Tech Start Hub

Blog

10 things small businesses should know about using Twitter

0
10 things small businesses should know about using Twitter

Original post by  via ZDNet

In late February, Twitter began recruiting small businesses for a new advertising service by offering credits of up to $100 for those who signed up to help it beta-test its ideas. The service was supposed to go into testing during March (the recruitment site is still live if you want to participate), and the social networking technology company hopes to sign up people for real starting in late 2012.

Meanwhile, the social networking company has released a guide to help small-business ownersget started as tweeps (see below). Some of the ideas are very rudimentary and intended for neophytes, focused on explaining how to use hashtags or retweets to reach different or broader audiences.

For example, here are some terms you’ll need to know, if you don’t know them already:

  1. Tweet – The term describing a 140-word-limit comment sent out over Twitter. (Can also be a verb!)
  2. Tweep – Someone who uses Twitter.
  3. Hashtag – Twits rely on a hashtag, aka the # symbol, to reach certain audiences. For example, there may be a community that likes reading all tweets about #greentech. You can set up a custom search and follow all comments related to a certain hashtag.
  4. Retweet – This is a noun or verb to describe when someone passes one of your tweets along to his or her followers in its entirety.
  5. Mention – When someone mentions and comments on something you’ve broadcast without necessarily retweeting the whole tweet.
  6. Links – To get around the 140-character limit for tweets, you can add a link (which WILL take up space). So, you might comment on a new promotion and include a link that can be visited for more information.
  7. Meetup – When tweeps who converse regularly over Twitter get together “live” to continue a conversation or attend an event of mutual interest.
  8. Direct message – When you follow one of your followers, you open the door to receiving direct messages from that individual.

Aside from these basic things, here are some best-practice suggestions that bear reporting for those of you who haven’t lived in Twitterdom as long as I have (working on my fifth year).

READ MORE

April 16, 2012 |

Lunching with strangers: The rise of social meals

0
Lunching with strangers The rise of social meals

Original post by  via TNW

I never expected to pay to lunch with a bunch of strangers.

I’m increasingly cynical about social media and the new social-local-mobile startups, which seem to emerge daily. The craze of collaborative consumption is no exception. From sharing your apartment, to sharing your car, and even to sharing your home-cooked meals, collaborative consumption offers technology that helps you share your goods and experiences. Social eating startups are one flavor currently flooding the collaborative consumption space, with names such as GrubWithUs, LetsLunch, and local DC startup Wednesdays.com.

Although I’m addicted to going out for lunch, the reasons to use Wednesday.com escaped me. What was wrong with the people I was lunching with regularly?

However, the technology angel on my shoulder encouraged me to be open-minded. So when an email arrived from Wednesdays.com inviting me to a “Lean Startup Club Lunch,” I signed-up.

The lunch was billed as a way to discuss the previous night’s Lean Startup Club meeting (“Love’d it? Share your opinion of yesterday’s meetup with your fellow LSCers over lunch!”). I imagined meeting a group of diverse people who spanned generations, race, and gender, yet were all interested in entrepreneurship.

READ MORE

April 15, 2012 |

Bootstrapping For All Phases of Your Business

0
Bootstrapping For All Phases of Your Business

Original post by Lee Drozak via My Office Assist

Many small business owners start their business employing the bootstrapping technique, or starting using limited resources. This technique means you use little to no money and spend on only what you absolutely need while not looking for external sources to fund your venture.  Here are some suggestions for whichever phase of business you may be in.

Start
For those just starting out you know that you need a plan and some basic office items for your office.  Now is the time to take advantage of the programs that are available though non-profits such as the SBA or SCORE or check out your local colleges for business programs they may have.  In these organization you will find forms, templates and even qualified mentors to help you start your business and the plan that goes with it.

For you office, find a little used space in your home and turn that into your office or workspace and look at equipment you already have.  If you are in need of other equipment look around for sales and discounted models that have been discontinued.  With changing technology you can always find a good deal on laptops, desktops and even printers.

Grow
You are up and running however settling for mediocre will not do.  Finding like minded business owners will allow you to create an advisory board and accountability partners to which you can share ideas and strategic alliances.  Also use friends or connections for your beta groups as you develop and hone your products/services.

READ MORE

April 9, 2012 |

Austin: Tech in the City

0
Austin Tech in the City

Original post by Jenvnifer Bergen via pcmag

You may think Austin, the live music capital of the world, was built on rock ‘n’ roll, but the Texas capital may actually favor electronica. With companies like 3M, AMD, Apple, AT&T, Dell, Evernote, Facebook, Google, HP, IBM, Intel, Nvidia, and PayPal inhabiting the city, Austin is also known as the Silicon Hills.

Austin’s unique tech industry includes an array of established computer and semiconductor companies, as well as a growing number of eager Internet and social media startups. According to the Austin American-Statesman, there will be an estimated 45,000 new jobs in Austin in the next two years. Angelou Economics CEO Angelos Angelou told theStatesman that venture-backed startups, a resurgence of established tech companies, and a growing population are all drivers for a strong economy. And Angelou’s forecast seems to be right; Austin ranked second in this year’s PayScale.com list of hotspots for startup IT jobs, behind only San Francisco.

So why is Austin such a burgeoning place for tech? To begin, there’s the city’s annual 10-day-long South by Southwest Festival (SXSW), which features film screenings, concerts, and emerging technology. Getting its start in 1987, SXSW was created as way to reach out to musicians beyond central Texas and bring them in for a week of fun.

READ MORE

March 20, 2012 |

U.S. giants gobbling up Canadian technology startups

0
U.S. giants gobbling up Canadian technology startups

Original post by JAMESON BERKOW via edmontonjournal

Daniel Debow, a Salesforce.com Inc. vice-president, says his new employer has been "hiring like crazy" in recent months Photograph by: Handout , Handout

Canada hemorrhaging technology startups to the United States sounds frightening, though Dan Debow doesn’t think the trend is as bad as it sounds.

“It is not only not so bad, it is a phenomenal thing,” said the co-founder of Rypple Inc., a Toronto-based software startup acquired by California-based cloud computing giant Salesforce.com Inc. last December.

“Sometimes it is bad when companies just acquire the [intellectual property], get rid of the people and move everybody to the states. That is not a good thing, but this is the opposite.”

Mr. Debow, now a vice president at Salesforce, will be unveiling Thursday what his new employer did with Rypple’s social media-styled employee evaluation software, often described as a ‘Facebook for feedback’. He will announce the launch of Salesforce Rypple from San Francisco, though Mr. Debow and his co-founder David Stein both still call Toronto home.

“Salesforce has not only not required everyone to move, they have actually doubled down expanded,” he said, noting the office has been “hiring like crazy” in recent months.

The new product integrates Rypple’s core product into the broader ecosystem of Salesforce software, which Mr. Debow says marks the first time such a widespread social integration has occurred in the human capital space. “And a lot of it happened in downtown Toronto and that is something we can all be proud of,” he said.

Another Canadian company recently scooped up by Salesforce, Vancouver’s Sitemasher Corp., formed the basis of another product the company is announcing Thursday called Site.com. Again, instead of shutting down the Web content publishing platform provider and shipping its staff stateside, the Sitemasher office was unofficially renamed Salesforce Vancouver and the local headcount has since grown.

READ MORE

March 17, 2012 |

Don’t Be Afraid To Go Pink:
Designing Great Tech Products For Women

0
Don’t Be Afraid To Go Pink Designing Great Tech Products For Women

Original post by SARAH PAIJI AND SANBY LEE via TC

Editor’s Note: This guest post was written bySarah Paiji, co-founder and CEO of Snapette, a mobile fashion shopping startup that drives users to nearby stores. She is an alumni of 500 Startups accelerator and dropped out of Harvard Business School to work on Snapette full-time with her co-founder Jinhee Ahn Kim. Snapette Director of Marketing Sanby Lee also contributed to the post.

When it comes to fashion, women have embraced products that were originally designed for men. Flip through any J.Crew catalog and you’ll encounter the Boyfriend Jean, Boyfriend Blazer, unisex ankle boots, and of course the classic men’s shirt paired with skinny jeans.

When it comes to tech? Not so much. In the predominantly male tech world, products are usually, by default, designed by men — for men. However, women have different design preferences and needs, with research showing that men and women do indeed use the Web and social media in different ways.

Designers and developers may be missing out on a huge opportunity by overlooking the gender of users when creating products. Women control 80 percent of consumer spending and drive the majority of user activity on many of the largest social networks. The recent success of startups driven by female users such as Gilt Groupe, Learnvest, InDinero, OneKingsLane, and countless social gaming apps show that there is value in focusing specifically on the female consumer.

So if a large portion of your customer base is women (or you’d like it to be) how do you design for them? As women who are developing products for other women, here’s what we’ve learned from our experience:

READ MORE

March 15, 2012 |

Startup site powers students network

0
Which Startups Are Breaking Out at SXSW

Original post by  via mashable

Mashable’s SXSW coverage is presented by the Samsung Galaxy Note, a smarter phone for a smarter world. Check it out here, follow @SamsungMobileUS or join the conversation via #benoteworthy on Twitter.

As SXSW Interactive kicks off, tech startups, app developers and technology fans are descending upon Austin for Geek Spring Break. The question on everyone’s lips is: What will be the next hot startup?

Historically, startups have used SXSW to either launch their apps or services or “break out” to a wider audience.Twitter and Foursquare are the most famous SXSW success stories, but they aren’t alone — dozens of startups and services have used SXSW to get traction and buzz.

Mashable‘s mRank leaderboard is tracking which startups are getting the most social media buzz at SXSW. mRank calculates buzz on a scale of 1-100 for a particular term (in this case, we’re using the company or product name), based on the conversations taking place on Twitter, Facebook and various blogs.

Our leaderboard has already begun tracking the startups, and it hints at the top trends of SXSW. Be sure to check out the leaderboard throughout the weekend to see how the buzz changes.

READ MORE

March 11, 2012 |

How Signal Stands Out in the Crowded
Text-Message Marketing Space

0
How Signal Stands Out in the Crowded Text-Message Marketing Space

Original post by  via Entrepreneur

Signal CEO Jeff Judge Photo courtesy of Signal

It’s hard to stay focused in the digital world, but Signal founders Jeff Judge and Chris Watland have turned their SMS-marketing startup into a web success story by emphasizing the fundamentals. The duo got in on the ground floor of the exploding text-marketing industry, building an easy-to-use platform for firms managing SMS campaigns. Today Signal has evolved into a cross-channel marketing platform for managing text campaigns, e-mail marketing, social media and even coupons and sweepstakes from a single cloud-based account.

And they did it without a dime from outside investors.

The Chicago-based company pulls in $2.7 million in annual revenue and has run more than 200,000 campaigns for more than 1,000 clients, including Redbox and Sears, since its launch in 2006. And Signal remains lean, running a 15-person office.

From Real Estate to SMS
Watland and Judge met back in ’06. Watland had been working in public accounting for PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Judge started out as a management consultant before a stint at web travel firm Orbitz, where he worked his way up from software engineer to director of technology. Both had ambitions for making it on their own, and they struck up a friendship pitching business ideas back and forth.

READ MORE

March 10, 2012 |

Silicon Valley’s hottest
social network isn’t Facebook: It’s Pinterest

0
Silicon Valley's hottest social network isn't Facebook It's PinterestSilicon Valley's hottest social network isn't Facebook It's Pinterest

Original post by Peter Delevett via insidebayarea

It’s a half-hour before the CEO of Silicon Valley’s hottest social network is set to take the stage and it’s already standing room only at the Startup Grind gathering in Palo Alto.

The bimonthly confab of tech entrepreneurs has nabbed some high-profile speakers in recent months. “The crowd was big for Kevin Rose,” Dave Wamsley, a regular attendee, said of the Digg founder. “But now Elvis has entered the building.”

Elvis, it turns out, is a baby-faced native of Iowa with a somewhat shy mien. Ben Silbermann is CEO of one of the fastest-growing websites in history — Pinterest, which lets its 12 million-and-counting monthly visitors collect and share digital images and link them to websites.

serial entrepreneur who has been in Silicon Valley since the dot-com era, said he hasn’t seen a startup take off overnight like this since Netscape.

Indeed, Startup Grind founder Derek Anderson admitted while chatting onstage with Silbermann this week that he’d never heard of Pinterest until a year ago, when he asked his wife, “What’s that on your computer?” Turned out she’d been spending every night on the site, looking for recipe tips and the like — for four hours at a time. Before long, all of her friends were, too, in keeping with the site’s heavily female demographic.

READ MORE

March 5, 2012 |

Today in Tech: What’s Google doing with $120 million?

0
Today in Tech What's Google doing with $120 million

Original post by  via FORTUNE

Fortune’s curated selection of tech stories from the weekend. Sign up to get the round-up delivered to you each and every day.


* How the music industry adapted to social media. (Brian Solis)

* Private social network Path came under fire in recent weeks after reports hit that the startup was storing users’ address book information on their servers. Since then, the company has apologized and reversed its actions, howeverNew York Times columnist argues Path’s data-mining issue represents a larger problem, where Silicon Valley upstarts tinker with user data and privacy first, then “apologize” for doing so later. (The New York Times)

* Google (GOOG) has $120 million worth of construction projects in the works, including a lab for its recently-reported “@home” music-streaming service, a 120,000 square foot “Google Experience Center” for clients and partners, and perhaps most interestingly, a lab for “Project X,” which may somehow involve the use of precision optical technology. (San Jose Mercury News)

READ MORE

February 16, 2012 |
Vantage Theme, business directory software, powered by WordPress.