RAZORWEST READER

A team of physicists at Cornell University has created a wrinkle in time. Actually, it’s more like a teeny tiny moth hole in time. Inside it things can occur that are entirely undetectable, at least to ordinary observers. It’s as if they never happened.

In 2006, IBM said 16% of its revenue came from growth markets, By last year, that figure had reached 21%. By 2015, the percentage of revenue the company expects to earn in growth markets will approach 30%.

Under Palmisano, IBM has already outlined a corporate strategy through 2015 that also calls for continued development of "higher-value" services and software, and an entirely new category of services and software it calls Smarter Planet.

Last year, IBM announced a plan to spend $20 billion to buy companies through 2015. That's more money than it spent in the previous 10 years. Many of those acquisitions will involve business analytics, cloud services and related software.

Business Analytics is going to be a game changer...

For a brand to be number one or two it has to occupy one of the following positions in customer’s minds:

• Be the best in its class.
• Have a unique set of attributes.
• Be the cheapest.

If a brand does not “fit” one of these perceptions then it has a “fuzzy” value proposition for most customers. Brands exist in the mind and represent a collection of experiences over time. The mind is like a dripping sponge of brand value perceptions and the only way anything new can get in is to replace what already exists with a newer better brand value perception.

Typically brands lose positions as the result of the introduction of faster, better, or cheaper solutions. This is particularly apparent in the telephony, computer, and software markets where many of the pioneers like Nokia, HP, and Microsoft are rapidly losing share of mind to more nimble competitors who are introducing a plethora of new devices and operating systems that allow consumers to experience a much richer overall life experience and a level of socialization never before available.

Every CEO must carefully compare their firms’ unique resources with specific customer’s changing requirements and select those that the organization can satisfy better than their competitors. When this is done well and promoted effectively your brand will “own” a position in the mind of a certain set of customers.

Been hearing this for years, but so few take this good advice.

Software firm Jobs2Web, a cloud-based recruiting platform that lures top candidates through social networks such as LinkedIn and Twitter, has been acquired for $110 million in cash.

The Minnetonka, Minn-based company, which appeared on the Inc. 500 for the third year in a row this year, will be acquired by California-based SuccessFactors, a human resources software vendor that is itself being acquired by German company SAP.

Jobs2Web acquired for $110M, with 2010 revenues of $9.9M. Interesting.

Autodesk's SketchBook apps for phones and the iPad are best-sellers that have been downloaded seven million times. It doesn't add up to a huge amount of revenue: perhaps $15 million. But there's more than money to this innovation story. With its first consumer hit, Autodesk now has more customers than it did in all its previous 29 years combined.

"It's the best advertising we've had in years," says Autodesk CEO Carl Bass. What's more, the home-grown apps are teaching Autodesk how to reach a fast-growing new audience that uses tablets and phones. Last year, Autodesk launched a new consumer products division, which includes SketchBook and other design programs that don't require users to have high-end computers.

interesting...

A startup called RedCritter is taking a new approach, with software that turns the task of measuring performance and sticking to a schedule into something more like a game. And managing software projects is just the beginning. The company's founder, veteran entrepreneur Mike Beaty, wants to apply these techniques to other business problems, like increasing sales leads and improving customer service.

RedCritter's software, called Tracker, is currently designed to work specifically with so-called agile software development methods, in which programmers launch themselves into short, well-defined tasks called "scrums" that allow rapid improvement of code. Agile development is the programming method of choice for many startups, especially those developing Web-based systems. Tracker uses video-game-style points, badges, and a Twitter-style conversation stream to turn the often deadly boring business of managing a software project into something programmers can enjoy.

For all the differences among them, the juggernauts of social media rely on a common business model: create free services, then sell ads against users' information. In a dramatic departure, a new social network plans to give its users a 50 percent commission—or even let them sell their own ads and keep all the revenue.

Chime.in is built around users' interests—think photography, politics, or travel—as opposed to friends, professional contacts, or news. The site's founders hope that by creating pages around those interests, the users will attract people with similar affinities, an attractive combination for targeted advertising.

"Because social is going to be so powerful, I feel that the people who are creating the engaging social content should have some stake," says Bill Gross, the serial entrepreneur who is the CEO of both Idealab, a startup incubator, and Ubermedia, a social media developer that launched Chime.in. "Right now that's sort of a heresy—but I almost like it that people think it's heresy. It gives me more of a lead." 

Thousands of people every day use the link-shortening service Bitly to tame unwieldy Web links to share on Twitter and other social media sites. Few realize that they're simultaneously helping the New York company peer into the Web's future. Bitly analyzes the pages pointed to by the 80 million short links it generates every day to predict changes in the public's attitude toward people and companies. Now Bitly is set to get access to a slew of new data that could make its Web crystal ball even better at forecasting the future.

Bitly has reached a data-sharing agreement with Verisign, based in Dulles, Virginia. Verisign acts as a kind of telephone directory for the Internet. Any address typed into a browser is sent to servers at Verisign or one of a handful of other organizations, which help turn that URL into a numerical address that a computer can use to find the Web page it needs.

Verisign looks up over 50 billion URLs every day and, like Bitly, gets a handle on what people are doing online as a result.

Recent advances in information technologies may be driving people out of work and enriching the already rich, a new book argues. The book challenges the long-held view that new technology displaces workers in the short term but always creates more jobs in the long term.

New approaches to manufacturing are set to take hold over the next few years, challenging the basic assumptions of industrial production. Much like the Big Bang, we’ll see manufacturing fragment and recombine along several dimensions:

- From centralized factories to distributed workshops

- From global centralization to highly local cottage industries

Traditional assembly lines have long placed limitations on where and how objects can be produced. But emerging additive and flexible manufacturing technologies are opening possibilities in personalization, democratization, and design that break free from traditional assumptions. While 3D printers have been around for a while, their use is reaching an inflection point and a new generation of home models promises to bring the means of production into peoples’ homes. Applications extend from printing jewelry and toys to printing organs and houses.

Interesting...

It won’t be long before people have a 3-D printer sitting at home alongside its old inkjet counterpart. These 3-D printers, some already costing less than a computer did in 1999, can print objects by spraying layers of plastic, metal or ceramics into shapes. People can download plans for an object, hit print, and a few minutes later have it in their hands.

Call it the Industrial Revolution 2.0. Not only will it change the nature of manufacturing, but it will further challenge our concept of ownership and copyright. Suppose you covet a lovely new mug at a friend’s house. So you snap a few pictures of it. Software renders those photos into designs that you use to print copies of the mug on your home 3-D printer.

3-D Manufacturing is (a future) for some large city - Philadelphia maybe?

The Saranac Lake Community Store and others like it reflect a growing shift among some communities to lessen their dependence on global businesses and invest their resources in homegrown enterprises that contribute to the welfare of the community. These efforts flow from studies showing that, dollar for dollar, locally owned companies contribute more to local economies than corporate chains. That is because more money stays local rather than leaking out to a distant headquarters.

In a recent analysis of nearly 3,000 rural and urban areas across the United States, a pair of Pennsylvania State University economists found that the areas with more small, locally owned businesses (with fewer than 100 employees) had greater per capita income growth over the period from 2000 to 2007, while the presence of larger, nonlocal firms depressed economic growth.

“There is definitely a trend towards community-rooted alternatives,” said Stacy Mitchell, a senior researcher at the Institute for Local Self Reliance, a nonprofit research and educational organization. Citing the Occupy Wall Street protests and Move Your Money campaigns, she said, “More people are interested in taking the economy back.”

Cooperatives — nonprofit businesses like food stores and credit unions owned by and run on behalf of their members — are one common manifestation of the trend. In a co-op, each member gets one vote, and excess revenue not reinvested in the business is distributed among members either as rebates or, in the case of credit unions, lower fees and better interest rates. In the United States, a University of Wisconsin study estimated, there are more than 29,000 co-ops generating $654 billion in revenue, and the number is growing.

Community-owned stores are not as well known and are structured as profit-making corporations, but the aim is the same: to keep ownership and control in the community, and to share the prosperity.

The Saranac Lake Community Store is a C corporation, the typical big business form, but the resemblance ends there. If and when there are profits that are not plowed back into the store, they will be distributed to investors — many of whom are also the store’s customers. The store’s three employees are paid a modest salary, but one that is above average for the area, and receive health benefits and paid sick days. “That was very important to us,” said Ms. Little, the board president.

The movie DVD and streaming service Netflix is responsible for nearly a third of the Internet usage in the United States, but it’s the mass migration from wired to wireless networks that will push an already burdened system over the brink, according the report, titled “Point of View: Wireless Point of Disconnect.”

According to the report, the volume of data traffic on U.S. networks will increase by 1,800 percent over the next four years, and mobile video will account for two-thirds of data traffic worldwide.

Wow! nearly 1/3 of all Internet usage in the US is from Netflix!

On Thursday, Boston Dynamics showed off its latest robot: the AlphaDog. This new robot is essentially BigDog’s big scary brother. It’s officially called a “Legged Squad Support System,” or LS3, and it is financed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency at the Pentagon, also known as Darpa, and the Marine Corps.

According to Boston Dynamics, the AlphaDog can carry up to 400 pounds of gear, while storing enough fuel for a trip that covers 20 miles over 24 hours. The AlphaDog robot also doesn’t need a driver, as it can be programmed to follow a designated leader using computer vision. It can also be programmed to independently travel to specific places using sensors and GPS.

The video shows some of the tricks the AlphaDog can perform, including running over boulders and fallen trees, and galloping like a horse while being aggressively pushed to the side. The most impressive feature is its ability to stand up independently while lying on its side or back.

great article.

A new social network, called Jig, aims to be a place where users do more than just share personal news or play games. It's a hangout where they can help solve one another's problems.

Jig was founded by Joshua Schachter, the creator of the social bookmarking site Del.icio.us, which in the early 2000s popularized the idea of tagging, as well as the notion of publicly sharing links people found interesting. Schachter's new site is pitched as halfway between a social network and a marketplace for advice and help, whether restaurant recommendation or diet tips.

The Jig homepage greets users with a blank, one-line text box prefaced by the words "I need." Once a person types in their want, their entry is added to the site's list of "recent needs" for other users to view and, if they're feeling helpful, address.

Numerous question-and-answer sites already exist, but Jig is notable for its focus on social interaction, and because users post with the expectation of acting on the advice they receive. "What we're trying to do is get the needs people have in front of other people that can help," says Schachter. "We're trying to build a social network around utility rather than just sharing stuff."

The definition specifies five "essential" characteristics of cloud computing: self-service; accessibility from desktops, laptops, and mobile phones; resources that are pooled among multiple users and applications; elastic resources that can be rapidly reapportioned as needed; and measured service. These characteristics combine to make cloud computing a kind of infrastructure or utility. It's not cloud computing when a company rents a specific computer in a rack at a facility that happens to be in Denver; it is cloud computing when a company rents a virtual host generated by machines that might physically reside in Denver, Atlanta, or New York.

Adaptly uses social media advertising APIs, like Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook and StumbleUpon, and allows brands to schedule campaigns across all of the networks at once. Media buyers no longer have to call up every site separately to spend their client's social media advertising dollars. Instead, they can put the entire budget in Adaptly, and Sethi's team will divvy it up accordingly.

The company spent $432 million on marketing in the first 6 months of 2011 ($345 million of which was on online marketing to acquire new subscribers). It had $225 million in cash.

Just a few months ago, daily deal coupons were the new big thing. The biggest dealmaker, Groupon, was preparing to go public at a valuation as high as $30 billion, which would have been a record amount for a start-up less than three years old. Hundreds of copycat coupon sites sprung up in Groupon’s wake, including DoubleTakeDeals, YourBestDeals, DealFind, DoodleDeals, DealOn, DealSwarm and GoDailyDeals. Deal sites were widely praised as a replacement for local advertising.

Now coupon fatigue is setting in.

But how can you figure out what stories are relevant in a town or neighborhood when the local media is so thin on the ground? And how do you even define "newsiness" or "relevance" when there's hardly enough material to allow a user to narrow their interests?

Subscription has proved by far the best way of paying for high-quality television. Advertising veers up and down with the economic cycle, and can be skipped by using digital video recorders. And any outfit that depends on advertising is liable to worry more about offending advertisers than about pleasing viewers. Voluntary subscription is also preferable to the compulsory, universal variety that pays for the BBC and other European public broadcasters. A broadcaster supported by a tax on everyone must try to please everyone. And a government can starve public broadcasters of money, too—as the BBC is painfully learning.

But pay-television is now under threat, especially in America (see article). Prices have been driven so high at a time of economic malaise that many people simply cannot afford it. Disruptive, deep-pocketed firms like Amazon and Netflix lurk, whispering promises of internet-delivered films and television shows for little or no money. Whether the lure of such alternatives or poverty is what is causing people to cancel their subscriptions is not clear. But the proportion of Americans who pay for TV is falling. Other countries may follow.

Foursquare, the location-based social network that lets users tell their friends where they are, announced new features on Thursday that allow check-ins at events, like concerts or movies, instead of just the places where those events are happening.

Individuals cannot act with group goals in mind until they see themselves as members of that group. In situations such as the recent London riots, this group identity seems to form spontaneously, but studies of the riots in England 30 years ago suggest a more complex buildup.

"Riots are the endpoint of a very long and entrenched process of social sense-making," Reicher says. "When an event comes along that clicks in perfectly to this broader social understanding, then suddenly it's much more likely to make you see yourself as a group member."

Google Plus just got a little more fun. The company announced Thursday that it’s adding a games section to its fledgling social network, and is taking a different approach than its rival, Facebook.

In the past, Facebook games have been criticized for spamming users with minute updates on every little thing going on at friends’ virtual farms and cafes. Google promised that those uninterested in games won’t have to see any information about them in news feeds.

Companies in the post-startup phase often require new layers of management.

As companies scale up in size, sitting CEOs should consider stepping aside.

CEOs seeking to bring their companies to the next level need to focus on recruiting talent who fill gaps in their own skill set.

If you haven't read this site before, it's great. Spend some time reading the articles and going through the archive. good stuff.

- Chris Mengel

It turns out that there are two key attributes have the highest impact on outstanding CMO performance: orientation towards results and change leadership.

 

Important to execute and get things done. Define success, manage the project, see success, and close the project out and open a new one.

- Chris Mengel

Now, only 45.3 percent of CEOs expect business conditions to be at least ‘good’ in the next year, up from July’s 41 percent.

Well, we are at least moving in the right direction.

- Chris Mengel

In July 2011, market research firm Lab42 surveyed LinkedIn users and found that the audience is highly engaged: 32% check the site several times a week and 35% check it daily.

Lab42 also found that 42% of users update their profiles regularly and 81% belong to at least one group. LinkedIn users are interacting with the site, which means they are also interacting with the companies on the site, as well as seeing the ads served there.

When it comes to the reasons why professionals use the site, employees act differently based on their position. Top level executives use the site mainly for industry networking (22%) and promoting their businesses (20%). Middle management professionals are more prone to use LinkedIn primarily to keep in touch (24%) with others, as well as for industry networking (20%). Entry level employees, not surprisingly, are using the site mainly for job searching (24%) and co-worker networking (23%).

35% check the site daily! That's a tool that is solving a need.

Google launched its Facebook competitor, Google+, just over a week ago now. Even though sign-ups have so far been limited to a fraction of Facebook's 750 million users, it already appears that, for a lot of people, Google+ will become the other social network they need to use. Why? Because a significant fraction of their friends will force them to.

It's not just that Google+ has 10-person video hangouts, or that Google+ is magically free of privacy worries. It's that Google has created the opportunity for Facebook-weary people to perform what one called "a reset on Facebook," allowing them to escape from Facebook members they've friended over the years but don't really want to interact with—and can't quite bring themselves to defriend.

The killer feature of Google+ is that, unlike Facebook, LinkedIn, or most other social networks, there's no such thing as a friend request. Users can create groups of friends, called Circles in Google+ terminology. These circles can include both other Google+ users and nonusers who receive status updates via e-mail rather than via the site. As a Google+ user, you can share your status updates and favorite links with those in one or more of these easily created circles, or with everyone. And you can see what other users have shared with you, or with everyone, in a Facebook-like feed that runs down the middle of the page. 

When a person adds you to a circle you get a notification.  If you don't add that person to your own circles they will know because they won't get a notification themselves. On Facebook you can cause offence by not confirming a friend request; on Google+ you can do it by not reciprocally adding someone to your circles. But you won't have an explicit friend request to snub, nor will you create a public list of friends whom you didn't really want to be seen with.

This is a key reason why I believe it will succeed. Another, is that they make it so easy to merge - or move - contacts from LinkedIn over to Google+.

I have much more flexibility with this system than the others.

Bluefin Labs wants to know not how many people are watching a TV show, but what they're saying about it. This week, the company, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, launched its first product: Bluefin Signals, a tool for monitoring and analyzing audience reaction to TV shows, which it collects by simultaneously monitoring television and social media feeds.

Bluefin has spent the past three years building up the infrastructure, algorithms, and computing power needed to process the enormous quantities of data generated by social media sites including Twitter and Facebook. Currently, the platform processes more than three billion public comments each month.

The flood of information available online with just a few clicks and finger-taps may be subtly changing the way we retain information, according to a new study. But this doesn't mean we're becoming less mentally agile or thoughtful, say the researchers involved. Instead, the change can be seen as a natural extension of the way we already rely upon social memory aids—like a friend who knows a particular subject inside out.

Researchers and writers have debated over how our growing reliance on Internet-connected computers may be changing our mental faculties. The constant assault of tweets and YouTube videos, the argument goes, might be making us more distracted and less thoughtful—in short, dumber. However, there is little empirical evidence of the Internet's effects, particularly on memory.

Internet companies are notoriously difficult to value, as investors learned in the dot-com crash 11 years ago. But since the "Web 2.0" companies fueling this year's Internet IPOs rely upon having a reliable group of engaged users, they do offer at least one telling metric: the amount of money each user is worth. That's why venture capitalists evaluating such businesses in their early stages often examine how much revenue a company is generating per user.

Bijan Sabet, a venture capitalist at Spark Capital, which has invested in several Internet companies, including Twitter, FourSquare, and Tumblr, says his firm often considers $2 of annual revenue per user to be an important target threshold for startups.

If you’re looking for one overarching explanation for the still-terrible job market, it is this great consumer bust. Business executives are only rational to hold back on hiring if they do not know when their customers will fully return. Consumers, for their part, are coping with a sharp loss of wealth and an uncertain future (and many have discovered that they don’t need to buy a new car or stove every few years). Both consumers and executives are easily frightened by the latest economic problem, be it rising gas prices or the debt-ceiling impasse.

These days, 47-year-old Kevin Ryan may be the most disruptive entrepreneur on the Web.

As CEO of AlleyCorp, Mr. Ryan oversees a network of startups in New York City's Silicon Alley. The jewel in his crown, at least for the moment, is Gilt Groupe. Currently valued at $1 billion, the four-year-old business is by some estimates the most valuable U.S. e-commerce company other than Amazon.

Mr. Ryan is the kind of guy who has 10 inventive ideas per day—or hour. But the concept for Gilt originated with a French company called Vente Privée. He travels regularly to France—including for a year in 1990 at the business school Insead where he met his (French) wife—and he witnessed the incredible popularity of the online retailer. "Why," Mr. Ryan wondered, "is no one doing this here?"

It clicked on 18th Street in April 2007. "I was walking by and these 200 women were lined up, waiting in line for a Marc Jacobs sample sale. And I'm thinking: That's unbelievable—the passion!" he recalls. His next thought: "There are 200 here, but how many women would like to be at this sample sale right now? Obviously the ones in Kansas would be. Even the ones in Westchester. There's women even two blocks away in a meeting. So it means that there's tens or hundreds of thousands of people—and I can do that. I can bring that to them."

Today, a startup called TrapIt launched a beta website that recommends content after learning your tastes via an artificial-intelligence engine spun out of research originally funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Sarah Townsend will no longer have to leave her 507 Facebook friends behind to buy the £35 ($55) baggy sweater she's been eyeing from Asos. On Jan. 27, the hip, London-based online clothing site became the first European fashion retailer to open an e-tailing outpost inside Facebook. Competitors such as Gap (GPS) and Inditex's Zara use the networking site largely to communicate with fans. Visitors to Asos's store on Facebook can shop the company's entire stock of 150,000 products without leaving the site. They also can post photos of items to their wall so friends can comment on potential purchases. "It's something I want to do more of," says Townsend, a 25-year-old marketing professional in London.

Asos and other retailers are going after consumers that marketing pros call "moppers"—as in mobile shoppers.

There are nearly 150 million social media users in the U.S. alone, which is more than 60% of the U.S. internet population.

According to eMarketer, the average time spent per user on social networks as of late 2010 exceeded 5 hours per month. Remember this is an average number, many users eclipse this number by a significant amount. As an example, according to clickZ, Blog readers average 23 hours online each week.

Nielsen data shows a 2x lift in brand metrics around social ads vs. non-social ads.

GroupM’s research reports a significant lift in search behavior from users exposed to a brand on social networks.

Over 12 million American adults currently maintain a blog.

I have clients who have tens of thousands of Facebook Fans, oodles and oodles of Twitter followers, popular blogs, have driven huge increases in revenue, and have quite literally changed the dynamics of their businesses, brands and cultures via social media.

There are four general types of public offerings: 1) Initial public offerings (IPOs) of securities issued by companies that have never before issued any public securities (normally common stock is the first security to be issued in an IPO); 2) Initial public offerings of new securities that companies that are already public have not before issued (e.g., a new class of convertible debt security); 3) Further public offerings of securities that are already publicly traded (e.g., the issuance of additional common stock when its price is sufficiently high so that cost of capital is sufficiently low); 4) Public offerings by company shareholders of securities that are already publicly traded (e.g., when an original large shareholder, say a private equity fund, wants to cash out its position).

Underlying Groupon’s success is an auction. It’s not explicit, like Google’s AdWords bidding platform, but the economic effects are similar. The fact that Groupon runs daily deals creates artificial scarcity and drives up pricing to absurd levels. Even with four deals a day in a given market, you’re talking about fewer than 1,500 deals a year.

The “bid” in this auction is the total revenue that goes to Groupon. That’s a function of the value of the voucher, the negotiated revenue share and the number of deals that will be sold. The number of deals that will be sold is a function of, among other factors, how deep a discount and how commonly needed the product is. The larger the discount, the greater the volume.

Hipster, a start-up in San Francisco that lets people post queries and answers to others in their geographic area using the Web and a mobile phone, is trying to attract fresh faces to its company with a particularly attention-getting offer — $10,000 and a year’s supply of beer. The company is also offering a bicycle, pair of oversized glasses, skinny jeans, a bowtie, mustache-grooming services and a pair of boots. The prize was designed to resonate with the company’s name. The beer, of course, is PBR (Pabst Blue Ribbon, for those who are not hip).

“As you know, recruiting is insanely competitive right now, so we wanted to do something that would break through the noise, and get the attention of the people we’re trying to reach,” said Doug Ludlow, one of the founders of the company.

Mr. Ludlow said the reward would be delivered to anyone hired through the campaign or to anyone who referred someone who was then hired.

Interesting...

By doing this, they are extending a message - to the larger market and also to potential talent - that they are different in other areas as well. Handing out beer and oversized glasses translates as exciting benefits packages, challenging work, and time well spent with them because it will be a career building role.

I like this...though, I might have provided a years supply of something else. Nothing like drunk employee's in skinny jeans and bowties. yikes!

I.B.M. researchers said Thursday that they had designed high-speed circuits from graphene, an ultra-thin material that has a host of promising applications, from high-bandwidth communication to a new generation of low-cost smartphone and television displays.

Ask for what you want

This is a common Paul Graham statement to YC companies.  Figure out exactly what you need and just ask for it.  Don't play games, don't posture, don't hint.  Just ask for what you want.

 

Make your request very concrete

We didn't ask for general advice.  We did our homework and made very specific requests.  It's much easier for people to respond to concrete requests.  Even if they can't provide for that direct request, the specificity of the request helps them find an alternative way to help.

 

Don't use and abuse

I only wanted to ask these incredibly busy investors for help once or maybe twice.  Obtaining industry introductions was one of the most important necessities of our startup. I made sure to ask for something that they could provide with minimal effort and risk.

 

Pay it forward

We're all part of the same innovation community.  This whole entrepreneurship thing is hard for everyone, but fortunately, everyone has something to offer.  Don't procrastinate on giving back.

 

Say thank you

Investors love knowing the outcome.  For both personal and professional reasons, they're interested in long term relationships.  Do your part by keeping them up to date with your successes.  I like to email everyone that helped me immediately prior to something showing up on Techcrunch.  It helps me communicate to them that I appreciate everything they did to be a part of our success.