Infotrade

One of my first rules of hiring is that you should always try to hire someone smarter than yourself -- so you can learn as much as possible.  I have been very fortunate to work with some wonderful people over the years. My friend   Van Morris   (who we hired to become CEO of Infonautics) taught me a wonderful lesson about risk taking.  It's about getting your fouls. If Alan Iverson fouled out in the first ten minutes of an NBA basketball game, you can be sure that his coach would immediately talk to him because he was playing too aggressively...and "urge" him to play it a little safer.  However, if Iverson played several games without getting any fouls, Van believed that a good coach should also talk to him -- because he was playing too safe...and "urge" him to take more chances and be more aggressive. Basketball players get the opportunity to commit five fouls before they are removed from the game.  Why doesn't that apply to business as wel...

Becoming an entrepreneur is a career path more young people are seeking out than ever before. It’s not a path everyone excels or succeeds at, yet many colleges now offer students the option to major or minor in entrepreneurship. With it being such a highly sought-after career track, there are plenty of organizations for entrepreneurs to join and network with fellow entrepreneurs. I want to talk about just one:   The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) , probably the most exclusive and elite of those organizations. As a member of the YEC, I can share some of what goes on inside — but not everything. Below is a sneak peek into America’s most elite entrepreneur organization. What is the YEC? The YEC was founded in 2010 by Scott Gerber, who came up with the idea after his first business tanked. He felt that if he’d had a group of peers to help him with that first venture, he might have been more successful — so the idea for a vetted, invite-only membership organization formed....

The desire to improve human conditions is an inherent part of being a designer. Since creativity is driven mainly by intrinsic motivation, how can design drive social entrepreneurship? Posing this question to creative professionals on online social networks however, resulted in only a dozen or so comments. It would seem that designers fundamentally see themselves as business executers, not initiators. However, designers, in their supporting role, firmly believe that design thinking can bring tremendous value to the tackling of complex social challenges. To better understand designers' behavior, we posted forty different Huffington Post articles on multiple crowd-sourcing platforms as well as twenty LinkedIn challenges. We found that designers forwarded articles on business more often than on social issues; however, they were more likely to comment on social issues than on business issues. This suggests designers want to contribute to societal causes and want to learn about busi...

At the recent   MobileBeat / GamesBeat  conference in San Francisco, I was interviewed on stage by   Matt Marshall , VentureBeat’s Founder & Editor-In-Chief on the topic of designing apps for monetization. The problem most app developers have is that they overly focus their initial design efforts on engagement and retention rather than monetization.  Most developers believe that once they launch a highly engaging mobile app, they’ll get around to optimizing for monetization. The problem is that most apps achieve their peak traffic levels within the first three to six months of launch. By the time they get around to optimizing monetization, they already blew past their peak traffic levels and are declining quickly. The solution is to focus on designing for monetization upfront. Here are three specific examples of high impact tactics you can implement during design: Integrated Interfaces for In-App Purchases/Offers   - At   W3i , one area in wh...

During our recent road trip through the American Southeast, a few things popped out at me. First and foremost, real innovation and entrepreneurial energy is coming out of the places you’d least expect. The secondary lesson is a bit more interesting and could change the way we traditionally look at startup incubators and accelerators. It’s an idea posited by Manoj Govindan, a partnership executive at Bank of America in Charlotte, North Carolina and I’m calling it the “cauldron”. Everyone is building accelerators and incubators. But the results, while interesting, rarely live up to their promise. There’s only so much value and synergy to be gained by putting 15 disparate startups into the same derelict office and offering them $45,000 or so to stick around. Remember: before startups appropriated the word, most incubator denizens were hatched, stripped of their feathers, fried, and eaten. What Manoj was proposing was a sort of anchor model. A major corporation – say a media entit...

Real5D takes floor plans from property developers and architects to create immersive environments where buyers can explore. The immersive environment platform just secured $1.2 million in funding through   AngelList   from Double Rock, and is running lean. Very lean. When I got a hold of Dan Canfield, Vice President of Investor Relations for the company, he was toiling away in the Hilton on O’Farrell Street. He said he’s not staying there but that they have great WiFi, access to a Starbucks and FedEx, and it’s busy enough that no one will notice you loitering. (I’ve either just ruined that for them, or launched the Hilton Lobby Accelerator.) The real5D team creates buildings inside their virtual reality world based on architectural plans provided. Aside from just zooming around inside a 3D rendering, buyers can meet a real-life real estate agent, who can offer a tours, show different room options, and answer questions. The product is aimed at solving the p...

Carmine demonstrates a message map If you can’t tell me what you do in 15 seconds, I’m not buying, I’m not investing, and I’m not interested. Few technologies are as complicated to explain as 4G LTE. Last year I worked with a group of leaders for the division of a global, publicly traded company who were responsible for pitching the technology to potential customers. Since the group was struggling to explain the technology simply, I introduced them to a tool that I’ve used very successfully with other brands—a message map. The leaders in this particular division were responsible for pitching the technology to public safety agencies. Their audience knew a lot about police work, but had little knowledge about wireless broadband. Imagine if the head of a public service agency heard something like this: 4G LTE is a standard for the wireless communication of high-speed data based on the GSM/EDGE and UMTS/HSPA network technologies, increasing the capacity and speed of new modulatio...