Cloud computing has evolved from the realm of novelty to a major growth industry in just a few years’ time. Enterprise-level companies and startups both rely on this computing infrastructure to increase efficiency, scale more easily, and lower costs.
But how will the Cloud change in five years – or even six months? How will current Cloud providers adapt and how will they deliver for a rapidly growing customer base? Continue Reading »
If you run a searchable website, you’re likely sitting on a potential gold mine: user search logs.
“The data is semantically rich,” said Lou Rosenfeld, information architecture consultant and founder of Rosenfeld Media. “Users are telling you want they want in their own words.”
Search analytics – an often under-utilized and free resource – allow you to “carry on a conversation with your customers” by listening to their needs and measuring how well your site meets those desires. You can also analyze search queries and results to improve UX design, site navigation, search performance, content strategy, and – as many online retailers have done with search analytics – product offerings. “If you just take the top 50 most frequent queries… and then throw that data into a spreadsheet and play with it, you’re going to get an unbelievable amount of insight in an hour,” he said. Continue Reading »
Every biz dev advice column, book, speaker or video you come across can probably be summarized by what Hipmunk CEO Adam Goldstein recently said:
“Lose your sense of shame.”
And while he was specifically referring to how often to ping a contact (it’s more frequent than you may think), the larger lesson learned is how tenacity can affect your startup’s business success.
Adam will share a number of other lessons, tips and tricks for improving your startup’s business development this October during his session at Web 2.0 Expo New York. (Use code BLG20 to save 20% on registration.) He took the time last week to talk to us about what relatively young travel search site Hipmunk has learned about startup business development since it launched. Continue Reading »
The inkling of a great idea can come from one mind, but it often takes a team to flush it out. And improve it. And work on it. And put it into practice. And improve it again.
Despite this, many of our office cultures encourage us to work alone or with other like-minded folks (other developers, marketers, designers, or however you identify). The result? Without a variety of perspectives, solutions we offer are limited and sometimes miss the root of the issue.
In her session next week, Web 2.0 Expo speaker Maria Giudice will discuss how we can develop collaborative cultures in our offices and avoid the issues of Groupthink. The talk, Don’t Go It Alone: Using Collaboration to Solve Creative Design Problems, will also cover how we can generate and iterate on ideas much more quickly through collaboration than we can on our own. Additionally, audience members will learn specific participatory design techniques, including group brainstorms, sketching exercises, card sorting, and Maria’s “paper doll” method of creating a web page.
Maria recently spoke with us about her upcoming session and how we can improve collaboration in our own companies. Check out the full audio interview now.
~~
Kaitlin Pike is the Web 2.0 Expo community manager. She can be reached @w2e or @kcpike. Register for Web 2.0 Expo SF now with discount code websf11bl20 to save 20%.
Mar 23rd, 2011 |
Kaitlin Pike Many of our workshops and sessions at Web 2.0 Expo focus on the mechanics of how to compete in your industry using social media. But speaker Andy Smith wanted to take a different approach with his upcoming session Harnessing Social Media to Build Brands. In his talk, he’ll take a deep dive into the psychological insights explaining which social media strategies work and which don’t.
Andy will go over the science of social persuasion, the strategies and tactics used by companies, as well as causes that have successfully harnessed social media toward a specific goal. Andy recently spoke with us about his upcoming talk, his new book The Dragonfly Effect, and how brands can improve their social media marketing strategies with a bit more thought.
We also discussed how happiness and marketing go together (including a great example about a Coca-Cola machine), how social media helped find an almost impossible bone marrow match for a patient, and “infectious action.”
Check out our full audio interview with Andy now.
~~
Kaitlin Pike is the Web 2.0 Expo community manager. She can be reached @w2e or @kcpike. Register for Web 2.0 Expo SF now with discount code websf11bl20 to save 20%.
Mar 18th, 2011 |
Kaitlin Pike While many developers have an intuitive sense of what looks right, they sometimes lack the vocabulary needed to express their hunches to designers and the rest of the team.
To help fix this common problem, EffectiveUI Senior Developer RJ Owen and Lead Experience Architect Michael Salamon are hosting a session at Web 2.0 Expo SF on Design Essentials for Developers, during which they’ll cover basic design techniques and principles; design vocabulary, heuristics and analysis techniques; how to do quick and dirty user testing and prototyping; and the difference between information architecture and interaction design.
RJ and Michael recently spoke to us about their upcoming session. You can read the full interview below.
Interview with RJ Own and Michael Salamon on Design Essentials for Developers
Kaitlin: Why did you decide to host this session? What particular problems were you seeing at your own company or others’ that made you think this training is necessary?
RJ: As a developer, I find myself frequently involved in making design decisions and really passionate about the way users interact with the applications I’m building. I think we-as-developers are in a unique position to be the first real deep testers of the software we’re making. It’s up to us to help identify design problems early, and this requires a set of tools and a vocabulary that most developers don’t learn in school or along the way.
At EffectiveUI we always hire developers who have strong opinions about design – even if they don’t have the background. We’ve found that people with opinions care, and people who care will take the time required to get the little things done properly.
Michael: It’s naive for designers to think that developers aren’t designing, and it’s in their best interest to arm their design implementers with all the knowledge they can. Unless you are supplying user interface specifications for every possible use case and error, then your development team is doing as much design as your design team is. Continue Reading »
Mar 4th, 2011 |
Kaitlin Pike Silicon Valley has witnessed a significant shift in power since the last big bubble burst and most especially within the last year and a half. One leading factor accounts for this change: It’s far cheaper (think hundred of thousands versus millions of dollars) to start a company nowadays. You can host your application on Amazon or Google or Rackspace, etc. PR efforts can be done through Twitter and Facebook. For sales, you have Salesforce.com, and for community development, just use a blog or forum.
One effect of this shift is the rise of Angels, a topic serial entrepreneur and investor Naval Ravikant will cover later this month at Web 2.0 Expo. Along with all the startups he’s founded and invested in, Naval’s resume includes being the founder of Hit Forge, an angel fund for social media startups, co-author of Venturehacks.com, and co-founder of AngelList.
Naval and I spoke this week about his upcoming talk, and you can listen to our full interview below or read the transcription.
In the interview, we covered
Listen to the full audio here or read the transcription below.
Full Text of Audio Interview:
Kaitlin: So, why would someone want to go to your talk?
Naval: Entrepreneurs would want to go to my talk to understand how the fundraising landscape has changed, because of the addition of angel investors.
Angel investors who want to go to my talk to understand what the new terms are, what the new normal looks like, how companies raise money, and why they go with angel investors or not, and what’s dangerous and unsafe about being a new angel investor and how one can protect themselves.
And then venture capitalists should go to my talk to understand how the increase in leverage and power that entrepreneurs have gained allows them to unbundle many of the services that VCs traditionally offered and how they could adapt to that new environment. Continue Reading »
Feb 28th, 2011 |
Kaitlin Pike Leading online real estate database Zillow.com has a thriving mobile strategy: People use its apps 6.5 million times each month “with more than 23 million visits to home detail pages; that’s 32,000 home views every hour or nearly 9 home views every single second,” says CEO Spencer Rascoff.
To hit these impressive numbers, Zillow has worked hard to re-imagine its business model for a mobile audience, for both consumers and advertisers.
Spencer will give a keynote (Redefining Zillow in a Mobile Era: When a dot com is No Longer a .com) this March at Web 2.0 Expo in which he’ll discuss how his company transformed.
We recently interviewed Spencer about Zillow’s success and how companies can develop their own location-based mobile technology strategies. Read on for the full interview:
Kaitlin: Your talk focuses in part on the impact of location-based mobile technologies has had on your company. Can you give me an overview of what changed and why you felt this was necessary?
Spencer: We live in a mobile society. People expect tools that can interact with their digital lives and that respond in fundamentally new ways.
We see real estate as a perfect location-based application for mobile – people want this information as they are walking and driving around neighborhoods. We saw this immediately in our mobile usage the first day we launched our first mobile app on iPhone two years ago. Continue Reading »
Maybe you’ve heard of this so-called “mobile trend” in the Web 2.0 space. If you’re only vaguely familiar with what’s going on, let me (actually, Mary Meeker) blow your mind with these slides.
Or if you just want a few interesting details on why you should care
Long story short, your company should focus more effort on the mobile space if you haven’t already. Luckily, Web 2.0 Expo speaker Melissa Clark (Siteworx, Inc.) is here to help you move your company along. In her session How Mobile-Friendly Is Your Organization’s Website?, Melissa will focus on how you can create a great mobile site, how to improve UX, and how to maintain brand consistency in the mobile space all while giving the audience great case studies on how it’s done right.
We recently spoke with Melissa about her upcoming session and what her audience can expect to learn. Read the full interview below for more. Continue Reading »
If your startup doesn’t know how to talk to users (and get the most out of those discussions), you could miss out on exactly what your customers want you to know.
Web 2.0 Expo speaker Laura Klein (Users Know) regularly consults with lean startups and other small companies on usability research, and shows them how they can use this valuable information to improve their business.
In her upcoming session Who Do I Talk To Now? User Research for Every Phase of Your Product, Laura will discuss the most common types of usability research, what types of conversations to have with different sets of customers, how this changes as your product matures, and tips on how to avoid some of the common mistakes startups stumble on. We recently talked with Laura about her session and user research.
Read on for the full interview:
Kaitlin: The basic problem your session goes after is how can a startup (which by nature has very limited resources) better “talk” to their customers, specifically with usability research. Without letting the cat out of the bag too much, can you list a few of the types of usability research your session covers and why they’re important?
Laura: Over the past couple of years, dozens of new products have been released that claim to help make user research faster and easier. The problem is that most people don’t know which ones to use or how to get the most out of them.
A large part of what I cover in my session is how to use things like remote usability, unmoderated testing, and micro usability tests to make gathering qualitative feedback much faster. I’ll also talk about which methods give you the best results for the different stages of your product. Continue Reading »
Twitter @w2e