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Uber’s Controversies Highlight A Growing Transformation of Its Utopian Vision To One of Chaos

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The word “disruption” has been thrown around in the tech industry rather nonchalantly over the past few years. The dictionary defines it as: “a disturbance or problems that interrupt an event, activity, or process.” And one company that has come up time and time again as the epitome of this phenomenon is Uber, the private car service that has Silicon Valley in a tizzy.

Since its inception, the company’s CEO Travis Kalanick has publicly said the existing taxi industry is corrupt and there was a perception that Uber was the white knight sent to provide the community with better transit options when they wanted it. This shared economy utopia started off great, but as the company grew, it encountered multiple issues that is shattering this vision and is giving rise to utter chaos and anarchy.

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This week alone has certainly been a public relations nightmare for Uber. Buzzfeed reports that a company executive sought to engage in opposition research against reporters who were overly critical about it, followed by allegations that its New York City General Manager Josh Mohrer spied on customers without their consent. And now Congress is showing an interest in Uber as U.S. Senator Al Franken from Minnesota has requested answers from Kalanick.

And that’s not all of it. But we’ll get to that in a bit.

What kind of Uber do we want?

It was in May 2010 when I was first introduced to the company that would eventually become known as Uber. It was at a San Francisco App Show event and its Head of Global Operations, Ryan Graves, was on stage talking about it. There was an idea about Ubercab (as it was known then) and the company put it thusly:

“The reality is that walking to the curb and waiting is a terrible way to get a car. Not only is it super frustrating, it’s a terribly inefficient use of your time. <insert UberCab> Now a service exists that is an incredibly efficient use of your time…

Forget about walking to the street to look for a cab anymore. Now, like the European Diplomat, you just make that request from the comfort of your home, office, gym, hotel lobby, whatever… There are cars doing nothing but waiting for your request.”

Sounds like a great idea, right? And it turned out great for the most part. In cities where I’ve been repeatedly shrugged off by taxi cabs who refused to accept my fare in exchange for a ride home, having Uber appeared to be a blessing. Having a non-judgmental car service was pretty awesome. It gave rise to people that there was a way to break free from the incumbent car services. You know that scene from Braveheart where Mel Gibson gives an impassioned speech to the Scottish warriors to fight for their freedom? Yeah, that’s what the community felt like and Uber did a pretty decent job of galvanizing the crowd to support it.

braveheart

But yet, there’s something disturbing about the way Uber runs its business. This is the part where we talk about the various controversies that have come about in the company’s nearly five years of existence. It’s faced lawsuits and cease & desist letters from city and state regulators throughout the United States, taxi lobbyists, and even protests from its own drivers! Initially, public opinion appeared to be on the side of Uber as it was championing the proverbial “will of the people”. But whatever goodwill that it had fighting a unmoved incumbent soon faded away to what it is now — intense criticism over its culture and apparent lack of clarity and morals.

The glory that is Uber ushered in a new way of thinking about transportation and technology — making it better. And in doing so, other companies took to the market, including Lyft, Sidecar, InstantCab, and many others. Not surprisingly, Uber remains the market leader thanks to its incredible resources and $1.5 billion in venture capital, but it faces some stiff competition, especially from Lyft (others certainly disagree).

But instead of furthering this “free from poor car service” utopia, Uber decided to open up a new theater and wage war against Lyft. And it has become a messy one with not only drivers caught in the middle, but other competitors in the space. Just take a look at this “playbook” that The Verge obtained listing all the ways Uber could sabotage Lyft. This bears some semblance to another Mel Gibson movie: Mad Max and the Thunderdome. Instead of living peacefully to advance society, Kalanick and his team are instead waging an all-out assault on anyone even remotely deemed a challenge.

Public perception is mixed and perhaps with all the news that’s been out there around the company, it’s something Uber certainly has to work on.

Disruption: I don’t think it means what you think it means

As I alluded to earlier in this article, Uber has become the epitome of this concept of “disruption”. The tech ecosystem is filled with many of these type of companies, including WhatsApp, Evernote, YouTube, Pinterest, Snapchat, and Airbnb, In their own rights, these companies have really changed an ecosystem, perhaps for the better. Many of them have gone on to be valued for more than $1 billion, joining the so-called “Unicorn club”.

Uber is an extreme case as it is part of an even more exclusive group, which some have referred to as decacorns — those companies valued at more than $10 billion. Certainly investors like Menlo Ventures, Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Benchmark, Wellington Management, and the slew of angel and individual VCs are seeing potential for the company, but are they also looking at the damage that Uber could be causing to an entire market?

Disruption is meant to re-frame an entire market or society, not to implement a Scorched Earth mentality where you begin entirely anew. The taxi industry, while not necessarily being on my favorites list, has been battling for its survival with one taxi association president comparing Uber to a terrorist group.Perhaps city regulators and the industry were onto something when they’ve attempted to slow down Uber’s progress.

The company’s efforts to become the new logistics service of the world is admirable, but in doing so, it’s bulldozing past things that are incredibly important, such as human decency. It has failed to do proper background checks on multiple occasions and when issues like a assault conviction happens with one of its drivers, Uber says that it’s not at fault, instead insisting that as independent contractors, the company is absolved of any responsibility. There are countless other “horror stories” relating to Uber drivers.

And Uber is apparently disrupting the livelihood of its drivers as well. There are periodic protests by drivers, both those that operate town cars, and those that participate in UberX, its ridesharing service. Uber claims that drivers could make upwards of $90,000 a year (or $25 an hour), some of those valued “partners” aren’t seeing the cash, with allegations being made that drivers are making less than minimum wage.

Ultimately, the one thing that Uber is definitely disrupting is its own culture. TechCrunch’s Jon Russell (and my former colleague at The Next Web) says it best with this headline: Uber’s Moral Compass Needs Recalibration. And it’s true. Uber’s culture has dwindled from caring about the community to focusing about bringing more integrations to its technology. The brash disregard for user privacy is clearly something that has become more apparent with the company — just look at the company’s NYC general manager Josh Mohrer who is currently under investigation (by the company, not by the police) for spying on a Buzzfeed reporter’s customer logs without her consent.

Uber is a Big Data company — it has a treasure chest of where we go, how much we pay, habits, when we need a ride, and much more. But just because it has the technology and the massive engagement that goes along with it, doesn’t mean that it has carte blanche authority to access it without consent. Privacy is privacy and no matter how fantastic the technology is, it mustn’t be compromised.

Recourse needed

As Uber soldiers on amidst all of the backlash and criticism from this week, let’s look at the company’s place in the market. Because after all, while I find its cultural practices concerning, the overall idea of Uber is enticing. Kalanick’s vision has been to turn Uber into a logistics company, perhaps becoming the next-generation UPS or FedEx. And he has certainly amassed a great deal of resources, including a potential $2 billion fundraising round currently on-going.

But it needs to become a better corporate citizen and that means a dramatic shift in what’s going on. Kalanick’s vision is still his and he has said he wants Uber to be a “positive member of the community.” But that’s a lot of talk — it’s time to put words into action and turn around the company. Bring harmony to the community once again, Mr. Kalanick.

Photo credits: Uber image via Bloomberg/Getty Images; Braveheart scene from Pars-United; taxi cab image via Bloomberg/Getty Images; Travis Kalanick image via Bloomberg/Getty Images.


10 Interesting Startups To Watch In 2015

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Omega Constellation and Leica M2

As we wrap up another year on this planet, people have begun reminiscing on what has gone on in the past twelve months and whether they should look back at it with longing regret or praise over their accomplishments. The same could be said about the world of technology and startups. For the past couple of years, I’ve penned an annual prospective (if you will) on The Next Web — see 2013 and 2014 — about interesting companies that you should pay attention to in the next year. Naturally, I’m no longer actively reporting, but I felt that it was worth my time (and yours) to highlight a few startups that are worth paying attention to.

As I premised my picks over the past couple of years, these aren’t all relatively new companies. Some you’ll find have raised some serious venture capital, but they’re still considered to be startups (in my opinion). Nevertheless, I feel that there’s going to be some significant movement or breakthrough taking place in 2015 — will I be right?

Here’s a complete list of the startups in this lengthy post. Scroll down for my reasoning:

  • Shyp
  • Leeo
  • Postmates
  • EyeEm
  • Zenefits
  • Brigade
  • HandUp
  • Emberlight
  • ProductHunt
  • Mattermark

Shyp

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Shyp opened to the world in March 2014 and has grown to now operate in several cities in the United States, including San Francisco, Miami, and New York City. The company has raised $12.1 million in funding from investors like SherpaVentures, Winklevoss Capital, Homebrew, and individual investors like Brian McClendon and David Marcus. If you’re not familiar with Shyp, the name gives away what it does: ships items for you. In this Shared Economy world we live in, the company specializes in logistics and could be poised to take on FedEx, UPS, DHL and others, disrupting an legacy industry. But how?

“We started Shyp with a mission: to make shipping a better experience for consumers and businesses alike…Shipping has always been a hassle: not only do you have to get your items to the shipping facility, you also have to figure out how you’ll package them, and pay for all the materials. Whether you’re shipping every day or on a one-off basis, shipping isn’t easy.”

Dealing with logistics is definitely a problem for many and for those who just don’t have time to deal with sending packages to and from their location either locally, regionally, or nationally, the Shared Economy could offer a solution. And while Uber could offer a similar solution, it hasn’t thus far as it seeks to focus on transportation matters. It’s worth seeing if Shyp will be able to capitalize on this and add more cities and capabilities in the future. Already it is looking at furthering its expansion to Los Angeles, but will it encounter any regulatory issues similar to those that have befallen fellow Shared Economy companies like Airbnb and Uber?

Leeo

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Leeo is the company behind a smart nightlight. Wait, a nightlight? Yes, that’s right. In stealth for at least the greater portion of 2014, Leeo has revealed itself with the first of possibly multiple products. With its nightlight, the company has offered consumers a way to easily tap into the Internet of Things and connected home space without a lot of effort. The Leeo nightlight is a $100 device that will detect if your smoke detector or carbon monoxide detector is going off and notify you. If it can’t reach you, it will contact one of five contacts you enter into the app. It can also tell you the temperature and humidity of your home or apartment.

This device is useful for those people who don’t have the technical prowess or are unable to install a smart device like the Nest Protect or thermostat in their residence (e.g. landlord won’t allow it, not comfortable messing with the wires, etc.). And who knows what will happen with the company in the future…will it compete with Google and release more products or team up with utility providers and other industries in order to improve the quality of living in the household? It’s not clear yet, but it’s worth keeping an eye out on Leeo’s future developments.

I’m rather long on Leeo, especially since I received one to try out earlier on (disclosure!). The design is quite compelling and the company is approaching the smart home from a good perspective. At first it was interesting to have in my apartment, but after the so-called #PineappleExpress storm shut off power, Leeo was helpful in letting me know when power to my apartment was restored.

Postmates

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Postmates is one of those services that seems to have endured even amid what many would speculate would be crushed under the weight of bigger competitors. The on-demand courier service has been around for a few years and is rapidly expanding to numerous cities around the United States. And along the way, it’s encountered foes like eBay with its eBay Now program, Amazon and its Prime Now initiative, and also Uber. But while people may have speculated that Postmates is “doomed”, it’s still here and operating quite well it would seem.

Just like Shyp, Postmates is focused on doing one thing really well, and that’s in the logistics department. But unlike Shyp, it’s interested in transporting local deliveries and shipments. So when you need something to be delivered in under an hour across town, then that’s Postmates. The battle for national and international delivery isn’t really being waged as furiously as before — the real battle lies with the local market and no one has effectively tapped into it. But Postmates may have a chance, especially when big companies are rethinking their same-day delivery program — just look at eBay Now. Postmates remains an important part of the Shared Economy with more than a million deliveries under its belt and is still looking for ways to scale.

The recent opening of its API is such an option and will be a worth looking at since Postmates will make it possible for people to quickly receive more items they want instead of having to go into the store. The company has signed partnerships with popular services to really kick up local mobile commerce, with deals in place with Everlane, Threadflip, Betabrand, and more:

“The Postmates API allows any developer to integrate fast and scalable local, on-demand delivery into their products, websites and apps. It also gives developers access to a delivery fleet of 6,000 drivers and riders in 18 U.S. markets.”

Postmates is demonstrating that it can expand beyond food delivery and into other verticals. Yes, it has been possible for users to request delivery of other things or even to have items picked up and delivered to other locations, but for many, it’s been rather difficult to decipher this — perhaps better explanation might be needed? Regardless, evidence suggests that it’s growing and demonstrating that it’ll be here for quite a while.

EyeEm

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As you might know, I love photography. Whether it’s with a dSLR camera or even my mobile device, much of what I capture is shared with my friends and followers through social media. When I first heard of EyeEm, it seemed to be nothing more of like an Instagram competitor and the “photo-sharing app wars” ended quite a few years ago. But upon closer inspection, you wouldn’t think that it is — it’s less of a tool and more of a portal into a world of photography enthusiasts.

But it’s definitely not the only game in town — it’s competing against Flickr, Twitter, and of course, Instagram. But here’s the difference that I see: EyeEm puts community ahead of the camera. Twitter allows you to capture and edit photos to share on its microblogging/communication/media platform, but it’s a secondary benefit (a nice addition). Instagram focuses on letting you capture photos first, but doesn’t encourage you to continue snapping images or discovering a community.

Flickr has some similarities to EyeEm, including most notably that the former’s Head of Product now works for the latter. Flickr does have the active community but it’s been stagnant in terms of innovation for years and it has forced people to abandon its platform. And EyeEm takes advantage of the fact people capture more photos on their mobile device and engages them through missions and other enticements. And with the latest update to its app, the company makes it possible for users to become better photographers by looking at what professionals have done.

It will be fascinating to see what the company continues to do to engage the global community while also finding ways to monetize itself — will it utilize sponsorships for its missions? What about targeted advertising? Webinars and resources to help further creative photography for users?

Zenefits

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Zenefits was founded in 2013 and is a graduate of the Y Combinator accelerator program. It specializes in the enterprise space, providing those in HR, managers, and employees a single online portal to manage all of their human resource services, including payroll, benefits, compliance, and more. Basically, Zenefits is disrupting legacy HR systems that have been in place for decades and has re-imagined the solution. To date, the company has raised $83.6 million in its pursuit to reinvent both the health and insurance and HR side of things for the enterprise.

And of course people are starting to pay attention to Zenefits. In December 2014, the company is now facing opposition from Utah state regulators. It has been alleged that because the company is giving away its cloud-based software for free, Zenefits is in violation of the state’s rebates and inducement law. Incumbents apparently don’t like this and if regulators proceed, it may shut down the company’s operation in the state. However, Zenefits isn’t taking this lying down — it has responded saying:

Zenefits says in the letter that if it is in violation of the law then so is Zion’s Bank for offering free checking, Marriott for offering free travel insurance and Hertz rental cars for offering perks such as skipping lines, under Kiser’s interpretation of the law.

However this plays out, it’s worth noting that with the opposition Zenefits is receiving in Utah, it’s on par with others in the Shared Economy. Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb have received this “badge of honor” and somehow still persevere.

Brigade

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In the current political climate, more people are becoming active in campaigning for change, regardless of which side of a particular issue you’re for or against. As we near the 2016 presidential election, and in the aftermath of the 2014 midterm elections, Americans will continue to remain active seeking reform on a variety of issues. Brigade Media might be the platform to help make things happen.

Started by Sean Parker, co-founder of Napster and formerly of Facebook fame, Brigade aims to reinvigorate democracy in this country. The company’s website states that the platform is about “expressing yourself, learning about your friends, and finding common ground — together.” Parker suggests that his product will help voters feel more empowered after years of feeling that their leaders don’t listen to them. But we’ve heard this song and dance before with the likes of Votizen, Causes, and Rally. But here’s a twist: Brigade owns Votizen and Causes — now all of it will be rolled up into a single democratic platform.

How will Brigade fare? It’s unknown as it has not yet launched — TechCrunch reports that it won’t be until 2015 before that happens so it’s definitely going to be of some interest. And pundits will definitely keep their eye on the company as the last couple of endeavors by Parker haven’t exactly been smooth sailing — remember Airtime and its relaunch?

HandUp

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While we’re on the topic of social good and causes, another company to keep your eye out on is HandUp. This tech startup is perhaps akin to a localized Kiva.org service. Those in need or homeless can use the service to seek out a “hand up” and donors can choose how much they’d like to give in order to provide the request. Whether it’s something like paying for dental work, rent, heat for a home, etc. HandUp is all about giving back and paying it forward. The organization’s co-founder Rose Broome has partnered with homeless service organizations to help facilitate delivery of goods and resources all in an effort to improve the lives of those less fortunate.

Similar to Watsi, in which the crowdfunding model is implemented to help fund projects, HandUp stands out in a sea of services seeking to raise money for their ephemeral app, stickers, or other nonsensical offering. It has raised $850,000 from a team of investors including Version One Ventures, Jason Calacanis’ Launch Fund, SV Angel, and individual investors such as Marc Benioff.

Emberlight

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Emberlight is a startup focused on the Internet of Things space. And before I go any further, I should disclose that the company is a graduate from season 3 of the Orange Fab accelerator, which is a part of Orange Silicon Valley. But aside from that, the company is working on a product where you’re able to control any light using your smartphone or mobile device. It eliminates the need for consumers to have to retool their entire homes, possibly saving them an incredible amount. But before you rush out to the department store to buy it, it’s not available quite yet.

So what makes Emberlight so interesting and worth paying attention to? It’s because of the perceived demand. The company opened up its pre-orders through a Kickstarter campaign where it hoped to raise $50,000. Within weeks, that goal would have been met and by the time the 30-day window expired, the company had raised over $300,000. Per the company’s plan, pre-orders will ship early next year and it will be then when we begin to see whether there’s sufficient public demand for the smart lightbulbs.

There’s demand for companies in the Internet of Things space, with Samsung tapping into it with its SmartThings purchase in August 2014 and Intel exploring its own IoT platform. Whether Emberlight makes it to its next phase will be interesting to see and any future partnerships that it can form — will it strike a deal with electric utilities to help customers reduce their energy expenditures and better track their activity? Or what about with bulb manufacturers like Phillips or General Electric in order to produce better lightbulbs?

ProductHunt

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Another Y Combinator alumnus, ProductHunt functions like Hacker News, but specifically about new products. If you’re not a journalist or an avid technology tracker, then finding time to keep track of the latest comings and goings is near impossible (or at the very least very difficult). Everyday, there’s dozens of new products being added to the service with the best ones rising to the top based on popular vote. What makes it more impressive is that the standings can happen independently of press coverage. But also, the service offers specific “tool kits”, aka collections, based on specific needs. There are Healthcare Hunts, products for artists and art enthusiasts, social impact, traveling, and much more.

ProductHunt is certainly useful for marketers and business professionals eager to find the latest tools to adapt into their content and strategy plans. And the team has been coming up with interesting ways to scale the service, including hosting something similar to Reddit AMAs (Ask Me Anything). When Path released version 3.0 and expanded Path Talk’s feature to allow users to communicate with places, CEO Dave Morin took to the service to answer user questions and feedback. And it has only grown from there.

So what’s in the future of the company? It already has $7.1 million in the bank thanks to investments from Andreessen Horowitz and also Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. It will be worth checking in with over the next few months over how the company will escalate engagement with the thousands of users on the site.

Mattermark

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Much of this list is focused on the consumer, but there are startups focused on a different audience — the consummate business professional and also investor. Mattermark is the one to watch to see what happens in 2015. The service has raised $9.9 million in funding for its platform that helps firms quantify growth signals and predict potentially successful startups. It pulls in data from a variety of sources, including Twitter, news sites, the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC), LinkedIn, AngelList, CrunchBase, and others.

So why should people care about this in the future? With a lot of companies raising more funds at ridiculously high valuations, finding the next “Unicorn” can be important to investors and maybe even those in corporate M&A roles. Instead of dealing with data piecemeal, Mattermark offers up a single source that already analyzes the information for you all at once.

Perhaps investor Brad Feld (who recently put money into Mattermark) explains it:

“While there have been numerous efforts over the last 20 years to organize detailed private company data on the Internet, the end result is still lame. Classical search approaches like Google are a mess – you can get bits and pieces of the data, but it’s impossible to get what you want in one place. When you use public company data as a metaphor, it’s not surprising that Bloomberg still exists in the world of Google Finance, Yahoo Finance, MSN Money, and a continued list of non-comprehensive, relatively neglected data sets and presentation layers.

Today, the data signals about private companies are ubiquitous. But no one organizes the data effectively. When you buy a CRM system, it comes empty. Everyone re-collects similar data from a wide-variety of sources and ends up recreating the same spreadsheets to try to do data analysis. Much of the data that gets presented is in PDFs or other report formats that are not structured or searchable. When market research on private companies consists of Google searches, manual data entry by analysts, and spreadsheets to present information, there’s an opportunity.”

By the end of 2015, we might be looking at a whole new way at analyzing and determining the viability of a startup. And we will probably have Mattermark to thank.

Photo credit: Shane Lin/Flickr; photo of voters in Hackney via Wikpedia; photo of Rose Broome via Dan Swartz/1776dc.com

In “Startupland”, Startup Life Is Full of Risk, but the Entrepreneurial Dream Is Possible

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startupland

Creating and running a startup isn’t all glamour and glitz, although emerging technologies have made starting a business somewhat easier. But it’s not like it was straight out of a fictional Hollywood movie where there’s a happy ending involved — in most cases, this isn’t the case with companies in the real world. Many often shutter for various reasons, whether it’s because of a decrease in traction, lack of funding, or something else.

Needless to say, it’s certainly tough being an entrepreneur. You give up practically everything to follow your dream of creating something that could impact an industry or the world and it’s tough to think about the light at the end of the tunnel when you read everyday in the news about those fabled “Unicorn” startups or others making it big.

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This is Startupland, a place not limited by demographic, geographic, or ideology. It’s a state of mind that every entrepreneur ventures into willingly when they found a company and it’s also the title and subject of Mikkel Svane’s book that was recently published. This nearly 188-page book is certainly a worthwhile read for anyone interested in trying to have positive results for their startup. It’s partially a tale of the creation of Zendesk, a customer service management platform that went public in May 2014, the trials and tribulations it went through, and important life lessons and tips that Svane has chosen to impart on the readers of his book.

Earlier this year, I said that Startup Mixology: Tech Cocktail’s Guide to Building, Growing, & Celebrating Startups was a useful resource for entrepreneurs. And I still stand by it. However, Startupland is most definitely a welcome addition to that now-growing list. While the former was focused more on the tactical steps, the latter stands out as a useful resource straight from a founder’s mouth that highlights the growth and challenges he faced when building a company that would essentially have a definitive impact on the world of customer relationships. Put simply, the sub-title says it all: “How three guys risked everything to turn an idea into a global business.”

Beaten down but Zendesk remains

Throughout most of the book, Svane recounts just a fraction of the journey that he and his co-founders took to have a successful company, one with a market cap of $1.76 billion. This isn’t your typical Silicon Valley story — on the contrary, it’s an international tale where Svane, Alexander Aghassipour, and Morten Primdahl start out in much the same way as your typical entrepreneurs — finding a problem and industry prone for disruption. The trio endured building a startup, generating customer interest, and difficult decisions in securing funds for their endeavor — all from their homes in Denmark. Somehow they managed to overcome any and all obstacles ahead of them, all learning along the way without having the assistance of accelerators like Y Combinator, TechStars, or even the recognition in articles on TechCrunch.

Startupland is a narrative of Zendesk’s journey across the Atlantic Ocean to San Francisco and transformation into a public entity. Readers will find that it certainly wasn’t rainbows and butterflies for the company. Rather, Svane and his cohorts had to figure out how to onboard new employees, understand how to deal with investors and turn down deals, and essentially scale quickly and efficiently. As he said during TechCrunch Disrupt in Europe this year: “Being lucky is just so much work. As an early startup, there is no way around trying to open all the doors, and that’s exhausting work.”

zendesk-buddha-techcrunch

Candid accounts

Although the book is written by Svane and his co-author Carlye Adler, the narration reads almost like it’s a narration from How I Met Your Mother and I mean that in a good way. You can almost visualize yourself in Svane’s shoes as he navigates Zendesk from idea to IPO. There are quite a few times where chapters include anecdotes and other interesting tidbits that you may not have expected, such as this one where Primdahl was in disbelief that the company would soon have a thousand customers:

“That is completely ludicrous,” said Morten. When that happened, he promised, “I will run down the streets of Copenhagen naked.”

(Today, over fifty thousand customers later, we’re still waiting for Morten to streak the streets of Copenhagen.)

Each chapter is titled as if it was from an advice piece, but the content within each one is more a specific part of Zendesk’s history. As alluded to earlier, throughout Startupland, there are key tidbits and life lessons from Svane’s experience. But it’s not blatantly called out as “here are things you need to know” or anything like that — they’re noticeable but not blatantly in your face. Some of the lessons learned include:

  • How to ask your friends for money — and stay friends
  • Curbing anxiety: Unexpected business advice! How to get over a fear of flying and make business travel semi-palatable
  • Fostering your VC relationship
  • Hiring: Our unconventional (possibly illegal) hiring checklist
  • Road warriors: How to survive an IPO road show

These aren’t your typical how-to or self-help topics you might encounter…they’re things derived straight from Svane and Zendesk’s experience and rather poignant for him to share with the reader.

Believe in your dream

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In reading Startupland, I had a vision of Svane recounting his team’s efforts to realize the great American dream. But soon I became misguided because it can’t be an “American” dream, but rather any entrepreneur’s dream, regardless of where they’re from. This book affectionately recalls Zendesk’s efforts to continue to move forward amid obstacle after obstacle until it finally reached its ultimate conclusion: an initial public offering.

The foreward is excellently written by TechCrunch co-editor Alexia Tsotsis and she frames the book in a great light by ending her message with lyrics from Paul Simon’s song “America“:

Let us be lovers, we’ll marry our fortunes together”
“I’ve got some real estate here in my bag”
So we bought a pack of cigarettes and Mrs. Wagner pies
And we walked off to look for America

“Kathy” I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh
“Michigan seems like a dream to me now”
It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw
I’ve gone to look for America

Laughing on the bus
Playing games with the faces
She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy
I said “Be careful, his bowtie is really a camera”

“Toss me a cigarette, I think there’s one in my raincoat”
“We smoked the last one an hour ago”
So I looked at the scenery, she read her magazine
And the moon rose over an open field

“Kathy, I’m lost” I said, though I knew she was sleeping
I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why
Counting the cars on the New Jersey turnpike
They’ve all gone to look for America
All gone to look for America
All gone to look for America

Svane’s point in his book is that no matter what, entrepreneurs must continue to believe in their ideas and be passionate about helping to change an industry or world. And it can be done no matter what — you don’t have to have a be in a “sexy” field or sector that you want to change, like Facebook or Twitter. Instead, the “unsexy” can be “sexy”. There’s always a need. And with that passion, entrepreneurs will be able to realize their dream — it may not be an “American” dream, but it’s a dream nonetheless…of achieving victory on that startup journey to create something successful and you’re proud of.

Photo credit: Image of Mikkel Svane via @Kmeron for LeWeb12 Conference @ Westminster Central Hall -London-; and photo of the Zendesk team at the New York Stock Exchange during its IPO via Mikkel Svane/Twitter.

Marissa Mayer and the Case of the Yahoo “Curse”

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Yahoo is one of those legendary companies that has existed for quite some time — nearly 20 years, in fact. And for many, it’s been known for at least a few things including being an iconic old school search engine, its acquisition sprees, co-founder Jerry Yang, and a steady stream of ever-changing Chief Executive Officers. It has a rather complex identity problem and needs to find some way to redefine itself. That’s where Marissa Mayer comes in — or at least that’s what investors and supporters thought in 2012.

Mayer’s selection as the leader of Yahoos was meant to herald in a new era within the company, one that has seen its morale practically decimated after years of losing market share to Google, failed innovation from past leaders, and just overall bad decisions. She was viewed as a savior…wasn’t she?

This is the subject of Business Insider’s Nicholas Carlson’s book “Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo” which was released this week and is definitely worth reading regardless of whether you’re for or against Yahoo. This 327-page book dives deeper into the company than just looking at who Mayer is and what she can do to “save” the company (if anything).

Well-thought out narrative

marissa-mayer-book-coverCarlson has wisely broken out this book into five key parts. The first is where you read about one of the most discouraging days in Mayer’s tenure as CEO where she held one of her (in)famous FYI meetings at Yahoo and responded to anonymously-submitted questions by reading a book entitled “Bobbie Had A Nickel“. Then, almost like you would see in a movie, a flashback of sorts happens that takes you back in time to the founding of the company and you’re invested in its history, starting from its original name of Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web to include fundraising, its public offering, meeting with Softbank’s Masayoshi Son, and the continuous turmoil starting with its first CEO.

Readers will find out all the politicking and backdoor deals that were done within the company while also discovering how Yahoo responded to attempts to crush Google after incorrectly passing on acquiring the company for $1 million, failing to acquire Facebook, opposing Microsoft’s acquisition bid, and other decisions.

Part two of Carlson’s book is a profile about Mayer. It’s very similar to the unauthorized biography he published in 2013 on Business Insider, meaning you’ll see a lot of the same stuff, but this goes deeper into helping you understand the personality of Mayer and how she thinks. While industry insiders may think that she’s talented, there’s a little bit “method to the madness”, so to speak. And it’s served Mayer well. Readers will see how successful rise to the top at Google, putting user experience as a critical element in Google’s dominance, but also will understand how she fell from grace and ultimately sought new challenges elsewhere, namely Yahoo.

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Marissa Mayer puts both Yahoo and Mayer herself on parallel tracks before you get to the third part where worlds collide. And when that happens, you’ll get a better view about just who’s to blame for the company being in its current situation. But it’s definitely not rainbows and sunshine under Mayer’s tenure. She had a good start turning the company around — within her first year, it would appear that Yahoo was turning the corner and becoming focused once again. But later on, Carlson highlights significant mis-steps in Mayer’s leadership, including the hiring (and firing) of Chief Operating Officer Henrique De Castro and also her performance review system (QPR).

Lastly, the fourth part examines whether there’s a chance for Yahoo’s success, starting with a chapter aptly entitled HOPE. The remainder of the book looks at Mayer’s struggle to revive one of the iconic technology companies that have survived to this very day and restore it to its former glory. But again, her path isn’t an easy one as she needs to deal with constant resistance from not only investors/shareholders, but people on the board, advertisers, and the public who find better opportunities with competitors like Google.

Can she succeed?

The problem isn’t Mayer’s alone

Throughout the many CEOs that Yahoo has had, problems have constantly persisted and eventually the company has lost its direction. At the very beginning, it was a place to find information throughout the Web. But soon it stretched itself too thin and was then forced to find ways to cut costs to improve its bottom line. Time and time again, it was plagued by issues, concerns, and demands from activist investors and shareholders. Whether for better or for worse, Yahoo has never had a moment’s rest.

So it’s easy to blame Mayer for these issues because she’s currently sitting at the helm, but these problems will not be solved in the next quarter. Yes, there are really significant issues it needs to address, including the fact that its core business is a small amount compared to its investment in Yahoo Japan and Alibaba, but this isn’t something you can fix in an hour. As Bloomberg columnist Katie Beener wrote this week:

“What’s most interesting about the Mayer critiques and defenses, including mine, is that they’re largely sideshows. Pick Mayer apart or build her up. Either way, the Yahoo tanker would be hard for anyone to turn around.”

“Mayer or no Mayer, investors would still fret about the future of the company and its stock price. This year Yahoo will divest its treasured stake in Alibaba, the asset that fueled Yahoo’s remarkable stock surge during the Mayer years. When Mayer became CEO in July 2012, the stock was trading at $15. Now it is at $49, thanks largely to Alibaba’s performance. Once that asset is gone, Yahoo’s core problems will infect its stock price.”

The issues affecting Yahoo stem from decades of problems within the organization and mis-steps. But the honeymoon for Mayer has certainly ended with the dominating IPO of Alibaba. Mayer has shown she has ideas and has made numerous acquisitions over her short tenure. So time to put that plan into action and right the sinking ship. I think that Yahoo is on the correct path but it will depend on what Mayer’s next steps are that will determine whether corrective action is warranted or she’s replaced. And the wolves are certainly at her doorstep, namely a firm named Starboard.

Read it to believe it

If it wasn’t a real company, it would seem that Carlson’s Marissa Mayer would be something straight out of a primetime drama on television and it’s probably easy to see it turning into Yahoo’s version of The Social Network. Suffice it to say, Carlson has cast Yahoo in a new light: one that doesn’t know itself and needs to discover it now. After two decades of existence, it’s astonishing that things have moved so slowly with the company and it’s fallen behind Google and many others that started well after it IPO’ed. Mayer’s agile development skills from her time at Google may breathe a new life into the company to help accelerate development, but will it be enough? It’s still struggling.

After reading Marissa Mayer, one thing that I thought about was how much of this was true. While it might seem to be believable (and it in fact might be), but you wouldn’t begrudge me a little bit of skepticism that not all of it was 100 percent true. But regardless, there’s one thing that is undoubtedly the truth: Yahoo needs help.

When it’s all said and done, I really enjoyed reading Nicholas Carlson’s book. It’s a page-turner that I refused to put down, even though at first it looked massive. To say the least, the information contained in the pages was entertaining and worthwhile while also giving me a whole new impression about Yahoo.

Photo credit: Marissa Mayer at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Dinner in 2012 by Don Feria/Getty Images via Flickr; Marissa Mayer HOPE poster via Business Insider

With Work, Facebook Aims to Consolidate All of Our Social Engagement (and Data) Under One Platform

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The battle for being social in the enterprise has heated up once again. Earlier this month, Facebook announced that it was launching a new offering specifically for businesses. Called Work, it’s intended to close the gap between the personal and the professional identities people have on the social network. With the introduction of both a mobile and desktop application, Facebook seeks to connect the next 5 billion people, not only for those around the world in under-served countries, but also in a whole new segment: within the workplace.

Until now, Facebook had been primarily an external communication tool for the enterprise. Corporate personalities, marketers/advertisers, and community managers have been using the social network for the past decade to interact with their constituents, whether that’s through Pages, Events, or advertising. But Work will further Facebook’s role to now foster internal communications among colleagues. Yes, it’s going to be an Enterprise Social Network (ESN).

A new rival for Slack, Chatter, and Yammer

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Naturally, once the news of Facebook Work came out, there was a slew of comparisons to incumbent services out there, namely Salesforce Chatter, Microsoft’s Yammer, and Slack. Altimeter Group’s Charlene Li believes that while there are many ESNs out in the marketplace, Work has a legitimate opportunity to quickly establish itself as the de facto platform of choice:

“Facebook’s 1.35 [billion] user base gives this ‘test’ real firepower. This instantly makes it a whale in an enterprise collaboration marketplace crowded with minnows. Even the de facto business social network, LinkedIn, has less than 25% of Facebook’s audience at 323 [million] active users and can’t be used for effective workplace collaboration. Enterprises could potentially have a hard time keeping employees on Chatter, Yammer, or other internal social networks when the Facebook interface is already so familiar and functional. In other words, how much do you really have to train your employees to use something that comes naturally to them?”

Indeed, Facebook has certainly captured the attention of employees. After all, many of the 1.35 billion users are in the workforce — and they’re using it to communicate with their friends and family while in the workplace. And by using something familiar to them, you are reducing the learning curve need to adopt the technology.

Let’s face it: you’re already using Facebook at work and if companies are trying to implement an ESN with Facebook-like features, then why not use the original tool that everyone already knows? In doing so, it’ll help consolidate the number of tools and platforms your team will have to reconcile later on. In more contemporary firms, employees have to deal with software like Google Docs, Skype, Dropbox, and dozens of others. Altimeter Group’s Jon Cifuentes thinks that we’re being overwhelmed:

“On average, we’re using close to 30 apps per month on our personal smartphones alone, and we’ve brought that behavior straight into the enterprise. We’re throwing tools at tasks instead of rethinking how or why we communicate the way we do across so many channels. The ‘consumer’ enterprise has evolved to an ‘appified’ one.

Here’s a key item we tend to forget: Form follows function. Behavior precedes tool. This ideal framework is precisely why a one year old chat app (Slack) is worth a billion bucks. Slack didn’t try and displace one behavior (email and workplace communication) for an entirely new one. Rather, it made existing behaviors more efficient than the norm, such as cutting down the whopping 30% of the workday we spend reading and receiving emails.”

Work is being positioned as the one platform to help companies consolidate their tools to make it easier for employees. Not only will there need to be one less service to check, but also the on-boarding process is easier as users can leverage their existing Facebook credentials (or have the option to generate a new professional profile).

But is it too little too late?

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Last year, on the eve of Facebook’s 10th anniversary, I interviewed Salesforce’s Vice President for Strategic Research Peter Coffee who provided me with a telling anecdote about Salesforce’s view of the social network. He said that Facebook managed to create a huge expectation with customers that companies can be social and during a meeting between CEO Marc Benioff and his senior managers, the team was asked who was on the social network. A “small fraction” raised their hands and a dismayed Benioff instructed everyone else to sign up for an account in order to get acquainted with it — this would be the next wave of innovation in the enterprise, which helped pave the way for the eventual introduction of Chatter.

It’s taken Facebook a long time to get to this place, but it’s a bit revolutionary for a social network primarily focused on consumers dive into the enterprise. It’s certainly further distancing itself from anything Myspace, Friendster, and Google+ could ever do. But is it too little too late? Large enterprises are already using a plethora of existing ESNs such as Yammer, ChatterJive, Tibbr, SocialCast, and Convo, so would there be a compelling selling point aside from the desire to consolidate platforms?

But is the entry of Facebook almost akin to Apple dominating a new segment just because of its reputation? It doesn’t seem to be that way — yes, there may be some cause for concern, but for companies like Slack, it’s just another competitor. In fact, Slack CEO and co-founder Stewart Butterfield told my old colleagues at The Next Web that he’s not worried:

“The brand ‘Facebook’ is not, I think, well suited to being used for work. The product sounds like it might be really useful at a really large company. Obviously, if it’s a seven person company, there’s not much point in creating a profile. But if it’s a 100,000 person company, then there’s certainly some value in having that.

When I think about our larger customers, the bigger corporations and large startups – Comcast, Sony or Dell say or Airbnb and Stripe – it’s hard to imagine the teams at those companies opting to use Facebook At Work instead.”

Maybe this won’t go according to plan…

The opportunity

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What perhaps makes Work the most interesting is the mobile focus and the incredible opportunity for growth. Facebook has certainly the credentials needed to consider itself to be not only mobile-first, but mobile-best. Work will be available both as an iOS and Android app and theoretically will offer employees the standard social network features we’ve all come to expect, such as notifications, status updates/News Feeds, sharing of photos and documents, and more. However, that’s pretty much it — it’s a basic offering that you might expect from other services.

However, looking forward into the future, there’s more potential for it, especially with third-party integrations. Right now it’s not possible, but Facebook’s engineering director Lars Rasmussen told TechCrunch that “we’ve disabled the Platform so the APIs that third parties work with are not there, but we are keen to turn it back on. Hopefully in the future other enterprise tools will integrate with Facebook at Work.”

Third-party integrations are essential to Work’s success. Without it, it’s just a professional version of Facebook without any flair. But once the platform and API opens up, one advantage that Work will have is the incredible amount of resources through Parse, the platform-as-a-service company that Facebook acquired in 2013. There’s certainly an army of developers who have extensive experience building apps around Facebook so the ecosystem isn’t a weak one — it’ll definitely rival any ecosystem competitors might have. And with Facebook’s annual f8 developer conference coming up at the end of March, it wouldn’t be surprising to see if the company formally unveils more details about Work for developers and provides additional tools and resources — perhaps bringing in support for WhatsApp chatting for the enterprise or even Instagram?

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Earlier, I mentioned that Facebook Work would bring in the capability of internal communications within the social network. While functioning as an ESN, Work can also serve as an employee advocacy offering as well, effectively combining services that were offered by multiple companies before. So while you can communicate with your coworkers, if your community manager has a conversation or comment posted on the company’s Page, it can be directed to the proper individual for a response — perhaps almost similar to the likes of Addvocate. Or perhaps there’s some news, shareable content, or campaign that you want to promote and would like to have coworkers on Facebook evangelize it — it could theoretically be done through Work.

The age of professional mobile-first ESNs isn’t new. In fact, Tomfoolery happened to be one of the most recent companies to attempt it. Ultimately that company got acquired by Yahoo in 2014. Will Facebook have better luck?

Privacy concerns

As this is Facebook, one big thing people will be concerned about and will lead them to shy away from using Work is concern over who owns their data and its privacy. Enterprises may not wish to go this route over fear that even communications between colleagues would violate their IT standards. The company hasn’t publicly commented about this issue, but I’m certain that it’ll say that user privacy is important to it. What’s more, there’s a chance that there will be a freemium model, meaning that with the cheapest plans, it’ll be supported by ads, probably targeted towards not only the content posted, but also the interests and demographics of the specific user, along with the background around the company.

It’s certainly way too early to determine whether the above issues will dissuade enterprises from giving Work more than a glance. After about a few months, we should have a better understanding of the type of users and companies integrating with this ESN, as well as what data is being provided and the amount of engagement. As it stands right now, the king of social networks has decided to expand to the business world and tackle a new vertical in its quest to tap an additional 5 billion people. But with a lot of competition already in the marketplace, can Facebook really use its dominance to get people to consolidate their lives into one single platform?

Photo credit: Facebook website via Simon/pixabay; Facebook employees via Dan Fletcher/VentureBeat, employee advocacy graphic via inkhuman

Scaling Self-Publishing Interests on Flipboard

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Just shy of a year following my decision to no longer be a reporter for The Next Web, I’ve continued to be enthralled by the hustle and bustle in the tech industry, from funding announcements, product releases, acquisitions, and more. And my role at Orange Silicon Valley (see disclosure) requires that I keep up-to-date on the latest happenings, all for various reasons. Naturally I’ve been looking into tech solutions to help me navigate the massive amounts of content being churned out across the Internet, including but not limited to, Evernote, Delicious, Twitter (favoriting), Instapaper, Pocket, and Feedly. All are great services, but for me, something just didn’t seem right about it — it needed to be really useful across various platforms.

That’s when I started to pay more attention to Flipboard. Granted, this wasn’t the first time using the publishing platform as I’ve covered it many times before while at TNW and even dabbled into it with my own magazine, but previously, I was mostly a reader, not a creator. But now that’s all changed and over the past few months, I’ve been using (abusing?) it to capture all the news that I find interesting and useful to others, instead of sparing people my constant barrage of Tweets.

A lot of power has been given to Flipboard users over the past few years, especially after the company introduced its self-created magazine feature. And was appeared to be evident from CEO Mike McCue’s talk during a ReadWriteMix event, the company is shifting gears to cast itself as more of a platform and not the content creator it once was. So while I’ve been seeing this first-hand, I don’t think that it’s totally quite there…yet. This is why I’m offering my public feedback to Flipboard about what I’d really like to see enhanced and/or added to the product to really help make self-curation even better:

#1. Improved integration between mobile and the browser

Currently, it seems that when you create a magazine on the mobile device, it’s “different” than what you’d see on the browser. It’s almost like there are two different products, but they’re also the same. What I’d like to see is better integration between the two — the native mobile app looks great, naturally, but perhaps the Web version could use a touch-up. Right now, it’s difficult for people to remember the web addresses of magazines that they follow — for example, my FYI magazine URL is flipboard.com/section/fyi-bBZQei — so it appears that Flipboard has a mobile-first perspective. That’s not to say that the company is wrong in its approach, but now is probably the time for this to be improved, especially with more than 2.4 million magazines created.

One thing you’ll notice is that on the mobile app, you’ll see a slew of magazines that you can follow or browse through. However, on Flipboard’s website, that’s not there — it’s not even possible to log in directly from the homepage and it’s pushing you to download the app. That’s not entirely bad, but I’d like to see a similar experience on the browser: show users what they can expect on the platform by offering sample magazines like The Daily Edition, or something else.

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It was July 2013 when Flipboard made its magazines available to everyone on the Web, making it a rather universal tool. But right now it’s primarily a read-only product. The experience navigating through it just isn’t as streamlined as one would have on mobile devices so there’s certainly a discrepancy between mobile and desktop.

#2. Better tools to help advertise magazines

Now that Flipboard has given the keys to the kingdom back to the user, one thing that I’d like to see is more resources and tools in order to help capture reader attention for self-created magazines. Right now, the company has tools and widgets that you can use to curate content into your magazines, but not enough to attract visitors to read your content and also follow you. It would be great to have the means to let users market their creations.

#3. Updated labeling of articles and improved filtering

Perhaps one of my biggest “peeves” about Flipboard is not knowing how new an article is. At least for me, I’d like to keep track of the latest happenings and if I see an article suggested by the service that says it was published an hour ago, I think it would be new…but only to discover that the article was from two weeks ago? Overall, Flipboard should clearly delineate new stories so that users won’t have to constantly cycle through their news feed to determine what’s new and what’s not.

In addition, it would be great to tap into the recommendation engine of Zite and improve the filtering of sources. Often times, as someone interested in web design, I’m pleased to see well-formed articles around responsive design, Google design sprints, etc., but there are occasions when I’ll see irrelevant sources that are nothing short of spam. Also, I’d like to have advanced controls to tell Flipboard what sources I’d like to read less from. Yes, the application has a way to “show less like this”, but I’m wondering about what “like this” means — does it mean the source? The topic? The author?

#4. Improved organization capability

I’ve been slowly creating multiple magazines based on various interests, audiences, topics, etc. My main magazine is all about tech news, but is a general bucket for all things tech. However, I’d love to be able to eventually break it out into trade publications, perhaps one for net neutrality, telecommunications issues, gadgets, or just one on funding. However, it’s difficult to parse through the thousands of articles that have been previously curated.

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#5. Improved sharing workflow

One of the nice things about the desktop is that it’s easy to add things right into your magazines — well at least for the most part. You just find what you want to flip and click on the browser extension. Then add it to a chosen magazine and you’re done. But on mobile, the workflow seems a bit lacking. Right now, if you’re seeing a link on Twitter that you want to flip, you need to copy the link, then go into the Flipboard app and then add it right to your magazine. Often, I find myself having to constantly switch between apps in order to curate stories, and it’s not just with Twitter, but also on other apps like Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, etc.

Another workflow issue I’ve had is being able to flip content into multiple magazines simultaneously. Right now, in order to post a story into my FYI magazine, or my “Sunday” Reads, I’d have to do it individually, which isn’t a total bummer, but it is time consuming.

The bottom line here is that while I have some thoughts on how Flipboard could improve itself, I’m not criticizing the product by saying it’s bad. It’s certainly captured my attention and may be on the cusp of opening up new segments, perhaps in the realm of self-publishing like what Quora and LinkedIn did with blog posts. It’s definitely not a platform that’s going to go away anytime soon and will be interesting to see where it progresses over the next few years.

Photo credit: Main image via Flipboard; Flipboard image on Nexus via Ariel Zambelich/Wired; and Flipboard on mobile device via t3

Yahoo’s Next Step In Its Mobile Revival Involves Pitching It To Developers

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We’re just hours from Yahoo’s first-ever mobile developer conference and people are wondering how the event will turn out. What exactly will CEO Marissa Mayer and her team of executives announce and how will it benefit not only developers but advertisers as well? There’s certainly no question that as Yahoo has made a big deal about its mobile advances, it has done so without really putting an emphasis on the developer ecosystem. Over 35 acquisitions have been made in the past couple of years, but certainly if Yahoo is looking to tout its credentials in the space, it needs to do a better job of courting developers to use its services. And that’s probably what Mayer will do in the span of about eight hours.

Evidence of mobile growth

There’s been statements made frequently about Yahoo’s turnaround, with hundreds of millions of monthly active users on the company’s apps. Mayer made perhaps the first such pronouncement during a fireside chat at TechCrunch Disrupt in September 2013 where there were 800 million monthly active users — 350 million were from mobile. Her mission was to refocus the company’s strategy on things that were a part of people’s daily habits, including mail, search, weather, finances, sports, and news. It’s important to note that this statistic at the time did not include any participation from Tumblr.

Nevertheless, in the past couple of years, Yahoo has started to launch or update some of its apps, including the release of its News Digest, built on top of Summly’s technology, a company it acquired in 2013. Other apps have been updated including its Weather app, Flickr, and its Finance app. I won’t recite Yahoo’s entire app history here, but the point is that the company has been making a concrete effort to make sure that we have all the information we need throughout the day right at our fingertips.

And Mayer’s strategy is slowly working: the acquisition of Tumblr for $1.1 billion is expected to generate more than $100 million in revenue this year, and Yahoo’s mobile ad platform is targeting $1.2 billion in gross revenue too. In last year’s third quarter, mobile revenue finally became “material”, bringing in more than $200 million. That amount increased 23 percent quarter over quarter to $254 million in Q4 2014. At the end of last year, Yahoo announced that it saw gross mobile revenue of $1.26 billion.

Appeal or showcase?

It’s no secret that Yahoo is late to the mobile game and it has much to do to catch up to its competitors like Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Apple. The company seems to have found itself and has set itself on course to become even more relevant, but now it needs to begin renewing its relationships with the people building apps and services that we all are flocking to.

It’s easy to forget about Yahoo’s developer initiatives, but it’s still around. In fact, its developer network provides quite a few options depending on your need. It’ll help you build out your app, enhance it, and monetize it — all including the latest tools at its disposal, including Flurry.

But while it’s optimistic that Yahoo will use its conference to pitch its vision to developers and encourage them to use its many services, could we perhaps see the company making a strong push to just get developers to tap into its Flurry and BrightRoll offerings so that Yahoo can look better in the eyes of advertisers, thereby showing that Mayer is doing something right by them? What I hope won’t happen is the company framing the conference like it’s some sort of roadshow or a Tupperware party where it just shows off its products and then moves on. Instead, I hope that the conversation will be much more engaging and shows the potential of Yahoo’s offering and why developers should consider it when looking at other services from Facebook, Twitter, and Google.

Two of Yahoo’s biggest acquisitions center around helping apps monetize themselves, so it’s pretty safe to say that this will be a big part of the company’s conference. In fact, looking at the agenda, at least five sessions (not including Mayer’s keynote) out of around ten talks/keynotes center around advertising or analytics.

And then there’s MaVeNS, the acronym created by Mayer last year that focuses on four areas where Yahoo thinks it has a strong offering: mobile, video, native advertising, and social. While the conference may not explicitly address all four, it’s safe to say that discussion around them will be sprinkled throughout the event.

Regardless of its intent, Yahoo needs to be bold in its next steps to rekindle its relationship with developers. It needs to show that it can compete alongside the big players for app attention and that the fruits of all the acquisitions thus far under Mayer’s tenure are actually bearing fruit and are beneficial to the ecosystem.

The ‘Mobile-First’ Yahoo: 575M Monthly Active Users and a New Suite of Dev Tools It Hopes You’ll Use

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Yahoo has doubled down on its investment in the mobile space, with CEO Marissa Mayer clearly putting her proverbial stake in the ground and declaring that her company is a “mobile-first” one. At Yahoo’s inaugural mobile developer conference (formerly known as Flurry’s Source conference), it was made known that Flurry would be the de facto platform for developers and she also took the time to reintroduce the developer ecosystem to the brand new Yahoo Developer Network.

It’s pretty well-known that Yahoo is late in the game to court developers, especially as bigger players like Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Apple have really been stepping up their respective games over the year. So what exactly could this 20 year-old iconic Silicon Valley company do to really compete with that? Mayer was clearly not going to be dissuaded and the company put on a good show to try and convince developers that it can offer them better content & information, relevancy, and data that’s pertinent to their users.

Yesterday, I wrote that there would be some confusion about what exactly Yahoo would present at the conference. Would the company showcase its wares in order to convince advertisers that it can generate eyeballs or would it be a true appeal to developers. It turns out that it’s more of the latter than the former, but not by much. Today’s announcements show that the company wants to cater to the developers and is putting its best foot forward.

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Updated Yahoo Developer Network

Prior to today, Yahoo’s developer network was simply a hodgepodge of services with no unifying theme. Today that has changed with Flurry becoming what all mobile development will be around. And there are five new updates announced today, including:

  • Flurry Analytics + Explorer: An updated analytics user interface and a data-exploration interface that returns insights to complex queries in seconds, all without having to write any code, build queries, wait for calculations, or even implement a new SDK. TechCrunch‘s Josh Constine has rightly said that this move is a clear attack on services like Mixpanel and New Relic — mostly because this capability is available for free.
  • Flurry Pulse: This new capability allows developers to easily share app data with approved partners just by using a single SDK. Currently available by invite-only, Pulse is billed as being able to limit SDK proliferation and additional engineering work. At launch, the only approved partner is comScore, but you can be sure that more will be added later.
  • Yahoo App Publishing: Yahoo wasn’t going to get anywhere without helping developers monetize their apps. With Yahoo App Publishing, developers can now tap into high-quality native, video, and display ads utilizing Flurry, BrightRoll, and Gemini.
  • Yahoo Search in Apps: Applications can now have the search power of Yahoo built right into them, without requiring users to switch between apps, potentially lowering engagement. This is something Yahoo has done specifically with many of their apps, including its core Yahoo app, News Digest, Mail, and Aviate.
  • Yahoo App Marketing: Now that developers have tools to research, monetize, and engage users, the only other thing left involves getting the word out that an app exists. It’s interesting that in this program, mobile app install ads are not a possibility, but instead, developers can tap into native and video advertising via Yahoo’s network, Tumblr, and thousands of other mobile apps — all via Gemini.

Mayer believes that this suite of products will will be appealing to developers. After all, Yahoo has the numbers to show that it can play in the ecosystem. During her keynote, Mayer announced that mobile revenue in the company last year was $1.2 billion and there are now 575 million monthly active users on Yahoo apps. Flurry remains a significant player in the space, supporting 200,000 developers and powering 630,000 apps across 1.6 billion devices.

In addition, it’s the largest publisher on mobile, with 34 properties reaching the aforementioned 575 million monthly active users.

Here’s how Yahoo put its mobile efforts:

Yahoo is all about powering innovation, increasing retention and engagement, and generating new revenue all through an SDK.

Mayer’s gamble

Yahoo’s mobile developer conference wasn’t just any ole’ developer event. It’s a gamble by Mayer and her team that the company can generate more engagement from users who will support her strategy of wanting to show users content that’s contextually relevant to them. By that, I point your attention to TechCrunch Disrupt in 2013 where she said that she was focusing mobile products that addressed people’s daily habits, such as mail, weather, stocks, news, finance, sports, etc.

So now that Yahoo has a platform where it can unify its tools and resources, Mayer is hoping that it’ll stick and in turn, create a broader ecosystem that could be appealing to shareholders and advertisers. Noticeably, Yahoo’s CEO stuck around long after her keynote, opting not to remain behind the scenes, like most CEOs during traditional developer conferences, but sitting amongst the crowd listening intently as product demos were going on stage.

And in case you were wondering, Yahoo’s shareholders probably thought that today’s news may be a tad bit interesting as the company’s stock closed up 1.65% to $44.37.

The start of a Yahoo app ecosystem

With integration of Yahoo technologies in more and more applications, one may speculate that the company is looking to build what may amount to being strikingly similar to Facebook Home, the failed Android launcher from the social networking company. The amount of content Yahoo can share through various apps using its technology could see the company maybe soon developing its own Android launcher — yes, that does sound far-fetched, I’ll admit, but the pieces are all there.

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Yahoo needs to find a way to tie all of these apps and technologies together to build a more cohesive strategy. What is it about the platform that separates it from others like Google, Facebook, and Apple? It’s way late in the game to really say it’s a different choice — in fact, it’s more like “why should we care?” If Yahoo is centering itself around productivity and daily habits, it will need to put more money behind its marketing to convince developers that their apps need to address these needs.

At Yahoo’s mobile developer conference, there were some great demos on stage that helped prove this thesis, but with millions of apps out there and lots of time being spent online, there’s must work still left to be done.


The Duopoly of Ridesharing

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Not sure if you heard the news, but it seems that Uber is in the process of raising yet more money into its coffers in order to maintain its growth. In doing so, the company wants to bring in $2.8 billion in new capital at a $40 billion valuation. Not to be outdone, competitor Lyft has its own funding news too: it’s raising its seventh round at a $2 billion valuation.

Such is the pattern between the two of these ridesharing-type companies. In the marketplace, it’s pretty safe to say that Uber is perceived to be the leader with Lyft trailing behind it. It’s almost akin to the Annie Get Your Gun song “Anything You Can Do” where one raises and another follows, or one launches a carpool option and another does the same. And while many of us are seeing a battle among ridesharing giants, it seems to me that there’s a shift taking place that could affect how we will view them in the next year or two.

The battle of would-be giants

Uber emerged first out of the gate compared to all the other major ridesharing services, and it had a mission: to take on the corrupt taxi industry. And it certainly had an impact, eventually spreading to more than 200 cities worldwide in 53 countries with just a idea that users didn’t have to stand out in the street and hail a cab — they could simply summon a ride from a participating driver using just their smartphone.

Several years after Uber had made its way throughout the US, Lyft debuted under a similar model along with Sidecar and other companies. Technically the team behind Lyft had already been invested in the ridesharing space for a while prior to Uber’s launch, but under a different name: Zimride. That company originated from an idea Logan Green had aimed at solving public transportation by helping crowdsource carpooling and specifically focused on the enterprise, providing private networks for companies and universities. Regardless, as years progressed and companies with similar offerings sprouted up, only two remained at the top of the class: Uber and Lyft.

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And both have certainly waged a battle against each other. We can’t forget Uber’s playbook to scorch the earth against Lyft, or perhaps the continuous PR battle aimed at drivers to encourage them to switch from one platform to another. One of Lyft’s counterpoints against its competitor is to emphasize its “weirdness”. It’s worth reading this piece from The Wall Street Journal for more of an understanding.

Defining perspectives

But how exactly are these companies scaling? Perhaps the most logical case is that both will continue to replace the existing livery companies with their own version, but how will it be fundamentally different? What makes them to enticing beyond the capability of summoning (and subsequently paying for) a car to arrive at your destination using a mobile app? In short, what will be the defining perspective for the ridesharing duopoly?

Let’s look at Uber first: this is a company that has spread like wildfires and even amid criticism and complaints from incumbent firms and fending off safety and regulatory challenges from government entities. And yet, there’s clear evidence that the first few years of Uber’s existence has all been a way to establish a transportation network that can not only be used to facilitate transit of people, but also other goods and services — it’s becoming the next FedEx or UPS of the world, a logistics business.

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And it’s not as if it’s out of the realm of reality for CEO Travis Kalanick. In fact, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, he mentions the possibilities of being centered around logistics:

WSJ: Beyond the car service, you have started to talk about the logistics opportunity. When you say you want to be a broader logistics business, what does that exactly mean, what are you targeting?

Mr. Kalanick: 
First, we didn’t pitch the logistics business in this fundraising. We are experimenting in logistics but it’s at the experimentation level. Uber Rush is a month and a half, two months old, it’s super early. Look, it took us a year before we went from our home city to our second city. You got to work the product, get the operations down, processes, technology, etc. We’re very bullish but that was not part of the pitch for this fundraise…If the logistics business works out, that’s icing on the cake.

And yes, while there’s quite a bit of backlash against Uber, most of it could possibly be attributed towards its culture, especially in how it views journalists and overall passenger safety. But above all of that, there’s no discounting the fact that this company valued at $40 billion is making an impact on not only our economy but society. It has taken an approach whereby it can leverage its technology infrastructure to help establish networks where it can start to deliver food and packages, such as in test cities like Los Angeles, New York, and Barcelona. It seems entirely feasible for Uber to help other companies facilitate transit of goods and services using its platform and/or API — the on-demand stack. And as I mentioned earlier, as Uber shapes up to be akin to UPS and FedEx, it certainly can corner a very unique and important market: the local one.

Uber’s valuation puts it on near-equal footing with market leaders in the logistics trade. Although it falls under the market caps of FedEx ($50.14 billion) and UPS ($92.09 billion), it’s not considerably that far off. Its strength rests with being able to easily coordinate shipment and coordination of goods and services within a city, quickly facilitating transit within hours, not days.

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So what about Lyft? It doesn’t seem that the company has a yearning desire to go the same route as Uber. However, that’s not to say that it’s not trying to define expectations either. In fact, it appears that the company is looking to focus on the humanitarian and community experience. It’s all about delivering happiness to their customers and this is partially why it started out with a pink mustache — after all, you can’t really be angry if you see a car with a mustache heading your way, can you?

The thing is that Lyft is looking to make helping your fellow person more satisfying. Just like Green and his co-founder John Zimmer’s previously thought about with ZimRide, Lyft aims to let anyone be a driver and make some money if they so choose. People have cars and if they’re just sitting around, why not make some money off of them. And before you say it, yes, Uber has the same capability through its UberX program. But Lyft doesn’t employ any professional drivers, just your neighbors.

Lyft’s pitch could be perceived as being all about reconnecting us with our “neighbor”, rekindling those happier times when we would reach out to them for anything like sugar for our coffee, housesitting duties, or simply for a ride to the market. And the “gas money” would be the fares you’d pay to the driver. This is certainly a night and day difference between it and Uber, which has an aura around being about the product while Lyft is around the people. Here’s a take on Lyft’s appeal to drivers:

The company’s new chief marketing officer had said recently that Lyft’s vision would be “achieved” when “the mom in the minivan is Lyft enabled.” A huge step in this direction, Zimmer said, was to give drivers more control through a feature they’d recently added called “Driver Destination,” wherein a driver has a say in whom he or she picks up along a given route. Features such as this one weren’t just savvy legal maneuvers that returned some feeling of independence to independent contractors, but made it easier to casually drive for Lyft, and to recruit new drivers. Lyft’s tagline — “Driving You Happy” — stood in stark contrast to Uber’s, “Everyone’s Private Driver,” in that it spoke to both its customer pools: passengers and drivers.

Battling for supremacy or survival?

So we have a duopoly in the ridesharing space: Uber and Lyft, each with their own experiential dynamic. But how will it all stand up to the test of time and market demand? Is it enough for Lyft to withstand the enormous onslaught of Uber’s rapid expansion and fundraising capability? Kalanick’s company has already helped usher one company out of a key market and it’s not out of the realm of possibility to see others also wave the white flag and give in to Uber. So which company will be the must-have alternative? Amid all of the backlash that Uber has received, it seems that Lyft has been designated as being the company with the strongest chances of not only giving customers another choice, but being able to avoid giving Uber a powerful monopoly.

In my opinion, it wouldn’t be far-fetched to see Lyft make acquisitions to consolidate all of the lower ridesharing services to bolster its offering to better compete. Additionally, with SoftBank playing a bit part in funding companies to rival Uber, the telecom company could very well be a wild card, giving Lyft the necessary ammunition to further its reach, perhaps into other countries and also generating exclusive deals with carriers like Sprint.

The ridesharing space has definitely become crowded with many companies but when you shake everything out, you only really have two big companies here in the US. It’s a tug and war battle to see which will give up more market share, but whether a monopoly will emerge remains to be seen.

Photo credit: Lyft car via Tom S. Warren/AP on NY Daily News; photo of Travis Kalanick via David Paul Morris/Bloomberg; Lyft community balloon via TechCrunch

In ‘Captivology’, Ben Parr Proves His Thesis Around Attention And Helps Us Understand The Factors That Drive It

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We all seek to gain attention. Whether it be for ourselves or for a third-party company, brand, cause, or product, getting people to notice and shift their focus towards it is not exactly an exact science. As a reporter for The Next Web, I received numerous pitches from agencies and tech companies eager to get my attention in order to write a story about them. We all have some need to get other people to pay attention, including for page views, shares, sign-ups and subscriptions, downloads, usage, and more.

benparr-headshotBut while it might be easy to think about deploying a tactic or gimmick to get people’s heads and focus to turn and be intrigued, it’s better to understand the concept around attention and the scientific rationale for why something is viral, bestselling, engaging, and worthwhile versus a similar offering from a competitor. This is exactly the purpose of Captivology: The SCIENCE of Capturing People’s Attention, a new book from former Mashable editor-at-large, CNET and Inc. columnist, and venture capitalist Ben Parr.

Attention [n. uh-ten-shuh n; interj. uh-ten-shuhn]: a concentration of the mind on a single object or thought, especiallyone preferentially selected from a complex, with a view to limiting orclarifying receptivity by narrowing the range of stimuli; a state of consciousness characterized by such concentration; a capacity to maintain selective or sustained concentration.

This 221-page book isn’t a history of the tech industry nor is it a self-help type of publication. Rather, readers will find it is more akin to a textbook that you would find in a college bookstore that shines a light at seven key aspects that causes our eyeballs to shift to the creator’s directions. Called “captivation triggers”, Parr says that these are psychological and scientific phenomena that “trigger shockingly predictable and quantifiable responses in the mind.” So what are these triggers?

  • Authenticity: Using specific sensory cues like colors, symbols, and sounds to capture attention based on automatic reaction to certain stimuli.
  • Framing: Adapting to or changing somebody’s view of the world so they pay more attention to you.
  • Disruption: Violating people’s expectations to change what they pay attention to.
  • Reward: Leveraging people’s motivations for intrinsic and extrinsic rewards.
  • Reputation: Using the reputations of experts, authorities, and the crowd to instill trust and captivate audiences.
  • Mystery: Creating mystery, uncertainty, and suspense to keep and audience intrigued until the very end.
  • Acknowledgement: Fostering a deeper connection, because people tend to pay attention to those who provide them with validation and understanding.

“I wrote this book because attention is THE engine that drives almost everything in the modern economy. I have had many agents and publishers approach me about writing a book over the years, but this was the first time I ever found a subject that I wanted to spend countless hours of my energy and time pursuing. I became fascinated by the topic of attention and its impact on our economy and culture. I simply had to write this book,” says Parr. And it’s not surprising that he centered around attention based on his background. Aside from his career covering, mentoring, and investing in startups, Parr is no stranger to doing outrageous, but highly attention-driven events.

Captivology certainly has that textbook feel to it, but if you’re looking to specific how-to tips, then you might not want to read this book. Think of it as something more strategic in order to help you understand the methodology behind driving attention. It’s helpful that Parr has included numerous examples and very succinct case studies to help prove why his captivation triggers have some validity. Some of the examples include why Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. wound up capturing our attention in the video game market, how Allied forces successfully tricked German forces using its Ghost Army, why we were so captivated by Wieden + Kennedy’s Old Spice Guy campaign, BuzzFeed, and Batkid. Parr even conducted dozens of interviews to gather the necessary research needed for Captivology.

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You might think that because Parr previously covered technology issues that Captivology was written with the entrepreneur in mind. On the contrary as Parr tells me that he wrote it “so it could be accessible and useful to anybody, regardless of what they do. Sure, entrepreneurs need to get the attention of users, but teachers need to captivate their students; politicians need the attention of voters; charities need to grab the eyes and ears of donors. It’s for everybody.”

Overall, Captivology is an engaging book with some real great points to make that anyone who is interested in marketing themselves or whatever they’re working on should read. A couple of things that I’d like to see in the book include (1) in a few pockets throughout the book, it can seem to get a bit more academic and you just want to glance over it, but those are few and far apart, and (2) while presenting these strategic overviews about the concept of attention-getting, what are the next steps in which someone can go forth and put it into practice? There are plenty of proven studies in the book, but how does a teacher, marketer, entrepreneur, investor, filmmaker, or average person put it into practice?

That being said, in Captivology, Parr has proven his thesis about attention as it’s not a book you can easily put down and it’s easily understandable.

Captivology is published by HarperOne and is available for purchase online starting March 3.

Photo credit: Headshot of Ben Parr via CNET, Batkid in San Francisco via Associated Press

Charlene Li’s ‘The Engaged Leader’ Tells Executives How To Lead Without Fearing Social Technology

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Technology can be a scary thing. No matter whether you’re trying to figure out ephemeral messaging apps like Snapchat, why you’d want to use a live-streaming service like Meerkat, or simply what’s your return on using Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. But imagine how difficult it could be for corporate executives who want to try and control the message and maintain the status quo? With the rapidly growing rate of new technology being thrust at companies, it can be overwhelming for executives and leaders to figure out which ones to use to engage with not only their customers, but also employees.

The Engaged Leader, a new book by Altimeter Group founder and principal analyst Charlene Li, aims to be that consoling voice for leaders to tell them to simply relax and not be overwhelmed by all the different tools at their disposal. This 93-page publication guides you through a process by which you can become a more engaged (a-ha!) leader by focusing on the communication and not on the tool you’re using.

What’s interesting about The Engaged Leader is that it’s specifically focused on the corporate executive/leader, but makes its case from multiple perspectives. Most of the book is directed towards the CEO or president of the company while the last chapter is intended to give support to employees and team members to encourage their leaders to grow. The book offers three key steps that Li says leaders should take to “successfully hasten their digital transformation”:

  • Listen at scale
  • Share to shape
  • Engage to transform

In a way, it almost reads like leaders need to be rehabilitated so that they can fully embrace the evolution of the business world. No longer is the status quo of leaders being viewed on a pedestal or revered as if they are a living god, corporations are having to deal with the fact that the world is more conversational and that not only are customers talking back, but also employees. But instead of figuring out the best ways to respond, Li wants leaders to instead focus on the “why” aspect.

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To accomplish this, Li created a worksheet that leaders can use to facilitate their transformation. I’ve recreated a sample shown above, but the basic tenets that you need to address are shown in the left column, specifically what are your goals, how will you measure success (what’s the ROI?) and then the three key parts to engagement from the top person, namely how will you listen, share, and engage?

The Engaged Leader is filled with anecdotes from leaders in some of the top companies in the world, but if you’re a startup CEO or in a small business, you might think it’s not pertinent to you. To that point, Li says that the concept holds true regardless, but the only difference is in terms of scale. She writes in an FAQ that “leaders in large enterprises simply have more employees, more business units, and geographies to worry about. This doesn’t make your job as a leader any easier — in fact, your engagement is even more essential because coherent engaged leader strategy has greater potential impact on a smaller organization.” When I asked her about why she didn’t address it specifically in her book, Li said that she debated about it but ultimately left it out as then the book. However, she added that it’s easier if leaders were engaged earlier on in the company’s history instead of when they get too big.

Li makes a good point: The Engaged Leader isn’t an average sized book. In fact, it’s only 93 pages, which makes it easy for any leader to digest sometime in their busy schedule. And if startups and small businesses have an easier time with establishing an engaged leader in their culture, then the book wouldn’t really benefit them, right? So Li has targeted the one with the most to gain from this practice.

Admittedly, when I read the book, I immediately thought much of what Li wrote was common sense. Face it, when you read the following, you may think that this isn’t really new thinking:

Engaged leadership in the digital era means not chasing the latest apps and gadgets. Being an engaged leader in the digital era means knowing what your goals are and what tools to use to achieve them. It also means being brave and bold enough to step into the fray: listen to followers, share yourself with them, and engage them directly in new and amazing ways.

However, remember the audience: The Engaged Leader does quite a bit of hand-holding for leaders to reassure them that the proverbial water is fine and that they need to think about technology as just a tool and not something that requires a PhD to use. To help break things down even further, Li describes the art and science of what it takes to be transformed into a new kind of leader. What’s the difference? The art is how you listen, share, and engage while the science is why it’s important that you do it this way and the methodology by which you can become successful.

And Li has experience knowing what she’s talking about. She’s written two successful books on the topic of leadership: Groundswell and Open Leadership. There is a deep connection between the latter and The Engaged Leader, but the difference is that while executives became aware of social business technology in Open Leadership, Li makes it clear that now is the time for leaders to step up and build better relationships with not only their peers, but also employees and customers using all technology available like normal people. Don’t be afraid, the water’s just fine.

The Engaged Leader is available now for sale on Amazon, Apple iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, and at bookstores. It was published by Wharton Digital Press.

Priime for iOS is a Photo Editing App With Pro Photographer-Curated Styles To Make Your Pics Look Good

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As some of you may know, I have a habit of taking photographs practically everywhere I go. Usually I’m lugging around a Canon 7D dSLR, but nearly all the time I have on hand my iPhone. I don’t fancy myself a professional photographer so when I browse through Instagram, EyeEm, Flickr, and Facebook and see photos from my more experienced photographer friends, I often ask myself “how can I get my photos to look just like that?” I still haven’t quite figured the trade secrets…yet, but suffice it to say, I have a better idea on how to try and recreate that look, thanks to Priime, a new photography editing app that launched at the end of last week.

I had an opportunity to download Priime prior to its release and must say that it looks to be well-designed. This isn’t a photo sharing app like EyeEm or Instagram where you capture photos, process them using a set of filters, and upload them. Rather, this is just focused on one thing: post-processing. Chances are that you would take photos using the default camera app on your mobile device, but aren’t sure how you’d want to share it — maybe post it to Snapchat, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, EyeEm, or simply text it to a friend. Naturally you’d want to tweak it a bit in order to maximize its appeal, right? Well Priime does that, but instead of overwhelming you with options to pick from, you can make your photos have that professional look with just a couple of actions.

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You might be thinking: “wait, you can do this already in many apps, why do I want another one on my phone?” And you’d be right. But here’s the thing about Priime, all the “filters” (called styles in app) were done by specific photographers (like real photographers who use cameras, not just their phones). The company consulted with more than 30 professional photographers to create the right style and instead of showing you the effects, the app offers information on the creator’s style and the best use cases where the style will come in handy. And the number of style authors is only going to grow — I had a quick Twitter conversation with Arthur Chang, CEO of Priime, who told me that the company has a backlog of people eager to contribute to the app:

One thing that Priime says separates itself from all the other editing apps out there is the fact that it was built by photographers for photographers. The founding team consists of not only Chang, but also Andrew Ng (former software engineer for Flowtown), Joe Pestro (former CTO of BeRecruited), and Loren Baxter (former design lead at Welkin Health and ReadyForZero). All of whom have experience in the photography field.

So where did Priime come from? Well this Y Combinator accelerator company seems to want to have people refocus (no pun intended) their energy into the composition of their photos. In the photography world, there are specific lenses that have no focal length, called prime lenses, which some photographers enjoy because it causes you to be really creative with the fixed zoom that you have. By naming their company Priime, the founders could have this same idea of making images creative instead of simply slapping a filter or style on an image and making it creative — filters don’t make a photograph, it’s the eye of the photographer.

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Nevertheless, however you take photos, if you want to have the end result be similar to a style from your favorite photographer, be sure to check out Priime. With just a tap, you can easily add in a style that makes it pop in sunlight or get that (near) perfect portrait shot. If you’re unsure which is the best style to use, then Priime has a suggested style option as well. The only problem is that it might select styles that aren’t free. Yes, the app is using a freemium option. And don’t worry, if you’re not satisfied with the way a photo looks, you can make granular changes to the editing, including adjusting the brightness, saturation, contrast, applying a vignette, and more.

You can even share photos directly to Instagram and other photo-sharing apps like EyeEm after you’ve done your post-processing.

When you first use Priime, the app gives you eight styles for free. The rest you can buy individually for $0.99 or you can unlock all 66 at a wholesale price — currently the company has a $9.99 sale for all 66 (a 85 percent discount). It’s unknown how much each contributing photographer receives for each purchase of their respective styles.

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Priime isn’t the first app to leverage the assistance of professional photographers — TapTapTap’s Camera+ app was built off of the expertise of Lisa Bettany. But what I find in Priime is a focus on simplicity. The app is well designed and allows you to implement quick edits without having to understand all the complex knobs, switches, and widgets needed. Yes, you could also do this in Instagram, but it doesn’t quite have the powerful editing that you would find in Priime…and chances are you’re editing the photos outside of Instagram, anyways — you don’t necessarily want a square-shaped natural image, right?

You can download Priime today for free, but it’s only available for iOS devices.

Facebook Today: A Scary and New Intersection of Our Digital and Real Lives

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“Build better communities” was one of the mantras featured on at least one of the screens on stage at this week’s F8 developer conference. Hosted by Facebook, the intent was to showcase the latest innovations within the company to get buy-in from developers on how it can further extend its quest to better connect us with each other. At one point, company CEO Mark Zuckerberg offered this battle cry: “Let’s go connect the world.” After the slew of announcements were made, it’s interesting to think how right he just might be.

In previous meetings, Zuckerberg said that the goal of Facebook was to help developers build, grow, and monetize. But to a certain degree, that’s limiting if you think of the social network as simply that and Messenger as just an ordinary messaging service, and so on. But it’s becoming apparent that Facebook is undergoing an evolution — one that will see its technology move beyond just being something you interact with on your browser to a force that we will all soon see affect our very real and public lives.

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Note, this isn’t a doomsday warning post nor am I proselytizing that we boycott Facebook. Rather, it’s just my view of how “social” is continuously being redefined by Facebook (possibly in a good way). Let’s take a look at the announcements to better understand why I think this way:

Facebook Messaging Platform

As first reported by TechCrunch, perhaps the biggest news of the day was the fact that Facebook was going to extend its platform to include the messaging space. Called the Messenger Platform, developers will be able to integrate their applications into Facebook’s core messaging product. With 600 million monthly active users on it, Messenger ranks as one of the top in its class and now is the time for the company to accelerate its development so that it stands out against other competitors, namely WeChat and Line. The intent is to allow people to “express themselves in new ways and make their conversations better.”

Part of the platform includes the capability for people to build better relationships with their favorite businesses. Similar to Path Talk and Intercom, Facebook Messenger allows you to converse with participating businesses right from within the app. You would make your purchase from the company’s digital property, be it on Web or mobile device. Then you could opt to receive communication via Facebook Messenger. In doing so, you would automatically authenticate using (what else?) Facebook Login. The idea is that you would continue to form a relationship with that merchant, especially now that they can know more about you based on what you’ve publicly shared on the social network.

facebook-messenger-for-businessThe idea of Messenger for Business is to streamline the experience so it looks like you’re having that in-store personal touch, especially when you’re buying something from an e-commerce property. Facebook’s head of messaging David Marcus explained that in the current paradigm, we’re inundated by emails, especially after we’ve registered on a site, made a purchase, when our order ships, etc. But with Messenger, it simplifies the whole process and conforms to the behavior that the user is comfortable with, not the system. You’ll receive in-app notifications when your purchase has been confirmed, when it ships, it’s delivered, and more. It’ll even let you communicate directly with the business — having some striking similarities to customer-to-business messaging offerings like Path Talk and Intercom.

Until now, Facebook has been centered around being simply online. But as Zuckerberg seeks to connect the next five billion users, it’s not about simply getting people to create profiles or Pages. Instead, Messenger takes a big leap forward by ushering in a new age where the concept of being “social” has been redefined to include a marriage of both online and offline. This is the reality that Facebook has created — Messenger has enabled us to bridge together our online and offline selves.

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The choice of having Marcus lead the Messenger team is another sign of the encroachment of our digital lives with the offline. As the former president of PayPal, his experience managing payments, leading a mobile initiative, and helping products develop to scale, certainly would benefit Facebook’s pursuit of a new “social” pact with its users. In his departure from PayPal post, Marcus wrote:

At first, I didn’t know whether another big company gig was a good thing for me, but Mark’s enthusiasm, and the unparalleled reach and consumer engagement of the Facebook platform ultimately won me over. So… yes. I’m excited to go to Facebook to lead Messaging Products. And I’m looking forward to getting my hands dirty again attempting to build something new and meaningful at scale.

He echoed the same sentiment at F8 during one of the event’s keynotes where he spoke about the importance of Messenger’s platform, saying that “if you look at Messenger today, there are opportunities to build great opportunities on the platform, find which app is going to remain on top, be sustainable, and used over time versus being a fad. You want to have an app that’s there to stay and build creative tools that people will use repeatedly. Facebook has been a phenomenal platform for distribution and discovery and now we’re doing it again with Messenger.”

Case in point, look at the things that the Messenger team has done over the past several years: it enabled Voice-over IP (VoIP) calls to be made through its standalone application, competing with the likes of Skype, WhatsApp, Google Hangouts, etc., and recently launched the ability to allow payments to be made, entering the same market as Venmo and Square.

However, the digital has invaded the real life, it’s not apparent how intrusive the Messenger platform could really get? What else could we see the chat service be integrated with? Certainly anything customer service related, but perhaps if someone wanted to integrate real-time chatting into their enterprise application, like a Yammer-like competitor? What about in the Internet of Things space?

Parse for IoT

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Speaking about Parse, the Facebook-owned Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering had its own set of announcements during the first day of F8. Co-founder Ilya Sukhar took the stage to talk about the divisions focus: the connected object. It was only a matter of time before at least one Facebook property broke free from the Web coil to focus on new areas where developers can have an impact. It turns out that the Internet of Things space is right where Parse wants to be.

With Parse for IoT, developers will have access to an SDK that will enable it to better connect with hardware objects. This certainly closely aligns with the company’s mission of simplifying developer experiences on any platform. But this also shows that Facebook as a global company is looking to improve our connectivity with not only other people, but objects as well. Right now, Parse is working with Arduino, a favorite of the Maker movement, but eventually we could begin to see chip manufacturers adopting Parse’s SDK as a standard and then see more Facebook-infused devices being released into the wild.

Yes, Parse is certainly still an independently operated company and developers have the option when they use Parse to incorporate Facebook technology or not. However, let’s not kid ourselves as there may be at least a few scenarios where a developer may want to build a smart object leveraging Facebook data/APIs through Parse. Then we might get a refrigerator sending us a Facebook message when we’re out of milk, or perhaps hardware playing music voted on based on likes on a Page. As cliche as it sounds, the possibilities could be endless.

It’s about a “sense of presence”

Photo-Mar-26,-2-45-04-PMOne thing that seemed to echo throughout the keynotes during F8 was the notion of “sense of presence”. This is a concept by which people remain free to have shared experiences with their friends and connections. As Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer noted during his talk, Facebook is striving to accomplish three things that will facilitate us really connecting with one another:

  1. Create planetary connectivity: helping those that are unable to have Internet access connected via Internet.org
  2. Offer natural interfaces: amid the tidal wave of information, ensure that the information people receive is relevant to them.
  3. Build immersive experiences: give users a real sense of presence and enable them to have shareable moments with those that they care about.

These seem like logical goals for the largest social network in the world. And what’s interesting about this is that Schroepfer was mostly speaking about how Facebook as a technology can help keep people connected (read: “in touch with one another”) worldwide. This includes the use of Oculus VR, the virtual reality company that Facebook purchased a year ago for $2 billion. He explained that over the next decade, we will be able to fully realize this idea of “sense of presence”, perhaps fully powered by Facebook.

But in order to really get back to focusing on our relationships, whether in real life or virtually (whether due to distance or various other reasons), we need to pretty much have a zen-like mind, at least when it comes to the information that comes to us. We certainly spend a lot of time on Facebook properties, so what the company is doing is utilizing data algorithms and machine learning to help remove any digital obstacles that could hinder us from fostering those relationships.

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The use of virtual reality may not help us with the face-to-face meetings that we all wish for, but it could come pretty darn close. Armed with a premiere virtual reality company, Facebook is exploring new ways to really get people to their destinations to have shared experiences with friends, colleagues, and loved ones. At F8, Zuckerberg remarked that soon spherical videos would be supported and there was even a “transportation” station at the conference. What this meant was that you could put on a VR headset and instantly be transported to a location (in this case, Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, CA) and have a 360-degree experience that probably looks like you’re actually there.

By now you might be wondering what this entire post is all about. In short, I’m theorizing that Facebook has moved beyond just being a Web app, grown tired of dominating mobile, and is now redefining what it means to be a “social” network. We’re in this next chapter of its evolution where it’s looking to combine its family of apps and services together to accomplish one thing: connect our worlds together — both the digital and the one in our reality.

Perhaps Schroepfer put it best at the end of his keynote: Facebook’s hope is that by marrying virtual reality technology with the most powerful social connection platform in the world, a true sense of presence will emerge. The output here is true moments will take place that you want to bring people towards.

That can’t be scary, can it?

Photo credit: Oculus transportation station at F8 via Mashable

Highlight’s Roll for iOS App Is Great For Quickly Sharing Photos With Friends, But Initially Lacks Unique Features

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Whatever happened to Highlight? You remember the app — it’s a location-based service that helped you find people near you in an almost serendipitous-type manner. Turns out that it’s still around and the company is still chugging away, especially after raising $4 million in December 2013. The company just launched its first standalone app today called Roll. What makes this new product so special? It’s being billed as a “new way for close friends to keep in touch by sharing their camera roll.”

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In a way, you could think about Roll as being more akin to Bump, the long-shuttered mobile contact sharing service that Google acquired in 2013. Essentially you connect with your friend and afterwards, you can “roll” photos and videos from your camera roll to them that only they can see. Once you’ve been successfully on-boarded, your feed includes photos shared by your friends and also files from your camera roll. Swiping up will push the media to your network while swiping down will keep them private.

Although photos are not ephemeral, Roll will only display a particular image from your friends’ shared camera roll once. Your friends can save your media to their device or like it. Tagging is also allowed on your photos and videos and if you associate it with someone not on Roll, an invite will be sent to them encouraging them to sign up in order for view it. One thing that I’ve noticed is that at the beginning, you parse through your media from the most recent to the oldest, but only 10 at a time — it can get pretty annoying when you constantly see an interstitial message saying “That’s it for now!” I’d much rather see the feed be uninterrupted. Highlight says that people should think of Roll as being a messaging app, not a social network — it takes time for the service to index all the photos.

If you don’t want to pull from your main camera roll album, you can select other albums as well. Perhaps you have one specifically from a trip you’d only want to share with your friends outside of a social network. Roll gives you that type of control. However, from what I can see now, there’s no way for you to target what photos you share to specific contacts. If you upload a photo from your trip to South by Southwest, for example, it will be seen by all your Roll friends, including business contacts, family, etc.

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One might think about why Roll was released by Highlight. What compelled the company to go this route and develop an adjacency to its core application? Remember, Highlight came about in 2012 during the “location wars” that many claimed would take place at South by Southwest. And yes, it did have its 15 minutes of fame, but what about it really excited people? Is the release of Roll a sign of the company’s struggle or pivot? It appears quite the contrary…the company looks to still be fixated on the notion of creating shared experiences that are “real-time, fun, and authentic“. You started to see this with the core application where you found out who was nearby you using GPS and the app’s proximity sensor. Then you could organize flash events by quickly setting up events based on Highlight users near you. Now, in continuation of that sharing aspect, Roll will let you pass along photos to others — almost making it seem like they’re right there with you.

But isn’t this based on Banjo, a one-time competitor to Highlight? There is some similarities but fundamentally they’re very much two different. Highlight is still about creating shareable and perhaps more intimate moments — serendipity, perhaps. But with Banjo, there’s less intimacy as you’re sharing with the public (but you could share with a smaller group). Here’s the philosophy behind why Highlight wants Roll to be in existence:

Roll was not designed to help you pick the top 3 photos of the 40 you took. It’s for sharing the other 37…and for getting the photos your friends took of you.

But while this makes sense, the early version of Roll assumes that you will be with your contacts throughout all of time — is there going to be any list or segmentation feature being added soon? Also, how does it overcome other apps like Facebook’s Slingshot, Cluster, and others?

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So was there anything wrong with the Highlight model? Should we view Roll as being a pivot? Company CEO Paul Davison answered that in a ProductHunt Q&A on Thursday morning saying:

With Highlight, our goal has always been to help you learn about the people around you. With Highlight 1.0, our focus was on surfacing mutual friends and interests. With 2.0, we added new bits of context about what the people around you were doing – like whether they were walking or driving, and what music they were listening to.

With 3.0, we started thinking “Wouldn’t it be interesting if you could learn about people by seeing the photos they’re taking?” Photos have always been a hugely important part of Highlight, and this had just become technically possible to do with iOS 7.

The idea was a bit too crazy to fit into the Highlight product, but it was interesting enough that we kept thinking about it, and eventually decided to prototype it as a separate app. We got a few friends on it and the engagement was really good, so we eventually decided to polish it up and release it.

We love Highlight and still deeply believe in the vision behind it, but I think we’re still in the early days of that space! Back in 2012, battery life was an issue. Social norms still have to be established. Hyperlocal distribution is notoriously tricky. It’s definitely going to happen, but there is still a lot to figure out!

As cliche as it sounds, it must be said that it’s still early to see how Roll will do. And we haven’t even discussed what the possible monetization strategy is for the app, let alone for the company. One could assume that the value that Highlight derives from its products are in the data that it gleans from all the photos, content, and location of each user. Eventually, the company will have a big enough database to know more about our habits, travels, etc just like Foursquare.

Roll is free for people to use on their iOS device, but don’t think that you’ll be able to use it on your iPad though as it requires a telephone number to be associated with. So why not just share photos from your phone? I mean, it’s the one device where most of our photos are anyways, unless you’re one of those people who takes pictures using a tablet…

The Neverending Rocky Path

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Four years ago I began using a new social network and since then, I’ve posted over 7,500 “moments” that only a few friends are privy to see. The service I’m using and of which I’m talking about is Path. And for many years, it’s been a lightning rod for criticism over privacy or just the standard cliche jab: “Are people still using Path?” But after all of that, I personally remain a fan of the service — well at least until recently. It has dawned on me that I’m not really sure what Path is really up to, so I thought I’d jot down my thoughts here to see if it’s possible to make heads or tails of whether this Path is about to lead us to a dangerous cliff.

Bottom line: Path has evolved its focus, moving away from being a private social network to an app studio — will this new shift really help it succeed? And can it help the company shed away its rocky past?

Dare to be private

If you’re not familiar with Path, it started approximately five years ago following Dave Morin’s departure from Facebook, where he led the development of the social network’s platform. The concept at first was to be a private photo sharing network. As former TechCrunch reporter Jason Kincaid once put it: think Instagram, but without the filters and with a privacy model that takes away any anxiety associated with sharing photos with people you don’t know. Surely a noble concept, but the first iteration failed to really gain any traction. Path eventually launched its 2.0 version of its namesake app and that quickly took off and got the attention of the media and users — at one point, it had over 300,000 daily users.

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The second iteration of Path certainly received acclaim, but mostly for its design. Personally, I was initially reluctant to check it out. I mean, why would I elect to use this new privacy app versus using my main social network where I can choose which friend to display my content to? It seemed like double-work. No way that this would succeed. But dive into the deep end of the pool, I did…and I grew attached to the service, constantly posting photos, status updates, and other pieces of content that allowed me to vent, pontificate, and share with my closest 150 friends. It worked pretty good for the first two to three years, but over time I’ve started to see a drop off of engagement in the number of people using the app with just a dozen or so friends interacting with my memories now (out of a friend list of nearly 125). Just what’s going on?

During a PandoDaily event in 2012, Morin was asked by Sarah Lacy how the company started. He responded by saying it’s the antithesis of Facebook whereby the purpose is to act like the family table or your home. While Facebook could be considered something eager to create cities and towns, Path’s focus was to be more about creating personal memories and allowing you to have a “home” on the Internet.

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Vision distorted?

That’s all well and good, but in the face of the past five years, has Path really stuck to its convictions? That’s a rather subjective question. At least for me, I think that the company has subtlety evolved its messaging so it’s no longer about sharing moments privately with close friends and family, but rather about helping you express yourself throughout “journey” through life, regardless of whoever is listening. As Morin told Business Insider earlier this week: “Last year, we shifted to a multi-apps or studio strategy where we have multiple apps under our umbrella…” so the transformation has already been taking place. But will this wind up being a win for this company?

To be honest, the whole thing about Path’s new direction, as it were, really concerns me. I can buy into it in the ultimate end, but much of what the company has done just didn’t make a whole lot of sense piecemeal. After Path 2.0 was released, that looked to have quite a bit of potential. Eventually the company began iterating, including making it available on iPad with an interesting horizontal layout (see below), but which has since gone away never to be seen again. Then it added a search feature to aid in social discovery, but failed to really iterate on it rendering it mostly ineffective to this very day, and then opened up its API to select services, including WordPress, Nike, Strava, and others.

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All of these helped Path really stick with its guns around being a social network for your close friends. Hell, even the first time it released stickers was kind of interesting and there seemed to be potential for its first monetization plan with its $14.99 premium plan. But that soon became tiresome. So later, when there was a new release to Path (version 4.0), it was underwhelming: simplified navigation, new stickers (!), and removal of its 150 friends limit — this further cast a spotlight on the fact that Path no longer was interested in being appealing for its intimate social network. Perhaps the only thing that offered some incentive was the acquisition of TalkTo and the debut of a new messaging service called Path Talk.

It’s about the journey and letting people be themselves

Launching a social network can be difficult — no question about it. Especially when you’re going up against Facebook, you’ll need a lot of resources and a strong argument for why you’re better. Perhaps after all these years, Path has decided to shift its gears towards a different message, maybe even something that it hadn’t really touted as strongly before. Then something caught my eye from an interview Morin did earlier this year with his friend and former Google Ventures partner Kevin Rose. In it, he was quoted as saying what would be success for Path: “It’s about people being themselves…”

And that’s the journey that Path is currently on. It’s main focus isn’t on a private social network — that has become more tactical than anything. Instead, how people wish to document their journey through life and express themselves is the underlying mission that it appears the company is getting behind. With its declaration that it’s now an app studio, Path is rolling out different products to accomplish just that task, including its most recent one called Kong, a selfie/animated GIF creator. Kong is the second new product to come out of the Path studios, with Path Talk being the first. But both are drastically different from the core business, which Morin has said is still alive, especially in Asia.

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But Path’s app studio strategy may not necessarily help turn things around. Yes, the release of Path Talk sure breathed life into the service, especially when you could communicate directly with businesses without having to actually call them — you just message them (via a Path liaison). And by leveraging the premium plan originally implemented for its core app, the company could have had something as a subscription service. But it may have to do better following Facebook’s foray into the space with its Messenger platform, which not only allows you to communicate with businesses via its service, but also interact (e.g. track shipping, provide feedback, file complaints, make purchases, and more). In order to remain competitive, Path will surely have to think outside the box and come up with new ways to really stand out while not only trying to engage its existing users.

Of course this whole thing about Path’s direction could be boiled down to the fact that it’s not about any specific theme or philosophy — maybe I’m just overthinking things. But watch Morin’s talk about Path’s strategy on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco and see if there’s a common theme for all the different things that it’s doing:

I suppose what I’m getting at is whether Path remains a viable platform and if so, what’s its core mission?

Photo credits: screenshots of Path for iPad and Kong via Path.


Box Seeks To Transform Industries With New Platform, SDKs, and Tools All Enterprise Apps Are Built From

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In its first public event since its IPO, cloud collaboration company Box sought to shake up the enterprise application landscape with several announcements aimed at changing the way technology is being used in the workplace. From the launch of a developer platform, releasing modular SDKs, unveiling of new resources, and more, Box seeks to facilitate the transformation of the digital enterprise.

There’s no question that Box has faced much criticism around its pursuit of becoming a public entity. But now, four months after its IPO, it’s taking what it thinks it needs to convince shareholders that betting on “unsexy” technology, especially one that some may have reservations about, can pay off. Is Box more than a one-trick pony and can it move beyond just being a storage company? The answer appears to be “yes”, it can and that evolution begins today.

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During his keynote, company CEO Aaron Levie proclaimed that Box would be a major player in the evolution of the digital enterprise, the next generation business that has adapted to changing trends to work with its environment. This is a stark contrast to the here and now where incumbent entities are still resigning themselves to working with traditional vendors, but befuddled at how to remain relevant. This perspective shift, according to Levie, comes from technology, brought about by new employees bringing in new behaviors, workplaces becoming flatter organizations, and new business models.

Box has seen success in this area — after all, it’s been trying to prove that it can manage all your content storage needs across all verticals and it’s paid off. The company now counts more than 35 million users (45,000 customers) and more than 50 percent of all Fortune 500 companies. And it has its hands in numerous verticals, including healthcare, legal, education, media, finance, construction, government, retail, and manufacturing. But what’s the next logical option for the company to do?

For over a decade, many have labeled Box as a cloud storage company, competing alongside the Dropboxes and the Hightails of the world. But perhaps it’s being typecast into being something that it’s not. At its last BoxWorks customer conference in 2014, the company released some new tools and resources, which prompted me to posit that it’s making a concrete effort to turn the page on public perception and show what it’s really capable of. Today’s announcements solidifies that move — but it’s ultimately up to Wall Street to make the judgement on whether it’s enough to push Box’s stock higher (or lower).

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Box Developer Edition and the myriad of SDKs it has at its disposal are the biggest evolutionary effort of the product in as many years as it moves the company away from being a creator of products and instead helps developers create them. In a way, the company wants people to view it like how Twilio is for telephony, Layer is for messaging, and Salesforce is for customer relationship management. Box will bill itself as the content storage platform for apps.

The pieces have all been there that shows that Box has a chance at making a difference. After all, if it worked for Box, why couldn’t it work for others? The company has spent years touting its achievements, such as document editing, previewing, integration with CRM systems, and security. And now it’s time for it to branch out and offer these tools piecemeal to developers in the hopes that it will benefit their products. It’s a smart and perhaps natural play — Box wants developers to take advantage of resources it has perfected over the years and become the part of the applications backbone, thereby effectively ingraining itself into the DNA of a company.

During one of the keynotes at Box’s developer conference, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff spoke about how the market has come to embrace services instead of just products and that companies need to embrace this change. Perhaps more symbolic, but the fact that Benioff heaped praise and platitudes upon Levie seemed to be like there was a transitioning in market leaders. Perhaps what we were seeing is the potential coronation of what the new age enterprise technology will be built upon. In fact, Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt himself said that he would have never thought of Box being as successful as it is within the enterprise space. It will be fascinating to see if Box and Levie can play the part to be what the new workplace tools and products are going to be built off of.

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Box’s transformation of the enterprise isn’t just impacting developers. In fact, it’s also affecting the main decision makers in corporations. In one of the afternoon panels at BoxDev involving Chief Information Officers, a panelist remarked that his company wouldn’t use services that their employees wouldn’t use. And within a digital enterprise, this can have a detrimental effect — in 2013, I attended a roundtable event where executives from GitHub, Stripe, Mixpanel, Tidemark, and Box (!) spoke about the changing role of the executive. Instead of someone in the C-suite making technology decisions, that ultimately was the call of the end users. From that event, here’s an interesting tidbit from Levie’s prediction back in the day:

Levie will see the continued growth of the “app-economy” with the emergence of an ecosystem and economy generating revenue for apps. He believes that there the IT department will be reinvented in a way to help usher in new technology.

With Box’s Developer Edition, Levie and his team are banking on the fact that CIOs will feel enticed by the solution in order to cut down on investment costs and time needed to provide the necessary tools to their employees. What’s more, there’s further incentives based on the fact that from a regulatory standpoint, Box has already received clearance from the governing body, especially when it comes to the healthcare and legal industries.

Perhaps this was all part of Levie’s plan, but we’re starting to see things come to fruition for Box. Whether investors will care and find the new platform favorable remains to be seen — the company’s stock closed up over 2 percent today at $18.29, but it’s still below its day 1 opening price of $20.20 in January.

But Box isn’t done yet…it’s still looking to foster strong enterprise applications and entice them to use its platform. The company has partnered with Bessemer Venture Partners and Emergence Capital Partners to invest $40 million into startups. In addition, it’s launched a resource center called Box Assured that will enable companies test their apps and gain a much faster route to market after receiving their security qualifications.

While this seems pretty positive for Box, it’s not exactly sure that developers will flock to using it. After all, critics have been rather quick to call Box’s time of death and could see these announcements as nothing more as a desperate company on life support clinging to avoid the inevitable. But in the absence of Box, is there a company that could take its place and help the enterprise better easily manage their content across their apps without pouring hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars to build the back-end themselves?

But let’s not celebrate too early…after all, we will need to examine the company’s performance over the next few quarters to see how this evolution fares. If it doesn’t receive a warm welcome by companies and if the market isn’t receptive to this new digital enterprise, where can Box go? At the very least, the company has certainly solidified its existence as not being a cloud storage service anymore.

The Great Tech Debate Presidential Candidates Should Be Having

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Last week, TechCrunch held its semi-annual technology conference in New York City. And while there’s typically nothing surprising about it, there was one notable first for the publication: a presidential candidate took the stage to address the community. That’s right, ousted HP CEO-turned-presidential candidate Carly Fiorina made an appearance on the second day of TechCrunch Disrupt New York for an interview with TechCrunch TV star Sarah Lane.

I watched Fiorina’s interview and she was very composed and was intelligent in answering some of the questions (not all). But I’m not going to comment on her talk too much. Rather, the one thing that struck me was that since Fiorina’s appearance marked the first time a presidential candidate (albeit one with a long-shot) from a major political party spoke to TechCrunch, is this a time when the technology community should be keen on hearing candidates’ positions about matters that relate to them?

This whole notion started out with but a tweet and shortly ballooned from there. Sure, some may have taken it for a joke and there are some that may think that it’s out of the realm of possibility, but my position is this: TechCrunch should request the presence of the declared presidential candidates at a public debate on stage at one of its conferences.

Okay, so how would this play out? Well certainly someone would have to fight tooth and nail in order to get the attention of each candidate in order to assess whether they’d do it. But it may appear easier for some than for others. Just look at during President Barack Obama’s administration when he courted Silicon Valley venture capitalists and held fundraisers here left and right. The Democratic party is capitalizing on the relationships with the technology industry in California in order to pull in money. The White House has steadily brought on board recognized and respected tech professionals, such as former Google executive Megan Smith to be the newest Chief Technology Officer, Twitter’s former Head of Public Policy and General Counsel Alex Macgillivray as her deputy, and many more. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also is looking to Silicon Valley for help.

Republicans aren’t shying away either, even though California leans towards the Democrats. Just this weekend, presidential candidate Senator Rand Paul made a stop in the San Francisco Bay Area to not only campaign, but also opened up a “tech hub” in the area. And there’s certainly more activity coming from the GOP to tap into the innovation and financial resources that Silicon Valley can bring to bear.

I chose TechCrunch because it’s simply the tech industry publication of record and likely has the biggest reach. Plus it has had extensive coverage of major issues affecting the industry, such as Net Neutrality, SOPA/PIPA, immigration reform, the JOBS Act, Edward Snowden and the NSA, gender and racial inequality, and more. So I posit that what would be great to happen is that TechCrunch hosts a debate during the San Francisco edition of its TechCrunch Disrupt conference between the major candidates — it can be after the main sessions as part of an evening thing. It doesn’t need to be broadcast on a major network like ABC, NBC, CNN, FOX, etc. but rather can be livestreamed on UStream, TechCrunch.com, Yahoo, YouTube, Facebook, Twitch.tv — the major networks of the tech generation. Questions would be specific to the tech industry, especially if the candidate wants to court the audience to vote for them.

But wait, would you have both GOP and Democratic candidates on stage at the same time?!? Probably not and no party would agree to that — at least not until the general election cycle kicks off after the party conventions, which all will take place in July 2016. So a thought would be that in the 2016 fall edition of TechCrunch Disrupt, prior to the actual election, the two candidates square off on stage — would it be too little too late by that time? Perhaps…so maybe TechCrunch should just focus on just one political party and I’m leaning towards the Republicans because they have the most people in the field right now. Once there are more candidates on the Democrats side, then that should also be a possibility.

Who knows, it’s a wishful thing and possibly something out of the realm of possibility. But as technology definitely becomes a big influence in our daily lives, both in how our government uses it for and against us, what we do with it in the homes to entertain and inform ourselves, and how companies are playing a big role in affecting how that content gets to us, Silicon Valley should continue to pay attention to these candidates. All those declared for the highest office in the land also should consider if such a debate were planned as millions of young voters, venture capitalists, influencers, pundits, etc. will be commenting, tweeting, sharing videos, and making memes out of their responses — there’d be instant connection with a audience no one thought possible.

Maybe I’m just crazy and expect a conversation more interesting than what is already on TV.

Image credit: TechCrunch

Changing Winds

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When I moved to San Francisco nearly eight years ago, I did so to explore the roots of technology and to gain a better understanding of how people can use the Internet and its byproducts to better their lives. Along the way, I’ve worked in agencies helping clients adapt and leverage these things to build better marketing campaigns, but often thought about exploring deeper into seeing who makes the digital tools we’re so fond of today. That eventually led me into blogging and journalism, starting with various small publications, then to Bub.blicio.us (thanks to the ever helpful Brian Solis). Eventually I shifted towards my first professional journalism role with The Next Web where I had an incredible experience working with not only talented individuals, but also got a chance to fulfill part of my dream of getting to know the movers and shakers of the tech industry.

Things shifted once again in 2014 when I pursued a different avenue with Orange Silicon Valley as one of the company’s Strategy and Research Content Leads. But after a while something didn’t sit right with me — no, there wasn’t anything wrong with the job. There was still something drawing me back to my passion of better understanding companies. While I could have accomplished that at Orange, it sadly wasn’t enough to satiate my hunger to learn. Over the past few months I’ve found myself drawn to look back at previous articles I’ve written, whether about Facebook, Yahoo, Google, or fascinating startups, to profiles and interviews that I’ve conducted. It wasn’t the constant rush of being a part of the press corp. No, it was the desire to be connected with this economy and ask questions.

So my friends, it’s time for me to change. I am moving on from Orange at the end of the month and am happy to announce that I’ve signed on to become a reporter with VentureBeat*.

Starting the first week of July, I’ll be covering the news once again and would love to hear from you, the entrepreneur, the venture capitalist, corporate citizen, digital native, and aficionado. While primarily I’ll be covering Facebook and other social companies, I’m also going to remain heavily interested in what I covered before while at The Next Web (at least I hope so). One of the really great things about being at VentureBeat is that I’ll be reunited with three amazing (no longer) former co-workers Harrison Weber, Emil Protalinski, and Paul Sawers. The publication has built an amazing team and I’m honored to have a chance to work with them. I’m excited to work alongside Dylan Tweney, Jordan Novet, Mark Sullivan, Jennifer Tsao, Ruth Reader, Dean Takahashi, and all the other people at VentureBeat.

This won’t be totally the same experience before. While some may know my hectic schedule at The Next Web, I’m going to take more time to look at the news and focus on not only the daily grind stuff (and embargoes — but won’t do as many anymore), but also focus on taking a deeper look at companies and doing fun stories like this one about Facebook’s Open Academy, or perhaps better understand different professions like what’s it like being a product manager, and also doing more profiles like this one of Shervin Pishevar. It’s certainly going to be hard work, no doubt, but I’m hoping that this will be a fun ride.

I’m still setting up everything, but I’d imagine that my work email address will be ken [at] venturebeat.com. Feel free to send me a note and we can grab coffee. I’m always looking to chat and hear your story.

Thank you so much to my colleagues at Orange Silicon Valley for some fun times and great experiences. Shout out to Mark Plakias for bringing me on board, Pascale Diaine and her Orange Fab team (always a treat), Chris Arkenberg, my team’s outstanding designers KC Cheong and Carolyn Ma, and so many more.

Off to the races.

* Yes Alex, you won the bet.

Photo credit: Weathervane image taken by Steve Snodgrass/Flickr

Google’s Daydream VR and AR Efforts Could Get Boost With Lytro Acquisition

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As a photographer and someone who appreciates creative tools and hardware, my conversations with Lytro while as a reporter were often a mix of investigative and curiosity. Having raised more than $215 million in funding, this 12-year old company appeared to have an ambitious way of making media appear life-like. But that vision alone hasn’t helped Lytro succeed and it looks like it found an exit.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear to exactly be a winning proposition as the company is reportedly getting ready to be acquired by Google in a technology deal worth approximately $40 million. When I spoke with Lytro’s chief executive Jason Rosenthal ahead of the company’s latest $60 million fundraising round, he promoted the idea that things were good, not only describing it as “ecstatic”, but also:

First, the product market fit for what we’re doing here is better than the consumer [space] — we’re fighting against Moore’s law…From a margin structure and meeting the needs of customers, everything is doing great. This is where we want to be.

Assuming that TechCrunch’s report is correct (likely so), the pick up of Lytro by Google could make things interesting in the world of mixed reality. After seeing minimal success with its commercial products, bringing light-field and digital imaging advancements to the average consumer, in the past several years, Lytro has specialized in crafting professional-grade cameras for studios and filmmakers interested in producing creative light-field engineered movies and games. To date, it only has two such products that are supposed to be commercially available: Immerge and Cinema.

Concept illustration of Lytro’s Immerge virtual reality 360-degree camera that’s available for filmmakers. (Photo credit: Lytro)

While Rosenthal was optimistic the last time we spoke, the marketplace is now more active than before, which means selling or even renting hardware can be difficult. Besides Lytro, there are other companies that offer 360-degree cameras, even commercial-grade, like Facebook. So the business advantage starts to whittle away. It’s unclear though how much traction Lytro received from independent filmmakers and movie studios, but its existing relationships could benefit Google in further tapping into that market.

It’s possible that Google won’t really need the hardware itself, but the software behind it could be a way to push a more premium offering in the world of virtual reality. Take this quote from Rosenthal when Lytro unveiled its Immerge camera:

No one has really thought about it from a system perspective — everyone is developing in isolation and most of the innovation has come from the headset makers. We’re the first company that has looked at this problem from the perspective of content creators.

Google may be able to infuse this thinking and architecture into third-party cameras so that there are more ways to capture Daydream-supported movies and even ways to view them through additional mobile devices. But the viewer experience could also be made more life-like. Lytro has produced at least a couple of movies that demonstrate how realistic things can get with light-field technology, including this one involving the moon landing.

Opening up this light-field technology to more filmmakers and third-party makers could greatly accelerate Google’s ambitions around virtual reality. And I’m not alone in thinking this — last week, Rachel Metz from MIT’s Technology Review penned an article that light-field could hold promise for Google.

The company is already working on its own efforts around with the technology, so Lytro’s current code expertise will only bolster Google’s efforts. A few days ago, Google launched a Steam app entitled “Welcome to Light Fields” which educates users about how they can experience things like real-world reflections, depth, and translucence. Lytro’s focus on premium filmmakers could give Google a competitive edge in pursuing movie studios and general artists, which could wind up benefiting YouTube Creators who may expand to become Daydream creators (it’s possible, right?).

Virtual reality isn’t just the only area where light-field could be beneficial for Google, but also the space of augmented reality. Why couldn’t we have our experience viewing this awesome Street Fighter demo in AR improved through Lytro’s technology? In the race for dominating AR among Google, Facebook, Apple, Samsung, and others, creating the ultra high-definition quality experience could solidly define a market leader, while also propelling the industry forward.

Lytro has yet to confirm whether it’s going to indeed be acquired by Google, but if the deal goes through, hopefully, the technology is smartly implemented in order to improve the overall user experience and improve the existing ecosystem. The better time people have, the greater the chances that we’re going to be using it — and hopefully without having to break the bank doing so.

The post Google’s Daydream VR and AR Efforts Could Get Boost With Lytro Acquisition appeared first on My Two Cents.

How A Dog-Eared Filter Got Tech To Think Camera-First

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As the adage goes, the best camera is the one that’s with you. The quality of photos captured and shared continue to improve with each device’s successive generation and tech companies are looking to capitalize on the media proliferation that’s being generated. But it’s one thing to request access to the camera and gallery on someone’s device versus making it a core feature of an application. It’s this hardware device that gives people a window into our lives and why we’re seeing greater attention being paid by the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and others in different markets.

Arguably, the ephemeral messaging app Snapchat has helped to usher the camera-first idea into the mainstream, and even with all its other problems, its adaptation of the lens has been impactful in how people share their lives, news, and what’s going on around them, and has even been one of the catalysts to propelling augmented reality forward in the market.

Learning how to Snapchat. Credit: HeadCase/Vimeo

With the camera-first concept, the lens is the default feature for any app or service. It’s the focal point of the experience (no pun intended) and the most obvious example is Snapchat. Amid all of its current turmoil, its technology has been impactful in how we communicate.

A picture is worth a thousand words

The age of user-generated content is far from over, but people’s de facto medium of sharing as text may be evolving. No, I’m not suggesting a “pivot to video” is what’s the future of our lives, at least not primarily. Rather, we’ve moved into a time where visual content is preferred because after all, isn’t a picture worth a thousand words? Perhaps people are more entertained or pay additional attention to images or videos uploaded from their friends, but more services want us to be visual sharers.

If I happen to be at South by Southwest and stumble upon What’s Trending‘s Shira Lazar interviewing Billy Crystal, a text-based description of the scene wouldn’t really be sufficient or effective to help people better experience what I’m witnessing. The same could be said if I’m having an amazing meal at a San Francisco restaurant or maybe at a sporting event. We can bring people into our lives through visual content versus typing it out — wouldn’t this post be more exciting if there was a video of me explaining all of this?

“What’s Trending’s” Shira Lazar at SXSW 2015 interviewing Billy Crystal. Photo credit: Ken Yeung

As with all things, with the introduction of the smartphone, namely Apple’s iPhone, came the photo-sharing “war” where apps like Instagram, Picplz, Hipstamatic, Flickr, and others jockeyed for pole position. And while these apps facilitated the proliferation of visual content, it wasn’t camera-first. Rather, you would have to tap to open up the camera or upload an image from your device’s camera roll. There was still friction and many of those photos were timed, staged, or shared post-processed. They weren’t spontaneous or at the moment.

Snapchat offered that from the get-go from its messaging to eventual Stories feature. These developments gave way to new entrants like Facebook, which has copied practically every single feature Snapchat has and added it to Instagram, and many others. The ephemeral messaging app has shown tech companies that there is interest from the public in this new mode of communication, which is one reason why we’re seeing an influx of new offerings centered around the camera, like Lens technology, augmented reality, and potentially new marketing opportunities (which I’ll get to later).

Please don’t be mistaken that Snapchat is the originator of the camera-first concept. I’m suggesting that the company had a notable role in directing the tech industry’s push towards this direction. Not only from its overall experience, but also how it capitalized on filtering which changed how people were creative, obtained the news and socialized with their peers, and how marketers have adapted to this visual revolution.

Through the AR looking glass

Beyond Snapchat, the camera is being seen as the gateway to a whole new set of technological advancements, such as with augmented reality. Google, Apple, and Facebook are three companies which have launched efforts to get support AR development. In fact, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg declared last year at F8 that his company is working to “make the camera the first augmented reality platform.

Demonstration of Google Lens at Google I/O 2017. Photo credit: Ken Yeung

Others like Pinterest and Google have turned to the camera to help identify objects and improve search. Both of these companies have launched “lenses” that offer face and image recognition capabilities. Pinterest is perhaps seeing the most traction in this area, with it being used not only in Target’s shopping app, but also by Samsung in its Bixby virtual assistant.

Socially, we’ve become a community that no longer converses in a character-exclusive manner and instead are more inclined to be visual in nature, so the text-based posts we’re posting on Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other Web 2.0 applications are becoming outdated. This creates an opening for new marketing options, like an ad platform with the impact akin to Google AdWords and Facebook advertising. And Snapchat is the one advertisers may want to thank for it.

From sponsored geofilters, lenses, Stories, and ads, Snapchat appears to give native advertising a bit of a reinvention. Casting aside the company’s financial struggles, the strategy it employs around marketing has changed how we think of attracting attention and dollars. While Google made it popular for advertisers to target by keyword and Facebook furthered that targeting by interest and your network, these are all largely non-display ads. Snapchat has a platform that centers around the visual element, where someone is and what they’re viewing and sharing. There’s something to be said about Snapchat’s advertising program because Facebook has replicated it with Instagram.

And now it’s reported that Twitter is contemplating a camera-first initiative of its own. To be honest, that wouldn’t really be a bad move on its part, with the exception that the company hasn’t really done a lot with the camera. Nevertheless, with moves by its social networking peers, it’s time for Twitter to make moves. Could we see a version of Snapchat Discover within our timelines sometime soon?

Should Twitter venture down this route, one possible area which could see a benefit is Moments. Executing a camera-first program may allow users to quickly take photos and videos and share them on Twitter, instead of capturing it through their camera and applying it to a tweet that is then curated into a Moment. It could also give brands more incentive to create their own Moments and, like Snapchat, generate potentially more revenue for Twitter.

Similar to Snapchat, Twitter is all about the here-and-now. But Twitter is very much still a text-based platform and it wants to bring itself to be more visual. And when it comes to covering events, concerts, sports, and news, it’s a whole different game.

So while Snap continues to struggle financially and show it’s a viable company, it has indeed made some noted advancements in how we communicate, and also in the way tech companies view the potential of the camera lens on our mobile devices.

The post How A Dog-Eared Filter Got Tech To Think Camera-First appeared first on My Two Cents.

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