pariSoma innovation loft. coworking and tech events.

Cross-posted from faberNovel’s blog:

Seth Weintraub (Fortune) explains why Google is less and less a search company:

• Google generates less than 70% of revenues from search, and it’s decreasing.
• YouTube revenues are growing very quickly, and has the potential to “push search-related revenues below 50%”.
• Google said that its Apps business “is growing faster than any other major cloud business” (they earn 50$ /user/year, plus a 20% commission on its Google Apps Marketplace).

Google made a very clever move regarding copyrighted content on YouTube: the company checks all videos against a database of copyrighted contents. If a match is found, the company gives copyright holders the opportunity to share revenues on ads and affiliation (YouTube adds links to iTunes & Amazon), or to remove the video.

Facts & figure about Content ID:

• The majority of copyright holders choose to monetize their claims
• 100m videos has been monetized thanks to Content ID
• 100 years of video are scanned every day
• Google’s database is one of the most comprehensive in the world

As a conclusion, Google should be considered a city of products, rather than a castle protecting search.

In such a metaphor, Android is the road that ties all products: it is the best way to use Google Apps, it has a mobile client, direct upload to YouTube, facilitated access to many of Google’s social and location services… While the author does not mention it, Chrome’s goal is identical: the browser and Android are yielding a seamless experience to Google’s users.

Sources:

• Fortune, It is time to stop thinking of Google as a Search company

Edu Tech v.3 – The Brain and Learning

April 7th, 7pm @pariSoma

Come join a group of professionals interested in the edu-tech space in an evening of discussion and sharing.  This month we will focus on the brain and how people learn, with an emphasis on the unique benefits and challenges technology presents.

A light dinner will also be provided! Click here for more information.

Craig Baute from Denver Coworking is on a “Mid-America Coworking Tour“. He is going around the country visiting coworking spaces and conferences about coworking and reporting back to all of us online, on youtube and on his blog.

The 2 week tour started at Grand Rapids, Michigan in the 2nd week of March.

According to Craig, his schedule was to get down to Austin, Texas (in time for the SXSW Festival and the Coworking Unconference event), then make his way up to Denver, Colorado and finally head back to Michigan where it all started.

Craig has been going around meeting various coworking peeps and checking out coworking spaces and also putting out videos and blog posts. We are not sure if his tour has ended, but he has posted 5 videos so far.

Be sure to check them out!

Mid-America Coworking Tour: Day 1

Mid-America Coworking Tour: Day 2

Mid-America Coworking Tour: Day 3

Mid-America Coworking Tour: Day 4

Mid-America Coworking Tour: Day 5 & 6

Written by blogdoctor

I am the editor-in-chief at oObly a tech blog based in San Francisco, California.

Follow me on Twitter

Cross-posted from faberNovel’s blog:

Authors Barry Eisler (who turned down a half-million dollars offer from a publisher) and Joe Konrath explain why they have chosen digital self-publishing:

• Price: data shows that digital books are a prince-sensitive market. Publishers are pricing digital books very high (presumably to protect paper sales). On the contrary, Joe sells 3,000 ebooks a day by pricing them reasonably (less than $4.99).
• Place: whereas in a library an author has to compete with a NYT bestseller who has 400 copies of their latest hit on the shelf, on Internet each book takes up one virtual space. Plus, “virtual shelf life is forever” (you have a few months to sell your title in a bookstore).
• Frustration: when a publisher makes a mistake, it has little incentive to quickly correct it, since it manages a basket of rights. For instance, most publishers add digital platform sparingly (presumably to get better deals), while authors would gain from an extensive presence on the Internet.
• Time-to-market: as a self-publisher, your book can reach your readers much faster. If you don’t want to, you don’t have to spend time booksigning, traveling, touring (the record being an author who visited 40 states and over 1,200 bookstores)…
• Timeline: publishing contracts often include an advance for the author, which can be considered a loan. Sometimes it makes sense to take the bet. Most often, though, it is more logical to earn a 70% royalty forever, as it is the case with digital books.

Digital reading will obviously become the preferred reading format: paper only adopted a static defense, while digital is gaining ground:

• Price of digital reader continues to drop, while functionality increases
• Selection: more and more title are available, whereas mortar stores are closing (most notably Borders)
• User Experience: those who have tried e-reading are not going back to paper books.

For them, publishers are in the business of delivering books: “and if someone can do the latter faster and cheaper than they can, they’re in trouble.”

Sources:

• Joe Konrath and Joe Konrath, Ebooks and Self-Publishing – A Dialog Between Authors Barry Eisler and Joe Konrath

Launch Pad, a new coworking space opened it doors last week to entrepreneurs, freelancers, small business owners and everyone else looking to collaborate and innovate.

Located in the heart of Prescott, Arizona, Launch Pad has an awesome set of facilities that promote collaboration and innovation, with open spaces, state of the art conference rooms, private offices and a private rear patio.

The founding members of the coworking space includes an all start team comprising of a former mayor, a retired professor and an economic adviser turned author.

• Jack Wilson – former Prescott Mayor (Nov. 2007-Nov. 2009) with a 37-year career in Information Technology
• Dr. William Arnold – retired Professor Emeritus of Communication at Arizona State University.
• Dr. Charlie Grantham - leading proponent of Business Community Centers, author of Corporate Agility.

Launch Pad Membership Costs

As with any other coworking space, membership costs vary based on the type and usage, with a Coworking membership costing $275/Month to Permanent Desk for $450/Month and private offices starting at $650 & up/Month.

For a full list of membership options and costs, check out their membership page.

Parisoma welcome Launch Pad to the Coworking Spaces community and wishes them the very best!

Written by blogdoctor

I am the editor-in-chief at oObly a tech blog based in San Francisco, California.

Follow me on Twitter

Cross-posted from faberNovel’s blog:

Given its track record (Google, PayPal, LinkedIn, Zappos, YouTube, etc.), it should come as no surprise that the advice of Sequioa Capital is worth listening to.

According to the venture capital firm, start-ups sharing some of these characteristics increase their chances of becoming enduring companies:

• Clarity of purpose: “Summarize the company’s business on the back of a business card.”
• Focus: “Customers will only buy a simple product with a singular value proposition. Pick the one thing that is of burning importance to the customer then delight them with a compelling solution”
• Agility and frugalitiy: “Stealth and speed will usually help beat-out large companies. Focus spending on what’s critical. Spend only on the priorities and maximize profitability.”

As regards the business plan, here are some elements that not always come to mind:

• Solution: provide use cases.
• Why Now: explain the historical evolution of the solution, as well as recent trends that made it possible.
• Market size: calculate the TAM, SAM and SOM.

The rationale behind these metrics is to give an idea about the size of the market, while also showing what you can reasonably achieve:

• TAM (Total Addressable Market): how much are all the players in the market generating on this market? For instance, if there are 200 m smartphones worldwide, the TAM is 200 m unit (multiply it by an average price of, say, $300 to get a TAM of $60 bn).
• SAM (Served Available Market): how much you could gain by actually selling your product to your segment? For instance, for Apple it could be only 20 % of the TAM, given the fact that not all customers will buy high end products. The SAM is thus 20 % x $60 bn.
• SOM (Serviceable and Obtainable Market): how much will you realistically gain from your current strategy? Taking a percentage of the SAM is impractical: the best way is to estimate what you can actually achieve given your size and limits. For instance, estimate the number of license you can sell, the number of users you can get, etc.

Sources:

• Sequoia, Writing a Business Plan
• Carsten Schade, TAM SAM SOM

Cross-posted from faberNovel’s blog:

For Aileen Lee, Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, “especially when it comes to social and shopping, women rule the Internet“.

To set up this stance, Aileen features some very interesting statistics:

• 55% of social networks’ users are women (source: Nielsen)
• On Facebook, women drive 62% of activity, have 8% more Facebook friends on average than men, and spend more time on the site (source: Facebook)
• 60% of Zynga’s players, 77% of Groupon’s customers are female (source: Zynga, Groupon)
• Women follow more people, tweet more, and have more followers on average than men (source: Dan Zarrella and Dharmesh Shah)
• While they represent half of the traffic, Yelp’s majority of contributor are female (source: Yelp)

If your product can benefit from having a larger base of female customers, it’s time to identify how you could make your product/service more attractive to women. “Do you do enough product and user interface testing with female users?”

“Women are the routers and amplifiers of the social web. And they are the rocket fuel of ecommerce”: they oversee over 80% of consumer spending, or about $5 trillion dollars annually (source: US Census Bureau).

Sources:

• TechCrunch, Why Women Rule The Internet

April 6, noon – 6:00 pm

Antone Johnson, founder of Bottom Line Law Group, will host “Ask The Startup Lawyer” office hours at pariSoma’s new location!

A veteran business and intellectual property lawyer, Antone has served as an attorney and executive for technology and media companies at all stages of growth, from incorporation and seed funding through venture capital financing rounds, IPOs, mergers and acquisitions. As the former head of worldwide legal affairs for eHarmony, and one of the original lawyers at MySpace, he is particularly well versed in legal and business issues related to social media, Web 2.0, digital media, e-commerce, online advertising and marketing. pariSoma startups and San Francisco community members are welcome to sign up for free consultations.

This event always fills up quickly, so reserve your spot now!

Cross-posted from faberNovel’s blog:

Andy Singleton, founder and CEO of Assembla explains Assembla’s pricing strategy and lays out some principles:

• The goal is to maximize revenues and reduce cost of sales. Offering free trials can be far less expensive than explaining the value of your products to your customers. Plus, they can attract or refer paying users.
• While free offers will increase your costs, they can be useful for traffic (monetized by advertising), product testing (free beta), giving back to the community (open source).
• “The biggest sin is to not get any money from people who will pay“
• Before anything, you need to satisfy the need for a commodity product. Customers will compare you to cheap competitors: “what customers think they are buying is not what you think you are selling.”
• Make changes and raise prices for new buyers only. Rather than reducing prices for existing customers, offer X months free, faster servers, etc.
• Never take pricing advice from your customers
• Never, ever take anything away

Sources:

• OnStartups, Secrets Of Freemium Pricing: Make The Cheapskates Pay

Cross-posted from faberNovel’s blog:

Podio, a danish startup that has received $4.5 m in funding, will unveil tomorrow how it intends to reinvent collaboration in the workplace. faberNovel had the chance to take a look at this offer before its launch.

Podio‘s approach offers some continuity with the current trends in IT for the workplace, especially as regards collaboration: very much like Yammer, it provides an activity stream where you can see all actions related to your items (new tasks, comment, files, discussion…).

The startup’s vision relies on two completing aspects:

• Centralization: Podio aims at replacing the wealth of tools we are using and becomes “Facebook for your workplace”, the first website you will check in the morning. Podio claims that centralizing all interactions in the same place will increase companies’ productivity and provides messaging, calendars, tasks, contact management… out of the box.
• Open innovation: since Podio can’t develop all the apps companies are using (task management, time tracking, file sharing, knowledge management, sales pipeline, vacations…), it also features an App Store as well as a tool to create your own apps. Promoting more than 2,000 items, available apps range from client project management to software development.

Creating an app is pretty straightforward and does not require any coding (which explains why it may seem quite limited at the same time): for instance, you can set up your own sales pipeline workflow or quickly modify an existing one.

Two of Podio’s main challenges may be:

• Proving that this “one size fits all” solution can be more efficient than a wealth of dedicated, simple tools. Apple’s App Store has shown that there is a strong trend toward very specialized micro-application: as Google’s philosophy puts it, “it’s best to do one thing really, really well.”
• Delivering a solution that will effectively accompany the transition for companies, which are often very reluctant to change their workflows: will Podio’s solution be sufficiently flexible? The startup does plan to provide APIs.

A French version should be released tomorrow.