Archive for December, 2004

Fastest Growth Sites Are Built on User Generated Content

paulballen — Thu, 30 Dec 2004 05:12:44 -0800

One of the most powerful ways to develop web site traffic is to enable your users to share their content through your web site with others--to create community around user generated content.

Many of the fastest growing web sites of all time did this (or do it now): MyFamily.com, eBay, GeoCities, Xoom, Homestead, MySpace, Epinions, Hotshots, LinkedIn.com, Meetup.com, Friendster, and more.

A recent company which admits they stumbled into this user generated content model is Flickr. Flickr is a phenomenal photo sharing site. Check out its traffic growth on Alexa. With no marketing dollars it has become one of the fastest growing sites in 2004. Read this great interview with its founders in Fast Company.

There were many super fast growth photo sharing sites in the late 90's. Some were acquired; some went out of business. At MyFamily.com we had tens of millions of photos from our users but these photos were not public--so we didn't get the kind of "free traffic" effect that comes when search engines indexes all this content.

But we did get this effect on Ancestry.com where we hosted enormous amounts of genealogical content submitted by our users. Our message boards had more than 10 million posts and our Ancestry World Tree with more than 350,000,000 submitted names was among our most popular databases.

When I advise companies on fast growth strategies, I tell them that to survive you have to have a real business model but to thrive you should also take a page out of the 90s playbook: create a user generated content strategy that is related to your business.

I don't have time to give specifics right now, but imagine getting your customers to blog, use message boards, upload photos or reviews

With open source software (for message boards, blogs, uploading photos, and more) and with the cost of hard drive storage a tiny fraction of what it was five years ago, the time has never been better to try a user generated content strategy.

One of our companies, iCount.com will embark in the next few weeks on a user generated content and social networking strategy in the political arena which I hope will give it a place in the fast growth companies I've listed above. In a few weeks or monthly I'll tell you how this goes and what lessons we have learned.

Universal Access to All Knowledge

paulballen — Thu, 30 Dec 2004 04:12:59 -0800

I've never met Brewster Kahle, inventor of WAIS, co-founder of Thinking Machines, founder of Alexa and digital librarian for the Internet Archive. But I've watched his contributions over the years and have admired his Vannevar Bush-like vision. (If you have never read the 1945 Atlantic Monthly article by Vannevar Bush titled "As We May Think", you're missing out on the original "access to all knowledge" brainstorm.)

I recently bought a biography of Bush entitled "Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century" but haven't read it yet.

Brewster spoke earlier this month at the Library of Congress on the topic of universal access to all knowledge. I am planning to watch the video of his lecture.

I played around with some new features of the Internet Archive the other day and was very impressed that they not only index web pages but they also index audio and video recordings. For example, here are the results of a search for "roosevelt" in the presidential recordings media type.

Google may have the means (and the business model to sustain it) to do more digitization of the world's knowledge than all other efforts combined, but the efforts preceding it, like Michael Hart's Project Gutenburg, a 20-year effort to create free digital version of all public domain texts, should be warmly regarded.

(When Google announced its massive scanning project in five major libraries I wanted my next blog headline to read "Goodbye Project Gutenberg; Hello Project Googleberg" but I didn't get around to it.)

I have never been more excited about the prospect of knowledge flooding the earth than now, with this Google announcement. And I'm not worried, as some are, about information overload.

To me, public domain content is a lot like open source software. The more freely available content or code there is, the more opportunity there is for companies to add value to the raw content -- like writing application software on top of the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack which is available for free.

In the case of the full text of millions of books, imagine that kinds of search engines and software that can be built on top of the freely available text.

The opportunity for individuals to build software or services around the knowledge core has never been greater. As open source matures and as these massive content projects proceed, knowledge workers and entrepreneurs will have more powerful tools at their fingertips than ever before.

The Original Multi-Language Blogger

paulballen — Thu, 30 Dec 2004 04:12:28 -0800

I am happy to report that I have offers from entrepreneurs to translate my blog and resource pages into Polish, Portuguese and Italian. In searching for translators, I also learned about a software programmer named Joel Spolsky who started a blog called Joel on Software in 2000. His blog is translated into more than 30 languages. His Alexa ranking is excellent, and astonishingly there are more than 682,000 pages in Google that contain the phrase "Joel on Software". (I guess there will now be 682,001 when Google indexes this page in a day or two.) That is amazing.

I hope Joel will give me advice on how to do a multi-lingual blog. I want to automate it as much as possible so that translators know when I post something, and I know when they have translated something, and links are automatically generated when there is new content to link to. I'm using Radio Userland for my blog and will probably call CEO Scott Young to see if he knows of any add-on tools that might make this easy to do.

One benefit my translators will get: they can ask me to blog about topics that they are most interested in and they can ask me for advice about their own startup companies. I generally do research for hours each day and would love to cover topics that are of interest to my readers and translators. Let me know if you can help with one of the remaining languages.

International Yellow Pages

paulballen — Wed, 29 Dec 2004 16:20:53 -0800

I heard a great story on NPR a couple weeks ago about a woman who was born in Afghanistan but raised in Australia. She visited Kabul earlier this year and discovered that there was no phone book or at least no yellow pages. (That kind of blows my mind--the population is more than 2 million!) She decided to do something about that and apparently is now publishing the first Kabul yellow pages, with more than 100,000 phone numbers listed (almost all cell phone numbers) from businesses and merchants.

I think every community and every developing nation needs a yellow pages phone directory. (Although I think there are too many in my neighborhood--I don't know what to do with them all.)

I know people who have done very well with yellow pages and directory publishing. It's a highly profitable business model (one cached article in Google says it's close to 50%) and a great catalyst for economic growth. I wonder how many other highly populated world cities don't have a yellow pages directory. I also wonder if any company has ever been formed to act on this opportunity.

Maybe I'll hire a researcher to determine how many of the world's largest cities (population over 500,000 for example) do and how many do not have a yellow pages directory.

If someone has already done this, please let me know.

2 Million Blackberry Users

paulballen — Tue, 28 Dec 2004 05:12:39 -0800

It's nice to see a great Canadian company hitting the hockey stick part of their growth curve.

Research in Motion added almost 400,000 subscribers last quarter to reach 2 million, after getting to 1 million in February of this year. The company generated more than $90 million in profit on sales of $366 million. The market cap today is $15 billion. Executives say the company is focusing on reaching 5 million then 10 million subscribers.

One of the co-CEOs was on Kudlow and Cramer the other night. He said they now have an application development platform and that next year they will be offering location-aware services.

I already use my Blackberry for Google phonebook searches, using the integrated web browser. (I also use Google SMS). But the thought of location aware Google Local or Yahoo Local searches on my Blackberry really gets me excited.

I've gone through 4 RIM Blackberries since they were introduced and absolutely love them. The thumb key pad is awesome--I can type more than 50 words per minute now. And I can take notes everywhere without pulling out a laptop and booting up. (At church I always feel a need to explain to church goers around me that I'm taking notes--not playing games.)

Until I saw a news release a few months back about Lexis data being made available to Blackberry users, I hadn't consider that the Blackberry could be a development platform for all kinds of third party software and data services. But since I consider it the most usable of all the portable computing devices I have used (because of the thumb keypad, the scroll wheel, and the integration of cell phone services with the address book and email), I'm definitely going to investigate their application development environment further.

I have said this before and I will say it again--the single best productivity investment an entrepreneur can make is to purchase a Blackberry and stop using desktop computer time for email. I seem to get an extra 1-2 hours of productivity each day from my Blackberry.

Providing Relief in Southeast Asia

paulballen — Mon, 27 Dec 2004 17:09:58 -0800

I am deeply saddened by the devastation and loss of life from the earthquake and tsunami which struck southeast Asia on Sunday morning. The New York Times reports the death toll is more than 23,000 with one third being children. It is hard to think about anything else today. I just learned that a close friend left a Thailand resort with his wife and children just two days before it was wiped out by the tidal waves.

The Southeast Asia Earthquake and Tsunami Blog has been set up to give people ideas on how they can help with donations and to make them aware of various relief efforts and the latest news. Paidcontent.org's author Rafat Ali is safe in India; editor Staci gives good advice for those wanted to help with donations.

May God bless all who lost loved ones in this tragedy and may He strengthen all those who are providing relief to those who are suffering.

Telling the Story--Why Startups Need PR

paulballen — Wed, 22 Dec 2004 21:12:59 -0800

The first thing I do when learning about a new company is check its Alexa ranking. The second thing I do is visit the web site and click on Press Room. I want to see what the company has been doing lately. Then I often look at the In the News section to see what media coverage they might be getting and I like to read about the management team and investors.

But too many companies don't even have a Press Room section on their web site. Literally every company that I work does a sub-par job of telling their story through press releases. I think too many PR firms have led us all to believe that press releases alone are not worth anything. They want us to believe that the only thing that matters is their relationships with the media which can lead to getting our news releases published and stories being written about us.

While the value of well done PR is enormous, it is often very expensive--way too expensive for most startup companies, which is why, I believe, almost all of them neglect it. (Except for SearchGuy.com, a publicly traded search engine company with few employees, very little revenue, almost no site traffic--but somehow they try to maintain their market capitalization by issuing a press release every couple of weeks--but that's another story.)

I see huge opportunities here.

We are starting a company to address this issue. We want all CEOs of small companies to be able to afford our PR service. We are designing software that will make it easy to choose a PR template (from hundreds or thousands), fill in some blanks, create some quotes, and have a press release prepared. The best part of this is the release will show up automatically not only on the company's own web site (which is important!) but also on several other web sites including Google News! (That is the "secret sauce" that I won't be disclosing.)

Some of my readers have wondered if disclosing our ideas and plans too early might be costly to us, and in fact, might create competition for us down the road, and thus lessen our company's valuation.

In this case, if another firm starts offering turn-key press release creation and distribution services that small businesses can afford then we may skip this opportunity and instead focus on training and encouraging all our portfolio companies to use such a service. But we haven't found such a service yet.

A consistent stream of press releases that contain significant announcements about products, customers, partnerships, trends, statistics, and good news can help a company gain momentum with, generate interest from, and reinforce the company's value to several different audiences:

Potential employees
Current and potential customers
Investors or potential investors
Strategic partners
And of course, the media

If you are aware of startup PR firms that are affordable please let me know. If you find this concept interesting and want to be considered as part of our startup team, please contact me.

Blogging in Other Languages

paulballen — Wed, 22 Dec 2004 21:12:34 -0800

I added Italian and German to yesterday's post "Blogging for the World" and already have a reader who is willing to do the Italian translation. Now I need to find a blog spot for each language and figure out a scheme for knowing when each translation is posted so that my site can automatically add links as the translations appear. I think this can be done with RSS feeds and some simple coding.

I think this is a job for Phil Windley, IT guru and blogger extraordinaire (or one of his CS students.) Phil, what do you think?

More Powertools for Entrepreneurs

paulballen — Wed, 22 Dec 2004 08:41:36 -0800

I'll be updating my Powertools for 21st Century Entrepreneurs page soon and I'm considering adding some of the following (after I have investigated them more fully):

Credit.net
Jigsaw.com (sales leads)
Gotomeeting.com
Rentacoder.com
Netmechanic
vFinance (venture funding emails)
Xenu (free link checking software)

I also need to add X1 (a desktop search tool) which is better than Copernic but costs $99 (until Yahoo starts distributing a free version of it early next year.)

I also need to list a few more key internet marketing tools that I have used for years.

One of my readers said MarketingSherpa should also be listed on this page. The free MarketingSherpa newsletters are the single most important resource available for internet marketers and they should be carefully read and studied, but I classify this as content not necessarily as a tool. However, I should also publish a list of all the critical publications that 21st Century Entrepreneurs can most benefit from. I'll be working on that list as well.

More on Wireframing

paulballen — Wed, 22 Dec 2004 00:12:37 -0800

I received this email about my post on wireframing from a friend:

Paul, I read on your blog that you wanted to know a program for wireframing. Visio by Microsoft is the "professional standard", but there is an open source replica called Dia http://dia-installer.sourceforge.net/

I personally like the simplicity of Macromedia Fireworks. I know it isn't free, but it is easy, and the vector graphics makes it great for beginners and has a much smaller learning curve then Visio or Dia. But if you want to go open source then Dia is the way to go.

Meanwhile, I took the suggestion of one of my readers and tried Microsoft Publisher for wireframing and quickly abandoned that. Then I downloaded a free trial verion of SmartDraw, which looks very promising, not only for simple wireframing, but also as a multi-purpose tool for doing org charts, flow charts, and dozens of other types of visual charts. I'm working on my first wireframe site design and so far the tool is easy to use.

Blogging for the World

paulballen — Tue, 21 Dec 2004 12:35:55 -0800

One of my primary career goals is to promote entrepreneurship in developing nations and all around the world. I love how entrepreneurs can change the world and I think the world needs more people who think positively about what they can do to make a difference and fewer people who sit back and wait for the government or for their company to provide something for them to do. It's easier to "make meaning" (Guy Kawasaki) when you start your own enterprise.

I recently saw stats that indicated that about 12% of adult Americans would like to start their own business. I know New Zealand and some other countries have a high degree of entrepreneurship as well. I love to see this.

The Entrepreneur's Manual (1977) suggests that before entrepreneurs start a company they should develop personal requirements including defining what they want from life. This is powerful stuff:

(1) Since your startup is nothing more than a vehicle which will allow you to meet your life's requirements, your company must be in complete harmony with your personal life style needs.

(2) If you are going to attract strong individuals to join your founders' team, these individuals will swiftly detect if you are directionless and will lose respect for you. Then they will walk all over you.

(3) If you wish to be an officer and a leader in your own startup, you'll require a solid personal foundation to cope with the many pithy problems that will arise.

(4) When you go before the venture capitalists [or angel investors] for funding, you'll discover that they are greatly interested in your motivations and will invest considerable time and efforts to determine what makes you "tick." These people become greatly disturbed if instead of clear, clean, and well-thought-out replies, you give them weak or fuzzy answers.

(5) The biggest reason for understanding youself is that if you select a startup that is in total harmony with your inner self, then you'll consider your work as the high point of your day. If you select a startup that is in friction with your real self (it's easy to do), then your personal goals and objectives will be in discord with your company's priorities and both you and your company will suffer.

Michael Gerber (E-Myth author) says most new company owners find that they are slaves to their company, rather than the company being a vehicle for their personal satisfaction and prosperity. He gives great advice on how to avoid this (work "on the company" not just "in the company.)

So why is the title of this post, "Blogging for the World" if all I'm doing is talking about entrepreneurship?

Because I have decided that my "inner self" is motivated to share ideas about entrepreneurship with more than just the English-speaking world. I want to blog and provide web resources for entrepreneurs in several languages.

I studied Spanish for several years, then majored in Russian in college. And I have a burning desire to learn Mandarin. But alas, I'm not capable at the present to blog in any of these languages.

So I'm looking for native speakers with business experience who are willing to translate my blog and resources pages into any of several languages, including the following languages:

SpanishRussianChinese (Mandarin)PortugueseFrenchJapaneseKoreanGermanItalian

This isn't for the money. This is for the opportunity to connect with entrepreneurs worldwide, learn with them and from them, and find the satisfaction that comes from helping people, turning strangers into friends, etc.

Think about it. If you can do this or know someone who can, please let me know.

If you know of any multi-lingual entrepreneurial bloggers today, I'd love to know about them.

Customers Help Define Business Model

paulballen — Mon, 20 Dec 2004 21:12:48 -0800

I am fascinated by IT Conversations. This is an audio service using podcasting to deliver up to 140 megabytes of audio "conversations" daily with IT experts. The founder has a very useful service and apparently a large number of users.

Now he is asking for his customers to help him find a business model that will keep the service alive.

Using a Wiki, he posts his ideas about his business model (part advertising, part subscription or micropayment) and then asks for feedback. What he gets is hundreds (or at least dozens) of ideas freely contributed by his users--some of them avid users.

I love the idea of providing a free service which is widely adopted and then engaging your interested users in helping you create a sustainable business model. In this case, this approach is being taken by a highly technical company founder who has technical users (they've already embraced podcasting) and is capable of setting up a Wiki for feedback. Some of us can't set up a Wiki, but we can easily create a Yahoo Group or Google Group and email our best customers so that they can talk to each other and to us about what they want most.

At MyFamily.com a private web site was created for hundreds of our top site administrators. One of our engineers visited the site every day. I visited it often. We received hundreds of excellent suggestions from our best customers, and in one case, one administrator created a spreadsheet of the top 100 enhancements they wanted on MyFamily.com. The value we received from our best customers was incredible. They loved our engineer because he truly cared about their opinions. He personally fixed problems they found and coded enhancements directly from their suggestions, without going through any product management layers. I loved this Rapid Development approach that brought the engineers and customers together onto the same team.

I think most companies don't really care about their customers very much, don't ask them questions, don't engage them in discussions, and don't create opportunities for them to discuss among themselves what should be done next.

Does you company have a way to continually be engaged with your customers? Do you personally? If so, tell me about it. If not, why not?

Google: Serve First, Monetize Later

paulballen — Mon, 20 Dec 2004 16:22:34 -0800

Guy Kawasaki says in business, before you think about money, you should think about "making meaning." You should want to change the world and make it a better. I don't know anyone who does this better than Google.

The Google founders continue to blow me away with their awesome moves: doubling the size of their index to 8 billion pages, scanning millions of pages in libraries, free desktop search engine, free photo editing and sharing tools, free blogging tools, free news and news alerts, free SMS query engine. I can't wait to see what they do with Keyhole.

This USA Today article about Google shows how they create value first and then seek to monetize it later.

That is the philosophy that drives me. I'm in good company. I think in the long run, it's the winning philosophy.

Single Product E-Commerce Sites

paulballen — Fri, 17 Dec 2004 21:12:49 -0800

Yesterday I spent time looking at internet marketing tools (I've purchased and used several over the years). I decided that Web Position Gold's web site is perhaps the cleanest and crispest single product ecommerce site that I can ever remember visiting. The layout, design, formatting, and copy is so well done.

Question for readers: what other single product ecommerce sites do you think accomplish their purpose superbly? And why are so few web sites laid out so well?

As a side comment, I've always been biased towards the functionality and not the design of a web site. If you look at ICQ in the early days (here's an ICQ snapshot from 1999) before AOL bought it for hundreds of millions, it gained millions of users with one of the ugliest text-based site designs you have ever seen. Because the functionality was hot. More recently, Craig's List is succeeding in a huge way (including getting a minority investment from eBay) with a horribly ugly -- but very functional -- text-based site design.

Jakob Nielsen is still my authority on web usability (www.useit.com) and Google is still my favorite example of simple but functional web site design. Too many designers are artists. Too few designers think about the user experience and how it can be simplified.

I also love the book by Steve Krug, Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. One of his objectives is to help designers cut out useless stuff from web pages, making them far clearer, more readable, and more usable. Most of the time you can eliminate half the copy, then eliminate half the copy again, and end up with a better web page.

Using Credit.net for Sales Leads

paulballen — Fri, 17 Dec 2004 21:12:25 -0800

I've been fortunate in my career to have a business partner, Dan Taggart, who is an expert salesman. In the early 90s, every computer and bookstore that he visited agreed to carry our products. As a telemarketer he is superb. Once when our in-house sales reps were only closing about 20% of incoming calls (to upgrade to our newest CD ROM product), to demonstrate how it should be done, he took 17 consecutive calls and closed 100% of them.

As a marketer, I focus my attention on generating leads for my sales teams. For consumers, this can easily be done on a web site by giving something away of value in exchange for contact information and permission to contact. For B2B sales I love Hoover's service, although a subscription can be pricey for a startup.

I've recently seen a full page ad for Credit.net (from InfoUSA) that offers unlimited usage of 14 million business credit reports. I thought the ad said $50 per month. The web site says $75 per month and then $250 per month for unlimited "sales leads." The sample data shows contact information, including key people, number of employees, revenue, SIC code, and competitors. It looks outstanding.

Question to my readers: has anyone used a Credit.net subscription to generate sales leads?

The Game of Work

paulballen — Fri, 17 Dec 2004 08:40:47 -0800

I ordered 5 copies of The Game of Work yesterday for CEOs on my Christmas list this year. It's an easy, quick read that shows how every job in every company can be made more productive and more fun by using a "scorecard" approach that will help employees measure their own efforts and feel satisfied as they reach goals. Highly Recommended!

Useful Online Calculators

paulballen — Thu, 16 Dec 2004 14:00:18 -0800

I found a web site with 50 interesting and free financial calculators, very simple tools that let you calculate annual returns, compounded interest, loan payments, etc. Very useful for financial planning.

Another site, Dinkytown.net has more than 150 calculators (and a way to put them on your own site).

Impressive Yahoo Moves

paulballen — Mon, 13 Dec 2004 23:12:00 -0800

Yahoo has announced that it will be giving away a free version of X1, the desktop search engine from Idealab! starting next year.

This is a brilliant move. In May I blogged about Google's free desktop search and what a threat it posed to Microsoft:

"When Google offers its free download, I'm not sure X1 will have a prayer, unless Microsoft buys X1 and starts giving its tool away for free to compete with Google."

I paid $99 for X1 and have also tried Google's desktop search and Copernic.com's free desktop search. While Copernic has the best user interface, X1 is far faster and more reliable than Copernic. I don't like Google's attempt to integrate web searching with desktop searching. I like the dedicated desktop search programs much better.

So Yahoo did what I thought Microsoft should do.

Yahoo is leading in another key area: customizable home pages. My Yahoo is absolutely superb. It offers not only stock tracking but now has more than 150,000 data feeds (including blogs and major news sources) that you can select for your MyYahoo! home page.

Overcoming the Waste of Human Inefficiency: A Challenge to Skype

paulballen — Mon, 13 Dec 2004 11:21:40 -0800

I bought the book The Genius of China after Joseph Schoendorf from Accel Partners (who had just returned from China) recommended it at the AlwaysOn conference at Stanford University this summer.

I'm working my way through this fascinating history. In the section on Agriculture, author Robert Temple claims:

"The Chinese [agricultural] system was at least ten times as efficient as the European one, and could be up to thirty times as efficient, in terms of harvest yield. And this was the case for seventeen or eighteen hundred years. Through all those centuries, China was so far in advance of the West in terms of agricultural productivity that the contrast, if the two halves of the world had only been able to see it, was rather like the contrast today between what is called the 'developed world' and what is called the 'developing world.'"

Imagine the wastefulness of hundreds of millions of Europeans farming for nearly two thousand years without the knowledge of such things as:

Growing crops in rows and weeding them carefully
Cast iron hoes and animal-drawn hoes
Iron plows
Efficient horse harnesses
Rotary winnowing fans
Seed drills

As the world becomes more connected to information through internet (1 billion users) and to each other through the cell phones (2 billion users) there is an unprecented opportunity to share knowledge and technology and best-practices across national borders so that one nation isn't 10-30 times less efficient in production than the more advanced nations. All humanity will benefit if free people in all nations can gain more knowledge and tools and become productive enough to lift themselves out of poverty. Imagine how much better the world's population could be supported if Russian, Indian, and Chinese agriculture could double or triple in its yield.

Shifting gears from agriculture to another major industry, telecommunications, there is some ubiquitous inefficiency that I believe will be solved by Skype or some other innovative new player, and I can't wait for it to happen.

Imagine how many billions of people make phone calls every day to people who don't answer their calls. Either they are not home, or are not at work, or are busy and not able to talk at the moment. This probably happens billions of times a day.

Voice mail helps turn what hoped to be a synchronous conversation into an asynchronous one. But there is a better way.

As a Skype user and promoter, one of the things I love about Skype is that like instant messaging, I know if my contact is online at the moment and taking calls. So I don't waste time Skyping someone who is not available.

I love that about instant messaging too.

So why not save billions of people the wasted time (and in the U.S. wasted long distance fees) that comes from making calls that won't be answered (except by an answering machine)?

I want to know if the person I am about to call is available to talk, before I dial the number.

I think Skype will find a way to do this on portable devices as well as on the desktop.

And the whole world will be better for it. In fact, I bet this single technological transformation would make almost every human being slightly more efficient than they are today, and would therefore increase the world economic output ever so slightly.

So let it be written; so let it be done.

LDS Collectors Library 2005 Released

paulballen — Sat, 11 Dec 2004 03:12:26 -0800

In 1997, Infobases Inc. (a company I founded with Dan Taggart) had more than 150,000 customers. Powered by search engine technology from Folio Corporation, we distributed libraries of valuable reference material (primarily religious and educational content) on CD ROM.

In 1997 we exited this CD ROM business to build Ancestry.com. Since that time, CD ROM sales overall seem to have been in a steep decline as more and more content and customers have turned to the web to access information.

But desktop search engines still have more powerful features than internet based search engines, and many of us wondered how popular a new LDS CD ROM library would be after many years without an update.

Earlier this year, LDS Media LLC formed a partnership with Deseret Book Company, raised more than $1 million from investors, and reassembled many key people from the Folio/Infobase era.

The result is the introduction of the 2005 edition of the LDS Collectors Library CD-ROM. With more than 15,000 orders to date, it appears that this new product will be adopted widely.

If you use this product and would like to help us improve it over time, please join our online group LDS Computer Users (hosted by Google Groups). Some of the ideas we hope to explore with you include:

What additional content should we add to the library?
How can we improve the usability and features of the product?
How shall we integrate audio clips, video clips, maps and images into the product.
What kinds of presentation tools should we design for teachers and parents so they can use gospel content in their talks and lessons?
When should we make portions of the library (and multimedia) accessible via portable devices and what devices should we support first (PDAs, Cell Phones, Smart Phones, Blackberries, Tablet PCs, etc.)?

Please consider joining our LDS Computer Users group and actively participating with us in designing our future versions.

Don't Build a Website Without Wireframing

paulballen — Fri, 10 Dec 2004 10:09:07 -0800

I have a confession to make.

I'm not into details. I'm a big picture guy, one who loves strategy and vision and what-if scenarios. But when it comes to translating ideas into something that can be built, and built correctly, and without too much unnecessary time and expense, I often fall short.

I sometimes tell my developers, I can't really describe what I want (or don't want to take the time to do it), so just get something up. Once I see something and use it I know exactly what changes I want to make--but not until. (Usually I show them a few web sites that I love and say, "copy this feature of this site and this feature or design of this site." But I still leave them far too many decisions to make.)

The result? Wasted time and money.

Playing with a website or with software and having insights into what to change and how to improve it is critical. According to the latest Business 2.0 magazine Jeff Bezos spends Saturday mornings playing with his web site and making a list of 10 things he wants to change. On Monday, he organizes his forces to make the improvements.

I love that the CEO of a $15 billion company spends so much time obsessing about the customer experience.

I also love heads of internet companies who spend time diving into web analytics and who personally write customer surveys to see what their customers are doing and thinking. (Okay, okay ... while I have heard that a number of very high-profile CEOs personally use web analytics tools like Omniture I admit that I don't know of a single CEO who writes customer surveys. While at MyFamily.com I think I personally wrote more than 300 daily surveys about dozens of topics. With 100,000 users logging in every day, we could get 1,000 responses to any question within a few hours. I loved asking my customers questions and getting instant feedback! I also loved organizing my marketing team to have weekly calls with real customers to find out what we could do to improve our service. Once in a board of directors meeting a question came up about how many of our users owned a digital camera and how many planned to buy one in the next year. I quickly posted a survey and by the end of the board meeting we had the results! But I digress....)

My subject today is how to correctly mockup or prototype a web site before sending it to the development team for coding and design.

Two of my closest friends who are also parallel entrepreneurs do very detailed mockups using Powerpoint or Word to design exactly what the pages should look like before sending them on to development. They save thousands of dollars every time they get a web site built, because they do a lot of the upfront design work.

Problem is, both are fairly gifted with design. I'm not. I don't have an artistic bone in my body.

So here's what I'm going to do from now on. I'm going to follow the advice from 2001 of the great folks at Future Now Inc and use the wireframing approach to web site design.

I can do basic HTML. So without doing an ounce of visual design, I can wireframe a web site's functionality. I can create the flow showing what links on what pages do what things.

I prefer not to do this by hand, so I'd like to ask you, my reader, if you know of any software tool that will guide you through the wireframe process (as described in the article above) and then quickly generate the HTML code for you.

In the late 80s we used Dan Bricklin's Demo software to do screen mockups. But this was more design-oriented than just functionality oriented (and it was a DOS program.)

If you know of any tools that I should be aware of, please let me know. (To reply to this post click on the comment link below.) Thanks in advance.

Infobase Ventures Mentoring Services

paulballen — Thu, 09 Dec 2004 08:09:49 -0800

Yesterday I met with another passionate entrepreneur trying to get her business off the ground. With more than 500 daily readers of my blog, and with my other writing and speaking opportunities, I am getting more requests for mentoring from entrepreneurs than I can handle.

So I'm raising the bar.

One of my friends raised the bar by charging a high monthly retainer if someone really wants his help. That way, he gets paid for his time, and the entrepreneur really listens to his advice--because it's not free.

I don't want to charge for my services (yet), because I hate taking money from entrepreneurs who don't have any, so here's how I'm going to raise the bar:

Before I take time to meet with you in person or on the phone to discuss your business idea, here is what I require:

You must be using LinkedIn.com and have at least 10 connections and 2 endorsements. That way there is a good chance that I will know someone who knows you. It will be easier for us to gain mutual trust this way.
If you have a management team or key employees, each of them must be on LinkedIn.com with at least 5 connections.
You must have an advisory board of 3 or more successful business people (preferrably 6-10) who believe in you and are willing to meet with you monthly or bi-monthly to dispense advice and help you with your challenges.
If your company is at revenue stage, you must be using Quickbooks Online Edition so that I can review your financials with you as needed. This costs only $19.95 per month and gives 3 users access to your data. I need to see the real picture and not just hear about the big ideas.
I need to see a simple cap table (showing the ownership of your company, including options and warrants)
You must know your company's SIC code and have a list of any publicly traded competitors that you might have. I want you to be familiar with SEC reports and gaining competitive intelligence. Too often entrepreneurs have an idea, think they are the only one doing it, and they are unaware that there are large well-funded competitiors doing the same thing. This doesn't mean you can't succeed by being faster and smarter than the larger company (in business, often large=slow), but I don't want you to be unaware of your competition.
If you do have publicly traded competitors, you must have a My Yahoo portfolio listing all their stock symbols, so you can stay current with their news and financial status.
For your privately held competitors, I need to know the Alexa rankings of their web sites and how many employees they have. (The best way to get this info is to download the Alexa toolbar.)
You must have set up Google Alerts so that whenever any of your competitors are in the news, you will hear about it and know what they are all up to. I want to see a complete list of your Google Alerts keywords.
Finally: don't dare ask me for advice or help if you haven't read Guy Kawasaki's Art of the Start. I think it's the best book ever written on startups. I expect you to have marked up every passage that struck you as important, and I expect you to have followed his formula for startups, including the MAT approach, the 10/20/30 rule for Powerpoints, and the bottoms-up business model and forecast.
I don't need to read a business plan, but if you have a 1-2 page executive summary that's okay, but certainly not required.

Okay, I got that off my chest. I really, really, really like helping energetic entrepreneurs, young or old, that are willing to learn constantly, and will not give up until their dream comes true. But before you ask me for personal time, please take these 10 steps, and then let's talk.

Paul Allen: Top 20 Most Popular Posts (2004)

paulballen — Thu, 09 Dec 2004 00:29:50 -0800

Seth Godin just listed his top posts in 2004. I decided to list my most popular posts this year--the ones that got individual attention from other bloggers and got the most reads after leaving my main blog page (which got tens of thousan

Will Google Netscape Microsoft? (3268 views)
Google Acquires Skype? (748 views)
Xango and Network Marketing Business Models (723 views)
Interesting Facts from Google's S-1 (619 views)
Best Way to Create a Billion Dollar Company (609 views)
Michael Moritz on How to Be the Next Google (527 views)

I'm out of time. I'll list more top posts later.

ds of

Profitable Content and Community Sites

paulballen — Tue, 07 Dec 2004 10:21:35 -0800

Intermix Media (MIX) is a hot stock that benefitted today from a great article by Bambi Francisco. I knew this company as eUniverse and tracked it for years along with other massively popular web sites. It was moderately profitable back in 2001, after the bubble burst. And it is moderately profitable again today on growing revenues. One of its properties, MySpace.com, is growing like crazy with its social networking model.

After reading Bambi's article, I looked back and found an interview with eUniverse founder Brad Greenspan, who took the company public through a reverse merger with a public shell back in April 1999. For a year it was listed on a bulletin board and then later as a Nasdaq Smallcap.

Their original business plan was to go public and use their currency to acquire content and community sites.

I don't know the full details of Greenspan leaving Intermix Media, but he still owns a large stake in the company, and it appears that the company is doing very well.

Key points of interest in the history of Intermix Media:

Went public through a reverse merger
Raised $7 million from hedge funds and institutional investors when it went public
Was a roll up of more than 300 web sites (40 main properties including MySpace.com)
Now has 60 million subscribers to opt-in newsletters
Hybrid model: advertising, subscriptions, and ecommerce
Vantage Point Ventures and Bill Martin (founder of Raging Bull) invested in the company in late 2003 as it was undergoing accounting problems
In February 2004, Richard Rosenblatt joined company as CEO (he co-founded iMall and sold it to Excite for more than $500 million and was the primary investor in Webmillion, sold for $20 million, and GreatDomains.com sold for $100 million.)
In December 2003, sold a 33% interest in website MySpace.com to certain employees that were developing the website and also gave them certain minority owner protections. (I think MySpace.com is the fastest growing property at Intermix--interesting what happens when employees are motivated by ownership.)
Did more than $17 million in revenue in the most recent quarter
Was listed on the American Stock Exhange earlier this year (MIX)

It is clear to me that "content, community and commerce" business models still work. The eUniverse/Intermix Media story will generate some great case studies for MBA students and tremendous insights for web entrepreneurs.

Advisory Boards for Startups

paulballen — Tue, 07 Dec 2004 05:43:51 -0800

The more I blog, write, and teach about entrepreneurship, the more individual entrepreneurs ask me for help and advice. On average, I think I get 2-3 requests per week for personal help.

While I enjoy doing this a great deal, I've decided that the first advice I will give every entrepreneur is to form an advisory board of perhaps 6-10 successful people, to meet with them regularly, and to use their collective wisdom to help solve every business problem.

In fact, I might tell entrepreneurs that I won't help them until they've formed an advisory board. An advisory board can help them be accountable for the advice they receive from me and others. If I'm taking 1-2 hours several times a week to counsel different entrepreneurs, what chance is there that they will act on my free advice? But if they have a board to update monthly, chances are they will be far more serious about acting on the advice they are getting.

One of the reasons to meet monthly with a board of advisors instead of asking for individual advice from "mentors" one at a time is that in a group setting the chances are high that the advisors will start feeding off one another and soon you'll have a boatload of excellent advice, offers to open doors and take assignments, and emotional support for you and your company's mission.

I serve on a few boards, with some very talented and unselfish people. I am finding tremendous value in these meetings. (The advice not only helps the CEO, but I think advisors can learn a lot from each other as well.)

I'll be working on a future article about the power of advisory boards; but in the meantime, Gary Williams wrote an excellent article for the Deseret News about advisory boards. He and I are on the SilentWhistle advisory board and enjoyed a tremendously productive meeting today with CEO Adam Edmunds. (If you want to comply with certain Sarbanes-Oxley requirements by providing anonymous feedback channels for your employees, check out SilentWhistle. More and more publicly traded companies are using their service, including MyFamily.com and Overstock.com).