Archive for 'Events'
Client News: 12seconds.tv launches today
Exciting news for 12seconds today, they’re announcing their new public alpha. 12seconds is a video status platform for sharing moments from your life. Use a webcam or video-capable cell phone to record and share videos up to twelve seconds long. If you want an invitation to join the alpha, inquire here.
This was an instance where we felt a press release was unnecessary. As many people have discussed, the traditional press release is not the only way to communicate company news. I certainly agree with Brian Solis that “the press release is far from dead,” there are many uses for a well written and carefully thought-out press release. We use them often here at Stage Two Consulting. But some times (and some people) call for non-traditional means of communicating the news. Robert Scoble likes getting pitched on Facebook for instance. For 12seconds, we felt that a company blog post was an ideal medium for a company launch that fit well with the style and flavor of the company (which is totally bootstrapped).
There are several reasons behind this announcement:
- The team wanted to formally announce themselves to the world
- A number of new features were added to the site and service
- They want to increase the size of the user community and test the scalability of their servers and infrastructure
- They want to increase their visibility and work on fund raising
- Using 12seconds is fun, and they want more people to experience the joy
It’s only 8:16 on the West Coast, but coverage has started:
Lastly, how could we pitch the company if we weren’t users ourselves? Check out the Stage Two team on 12seconds:
Under the Radar Getting Started
We’re here at Under the Radar, for a multitude of reasons. Lowell Goss, our friend, client and the CEO of LOUD3R is presenting in the Mercury room today around 11:15. Ellen McGirt from Fast Company is moderating. Should be a great presentation.
We are also here to help our friends from Dealmaker Media promote their show. We will be twittering on their behalf – you can follow us here: http://twitter.com/UTR08
We also have a Ustream up and running – you can follow it here: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/utr08
If you like, you can also watch it below, and chat as well.
Client News: LOUD3R Speaking at Under the Radar
Tomorrow, Lowell Goss, CEO of LOUD3R, a new client here at Stage Two, is speaking at the Under the Radar Conference. LOUD3R offers a network of enthusiast-oriented Websites to help millions of people find great information about topics they love. It is difficult to find quality Web content for topics that aren’t mainstream – whether it’s just trying to find good sites, or sifting through junk (spam, splogs and dupes) on RSS feeds.
To solve this problem, LOUD3R is launching a network of sites created by a semantic content engine that gathers, ranks and publishes the best content (news, editorial, photos, video) for a given topic, while filtering out all the junk.
It’s an exciting time for the LOUD3R team as they begin wrapping up beta and prepare to launch the network later this month. We are currently setting up interviews and briefings to learn more about LOUD3R, so if you would like to speak with Lowell for a more in depth look at the powerful tools behind the network, give us a call, email, tweet, comment or whistle – whatever works for you.
Want to see 32 cool new startups prior to September?
There’s always more startups launching than any of us can possibly keep up with. Some launch quietly, some launch loudly, there’s so many different ways to launch a company. One oft-recommended path is to use a conference. It’s a bit of a risky proposition, since you have to excel beyond just doing what you do well, you also have to stand out from the crowd, all of whom are trying to stand out from each other. When we launch a company, we evaluate these types of issues all the time, and our approach is to pick the best solution for the company’s needs, regardless of the events around them.
As I’ve blogged about before, there are two mega-startup-launch events occurring this fall (which I still hope will clean itself up, though I know it’s unlikely). But what about all those other companies who are ready with their products/services now, and don’t want to duke it out with 114 others? Enter the Under the Radar conferences, put on thrice annually by Dealmaker Media. I love these events, and now spend so much time there I’m lucky enough to be a “regular” moderator (along with my colleagues Rafe Needleman and Ellen McGirt). The events are well-attended by startup teams, accomplished industry experts, VCs, press, bloggers, and some fairly senior people in the tech industry.
The next event is on June 3rd, and features the following startups:
Jacked MovieSet Verismo Networks Vusion Jygy Nesting Vivaty Xumii Comedy.com Curse Hollywood Interactive Group PluggedIn AudioMicro GumGum Keibi Loud3r 33Across Kontagent MediaForge Sometrics CrowdSPRING ffwd Lil’Grams PutPlace Dizzywood Mochi Media Mytopia Pikum! Animoto Aviary Big Stage Overlay.tv
I’ll bet you don’t know most of them – what a great way to come take a look. The format of the show is highly interactive, with audience-wide topic discussions, text-your-vote-for-a-prize, and, the essential of all conferences, valuable hallway time for essential networking. Not convinced yet? How about $100 off your registration. Also, if I hear from the Dealmaker Media team that we send in more than 10 people, I promise to do my infamous impression of “George Lazenby Performing Sir Mix-A-Lot’s Baby Got Back.”
See you on the 3rd!
The Importance of Understanding Your Competitive Advantages
While wandering the Web 2.0 Expo show floor yesterday I couldn’t help but notice a chunk of startups trying to pitch ideas and business that seemed awfully familiar. In some cases they were rehashing older ideas trying to pump them back to life with a new fresh look. In others, the companies were tackling areas that are overly saturated with competition today. As I talked to the various booth reps, I was surprised by many of the pitches, as many of them seemed to base their entire “differentiator” story by aspects of their business which are simply insufficient to truly differentiate.
It’s one thing to have a massive amount of differentiation against your competition, and to heavily play up that feature/tech/etc. For example Google grew out of literally nowhere thanks to serving significantly better search results than other offerings at the time. Notice I said “significantly better,” not just “better”. Further, timing was important – Google came to market against products whose offerings were quite poor, so the “significantly better” results were highly noticeable.
Launching a “better than Google” company today, on the other hand, is a much larger challenge (despite numerous attempts). Not only are people NOT dissatisfied with Google’s results, their products now span well beyond just search, and are tightly integrated with a huge amount of Internet users’ lives and services. I’d say Google is more intertwined with the Internet today than Microsoft ever was with integrated Internet Explorer and other products which prompted all the lawsuits. Competing with the big G is going to take a lot more work than even “significantly better” search results would provide.
Another topic that seems to cause confusion in regards to differentiating companies is user interface (UI). I’ve heard countless companies show demos and talk about how they are great because their UI is so amazing and easy to use. One company’s rep even stated that the thing that will make them “stand out from the rest” is their signup process. Baloney. This is a very dangerous ground to play in, because it’s lacking the important tactical element of understanding when UI actually matters.
First, it’s my position that to use UI in this manner requires existing products to have bad UIs (not just average or mediocre, but bad). Second, existing UIs must be bad enough that the consumers who use these products are vocally unhappy and can identify statements such as “it’s too hard to use”. Third, the “better” UI must be easy to absorb instantly – in other words a new potential customer should see your screenshot/web site/gadget interface and instantly see how easy it is to use. Fourth, and of no lesser importance, better UI doesn’t mean “prettier” UI. Fifth, it’s hard to use UI to compete against massively entrenched players, though if its a bunch of startups fighting for attention, having a better UI is good.
TiVo beat ReplayTV with a stick when the two launched, outselling them at over 10:1 ratio from the getgo (although much of this was also due to pricing models, with the ReplayTV units coming in almost double the price of a TiVo, albeit with no monthly service fee). My precious Slingbox sent Sony’s LocationFreeTV packing time and time again. In both cases the products at hand were in new categories with no existing comparative products. Today, however, competing with either is much much harder, and good UI alone isn’t enough to cut it. While my examples here are both physical products, it’s fairly easy to see how they apply to Web services and sites as well.
Whether it’s UI or features, pricing or compatibility, it’s extremely important to understand how you stack up against the crowd. The key challenge startups and even large companies with new products face is to figure out the how and what of demonstrating competitive advantage. Building great products is only the starting point. Understanding how your potential customers will perceive your products is at least as important, and proper timing and positioning is just plain essential.
In a pseudo-related note – please come check out the unconference today!
Panel on Leveraging Social Media for Business
For most of next week you should expect a deluge of events, panels, conferences, unconferences, camps, meetups, mashups, foos, crunches, gigas, and memes all surrounding the Web 2.0 expo. I’ll be taking part in a few activities, including a panel (hosted by Softech) on how to leverage social media for business (professionals, b2b, etc). The panel is being moderated by my colleague William Gaultier (from e-Storm), and I’ll be joined by Karl Long (Nokia), Adam Metz (theMIX Agency), and Pankaj Parekh (Zmingo Inc).
The details:
Date:
Wednesday, April 23, 2008Location:
San Rafael Corporate Center
750 Lindaro Street
San Rafael, CAAgenda
6:30-7:15 Registration and Networking
7:15-7:20 Welcome and Upcoming Meetings
7:20-8:15 Panel Discussion
8:15-8:45 Audience Q&ARegistration Cost
This meeting is free to SofTECH members
Non-members pay $15 to pre-register, or $20 at the door. Register in Advance for Business Social Media- 4/23/2008
Should be an interesting discussion, as we have a variety of experts in the room, and we’ll probably each come at the various topics from different angles. It’ll likely be my last opportunity to talk about how I don’t use Twitter, since it’s seeming rather inevitable that I’ll end up having to use it for something sooner or later. Now now, the sky hasn’t fallen, dogs and cats are still not living together. But twitter is no longer just a neat tool for telling strangers how cool you are while waiting in line to get a sandwich, and I can’t keep my head in the sand forever.
But at least I’ll have tonight, and probably this weekend… Hope to see you next Wednesday!
When Conferences Collide
TechCrunch50 is the sequel to last year’s TC40 conference, which at the time was promoted fairly heavily as a “DEMO 2.0″ event, shifting the cost structure from demo-er to attend-ee. This year, the organizers have planted the event squarely on top of the DEMO conference, thus creating a bit of a conflict. But in any conflict comes some opportunity, which I am sure some folks will figure out between now and then. The other aftereffect is creating sufficient confusion and chaos as to cause people to turn away from having to make any choice.
As marketing consultants, people in our field will have quite the interesting challenge for the next few months. We’ll be asked to advise startups as to whether they should:
- Pick TC50
- Pick DEMO
- Pick *both* (you know someone’s gonna try it!)
- Pick neither
Personally, I don’t exactly know right now, but I will say this: I don’t care *who* you are, I don’t like going up against ~110-160 other startups in an attempt to get attention. I hate those odds, which are nowhere near the 1/x that you’d expect them to be. Quite a few of the attendees will likely have pre-existing connections to various media/bloggers in attendance, who will obviously give them the extra bit of attention (nothing wrong with all this, just stating the facts).
I will give this advice right now: if you are a brand-new startup and have NO marketing department and/or PR firm, don’t do either. You’ll have a devil of a time getting anyone’s attention outside of the 6ish minutes you actually get on stage. You’d be better off launching at some quiet time when you can get people to notice you without all the hoopla.
One other major concern I have is the potential for external disruption. This year’s DEMOspring event was somewhat eclipsed by the Yahoo-Microsoft merger talks. So that was 60 companies all getting a fraction of the publicity they had planned on. There are certainly no guarantees in marketing, and the best planned launches never go quite as you’d expect, but can you imagine what would happen if Apple and Facebook teamed up against Google next September 8th? It wouldn’t be pretty.
My best advice at this stage is to think deeply about your plans and needs. Don’t knee-jerk. Don’t follow the wrong trends. If you have a great product, it’ll always be great. How exactly do either of these events benefit your strategic goals? The true costs of either are well higher than the attendance fees, so think a lot before making a final decision. If you are considering either, this is probably one of the more important decisions you’ll make this year. Make it wisely.
Under The Radar: The Business of Web Apps
Being a PR and Marketing firm, we typically don’t “fly under the radar.” Our goal is to make a lot of noise (at the right time, and in the right way) and get the word out about our clients’ great products and services. However, today we did fly under the radar. By which I mean, we attended Dealmaker Media’s Under The Radar conference in Mountain View, CA. 
The conference was great – the folks at DM have got it down to a science. Speakers, moderators, and judges showed up on time (unless their cars broke down) and all the presenting companies had interesting ideas to pitch. We had several different reasons for attending:
- Two of our clients (DeviceVM and kwiry) presented at UTR
- Jeremy moderated two of the panels (and treated the speakers kindly for the most part)
- networking, networking, networking
We are big advocates of industry networking, and conferences like this one are great for that purpose. Founders and employees from dozens of different startup and large companies were in attendance, all with something new to pitch. Some are great, some are terrible, but it’s good to know what’s new and who’s doing it. There’s a great opportunity for business development at these events, and also a great chance to play matchmaker and connect two people that really ought to talk to one another. We like to help out where we can.
In addition to the presenters and attendees, there were also a good swath of media folk in attendance. Rafe Needleman from Webware was there, though he had some car trouble on the way down (bummer Rafe, that really sucks.) Kara Swisher from the WSJ (and other pubs) was there, judging for Jeremy’s panel. And Brad Stone from the NY Times was there as well, helping to judge some of the other presenters.
Last night Dealmaker Media threw a little party in Palo Alto at a restaurant called Zibibbo. We snapped a couple of pics while we were there.
Here’s a picture of Sol from DeviceVM, Cliff from DocSyncer, and some of our friends from Dealmaker Media:
Here’s a self portrait of Sol and myself:
And this is a picture of Ron from kwiry, hanging out with the lovely ladies of Dealmaker Media:
Under The Radar was a great conference because it had just the right combination of factors. There was a variety of interesting startups, a good supply of industry leaders and important members of the media in attendance. The presentations were generally engaging, and fomented lively discussions with both the judges and the audience.
Events like this are both fun and educationall, and can represent a great opportunity for business networking and business development – especially if you pick the right conference.
Marketing advice for CES booth staffs
In the past 9 years I’ve had the privilege to attend CES from so many different vantage points, including working in “traditional” CE booths as well as organizing the booth for tiny startups. I’ve also attended as a consultant and as press.There’s a lot of tips out there for attending CES (my CES tips at LIVEdigitally, Forbes, SAI’s, etc), but I haven’t come across any good advice for the folks in charge of staffing the booths. Here are my suggestions:
- Know your audience. Look for name tags before you get into an in-depth discussion (if someone’s got theirs flipped around, just politely ask them who they are, it might feel awkward, but it’s important). I watched a junior booth staffer spend 20 minutes with a fairly recognizable, high profile individual, without knowing who he was. This is a colossal mistake, as it’s vitally important to get the right people talking to the right visitors. Which brings me to…
- Funnel your traffic. You should have a game plan for “who talks to who”. If it’s a member of the press, someone from marketing should get them. If it’s a senior exec from a big tech firm, someone from your BD/exec management team. Different audiences get different discussions, and it’s as much a favor to them as it is to you to get them talking to the right folks.
- Wear comfy shoes and carry Purel. Borrowing from my end-user post, booth duty is gruesome. You’re standing most of the day, and odds aren’t bad your booth organizer cheaped out on the carpet so you are about 2mm off the concrete floor. Additionally, you are going to shake several hundred hands per day. Yuck. Purel, and definitely be sure to wash prior to eating!
- Have bottled water handy. I’ve lost my voice almost every year I did booth duty. Nuff said.
- Emphasize the team spirit. I don’t care what your title is, if someone who is on a 4 hour shift needs a soda or a hot dog or a piece of chewing gum, help them out. When I was at Sling Media, the first year we did a booth I distinctly remember one moment where the VP of Engineering did a coffee run for everyone. That’s the right spirit.
- Don’t mistreat competition. With the power of blogs and live video streaming today, it’s silly to assume your entire demo WON’T end up online somewhere. And if that occurs, your competition WILL see it. So if they walk up to you, camera in hand, just do your normal demo and spiel. You certainly don’t have to give up company secrets, but you really should treat them like any other demo. Personally, I take it a step further and make the effort to actually meet the person in question, commiserate on the show, etc.
- Ignore nobody. When doing demos I make a huge effort to make sure everyone around me is getting my attention. Even if the demo you are doing is to some uber-important industry exec, that doesn’t mean you completely ignore the rest. You can certainly say “hey everyone, I have a schedule demo to do right now, but I’ll be done in 15 minutes if you want to come back then” or something similar. Also, even if the person looks like a kook (which they probably are), you still have a job to do. Complain/joke about them later.
- Adapt your script. This year I’ll be doing demos with Bug Labs, and if I get a layman versus a Java programmer, I need to have two different stories to tell. But not only that, my Wed/Thurs storytelling will differ from Mon/Tues, as I’ll be paying attention to what works and what doesn’t. I recommend having group meetings at the end of either the first or second day to make changes to your scripts and pitches as necessary.
- Engage in discussions. Unless you are demoing iPhone 2.0, odds are pretty good you won’t have a line of a hundred people waiting to talk with you. So take some time with the people around you, ask what they think. More importantly: pay attention! If three people in a row say the same thing or ask the same question, that should be something you note for your script. If ten people in a row don’t understand your product, you have a bad pitch, and should fix it on the spot!
- Give useful schwag. The best schwag is stuff people keep and reuse. The worst schwag is gimmicky stuff that gets played with once then goes to the landfill (mini-frisbees, light-up bouncy balls, etc). My personal favorite is a deck of playing cards, but I also like pens, notepads, and mints. Creative stuff is good, but again, if its future landfill supply, then consider skipping on it.
- Take and give business cards. This ritual will hopefully die off in the next few years, but in the meantime, play ball. I recommend (but cannot say I perfectly practice what I preach here) followup with 100% of the cards you received, even if its nothing but being polite.
- Be on time. If your entire role with the show was being flown in, 6 hours a day of demos, then going back to the office, then you have no clue as to how much work went into organizing it by your colleagues. Show up when and where you are supposed to, and be on time. Vegas is about as big a distraction as one can imagine, but that’s a terrible excuse for disrespecting other people’s hard work.
Have a great show everyone!
