Sophia Perl of Wisdom

At work, someone had a great idea to show a tagcloud of her slide deck content at the beginning her presentation.  I thought, “Hey that’s cool, how about my resume?”  So I was geek-ing around and made a tagcloud of my resume.  Yep, this is what I do.  Go to TagCrowd.com to create your own!

It’s been awhile since I’ve been out and about in the Valley.  Last Saturday, I attended Santa Clara University’s Women in Business Conference at eBay’s north campus, aka PayPal.  I’m a bit of hard person to please when it comes to talks.  I get bored easily if the talk is too high-level, abstract with no takeaways.  That Saturday morning, it was far the opposite.  The keynote speaker Shellye Archambeau, CEO of MetricStream, gave a great talk on how to leverage your strengths as a woman leader and then some.  It was a very educational and entertaining talk.

My top 5 take aways:

1. Ending your opinions with questions may make you sound not confident.  Action: Don’t end with questions unless you really want other opinions.
2. Being collaborative could make you look indecisive.  Action: Set decision criteria and timelines for when decision will be made.
3. Not enough self-promotion.  Action: If someone asks how you are doing, talk about recent achievements like “oh I’m great because the team just hit this milestone…”.  Take opportunities to promote in everyday conversations.
4. Using “I feel…”, nobody cares how you feel.  Action: People care about what you know.
5. Don’t formally ask people to be your mentors because it requires time and commitment.  Action:  Just adopt mentors informally and don’t tell them.  What they don’t know can’t hurt them.

One thing that I’d like to add is to say no to meaningless (or not as meaningful) tasks.  I don’t know how many times I’ve seen women be asked to organize team events or lead up some random task force while others are constantly are passed over or say no.  I’m all for being a team player, but not at the expense of my valuable time and maybe my work reputation (Who wants to be known as the potluck queen?).  If you keep saying yes, then you’ll keep getting asked.  Say no already!  It’s okay.

Do you need ideas to make your meetings more efficient?  Here are some ideas that I’ve collected along the way.  I do not claim that they are my ideas and I have not tried all of them.  Have fun!

1. Conduct meeting without tables and chairs aka standing up – studies show meeting times will be cut in half!
2. Money jar for late comers or no-shows – make it hurt (financially) to be late or miss a meeting, use that money to buy the team beer or donate to charity
3. Take a moment of silence after a major decision – reflect on decision, give time for last minute objections, let the commitment sink in really good
4. Put a clock on the wall – meetings should begin and definitely end on time
5. Assign a note taker – the meeting chair needs to run the meeting while someone else takes notes, hard to do both
6. Divide up a large block of meeting time (with same people) into smaller chunks – helps guide the agenda and keeps the meeting going
7. Enforce a “no meeting” time period or day – seriously, there needs to be time to do work, come on people!
8. Provide food – attendance will be good, also many will pay more attention (while eating) instead of typing on their laptops
9. Clarify participant roles in invite – sometimes it’s obvious, sometimes it’s not, provide some context, maybe it’ll help form the agenda easier
10. Bonus: If the meeting requires 6+ people or more than an hour, the CEO is notified – one company did this, the theory is that a meeting of that size or time length should really damn important, I wonder if the company is still around, does anyone know?

If you haven’t heard about the startup Square, you are in luck.  I’m going to give you the latest on them.  Keith Rabois, COO of Square, joined 14 months ago when there were 14 employees and no users.  At Mobilize, he talked about how a small, white, square pluggable hardware piece is making its dent in the payment space.

About 26M US businesses do not accept credit cards today.  In order to process credit cards, you need to pass a credit card check yourself (e.g., FICO score) and provide your last year’s business sales.  For a person just starting out, this is an instant fail on two accounts.  Then steps in Square.

Today, 750,000 merchants accept Square, just 10% of companies who accept credit cards.  Before Square,  50-60% of users would not be able to accept credit cards.  Of those who apply for Square, 93% are accepted and can accept payments in less than 3 minutes.  What about the FICO score and sales requirement?  Square uses automated and manual analytics to observe unusual transactions for fraud protection.

When asked about NFC and other payment options?  Rabois said, “We don’t worry about what other people are doing”.  He doesn’t think that NFC will resonate with mainstream America.  He further adds that Google is interested in NFC to track spending habits which is better ROI for ad spenders which includes top 100 retailers.

Square will be having two major releases in October – one for Square, one for Card Case.  Then in December, they will have some things to say, but on the hush hush.

Rabois puts it plainly, “Square is Paypal for the real world”.

On 9/26 Monday and 9/27 Tuesday, GigaOM held its Mobilize conference in San Francisco.  Over the next couple of posts, I will talk about the trends that were discussed during the conference.

Unless you live under a rock, it’s hard to ignore that mobile advertising is exploding.  According to Smaato, mobile advertising is a $11.4-$20B market in 2011 alone.  At Mobilize, AT&T Interactive, Kiip, Pontiflex, and Appsfire grabbed the stage to talk about this hot topic.

The current landscape of mobile advertising is still evolving.  One panelist said it took about a year ago for ad networks to target ads based on location, previously it was just based on clicks.   Imagine the days before Groupon and LivingSocial.  Pontiflex and Kiip say about 48-60% of mobile ads are clicked on accident.  Some app developers are gaming the system by putting ads right next to frequently pressed buttons (e.g., pause button).   This implies about 50% of your mobile ad budget is wasted.  A big challenge is that the definition of engagement has a wider range of possibilities than web advertising.  Is engagement a call to the store?  Entering the store (offline/online)?  Measure on size of (offline/online) purchase?  Use of a coupon?  If Google Wallet catches on, Google will be able to track ads all the way down to the point of purchase in a brick and mortar store.

One company Kiip focuses on achievements as a cost of engagement.  For example, when a player completes a level, they will show a mobile ad at that very moment.  For a BestBuy campaign (assuming because it was described as a yellow large electronics retailer), Kiip got a 15% conversion.  They believe that people will want to “engage” when they are in a happy moment.  In fact, they are working with experts in cognitive and happiness to improve their service.  Appsfire is at the promotion level.  AT&T Interactive is doing search advertising.

Mobile advertising can be helpful and it’s not all bad and intrusive.  An example coming from web advertising, when Google took off its ads off of the websites, people complained because the ads were useful.  Pontiflex says when it comes to mobile advertising, there are three major groups involved in order to make mobile advertising a success – ad networks, app developers, and users.  You can’t ignore any of these groups.  Appsfire says you have to trust app developers to know where to place the ad and give them flexibility.  Most importantly, you have to let users figure out how they want to engage with you.  For example, 1 in 5 do not want mobile coupons.

Tips for app developers, you need critical mass with make money with ads.  If you have local mass, it’s even better because a lot of mobile ads are local.  It helps to have your app translated to other languages too.

On 9/26 Monday and 9/27 Tuesday, GigaOM held its Mobilize conference in San Francisco.  Over the next couple of posts, I will talk about the trends that were discussed during the conference.

One hot topic was mobile development strategy mainly around designing for better adoption and technology choices.  The people speaking on the topic were from SalesForce.com, Verizon, MeLLmo, and Rhomobile.

Companies need to create a completely different team focused on mobile development and not use the existing web development team.  The differences between web and mobile development are big enough that one panelist said you will fail if you use the web team.  Another panelist urged companies to rethink all of their development processes and products from the ground up, especially to be based on simplicity like mobile apps.  Do.com (part of SalesForce.com) designed for the tablet then made the web look like it.

When designing a mobile app, companies should think about the end user (whether customers or employees) as people have lower tolerances for bad mobile apps.  At Verizon, they create storyboards about the end user experience and then develop apps from there.  At SalesForce.com, they put a lot of emphasis on personas and develop workflows.  Features such as disconnected/offline capabilities, refreshing part of the app (not the whole app), and a lot of drag and drop (for tablet apps) make for a good experience.

The verdict is still out about native vs HTML5 as the panel was mixed on their recommendation.  Some are hedging their bets like SalesForce.com who is building native and HTML5 apps.  Another panelist says you can go native but leverage HTML5 (like a iOS webUI view).  Using webUI is not the same as native in my opinion although it is an easy way to say to go “native”.  The big supporters of HTML5 said that a native interface can be mimicked with HTML5.  One disagreed saying not all of the great native interfaces are available.  The big advantage with HTML5 is that it is not locked into any mobile OS and you can design once and make it available for all mobile devices.  I agree with the theoretical strategy, but the HTML5 app will be restrained to the limits of the mobile browser, still in its infant stage.

All the panelists seem to be on the same page that leveraging the native features of the phone/tablet are important for the user experience.  One panelist said that you can’t have a high performing app unless you go native.  This statement is correct as of today, but companies like Google are pushing for improved mobile browser standards.  The debate continues…

On 9/26 Monday and 9/27 Tuesday, GigaOM held its Mobilize conference in San Francisco.  Over the next couple of posts, I will talk about the trends that were discussed during the conference.

One of the hot topics was the disruption of tablets and personal smart phones in the workplace.

Tablets and personal smart phones are making their way into the business space whether the company encourages it or not.  This uncontrollable trend is consumerization, devices becoming popular in the consumer space then moving into the business space.  One panelist observed that more people today are carrying just iPhones (both work and personal) than 6 months ago when they were carrying both Blackberrys (work) and iPhones (personal).  The surge of tablets in the workspace is a push to get more business-oriented, customer-facing employees to be more efficient and mobile.  At Salesforce.com, all sales people carry iPads, no one carries a PC.

With the convergence of personal and work devices into one device, companies like VMWare and Cisco are looking to figure out how to separate (e.g., expense, secure) corporate data from personal data.  Cisco believes that security should be built into the fabric of the network (e.g., containers).  The end point (e.g., devices) can change all the time.  They say that a MacAfee or Symantec solution is not enough.  VMWare is looking at ways to virtualize corporate phone images to personal phones starting with the Android platform, working with LG and Samsung and others.  They are even looking at virtualizing two sim cards so that you have two different numbers on one smart phone.  Imagine getting a ring tone that is different based on whether it is a personal or business contact.

Companies are realizing that they can’t stop people from using their personal devices.  They are embracing the idea of people using personal devices for work and play.

GigaOM Mobilize is an event to not be missed next year as it is full of who’s who in the mobile space.

Sachin Agarwal on left

There are a lot of blogging sites out there – WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, and then there’s Posterous.  Sachin Agarwal, founder of Posterous, told a story which seemed to be a collection of happenstances.  At a talk last Friday, Agrawal talked publicly for the first time since Posterous spaces launched.  He started by saying that he will be talking about things that he hadn’t shared before.

Agarwal describes himself as a backend engineer guy with no frontend and web programming experience and not a product guy.  So how does a former Apple Final Cut Pro developer start a blogging website?  Now comes the problem and the solution.

He wanted to easily upload photos to his blog via email.  So he developed the function just for him to use.  Eventually, his friends and family liked the function and it caught on.  This led to him getting into Y Combinator and then launching at TechCrunch.

People were calling Posterous blogging by email or easy blogging.

The 3 main innovations that made Posterous unique:

1. The ability to email one email address to post to your Posterous site.  This came about because he didn’t know how to set up an email server.  Unlike other blogging sites, you did not have to send emails to an obscure email address like 123abc@WordPress.com.
2. It’s very easy to set up a new Posterous account.   He didn’t want (or maybe didn’t know how) to create a registration page.  If a sender email address is not recognizable by Posterous, then it will assume it’s a new account and create a new Posterous account.
3. When you post to Posterous, it’s easy to post to other social accounts.  No story here.

Posterous had two main products – sites and groups.  It started to confuse people especially new users.  Also, over time, Posterous team started to notice a lot of people creating private blogs and add contributors.  The idea for spaces came from this.  It is a way to simulate how people share privately through email, but with Posterous hosting the site and archiving the data.  Unlike Google+ and Facebook, Posterous sharing is symmetrical, everyone in the posterous space can share with one another equally not just sharing by fanning out to contacts (asymmetric).  Tip: Monitor how your users interact with your product.  There may be an opportunity to capitalize on unforeseen patterns.

Posterous had a lot of design debt and they were faced with keep the old or go with the new.  For every new feature, a button would appear.  Existing customers were happy with this approach, but new users didn’t feel the same way.  Tip: Top talent do not want to work with outdated technologies (e.g., older versions because of technical debt) and confusing code.  Tip: Technical debt will make your website slow “like Friendster”.

In a bold move, Posterous decided to scrap everything and start from scratch.  This decision was mainly driven by the technical debt that they had accumulated over time.  For 6-8 months, they  spent time building a new Posterous focused on mobile, email, and controlled sharing.  Nothing was sacred, any feature can go if it didn’t make sense.  The entire company can participate in the redesign.  Tip: The whole company / team must be onboard for such a dramatic change to be successful.

The strategy was to redesign the mobile site first.  The goal was to complete one screen a day for 30 days (total 30 screens).  Someone would make the screen and send out for immediate feedback.  At Posterous, the mobile and web developers are on separate teams.  It just so happened that while the mobile team redesigned the mobile site, the web team built the backend APIs.  Agrawal said it was an accident in terms of efficient resource allocations.  After the APIs were completed, then the web team worked on the website leveraging much of the mobile redesign work.  Agrawal believes that the mobile and web sites should look and act the same.  Tip: Consider developing the mobile site first before the website so that you focus on simplicity and performance.

During the process, Posterous spent a bit of time getting user feedback.  To get users, they posted ads in Craigslist, vetted out candidates using Wufoo forms, and compensated them afterwards.  Twenty-four hours after a user session, they would whiteboard a new design and get a working prototype 3 days later.  They saw trends pretty quickly with just 3 users.  One thing that Agrawal wished that they had done was bring in more existing users for feedback.  Tip: Don’t alienate your existing user base who made your company.  Well the only exception to the rule is if you are going after a bigger, different market and abandoning the existing user base.

When they finally rolled out the new “spaces” Posterous site, it had already been running internally and for select users publicly.  It was just a matter of turning on the switch for everyone.  Tip: Many companies do the best practice of testing company-wide internally before launching publicly.  Employees get the benefit of learning the new product and the company gets user testing by different types of users.

I admired Agrawal for being candid about the things that led up to Posterous and then to spaces.  I got the feeling that they were unsure about many of their decisions, but took the risk to see where it would take them.  Good job!

Other tidbits:

• Agrawal said that ”Y combinator is awesome”, it’s good for people who don’t know the business side of starting a business.
• VCs/Angels want to either see you get a certain number of users by a certain time or a particular revenue number by a certain time.  It’s not always about the money, it can be about user growth too.
• Posterous uses Mixpanel and Rackspace.

From ZURBsoapbox website:

A Bit About Posterous
The concept of Posterous was decidedly simple: email is the gateway for sharing any content online (be it text, photos, or videos). Instead of logging into Facebook or WordPress to post photos, videos or writing your thoughts down you simply email post@posterous.com and Posterous figures out the best format for the content and publishes a blog post for you automatically with the content you emailed.

In the summer of 2008 Sachin Agarwal received $15,000 from YCombinator and launched the first version on TechCrunch shortly after.
Posterous has taken off since then. The service currently has 35M+ pageviews a month from 15M+ unique visitors to the site. They have a consistent traffic growth of 20%-30% every month. They have also raised a $4.4M round from Trinity, Redpoint Ventures as well as one of our upcoming speakers Ron Conway.

Posterous has yet to turn a profit. The revenue idea which Sachin has talked about is a premium plan they can sell to big businesses using the service. Posterous has also been facing tough competition from Tumblr a very similar service.

A Bit About Sachin
Sachin has been named by Inc magazine as 30 under 30. He has worked on designing Final Cut Pro at Apple for 6 years before getting an idea for a service to make it easier to share pictures, videos and stories with others. Since then he has grown Posterous to 35M+ pageviews a month.

Why Network with People?

People underestimate the power of networking within your workplace and out and about.  At the workplace, people like to work for/with others who they respect and like (note: I used both respect and like, like alone is not enough).  This is the same outside the workplace.  You don’t lose anything by networking (well maybe time), you only gain by expanding your networking.

A Story about Networking

I’ll give you an example of when I unknowingly networked with someone.  This incident sparked a 10+ year mentoring relationship with me as the mentee.  When I first moved up here, I didn’t know very many people.  I had a friend who lived in the east bay.  One day she invited me over to her mom’s for a family BBQ.  I met her cousins and her mom’s cousins.  I mostly spoke with my friend’s mom’s cousin’s wife (did you get all of that?).

After the BBQ, I went home, thought nothing of it.  Two weeks later, I ran into my friend’s mom’s cousin (the husband) at a local restaurant.  Apparently, the family lived in the same city as I did.  We recognized each other and exchanged business cards.  I saw that he worked in tech, so I asked if we could meet up so I can learn more about what he does at “ABC Co”.  He was happy to meet and talk about his career.

Today, I still meet with this person.   He has since worked with many companies, been acquired, and continues to work on great technology.  I find it so invaluable to hear his war stories of being an executive at all of these tech companies.

After that networking incident 10 years ago, I became a firm believer in (purposely) networking.  You should too!

Tips for Networking

• don’t know where to find events to attend, find events via Eventbrite and Meetups
• you can network at any event, don’t assume that networking is off limits at any event, if you don’t know everyone, it’s your chance to network
• go with a goal, is it to meet as many people as possible?  to meet new friends?  to find some job leads?
• figure out your 1-2 line answer to “what do you do?”, everyone always asks, so might as well prepare
  • bonus: try different (truthful) answers to see which answer peaks the most interest with folks
• for several reasons, invite a friend to go with you to an event:
  • you can meet people together
  • you can split up and meet more people by introducing one another to new people
  • worse case if event is a thud, you can hang out with your friend
• can’t find people to talk with, it’s as simple as saying “hi” when you walk up to a group
• listen more than talk, learn from others, be genuine
• it’s ok to cut the conversation short so that you can meet other people
• give out business cards and be sure to get business cards from others
• smile! smile! smile!
• limit the eating and drinking because it’s hard to talk, for sure limit the drinking, slurring and spitting while talking is not likeable
• a firm handshake says a lot, a wimpy handshake does also
• if you’re not up to the latest news, before you go, read a couple of articles on CNN.com, you can participate in the current event discussions or be the one in the know about “XYZ”
• maximize your nametag signage, put your twitter handle and blog URL on there
• being fashionably early is IN, less people means less noise to chat it up, as people trickle in, they will want to join a group which hopefully you are already apart of
• welcome new people into your chatty group and introduce yourself
• no snubbing! treat everyone as you would want to be treated, you never know if your newly found contact has more in common with you than you think
• if you can’t get yourself out of a group, say that you need to go to the bathroom, some people are good are breaking away, some aren’t, use the bathroom excuse
• if you know there’s a panel or speaker ahead of time, prepare 1-2 questions to ask during Q&A or 1-on-1 after the talk is done
  • if you ask during Q&A, others may like your question and come up to you to say so, might as well let others do the networking work for you
• after meeting someone, jot down some notes on the back of his business card to help you remember the conversation
• that night or the day after, send a “nice to meet you” note, some will respond back, some won’t (it’s their loss!)

Alright, all of my secrets are out.  Get out there and network!!!

Through one of my SF New Tech emails, I found out about Pitch San Francisco ’11.  I snagged a ticket and checked it out out of pure curiosity and because it was at AT&T Park.  Who doesn’t love the Giants?  Dodger fans, please do not respond.

When I first got there, I was overwhelmed with all the startup pedestals, over 90 in attendance.

Here are the ones that I visited and my two cents:

• JustShareIt – peer-to-peer vehicle / motorcycle rental website, like a GetAround competitor (who recently closed a round of funding), I heard that they do not have insurance in the mix which is a bad business decision, it’s an accident waiting to happen (no pun intended).
• BackBlaze – Mozi backup competitor but charges by the month ($5/mth) for unlimited data backup, Mozi charges by the GB now, I asked the founder why I hadn’t heard of them, he told me they do zero advertising and rely on word of mouth, I should have asked how many TB of data they back up.
• HeyStaks – community-based internet search, you can pick an interest community to be apart of, then when you do searches, then it shows the popular search results of that community for the same keywords, not sure if this is good or not, you need a lot of people in a community doing a lot of searches for it to be a really good search, I also wonder if people want to share their search results, today Google gives you different results for different people, how does that gets normalized w/ HayStaks usage?
• TauMobility – has many products but showcased telemedical diagnosis system, basically a doctor in another location can see a patient and see her medical data (e.g., blood pressure, heart rate, etc), they have medical devices that collect the data and upload it to servers to be shared instantly (real-time?) with doctors, I learned that the medical devices like a stethoscope with a USB connection needs to have FDA approval because it’s medical-related, they are trying to get into hospitals, so far one in New Jersey and maybe another one.  I heard getting the medical industry to go electronic all the way is hard.
• MomoLocal – I didn’t get a chance to talk to these guys, but from afar, it reminded by of Zaarly, they tout themselves as a “community marketplace for anything by anyone”, I’m a bit Zaarly-biased because I met some of the guys at Where 2.0 conference.
• Schwinkers – drinking made social, if you’re lonely and need a drinking buddy, use it to find drinking partners, they are doing a big push in the Mission District in SF, so if you live there, check it out.  I was drawn to the pedestal because I liked the big mustache logo and wooden background, I am very scientific.  It would be interesting to see a Groupon-like approach to buying drinks incorporated into the service.
• Short Enuf – temporary URL shortening service, think Bit.ly but with a time limit, the founder told me that you can share long URLs easily using the service especially on a mobile device where you don’t want to type in the whole URL.  If there is real value in this, I don’t see why Bit.ly wouldn’t just add time limits.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t get to all the pedestals.  There were some pedestals that had a lot of people, HipMunk being one of them.  It would have been great I was surprised that there wasn’t a lot of schwag being given out.  I got a bunch stickers though.  :)

You can find out more at the official event website.