Cross-posted from faberNovel’s blog:

In an article published by UX Magazine, Audrey Crane argues that gamification can either be superficially implemented or be the fundamental layout for an application. Her framework identifies four different degrees of gamification:

1. Cosmetic: game-like aesthetics or copy (immersive graphics, story-telling inspired by games)
2. Accessory: easy to add components that do not create a particular motivation (leader board). Usually marketing driven.
3. Integrated: subtle integration of the same elements to foster motivation (% complete). Usually interaction design driven.
4. Basis: an entire part of the application leverages fundamental games dynamics (Mint’s saving goals)

Sources:

• UX Magazine, A Gamification Framework for Interaction Designers

Cross-posted from faberNovel’s blog:

James Slavet (Greylock Partners) explains what are the seven signs of a customer-focused CEO:

1. Make it easy get in touch with customer service
2. Be obsessed about details of the customer experience, even if it’s economically irrational (e.g. the experience you get whenever you un-box an Apple product)
3. Be out on the front lines, directly connecting with customers (e.g. at Amazon.com, every employee, even the CEO, spends two days every two years on the service desk to answer calls)
4. Channel the voice of the customer in all-company email updates
5. Invest in customer service: it should be regarded a strategic investement. “Each customer contact is an opportunity to retain a customer, create positive word of mouth, and build the brand.”
6. Focus on customer quality metrics (repeat transacting customers) rather than customer quantity
7. Make customer satisfaction drive team pay

Learning from “Earth’s most customer-centric company” (Amazon.com)

This slide is extracted from our comprehensive white paper about Amazon.com: the Hidden Empire.

Sources:

• Forbes, Seven Signs of a Customer-Focused CEO
• faberNovel, Amazon.com: the Hidden Empire

Saturday, June 18th

Join us for TEDxSoMa, a unique experience bringing together innovative ideas and people to grow the collective conscience. Created in the spirit of TED’s mission, “ideas worth spreading,” the TEDx program is designed to give communities, organizations and individuals the opportunity to stimulate dialogue through TED-like experiences at the local level. Tickets and registration open tomorrow, Tuesday, June 22nd.

In the past, TEDxSoMa has hosted some of the most exciting speakers from within the tech community and beyond. Speakers have included leading journalists, founders and innovators all bringing fresh perspectives and insights to the table. This fourth edition of TEDxSoMA will be held in an all new space, allowing to double the size of the event. Whether you are a seasoned TEDx-ster or new to the community, prepare to have your ideas shaken up as we will share an invaluable resource: some new ideas worth spreading.

This time round, speakers will include, among others:

-Jay Nath from the City & County of San Francisco
-Ligaya Tichy from AirBnB
-Frank Schulenber from Wikimedia
-Amit Garg from Hospital for Hope and Norwest Venture Partners

Ticket registration is now open, follow the link to sign up!

Check out the videos below for some of last years highlights.

Howard Roffman – Interacting with Star Wars


David Pescovitz – The World as Wunderkammer

Cross-posted from faberNovel’s blog:

Shane Mac is the founder of Hello There (a hosted résumé page) and provides us with inspiring tips:

• What you think people should pay for, may be what they think should be free. While Shane intended to have users pay for videos, he then understood that most of them thought it should be free (thanks to YouTube).
• Do not hide your idea! Ever. This one is worth repeating: “Ideas are worthless, execution is everything. Then there’s competition.”
• Share customer feedback: “Great feedback leads to motivation. Bad feedback will force a team to fix the problem.”
• Why do you need money? Bootstrap it damn it. Startups’ strength lies in their ability to bootstrap at virtual or no cost.
• Your main feature may not be so important. Even if you firmly believe in your vision, keep listening to your users.
• Your product can be in different markets but it needs different branding and pricing. Hello There was primarily intended for people looking for jobs. It is now used by salesmen, but the interface is different, as well as the branding (Say Hello Sales) and the pricing.
• PR is much easier with a simple product and success stories.
• Don’t give people choices. The more choice you give, the higher the drop off rate.

Sources:

• Shane Mac, From a notebook to launching a startup. 10 lessons learned from a not so fast company

Cross-posted from faberNovel’s blog:

It is now obvious that Amazon.com’s rumored tablets are only a question of time. While most articles focuses on the technical specifications of these tablets, this article lays out the reasons why Amazon.com’s strategy is sound and logical.

All images are excerpts from our study about Earth’s largest e-retailer: Amazon.com: the Hidden Empire.

Increasing customer loyalty

• Recurring usage: by using Amazon.com’s own tablet, customers will be more acquainted with the e-retailer’s offers. Kindle with special offers already sends specific notifications about Amazon’s coupons.
• Seamless integration: the e-retailer’s digital goods offer is the most fully-fledged in the market, ranging from audiobooks, music, apps, ebooks, movies, cloud storage and downloadable software. This is a very Apple-esque move: seamless integration fosters a halo effect; for instance, Apple users tend to buy Apple because all its products are tightly integrated, while other brands require painful configuration. If Amazon.com succeeds at making it extremely easy to access its digital offering (most interestingly, its cloud storage) on the tablet, this move will increase the value of the whole platform.
• Lock-in: firstly, Amazon.com needs to prevent other players (most importantly Apple) from establishing barriers to entry, otherwise its ability to sell digital goods might be significantly impeded. Secondly, Amazon.com will try, in turn, to implement these barriers to entry. DRM are implemented in Instant Video and Kindle ebooks, making it extremely difficult for existing customers to leave the platform, as their spending on digital good is increasing.

Building the personal cloud

Commoditization: devices (hardware and software) will become more and more a commodity, in a cloud paradigm. The cloud will become the place where individuals and companies alike store their data.

• Introducing new devices will help Amazon reach more customers. Amazon is the only company with a strong two-fold approach, both in cloud infrastructure (with its AWS offer – one of its competitors is Google) and consumer usage (with its digital goods offer – its most important competitor is Apple). All market players are positioning themselves, with vertically integrated approach. Even if devices will be commoditized, they still are a great way to reach end users.

Vesting in the payment market

An Amazon.com tablet could be fueled with some specific e-commerce applications.

• Mobile payment is a very promising market. It is expected to quadruple by 2014, reaching $630 bn in value (Juniper Research). Amazon.com could add a fully-fledged payment app to its tablet, with NFC. It could then build an ecosystem around it, or add some local-related functionalities.

If you are interested in reading more about Amazon, our presentation Amazon.com: the Hidden Empire will let you know everything about Earth’s largest e-retailer!

Sources:

• faberNovel, Amazon.com: the Hidden Empire

Cross-posted from faberNovel’s blog:

In his report for the Facebook Developer Garage held in France, Maxime Sarri argues that social design is now the true core of Facebook’s offer.

The Open Graph uses metadata (namely, <meta> tags in your HTML file header) to streamline users’ social interactions with rich objects (web pages, videos, images…): when a user likes a page, Facebook uses these metadata to share a summary (title, type, video…) on his profile. As a consequence, Facebook’s core offer does not consist in sharing on the Facebook website, yet it is the actual graph of our interactions with other users and objects. This very strong asset should undoubtedly make Google wary: despite the fact that the Open Graph is an open protocol, Facebook’s grasp over the social value chain remains firm and is increasing:

• Facebook Comments lets users post comment on websites and aims at replacing Disqus, which just secured a $10 m funding.
• Facebook Login and Registration (one-click registration!) show how the social network is now more of an identity holder than a mere social network.
• The like button not only let users share content: companies use it to engage with them.

To conclude, one should not turn a blind eye to Facebook’s rather emerging strategy. What is stake is truly massive: who will be our identity holder on the Internet? In the old economy, it was the credit card; and the worldwide payment market represented $600 bn in revenues in 2010 alone…

Sources:

• adevby.me, Facebook + Social Design = Open Graph : le VRAI produit de Facebook

Tuesday, May 21st

7:30pm-9:30pm

Join us for an evening of Lean Startup talks with a twist. Each brave presenter gets five minutes and 20 slides–which advance automatically every 15 seconds. Fast-paced, thought-provoking and social, this Ignite features presentations from in-the-trenches entrepreneurs ready to share their lessons learned. Also: booze.

The evening’s slate:

• 20 Ways to Not Build Stuff
  Cindy Alvarez. Product management and customer development, KISSmetrics. @cindyalvarez
• Petabytes on a Budget – How to Beat the Big Guys (and Build Cheap Cloud Storage)
  Gleb Budman. Co-founder, Backblaze. @budmang
• Conquering Madison Avenue as a Lean Startup
  Rob Fan. Co-founder and CTO, Sharethrough. @rfan622
• How listening to customers helped us raise $700K in seed funding
  Mariya Genzel. Co-founder and CTO, Saygent. @mashagenzel
• How $40 Saved Us Nine Months and $2MM
  Paul Howe. Founder, BlueSpark. @phdc
• Making Good Use of Fake Doors
  Jess Lee. Co-founder, Polyvore. @jesskah
• Lean Startup Savvy from Ice Road Truckers
  Michele Lisenbury Christensen. Founder, Working With Power. @lisenbury
• UltraLean: Building Products Without a Dev Team
  Sandeep Sood. Founder, Monsoon and Badmash. @soodsandeep
• How I Set Out to Kill E-Mail but Ended Up Building An E-Mail Client
  TK. Founder, Tout. @tawheed

—–

Your MC: Tony Stubblebine. Founder, Crowdvine. @tonystubblebine

Sunday, May 19th, 2011

@ pariSoma 7pm

Come join a group of professionals interested in the edu-tech space in an evening of discussion and sharing.  This month we will be focusing on gaming in education and its implications for students, teachers, and entrepreneurs.

There will be time for networking from 7:00 – 7:20 pm, with a series of short presentations by content experts to follow.  From 8:00 – 8:30pm there will be time for debrief, questions, and further discussion.

Antone Johnson, founder of Bottom Line Law Group, will host “Ask The Startup Lawyer” office hours again at pariSoma on Thursday, May 16th.

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!