Tech Omelet

@michaelrlitt

It's been awhile - I wish I had the time and initiative to handle this blog AND the business. The reality (and what many of you don't know) is that I'm still enrolled in my undergrad. Fortunately for myself, the business and everyone in my life, I'll be finished my degree on April 19th.

Beer will ensue.

The past 4 months have been very busy. The business is succeeding, we're hiring, we visited some VC's on SandHill road, set up shop with an office in Sunnyvale, CA (at the Plug and Play Tech Centre), sponsored TedX Waterloo, had a booth at the Tech Leadership Conference (where we met Geoffrey Moore) and continually ramped up business for Redwoods Media.

The new news is that we've built a platform for video. We've received traction from big enterprise all the way to small business/startup. The product - vidyard - is still undoubtedly in alpha, but it's robust and useable. Features are being added/implemented every day.

Looking at my blog posts from roughly 6 months ago is fun. I'm amazed at my insight then but also intrigued at how fast things have changed. I plan on sharing some lessons learned on this blog over the next few weeks. Chances are (if you're reading this) - you're following me on Twitter or a friend of mine on Facebook. If you are running a business or thinking about starting one, tune in here. If you have questions or concepts you'd like me to write about - feel free to ask! 

Thanks to everyone for hanging in there - especially those close to me. You know who you are!

@michaelrlitt

Don't be a Wantreprenuer! 

I tweeted an article yesterday about a study to predict fluctuations in the stock market by analyzing twitter moods about trending topics related to corporate performance.

 

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"So these guys took 9.7 million tweets posted by 2.7 million tweeters between March and December 2008 and looked for correlations between the GPOMS indices and whether Dow Jones Industrial Average rose of fell each day."

"We find an accuracy of 87.6% in predicting the daily up and down changes in the closing values of the Dow Jones Industrial Average," say Bollen and co"

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It makes sense. After all, a portion of the Twitter community is not Beiber obsessed and probably maintains opinion and invests in any number of industries. 

Playing the stock-market sucks. Back when I was designing toilets as an intern at a small RV manufacturer in my home-town, I dappled in day-trading, shorting and making 1-2 month long investments in all sorts of stock. My interests were in Technology, however my biggest success was with Pharmaceuticals and Mining.

I used to listen to earnings calls and hedge on overnight results via shorting or bidding, I was rarely met with success. For some reason, I never got it right. I'd say "up" and everyone else (with considerably more market pull then me) would say "down".

What gave? Once I hedged on a pharmaceutical company via an anonymous tip on the Bull-Board that the FDA had approved one of their ingredients in a topical foot-cream. The next day was spent away from my computer, testing toilets for fitment. On that day, the stock value inflated to over 700% of the previous day's closing price. By the time I was at my computer, the bomb was dropping. Fortunately I managed to get out with a considerable gain of just over 410%.

6 months of analysis and education were validated in 8 hours. I had paid my "trading tuition" and it all came down to luck. This was the last time I bought stock.

Where are you going with this?

4 Years have passed and last night I found myself laying in bed, listening to Steve Jobs' rant about tablet screen sizes and sandpaper during Apples Q4, 2010 earnings call. 

The big announcement? $20B dollars. My instinct? BUY!!! Reality? See below, October 19th, 2010.

Can Social Media be leveraged to predict or quantify stock prices in advance? Perhaps this is the software-messiah I've been waiting for.

I've also heard that Social Media has been used to predict Box-Office sales.

Is a solid purpose emerging for these networked technologies? Can advanced algorithms identify success, failure and fluctuations in stock prices? What about global economy?

This is very exciting stuff, especially for you Data nerds. Where are the apps? Where is my data visualization?

@michaelrlitt

Don't be a wantrepreneur.

The word Entrepreneur is missing some letters. Those letters are "M" and "A". Can't figure out why? Let me tell you a story. 

An old-friend of mine had a great idea, let's call it a social network for a specific form of artist. At the time he was employed by a fantastic corporation, lived in a great area and had a respectible salary with benefits. 

The dream of independence has strong pull for some. For this particular gentleman, the pull could have been considered irresistible. In fact, he decided to quit his well paying, highly respected job in pursuit of (said) happiness.

I hope I've painted the picture very clearly. To help, let's say that the product was non-existent, had zero web or socially marketed presence and no form of documented consumer/market research. 

Some would say he left the job too early. My response? Yes and No - it's hard for some to switch gears. people who can't chew gum and walk are better off just walking. Get the flow?

No one had spoken with a lawyer, accountants, financiers, but most importantly (and the moral of the story), there was NO sounding-board. 

As I'm sure you can understand, founding a company is difficult at best. Dealing with legalities, finance, hiring, firing and marketing creates a sum of tasks too tall for one person to manage. Entrepreneur's go crazy over time, you need someone to go crazy with.

So in short, what was my friend missing? 

A co-founder. 

Someone to share the pain, handle the accountants, lawyers, documents, applications for funding, marketing, logo/brand design and customer research.

Small tasks can really absorb patience and focus. A product designer needs to channel everything he/she has got to initiate "success". 

So what could the missing letters spell? T_E_A_M. Cheesy right? Not really - ideas don't get financed, solid teams do - everybody knows that. Find someone you like, not love, and get to work - conflicting personalities are a good thing.

For the love of all things, don't go it yourself. There's no "I" in entrepreneur. 

@michaelrlitt

P.S. Our team is awesome. Thanks guys, you know who you are.

Don't be a Wantrepreneur.

Don't be a wantrepreneur, I used to be one.

I go to a fair number of networking events. I generally use these as an opportunity to develop warm leads for redwoods media.

Since we're not exactly selling bread to a bakery, cold-calling is fairly ineffective and we end up relying on daisy-chained "warm" referrals from customer to customer, lead to lead, and acquaintance to acquaintance.

I often run into people I would wholly classify as wantrepreneurs. These are the people I avoid, as they're often pitching any number of ideas with minimal competitive or market analysis entering the event.

I hate hearing about new social networks, apps and widgets. I hate hearing about startups that require $3M to develop a software product. The catch? The exit strategy is always acquisition based. The reality? VC's aren't investing as much. If you don't have grey hair or a solid team of extremely-talented folk, you'll never get the money.

It's with this in mind that I really condone something VC's hate and rarely ever invest in: the "lifestyle startup".

I classify a lifestyle startup as something that can break even within 6-8 months and perhaps be sustainable within  the first year. These are the companies that start by addressing a customer's need or absorb a small portion of some existing market share by implementing small value adds and innovations.

They don't experience insane growth or make millionaire's overnight. They DO allow you to experience entrepreneurship, management, cash flow and independence. Isn't that what you wanted in the first-place?

Don't be an wantrepreneur. Focus on one thing, that will make you money/be sustainable in the short-term. Make small evolutionary pivots as necessary and recognize when the ship is sinking. That's the key to the city my friend.

@michaelrlitt

Awesome Infographic - LifeHacks, courtesy of theirtoys.com

This infographic should help you find out:

-Mike

Found this fantastic image, courtesy of onlineschools.org and thought it was worth a share.

Most people think I'm a heavy Mac user. I'm not. My computer of choice? The Asus 1201N. Dual core Atom N330, Nvidia ION 1, windows 7 and 2GB of RAM. This machine is pretty quick - it has no problem with 1080p video and I've benchmarked a variety of 2008, 2009 games with surprisingly good results.

It's weakness? Flash. Flash sucks. Netbooks, those machine designed to explore the web-on-the-go, suck because flash exists. For some reason, Intel puts these run-of-the mill Atom processors in these things. Their power-requirements are pretty much equivalent to the 1.3GHz CULV (Consumer Ultra Low Voltage) Core 2 Duo processors we're seeing in CULV laptops, but the Core 2 Duos absolutely PANTS the Atom!

Flash is a fantastic tool for developing content - it ruins the web-experience. I don't think I was the only one disappointed with GPU enabled flash 10.1. Does flash still have a chance? 

One thing for certain, Intel is making a splash with it's new 32nm CULV processor designs. Maybe I'm due for an upgrade sooner then I thought - maybe adobe will get's it's junk in gear and build a competitive and satisfying platform. It's interesting how monopoly's fall so hard so fast due to lack of innovation.

-Mike

Under the wings of an aspiring startup and managing a blog with sustained Ad-sense revenue, I feel I'm at a point where I can seriously comment on the value of a both ad-platforms.

A Google Ad-words account is essentially the bread-and-butter of any fledgling service-based company's success. Initializing a good campaign and learning from your mistakes are essential to boosting your page-rank and meaningful ad-conversions. The Page-Rank algorithm (Google's method of ranking your page in search results) is highly secretive, one can only make reasonable conjecture's as to how it works.

Gone are the days of keyword tracking (thanks to keyword spammers). Now we're looking at an algorithm based off of quantity of back-links, back-link rank, site-maps AND keyword matching. It makes me wonder - is there an allocation for ad-words spending? Think about it - spending money on an ad-words campaign is going to help you achieve both impressions and clicks that are registered in google's servers. This would undoubtedly boost your page-rank.

Does this mean that an ad-words initiative is integral to a startup's success? I hope not.

I have a few problems with ad-words. Like the original query-indexes, all ad results are based on keyword and key-phrase matching. What if I want to target a specific demographic (age-group, professional in a certain field/job-type, etc.)? Moreover, what if my content is catered specifically to a demographic that is technologically proficient and uses firefox and/or chrome? These individuals are more likely to have ad-block enabled and if not, even less likely to click a "stupid Google ad".

That's where facebook ad's come in. Not only are they cheaper, they allow me to connect with specific demographics based on their account information. Now we're talking.

Unfortunately, these facebook ads are not related to search, therefore I require both an ad-words and facebook ad campaign to make sure I'm targeting both search content and demographic relationships.

Now rewind a few months back to Google Buzz. The advent of Buzz made me update and refine my Google profile and it got me thinking... Google now has some of my personal information (age, interests, jobs, etc.). Does this mean that Google ads will soon be "interest and demographic targeted" to users logged into their Google accounts while searching? 

It only makes sense. I'm sure Google is already identifying my search habits and building it's own profile of who I am - why not help it? After all, I am paying their bills.

boom.