The Progress Bar

Last summer I met up with Lukas Biewald in Cambridge to talk about how Crowdflower could help a client in the online dating industry. Smart guy, glad to see him evolving Crowdflower services to address a burning need. This is going to be great for location-based services that keep sending me to the wrong places. CrowdFlower taps the power of the crowd to get more accurate business listings at VentureBeat.

Loved reading 55 Interesting Social Media Infographics.

Protecting our data in the cloud is of utmost importance. I’ve mentioned securing the cloud several times on this blog and was please to see this Boingboing post, Grendel: free/open source software for protecting your cloud data.

Back in the day I was involved in some of the early banner ads at Hotwired. This article made me feel nostalgic.

Happy Birthday, Digital Advertising!

It’s that time again, get ready for Webinnovators Group session #23. Webinnovators has grown from 20 people in a room when I first attended the second or third event to almost 1,000 at the last one.

We begin with the doors officially opening at 6:30pm in the Cambridge Royal Sonesta Hotel. At 7pm in the Grand Ballroom we’ll hold our usual format of self-/angel-funded startups demo’ing to the audience in Main Dish showcases, and select an “Audience Choice” winner of the crowd’s favorite. After a brief intermission, at 8pm we’ll hold a strictly-optional special entrepreneur’s PR breakout session. During the entire evening’s event, Side Dish startup companies will provide informal demonstrations to the networking crowd from the Skyline Suites room.

An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Bootstrapping PR

Entrepreneur and marketing/media executive Mike Troiano will host a conversation with a panel of media reporters/columnists/editors including Scott Kirsner of the Boston Globe, Wade Roush from Xconomy, Peter Kafka from AllThingsD, and Bob Brown of Network World. Despite the fact that media coverage is as an essential component of any web start-up’s marketing mix, full-blown PR support may not be in the cards. This on-stage discussion will provide the inside scoop on engaging with the media – everything from how entrepreneurs can generate awareness of their company through the media to what do you need to know before you connect with the press. In addition, panelists will cover questions like “What’s the best way to engage with reporters?” “What do reporters care / write about?” “What could entrepreneurs learn from PR people?” and “What really ticks reporters off (pet peeve)?”

We are just two weeks away from our September 29^th Web Innovators Group meeting and I wanted to announce our set of demonstrating companies. The doors officially open at 6:30pm at the Grand Ballroom in the Cambridge Royal Sonesta, with the “Main Dish” presentations to the entire crowd starting at 7pm:

• BookofOdds – Pre-launch Sneak Preview – Amram Shapiro
• Epernicus – Eric Silberstein & Mikhail Shapiro
• BatchBlue Software (BatchBook) – Pamela O’Hara

Following those presentations, each of our “Side Dish” demonstrators will have an opportunity to give a quick 30-second overview of their service to the audience followed by a showcase of their company at tables spread throughout the periphery of the skyline suites room during the unstructured networking portion of the evening:

• Clickframes (by Beacon16) – Vineet Manohar
• BetterLesson – Alex Grodd
• Baydin – Alex Moore
• TheIdeaStartup.com – Matt Chepeleff and Ray Di Nizo
• Confidant Solutions – Sandy Haviland
• Happn.in – Jay Boice
• Tripleseat Software – Jonathan Morse

All of the above companies were selected amongst dozens of applicants looking to participate in the program. Unfortunately there was not space for other qualifying startups; if yours was not chosen, I’d encourage you to reapply for the next event in December.

And as a reminder, we also have a special breakout session at 8pm entitled, “An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Bootstrapping PR.” It will feature entrepreneur and marketing/media executive Mike Troiano hosting a discussion with a media panel including Scott Kirsner of the Boston Globe, Wade Roush from Xconomy, Peter Kafka from AllThingsD, and Bob Brown of Network World.

With both a great set of presenters (including a pre-launch sneak preview) PLUS the optional breakout session, this September WebInno will be a special one. Everyone who is interested in web and mobile innovation is invited to attend the free event. Please RSVP (and find additional details) on the event page (http://webinno23.eventbrite.com/) if you plan to join us so we are able to print name tags and appropriately size the room.

Svetlana Gladkova talks about a survey of online tools used by businesses for marketing.

So while you may think that social media tools are heavily employed by businesses for promotion, the survey has a surprise for you: in fact, only traditional internet tools are actually heavily used by marketing people so direct mail and web analytics are leading the game with 46% and 37% respectively. Other popular internet tools include online advertising (used by 35% of companies) and optimization for search engines (used in 34% of all cases).

At the same time the latest and greatest tools that we’ve only been hyping for a few years now all hold quite low shares in terms of use for marketing: for example, viral marketing, blogs, and podcasts each have 6% of companies using them with Twitter holding the last position in the list with its 2%.

Don’t believe the hype, people, thats all I’m saying. There are a handful of people and companies making millions off of Twitter, the rest are still trying to figure out what it is and how to leverage it as a new communications channel.

Joshua schachter, founder of the Delicious social bookmarking service, weighs in on url shorteners.

• any phone that can run a web browser and thus follow links can also run a proper client, and doesn’t have to hew to the SMS character limit.
• Shorteners are relatively easy and lightweight to set up. Adding a simple interstitial before the redirect provides an obvious way to monetize. And maybe someday all the link data will be worth something.
• With a shortening service, you’re adding something that acts like a third DNS resolver, except one that is assembled out of unvetted PHP and MySQL, without the benevolent oversight of luminaries like Dan Kaminsky and St. Postel.
• A huge proportion of shortened links are just a disguise for spam
• If the shortener accidentally erases a database, forgets to renew its domain, or just disappears, the link will break.

Well-reasoned responses to a new service in which few people are considering the negative implications.

TechCrunch says if (url-shortening service) bit.ly Is Worth $8 Million, TinyURL Is Worth At Least $46 Million. I personally can’t stand short url’s and I bet domain name marketers are even more upset. Why pay a lot of money for a seemingly-great url when it’s going to get morphed and truncated into a mini-url owned by a third party? Much of bit.ly’s success is due to the fact that for some reason it’s the default url for a Twitter dashboard called Tweetdeck. Tweetdeck is cool because it also lets you update your Facebook status at the same time.