Ziv Eliraz is the Founder and CEO of Zao, social employee referral management platform. Connect with Ziv and Zao on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. BYOD: A workplace phenomenon …
A short but good summary from Ziv on how the relationship with potential candidates is changing because of BYOD.
Has BYOD changed the way you hire? Here are some things to consider
To put it bluntly: Their work in building audiences from nothing might be unparalleled in media today.
“The 2 Teenagers Who Run the Wildly Popular Twitter Feed @HistoryInPics” via The Atlantic
I came across this story over the weekend and was fascinated by the backstory of a feed that I love to read. It’s incredible the scale that these guys were able to build using nothing but content curation on Twitter. They appear to be playing it fast and loose with their use of images, but their ability to drive genuine engagement and go viral is impressive.
I would think it would be a big fucking nightmare to have a VC on my board who simply doesn’t get what I do and yet my perception is this happens often. I know many VCs who don’t have operating experience and frankly some of them are fantastic. Simply put – I’d be in search of a VC who had an intuitive sense of my product, my customers, my organizational issues, my competitors, etc.
“What I Would Look for When Choosing a VC – Knowing What I Know Now?” via Mark Suster’s blog.
I’m at my first true startup and am voraciously reading everything I can about VC’s and how to think about funding. I think Mark did a great job in this article summarizing some of the key points I’ve read and discussed about the space in the last year.
Looks like there won’t be any big new challengers for iOS and Android this year, after Japan’s NTT DoCoMo shelved plans for a Tizen launch and Canonical conceded that no big manufacturers will release Ubuntu phones this year.
Major setbacks for two new smartphone OSs, Tizen and Ubuntu Touch
Just ask Yahoo, which paid $5.7 billion for broadcast.com and $3.6 billion for GeoCities in the last Internet bubble more than a decade ago. It drove off a crazy round of overvalued acquisitions culminating in America Online’s $165 billion deal with Time Warner in which funny money bought an old-line media business. It was fun for a while, but when these businesses didn’t produce, it all fell apart. Mojo can’t sustain itself.
Let’s hope this is not what we are seeing again, but it’s hard not to be worried. Silicon Valley has no incentive to stop the valuation madness.
Search for the ‘Next Big Thing’ Yields Soaring Valuations via The New York Times
I know that these stories all begin to sound like some hysterical “the valuations are too damn high” meme. But I was there for the first dot com boom and fizzle. Something has to sustain the market as it grows, and once the valuations get to a certain level, it requires the scale of the public markets to exit these investments. Unfortunately, the exuberance of the equity markets can only be sustained for so long.
(via marksbirch)
According to psychologist Barbara L. Fredrickson, it takes three positive emotions to outweigh every negative one. Based on this, the Google design team set up two jars of marble to examine the costs and benefits. For every positive emotion that the design makes, they put a marble in the good emotion jar. However, if the design causes a negative emotion, they’ll put 3 marbles in the bad emotion jar. Their goal is to get an empty negative jar and a full positive jar.
“Google Android’s 3 UX Design Principles and 2 Jars of Marbles” via Keira Bui on Medium
Very cool of Google to share these. I like the approach of thinking about positive/negative experiences as it can be a simple but powerful way to create emotionally engaging experiences. This is definitely true for apps like Contactive as we focus on improving productivity for our users.
Just don’t expect it to last forever. They’re not “building addicts” for nothing.
“HBO Doesn’t Care If You Share Your HBO Go Account… For Now.” via TechCrunch
“Is there anything wrong, or evil, with this strategy? Not really. In fact, it’s pretty damned smart. It’s like an indefinitely long free trial in disguise. With HBO currently set-up to be sold only as a premium add-on to a cable bill that’s generally already pretty massive, convincing someone to get their their own account is a pretty huge hurdle. If the alternative is people pirating HBO’s shows, HBO might as well get those people comfortable with the convenience of going through the official channels.”
To put that another way, a 10-month-old startup just purchased a 93-year-old business for $100 million.
“10-Month-Old Startup Buys 93-Year-Old Business for $100 Million” via Mashable
I was literally about to sign up for Dollar Shave Club when I heard about Harry’s, then read this story today. I love the way they leveraged their initial product into being able to make this giant strategic investment.
Make way for another startup in the area of cybersecurity: Aorato, which has developed a behavior-monitoring firewall for the Microsoft Active Directory..
A very interesting enterprise startup, using behavioral patterns to improve security and being started by former Israeli cybersecurity experts.
Cybersecurity Startup Aorato Exits Stealth With A ‘Behavior Firewall’, $10M In Funding | TechCrunch
“Gartner said it expects global mobile advertising spending to reach $18 billion this year, up from the estimated $13.1 billion in 2013. By 2017 it’s projecting the market will have sized up to be worth $41.9 billion.”
Key points:
Mobile Ad Market Spending To Hit $18BN In 2014, Rising To ~$42BN By 2017, Says Gartner | TechCrunch
#neato 