For example, you may be working on building your new blog newsletter and on the top right corner the Chimp would say:

and then the link, if you’re tempted to click it, would play this weird video:

Click here to view the embedded video.

or you could be looking at your campaign analytics and find a note that says: “Your campaign got a 100% click rate. Your best ever! Ka-ching! Yeah baby yeah”.

You may say it’s silly, and I’ll add that the monkey’s sense of humor is sometimes on the lame/dorky side, but, it made me smile and you know what, I think a 100% click rate does call for a “Yeah baby, Yeah!”. It gave me a much needed commic releif between html tags AND it let me know there are people on the other side of this service. People that bring themselves to work. People with personality. People that appreciate a comic relief from time to time too. People that understand that professional work doesn’t mean being dead serious all the time.  And  it doesn’t mean you have to communicating with your customers in a dry, official and law-suit-like way (as Microsoft often does).

Dare to be conversational. It’s more fun for everyone involved. As for professional, if you’re not, no amount of “we appreciate your business” kind of talk will change that.

And, if you’re a more ‘tight-chimp’ type at work, you can always set your account to :

Finalists will get to pitch at the national pitching Competition and stand to win a prize of $20,000.

This honest and truly funny talk by Guy Kawasaki about Art of The Start will help you prepare your pitch while you learn how many people it takes to change a light bulb at Microsoft and Apple.

Note that the contest is open to both individuals and teams, and at least one member must be listed IDC student or grad.

1. Don’t let go!
2. Hesitation is bad
3. Have a plan
4. The move is the end
5. Know how to rest
6. Fear sucks
7. Opposites are good
8. Strength != Power
9. Know how to let go

Matthew Childs is VP of Strategic Planning for FKQ Advertising and Marketing. He is a lifelong rock climber and climbing guide.

How can Google Insight for Search be useful?

1. SEM - Search trends can help you find hidden treasures in terms of territories which show high demand for what you offer. In many cases you’ll find countries that are still low cost in CPC campaigns. Tapping into the potential of these high demand low cost countries can really help you stretch your SEM budget,
2. SEO -In SEO projects, if you’re considering several options as leading keywords, this tool will let you know which keyword will drive more search traffic.
3. Strategy – When looking into different product development options, for example developing desktop app vs. browser based one, you can use this tool to know which is more in demand and where the trend is going.
4. Buzz - Effectiveness of word of mouth campaigns can be measured and compaired. Here’s the amazingly viral campaign of Blendtech “Will it blend?”.
5. Feed your curiosity of what people search for and get ideas for areas of potential and demand.

Gmail Labs is a way for Google to take ideas that aren’t quite ready for prime time as well as ideas that wouldn’t normally be picked and let Gmail users decide whether they’re good (and should be further developed) or not (and should be dropped).

Perpetual beta, is a term used to describe software or a system that never leaves the development stage of beta. It’s often used by developers in order to allow them to constantly release new features that may not be fully tested. The term represents one of Web2.0 key application development practices to “release early and release often”.

By adopting this approach of treating users as co-developers, Google significantly reduces development risk and costs. Many product development decisions are based on user feedback and help Google “make what it can sell”.

Gmail Labs currently tests 13 new features. One of them is “Random Signature” which adds a random quotations to your email signature.

I’m the first to say that quotes are a great way to offer recipients of your emails a peek into who you are and what you believe in. But, an irrelevant or inappropriate, randomly selected quote can do more harm than good. Imagine a vegan signing with this quote by Homer Simpson: “If God didn’t want us to eat animals, why did he make them out of meat?”

A quote that’s hilarious to some, isn’t that funny to others… What is funny though, or not, is that countless jokes that made only me laugh, and remarks that backfired, still haven’t taught me that lesson.

Sure enough, following the launch of Gmail Labs, many requests for better quotes feeds for the “Random Signature” feature have been posted. We heard the call and now, instead of the default quotes feed, you can use QuotesDaddy’s customized quotes feeds by any tag, author or best, your own personal favorite quotes.

The other thing that currently still holds many users from using Gmail Labs Random Signature is that the quote + author is limited to 96 characters. Even for the most succinct authors that’s not enough and the quote ends up being automatically truncated half way thr…

1. The pros and cons of different equity capital sources (financing by founders, friends and family, angels and Venture Capitals).
2. How to create and deliver effective investment raising presentations.
3. The big DOs and DON’Ts of investment raising presentations.

This presentation was featured in Slideshare and you can view it in full screen by clicking the view button below.

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Here’s a list recommended resources for entrepreneurs looking to get deeper understanding of the subject:

1. The Startup Company Bible For Entrepreneurs: The Complete Guide For Building Successful Companies And Raising Venture Capital
2. Angel Investing: Matching Startup Funds with Startup Companies – A Guide for Entrepreneurs, Individual Investors, and Venture Capitalists
3. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Finance & Business: Wealth Creation Techniques for Growing a Business
4. The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything
5. The Four Steps to the Epiphany
6. Deal Terms – The Finer Points of Venture Capital Deal Structures, Valuations, Term Sheets, Stock Options and Getting VC Deals Done (Inside the Minds)

The Most Successful Ventures are the Ones where Founders “Scratch Their Own Itch”.

Craigslist is just one of countless examples of highly successful companies, founded by someone who just wanted to solve an aching problem or satisfy a need.

Besides the obvious benefit of tailoring a solution to your need, a startup that “scratches your itch” has great business and entrepreneurial advantages:

1. True, long term interest is the best form of market research. Being the target audience of your product or services, you know your market, and more important, share the point of view of your prospective users. That gives you significant edge in market research. Not only does it crunch research time, it ensures a quality market analysis, that’s based on gradual learning, driven by pure interest in the subject and need for solutions.
2. Pain writes the best feature list. Sharing a pain with your venture’s prospective users, means you naturally identify with their pains and challenges. Such intimate understanding of market needs is stronger than any market research can be. This is extremely helpful when writing the initial feature list of your product or service as you intuitively know which features will give users the greatest gain.
3. Regular Usage is the Best Quality Assurance Method. What better way to debug a web application than to use it regularly just like your users do? Following a list of tests for every feature will never reveal the kind of bugs you discover when you use your product as a solution to a real problem you have. And this is a great way to discover not only bugs, but also required (or more important, unrequited) features.
4. Word-of-Mouth Marketing Becomes Talking to Friends. Going back to the craigslist example above, Craig’s first mailing list opt-ins were colleagues from the software and computer industries. Naturally, it’s easier to invite people from your social circle to be the first to try your new product. When you are highly interested in something, you tend to socialize with people that share the same interest. This gives you an edge in market penetration as your target audience is accessible and and open to your offerings. Another advantage is that by just sharing your idea with friends, you already seed a WOMMA (Word-of-Mouth Marketing) campaign.
5. When the Going Gets Tough, It’s Passion that Keeps Your Going. Starting your own business is like a roller coaster ride. One day your up and it feels l like you’re “this close” to making it bigger than you ever imagined. The next day, a competitor beats you to the market and you’re so down, you’re considering asking your boss for your job back. In those times of low, it’s your passion for the field and for the solution you are developing that keeps you going.

Another example of founders successfully “scratching their itch” is 37Signals, a small company which Time Magazing recently called “One of the Net’s Rising Start”. 37Signals offers browser based project management, collaboration and personal productivity software. A Business Week cover story 37Signals: Programming at Warp Speed tells how the idea for Backpack, one of 37Signals leading products was conceived:

Fried [one of 37Signals' founders] and two colleagues were at a restaurant in Seattle at the end of 2004, griping about the difficulty of keeping track of their travel, meeting, and contact info while on the road. They asked themselves: Why not handle it with a simple Web application?

The need for better project, time and collaboration management tools, lead to the development of Backpack (organizer), Basecamp (project management) and other phenomenal 37Signals products I use, which are rapidly closing the gap with dated products like Microsoft Project.

How I Got to Scratch my Famous Quotes Itch

I love famous quotes and use them often in writing and lecturing . A good quote nails a point better than elaborative explanations ever could. In general, I find that quotes are a great way to get a message across. When a quote is right on the target, you’re brilliant and when it backfires, you’re not the idiot that came up with it.

Being a heavy quotes user, I needed an easy way to find and save the right quotes for every post, lecture or talk, and a way to later retrieve the quotes I needed. I also wanted to be able to share my favorite quotes with friends in the social networks I use and with readers.

Unhappy with the quotes sites available, I decided to make myself and fellow quotes lovers a site that will let us find, save and share quotes easily. The result is QuotesDaddy.com which was recently launched and got me one step closer to happiness…

Deadly Crash on the TTM (Time To Market) Highway

It’s almost as a side note of little significance, that Steven Gary Blanks in his brilliant book The Four Steps to the Epiphany (p 136), talks about the fallacy of “First Mover Advantage”. Worthy of serious discussion, I’d like to dedicate this post to this notion. It has driven too many promising startups to exceed the speed limit, loose control and end up in a deadly crash on the TTM (Time To Market) highway. The phrase “First Mover Advantage” was first popularized in a 1988 paper by a Stanford Business School professor, David Montgomery and his co-author, Martin Leiberman. Only 10 short years later, in a 1998 retrospective paper, the authors backed off from their claims. Blank: “By then it was too late. It’s misreading by some Silicon Valley VCs who had Montgomery as their business school professor, was used to justify the wanton and reckless ‘get big fast’ strategies of dot-com startups” … “this one phrase was the theoretical underpinning to the out of control spending of startups”.

Pioneers Get the “Advantage” of 47% Failure Rate

In the 1993 Journal of Market Research article Pioneer Advantage: Marketing Logic or Marketing Legend? the question of “First Mover Advantage” is revisited and approximately 500 brands in 50 product categories are analyzed. The results show that 47%, almost half, of the market pioneers fail and their mean market share is much lower than that found in other studies. Early market leaders on the other hand, have much greater long-term success and failure rate of only 8%. Leadership dynamics in the US Auto Manufacturer market is just one example of the above findings. Ford, the first to mass produce cars in the US, soon lost it’s lead to GM and now both gradually lose market share to Toyota’s continuing upward momentum.

That’s The Rub. First ≠ Leader.

Too ofter, “First Mover Advantage” is taken literally, driving entrepreneurs to put all their resources in being first to move – first to put a product on the shelf. Blinded by the promise of long term victory, many burn out quickly, before they even understand the driving forces of the new market they’ve entered. What we should be aiming for, is Leader Advantage. Or, as Ries and Trout show with countless examples in The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, sustainable market advantage is achieved by those who follow “The Law of Leadership” and successfully position their product FIRST in the customer’s MIND. If all it took to win was to be the first to move, most competitive sports would be dead boring to play, moreover to watch. Similarly, it’s true understanding of the type of market you’re entering, compatible penetration strategy and agility, that makes a winner. Next time you hear praises of “The First Mover Advantage” remember the famous saying: “You can always tell who the pioneers are because they have arrows in their back and are lying face down in the dirt.”