Google has long dominated the search space, putting the likes of Yahoo, Excite, Ask Jeeves, Cuil, and others largely out of business. Consequentially it also resulted in overwhelming superiority when it comes to advertising, although it’s being rivaled by Facebook. But in order for Google to maintain its advantage, it needs to look to other ways people are looking for information and that has led it to set its sights on the power of GIFs, specifically the image provider Tenor, which it acquired on Tuesday.

Financial terms were not disclosed, but with Tenor powering 12 billion monthly requests, it’s easy to see why Google expressed interest. But it’s less about the individual animated GIFs that Tenor provides but the so-called “emotional graph” that the startup wants to monopolize. Its chief executive David McIntosh once told me: “The challenge for sentiment is that people aren’t saying things publicly at all…unlike other platforms, [we] can tap into when people are thinking and feeling emotions.”

GIFs are everywhere — in Twitter, Facebook, Slack, and iMessage. It has become a language unto its own right from children to adults, and brands are becoming hip to using it in their outreach. Google acquiring Tenor gives it a massive network because Tenor is already one of the biggest GIF providers out there, with its hands in many popular social media and chat-based tools. The amount of data that Google can receive from this, especially around someone’s emotional state-of-mind, could further boost its search and even advertising opportunities.

Speaking of advertising, last year Tenor debuted an ad product and analytics tool which were geared towards brands looking to capitalize on the GIF craze. These weren’t really anything that would rival Google Analytics, but were meant to educate brands on how they could use GIFs. It was also an in-road for Tenor to really start monetizing itself and showing real promise, especially faced with stiff competition from Giphy.

As I reported at the time, Tenor offered brands a tool called Tenor Insight, which was essentially a keyword research tool. With it, marketing managers could look up what emotions people were expressing, like were they sharing a lot of GIFs showing surprise, love, anger, nailbitter, etc. and could sort by date, time, or specific event. Then, brands could interject a sponsored GIF in a bid to draw attention to whatever product they were selling.

When you see a happy dance GIF, it immediately tells you the sender’s state of mind — and perhaps what they’re interested in — whereas if you try to analyze their tweet, post, or message you may be limited to an overall positive or negative sentiment. And a keyword doesn’t necessarily reflect a person’s emotional state.

As McIntosh told me, “how do you capture 30 to 50 emotions a day expressed over mobile messaging?” The data that Tenor collects is probably something of interest to Google, especially across the several billion people worldwide that have a mobile device, and the countless others sharing GIFs across the internet.

Around the same time as the launch of Tenor Insights, the startup brought on board Jason Krebs as its chief business officer. Formerly head of sales at Maker Studios, which Disney acquired, Krebs was tasked with outreach to brands. He quipped that it was too soon to tell whether brands would jump “head over heels” to embrace this new paradigm of emotional advertising, but believed that brands have a lot of stories to tell and GIFs could be an opening for that.

The plethora of data that Google receives from this acquisition is enormous as Tenor is sitting on a treasure trove of emotion that people can express at any time. If I use a GIF from “Despicable Me” in a tweet or chat conversation, Google could pick that up and then display ads or prioritize search results in favor of Disney movies, or maybe other related results, like nearby showtimes for the latest animated movie or Disney store.

What Tenor could receive from Google’s involvement is all the resources from an advertising juggernaut, rapidly accelerating the company’s advertising capabilities and giving brands a scalable and programmatic way to leverage GIFs in their marketing campaigns.

It looks like to keep its extensive network, Google is permitting Tenor to remain a separate brand, not wanting to absorb it into the mothership.

The post Google Targets Emotions With Acquisition of GIF Platform Tenor appeared first on My Two Cents.

Last November, Marc Benioff proclaimed his company would generate $20 billion in revenue by 2022. The declaration by Salesforce’s chief executive came after successfully beating analyst expectations in the company’s Q4 earnings, where it revealed it had also passed a revenue milestone of $10 billion for the fiscal year. The growth was attributed to more global brands signing on for the Customer Relationship Management platform.

Targeting an additional $10 billion gain in revenue is no small feat, but for Salesforce, there’s plenty of opportunities for it to target, not only by sector but also those companies which prefer a multi-cloud strategy. And while we have come to expect Salesforce to launch a new product each year that’ll allow its customers to remain technologically advanced in the world of sales and marketing, perhaps the biggest initiative flying under the radar is an effort to modernize legacy systems to work with Salesforce’s massive platform, which is why MuleSoft was acquired for $6.5 billion.

“Together, Salesforce and MuleSoft will enable customers to connect all of the information throughout their enterprise across all public and private clouds and data sources—radically enhancing innovation,” Benioff remarked in a statement.

For 12 years, MuleSoft served as middleware, facilitating integrations between applications, data, and services. Among its many capabilities included an API hub, which contained more than 13,000 feeds and was likely viewed as an integral resource for developers to make enterprise systems work more closely with each other. MuleSoft also has the capability to connect systems that are in the cloud with on-premise ones, making it logical why Salesforce decided to make MuleSoft the centerpiece of its brand-new Integration Cloud.

No systems left behind

There’s no denying that Salesforce is advancing at a rapid pace, with each quarter generating more and more revenue. And every year at the company’s Dreamforce conference, it reveals the next round of innovation to improve how businesses can be more in lock-step with their customers, such as the launch of its Einstein AI solution, an offering around the Internet of Things, the release of a streamlined solution called Salesforce1, and more. This is great for existing customers or those that are “hip to the ways” of modern business, but for those stuck using legacy systems that just haven’t scaled as fast, it leaves them wanting.

MuleSoft is no stranger to Salesforce, having been one of its biggest partners for years. But now that it’s powering the Integration Cloud, Salesforce can help administrators and developers find ways to sync their data across their on-premise systems and tie it back with Salesforce capabilities, such as Marketing Cloud, Einstein, Analytics, and even integrate with thousands of third-party apps through the AppExchange.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Salesforce president Keith Block explained the acquisition decision:

As we were listening to CEOs, the whole notion of integration and data kept coming up over and over again. They are so frustrated that they can’t unlock data from their legacy systems. That is the strategic nature of why we are acquiring MuleSoft. We believe that it is a very important piece of the puzzle to satisfy the needs of our customers and a necessary piece to drive their transformation.

But after these companies are now up-to-speed with what Salesforce can do, what’s going to really jumpstart their innovation? It’ll likely reside within Salesforce’s AppExchange and Trailhead programs, each designed to encourage developers and customers to get better acquainted with the platform.

The first one’s free

No, integrating with Salesforce via MuleSoft isn’t going to be free. But what Salesforce likely hopes will happen is this: New company loops the data from its legacy system into Salesforce, realizes the capabilities, and wants to further weaponize the information. Because each company is different, it’s not possible to identify each specific need for them all, which is why there’s a marketplace for third-party developers to produce possible solutions.

For as long as MuleSoft has been around, Salesforce AppExchange has been the business world’s version of Apple’s iTunes. More than 3,000 apps are available for download and new Salesforce customers may find this appealing as if it’s a treasure trove of capabilities that they didn’t previously have access to — which likely they haven’t.

Even with Salesforce developing at full-steam, it hasn’t forgotten about the AppExchange. The company has invested in making the quality of the apps better and personalizing it so Salesforce customers are able to discover tools that they’ll find useful and those they may not know have existed. In the long-run, new businesses will likely be able to do more with their data, meaning more experiments and marketing services can be offered to their own customers.

And even if a company doesn’t want to use the full weight of Salesforce’s platform — maybe they already have a marketing solution — the ability to still extend their data from legacy platforms into third-party apps via AppExchange is available. So there’s great potential there and the more sources of data Salesforce opens up for developers, an ever-diverse set of applications will flourish.

The trailblazers will inherit the cloud

As Salesforce’s Senior Vice President of Developer Relations, Sarah Franklin has noticed a problem: With more than 3 million people building apps, there’s a disproportionate amount of solutions versus needs.”How do you educate developers at scale with a company that’s a fast innovator in all of the technologies coming out?” she told me in 2016.

This is why Salesforce created Trailhead three years ago, as an online course to increase the number of skilled workers who are adept at using and building around the platform. It’s no surprise that Salesforce has become an economic sector unto itself, but it could eventually lead developers and administrators who primarily work on legacy systems to better understand Salesforce and improve their integrations, thanks to the support by MuleSoft.

Being a so-called “trailblazer” is almost being an evangelist for Salesforce, but without being an employee. For most customers, what Salesforce offers with its suite of cloud products will be sufficient. But for others, being able to customize their experience may be critical. Better understanding the bones of Salesforce can help developers and administrators realize what they’re lacking in their own companies. So if that’s the case, are there APIs that are available either through Salesforce or MuleSoft that they can leverage to create a custom application, which in turn could help other businesses with a similar problem?

Benioff didn’t specifically say from where the $20 billion in revenue would come from, so it could be through app development, propelled by people’s better understanding of what Salesforce can do. This is the benefit Trailhead brings. It’s not just for beginners or those with intermediate exposure to the platform — it’s a continuing education service to those looking to find ways to tap into MuleSoft’s API to modernize their legacy systems, there will likely be courses on that, as well as how to use AppExchange apps to further weaponize data, or maybe specific use cases that will appeal to those in untapped markets will find interesting.

Over the next few years, it wouldn’t surprise me if Salesforce devoted more resources and development catered towards businesses with legacy systems and improving education to potential end users. This type of outreach could be important in Salesforce surpassing or failing to achieve its milestone.

The post Why Salesforce’s Quest For $20 Billion Rests With AppExchange and Trailhead appeared first on My Two Cents.

Facebook once had the mantra “Move Fast and Break Things” which encouraged the development of tools and services at breakneck speeds. While it was retired in 2014, for more than a decade, it was something that the technology company believed in and that philosophy has helped lead Facebook to the success it has had since going public in 2012.

But things aren’t exactly going swimmingly for the company right now as it’s embroiled in controversy around its privacy practice. Thanks to Cambridge Analytica, the spotlight has been cast on Facebook’s handling of data, something that has forced it to do some self-reflection, more so than ever before because this isn’t the first time the company has been caught up in a privacy scandal in the nearly 15 years of its existence. And before I go any further, I’d like to address a few things:

• Cambridge Analytica exploited Facebook’s system exactly how it was designed for;
• I don’t agree with what Cambridge Analytica did to allegedly manipulate the American electorate;
• Facebook is definitely not blameless in any of this as past precedent has shown — multiple parties are accountable;
• Facebook will remain relatively unscathed from this, in my opinion because of its dominance, but this incident appears to have legitimately shaken the company at its core.

I’ve often been bullish on Facebook’s progress, thinking that even amid a rough Initial Public Offering and other hiccups along the way, the company is still worth investment. And its continued financial dominance over multiple quarters has supported that belief. So it’s improbable (although not impossible) to think of a scenario that would humble this monster of an organization, one with more than 2 billion monthly active users and a practical stranglehold on how we communicate. But yet, it has happened and the one to bring cause some fear, uncertainty, and doubt on Facebook is…Facebook.

The innovation is my undoing

For years, Facebook has changed the landscape of social networking and communication. When it launched, it was just the next evolution of a chat site, taking the place of predecessors Friendster and MySpace (yes, the one with the capital “S”). But it soon pushed beyond its confines and opened itself up to third-party app developers and advertisers, vastly expanding its empire. Then it saw opportunities in chat with the launch of Messenger and the acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp, before tackling the world of augmented and virtual reality.

Facebook pursued the one thing companies treasure the most: Data. Company chief executive Mark Zuckerberg understood that personalization was going to be important to distinguish his company from everyone else and it worked because not only was the experience on Facebook better than its predecessors, but users seemed to appreciate being shown ads for products they were genuinely interested in or had a remote appeal to versus the same ad as everyone else.

Innovations and the company’s growth continued unabated, even with numerous lawsuits brought against it for privacy concerns. But now with the spotlight once again centered on Facebook, it seems a reset is necessary, not only for the company but also for its CEO. Since the Cambridge Analytica issue surfaced, it has taken numerous steps to repent for any offense it may have caused its users — and I mean specifically the consumers, not advertisers.

The company was once “open”, meaning that it allowed users to connect their profiles with third-party apps to improve the experience and, of course, gather more data about them. It was a blossoming ecosystem at one point and startups were created on top of this platform. But as the saying goes, what Facebook giveth, it taketh, and so it has, opting to react to the Cambridge Analytica outrage by rescinding some access across several major API feeds which likely has detrimental impact on startups that have put all of their proverbial eggs in one basket — Tinder is one example showcasing how much of its app, although not all of it, was impacted by Facebook’s decision.

"I feel deeply personally responsible because there are real mistakes that we made and that I made" — My interview with Facebook COO @sherylsandberg on what happened and what now https://t.co/LUHZ97EOeB pic.twitter.com/BAeYCe5EkC

— Emily Chang (@emilychangtv) April 5, 2018

In an interview with Bloomberg this week, company chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg accepted responsibility for Facebook’s shortcomings, echoing her boss. She explained that while efforts were taken to shut down Cambridge Analytica in 2015, Facebook took a myopic view instead of looking at the bigger picture at how the data it contained could be weaponized to negatively impact society. Sandberg blamed it on a lack of operational systems in place.

The bottom line: Facebook’s innovation efforts got the better of it and while we reacted to the latest product releases, acquisitions, and metrics, who was watching the incredible information that it had?

Worked as intended

Both Zuckerberg and Sandberg will be testifying before Congress next week and government officials are exploring the possibilities of regulating the company. Facebook’s CEO has indicated some agreement to that but not specifically what it could look like. But here’s the thing, as much as we’re concerned about our data being used to manipulate the American electorate, for the most part, Facebook’s advertising and developer platform seemed to worked as designed. It’s just that in the pursuit of innovation, the company didn’t map out all the possible outcomes of how the data collected would be used for.

To its credit, Facebook has for years made efforts to reinforce to users that it has privacy settings and tried to explain how people can restrict what others see on their profile. But even with that, it seems that people were still uncertain about what information third-party apps were collecting and using to their benefit (or detriment).

With a system working as intended, it’s not likely that Facebook will see significant drop-off of business, especially because of the duopoly it holds with Google — there’s really nowhere else to go with that type of data available to marketers. But brands should be looking at the next steps that Facebook takes as it begins to seal off access to data, because it could ultimately impact how their ads are targeted — ad services like Acxiom have already been kicked off, although that decision is being reevaluated. On the other hand, Facebook’s reset could impact other adtech companies offering alternatives, but that remains unclear if they’ll see a residual boost in business.

Bringing people together

In its haste to pursue its mission to bring people together and connect the next 5 billion people around the world, Facebook has slipped up when it comes to managing people’s expectation of privacy. Yes, many of us live in public, but what’s good for the goose isn’t really good for the gander. So now Facebook is going back to its roots and taking a firm hand at reevaluating what’s necessary and cleaning up its act.

Facebook has transformed itself into an integral part of our society, almost like an inceptionized internet, so its task at hand is not an envious one. It’s an undertaking that will last for years as it continues to adapt to new challenges around data privacy, portability, and how to improve marketing for brands. And before you suggest advocating for #DeleteFacebook, I recommend reading my friend Chris Saad’s post which offers some insights around data portability.

The next week will be worth watching as Facebook begins to reset itself and works with regulators and government officials to improve how it can be a boon to society, not a blight. After all, as the Voltaire saying goes, “with great power comes great responsibility.”

Now it’s up to Facebook and Zuckerberg to show that it’s up for the task.

Thanks to Greg Narain for inspiring this insight.

The post The Reset of Facebook appeared first on My Two Cents.

When Square started nine years ago, it was simply focused on helping businesses make transactions on the fly, thanks to its iconic mobile card reader. Since then, it has branched out to look at new technologies designed to make commerce easier for business owners and consumers, from creating an online marketplace to the production of its own point-of-sale hardware solutions, dedicated apps, and a platform that lets larger entities keep their existing workflows while having to transact the Square way. We’ve borne witness to its evolution from a simple solution provider to one where it offers a well-rounded selection of tools for any business owner.

In 2015, I examined the success of Square, concluding that a big contributor was its appeal to small businesses. Today, as the company pursues an up-market strategy, it has set its sights on beefing up an arsenal of tools to entice fledgling entrepreneurs, giving them more resources to be successful. On Thursday, Square acquired do-it-yourself website builder Weebly in a $365 million deal (for those interested, Weebly raised $35.7 million in venture funding. Now Square has an option to provide entrepreneurs for firmly establishing their own online presence and extending their reach by facilitating virtual sales.

“Square and Weebly share a passion for empowering and celebrating entrepreneurs,” Square chief executive Jack Dorsey said in a statement. And while this certainly lets his company provide tools across the entire spectrum, Weebly’s acquisition also opens up opportunities internationally. In its release, Square said that nearly 40 percent of Weebly’s paid subscribers are outside of the United States, which could expedite Square’s offering abroad — currently Square is available in Canada, Japan, the United Kingdom, and Australia (only its developer payment toolkit API).

Prior to the acquisition, Square did have a place for business owners to set up shop, in a manner of speaking. It launched Square Market in 2013, but that didn’t really fare too well. The company is painting a picture that it wants to grow with its customers, helping them from humble beginnings as a freelancer to establishing a brick-and-mortar store, before ultimately expanding to their second, third, fourth, and additional properties. The pick up of Weebly may certainly aid in that because businesses are looking for their own properties to manage, not have it reside on Facebook, Square, Amazon, or other marketplaces — they want a destination that they control and can customize based on what their customers want, not limited by the platforms itself.

Weebly has moved beyond its DIY website building space, as has its competitors Squarespace and Wix, both of which have since gone public. Besides the drag-and-drop approach to creating websites, these providers have branched into search engine optimization, marketing, and e-commerce. These are definitely things that can make life easier for business owners who just want to focus on customer relationships instead of deciphering important keywords, which sales platform to choose, and other obligations that’ll distract from their efforts to make a transaction.

Square and Weebly are definitely not strangers — it wasn’t as if Dorsey thought one day: “Hey, we need a website builder as part of our offering. Is Weebly any good? Let’s buy it.” In fact, Weebly has been a part of the Build with Square program since 2016. Perhaps the expectation is that just like the Square experience entrepreneurs seek out with their commerce set-up, they’ll want the same with their online marketing programs.

In its S-1 filing, Square declared, “Most of the sellers that use our services are small businesses, many of which are in the early stages of their development…” With Weebly’s acquisition, it’s looking to show that its experience can be extended to all facets business owners may be looking to solve. It happens to be the second purchase Square has made in this month — last week, it picked up Zesty to shore up its Caviar food delivery offering in a bid to go after the corporate dining space.

Perhaps best put, I’m reminded of a quote Altimeter Group analyst Brian Solis once said about Square’s potential. “The thing about Square is that its biggest advantage is that it could empower SMBs to become more of a digital business,” he explained. “Digital Darwinism knows no sides — it’s an equal opportunity disruptor. SMBs struggle with this and it’s devastating to the economy if they don’t adapt.”

Now Square hopes it can help its customers better adapt to the changing landscape of business and weather the onslaught from bigger competitors.

The post Square’s Weebly Acquisition Beefs Up Its Small Business Stack Offering appeared first on My Two Cents.

Companies are always searching for ways to improve productivity. It’s this need that helped propel Slack, Atlassian, and other providers within this “Future of Work” segment to success or notoriety. But one solution doesn’t fit all, especially when it comes to engineers. They are more data-driven and mathematical than others in the workforce, so providing evidentiary support is critical to improving productivity.

This is an area where GitPrime believes it can provide the best service. The startup on Wednesday announced it raised $10.5 million which will help it continue to provide engineers with quantifiable reports based off of their code base. The idea is that by identifying events through this data, teams will have greater visibility in terms of what’s going on, versus constantly wondering who’s working on a particular area or why a change was recently pushed live or deprecated.

“When you hire a team to build a house, you can walk on-site and see the house slowly being built. It’s obvious when people are working and their work-product is self-evident,” remarked Ben Thompson, GitPrime’s co-founder and Chief Customer Officer. “That’s not true when you’re building software. On the surface, programming ‘work’ is just people typing on computers. In fact, it’s very difficult to tell the difference between incremental progress and chaos at a glance.”

The latest infusion of capital is thanks to new lead investor OpenView and existing investor Data Collective. As is typical for startups hitting their Series A milestone, the funding is earmarked for expansion of the product and team. To date, GitPrime has raised a total of $13 million in venture capital.

In today’s business climate, practically every company has at least a developer on-staff, likely either in the engineering or IT departments.  The bigger the company, the more developers, and the larger the code base, which makes managing time and effort that much more critical. When you’re a startup, having teams communicate with one another is easy — you’re a small group. But if you look at corporations like Disney and Cigna, which are GitPrime customers, then having a solution that provides clear optics over everything a developer might touch is essential.

“As teams scale beyond the ‘garage band’ size of 8 to 10 [people], we tend to lose our intuitive feel for how each member of the team is doing,” Travis Kimmel, GitPrime’s chief executive and other co-founder told me in an email. “The bigger the team, the worse this problem as leadership gets spread thinner and thinner. With a team of 500, it’s nearly impossible to track team health without some sort of data benchmark.”

Sure, you could have teams hold conversations within Slack, Google Hangouts Chat, Atlassian’s Stride, Cisco Spark, Microsoft Teams, or any of the countless intranet or chat services. But none are borne out of code culture — they aren’t attuned to the ways of the developer and how these teams interact with one another. GitPrime pulls in key events from multiple sources, including the code base, ticketing systems, and other existing tools engineers use, to produce reports on how the organization is doing and what should be improved.

“As engineering leaders, our mission is to keep the team on track and help each engineer reach their potential, yet even seemingly simple questions like ‘Who should I help today?’ or ‘Did everyone make progress yesterday?’ are surprisingly difficult to answer,” Kimmel declared.

With the new funding, GitPrime said that it’s going to look to beef up its offering around the enterprise, a space where many of its customers are in. Kimmel declined to specify what specifically the company had planned, but hinted that artificial intelligence would play a role in GitPrime’s roadmap. “The recent advances are just too compelling to ignore,” he said. “As additional data sources beyond version control come into the mix, we’re seeing more opportunities for this kind of tech. In the immediate future, we’re really focused on the needs of Enterprise and will have some great features to share in the coming months.”

It’s feasible that additional integration support may be in the pipe for the company, looking at the various systems that companies are currently using and whether there’s an opportunity to tap into them. After all, with access to more data, the better-informed teams will be, right? “We’re laser-focused on using data to help with software engineering performance management,” Kimmel indicated. “It’s a vast and completely unexplored space  Data-driven Marketing & Sales platforms continue to mature, even though those concepts are at this point a decade or more old. We believe one day every engineering team will use data as a key part of their success, and getting there is our central goal.”

The post GitPrime Lands $10.5 Million Investment To Make Engineers More Productive appeared first on My Two Cents.

Facebook’s F8 developer conference is right around the corner (May 1-2) and while the past few years have been more celebratory and designed to further modernize the company’s ecosystem, the 2018 edition will likely be a bit subdued. Weighing on people’s mind is the latest controversy plaguing Facebook namely, how it uses our data. Whether or not you’re outraged personally by what the Cambridge Analytica scandal uncovered, won’t impact what Facebook says at F8 next week. But what the company has done consequentially will likely be at the forefront of the show and developers and brands alike will want to hear what future exists on Facebook’s platform.

For chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, who along with his team, has been on an apology tour as of late, the message to developers will likely be to hear him out and let him explain the path forward because there are still opportunities for everyone.

The past couple of months have not been kind to the social media company, thanks to whistleblower Christopher Wylie. Facebook has largely been on its heels defending itself from criticism levied by not only both houses of the U.S. Congress but also the U.K. Parliament, and the European Union. In response to public outrage, the company has rolled back API access on not only Facebook but also Instagram impacting numerous businesses that had relied on Facebook’s data to have a better user experience.

Just with a snap of its fingers, Facebook has begun to wall off parts of its once-famous open platform, a resource that gave developers access to some of the most personal (non-financial) stuff it knows about you. Undoubtedly, the company’s activities over the past few weeks may give developers pause and maybe eerily reminiscent of Twitter’s developer struggles, dating back to 2010 when it held its Chirp conference. Twitter tried to make amends several years ago but seems to keep stumbling. It’s unclear whether Facebook, which has a much larger platform, will be impacted as severely.

This is why Zuckerberg’s keynote on Tuesday will be important for developers and brands. It’s the first time that we’ll hear a targeted message designed to persuade businesses, advertisers, and brands that amid the Cambridge Analytica controversy, Facebook has planned a way forward and is sharing how restricting data can be a good thing for everyone. For Zuckerberg, it allows him to speak directly to his customers without having to do it in a setting outside Facebook’s control — previously it’s been before the media or the government. Now it’s at his own event.

In 2016, Zuckerberg revealed Facebook’s 10-year roadmap while at other F8’s, he introduced the world to extensions of his vision of the social network, including new chatbot-based Messenger platform and one around augmented reality. The world has also been shown developments around VR, artificial intelligence, photo and video technology, and even frontier technology such as providing internet through drones. But all of that excitement and fanfare may not be as notable this year as the company seeks to set the record straight and take corrective action over what Zuckerberg’s testimony and Facebook’s actions will mean to the broader community.

Facebook is going to F8 with some momentum, thanks to a great first quarter of earnings. But much of that performance is attributed to events prior to Cambridge Analytica and we could see some developments in three months. Nevertheless, the company isn’t being abandoned by advertisers nor is it seeing a significant number of accounts being deleted, which gives it some room to breathe before addressing the masses about where it goes next.

Expect Zuckerberg to apologize once again and echo similar statements he’s given to media and Congress, but then look at what concrete actions Facebook will take to make, especially since it constantly touts that it cares more about the users than anything else, including advertisers. After all that is out of the way, expect Facebook to proceed with announcements around new features and products, including around Messenger, ads, Workplace, the latest evolution of its AR platform, and Oculus.

By the end of this two-day conference, Facebook will likely hope to get the majority of developers on its side and show them that while it made several API changes suddenly, it’s not a bad thing. While previous F8s have been about showing what Facebook is looking to next a la “the big picture”, it probably shouldn’t surprise anyone that this year will be about fixing all the mess that the company forgot about as it pushed forward.

The post Facebook’s Likely Message to Developers at F8: Hear Us Out appeared first on My Two Cents.

Nearly two months ago, Ryan Block launched a Slack bot called Begin with a goal of improving our workplace productivity. But on Thursday, his company announced a major change: The bot is being shuttered in favor of pivoting to become a “continuous delivery platform.” For some, the termination of Begin’s current incarnation might be stunning, but in an email to users, Block indicated that his team’s vision of “building a Slack-first team tasking tool” wasn’t a “viable one.”

There’s no timeline on when Begin’s next evolution will be publicly available, but for those that used its Slack bot, you have until May 9 to download whatever tasks you created before it, along with the associated web and Mac apps are no more. The company has created a way to easily download the data.

When Begin launched in March, the idea was to bring order to the chaos that exists within Slack. Practically everyone deals with information overload, from too much chatter/watercooler gossip, meeting notes, deadlines, action items, and other work-related stuff, that it can be hard to really get anything done. Block’s team had an idea of using natural language to identify things that you needed to get done from conversations. It was to be a task management app within one of the most popular communication tools in the marketplace today, competing in a crowded space with the likes of Wunderlist/To-Do List, Asana, Todolist, and others.

Block didn’t state what specifically wasn’t viable for Begin’s task management bot to succeed, but what the company works on doesn’t seem to be a stretch for it. It’s building off of work the team has done in collaboration with the JavaScript Foundation. Begin wants to be a player in the serverless stack, meaning it’ll provide tools that developers can use on top of cloud providers like Amazon Web Services to power their large-scale applications. Block said that his company will let developers “create, provision, orchestrate, and manage instantly deployable, nearly infinitely scalable web applications of just about any kind — all in seconds.”

Technology today is all about serverless computing and notable providers are participants, including Amazon, Google, IBM, and Microsoft. While cloud computing has helped to scale applications so they no longer have to be on-premise and reduce the cost of overhead, serverless technology is evolving it once again — now it’ll be even quicker to get the tools, features, and service developers need and how they need it.

And it’s a growing market too with companies like Netflix, Aol, Airbnb, Expedia, Adobe, Nordstrom, and others using it. Here’s the state of the space according to YL Ventures:

While Begin’s Slack-bot had some potential, its pursuit of this new frontier may be more rewarding because of the incredible payoff if it’s able to execute efficiently and effectively. There are a lot of players in this space so could it see significant investment if it becomes the Parse of the serverless computing space?

It will be worth watching to see what areas of the serverless stack Begin tackles first. Right now it’s accepting applications to participate in its beta program and plans to let people test the first product out “in a few weeks.”

The post Begin Shuttering Slack-Based Task Management Tool To Pursue The Serverless Stack appeared first on My Two Cents.

Square announced the results (PDF) of its first-quarter 2018 earnings, and for the most part, it was pretty routine. But one thing that did stand out was the revenue that was generated from Bitcoin: $34 million. This was the first time the company revealed the figure, given the fact that it only started letting its customers trade in cryptocurrency through its Cash app starting in January.

Cryptocurrency has become increasingly ever-present in today’s society and more tech companies are exploring the usage within their respective stacks. With Square, it’s taking an omnichannel approach, one that enables sellers to engage with buyers wherever they are. And being a seller doesn’t specifically mean being a merchant with a brick and mortar location. This is likely why Square decided to move into Bitcoin territory and see whether its peer-to-peer payment app can easily facilitate crypto-commerce, and it looks to be off to a decent start right now.

Here’s how Square’s Bitcoin excursion played out for the first three months of 2018:

• Revenue: $34.1 million
• Cost: $33.9 million
• Adjusted revenue: $0.2 million

While notable, this is only a small fraction of Square’s total revenue, which was $669 million for the quarter (up 45 percent year-over-year). The bulk of its revenue continued to come from non-cryptocurrency transactions, subscriptions, and hardware, respectively.

The fact that Square didn’t immediately take a loss with respect to Bitcoin is probably a relief. Analysts had opined that the company’s push into cryptocurrency was “nonsense”, but chief executive Jack Dorsey seems to have strong opinions about Bitcoin’s role in our economy, declaring last year that it could be the world’s sole currency in a decade.

It’s unclear whether analysts had expectations around Square’s Bitcoin results, but if you went off of Citron’s note on Tuesday, it seems that Wall Street probably wants the company to be more targeted in its approach instead of stretching itself too thin. Shareholders punished the company for its results, with its stock tanking nearly 6 percent in after-hours trading.

Square wants to dominate the commerce space — anywhere that a transaction is taking place, the company wants to be a player and bring its experience to bear. But investors are probably skeptical, which is understandable because this is the first time they’ve seen the results through a public filing. Square has done well with its card reader, hardware, and push up-market — the group of merchants with more than $500,000 in annualized gross payment volume now stands at 20 percent from 16 percent last year. And its capital infusion program is also seeing success, but when it comes to cryptocurrency, investors wanted more, and fast.

Pay attention to the company’s quarterly earnings for the rest of the year as that’ll be a good indication of whether Square has a chance with Bitcoin or should cut its losses. But among peer-to-peer payment apps, Square Cash is up against a tough market, one where its biggest competitor is Venmo, which is owned by payment goliath PayPal. But again, there is an opportunity to reap rewards out of extending the Cash app.

Square has never really broken out revenue from the Cash app, so speculating, it’s possible that the company wants to open up another avenue for its to make more…ahem…money from people using it. So the more diverse types of transactions that are made, the greater the usage, and ultimately the more fees that Square will reap from it, leading to more revenue, and happier shareholders.

The post Square’s Bitcoin Efforts Generate $34 Million in Revenue, But Doubt Remains appeared first on My Two Cents.

It’s a typical tactic that politicians utilize when they want support for a proposal they’re pitching — hold a rally in a part of their constituency where they have strong backing from their base. But this isn’t always limited to those in elected office. Even though he says he hasn’t set his sights on the Oval Office, Mark Zuckerberg is no stranger at employing these same tactics. His keynote address at Facebook’s F8 developer conference this week was all the evidence you needed.

Dealing with one of the worst crises that his company has ever faced, Zuckerberg seemed most comfortable on stage Tuesday when he addressed a room filled with developers — the people who he could most relate with. Zuckerberg quickly acknowledged the elephant in the room, that Facebook’s recent restrictions in access to API feeds in favor of what the company claimed was to better protect users, had caused disconcerting feelings among third-party developers. His address, which quite often sounded like a stump speech you’d expect former President Barack Obama to deliver, seemed to brush aside those concerns and instead sought to rally developers into the future, saying:

We’re here to build things to bring people together and to put people in our relationships at the center of our experience with technology where they belong. Because for all the challenges that we face today, the vast majority of what happens on these services are people getting closer to the people they care about… and we can help people do this…the best part of what you do isn’t on Facebook, it’s the relationships you build and what you can go do together. That is what this is all about.

If you believe, like I do, giving poeple a voice is important, that building relationships is important, that creating a sense of community is important, and doing the hard work of trying to bring the world closer together is important, then I say this…we will keep building.

The last four words are telling: “We will keep building.” For months, Zuckerberg and his team have been responding to inquiries from not only from Congress but also the U.K. Parliament, and this is the first opportunity that Facebook has had to get its message out unedited or filtered by media or outside parties. Zuckerberg’s presentation was strong, one where he put on a facade that showed “we’re upset this happened and we’re taking steps to prevent this from happening” before jumping right into the main event: the announcements.

It was predicted that this year’s F8 conference would be more subdued following the Cambridge Analytica revelations and the keynote seemed to indicate that, but there were hints that it was also business as usual. If you took anything away from the conference, it’s that Facebook is working to shore up its defenses and make itself better, but nothing will stop it from moving forward to further encapsulate our lives.

In short, the good of Facebook outweighs the bad.

And amid concern over data privacy and how much information Facebook has over users, Zuckerberg’s first announcement was news that the social network would soon deploy a dating feature. Naturally, the company’s CEO quipped that it was built with privacy in mind, but the fact that its introduction so close to Cambridge Analytica could cause people to worry. What’s more, if you look at all the news that came from F8, it was all around how Facebook was using our data to improve the experience. It’s business as usual for the company and it’s not going to let a data privacy scandal compromise the way it operates.

Zuckerberg’s keynote struck the right tone for the audience, although it’s possible that not everyone was convinced. He needed to convince the people in the room that Facebook was taking everyone’s concerns seriously, from how to protect users and keep the platform open, and he did that. His Obama-esque speech was meant to serve as a rallying cry to Zuckerberg’s base that Facebook will take care of them.

And so Facebook may have smoothed over things for now, at least until the next scandal hits. But for now, it’s back to building.

The post Mark Zuckerberg Turns to Base, Pitches Continued Building as Way Forward appeared first on My Two Cents.

For some, it’s considered to be the punch line to a joke, or just a vanity metric. For others, it’s a badge of honor — the dispensation of the “+K” that for years, bolstered their designation as being what has become an overplayed term: influencer. With such a polarizing service, it’s not surprising that the recent announcement of Klout’s shuttering has resulted in multiple opinions. Truth be told, whether you loved it or hated it, there’s a high likelihood that you used it, or perhaps were impacted by the numeric representation of influence.

And perhaps The New York Times put it succinctly in an opinion piece: we’re living in Klout’s world. As a practice, discovering influencers is nothing new to the world — politicians are using it when on the campaign trail, using surrogates to speak to the media and public about specific talking points. Businesses have also been doing it for many years, but until a decade ago, entrepreneurs Joe Fernandez and Binh Tran found a way to capitalize on the data and conversations we put into our social media accounts to ascertain which is the most…influential.

I don’t have a disagreement with finding out influencers, but as I’ve written previously, looking at a single numeric score doesn’t really determine just how and in which areas someone can sway other people’s decisions. Many were up in arms over the metric, whether someone that had a score of 82 was really more influential than someone else with a 65. Perhaps it’s this issue — the public aspect of Klout — that made the company so polarizing to the masses.

Klout played a big part in how influence was measured, resulting in brands stepping over each other trying to find the right personality to go after, and even having people find ways to game the system. As the service goes away later this month, its impact has resulted in companies looking at quantifiable ways to amass an army of evangelists without necessarily doing all the manual legwork of parsing through one’s account. A score was all that seemed to be needed, but a lot more work definitely needed to be done.

The company did try to make it more impactful, establishing the +K metric that would allow people to really understand what areas did others legitimately see them as influencers. Below is an interview I conducted with Megan Berry, then-Klout’s marketing manager, on what this really meant for the social media world. But in hindsight, what the company might want to have focused on is the analysis of social media data and providing that directly to brands through third-party software integrations, such as Hootsuite, Salesforce, Zendesk, and other enterprise tools focused around customer service. In short, it should have put less emphasis on the consumer pitch and just offered it to businesses.

Of course, we all know what they say about hindsight. But look at the statement Lithium issued around Klout’s shuttering, particularly this paragraph which is telling (emphasis mine):

Lithium is committed to providing you with the technology and services that will enable you to differentiate your customer experience. Our recent launch of Lithium Messaging is evidence of our focus on this mission. The Klout acquisition provided Lithium with valuable artificial intelligence (AI) and machinelearning capabilities but Klout as a standalone service is not aligned with our long-term strategy.

Lithium acquired Klout four years ago with a reported $200 million price tag. And a lot has changed since then. Tech trends have changed where now artificial intelligence and machine learning are even more highly regarded in the industry, so anything that amasses a lot of data can be viewed favorably. Klout’s ability to siphon data from the biggest social networks allows anyone to really understand the individual, their conversations, and how they could possibly be used to evangelize goods and services, or who might be someone customer service should watch out for in case things go bad. It’s possible that following the acquisition, Lithium sought to better utilize this treasure trove of data to help brands improve relations with their communities.

In the decade since Klout’s arrival, and soon-to-be departure, others have come on the scene to try and measure influence, such as PeerIndex, Kred, and Empire Avenue, but none have really stuck. But that hasn’t stopped others from trying. In fact, Facebook is reportedly working on a search engine that could connect marketers with “creators”.

Some personalities have found ways to really capitalize on this concept, such as Jake and Logan Paul and the Kardashians. There are others that, once they’ve received such notoriety, they wind up squandering it because of bad decisions. It’s this vanity metric that we, as consumers, get caught up on that has played perhaps a big part of the rise of these internet celebrities and influencers. We’re now stuck in a new world, one complete with a vast internet where determining one’s true influence can be easier said than done — everyone is a “creator” on a platform, be it Twitter via Periscope; Facebook, Instagram, and Facebook Live; YouTube; Snapchat; Musical.ly; Google+; Pinterest; EyeEm; Flickr; LinkedIn; blogs; and more.

Klout was definitely polarizing, but its place in influencing influencers and how brands view them is certainly something that’ll remain for a long while.

The post Klout’s Role in the Weaponization of Influence appeared first on My Two Cents.

A fad these days is for corporations to launch startup accelerators, a program designed to help legacy incumbents innovate. We’ve seen these initiatives sprout up time-and-time again, like with Orange, Samsung, and Qualcomm. And in Silicon Valley, independent ones like 500 Startups and Y Combinator are viewed as a badge of honor among entrepreneurs.

In many cases, it makes sense to start an accelerator when you can truly have something of value to offer startups, be it expertise in telecommunications or access to the European market, influence in processors or smart devices, robotics, and more. So it might not surprise you that on Wednesday, Snap launched its own accelerator named Yellow. The goal is to guide mobile media startups and help them grow, which is a commendable idea. But one must wonder, in the case of Snap, which party is truly the beneficiary?

The details

According to Yellow’s website, it’s putting an investment of $150,000 into startups, storytellers, and creators that will “push the artistic boundaries of what’s possible with mobile content.” Up to 10 startups will be selected in each batch and it doesn’t seem to matter what you’re working on, be it an “interactive story, a show, an AR experience, building the next big media company” or anything else.

Naturally, Snap has outlined a few areas where its interests lie, specifically in work around AR, interactive, and narrative storytelling.

Yellow is offering participants commercial support and partnership, mentorship from industry experts, networking opportunities, and of course, office space (based in Venice, Calif.). All of this is in exchange for an undisclosed amount of equity.

Upon the conclusion of this three-month program, there will be a demo day.

By comparison, 500 Startups is providing an investment of $150,000 for “around 6 percent” equity in the form of a convertible security, which grants 500 Startups the right to make a follow-on investment of an additional $500,000 or 20 percent of the next round. One of the more well-known accelerators is Y Combinator and it invests $120,000 into each company for 7 percent equity.

The balance of benefits

It’s understandable that both parties will likely benefit from the accelerator: Snap will better understand what others are doing in the space and find ways to improve itself; while startups get tutelage and can quickly connect with Snapchat’s demographic and also other media partners. But the reality is that Snap may benefit the most, maybe finding a solution to a problem that has plagued it for a while: Coming up with ways to retain users and stand out from a crowded social media market.

To say things could be better for Snap is an understatement. The company is losing money — $385.7 million in Q1 2018, up from $350 million in the previous quarter — and experiencing a sluggish growth rate of 2.13 percent to top off at 191 million daily active users. It’s also losing executives, including its chief financial officer and vice president of monetization. And the recently rolled out redesign that everyone hated, but chief executive Evan Spiegel declared was here to stay, has not met expectations.

For added color, it looks like Snap’s redesign was done without any input from the company’s designers — CEO’s prerogative, it seems.

So it’s not out of the realm of belief to think that what Snap is doing is looking for outside the box thinking on ways in which it can turn itself around. If it can’t find solutions from within itself, then it might as well turn to its ecosystem for ideas, those that are doing tangential products that could have a good fit as potentially part of Snap, or at least spark some creative ideas.

I’m not suggesting that Yellow is meant to drive Snap’s roadmap and cause a pivot, but there’s a good chance that the 10 startups chosen will play some part in influencing Snap’s long-term marketing strategy and hopefully setting itself on the path towards profitability.

Since its release of the first Spectacles, Snap has positioned itself as a camera company, and Yellow might be a way for it to double down on that mission and tap into its platform and really showcase what it’s about. many critics are caught up in its financial and usage losses, but what if Yellow is the catalyst that ignites Snap’s real potential that we didn’t see before?

Entrepreneurs, storytellers, and creators that participate in Yellow will likely be eager to do so for several reasons:

1. They’re working on some new-age storytelling product and see Snap as the leader in the space.
2. They’re determined to get connected with any one of Snap’s media partners, be it BuzzFeed, CNN, ESPN, Esquire, Complex, MTV, and others.
3. They are targeting the same demographic as Snap and want to learn how to optimize their efforts.

As I wrote about previously, Snap is one of the first tech companies to mainstream this camera-first modus operandi so startups may want to take advantage of this chance to learn from an early pioneer in the field and also change the way storytelling happens in this new digital age. These creators may also look at the media landscape and not see available support or resources from other entities like Google, Twitter, and Facebook/Instagram around their field of storytelling, which is probably an advantage for Snap.

Hopefully Snap will be able to provide the right advice, tools, and resources to these startups in order to improve its ecosystem and ultimately its product offering. If it wants to guide the direction of how people tell stories and share information in the future, it’s going to have to get this right. Snapchat depends on it.

The post Snap Has a Startup Accelerator, but Who Really Benefits? appeared first on My Two Cents.

Data for you, not third-party platforms

Don't discount the power of live chat

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The voice-powered internet age

What AI assistant?

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I have a compulsion where I’d like to be one of the first to share the news with others, either as a writer or a curator. It’s what drew me to first blog here, for Bub.blicio.us (thanks to Brian Solis), then professionally for The Next Web and VentureBeat, along with joining social media and using apps like Pocket and Flipboard. While I’ve spent time writing about the news, I’m going to try my hand at something slightly different — taking an editorial approach and curating the news while helping readers find the signal from the noise.

Starting next week, I’m joining Flipboard full-time as a technology editor. I had been working for Flipboard in a similar capacity since earlier this year, but after collaborating with the team, we decided that things were too perfect and opted to make it a more permanent thing.

From user/observer to builder

What makes Flipboard special for me is that I’ve been a long-time user of the platform. For those unfamiliar, it enables you to generate your own digital magazine based off of what you’re interested in, no matter how niche of a topic it is. You can go as broad as “technology” or granular as “artificial intelligence”, “cryptocurrency”, or “venture capital”. Think of it as creating a customized magazine rack you’d find at a newsstand on the street or in an airport kiosk.

You could use Flipboard as a means to aggregate articles you’d want to read later, but I use it as a way to curate news that I think others would want to pay attention to. It started with my main magazine FYI which features all the important technology-focused news you may have missed throughout the day (e.g. funding, acquisitions, app updates, and breaking news). Magazines I've created focus on world events, U.S. news, business, media issues, blockchain, and long-form feature stories you’d typically read on Sunday mornings over coffee.

Sure, I can share stories to Facebook, Twitter, and other social apps, but with the way I’m consuming news, I risk alienating people with things they may not care about. That’s why I turned to Flipboard as the mechanism for sharing everything I’m passionate about. What I enjoy about Flipboard is that it’s a functional bucket for everything I’m reading and think people should like and that it “gets” me — serving up articles it thinks I’m interested in.

But I’m more than just an active user — I’ve spent time covering Flipboard as a reporter, interviewing executives there including CEO Mike McCue, building a rapport that has allowed me a closer look at what the company’s doing. All of this has influenced my decision to become an employee, hopefully allowing me to contribute in some way to the product and help make it even better.

In an era where it’s easy to call something “fake news,” I view my mission at Flipboard at highlighting meaningful articles that convey the truth about what’s going on in the industry. If you’d like to know more about how the company views quality journalism, I recommend reading my interview with Mike McCue:

We want it to be the go-to place for what you’re passionate about and show multiple perspectives from people that are just as passionate, if not more. We want people to get a full roundup of perspectives and then, if they want to see more, click-through.

What will I be doing?

Although Flipboard uses algorithms to show you articles you might be interested in, the company does have human curators to spotlight really important news. As an editor, my job is to do just that but specifically around technology, a subject I’m really obsessed with.

Throughout the day, I’ll be curating important news around technology into a selection of magazines created by the company:

1. Top Stories in Tech: Think of this as Techmeme, but instead of listing all the articles around a particular topic, we surface the one that’ll give you the most details around the news.
2. Follow the Money: A collection of articles around funding, acquisitions, hirings/firings/layoffs, and more.
3. Tech Podcasts: The latest episodes of your favorite tech-related podcasts, such as Recode Decode, Wired’s Gadget Lab, This Week in Startups, shows from the This Week in Tech network, Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, CNET, GeekWire, The Wall Street Journal, and many others.
4. Reviews: Want to know what critics are saying about the latest gadget or software? This is where we curate detailed reviews on phones, headphones, laptops, games, smart devices, and apps.
5. Longreads: Looking for more detailed reporting or the latest expose in tech? This is the magazine for you.
6. Breakthroughs: This magazine highlights frontier and moonshot technology news. Whether it’s rocket launches, advanced computing, biotechnology, or anything else — this is where you’ll find news about it.
7. Strategy: As the name implies, this is non-news, but offers strategic perspectives for entrepreneurs and aficionados looking to step up their game.
8. Opinions: This magazine curates opinions from influencers, thought leaders, and journalists, offering a perspective on the day’s news.

Beyond the aforementioned magazines, I’ll also be curating news around special events too, such as Google I/O, WWDC, Mobile World Congress, and more.

My hope is that I’ll also be able to work more closely with publishers to help produce quality magazines and build better relationships. If you’re an editor, social engagement manager, or writer interested in leveraging Flipboard, please reach out as I’d love to chat more about how we can work together. Whether it’s for a major conference (e.g. Code Conference or TechCrunch Disrupt), event (e.g. CES or SXSW), or you simply want to assemble one for special reports, then let’s talk.

If you’ve written a great exclusive, feature, podcast, or story you think should be flipped into a tech magazine, feel free to send it my way (assuming I haven’t seen it) and I’d be happy to take a look.

Non-journalists in tech: I would like to also hear from you about things you’d like to do on Flipboard and if you’re actively using the app, it would be great to know that too and get you more involved!

Basically, please keep me up-to-date on all things tech because I want to know about it. :)

Will you still be writing?

I will not be writing for Flipboard — the company does not do original content, so please don’t pitch me to cover your news. If you do, please note that it’ll be for my own blog as a private citizen. I may flip the resulting article in my own Flipboard magazine, but that’s the extent of my involvement.

That’s it for me! Happy flipping!

The post Joining Team Flipboard appeared first on My Two Cents.

Whenever I'm motivated to take on a massive undertaking, be it a new adventure, traveling to another country, or anything work-related, I try not to take a half-ass approach to it, and this means educating myself on all possible avenues, obstacles, and angles. Whether talking to experts or extensively researching items online, I continue to dig through all the data I can find before determining that I've answered all my questions. This is a logical step that I'd imagine most, if not all, entrepreneurs will do as they start their businesses, but it seems that most of the information is largely distributed across sites and individuals.

A signature feature in newspapers is the advice column, with one of the most well-known titled "Dear Abby". Each week, readers would have their pressing questions answered about life, be it about romance, family matters, work, society, relationships, finances, and more. In the business world, nothing like that really exists, especially coming from an expert. Don't get me wrong: there are a lot of credible people in the industry, but when it comes to understanding entrepreneurs and CEOs, some helpful filtering of answers is needed.

Advice column for entrepreneurs

That's where a new book titled "Dear Founder" plays a critical role in helping entrepreneurs build out their business. It doesn't matter whether you're in technology or not, this 352-page book provides sage and practical advice readers need to become leaders. And it's not filled with pithy philosophical quips, but actionable advice and covers subjects you wouldn't get from an entry-level book on entrepreneurship.

"Dear Founder: Letters of advice for anyone who leads, manages, or wants to start a business" is co-written by Maynard Webb, an individual with a storied history in Silicon Valley. He was the former president and chief operating officer at eBay before taking over the helm of LiveOps as CEO before becoming its chairman. Besides authoring books, Webb is the co-founder of workplace mentoring startup Everwise and the founder of Webb Investment Network, not to mention that he sits on the boards of Salesforce, Visa, and Yahoo.

Joining Webb is Carlye Adler who is an accomplished journalist and author, having contributed to books by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Andreessen Horowitz partner Ben Horowitz, Zendesk CEO Mikkel Svane, and also Webb's previous book "Rebooting Work."

While organized in a way that guides you through the process of building out your business, following that linear path is not scripture. Each chapter is framed as a letter Webb or a guest author pens in response to an inquiry he's received. As such, you should feel free to jump directly to the chapter of your choice and not risk missing out on the knowledge that might be buried in previous chapters, like other books. The structure reminds me "Ask GaryVee" in which Gary Vaynerchuk similarly responds to frequently asked questions about entrepreneurship.

40-years of entrepreneurial advice

Unlike Vaynerchuk's book, "Dear Founder" addresses the CEO and founder directly -- the person who has made a conscious decision to launch a business and wants to grow to become the next Mark Zuckerberg or Marissa Mayer. While some entrepreneurship books often scratch the surface, Webb provides anecdotes from his time in the trenches, offering advice on things founders will likely have to deal with either in the beginning or over time. Let's take a look at some of the topics covered:

• How to resolve co-founder disputes; when you need to recruit; hiring a rock star; setting your culture; dealing with diversity and inclusion; and onboarding executives.
• What to do when no one will invest versus when everyone wants to; how to figure out your valuation; dealing with budgets and compensation; and what about philanthropy?
• How to delegate as managers, dispensing responsibility, and establishing goals.
• What should you do when your first hire leaves? How do you fire someone? What if no one is excited to work there? 
• Overcoming personal challenges of leadership.
• How should you handle new competitors, the press, and what if your idea isn't working?
• Improving the company operationally to deal with scale; running an effective board meeting; and avoiding nasty surprises.
• Quarterly goals.
• How do you build a company that lasts for the next 100 years.

Although primarily geared towards those in business, it doesn't matter whether you're a cook, janitor, architect, designer, developer, marketer, or a stay-at-home person. If you're interested in becoming a leader or perhaps run your own business at some point, then "Dear Founder" is a good starting point to be aware of what you're up against. Think of these letters as something that a father would pass down to their child, imparting wisdom so that they may see the same success as their parents have before them.

Webb's perspective on entrepreneurship was refreshing as his vantage included both working for established Fortune 500 companies and also founding his own startup. Previous books I've reviewed offer a one-sided affair, that from the perspective of the founder. That's not to say it's bad, but the examples that Webb provides can further inform readers who have a desire to launch their own business. "Dear Founder" is a blend of Webb's 40-year work history, time as a board member, the trials he endured while at Yahoo, and as an investor managing a portfolio of companies. It's certain that he has amassed quite a bit of intelligence to share on the subject matter. 

"Dear Founder" is now available for sale on Amazon and at your nearby bookstore. 

The post ‘Dear Founder’ Is the Business World’s ‘Dear Abby’ That Entrepreneurs Should Read appeared first on My Two Cents.

Not a single solution app

The first involves leveraging Quip’s Lightning component, meaning that any linking, accessing, and editing of documents, spreadsheets, and task lists can be made directly within Salesforce records... With the second feature, Quip now supports live data within documents and spreadsheets. Traditionally, users would have to copy and paste data, but now variables can be added to files that will dynamically pull in the corresponding data, so if anything changes within Salesforce, it’ll automatically be reflected within the document.

Your moment of zen

The new Office of our time?

The post Salesforce’s $750 Million Bet to Reimagine Productivity in the Modern Workforce appeared first on My Two Cents.

In the Aaron Sorkin-created show "The West Wing", there's an episode in which fictional President Jed Bartlet (played by Martin Sheen) argues with his Chief-of-Staff Leo McGarry (the late-John Spencer) about stances on political issues -- the latter wished Bartlet would be more aggressive about his positions. Ultimately they reach the conclusion that it's time to stop feeling powerless and change up their strategy, letting Bartlet...be Bartlet.

While "The West Wing" bears little resemblance to Facebook, except for correlation to Sorkin's movie "The Social Network", what the company revealed from its recent quarterly earnings indicates that it's done apologizing for past mistakes and wants to get back to business, connecting the next five billion people. After a tumultuous 2018, Facebook has signaled that it's emerged relatively unscathed and has laid out a path to move forward.

If you looked at the tech industry last year, most of the news was about Facebook, starting with Cambridge Analytica to numerous other privacy scandals, its contributions to the spread of misinformation ahead of elections, and the testimony of both its chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg -- all of which I documented in a special Flipboard magazine. Needless to say, the events of 2018 likely derailed Facebook's roadmap for a bit, causing it to instead to retreat and issue numerous apologies and clarifications.

Amid the privacy controversy, a #DeleteFacebook movement picked up steam, made up of people who were fed up from what they believed was inadequate protection of their information by the social networking company. Each scandal took a toll on Facebook's stock price, which fell approximately 23 percent (January 2017-January 2018) and some thought it could impact the company's earnings. In fact, for three of the four quarters of 2018, Facebook posted mixed results (Q1, Q2, Q3, and Q4). Would this be the chain of events that might bring the company to its knees? What would be needed to stop this juggernaut of a company?

At least the numbers were positive

Turns out, the answer is no. Facebook's latest earnings showed that with all the talk of users fleeing and investors shaken by repeated scandals, the company is still doing pretty well, beating expectations on not only its financials but user metrics. As The Verge noted:

There were more than 1.52 billion people using Facebook every day in December 2018, a 9 percent increase year over year. Monthly active users were also up 9 percent year over year, with 2.32 billion as of December 31st.

No more apologies

As it begins a new fiscal year, Facebook thinks enough is enough, at least in terms of being put on the defensive. It was to go on the offensive and get its message back on track, but ever cognizant that another scandal is right around the corner and it also still has to deal with potential inquiries from states and the federal government. In his traditional after-earnings Facebook post, Zuckerberg acknowledges that his team will forever need to be vigilant, but says that Facebook has been transformed, that "we’ve fundamentally changed how we run this company. We’ve changed how we build services to focus more on preventing harm."

Twelve months won't fix what ails Facebook -- Zuckerberg said it could take three years -- but the company isn't going to stall its development any further. It has been battered and vilified by the press and public over perceived indifference over user privacy but after successful Q4 earnings, Zuckerberg, Sandberg, and other executives struck a more optimistic tone, perhaps indicating the company was in a better position to deal with breaches, misinformation campaigns, and election interference. In fact, this week, Facebook announced that it terminated more than 800 pages, groups, and accounts with ties to Iran for "inauthentic behavior".

Bloomberg columnist Shira Ovide perhaps put it best in her article "Facebook is done apologizing":

Facebook can’t go back to the carefree days of 2015 when revenue growth came easily and the company and the public were largely ignoring the company’s vulnerabilities to propaganda, social harm and privacy abuses. Facebook did, however, recapture some of the optimism of a time when it and the rest of the world were more upbeat — or naive — about the opportunities for Facebook and tech companies at large.

Recode had a similar perspective, reporting that during Facebook's earnings call, Zuckerberg listed out the company's 2019 priorities, of which one involved delivering new experiences:

I’m talking about major improvements to people’s lives that whole communities recognize and say, ‘Wow, we’re all doing something new on Facebook or on WhatsApp that we weren’t doing before.'

This isn't the first time that Facebook's CEO has explained the company's path forward -- he did it at the 2018 F8 developer conference at the height of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. That kicked off the year-long apology tour, but now after many "we must do better" posts and apologies, Zuckerberg and his team appear willing to try and find a balance between being vigilant and pursuing progress.

Facebook does have a lot to build on, not only with having the attention of billions of people worldwide but also more than 7 million advertisers. Before things got derailed, the company had a larger vision of connecting the world, with Zuckerberg repeatedly touting Facebook's roadmap. There were ambitious frontier goals such as bringing the internet to untapped parts of the world via drone, a project that has since shuttered, developing a helicopter that would deliver the internet through fiber optic cables, and technology that would let you hear through your skin.

Appearance-wise, we are to believe that Facebook has turned a page, and what a marked change too. Following Cambridge Analytica, the company faced intense scrutiny over how user data was being used in what many perceived to be a threat to democracy and free thinking. Some clamored for Facebook to fire those responsible and although much of the spotlight seemed to shine on Sandberg's possible departure -- especially in light of repeated scandals such as the opposition research done on George Soros, ultimately Zuckerberg threw himself on his sword but said he wouldn't step down -- and no one could really make him either since he owns controlling shares in Facebook.

Zuckerberg is playing up to the proverbial cameras, telling shareholders that it's time for Facebook to move forward and that it still has a purpose. Even with its internal turmoil and enemies at the gate, the company wants the public to know it won't be hobbled by this and can continue with its mission to connect the world. And financially-speaking, Facebook's numbers give it the proof it needs to accelerate on what the next evolution of the social network will be, whether it's a reimagining of what messaging should be, the role virtual reality plays in communication, the development of a stronger video platform, or even how Stories will further dominate and likely replace the traditional News Feed.

As TechCrunch's Josh Constine noted from Facebook's Q4 earnings call, here are new products that Facebook plans to introduce this year:

• Encryption and ephemerality will be added to more features for security and privacy

• Messaging features will make Messenger and WhatsApp “the center of [your] social experiences”

• WhatsApp payments will expand to more countries

• Stories will gain new private sharing options

• Groups will become an organizing function of Facebook on par with friends & family

• Facebook Watch will become mainstream this year as video is moved there from the News Feed, Zuckerberg expects

• Augmented and virtual reality will be improved, and Oculus Quest will ship this spring

• Instagram commerce and shopping will get new features

Progress is surface-deep

Facebook doesn't appear to have brushed aside its responsibility to fix everything it's damaged, like allowing foreign actors to spread misinformation, but it isn't naive (anymore) to think change can happen overnight. Zuckerberg has declared his 2019 "resolution" to hold public talks on technology's future, specifically "the opportunities, the challenges, the hopes, and the anxieties." In his post after Facebook's Q4 earnings, the first priority he outlined his company would be focused on would be to "continue making progress on the major social issues facing the internet and our company." The last priority involved transparency.

Things are easier said than done for Facebook as it still has to fend off multiple lawsuits; inquiries from state governments and regulators; the threat of regulation which Zuckerberg admitted in some form may be required; accusations of being a monopoly, although Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim said this week that the Department of Justice might not pursue a Facebook breakup; and let's not forget about its battle on ensuring quality content is available and not spread like wildfire through its technology (looking at WhatsApp specifically).

For all the optimism that Facebook has about its future outlook, it still has to keep an ever watchful eye on the next scandal to pop up and derail its momentum. For more than a decade, the company has churned out features, apps, services, and new technologies designed to bring the world closer together, but in the past several years, it has had the contradictory effect and perhaps Zuckerberg has an idea of how to reverse this. The "success" of last quarter might give him the strength to put his foot down and find a route to reshape the company he started.

But will this time be different from the first generation of Facebook? At this year's World Economic Forum, Sandberg admitted that the company was caught off-guard by giving users access to so much data. "We did not anticipate all of the risks from connecting so many people," she said. As Facebook evolves itself, hopefully, it'll learn from its past mistakes and remember that it may not get a second chance. As that famous Voltaire (and Spider-Man) quote goes, "with great power comes great responsibility". Facebook has damaged its power and should listen to Sandberg's advice: it has a lot to do to re-earn the trust of its users.

The post Facebook Going to Facebook appeared first on My Two Cents.

If you looked at the video space earlier than 2017, LinkedIn would not have been associated with it. The Microsoft-owned professional social network hadn't really dipped its toes into the media, essentially surrendering opportunities to the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and of course, YouTube. Fast-forward to today and LinkedIn is rolling out its latest feature that could put it on par with its peers, seemingly underscoring that it's been deliberate in its actions versus maintaining a "keeping up with the Joneses" practice. After debuting video support in 2017, the company this week will start letting users broadcast live video, changing how professional networking is done, for better or for worse.

Called LinkedIn Live and initially invite-only to those in the U.S. -- likely to influencers -- this feature appears to have similar features to Periscope and Facebook Live. Unlike those services, however, LinkedIn's livestreaming option will be targeting the 9-5 types, such as broadcasting conferences and events, hosting seminars, or even interesting "Ask Me Anything" type broadcasts, as TechCrunch reported:

Initial live content that LinkedIn hopes to broadcast lines up with the kind of subject matter you might already see in LinkedIn’s news feed: the plan is to cover conferences, product announcements, Q&As and other events led by influencers and mentors, office hours from a big tech company, earnings calls, graduation and awards ceremonies, and more.

Ahead of LinkedIn's video push in 2017, I spoke with then Senior Product Manager Jasper Sherman-Presser about the possibility of livestreaming. He didn't deny that was something LinkedIn pondered, but told me: "Our focus is about helping members be productive and successful. What's unique about LinkedIn is the professional context...live [video] is very much on our minds. Whatever we do, [has to fit] into how members use the product and work life."

Pundits are quick to pounce on LinkedIn's lateness to the game when it comes to live video, but maybe the company's gamble could pay off, especially if it's able to learn from its competitors' mistakes and find ways to prevent the distribution of murders, suicide attempts, and other horrific incidents that we've read and seen online. And will there be an effective way to target broadcasts to the right individual at the proper time? When will I be shown a relevant video versus seeing a sales pitch that's reminiscent of a timeshare presentation in my News Feed?

One insight LinkedIn seems to have taken from its competitors is the quality of its videos. Its live video service will have integrations with third-party production software such as Wirecast, Switcher Studio, Wowza Media Systems, Socialive, and Brandlive.

Starting with influencers and a limited group of its users, LinkedIn might be trying to not only set the tone for what they hope people will do with LinkedIn Live, but learn from what programming could come from this. Perhaps those that offer thought leadership on LinkedIn's Pulse publishing platform might extend their reach to Live, or a salesperson could build a cohesive package with live video, SlideShare, and other LinkedIn Navigator tools to close deals and log it into Microsoft Dynamics. Okay, that last part is probably not as easy as it sounds since the integration between LinkedIn and Microsoft has been slow.

Professionals must not discount the reach of LinkedIn videos since it's one of the popular avenues for creators. The company's principal product manager on its video team, Peter Roybal, told Digiday that "millions" of users have created videos on the platform since the feature was released in 2017, calling it the "fastest growing type of content on the platform."

While we might bemoan videos about the latest gadget, fad, meme, or scandal that pollutes our News Feed on Facebook, Twitter, or Google+ (RIP), for business professionals on LinkedIn, it's likely that they want to learn -- their mindset is different versus the other social networks. If you follow someone like Gary Vaynerchuk, Jeffrey Hayzlett, or someone you're inspired by, having a livestream of them while they're presenting at a conference or talking about a topic you're interested in, might be useful. Not everyone can have time to attend the same events or seminars. This brings learning opportunities to those that are remote.

And let's not forget about LinkedIn Learning, formerly Lynda.com. After completing a class, you might want to follow the instructor to glean additional insights. LinkedIn Live might be an opportunity for teachers to have additional touch points with students.

All of this seems optimistic and naturally, time will tell to see how well the live content is on LinkedIn. But it's likely marketers and influencers are chomping at the bit to get their hands on this new offering to really engage with their targeted professionals.

The post LinkedIn Goes Live appeared first on My Two Cents.

As brands continue their quest to leverage the latest shiny object tech affords them, the question remains how adept companies are in really knowing how to best reach their customers. It turns out that less than half of all businesses are really mapping out their customer's journey and understanding how to connect with them, but in light of data breaches, privacy concerns, and negative perception around tech, it has become even more important to understand the modern consumer's behavior.

These were some of the findings borne out of analyst Brian Solis's latest edition of his "The State of Digital Transformation" report. In its fifth year, the research has looked at how brands are evolving to reflect today's society and adapting to the latest technological shifts. According to Solis:

This year it's clear that digital transformation is maturing into an enterprise-wide movement. Digital transformation is modernizing how companies work and compete and helping them effectively adapt and grow in an evolving digital economy. What's also evident is that there is still much work to do as companies are, by and large, prioritizing technology over grasping the disruptive trends that are influencing markets and, more specifically, customer and employee behaviors and expectations.

Companies know that the status quo from a decade ago isn't sufficient anymore and recognize that technology is the way to go to help adjust to the changing climate, but it's one thing to select tech you think is popular in the public arena and another to know whether your customers are actually using it. "Many organizations are not doing their due diligence when it comes to understanding their customers, with 41 [percent] of companies making investments in digital transformation without the guidance of thorough customer research," Solis writes.

"The State of Digital Transformation" provides a snapshot in time, a look at how businesses are receiving this concept of evolving. In 2018, businesses were more accepting, with more than half of those companies surveyed saying they were building a "culture of innovation" complete with in-house resources including change agents. But simply having a dedicated team charged with righting a proverbial sinking ship isn't enough -- more work is needed.

There are many forces dictating how a company will respond to digital transformation, of which the main one appears to be growth opportunities in new markets. Brands in the past year don't appear as motivated to focus on improving the customer experience or fending off competitors, but one of the fastest rising trends involved regulatory and compliance concerns. This isn't surprising as the tech industry has been rocked by numerous allegations and concerns over user privacy. Whether it's concern over Facebook, whether our smart devices are listening to us, ownership of our data (e.g. the European Union's GDPR law), or anything else, brands must be aware that "business as usual" isn't going to cut it. They need to be cognizant of what their customers are concerned about.

Mapping out the customer journey is especially critical to the success of digital transformation. Although your customers might be present on social media, using chatbots in Facebook Messenger, Kik, Line, or any other messaging service might not be well received, even though there might be high usage in general. And developing a tool that would allow support teams to track a customer's location in order to optimize assistance may not go well if customers haven't indicated consent. Digital transformation cannot succeed with siloed teams.

This process is a marathon, not a sprint, and while there are some things that can be accomplished in the short-term, ultimately really transforming an organization will take years, if not decades. This isn't surprising as the technology landscape keeps changing, from websites to emails, messaging services, artificial intelligence, voice assistants, virtual and mixed reality, and who-knows-what in the future.

It's understandable that transforming legacy companies won't happen overnight, especially if you look at all the challenges facing them. Solis' report highlights 13 key factors for hindering innovation efforts. In 2018, executives cited a lack of data or Return on Investment as a key factor in adopting digital transformation. This probably shouldn't be surprising since executives always like looking at numbers before making a decision in order to justify a course of action. Solis concludes:

While they often perceive digital transformation as a resource that takes away from shareholder value and quarterly performance, the reality is that it is an investment in near and longer-term competitiveness and value creation. Without clear data that shows how digital transformation positively affects the bottom line, digital transformers or change agents
struggle to get the resources they need to succeed.

Although this has largely focused on the customer, their perceptions and behaviors aren't the only things that'll revolutionize a business -- it'll require the assistance of the company's employees, change agents, and understanding culture. At the end of his report, Solis lists out seven priorities for companies to focus on in order to accelerate their efforts. Since this report is essentially a living document, executives could view this as akin to an annual physical exam where they pause to examine their progress, take a temperature check, and evaluate what needs to change.

The post The Secret to Innovation Rests With Knowing Thy Customers appeared first on My Two Cents.