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.

You should see the count here, it’s amazing!

So if you have yet to upgrade, or worse, yet to drop Internet Explorer, now would be the time to learn what browsing should really feel like.

You can get this amazing open source browser here.

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…

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.”

This, for example, is a Map of the Online Advertising Space that I’ve prepared for a client that wanted to introduce a new product for Ad Networks and needed to understand the playing field. It was created with NovaMind, a very feature rich Mind Mapping software that produces great looking maps.

I have recently dropped NovaMind for Mind Meister, a more accessible application that also allows online collaboration. This is another step in my transition to becoming completely location independent. I will dedicate a post to the LIP (Location Independent Professionals) trend soon.

By accessible I mean first, the obvious, that Mind Meister is browser based rather than OS (Operating System) based. This means, you can work on your mind maps from any device that runs an internet browser. You are not bounded to your PC. The second level of accessibility, and this is were Mind Meister is different from other browser based Mind Mapping applications, is achieved by its implementation (via Ajax), which allows it to run with no additional browser plugins (such as Flash or Java). The benefits are that you can use any public computer where you will probably not be authorized to install plugins and that you can collaborate with anyone, without imposing specific system requirements.

Here’s a good Review of three Web-Based Mind Mapping Tools, that also covers Mind Meister and a good source about Mind Mapping Software in general. And here’s more about Mind Maps from Wikipedia.