The business of making software for online surveys is pretty easy to understand: You find people who want to conduct surveys and sell them access to software that creates forms they can circulate. ?That?s all a survey is?it?s a form with an analytics component,? says Ryan Smith, the co-founder and chief executive of Qualtrics, one of the bigger names in the online survey industry. ?We have the best form.?
When you graduate from college with a degree in communication studies and rhetoric, the business world can look very confusing. Unsure of where I fit in, I explored options. Many friends suggested sales. I was doubtful. I worried that being in sales would not carry the prestige and credibility I so badly wanted as I started my professional career. I was also having a hard time getting excited about selling any particular product.
Mail.ru, Russia?s most popular email provider, this morning announced that it has paid $1.47 billion for the 48% that it did not already own of VKontakte, Russia?s most popular social network. Mail.ru already owns Odnoklassniki, the second-most popular network. It?s as if Gmail (if it were an independent company) were to buy Facebook.
A long-simmering feud between North Carolina?s state dental board and a group of non-dentists who provide teeth-whitening services in malls and day spas is headed for the U.S. Supreme Court. Oral arguments in the case, North Carolina Board of Dental Examiners v. Federal Trade Commission, are scheduled for Oct. 14, the ADA (American Dental Association) News reports.
When I?m talking with entrepreneurs or recruiters who are looking for advice on how to recruit the right marketer for a position, I always tell them that there is no perfect candidate, or perfect place to find them. Inevitably, it?s a lot of networking, LinkedIn and sweat.
Once upon a time, Santa Claus had to work for a living, deciphering scribbles on pieces of paper to discern the gift desires of countless children, earning, perhaps, a few dry cookies and some warm milk for his toil. Now, thanks to Amazon.com Inc. and Twitter Inc., the red-suited home invader can lounge back at his North Pole headquarters monitoring tweets to figure out what exactly how much tonnage his reindeers will have to haul this December.
The hardest part of design is presenting work. You can?t even argue about this. I?ve seen people who did amazing work get up in front of a client and lay eggs. I?ve also seen people do alright work and work clients around their little finger. Optimally, you want to do good work and present it well. But I?d rather have a good designer who can present well than a great designer who can?t. In fact, I?d argue whether it?s possible to be a good designer if you can?t present your work to a client. Work that can?t be sold is as useless as the designer who can?t sell it.
A couple of weeks ago I had a great discussion with Renat from elastic.io about the characteristics of the self serve model for SaaS startups and more specifically about the role that marketing / branding have in it when you are at early stage.
The ?unbundling? of mobile applications is emerging as the trend du jour for large tech companies. Google, Facebook and Foursquare have all recently made headlines for dismantling some of their mobile software to create and launch multiple apps.
In August, a widely reported report from comScore, a measurement firm, concluded that the majority of smartphone users in the United States download precisely zero apps in any given month.
