June Event Roundup

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Lots going on in the first half of June plus one.  Here's a roundup. Busy.

GRA/TAG Business Launch Competition Finals
On Wednesday June 3rd from 8:00am – 2:00pm the finals of the GRA/TAG Business Launch Competition are being held at IBM. The finalists are AccelerEyes, Band Metrics and TalentSoup.  These companies were selected from over 75 entrants.  They will presenting their business plans to an all-star panel of judges to close the deal for over $300,000 in cash
and services. Register here.

Atlanta Social Media Tweetup
A special social media tweetup (a.k.a. happy hour)
with special guest David Meerman Scott, bestselling author of The New
Rules of Marketing and PR and World Wide Rave is taking place on Thursday June 4, from
6:00 – 8:30pm.

ProductCamp
A user driven unconference about product marketing and management ProductCamp Atlanta takes place on Saturday June 6 from 8:30am – 5:00pm at GTRI.  I am going to be participating on the Listening to Social Networks
(an area of keen interest) session, and may do a bit on evolving
product management from startup to enterprise.  ProductCamp is free to
attend.  Please register.  I hear tell about 180 people have already done so.

CapitalLounge
The Next CapitalLounge is scheduled for June 10th from 6:00 – 9:00pm.  CapitalLounge is  a free, networking event for Southeast early stage, fast-growth entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and angel investors.  You can expect  anywhere from 250 to 300 entrepreneurs and investors sharing ideas, connections, a great food spread, and cash bar.  Southeast-based bootstrappers, ‘idea-napkin’ holders, and more established entrepreneurs seeking expansion capital or networking contacts are also invited to apply.

Calling All Entrepreneurs
The boys from Southern Capital Ventures will be in town for CapitalLounge and they are having open sessions with entrepreneurs from 7:00 – 10:00am on June 11.  So don't spend too much at the cash bar and get up early to meet with Jason Caplain and David Jones.  You can find the details on Jason's blog.

CapVenture
CapVenture is a unique ATDC education program that equips
early stage (typically those seeking their first institutional round of
financing) CEO's and executives for smarter and more productive
capitalization of their business. Early applications are due June 16.  The program runs from run from August 25th to September 29th and concludes with an investor forum and a shot at getting involved with Venture Atlanta.  It costs $400.  You serious about raising money?  Worth it.

June 2, 2009  |  Comments  |  Tweet  |  Posted in Entrepreneurship

Mobicamp Wrapup

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This past Friday ATDC was the host sponsor for mobicamp, a new unconference centered around mobile technology and its impact on the day to day life of average users.  About 70 or so mostly mobile devs descended on the incubator to talk about iPhone development (a bit too much) and more.  While the production put together by Return 7 was described by some as “lightly attended”, it was a great first effort for a growing group interested in mobile media on a beautiful Atlanta summer night.  My favorite session of the night was put on by Jerry Rocha of Nielsen.  Great research on the burgeoning smart phone space.

Here are some links from folks that covered mobicamp better then me as I wade back into the world of blogging.

Lessons Learned While Planning an Unconference.  Amro Mousa

Mobicamp ATL a Ringing Success. TechDrawl, Celia Dyer

Configuring PR for the Mobile Internet. Bernaisesource, Dan Greenfield

June 1, 2009  |  Comments  |  Tweet  |  Posted in Mobile, Unconference

It’s Summer

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I got up this morning for an early breakfast meeting.  Made it out of the house in about 30 minutes.  No kids to feed and get ready for school.  They were still sleeping comfortably.  A real sign it's summer.  And if it's summer then spring break must be over and it's time to start paying attention to FoG again.  

It's been over five weeks since I have written a blog post.  I stopped because I needed a break.  And when I stopped I did not know for certain if I would start up again. So instead of writing articles I spent time thinking.  Thinking if I wanted to write articles.

Part of me said no, that I had achieved the objectives that I set when I started blogging. As I wrote in my second blog post:

"I am blogging to find my voice again,
learn about this new corner of the Internet, see how it might work for
my clients, and shameless self-promotion."

FoG has been a pretty good vehicle for me to be me.  That individual that some how was turned into a corporate drone (never really).  I have learned quite a bit about social media.  Dare I say an expert? (shudder). Perhaps.  And somewhere along the way I lost my clients as I focused more and more on finding my own startup.  As for the shameless self-promotion, that never ends, marketing is a never-ending process.  So a part of me feels that I have achieved almost all I can achieve with my personal blog.  At this point is keeping it up worth the effort?  Would the time I spend on FoG be best put to use on more important objectives?  Perhaps. Perhaps not.

Something else happened as well.  It seems I had stopped writing because I had something to say and started writing to build traffic.  To keep the Compete, Google Analytics, Technorati gods happy. To keep those trend lines hockey sticking upward.  Two words.  Off strategy.

So I stopped.  To get a little perspective.  Just to let it go.  And I gotta tell you, I did not miss the writing all that much.  But there was one thing I did miss.  I missed all of you that make FoG a community.  As a community where good conversation can happen.  As a community where I try to be a good approachable organizer and meet interesting new people with interesting points of view.

So I am back on FoG. And I am going to keep on it for a while.

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Quote of the Week

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"…spend the majority of your time getting to know your early users."

Sean Ellis

In this insightful article entitled "Indifference is Your Real Competitor".

I just stumbled upon the Startup Marketing Blog this week.  It so loaded with excellent content that it immediately made its way to my blog roll sidebar.  Sean coined a term that captures something that I have always believed and practiced, "metrics driven customer development."  Marketing is much more about math and metrics than creativity.    I am a big believer in metrics driven marketing.  Basically applying measurement to every facet of marketing in the same way you would sales or operations. 

But more to the point of the quote, I can not tell you how many times I have asked an entrepreneur what a customer or potential customer thinks about their product offering only to receive back a blank stare. 

Launch something, get somebody to use it, and engage them to improve until you have something that a lot of people want.

April 17, 2009  |  Comments  |  Tweet  |  Posted in Quotes

How To Pitch

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I bet a spend somewhere between 5 to 10% of my time listening to entrepreneurs give pitches, helping entrepreneurs create pitches, or providing suggestions for improvements to pitches.  More often then not I point entrepreneurs to online resources such as the ATDC presentation template or a presentation that I gave at CapVenure on "Communicating With Investors" that made its way onto the Peachseedz Library.   And of course Guy's infamous 10/20/30 Rule of Powerpoint is a mainstay as well.  But yesterday Paul Freet pointed to this fantastic presentation by Canaan Partners called the "Entrepreneur Pitch Workbook" that instantly became a favorite. 

The structure of the pitch section on slides 5 through 11 is a most excellent explanation of the key elements needed in any pitch. Very
specifically follow slide 7.  By the time you are finished with the intro slide everyone in the room should know the basic idea and the value proposition of what your company is doing.  And at the end, the presentation has a nice summary slide of the structure before closing with a billboard slide with contact information.  If you are pitching you want such a billboard up on the screen during Q&A.

An entrepreneur that follows Guy's simpe rules coupled with the objectives based structure laid out by Canaan will be well prepared for a successful pitch.

April 14, 2009  |  Comments  |  Tweet  |  Posted in Entrepreneurship, Presentations, Venture Capital

People’s Choice Contest Voting Open

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The GRA/TAG Business Launch Competition has opened it's People’s Choice Contest.  The top two companies receiving the most votes will become “wild card” presenters in the semi finals of
the competition.  Last year one of the company's that emerged from the People's Choice Contest Made it to the finals so it is a great way for a company to advance. 

After viewing the presentations you can vote for your favorite.  I went through them all.  BeMyAd's catchy jingle got my vote. 

BeMyAd

Voting is open until April 29.

April 13, 2009  |  Comments  |  Tweet  |  Posted in Startups

Quote of the Week

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"Technology is changing the whole fabric of social interaction. We're
absorbing our machines in a symbiotic way, evolving to become one with
our own devices, and that's going to continue indefinitely."

James Cameron

In the current issue of WIRED where he discusses the Terminator series and his predictions of machines in our future.  T4 is coming out in May.  I am eager to see Christian Bale play the role of John Conner.

April 10, 2009  |  Comments  |  Tweet  |  Posted in Quotes

Map Reduce for the People

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This is a guest post by Russell Jurney, a technologist and serial entrepreneur.  His new startup, Cloud Stenography, will launch later this year.  The article is an extension of a simple question on Twitter asking the importance of Map Reduce.  Some subjects take much more than 140 characters.

The Technical Situation in Brief

The advent of the personal computer and the Visicalc spreadsheet were the foundation for a revolution in computing, business and life whereby normal people could carry out sophisticated
accounting, analysis and forecasting to inform their decisions to arrive at more positive outcomes. As Moore’s law has progressed and processors have become faster, and computers inter-networked, large volumes of highly granular data have been collected. Analysis of terabyte datasets on the same level as a spreadsheet has been limited by the disparity of acceleration between processor speed and computer I/O (input/output) operations. Intel has produced ever faster processor clock speeds without accompanying disk, RAM or bus speeds. Put simply: We have cheap and numerous computing resources and abundant data, but bringing those resources to bear on that data to generate real value from it has proven exceedingly difficult.

Visicalc

The widespread use of relational databases to access data in pre-defined static relationships has also limited our ability to discover and infer new and unique relationships among data. Dynamic analysis of large volumes of data in relational databases requires exhaustive pre-calculation of indexes and summaries of data for each relationship, and scaling relational databases to handle large datasets is a complex, painful and expensive process. As a result business intelligence systems relying on relational databases are prohibitively complex and expensive. Other methods of raw parallel computation, such as MPI, were exceedingly difficult. Such ‘smart kid only’ technologies have significant barriers of entry for mere mortals. In fact, multi-threaded, shared-memory computation in languages like C++ are considered some of the most difficult, arcane areas of computer science, leading to entire languages aimed at making concurrency easier.

MapReduce As the Way Forward

In order to extract value from large piles of data, we must escape the bounds of IO by going parallel and having many processors work on the data at once, without grinding our development to a halt dealing with complex algorithms and frameworks. MapReduce and platforms that implement it satisfy this requirement for a surprisingly broad set of problems. MapReduce is a simple way to process data in parallel among many commodity machines. You are already familiar with the power of MapReduce in your daily use of it – it is the pattern pioneered by Google to bring you the effective search on which we now all depend.

MapReduce is the design pattern that in combination with recent developments in cloud computing and cheap, plentiful broadband will bring us spreadsheet-style analysis of vast amounts of data ill suited to traditional database management systems in both scale and structure. MapReduce offers a cost-effective way for any business to harness massive amounts of computational power in the cloud for short periods of time to perform complex computations on large volumes of data that would be prohibitively expensive and time consuming on an individual machine, or that would require the construction of a data center to handle.

The Business Impact

What does this mean for your business? Knowledge of MapReduce has spread beyond Google, and it is now used by an increasing number of companies to extract value from web-scale data. Facebook, Yahoo, Cloudera and many others have embraced MapReduce in the form of Apache Hadoop, the platform around which most open discussion of MapReduce has occurred. As a result, a new generation of startups is rising that will take advantage of MapReduce to bring the same power that Google pioneered on search to bear on a variety of datasets. New opportunities exist by ‘thinking big’ and extracting value from ever-increasing streams and volumes of data.

Example 1: Proving Global Warming

What does this really mean? It means that developers will have a clear way to reduce vast datasets to scales they can work with to extract information to inform your decisions. In this example from Cloudera, Hadoop and Pig are used to query a 138GB log of weather history for the last 100 years from the National Climatic Data Center to reduce that vast data to a scale the developer is comfortable working with.

As a pile of data, the NCDC log informs nothing. When queried via map/reduce using Hadoop and Pig, we arrive at an informative chart that shows us an important trend. Would that chart inform a discussion about global warming? If you could get such clear visualizations about every minutiae of your business critical to your success, would it inform your decisions? Can you log and mine more data to streamline your operations?

Example 2: A Supercomputer for Every Biologist

When Amazon S3, EC2 and MapReduce via Hadoop are applied to the RMAP algorithm of genetic analysis, thanks to the work of one grad student, the result is a point-click supercomputer for every biologist that wants one in the form of Cloudburst for Amazon Elastic Map Reduce. Now any biologist that wants a supercomputer for this kind of genetic analysis can have one by the hour, and its as easy as point-click. More map/reduce genetic analysis algorithms are sure to follow. That’s revolutionary.

Conclusion

We are constrained in our strategies by what we imagine possible. MapReduce and cloud computing open broad possibilities and business opportunities by placing a usable supercomputer by the hour in the hands of every startup that wants one. There is no problem which you lack the processing power to solve, its just a question of whether the hourly cost is profitable. That’s a profound change from being bound to one machine. As a result of this shift, smaller companies can attack ‘bigger’ problems without a large up-front investment in hardware or software infrastructure.

A new renaissance in computing is coming that will be comparable to the business adoption of the personal computer and VisiCalc, and MapReduce will drive it.

April 9, 2009  |  Comments  |  Tweet  |  Posted in Computing, Internet

Putting A Face On Your Brand

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I am spending the week on spring break with my family being analog.  FoG is being populated for the most part by a series of guest posts.  The first is from Ron Huey of Huey Partners, a full-service advertising agency.

Entrepreneurs are inventors by nature.  They, most often, have a clear, concise vision of the product or service they want to create.  Where that vision can become a bit fuzzy is in defining the overall brand their product or service must live under.

Your brand is a living, breathing entity with its own personality and style. That brand persona is the critical entry point to your product or service.  In fact, potential customers will form ideas and perceptions about your brand before they ever experience your product.  I like to use the analogy of meeting someone at a cocktail party.  Is your brand someone people are attracted to?  Do they enjoy conversing with you?  Do they walk away feeling that you’re smart, engaging, considerate and empathetic?  Do they become an advocate, or better yet, an evangelist for your brand? 

Conversely, we’ve all met the guy at the cocktail party who, while smart, can’t seem to talk about anyone but himself and his accomplishments.  And while he may have very valuable information to impart, we’re not really in the mood to listen and walk away seeing him as an off-putting, self-centered, know-it-all.  No sale there.

My firm was fortunate to work with MindSpring when they were moving from a regional ISP to a national provider.  At the time, their advertising consisted of a cartoonish drawing of a man whose spring-loaded head was popping off his shoulders.  It was an arresting visual, but the wackiness and crude, haphazard approach of the ad seemed to undermine the credibility and trust MindSpring hoped to instill.

We needed to create a brand persona for MindSpring that captured their quirky, non-corporate culture, but also positioned them as credible, reliable and sympathetic to the plight and needs of the internet user. The brand needed to come off as a friend who was there to help.

MindSpring001

MindSpring003

Another key to creating a successful brand image for MindSpring was the concept of simplicity. Simplicity can’t be stressed enough and its value has been covered in this blog in relation to the brand identity and brand promise.  We used MindSpring’s iconic blue and yellow colors, but kept our thoughts and graphics incredibly simple.

MindSpring005

Regardless of how amazing your product or service may be, remember that your brand image is the crucial entry point. If prospects are intrigued and attracted to your brand, you have a  much greater chance of inducing trial and ultimately selling them on your product or service. 

April 8, 2009  |  Comments  |  Tweet  |  Posted in Marketing