Archive for May, 2012
Customer Focus Groups Via Google+ Hangouts
- My recommendation, is to create a loyal customer group and showcase your new products and services.
- Get feedback from people that buy your products and services in their own language. And since it is video, you can HEAR and SEE their feedback.
- In addition, you can conduct a focus group of target and potential customers to ask questions like “Is this product/service valuable to you?” or “Would you recommend this to a friend?”.
- You can also share your screen, for example if you want to share a site re-design or blog with potential customers to get there opinion – you can do that via Google+ Hangouts.
- Video chat with up to 9 people: Hit the “Invite” button and add more friends to your hangout by clicking on their pictures or entering their names. You can also invite groups by selecting your Google+ circles from the dropdown menu.
- Catch up face-to-face-to-face: Be together, even when you’re not together. Jokes get funnier, big news gets bigger, and surprises get more surprising when you’re catching up in person.
- Make conversations more fun: There’s always more to do when you’re in a hangout. Click the “Apps” button to watch YouTube videos with your friends, play poker, wear pirate hats, or even doodle with your kids.
Web Marketing Related Posts:
Major Changes Coming to Google Shopping This Fall
Remember those four tips I gave you today about Google Shopping? Well, forget them. Yes, forget all of them because Google has decided to wipe the slate clean and change the product search landscape completely. What’s going on? Google announced today that it is transitioning the free Google Shopping program into a fully commercialized one [...]
Use Kitchen Tongs to Grab Things from Your Hard-to-Reach Shelves [Clever Uses]
Unless you’re a pro basketball player, we all have one or two shelves in our kitchen that are just too darn tall to reach. Instead of grabbing a chair every time you need to get something from it, just use a pair of kitchen tongs. More »
Foursquare and Starbucks fight AIDS with largest non-profit check-in campaign
Fighting AIDS through Foursquare check-ins and lattes, non-profit (RED), Starbucks, and the location-based startup have partnered up for a 10-day fundraising and AIDS awareness campaign.
From June 1 to 10, Starbucks will donate $1 to the Global Fund, the recipient of (RED) money, for every Foursquare check-in at any of Starbucks’ locations in the U.S. and Canada. The partnership and check-in campaign, which will raise up to $250,000, aims to spread the word via social media channels around (RED)’s Rush to Zero campaign, an effort that seeks to eliminate the mother-to-child transmission of HIV by 2015.
(RED) is the non-profit founded by Bono and Bobby Shriver in 2006 to raise money for the Global Fund and fight AIDS in Africa. The organization has raised more than $190 million to date, and Starbucks has long been a RED partner having already contributed $10 million to the Global Fund.
“We are excited that through (RED)’s check-in activation with Foursquare, our customers have an easy way to help make a difference towards an AIDS free generation by 2015, a hugely important milestone in the fight against AIDS,” Starbucks public affairs executive vice president Vivek Varma said in a statement.
Foursquare says the fundraising effort is the startup’s largest non-profit check-in campaign to date. The startup will also be commemorating the proxy donations by doling out virtual (RED) Rush to Zero badges to its members that participate.
Photo credit: jonathan mcintosh/Flickr
Filed under: social 
Goodbye Photoshop, Hello Cloudinary
Manipulating images for your website is such a tedious chore. You need to open Photoshop, click your mouse about ten thousand times, then save the file and upload it. Then next month you redesign your site and suddenly need to re-size all your image elements again! Startup Cloudinary has a good alternative for you: use custom URLs to transform your images in the cloud! I was a bit skeptical when I first read about Cloudinary, but after five minutes of goofing around with it I’m sold.
Upload your images — either through the Cloudinary dashboard or from your own applications via their API — and then access those images using specially crafted URLs to apply a variety of transformations to your images. That’s the real magic: you don’t need to do anything other than request your image with the transformations you want. Your original photo is still available, if needed, and each new variant you request is cached and delivered through Amazon’s CDN.
You want that full-size image scaled to 100 pixels high? Here you go!
http://res.cloudinary.com/demo/image/upload/h_100,c_thumb/butterfly.jpg
Oh, you just want the woman’s face from that photo in a nice 90×90 thumbnail? Cloudinary provides face detection, so no problem.
http://res.cloudinary.com/demo/image/upload/w_90,h_90,c_thumb,g_face/butterfly.jpg
You need rounded corners?
http://res.cloudinary.com/demo/image/upload/w_90,h_90,c_thumb,g_face,r_20/butterfly.jpg
Or how about a circle?
http://res.cloudinary.com/demo/image/upload/w_90,h_90,c_thumb,g_face,r_max/butterfly.jpg
Users can create named transformations in their dashboard, which can then be used in the URLs for convenience and clarity. “round_thumbnail” makes a better URL component than “w_90,h_90,c_thumb,g_face,r_max”, wouldn’t you agree?
Cloudinary can also trivially grab profile photos from Facebook and Twitter:
http://res.cloudinary.com/demo/image/facebook/scottmerrill
http://res.cloudinary.com/demo/image/twitter_name/smerrill
And all the various transformations can be applied to these images, as well.
Cloudinary offers a robust and well-documented API. Pricing plans look reasonable, and they have a free tier for low-volume or proof-of-concept users. Now you can quit mucking around with Photoshop and get back to agonizing over which font to use for your blog about ancient Egyptian cat worship.
Remains of the Day: Netflix Update for iOS Brings Bigger Controls, More Options [For What It's Worth]
Netflix revamps their mobile players starting with iOS, Apple makes their first iPhone deal with a prepaid carrier, and Microsoft assures PC shoppers they can upgrade new Windows 7 machines—for a modest fee. More »
Impact of tablets to drag PC unit growth down to 1%
Riding on strong sales and adoption rates tablet cannibalization of the PC market has been greater than expected, causing analysts to lower PC unit growth expectations for the 2012 and 2013 calendar years to one percent.
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UberConference Keeps Track of Your Crowded Conference Calls (And We’ve Got Invites) [Video]
Conference calls are a pain, and it’s a bit crazy that in the year 2012 we’re still trying to keep track of who said what, let alone remember who everyone is. UberConference is a new service that aims to fix all that, showing you who’s on the call, information about each of them, and who’s talking at any given time. More »
Kickstarter Responds To Hidden “Failed Project” Claims
Yancey Strickler, co-founder of Kickstarter, dropped us a line about the systems in place to “hide” failed projects. He told us that Kickstarter does indeed hide many projects from search robots, but it’s for a good cause.
“The original poster was correct in noting that we don’t have a browse area for projects whose funding was unsuccessful,” he wrote. “This isn’t to ‘hide failure,’ as the original post said, it’s because it would be a poor user experience (there’s no action that anyone could take) and it would expose the creators of unsuccessfully funded projects to unnecessary criticism from the web (those projects would be prime for trolling).”
“Most unsuccessfully funded projects come up short because of a lack of interest in the project or because their creators didn’t promote it enough, not because of the Kickstarter page itself. Success on Kickstarter comes down to making a video, pricing things reasonably, and telling people about the project.”
In fact, project creators asked that Kickstarter projects be de-indexed for a reason: they ranked high in search results and, if Google crawled them, the resulting failures would percolate towards the top. “Because Kickstarter projects index very highly in search, creators were seeing their unsuccessfully funded projects ranking extremely high — in some cases as the #1 result — for their name. That obviously sucked, so we made the decision to de-index them.”
The company has added a FAQ to address the problem here.
As we said before, this isn’t a marketplace, it’s a dog show. You don’t want the ugly mutts hanging around when there are plenty of great specimens to peruse. This is crowdsourcing perfected, in a way, and if there’s one thing we know about crowds it’s that they’re easily swayed, fickle, and rarely kind.
Solar Mosaic Raises $2.5 Million Series A To Be The “Kickstarter For Solar”
Solar Mosaic, an Oakland, California-based startup that is creating a crowdfunding platform specifically for solar energy projects, has taken on $2.5 million in Series A funding.
The round was led by Spring Ventures with the participation of Serious Change, Jim Sandler, Steve Wolf, Tom Chi, and a group of angels from the “Toniic” investor network. The round was first disclosed in an SEC filing that surfaced earlier this week which was reported on by GigaOM’s Earth2Tech blog. Today the company confirmed the funding and disclosed more details.
Solar Mosaic, which also goes by just Mosaic, says it wants to be the “Kickstarter for solar” — enabling people to invest their own money into solar energy projects large and small. To date, the company has facilitated the crowdfunding for five projects in its beta mode, in which more than 400 people invested more than $350,000 in five rooftop power plants in California and Arizona. The company says it will use the new funding to build out its platform for crowdfunding on a larger scale.
Now, the Kickstarter comparison may not be completely accurate: According to Solar Mosaic’s website, investors earn a return from each project’s eventual revenue — so it seems to be facilitating actual equity investing, not the donation model used by sites such as Kickstarter. Today, only accredited investors are legally allowed to invest money into private companies in exchange for equity — and to receive accreditation, individuals must meet certain criteria such as having a net worth in excess of $1 million. Existing crowdfunding public platforms like Kickstarter allow people to fund projects on a “donation” basis — they can’t receive a stake in the company in return.
However, the JOBS Act signed into law last month contains passages that remove that restriction, allowing virtually anyone to invest in private companies. Crowdfunding as it stands right now is already huge — more than $1.5 billion was raised with crowdfunding methods last year alone — and the recently-passed JOBS Act will soon opening up the floodgates even further for a brand new investor class to enter the scene. The crowdfunding aspect of the JOBS Act is still being reviewed by the SEC, so Mosaic may be teeing up its widescale public launch until it goes live.
Overall, I think Solar Mosaic seems like a smart idea that comes at a smart time.Thanks to debacles such as Solyndra’s, government bodies and traditional venture capital firms are now a bit skittish about investing in solar energy and green projects. Opening up the space to crowdfunding could give the industry the jolt it needs to keep innovating. Of course, people looking to donate money have to be very careful here — but that is always the case, isn’t it?