Posts tagged Valley
Silicon Valley Search Marketing Conference Adds 5 In-depth Workshops for … – PR Web (press release)
Nov 14th
From Silicon Valley to Bahrain, the Web Mourns Steve Jobs
Oct 5th
Following the news of the death of Steve Jobs on Wednesday night, millions of people took to the Web to mourn the founder and former chief executive of the biggest technology company in the world.
Everyone from Apple customers and admirers to other tech luminaries and the President of the United States expressed their condolences in the form of obituaries, blog posts, tweets and status updates on Facebook and Google Plus. Somber homepage tributes went live on Apple.com, Google.com and other major websites, and some publications like Wired and Boing Boing altered their homepages dramatically to pay tribute to Jobs.
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In a way, the Web served as sort of a global virtual meeting place for mourners to gather in the wake of the loss of one of the technology world’s most celebrated figures. Within a few hours of the news breaking, five different Steve Jobs-related phrases were trending globally on Twitter. Google Plus was awash in links to written tributes, video clips of Jobs and photos taken outside of Apple retail stores. Meanwhile, news sites from all over the world began publishing formal obituaries for Jobs.
Among the most widely-circulated (and worth reading) tributes came from Wall Street Journal columnist Walt Mossberg, who was friends with Jobs, and Gizmodo editor Brian Lam, who recounted the exuberant experience of meeting Jobs, as well as the more tense exchanges the two later had when Gizmodo acquired a stolen prototype of the iPhone 4 before its release.
This Week in Tech host Leo Laporte streamed a special, impromptu segment in which he and other technology journalists and commentators shared stories and thoughts related to Steve Jobs, sometimes on the verge of tears.
While the epicenter of the mourning was undoubtedly the Silicon Valley and the news dominated major media outlets across the United States, the passing of Steve Jobs was in fact a global news story.
“Steve Jobs is dead and I learned about it first through a notification on my android from a #Libya colleague on Facebook,” tweeted Small World News founder Brian Conley. Another tweet, this one from NPR social media guru Andy Carvin read, “Right now I’m seeing tweets from Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Bahrain, all united by one thing: #RIPstevejobs.”
While most of the reflections on Jobs’ life and career were highly positive, sometimes bordering on deifying the reaction was not without criticism of some of his business practices. Some tactfully pointed out common critiques of Apple, including factory working conditions, their environmental impact and the limited nature of Jobs’ philanthropic efforts.
It was was with somewhat less tact, however, that controversial Westboro Baptist Church tweeted about plans to picket Jobs’ funeral because he “gave God no glory & taught sin.” That tweet, as many were quick to point out, was sent from an iPhone.
More on Steve Jobs From ReadWriteWeb:
- Steve Jobs, 1955-2011
- A Great User Experience: The Web Legacy of Steve Jobs
- What Steve Meant Back Then
- The Steve Jobs Formula and Why It Works
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Facebook’s New Timeline, Beacon & the Uncanny Valley
Sep 22nd
At Facebook’s developer conference F8 today, a number of trends that web watchers have predicted would be defining characteristics of the future suddenly became parts of mainstream discourse. The Facebook megalith learns fast from its R&D department, what the rest of us call the rest of the Web.
Specifically: data as platform, the real-time/synchronous web and pre-cognitive discovery. Those are things that web nerds have said would be big and in one fell swoop today, Facebook made its move on them all. Below, some thoughts on data as a platform, and the new Timeline feature in particular. It’s like a grown-up version of the much-criticized Facebook Beacon, which the company had to remove after a backlash several years ago. It will be interesting to see how people react to this – I suspect that this time it may be less a question of privacy and more a question of creepy.
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Data as Platform
Facebook’s forthcoming Timeline is a half-automatic, half manually curated visual display of all a user’s past activities and app data. Inspired by Nick Felton’s annual report for an individual person, this feature is something you can sign up for now and get it as it rolls out over the next few weeks.
Data about your online activities is now displayed in a beautiful interface that “tells the story of who you are.” It looks great, in theory.
This is like Flipboard for your life or the lives of friends, it’s like Memolane inside Facebook, it’s like startup Intersect. But now it’s huge.
I expect that you’ll see many more projects like this from many other companies – value added interfaces on top of aggregated data are going to be a key area of competition.
But for now, the “data exhaust” that we all publish passively as a result of using the Web will now be turned into a timeline automatically on Facebook.
Will people feel comfortable opting-in to all allow apps like their run tracker, music player, food photo poster automatically grab and publish their activity data? Eventually they will and I think that day may be here now.
Facebook’s Beacon did this with shopping data off-site and there was a huge backlash – but that was four years ago and it wasn’t implemented nearly as well as this is. Beacon didn’t add nearly as much value for the user as Timeline will. Shopping data or data that can inform indirect advertising could be added to Timeline later, but for now it adds a lot of emotional value to the Facebook user experience built on top of wide ranging data. Much but not all of it is opt-in. It’s really smart.
Facebook founder Zuckerberg believes that this experience of value built on top of shared data will compel people to share far more data than they do today. It will be the next step in the continuing growth of social sharing. I think he might be right.
Uncanny Valley
The most likely worst-case scenario though is that people will be creeped out by all this. I think there’s a risk that the new Facebook Timelines are going to look a lot like our real lives – almost exactly like them, but not quite. Far enough off to be frustrating but close enough to be creepy.
We’ll see if it feels empowering, like a new way to articulate the epic meaning of all our individual social lives, or if it feels like a too-nearly-human panopticon’s picture-book of more memories than our own brains are capable of retaining. And thus somehow wrong.
In the world of human look-alike robots, there’s a theory called the Uncanny Valley. Per Wikipedia: The uncanny valley is a hypothesis in the field of robotics and 3D computer animation, which holds that when human replicas look and act almost, but not perfectly, like actual human beings, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers.
We’ll see – but I think there’s a real risk that people will find the Facebook reflection of themselves repulsive, horrifying on an existential level.
It’s not about privacy or clear exploitation of activity data, as it was with Beacon, it’s more about concern with how extensively one company and the web is able to stitch together a picture of our whole lives.
The Timeline feature will roll out in the coming weeks and then we’ll see if it feels empowering, like a new way to articulate the epic meaning of all our individual social lives, or if it feels like a too-nearly-human panopticon’s picture-book of more memories than our own brains are capable of retaining.
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Strategy Roundtable For Entrepreneurs: Menlo Park and The Silicon Valley Renaissance
Aug 11th
During this week’s roundtable, we started off by discussing the pre-incubation procedure we are recommending with audience members from different parts of the world.
This week, I’ve had several meetings with venture funds, incubators, corporate accelerators and other significant players in the startup eco-system. One theme seems to come up over and again, especially from geographies outside Silicon Valley: lack of a reliable pipeline of deals. In many of these cases, the funds or the accelerators want to put in $100,000 to $500,000 in select ventures but are having a hard time finding mature entrepreneurs to support. To those in our eco-system who are facing this problem around the globe, I have the following suggestion: Instead of giving $100,000 to one startup, give $1,000 each to 100 startups, and put a larger number of entrepreneurs in your community through 1M/1M. Announce one or two $100,000 prizes that only those entrepreneurs who have gone through and completed at least 60 hours of 1M/1M curriculum would be eligible for. I am pretty sure that the pipeline in your community will be of a significantly higher quality within six months.
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Tom from Omaha, Nebraska, shared an update about what is going on in that part of the world, as did other audience members from New York City, Israel, and Columbus, Ohio.
Wha’ the…?
In fact, Spencer Bardsley from Columbus, Ohio, pitched Wha’ the…? – an innovative concept for capturing stray conversations heard in random places and sharing those on Facebook and Twitter.
On the topic of business models, Spencer proposed building traffic and then selling the company, which I pushed back on. We spent considerable time exploring ways to verticalize the app and creating an ad-supported business model instead, which would also broaden his exit options considerably.
The challenges of bootstrapping a venture that is dependent on ad-revenue is, however, also quite significant. You have to finance the period of traffic building that is pretty much red-ink financing. Spencer needs to think through a strategy for bootstrapping that phase.
For those of you who resonated with the ideas presented in my Silicon Valley Renaissance piece, we (myself, Dominique Trempont, and architect Bernardo Urquieta) have since opened a dialog with the Menlo Park City Council, and they are interested in incorporating them into the city’s revival plans. As many of you are aware, Facebook is about to move to a large campus in Menlo Park, and plans to house 9,000 employees in it. Add to that the impact of their upcoming IPO – lots of angel investors and spin-off entrepreneurs are in the making. The question we have asked the city council is how does Menlo Park play a role in harnessing this energy and momentum, and turn the city into a hotbed of exciting incubators, startups, great restaurants, cafes, boutiques, nightclubs, designers, while still maintaining what is lovely about the ‘village’ ambience. Please email me if you wish to participate in this effort. You can also use my blog to brainstorm. We discussed this at today’s roundtable as well.
Also, on the topic of renaissance ideas, here’s a fun piece of summer reading amidst the upsetting gyrations of the market: The Future of the Harry Potter Franchise.
And if you are experimenting with cooking, 1M/1M premium company iFood.tv could be your companion. This 1M/1M premium company is a popular destination for food- and recipe-related video content. The company has been generating revenues for the past three years and is profitable. In the past 12 months, there have been an average of 3 million monthly unique visitors and close to 125,000 daily video streams. There is a growing display ad network (currently more than 70 sites) using iFood.tv for their monetization needs. This year, they expect to grow more than 100% and be well over a million dollars in revenue. More details on my Incubation Radar.
The recording of today’s roundtable can be found here. Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here.
I would very much like to hear about your business, so let me invite you to come and pitch at one of our free 1M/1M public roundtables. We will be holding future roundtables at 8:00 a.m. PDT on the following dates:
Thursday, August 25, Register Here.
Thursday, September 1, Register Here.
Thursday, September 8, Register Here.
Thursday, September 15, Register Here.
Thursday, September 22, Register Here.
Thursday, September 29, Register Here.
We will be holding our 100th roundtable on Thursday, October 6, and are planning a special event for that day. You can register to attend here.
And if you want a deeper relationship with me, you are very welcome to join the 1M/1M premium program. If you have any questions about the program, please, first study the website, especially What to expect from the 1M/1M premium program and the FAQs. You can also take the 1M/1M self-assessment test here. If you have additional questions, please email me, and I would be very happy to respond. Please note, that I work exclusively with 1M/1M entrepreneurs.
I also invite you to join the 1M/1M mailing list for the ease and convenience of getting updates. This way we can stay in touch and it will help you to decide if 1M/1M is a program for you.
About Sramana Mitra
Sramana Mitra is the founder of the One Million by One Million (1M/1M) initiative, an educational, business development and incubation program that aims to help one million entrepreneurs globally to reach $1 million in revenue and beyond. She is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and strategy consultant. She writes the blog Sramana Mitra On Strategy and is author of the Entrepreneur Journeys book series and Vision India 2020. From 2008 to 2010, Mitra was a columnist for Forbes. As an entrepreneur CEO, she ran three companies: DAIS, Intarka, and Uuma. She has a master’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Silicon Valley photo by Franco Folini
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SEO Valley Ranks #3 in Best Site Audit Companies in India by topseos.in for … – Press Media Wire
Jun 19th
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SEO Valley Ranks #3 in Best Site Audit Companies in India by topseos.in for …
Press Media Wire An independent research team that was assigned to the Site Audit category reviewed each applicant in order to determine the best SEO companies in India. SEO Valley Solutions Private Ltd., made its presence as one of the top players in the rankings for … |
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SEO Valley Ranks #4 in Best Social Media Marketing Companies in Australia by … – Press Media Wire
Jun 16th
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SEO Valley Ranks #4 in Best Social Media Marketing Companies in Australia by …
Press Media Wire SEO Valley Solutions Private Ltd., made its presence as one of the top players in the rankings for this month in a field of thousands in Australia. An extensive review was completed and the research team evaluated the services of SEO Valley Solutions … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
SEO Valley Ranks #2 in Best Local Search Companies in UK by topseos.co.uk for … – Press Media Wire
Jun 8th
 Video Commerce Consortium |
SEO Valley Ranks #2 in Best Local Search Companies in UK by topseos.co.uk for …
Press Media Wire SEO Valley Solutions Private Ltd., made its presence as one of the top players in the rankings for this month in a field of thousand providers in India. An extensive review was completed and the research team evaluated the services of SEO Valley … OneIMS Ranks #4 in Integrated Search (SEO & PPC) Companies by topseos.com for … Atlanta SEO Expert Stacy Williams Named President-Elect of SEMPO Atlanta Top 10 Small Business SEO Tips for Link Building |
View full post on SEO – Google News
