corporate Development at Google) was quietly dropped from the program and Sean Wise (From Dragon’s Den show on CBC) didn’t show because he had a paid gig elsewhere. Worse yet, some speakers such as Louise Guay (MyVirtualModel) and half of the four VC’s on the “Meet the money” panel just didn’t show when it was time for their talk or panel, with no explanation.
- The price tag: Definitely not worth the $2500 ticket.
- Alex Vieux’s ego: He hogged the stage, moderating most of the panels and boring the audience with his endless mentions of how he’s been “good buddies” for decades with Bill Gates, Tim Draper, John Doerr, etc etc, etc. He could have made things a lot more interesting and engaging by at least taking questions from the audience. Instead, conference goers deserted the main track presentations in droves, opting instead to network amoungst each other in the hallways.
Read more blog coverage on the event from Mat Balez (here, here, and here), Roberto Rocha (here, here and here) and Alec Saunders. (By the way, Alec has a cool new Facebook conference call application.)
Oh, and I presented the first public preview of SmartHippo.com, which is currently in closed beta. SmartHippo is a consumer-powered marketplace for financial services. Here’s the video I opened with:
BumpTop woos DemoCamp Montreal crowd
Mar 31st
This post was originally going to be a round up of this past Thursday’s DemoCamp Montreal, but others beat me to it, so I decided instead to focus on one presentation in particular.
[For those of you who don't know, DemoCamp is an informal gathering of people who have interesting technology or products to showcase and which have not yet reached the mainstream. Of course some of them never will, but part of the fun is getting to see things that are still "raw" before they either make it or sink into oblivion.
Kudos go to Austin Hill for helping organize this event and for the significant increase in the quality of the presentations this event (not to mention for throwing a cool party, which he's always excelled at).]
By far the most impressive presentation of the night was BumpTop from UofT Master’s student Anand Agarawala. BumpTop is a user interface which renders your PC’s workspace as 3-D desktop where you can push, throw, flip, pile and even crumple documents, just as you would in the physical world. Here’s a demo.
Different people have different ways of organizing their workspace. Some people a virtually naked desk with everything neatly labelled and stored away in alphabetically sorted folders. I, on the other hand, have a somewhat more cluttered desk and work area (at times refered to by epithets such as messy or disorganized). There’s no right or wrong organizational system, just different ones for different people.
A BumpTop desktop would let me organize my computer the way I think and work, rather than the other way around. Judging from the reaction from the audience – which burst into spontaneous applause at several points in the presentation – I’m not alone.
What Yahoo! Pipes teaches us about entrepreneurship
Feb 20th
Almost as interesting as the launch of Yahoo!’s Pipes service — which lets users create their own feeds by combining and processing multiple RSS feeds – is the way in which the project came about. A quick look at the Pipes site and it’s easy to miss the association with Yahoo! The site uses Yahoo! accounts for user management, and sports a tiny “this is Yahoo!” icon at the bottom of the home page, but otherwise does not fit the typical model of what a Yahoo! property looks like, what is does, nor how it integrates with its Yahoo! siblings.
The major web properties have a history of maintaining distinct brands for popular web properties. Yahoo’s Flickr and Google’s Youtube are prime examples. But these are all properties which were launched independantly and managed to build strong brand awareness before being acquired by their parent.
Pipes, on the other hand, is a Yahoo! baby from the start. It was incubated within Yahoo!’s new Brickhouse division, physically located away from the Yahoo! campus, where teams are given more freedom to think outside the box and experiment.
An article by BusinessWeek, points out how Yahoo! has acknowledged the risks that come with being big:
Yahoo’s brand is another challenge. People associate the company and its trademark yodel with one of the Web’s prime destinations for mail, news, entertainment, and search. But Yahoo’s status as an established, family-oriented, commercial brand can turn away some cutting-edge users.
The article goes on to state that Yahoo! plans to launch additional products off-brand.
Google is known for allowing their staff to spend 20% of their time on personal projects, but the projects that even see the light tend often languish on the Google Labs page.
Yahoo!, on the other hand, is demonstrating a real commitment to allowing innovation to not only take place internally, but also to launch. They are getting edgier and taking more risks. They’re getting traction with new uses of community and social networking concepts — witness the early popularity of Yahoo! Answers, launched as as Google pulled the plug on its equivalent. In short, they are being entrepreneurial. This is great news for Yahoo! and entrepreneurs everywhere who can take a page from their book. Where they go from here will be fun to watch.
Tags: Yahoo, Yahoo Pipes, Brickhouse, Entrepreneurship, Flickr, Youtube, RSS, Yahoo Answers, Google, Google Answers
