Connecting Robert Scoble

Robert Scoble

The coolest thing happened last week when I went to a Startup Dream Team talk featuring Robert Scoble.  At the talk, Scoble discussed how our phones in the very near future will start knowing everything about us.  It will start with continuous GPS tracking, where the phone will learn a user's habits, recognize the patterns and then serve the user information accordingly.  For example, the phone knows the usual route the user takes to work, if it detects an accident, it automatically alerts the user and routes a new path.

Father down the line the phone will be able to communicate with various other surrounding objects via different radios.  This could mean that the phone will know immediately when the user gets into his car, via Bluetooth or RFID and then proceed to serve up the relevant traffic information.  Even farther down the line, will be the elimination of the phone and the advent of wearable technologies that will be able to actively recognize and interact with the surrounding environment.


In essence, Scoble states that the future of technology will be about putting the user in context.  Taking into account user behavior, time, place and environment, technology will be serving users immediately relevant information.

When Scoble said context, I was reminded that I had heard and even seen this executed just a month ago at Startup Weekend San Diego (SWSD). At SWSD Qualcomm offered cash prizes for teams that best integrated Context.Beta SDK (now called Gimbal) into their products. The Context SDK developed at Qualcomm Labs was in beta at the time, but it did almost everything that Scoble said was coming up in the future. In addition, Breadcrumbs, the app that won Qualcomm's grand prize was an app that constantly tracked the user and then served him with immediately relevant information. It seems the future was a lot closer than Scoble thought.

The cool part of this story is that immediately after the Scoble talk, I went back to my office and tweeted Scoble and Roland, the project manager for the Context.Beta SDK/Gimbal.

I did not think much of it, especially since Scoble never retweeted or mentioned me, but the next day I see this on Scoble's blog:

Today I was talking with Roland Ligtenberg, product developer at Qualcomm Labs. While talking with me I realized just what Qualcomm was up to.

Even though nobody knows, it feels pretty damn cool to have connected Scoble with Roland to make that blog post happen.

China Application: HUB-Ventures Investor Day

On Wednesday, I attended Investor Day hosted by Hub Ventures. The Hub is an international organization that creates co-working spaces for companies with social missions. That night, HUB-Ventures, the 3 month in house incubation program that provides funding and mentorship to a select group of startups was graduating its second class.

After countless local, mobile and social pitches, it was great to to hear ideas that had legitimate claims to changing the world.  While getting wowed by the presenters, it suddenly occurred to me that some of the startups could very well make it in China.

Below are the three startups whose products I could see making it in China:

Acopio

Most of the world's coffee is grown on small farms and cooperatives where record keeping and ordering is still handled on paper.  Acopio aims to bring these small growers to the digital world with their data management software that will allow producers to track operational data as well as clearly communicate with lenders and buyers.    

Currently, Acopio's focus is on South American producers, but I can easily see this software used by Chinese coffee growers in Yunnan.  In addition, due to the high likelihood that Chinese and South American farmers are at the same technology level, bringing Acopio's software to China would just require some translation.          

Africa's Talking

With the heavy focus on smartphones, it is easy to forget that the most popular phone in the world today is the Nokia 1100, a dumbphone.  Africa's Talking wants to help developers build apps for the much larger dumbphone market by creating a universal platform that would be adopted by service providers.  M-Pesa a mobile payment system originated out of Kenya has shown that there is a great demand for practical mobile apps.    

In China, the smartphone market is growing rapidly but the large majority of Chinese still own dumbphones so there is definitely a large market for dumbphone apps.  However, if Africa's Talking were to shift its focus to China, it should do so fast because dumbphones are a rapidly sunsetting business.    

Project Repat

Apparently, I have been missing out a on a new trend called upcycling where discarded textiles are creatively remade into new textile products and then sold for a higher price. Project Repat has turned upcycling into a big business, by partnering with big brands to take their unsold merchandise off their hands and then upcycling it to be sold back under the same brand.

China being by far the largest textile manufacturer in the world, has an abundant supply of defective and rejected goods that could be upcycled right out of the factory.  Taking into account the lower labor and shipping costs, upcycled products in China would be very competitive in the global marketplace.  

New Grad Job Search Tips: My Guest Posts on StudentAdisor and CollegeAftermath

Recently, I wrote two guest posts giving the class of 2012 a few tips on how to find a job.  Times are tough right now and many of my friends who are new graduates are competing not only against each other, but other more experienced workers who have been let go in the economic downturn.  Below are my two guest posts on Student Advisor and CollegeAftermath giving some tips on how to standout from the very large pack.  Hopefully they will be of some help to my fellow classmates.    

Click on the links to read more:

StudentAdvisor (A Washington Post Company)

1. Work an Internship

2. Look in non-traditional places

3. Build a non-traditional resume

4. Ask for help

5. Take your search to the recruiter

CollegeAftermath 

(Rehash of the StudentAdvisor post but added in new idea on #5)

1) Apply for an Internship

2) Leave no stone unturned

3) Fully Utilize the Digital Resume

4) Network

5) Quality over quantity

6) Get in front of the recruiter

Takeaways from Startup Weekend San Diego #SWSD

Last week, was San Diego's 4th Startup Weekend, here are my thoughts on the event as part of the organizing team.

Organizing the event

The organizing team was decently sized and that meant the workload ended up being very manageable.  Though, I kind of wished I had taken on more responsibility.  Nonetheless, organizing SWSD was an incredibly rewarding experience.  It helped that the attendees were incredibly appreciative of the organizing team.  On Sunday night after SWSD wrapped up, we joined some of the attendees at the bar and when we entered through the door they gave us a round of applause!  That one moment made all the hard work and fatigue worth it.

Friday pitches

As much as I tried to, I could not like the pitches on Friday night. After witnessing the originality of the pitches from Startup Weekend Santa Barbara, the San Diego pitches just seemed stale.  Most of the ideas pitched seemed to be minor variations on already well established products.

Inside the judges room

I found myself disagreeing with the judges on the winners.  Aside from GeoContractor, an app for contractors to keep track of where their workers and materials are, I thought the judges really missed the boat.  The first place winner Remix Replay was a website to create web games via a drag and drop interface.  According to the judges, Remix Replay was not ready to immediately go to market judging by the demo presented, in addition, it had no clear monetization strategy.  This made it all the more surprising, when the judges selected Remix Replay for first place over GeoContractor, when GeoContractor's product was at the same stage but had a clear monetization plan for the huge contractor market.

Qualcomm ContextBeta SDK Winners

On the other hand, I completely agreed with the selection of Breadcrumbs for the first place ContextBeta SDK prize.  This smartphone app which tracks a users movement throughout the day and then breaks that data down into easily understood and relevant chunks, fits well with the growing trend of quantified self.  Its monetization strategy also fits well with the trend of localization of ads.  The data that Breadcrumbs would have access to such as when and where a user is, as well as how long he is going to stay there and where he is going to go next would be extremely valuable to an advertiser.

Conclusion 

SWSD did not start off strong, but it certainly made a good showing in the end.  There were a couple of products such as GeoContractor, Breadcrumbs and Backdropp that I would love to try.  However, after Santa Barbara, I must say that San Diego has some serious catching up to do.  

Startup Weekend San Diego #SWSD: Competing Teams and Winners

Startup Weekend San Diego (SWSD) was just last week and I was part of the organizing team.  

Below are the winners as well as a list of the teams that formed:

SWSD Winners

1st place: RemixReplay
2nd place: GeoConstructor
3rd place: StokeBox

Crowd Favorite: CollegeGoGo
Runners-up: GeoConstructor, RemixReplay

Qualcomm Labs - ContextBeta SDK winners: 

1st place: Breadcrumbs
2nd place: GeoConstructor
3rd place: SafeAlert

Competing teams:

F-ParkingTickets

www.fparkingtickets.co

Startup company building a system to save us all from parking tickets.

Stoke Box

www.StokeBox.com

An online community of parents that matches members based on what they have and what they need.

People Are Waiting

www.peoplearewaiting.com

Communicate effectively with latecomers to meetings and quickly decide if you should start without them, reschedule, or wait.

SafeAlert

A service that provides alerts of a crime that are taking place in the vicinity in real time, so that you can stay away from the location of crime.

LocalWall

Digg based event posting community.

GeoContractor

www.geocontractor.com

Automatically locates employees and subcontractors for Construction General Contractors and Developers. Automatically checks them in and out of job sites and hardware stores. Allows workers to establish lists of supplies to pick up, and automatically pops up this list when the worker enters the geolocation. 

Tour Me

Location-aware mobile app platform for cultural institutions.

backdropp

www.backdropp.com

A geotag solution to location scouting for the creative community.

Backdropp allows the user to pin a cool location on the map, attach a photo of the point of interest and write a short description. Our geotag system alerts other users when they are in the vicinity of that backdrop so they can check it out and utilize that backdrop for photo shoots or location scouting.

Breadcrumbs TBD

Working with geo fence technology.

College Go Go 

www.collegegogo.com

A college registry site and app for students. 

TravelShot

http://travelshot.adspark.net/

TravelShot is an interactive travel photo journal and social network.  While traveling, TravelShot allows you to snap a photo and upload it to a personalized size that tracks your travels on a visual map filled with the photos you've taken along the way.  TravelShot is integrated with Facebook and Twitter to send out updates to your friends and family every time you post an update.  When you get home, you instantly have an interactive photo gallery of your travels.

Solace.com

http://solace.kickofflabs.com/

Making the creation of online memorials easy for the bereaved.

Remix Replay

http://remixreplay.co/

To create a web app that allows users to make personalized computer games. No programming skills required.

WRIGHT

A Jetshare Community

Financial Horizons Marketing Campaign: Ideas and improvements for next year

A list things that would make next year's marketing campaign much better.

Increase Extra Credit Pitches

Extra credit has shown to be the best driver of attendance.  An email should be sent to every economics professor teaching that quarter asking them to offer extra credit for attending the conference.  This assumption is not supported by data, but I believe classes that offered extra credit had over 50% of their students attend the conference.

Flyers With Slogans

No Slogan!

The reason we did not have the slogans on it this year was because we had to rush printing.  The flyer designer and director of marketing should be working closely together on the flyer.  The flyer design, which also becomes the face of the conference should be fully integrated into the marketing campaign.  

Study Party/Promotional Event 

Students in the same classes tend to only gather together right before an exam.  In order to take advantage of that, UIS should work with economics TA's to organize a study party the day before a midterm.  UIS should treat these study parties as promotional events and use its marketing budget to provide free food, caffeine and T-shirts.  The combined force of TA's and free stuff should draw a significant group of economic students to these study parties. A conference pitch directed at this captive audience should play to the fact that many students do not know how what they are studying will help them in the future.  Essentially, the conference pitch should say something like "Don't know how this stuff will help you in your life? Come to the conference and find out."

Display Case 

There are many display cases that student organizations can reserve all over the Price Center, but there is only one that matters.  The display case that is in the hallway that connects Price Center East with Price Center West is possibly the most highly trafficked path in the whole school.  Putting an eye catching display, or even plastering the case of with flyers would greatly increase awareness of the conference.

Financial Horizons Marketing Campaign: Results and Conclusions

Here are the results of the marketing campaign from analyzing the registration data.

Background on Attendees

As expected, the large majority of attendees were from UC San Diego.  Economics and business majors made up 71% of attendees, which raises the question should UIS continue to target economics students or expand out into other majors?  I believe that with over 6000 students that enroll in economics courses every quarter at UCSD, there is still a lot of low hanging fruit to be picked.  The next marketing campaign should focus almost entirely on economic students, as fewer than 10% students taking economics classes are registering for the conference.  

What worked?

Flyering and chalk boarding which were the two most most labor intensive methods produced the worst results, reaching a combined 8% of attendees.  On the other hand, the least labor intensive marketing methods econ blog, in class pitches and social media were three to six times more effective.

Word of mouth through friends was the surprise leader in how attendees heard about the conference.  This makes me think the next campaign should focus on soundbites and something that encourages attendees to bring friends, such as "bring a friend get X free" type promotion.

Though this graph is informative, I believe that it underestimates the value of flyering and chalkboarding.  I have a nagging suspicion that there would have been fewer people who heard about it from friends had the campus not been covered in flyers.  There is a chance that flyering and chalkboarding serve as reinforcement to the more popular methods, for example a student hears about the conference from a friend and then is reminded to register upon seeing a flyer.  That kind of value that chalkboarding and flyering brings would not be reflected in this graph.

Facebook Ads

Overall, Facebook ads were dismal.  With over 6000 people seeing the ads, only 6 of them clicked.  Out of the 7 ads that I ran, the one titled "Hedge Funds @ UCSD" did the best, and by best I mean it got all the clicks.  The success of  the "Hedge Funds" ad suggests that more mainstream finance terms are the key to targeting students.

Currently, there is a debate raging about the effectiveness of Facebook ads. My dismal results has pushed me towards the "not effective" side of the debate.   There is a very real possibility that my generation, which grew up with banner ads, have learned to completely tune them out.  WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg is definitely onto something when he said that the display advertising model is broken and in-stream advertising is the future.