August 30, 2005

Jobster raises $19.5 mm in a Series B

Seattle uber-achievers Jobster have raised $19.5 mm in a Series B financing. Looks like Jason and his team are on to a good thing there, so congratulations guys!

August 29, 2005

GooglePark

A mildly amusing spoof.

Very cool Google Maps Mash

HousingMaps: click a city and get zoomed in.

Soda v. pop v. coke

Via TheLadders.com: soda v. pop v. coke.

How to resign a job

Great advice, wish I'd thought of this post first.

Blogs speak

This blog-talking service from Talkr is interesting at first glance. But the disembodied, emotionless and emphasis-free voice gets rather creepy rather quickly.

Icons and icons

Very interesting treasure troves of free icons here and here.

Oh my, MySpace...

MySpace will start a record label, and soon take over the entire social lives of its 27 million users.

MySpace is absoutely the way social networking should be done. Like Flickr, it focuses around a shared interest first, with social networking and interactive features built around the core. In MySpace's case it's music. In Flickr's, it's photos. (And, if you want to extend the argument to its logical, pre-Internet conclusion, in Bloomberg's case, it's finances. Anybody who uses Bloomberg regularly ends up doing everything from their Bloomberg -- e-mail, news, info, job hunting.... everything).

I've been over to the new Bloomberg tower on 59th and Lex a few times for TV interviews. And just like it's not that far-fetched (now) to believe that what was basically a glorified updated spreadsheet of bond prices could spawn a magazine-, TV-, and media-empire, so too is it not that ridiculous to believe that MySpace, and the similar businesses that will focus on other lifestyle niches, will thrive as it conquers new facets of the industry it now dominates.

August 28, 2005

10 Steps to a Hugely Successful Web 2.0 Company

Pretty clever commentary over at This is going to be BIG!:

Do you want to make money in your own home?

Forget real estate scams, tupperware, or becoming a spammer.

Create your own Web 2.0 company NOW!!

Its easy. Just follow these 10 simple steps and you, too, can be seen in fine dining establishments like Jamba Juice and speaking on panels for conferences like Distribucate 2.0, Fred, Bloggerstock and Elfdex.

1. Solve the smallest possible problem (that is still big enough to matter) for the user and know exactly what problem you're trying to solve. Google's first and primary job was very simple: Help people find stuff. They didn't start layering on everything else until much later. Brad calls this the "narrow point of the wedge." Its the easiest, simplest version of what you're trying to do... the smallest bite your users will ever have to chew--small enough to get hooked on very easily.

2. Get a responsive and chatty audience using the product. The del.icio.us community eats new features like piranhas. They pour over the service, discuss it, promote it, and complain when they don't like stuff. You couldn't have hired a better, more thorough, or more passionate group of alpha testers. Don't rush to get the service so easy that my dad can use it, because he's not going to really be helpful to you in the early days when you need really hardcore Beta testing.

3. Launch. Now. Tomorrow. Every day. Don't wait until its perfect to put it out in the open. No more closed invite-only betas. Your idea of perfect may not jive with your users' ideas of perfect. Put whatever you can out there and get people using it as soon as possible. Feed them daily with new features to keep them interested and coming back. No one likes waiting six years for new releases.

4. Distribute. Distribute. Distribute. Don't force your users to play on your site in a walled garden. Let them take the service and use it wherever they want. (See Flickr badges, Google Ads, Amazon affiliates, Indeed jobrolls, del.icio.us linkrolls, moblogging, RSS, e-mail alerts, etc., etc....) Instead of building it so they will come, go out and get them by placing little bits of your service everywhere on the web. Be where they are.

5. Don't hold users against their will. If they want to leave, let them pick up with all of the content they created while they were on your site and leave... for free. Charging $0.29 to get back each of the hi rez photos you uploaded to the site (See my upcoming Snapfish post) is thievery. You have to let the barn door open and focus on keeping your customers fed, so they want to come back, instead of coming back because they're stuck.

6. Be mindnumbingly simple. Extra clicks are deadly. People just won't do it. Indeed: One search, all jobs. Two boxes: What job and where. You can't get any easier than that and all it takes is for someone to put one search in for people to go, "Wait...what's this... links to Monster AND Careerbuilder??"

7. Get people hooked on free. Craigslist wouldn't have become Craigslist if it wasn't free for so much for so long. Even now, they're very profitable and they're only charging for just a few small pieces of their service in just a handful of their 120 markets. The world is changing. Service is cheaper to provide now than ever and users are expecting to get more for free than ever before. Its hard for a lot of big companies to accept that. I just had lunch recently with a couple of friends from a music publisher. They were signing some bands to "incubator" deals for just a couple of songs to test the market with them. I said, "And you're giving those songs away for free, right?" They nearly choked on their food. :) Well, why the heck wouldn't they? Give a few songs away for free, generate buzz, get lots more people to buy future albums. Seth Godin did that with his books, releasing e-books that generated buzz around hardcover sales. Free sells. Do you think the Facebook would be the Facebook if you had to pay for your smooches like you do on Match?

8. Don't waste any money on marketing. Word of mouth has never ever been easier or less expensive in the history of human communication. Things go viral in a hurry... when they're good. Ever see a Skype superbowl commercial? No, but they've had 146 million people download it. If you don't have the service and the quality to back it up, no amount of fancy marketing is going to help... and people are so quick to share cool stuff, because they want to be the person "in the know". When they're satisfied, they'll blog about it and e-mail everyone they know. And they'll tag it furiously on del.icio.us, too.

9. Don't overfund. Do you know how many times a day I see companies get funded on Private Equity Week and I'm like, "What the heck are they going to do with all that money??" Underfunding a company can be a problem, too, but thinking that more money makes you better is a fallacy. It probably makes you a bit sloppy and fuzzies your focus. When you raise $2 million, you're much more likely to have a clear sense of exactly where that money is going to go than if you raised $20 million.

10. No one sucks. I hate it when someone says that a whole service sucks. Now, I say it myself, I'll admit, but what that does is it teaches you to discount and generalize, and probably miss a lot of small opportunities that add up. Now, I think Ofoto sucks versus Flickr, but people still use it. Why? There's got to be something there. AOL sucks... or does it? They still have 20 million users, so it can't entirely suck. You should look at every competitor and take the best of what they do right and do it yourself, even if that's only one thing and the rest of their service sucks.

Professional organizations and double dipping

Heather over at Microsoft has a great post on professional organizations and double dipping. Money quote:

I hate to keep harping on the same things over and over again, but for a professional org chapter, you have to think about who the customer is and what they want. If the ultimate customer is the member, they may want access to open job listings (hello...networking is a major reason people join these groups). If you don't charge the company for the job postings, you will get many of them. This will make your members happy and you'll have lovely stories about job seekers who have found their next role via the organization (hello....that you can use as marketing tools to get more members). All this from me and I have no formal training in marketing (other than one undergrad class which I hardly remember at all). If you charge the companies for the job postings, you are competing for dollars with other chapter level organizations so you aren't going to get as many listings and your membership will go elsewhere to seek out listings. Seems pretty simple to me. What am I missing? I think that these groups will end up making more money in the long run if they decide to charge EITHER the employer or the seeker, but you can't have it both ways. You have to pick....what is your business, who is your supplier and who is your customer. Could it be any simpler?

That's exactly why we don't charge our corporate recruiter and executive search friends for job postings at TheLadders.com. As the nation's largest organization of $100k+ professionals, we exist to serve the job-seeker, the high-end professional. And to do that, we need to see all the high-end jobs out there, not just the ones that have a little extra left over in their recruitment advertising budget.

I Have A Dream

Forty-two years later, it's still electrifying to listen to "I Have a Dream". Take ten minutes on this anniversary to listen Dr. King's inspiring words:

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. And there will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.

I've always rather admired the less-lauded first part of the speech with its elaborate analogy around "insufficent funds" and cashing a "check." But I suppose that's the finance / economics geek in me:

In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the "unalienable Rights" of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds."

And the middle bridge that connects the opening with the end is thrilling. You can hear Dr. King gain momentum as the crowd is increasingly enthralled, enraptured with his words. The refrain "now is the time" seems to ignite the audience:

We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.

Thank you and Godspeed, Dr. King!

Engadget 1985

For all the latest news in consumer electonics from, errr.... 1985.

Humans respond to incentives

So Elliot Spitzer has forced AOL to Pay a $1.25 Million Fine:

According to Spitzer's findings, AOL customer representatives received bonuses of thousands of dollars if they managed to retain about half of the people who called trying to cancel service -- and that led some employees to fail to process such requests. Workers who did not meet that quota were overlooked for promotions or sent for additional training, Spitzer's office said.

Incentives can positively impact employee behavior by re-inforcing and rewarding people for their shared pursuit of company goals. Incentives' dark side is that people will, understandably, take the signal the company gives them via cash rewards, and pursue it to the exclusion of other, laudable goals, such as honesty and enlightened customer service.

Thanks Dave!

David Manaster at Hire Calling graciously offers to host a recruiting blogger event in Boston.

Unfortunately, that conflicts with a Board meeting, so I won't make i, but thanks very much Dave!

Match.com results up substantially

Seems like the personals industr is getting out of the slump. Match.com shows very strong 26% y-o-y growth in revenues:

I suppose this augurs well for TheLadders.com, as more and more Americans adopt the practice of spending real cash on intangible information.

Flickr as a Social Network

Interesting thoughts on Flickras a social network built around photos.

August 25, 2005

Jeff Taylor's New Gig -- Eons!

Drinks With Jeff Taylor.

August 23, 2005

Cool! Search jobs on Indeed.com while in Excel

Work Blog: Exciting Sneaky Bastard Fun from Work Magazine - A Third of Your Life, All of the Time

August 20, 2005

very, very deeply cool

Flickr Related Tag Browser. I did a search on "dumpling" -- very funny!

cool

del.icio.us most popular treemap

August 16, 2005

Base26

Super cool visualization of all 4-letter words in English. I wonder what this would look like in 4-D?

Quarters

Nicely done.

August 15, 2005

Apology to Google

ZDNet UK nails it:

Clearly, there is no place in modern reporting for this kind of unregulated, unprotected access to readily available facts, let alone in capriciously using them to illustrate areas of concern. We apologise unreservedly, and will cooperate fully in helping Google change people's perceptions of its role just as soon as it feels capable of communicating to us how it wishes that role to be seen.

LOL!

August 11, 2005

35 Years of Spork

It was 35 years ago today that a trademark application for the word Spork was published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

August 09, 2005

John gets Ink

Good ol' John Sumser is tweakin David about... what? I don't know.

t does remind me of an adage John shared with me at his California hacienda -- if you want to ge noticed, insult somebody.

:)

Staffing is still cyclical

A jaded Dave notes that comments about cyclicality parting ways with staffing is the same ol', same ol':

It sounds like the same thing that people say every time things are good - "this time it'll be different."

Just as every bubble has a new theory, untestable by prior experience, to explain how valuations should be different this time, so too does staffing periodicaly try to convince itself that it is not a cyclical business. But the fundamental remains the same:

Employer demand for employees is cyclical. There's no escaping it.

(p.s. one of the things I love about our business at TheLadders.com is that employee demand for jobs is not cyclical. Yay!)

Competition is good!

Yahoo! has tripled its search index. The strong competitive response from Yahoo! to the surging success of Google has been great fr the online industry.

There are always exciting features coming, cool extensions of products, and the invigorating froth of innovation.

At a tactical level, a strong Yahoo! (and dare we hope AOL or MSN) keeps the Google Guys arrogance in check and makes the search marketing market competitive on price, which is very good for web content folks like myself.

Keep going Terry!

Top Ten Dot Bombs

CNET, which by the way should get an award for outstanding graphic design on these "Top 10" series, takes us down the memory hole with Top 10 dot-com flops.

Celebrities when they were kids

I thought DeNiro was the best of these famous kids photos. Doesn't he look just like today?

Folksonomy

Over at Fractals of Change: Blog Changes, a bit on folksonomy.

The challenge with getting any sufficiently large number of individuals to accurately tag a sufficiently large number of items is that the cost is entirely borne by the tagger, and the benefit shared by all.

August 08, 2005

Hand Art

Who knows if this is actually photo-shopped, but here are some Incredible Hand Paintings. I loved the Bald Eagle.

Indeed!

Congratulations to Paul and his team on thier $5 mm investment from The New York Times and Union Square Ventures.

Fred Wilson is an awfully sharp guy, and I've known the New York Times crew for eons. Fantastic partners and a very good sign for the aggregators!

Great work Paul!

August 03, 2005

And Fred gives this out for free?

Entrepreneurs! Pay attention!

Fred Wilson, to whom you normally have to give a nice size fraction of your start-up to get his wisdom, is continuing his firesale on great advice over at his blog.

The punitive new pricing schema? FREE!

(Not much of a business model, Fred!!! ;) )

Hoopla aside, I've mentioned before how much I love Fred's VC Cliche of the Week.

Today's installment is a classic, particularly if, like me, you're going through the exceed one period / underperform another period seesaw that is the life of an entrepreneur defining a new market.

It feels awesome when you crush expectations by 100% and hurts real bad when you miss, even by 5%. But that culture of knowing, disseminating, and, yes, meeting the numbers is critical to a business.

Because having the numbers written down is like a little message in a bottle to yourself today from yourself 3, 6, or 12 months ago. Old You looked at the market and made an educated guess about where you could end up in the future.

And that Old You could be easy to ignore, especially when it's the Old You reminding Today's You about how you've failed to live up to expectations (that's what parents are for!)

And the danger is that it is natural and psychologically common to try to dismiss the past expectations when not met. All sorts of rationalizations can come into play.

Getting the numbers written down, getting a committment to meeting them, and getting it into your head that missed numbers are a plain, bald fact that you can't ignore, are all essential to making sure that you don't ignore that Old You, and that you're equipped with the tools to truly understand how the market actually is responding to you new product or service.

Because the most dangerous thing we, as entrepreneurs, can do for the health of our businesses is to say "it will all work out."

If the numbers aren't there, buddy, something isn't working out, and it's high time you and you team started facing facts and making changes...

...do you have the right strategy?
...do customers want your product?
...are customers pleased with your product and will they recommend it to friends?
..and most importantly, do you have the right people in place to help you explore, understand, and solve your new problems in your new market?

These are great questions, these are essential questions. And without the benefit of meeting the numbers to force you to ask them of yourself, you might not realize you have a problem until it is much too late....

August 02, 2005

Free Online boosts Paid Offline Sales

Intersting take from Boing Boing:

James Randi puts text of "occult-debunk" encyclopedia online The self-appointed guru of anti-woowoo has released the full text of his Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural online for free. James Randi hopes the move will boost sales of the print edition.

When I decided to place the entire text (...) on the Internet, it was suggested to me that this could cut into the sales of the printed version. However, experience has shown that, in the publishing business, making a book available on the Internet only stimulates sales of the actual book! Another mystery.

Flickr interesting photos

Flickr: Explore interesting photos from the last 24 hours, automagically determined (from Kottke).

Fare thee well, Uncle Jim!

Posting has been light over the past week as my Uncle Jim passed away last Tuesday. He was quite a fighter: he was given 24 hours to live 3 years ago, so that tells you just a bit about the man.

We eulogized him in fine style this weekend with his many family friends in from all over the country. So long Uncle Jim, we will miss you!

August 01, 2005

Colour perception

This is the most amazing optical effect in the world