We really thought about this decision as it relates to the future as a health company — it’s good for customers and our company, in the long run.
CVS just made a decision that’s going to cost them $1.5 billion in revenue a year, and it’s a fantastic move.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/02/05/cvs-caremark-tobacco/5220479/
…the whole funding round was done in 22 days without having to build a pitch deck. It’s a message — and product — that just resonated with investors.
“Confide Raises $1.9 Million In Seed Funding To Bring Disappearing Messages To Enterprise Users” via TechCrunch
It’s SnapChat for the enterprise. The UX is pretty slick (makes me think of the “redacted” text in spy movie documents) and I’m looking forward to trying it out when it hits Android.
So what does a minnow like Mxit have that makes it so confident it can crack India? The answer is simple: a vision beyond smartphones. Unlike its bigger, richer, more established competitors, Mxit offers connectivity to old fashioned “feature phones,” of which there remain many users in India.
“An African messaging app could beat out WhatsApp, Line and WeChat in India” via Leo Mirani at Quartz.
As a mobile app company we know (and love and hate) the choices you have to make when supporting multiple devices and OS’s. It’s easy to get tunnel vision and think about amazing experiences that we can build on the latest, high-powered devices; Mxit’s potential success is another great reminder that for large portions of users in developing countries, feature phones remain the primary (and sometimes only) way they experience the mobile internet.
You have to have innovative ad units … and we’re probably the most innovative in the marketplace.
“10X growth in 18 months: StartApp hits 1.5B downloads, 70K installs, and 200M daily impressions” via VentureBeat
Eighteen months after it reached the 150 million download plateau, mobile ad platform StartApp announced today that it has now hit over 1.5 billion downloads. And while the official release says the company’s ad software is now embedded in 60,000 apps, CEO Gil Dudkiewicz told me the number is actually higher.
Impressive growth and great platform; their ad quality and display flexibility is going make them a strong player on iOS.
The company tells us that the way things are organized within each section is based on its algorithm and curation team — in a sense its process is similar to Inside.com, which launched earlier this week. Paper is relying on computational programming and human-based expertise in order to know how good of a story is on Facebook, whether it’s receiving any shares or comments or if it’s visually appealing.
“Facebook announces Paper, a visual and social news app that launches in the US on February 3” via TheNextWeb
I will add this to the already too-numerous-apps I have for reading news, and I’ll be interested to see how it compares in both content and style to Flipboard (my primary iOS newsreader).
My $50,000 Twitter Username Was Stolen Thanks to PayPal and GoDaddy.
“How I Lost My $50,000 Twitter Username” via Naoki Hiroshima on Medium
I try to be as security-conscious as possible when it comes to my identity, information security, and passwords. Reading about this type of scenario playing out in real life scares the hell out of me. Unfortunate as it was for Naoki to go through this, there are some good lessons to learn in his story and hopefully they can help others from getting hit by similar attacks.
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.
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.
#neato 