When we pitch our idea, people always asks us one question: why not use YouTube to enrich your personal profile pages? One answer is: because the video may disappear from YouTube because of legal matters (see YouTomb for a list of videos removed for copyright complaint) and you have a black hole in your profile. An US court gave a new answer today: because YouTube must pass all data concerning users who watched illegaly uploaded videos over to Viacom!
Here are some exciting news from our head quarter in Garching (near the “Atomei” - the nuclear power plant of the Technical University of Munich that looks like a egg):
We lost our business angels: they demanded 50% of the company, we offered much less. The insight from this eposide: always speak to multiple investors at the same time. Now we apply for different governmental support programs and further competitions.
That’s why we spend for example the whole Monday until Midnight to update our business plan for the Gründerwettbewerb “(founder competition”) of the Wirtschaftsministerium (”ministry of economics”) and for the competition of the magazine “Wirtschaftswoche”. Wish us luck!
Our team (see about us) gets bigger: Matthias, he studies media business in Mainz, joins our company as a trainee; André, a computer science student from Aachen, speaker colleague from the BASTA! conference and author for CREATE OR DIE, works for us as a freelancer (for Silverlight development) and will join us in october for a trainee semester; finally, a well experienced marketeer helps us two days a week with our marketing.
The UnternehmerTUM provided us four additional monitors! Yeah! So we can use the monitors of our notebooks in addition to the big ones what makes development and design much more fun! A big thanks to Sebastian from the UnternehmerTUM!
Now, we have full house in our office room: there are only three desks, but six people, six notebooks and five monitors. What a fun!
Not everything will be long tail, there always will be a strong mainstream, that’s what we think and that is what a study now confirms:
A book from 2006, “The Long Tail,” was one of those that appear periodically and demand that we rethink everything we presume to know about how society works. In this case, the Web and its nearly unlimited choices were said to be remaking the economy and culture. Now, a new Harvard Business Review article pushes back, and says any change occurring may be of an entirely different sort.
Lightspeed Venture Partners Blog lists 29 business models for games:
At the Social Gaming Summit recently, on the panel about Monetization and Business Models, David Perry mentioned that there were 29 business models for games that he was familiar with. I asked him to do a guest post listing them all and he agreed.
“Start-up with Silverlight” is the title of our showcase at the BASTA! conference in Mainz (22. - 26. September). Here is the abstract (in German language because the presentation will be in German too):
Mehr als die Idee zählt die Umsetzung: Eine fesselnde User Experience ist für Startups entscheidend für den Erfolg. Visual Studio und Expression Blend machen es möglich, auch mit geringem Personalaufwand lebendige Rich Internet Applications zu erstellen. Die Gründer von Squirrel, einer Plattform für digitale Sammelobjekte, zeigen in diesem Showcase, was sie aus Silverlight herausgeholt haben.
Hope to see you in Mainz - a beautiful city by the way! Have a good time!
The Lightspeed Ventures Partners Blog pointed me to the following article:
The following graphic from the pattern library illustrates what Yahoo calls the “competitive spectrum”, which is a way to classify the activity on your site and helps you to choose which reputation pattern might work best for your community.
Nice post by Jeremiah about how to fail the right way:
The trick is to quickly make mistakes and then rapidly fix them and move on. So my friends, fail fast.
Of course, you must read the whole article: Fail Fast!
PS: One commentor mentioned that David Kelley from IDEO proposed:
Fail often to succeed sooner.
I strongly agree with that and I only can recommend to read his books!
PPS: We failed in convincing our business angels that we are worth more than they are willing to give - but we we will fix this problem soon and continue to succeed :-)
Just like with golf, technology is as much about ensuring that your bad hits are recoverable as it is ensuring that you make great ones. We’re all going to have failures in our careers but avoiding the really big pitfalls will help you keep your company on the right growth path. Here are 10 common mistakes we at AKF Consulting see made during platform development — and the ones we believe are the most important to avoid.
Another great post by Andrew Chen, this time about how to loose customers:
I imagine that many in the readership are working on social products - for any product in this space, you often have a number of fuzzy stages that a user can move through during their lifecycle. This may include stages like:
* First experience
* Soloing and single user value
* Encountering some friends(?)
* Hitting critical mass for social
* Becoming a site elder
