Slovenian Startups: it’s personal

August 18th, 2012 § Comments Off on Slovenian Startups: it’s personal § permalink

 

Roughly three quarters of the webpages of Slovenian startups don’t say who the founders are. Not on the front page, not on the about page, nowhere. Most of the list the tax ID numbers and official address of the company, but not the names of the people running it.

This is a catastrophe! Are you trying to hide your head in the sand until the success ‘happens’, and only after that will you collect the credit? The founding fathers of America wrote their names on the Constitution, before it was a success.

Every young company has two major challenges when it comes to public communication:

  1. how do I tell enough people we exist?
  2. how do I make them trust us with their money?

The best answer to the first one is – go out of the office and talk to people on events and in their native environment. It’s also a great way to get to know your core audience inside-out.

But for the trust issue, the absolutely best remedy is for the founders to be put up front, essentially saying loud and clear: “Trust Me”. Don’t just trust the words I’ve written (they are wrong), don’t trust the design (it’s bad), don’t trust what you heard on the street about us (it was probably wrong), trust ME, I believe in what we are doing, I believe we are changing the world into a better place, and should something bad happen, I will feel ashamed to death.

So startup founders, please, write your names everywhere you can and be proud of it. There is no other way your startups will succeed.

 

What was the most common phrase in English 500 years ago? [Linguistics]

August 17th, 2012 § 3 comments § permalink

We live in amazing times – in a couple of years, we will have digitized all books every published (that survived), and we will be able to apply machine learning to the past. It will spur a whole new era of historiography.

What was the most common phrase in English 500 years ago? [Linguistics]

#linguistics With millions of books scanned and digitized by Google, a new type of linguistic analysis has become possible – as people are able to delve into hundreds of years and millions of books’ worth of data.

via: io9.com

… that the research has been done by a fellow Slovenian is not a coincidence – lots of talent over here 😉

big exits are not for the common people

August 16th, 2012 § Comments Off on big exits are not for the common people § permalink

 

This article made me think, that as a young entrepreneur, one has to realize that the big exits that are presented as success, actually require a very specific state of mind, which most of normal people would never submit themselves to.

Yes, if you are a startup entrepreneur and you hope for a billion dollar exit, chances are it’s not going to be smooth like Instagram’s, but convoluted like Facebook‘s, and you’ll have to piss off and disappoint a lot of people on the way.

Was the Social Media Tech IPO Boom a Big Scam?

Was the Social Media Tech IPO Boom a Big Scam? Billion-dollar cash-outs at Facebook, Zynga and Groupon. Abysmal stock performance. Tweet Jake Rajs / Getty Images Over the last year-and-a-half, several of the most prominent social media companies in the country have sold shares to investors in high-profile initial public offerings.

We need this to understand how you use our service - you can take it out if you like. Cheers, your Blogspire team.

via: business.time.com

Are you sure you want to do it? I’m not.

 

How big is the Web? [data]

August 15th, 2012 § 6 comments § permalink

Tim Berners-Lee: The World Wide Web - Opportun...

Tim Berners-Lee: The World Wide Web

I was curious about the total pageviews of the web. It turns out they are not really tracked anywhere, and that they are easy to estimate, so I did a quick analysis.

First I found two sources for ‘global total pageviews’:

  • Akamai Net Usage Index – amazing real time dashboard of part of this data. They say that every minute 3 million pageviews are spent on news sites, and 10 million on social sites. That’s friggin’ a lot of pageviews! But I wanted to know the grand total, and hopefully get some sense on where the blogs are in the picture.
  • blog post about interpolating this data from Alexa. Nice approach, but a few years old data, so I decided to repeat the process.

Alexa publishes pageviews for every site for free as a % of global pageviews. First thing to do was estimate the grand total, as described in that blog post, by looking at the published data from Wikipedia.

11,600,000,000 / 0.5% = 2320,000,000,000 monthly total pageviews on the Web

… told you it was easy 🙂 but that just means we can dig deeper. Alexa publishes the list of top million sites in a downloadable text file, so I wrote a script to go trough it, scrape Alexa pages for top 10.000 sites and store their individual traffic shares.

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