entrepreneurship Archives - Page 56 of 235

The truth about technology

Posted on February 12, 2013 by Steve Sammartino

I happened upon this TED talk just yesterday from the ever clever Kevin Kelly. It is approximately 3 years old but it really blew me away. In fact, the thing that it does best is demystify technology. It reminds us that we are all technologist, that we all create different forms of technology as humans and that we all benefit from it.

A great little piece I took from it was my favourite invention from the last 50,000 years – Grand Parents. You’ll see what I mean once you watch it. Enjoy!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GS1xL1qcBa4]

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Motivation & Administration

Posted on February 11, 2013 by Steve Sammartino

A part of life ‘on-line’ is that it requires a certain amount of administration. Stuff needs to be set up, logged in and authorised. It’s also a big part of getting people into a start up. So we most often ensure that the barriers to entry are reduced…. we let our new users do the admin later. Maybe, on their next visit. The only problem with this is that administration should always be undertaken when motivation is the highest, and that’s usually at the start of a process or project.

A story from Sir Tim

Posted on February 8, 2013 by Steve Sammartino

I had the good fortune this week to meet the inventor of the world wide web Sir Tim Berners Lee. He is currently touring Australia and after he gave a public lecture at Melbourne University, I was lucky enough to attend a private session thanks to the AUDA and meet him personally.

Firstly, I’d like to say he was a total gentleman, who is very humble for all that he has given us. Over drinks I asked him what seemed like the first non techie question he’d been asked all night, and his answer I found totally inspiring. The dialogue is below:

Me: “Tell me how it feels to have created something everyone loves and uses every day…. How do you cope with all the attention and adulation?”

Tim: “Well, I’m just Tim, a normal guy around campus. But, it is interesting you asked that, because I made a conscious decision to avoid the public sphere for the first 10 years after I created it. I didn’t do any interviews or make any public appearances. Mainly so it wouldn’t interfere with my family. About 10 years into the web I received a letter telling me that I was to receive the Millenium Prize in Finland. It turned out that the ceremony happened to be on my son’s birthday. So I wrote back to them saying that I couldn’t make it on that day as it was my son’s birthday. That I could come if they changed the date. They then wrote back to me saying something like… ‘You don’t understand Tim, this is like a really big thing, and the dates can’t be changed….’ And then I wrote back saying, ‘No, you don’t understand, nothing gets in the way of my family, I’m very honoured, but you’ll have to give it to someone else.’ Well – in the end they were determined that I come and suggested they fly our entire family over so that we could still celebrate his birthday as a family, and so that I could still get the prize, and that they would pay respect to my sons birthday at all the ceremony. So I asked my son Ben and he was ok with it. In fact, he really enjoyed his birthday as entire auditoriums sang him happy birthday and he had something like 5 birthday cakes while we were there.”

I thought this was cool and grounded. In fact, it’s a terrific thing when someone you respect greatly, gives you more reasons to respect them after you’ve actually met.

(A photo with Tim – He said ‘Send me a copy of the photo!‘ – but I’m sure he says that to every fan boy who asks for a picture.)

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Persuasion & Startups

Posted on January 29, 2013 by Steve Sammartino

This video was a nice reminder of what motivates people in life. I dig the animation, but I did think that the examples were kind of naff. In the spirit of de-naffing – I thought I’d list out the 6 key motivators, and then give an example of how a startup can employ it in a cool way that makes sense.

According to the science these are the key drivers that persuade people to take action.

Reciprocity
Scarcity
Authority
Consistency
Liking
Consensus

Reciprocity: Be the resource first. Give to an audience something valuable, without asking for anything in return. Advice, information, news, utility. When I think of this, I think about the freemium model. I think about Google serving data points and monetizing later. How can your startup help in the first instance?

Scarcity: One of my favourite marketing strategies is when brands who know they have something cool and limit the distribution of their thing. Invites to Google+ and Pinterest come to mind, as does the retail strategy of many premium goods. This also has an important impact on our ability to price more profitably.

Authority: People want to deal with experts. One thing smart startups can do these days is build credentials in related spheres to what they sell. Smart brands do thought pieces on their industry, share intimate knowledge they have learned, and even give away perceived trade secrets. This is a smart way to fast track reputation and gain authority. A company blog is a great start. Talking at relevant industry conferences, getting articles published and mini doco’s are also great ways of developing a brand as an authority. Another old school method is gaining borrowed interest via sponsorships.

Consistency: In a world of exponential change and category fragmentation, it would be easy to think we desire unique and changeable experiences. But the opposite is true. While our tastes are becoming more niche, every niche experience we have we want to be consistent with our expectations. In technology Apple does it extremely well with their interface. But the true master would have to be McDonalds. When it comes to homogeneity of experience, they are the true masters. A simple question we can ask ourselves is this: How will the system we are building facilitate a ritual? Humans are creatures of habit and certainty – brands that serve this, have a chance at generating loyalty.

Liking: While this doesn’t appear in many strategy documents, people do business with people they like. The science says we like people and companies that are similar to us, and co-operate with us. When it comes to startups, a fast track to doing this is to personify the brand. Have a set of values that people can relate to, to stand for something politically and environmentally. The days of corporate fence sitting and both party political donations are over. The best way to be likable is to take a stand and find the people who value what we do. The others are irrelevant.

Consensus: With humans being social animals, we look for decision validation within our reference group. This doesn’t mean that the wisdom of crowds is right. In fact, it might mean the wisdom of a closed group of people we trust. My best current example is that the popularity of Facebook and its ever growing user base assures me that it isn’t right for me.

While it is hard to do all of these, it’s a nice reminder of the type of activity we need to undertake to inspire people to take action.

What are some of the methods that you’ve used?

How invention timelines distort

Posted on January 23, 2013 by Steve Sammartino

The screen culture era that we have entered is clearly here to stay – but it does represent some interesting nuance in human perception. Given that we are in the middle of a technological upheaval there is a default belief that everything newer is better. And often it is, the real challenge is for us to train ourselves to stop and compare the new option with the existing method. Once we start to do this, we might surprise ourselves to find we adopt a lot of new technology for reasons that defy relative utility.

This short doco I was watching on the future of connections got me thinking about it more deeply. Our current obsession with the screen as the default to every solution to every business flow problem. The idea that UX is seen as a screen issue, that we use digital to replicate analog, and the fact that we even make ebooks look as though they are turning paper pages, says that our we are distorting the true utility of the tools we are using.

So let’s imagine for a minute that the digital screen was invented before paper was. That paper, and printing upon it had just arrived today. I have no doubt that the same level of excitement would bubble around this as a technology. We’d all be very quick to point out the benefits of the printed word and visual over the screen:

It doesn’t need electricity
You can drop it without breaking it
It’s super light
It can be incredibly thin…. “paper thin?”
It can have a superior resolution
It’s flexible and can be shoved in a bag, folded, rolled etc
It can be compiled into multiple sheets or bound together
It doesn’t take memory to scroll through, or load up, you just turn directly to a particular page
It can be written on with almost any writing device (which probably wouldn’t have been invented yet!)
It’s very low cost to produce single or multiple copies
Data can be generated on it and stored with or without computing power
It can be sent without risk (although mail probably wouldn’t exist – but it would be a ‘hot’ startup vertical!)
You can tear out a page or square and give it to someone

You get the picture…. and I’m sure you can make an equally compelling list in reverse which is ‘pro digital screen’. And the irony is not lost on me that the current battle in screen technology is for one that can can flex without breaking.

So why does this matter? Because it is time we started again to focus on utility, not newness for the sake of it. It is time we appreciated the variety of tools at our disposal and used them interchangeably or together based on suitability. But most of all it’s time we started to remember why technology matters, which we can do by reminding ourselves of the definition according the Oxford Dictionary:

Technology: The application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes.

Or put another way, the thing ought serve the purpose, the purpose is not the thing – unless of course it’s the thing we sell.

As far as startups and entrepreneurs are concerned, there’s a clue in all this. The only way we’ll ever get adoption of our technology, will be if it ‘practically’ supersedes the alternative.

Strange Project

Posted on January 22, 2013 by Steve Sammartino

I was thinking about someone doing a project where they give themselves to others for a year via twitter.

Each day or week they are available to help someone (person, SME, startup) for free to do anything so long as it is legal. The only price will be that it is able to be documented.

Or maybe this: sell their labour a week at a time on eBay and see what the starting price is (early on in the year) and what it becomes towards the end of the year based on the value they add, or social followers they acquire during the process. But again, it would be documented.

If someone wants to do this, be this person – then hit me up. Would make a cool documentary or something…

I’m not joking.