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Making Energy Matter | Ben Foster

Ben Foster manages the creation, design, and delivery of Opower’s products, ensuring the company continues to build the industry’s leading suite of energy information services. He is responsible for the company’s products from a variety of perspectives, including features, functionality, user experience, and roadmap. Prior to Opower, Ben was VP of Product Management for Adchemy, a leader in digital advertising technology. While there, he was responsible for the company’s entire product suite supporting lead generation and Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings.

Before joining Adchemy, Ben led dozens of consumer-oriented product management efforts spanning the disciplines of marketing, merchandising, search, structured data, and technology integration at companies such as eBay, Webvan, ThoughtWorks, and Barra. He maintains a blog about best practices in product management and design, PMRant. Ben holds a BA in Statistics from the University of California at Berkeley.

Samwers clone Quora: Never!

Quora connects you to everything you want to know about; that is the quoted tagline. It helps you mine and archive answers for all questions and topics of interest. If I maybe bold, it takes WikiAnswers to a new level, with a sharper, more business social media approach. Their startup has peaked the interest of renown investors such as Peter Thiel, who brought in his share during the Series B round of funding. 

So why can’t the Samwer brothers clone Quora? After all, they have cloned every major startup from the US in other markets. Quora has a four fold advantage: 1. They use unique source code; their technology is so complicated, a simple hire/outsource/plug and play development would not work. 2. Their 30 person big team work on unique projects; projects that are neither redundant nor impersonal. 4. The knowledge they aggregate is used for higher causes i.e. they create projects for execution based on knowledge gathered through the content management process. 4. Nothing says strength like vc gurus saying you have a 100 year future. 

The Tech Crunch link provided in the title provides more detail into why Quora is not a “Bora”.

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Resisting Knowledge Centralization

The internet has made things easier, faster, and within reach. The world has become flat and barriers to entry have reduced significantly. We are instantly sharing our likes, tastes, moods and interests. The process of discovery has become social and can be curated.

Now, we have to overcome centralization. Centralization can lead to price controls, censorship without due process, lack of reader privacy, and resistance to innovators.The podcast attached provides a concise yet crisp look into why we need to destroy oligopolies and how can we ensure universal access. 

13 Plays

The values of books | Amy Novesky

Amy Novesky is an award winning author in the genre of children’s books. She has written several books based on real characters and stories with beautiful illustrations. In this micro-mentary, Amy highlights the value of books and why we need them inspite of modern advances in technology. Books, not only can be used to transfer knowledge, but capture and grow the imagination of kids today. 

How Big Data Can Fuel Bigger Growth

In the right hands and handled strategically, the massive amounts of information companies collect today can become a valuable new asset. Players seeking additional organic revenue streams should consider tapping their data trove to power a new information services growth engine. In this Accenture High Performance Business Podcast, hear how big data – the massive amounts of analytics data companies collect – can power a new information services growth engine.

Cloud Computing To Reach $150 Billion by 2013

Estimated at the same value of the Greek Bailout and 10x the 2012 Olympics budget, the cloud computing industry is scheduled to grow twice as big as the coffee industry. By 2015, a quarter of all business software purchases will be service enabled software with SaaS delivery accounting and 80% of all apps deployed will be on the cloud. The cloud allows you to deploy apps faster, increase efficiency and flexibility, improve customer service and reduce cost.

However, it comes with its own set of challenges such as security threats, adaptability, overhaul of legacy products and lack of budget. With information being deployed to foreign servers, not only is cloud computing being perceived as an area of growth, but cloud security as well.

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VC Funding in New York Lowest in 15 Months VC Funding in New York has been the lowest it has ever been in 15 months. Funding levels have fallen by approximately 41% since the fourth quarter of 2011. However, these numbers reflect the deal values but not the volumes. The deal volumes have climbed by 11% in the same time frame, the reason being that there are more deals being conducted in the early stage and seed A rounds of funding than subsequent rounds.  Mega-deals have been hard to come by this quarter. Due to this, New York has slipped to the third spot behind San Francisco and Mountain View in terms of Internet deals and fourth spot behind San Francisco, Mountain View and Palo Alto in terms of Mobile deals. Their plan to move up the list should be to invest in startups that have been around for awhile and have managed to sustain themselves through their initial periods of volatility while growing an active user/consumer base. These startups that have passed seed/ Series A stage will drive the NY ranking up the list. To learn more about Q1 2012 VC Funding Results, please click on the following link: “Venture Capital Deals and Funding – Quarterly Venture Capital Report for Q1 2012”

VC Funding in New York Lowest in 15 Months

VC Funding in New York has been the lowest it has ever been in 15 months. Funding levels have fallen by approximately 41% since the fourth quarter of 2011. However, these numbers reflect the deal values but not the volumes. The deal volumes have climbed by 11% in the same time frame, the reason being that there are more deals being conducted in the early stage and seed A rounds of funding than subsequent rounds. 

Mega-deals have been hard to come by this quarter. Due to this, New York has slipped to the third spot behind San Francisco and Mountain View in terms of Internet deals and fourth spot behind San Francisco, Mountain View and Palo Alto in terms of Mobile deals. Their plan to move up the list should be to invest in startups that have been around for awhile and have managed to sustain themselves through their initial periods of volatility while growing an active user/consumer base. These startups that have passed seed/ Series A stage will drive the NY ranking up the list.

To learn more about Q1 2012 VC Funding Results, please click on the following link: “Venture Capital Deals and Funding – Quarterly Venture Capital Report for Q1 2012”

New “Listen” Button On Facebook Musician Pages Instantly Plays Their Songs In Your Favorite Streaming App

Facebook is currently in route to launching the listen feature next to the like button on the band pages. Currently, it is not available for everyone, but this feature will allow you to listen to their music by launching Spotify and MOG apps from within Facebook. The eventual line extensions of these modules would be to extend a retail component for band t-shirts and concert tickets, making it the complete online store within Facebook. 

Listen Button Pages

Concerns voiced from the musicians have been that this made lead to a decrease in traffic to their individual websites. Regardless, musicians will have to remain vigilant that this will eventually happen and they may have to concentrate their traffic on the Facebook page. Other speculations about Facebook’s strategies based on this move are (1) Will they incorporate the iTunes Store into their band pages? (2) Will applications such as Hulu be incorporated into Facebook to watch your favorite shows? These are still early days for those questions, but hopefully Facebook’s operational strategies are aligned with its explosive growth. 

Do I need a Tech Co-Founder?

Are you still looking for the digital artist that will make your venture go live? It may be hard to find good, qualified engineers to work on your ventures. Lets face it: software engineers are the creme de la creme these days. The qualified ones go to work for Google and Facebook to make their six-figure salaries. The less than qualified ones are the ones you want to avoid bringing onboard.

In order to become more self reliant, here are some options:

1. Learn to code

2. Hire an external team

3. Utilize existing plug and play design options

The article attached provides good insight on why should you go down these routes. Self-reliance beats co-dependence if your team is not as motivated as you. 

Why You Should Manage Your Own Social Media

If you were thinking of outsourcing your social media to an external third party, STOP!

Noone understands your brand better than you do; noone is as passionate about the brand as you are; noone knows where the brand is headed more than yourself.

Your social media space is your gateway to the world - think beyond just delegation of responsibility.

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