International CRO – Choosing the Wrong Colors and Other Mishaps

Posted by Sam Crocker Good morning Mozzers! Today we’re going to walk you through some rather basic but far-too-oft overlooked conversion factors specifically for international SEO. Anyone who has had the pleasure of using ecommerce sites in multiple countries may have noticed that as a general rule the sites look pretty similar if not identical. Today we are going to walk you through some of the pros and cons of this approach and how you might actually benefit from mixing things up for different audiences in different countries. WARNINGS: 1. There is something to be said for having a similar site, brand, and feel that can be recognized all over the world. 2. Some CMS systems do not allow for easy changes to be made for different versions of the site. 3. With Google Translation, many folks are becoming less interested in having multiple sites anyhow. 4. More sites mean more potential problems and things to worry about. Now, with these warnings out of the way let’s first jump into some of the potential benefits, and then look at some examples.

Is The Economy Headed Back Down Again?

For a few months there, things were starting to look rosy for small business. Retail sales went up for eight straight months. Jobs started being created again.

Many Entrepreneurs Would Swap Ownership for a Job

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it’s been a bad week for business, no doubt about that. New jobless claims are on the rise –again. The stock market has dropped below 10,000–again. The national debt has climbed to its highest level since World War II, and pending home sales plunged a record 30 percent . And it’s only Thursday. On top of all this, a new survey shows that fully one-third of small-business owners say that–given the opportunity–they’d swap their business for a job working for someone else. As long as they were paid what they’re now making or more, these entrepreneurs said they’d drop everything, close up shop and take a job. Another 13 percent said they’d certainly consider selling for employment with someone else. This second-guessing of business ownership was revealed this week in The Discover Small Business Watch , a survey compiled each month by Rasmussen Reports LLC , an independent research firm. Conclusions are based on interviews conducted a with about 750 small-business owners, and it has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.8 percentage points. The small-business owners were also asked what it would take for them to sell their business. Forty-one percent said they’d never sell. Of the remaining 59 percent: 27 percent said they aren’t sure. 18 percent said they’d need to make money on what they’ve already invested. 11 percent said they’d be happy just to recover what they’ve put into their business. 3 percent would be willing to take a loss to get out of the business. The survey also reports that 40 percent of those responding to the survey said they’ve given some thought to modifying their business model or entering a new line of business. And half of those claim the recession has “severely” hurt their business, prompting those thoughts of change. In addition, the economic climate has seen more small-business owners experiencing temporary cash-flow issues in June–51 percent compared to 45 percent in May. These are the highest figures since January. The percentage of owners who say the economy is getting worse remained steady at about 51 percent. Forty-three percent of June’s respondents said business conditions are getting worse, down only one point from the 44 percent reported in May. On the other hand, 30 percent of those answering the June survey said economic conditions for their businesses are improving, a 2 percent increase over May’s figures. What about you? If you were offered a job working for someone who offered more money than what you currently make, would you take the job or continue to own your own business?

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Many Entrepreneurs Would Swap Ownership for a Job

S&P 500 Stock Market Trends – September 2009 | Ancient secrets of …

S&P 500 Stock Market Trends – September 2009 When analyzing monthly stock market trends , I use the S&P 500 charts to identify important.

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S&P 500 Stock Market Trends – September 2009 | Ancient secrets of …

The Poor, Pilloried, Tech IPO

A decade ago, tech IPOs ruled the stock markets and Silicon Valley. They were the end-all and be-all for ambitious entrepreneurs and venture capitalists looking to become instant billionaires, or at least millionaires. That was many booms and busts ago. The IPO market never came back, and the multiple financial meltdowns which brought on Sarbanes-Oxley and other regulations made going public even less appealing to shoot-from-the-hip entrepreneurs. The founders of the most successful tech companies today—Facebook, Skype, LinkedIn—are pushing off the inevitable IPO for as long as possible. And for smaller tech companies, IPOs seem hardly worth the bother. And those companies which are going public simply are not the cream of the crop. IPO returns across all sectors this year are down 3 percent, according to Renaissance Capital .  And over the past three years, IPO returns are basically tracking the S&P 500 , which hardly justifies the added risk of investing in them. Even venture capitalists are souring on IPOs. In a post this morning titled “IPOs Just Aren’t What They Used To Be,” Fred Wilson laments: The cost is just too high and the benefits are just too low for most companies these days. Wilson shares two anecdotes. One was of a startup which prepared to go public, but couldn’t and was still stuck with a $3.5 million bill it couldn’t afford. The other was of a “successful” tech IPO which raised $75 million, but gave the company a lower valuation than it might have gotten in a “late stage private financing.” (He doesn’t name either company). In his opinion, “only the very best companies” should attempt an IPO: The exit of choice for most startups, he suggests, is selling to a larger company. And that describes exactly the market today, where the best possible exit for most startups is to be acquired by Google, Microsoft, or (more recently) Apple. And instead of going public, the best tech startups like Facebook, Zynga, and Groupn are getting early payouts for founders and employees via late-stage, private DST-type financings . But limiting exits to M&A might not be the best thing for venture returns. At TechCrunch Disrupt, technology banker Frank Quattrone argued : “For the VC market to produce above average returns you need there to be an IPO market.” An important part of venture returns come from holding onto some shares after an IPO and riding the public markets a while. “If you lose those longtail returns you lose a lot of the returns,” he concluded. Quattrone seems to think this problem will be solved when the new standard bearers of the Web decide to go public, as opposed to the lackluster offerings so far: There are probably 40 to 45 IPOs on file. They are not the category-defining, earthshaking companies the market wants to see. The market wants to see Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, LinkedIn, Skype. They want to see the companies that are changing the way we live. I’m not sure a few iconic IPOs will bring back the Netscape years. First of all, it might still be a couple years before we see a Facebook IPO, and even longer for a Twitter IPO. But even if and when those kinds of tech companies do go public, the IPO option for lesser startups will remain limited for the reasons Wilson outlines. Unless, of course, a Facebook IPO makes public investors irrational once again and we get another bubble. But nobody wants that, or do they? CrunchBase Information Fred Wilson Frank Quattrone Information provided by CrunchBase

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The Poor, Pilloried, Tech IPO

S&P 500 Stock Market Trends Forecast for June 2010 :: The Market …

S&P 500 Stock Market Trends Forecast for June 2010 :: The Market Oracle :: Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting Free Website.

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S&P 500 Stock Market Trends Forecast for June 2010 :: The Market …

Facebook’s Market Cap On SecondMarket Is Now $25 Billion (Bigger Than Yahoo’s)

If Facebook were a publicly traded company, its market value would rival Yahoo’s and be ten times bigger than AOL’s, if demand for its private shares are any indication. Shares of Facebook on private-company stock market SecondMarket are going through the roof right now. This week, Facebook shares traded on SecondMarket passed $50, giving Facebook a total market value of $25 billion, according to sources with access to the market. (SecondMarket itself does not disclose pricing or valuation of the private stocks it trades). In comparison, Yahoo’s market cap on the publicly traded stock market is currently $21 billion, while AOL’s is $2.3 billion. These aren’t apples-to-apples comparisons because SecondMarket is a private stock market with thinly traded shares where demand often outstrips supply. (By definition, private stock sales trade in an illiquid market). But it is a real market with buyers and sellers, and right now that market is putting a $25 billion value on Facebook. The last time we checked in on how Facebook’s shares were doing on SecondMarket was in January, 2010 when the company was valued at $14 billion (which was up from $11 billion the month before). Back in August, 2009, DST was buying back common shares at a $6.5 billion valuation , so that’s been an incredible rise in value over the past year. Even Microsoft’s $ 15 billion valuation (albeit for preferred shares) does not seem so crazy anymore in light of what investors are paying on SecondMarket. Last week at TechCrunch Disrupt, SecondMarket’s chief strategy officer Jeremy Smith explained how the market works to Beet.TV, and that so far a total of about $100 million worth of Facebook stock has been traded through SecondMarket ( watch the video ). CrunchBase Information Facebook SecondMarket Information provided by CrunchBase

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Facebook’s Market Cap On SecondMarket Is Now $25 Billion (Bigger Than Yahoo’s)

TechStars Boston Graduates Ten New Startups In 2010

Editor’s note : The following report comes from Don Dodge, who blogs at Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing and is a Developer Advocate for Google. TechStars is a seed accelerator program that selects about ten companies and provides funding of $18,000 per team, as well as support and mentorship. Dodge covered the last Boston TechStars class in September, 2009. TechStars has now been operating for four years. According to results data that TechStars has published, six of the first twenty companies to go through the program have been acquired by larger companies, and about 70% of its companies have been funded and/or are now profitable. This week, TechStars debuted ten new startups from the second Boston class. The teams presented on Tuesday to about 250 VCs and angel investors for the first time. These companies are about three months old and have two or three founder employees. Don was in attendance and these are his notes on the startups that presented. Just nine months ago, I attended the inaugural Boston TechStars demo day where companies such as oneforty and Localytics presented. Since that time, TechStars has shifted the Boston program to operate in the spring instead of the summer, so ten new companies presented. Below is a summary of each one. Mogotest is a front-end testing tool to help companies ensure that their web sites render properly across various web browsers and platforms. MogoTest can spider your web site or test individual pages to help you spot browser inconsistencies. The company demoed a very easy to use comparison tool that visually puts two browsers side by side so you can quickly spot inconsistencies between various browsers. It works with all browsers and all platforms including mobile browsers. Monkey Analytics powers mathematics and data analysis in the cloud by providing on-demand computing resources, analysis tools, and a socially driven marketplace for analysts, algorithms, and data. Today, complex math and data analysis is commonly done in applications such as Matlab and R. Monkey Analytics is bringing those sorts of analysis tools to a cloud based system so that it can be accessed by anyone from anywhere with at scale and on demand. Marginize augments pages on the web with an independent space owned by the visitors where they can meet each other and interact freely. For example, you can see what people are saying about the Marginize homepage here . Marginize cleverly makes use of existing Twitter content about each page, and allows visitors to “check in” to the page and comment. The most active community member becomes the “curator” for that site, and other recently active users are shown after they check in, hinting at possible game dynamics to come in the future. Investor Dharmesh Shah agreed to fund the company on the spot. Appswell is a mobile crowd sourcing system that allows people, companies, and brands to harness the wisdom of crowds. Appswell is their own first client of the platform, with a crowdsourced contest for iPhone app ideas and has redeployed the platform to power Brightidea Mobile. Appswell is now working with interactive agencies to offer turnkey crowdsourcing solutions for brand advertising campaigns, which can be launched quickly and cost effectively. Loudcaster lets anyone create interactive online radio stations quickly and easily. Their model is to sell Internet broadcasting tools to DJs and to generate revenue by aggregating their audiences and inserting advertising. Loudcaster has been running a stealthy limited beta, working with 100 DJ’s, and there are 200 more waiting to use the product. The company plans to officially open to more DJ’s by June 30th. SocialSci helps academic and professional researchers source and survey participants for their scientific studies. Today, universities and researchers find study participants offline and they’re overpaying to do so. SocialSci helps source them more efficiently online, and delivers the research studies to them through their own integrated surveying tools which are designed to be secure and private. Currently, SocialSci is tracking over $5 million being paid out by live research studies and is operating a private beta of their online research platform with several major universities. Sparkcloud introduces you to interesting people who are around you in realtime. The company has several early applications to demonstrate how developers can leverage Sparkcloud to more easily create their own real-world social applications ranging from urban gaming to location-based dating. SparkCloud will introduce you to 12 new people every day based on profiles, preferences, and social data. StarStreet is a sports stock market that allows sports fans to make real money based on their skill in trading players and their knowledge of sports. It works similar to the real stock market. You buy shares in a professional sports player. If the player does well the value of the stock theoretically goes up as more fans want to own that stock. You sell your shares and make money. As we know from the real stock market, you can also lose money. TutorialTab lets non-developers add interactive help systems that make web sites easier to learn. For example if you hover your cursor over a text input field it will pop up a text box that explains what you should enter in that field. TutorialTab makes it easy for web sites to create hands-on tutorials to guide their users. They are currently pre-launch, but you can see a preview video on their site. UserMojo is an emotion analytics platform that measures the quality of user experience to help site owners understand not just what their users are doing, but also why they’re doing it. The company records emotions from users via a simple feedback mechanism, and then allows customers to see heat maps of emotional response to various pages over time and to understand what’s driving actual user behavior. When users hover over any area of a web page they are presented with emoticons that relate to how they feel about that content. The web site owner can see the results visually on the page. CrunchBase Information TechStars Information provided by CrunchBase

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TechStars Boston Graduates Ten New Startups In 2010

Alley Trumps Valley in VC Funding

In the perennial horse race between Silicon Alley and Silicon Valley, New York-area companies have pulled ahead by a nose. While Northern California’s tech community still receives the lion’s share of venture funding, Big Apple startups raised $566 million in the first quarter, up 18.9% from the fourth quarter of 2009 and 32% over Q1 of last year, according to a report released last week by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association . Seventy-five New York City companies got funded in the first quarter, up 13.6% from the fourth quarter of 2009 and 11.9% year over year. Although Silicon Valley still dwarfs New York in terms of dollars and deals — 202 California companies raised $1.5 billion in venture funding in Q1, VC funding in The Valley dropped 21.4% from the fourth quarter of 2009 and deal volume declined by 24.6%. More than half of the venture dollars raised by New York-area companies went to software, financial services and biotech with a resurgent stock market sparking renewed interest in the financial services sector. Five financial services companies raised $98.5 million in funding while 10 biotech firms received a total of $81.9 million. “It may not be an especially robust market, but I think it’s going to be improved,” Bill Wiberg , a general partner at Advanced Technology Ventures , told Crain’s New York Business . “With that comes optimism, and optimism is a key ingredient of new investment activity.” Among the winners: Pierpont Securities , a Stamford, Conn.-based financial services company ($85 million); 1010data Inc. , a Manhattan-based software company ($35 million); Yodle , an online marketing company ($10 million), and social networking service FourSquare Labs Inc. ($10 million). While expansion-stage companies raised more money than startups, the uptick in VC funding in New York is good news for clients like ours at Axxess that are out there shopping business plans to friends, relatives and angel investors. If even a handful of these VC-backed ventures hits pay dirt this year, there will be plenty more capital in the pipeline to turn today’s wannabes into tomorrow’s superstars.

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Alley Trumps Valley in VC Funding

The Rules of Venture Capital 2010

The mating dance that entrepreneurs do with prospective investors–venture-capital firms, angels or even just friends and family members–has obvious parallels to the dating scene. On the one hand, you don’t want to seem so eager for a term sheet that the investor thinks you’re desperate and tries to low-ball you. On the other, you don’t want to appear so aloof and arrogant that the investor passes on your deal because he doesn’t think you need his money. With the stock market rallying and banks beginning to lend again, the market for early-stage capital is once again showing signs of life. While last year I was urging my clients to keep knocking on doors until they got a meeting, this year I’m busy advising them on the finer points of equity vs. convertible debt. Though it’s too soon to know if our clients will get funded or at what valuation, they’re starting to line up meetings with investors–and, in the case of one client, three meetings this week. So, while the experts expect the market for angel financing to remain flat this year, at least the fish seem to be biting. Here are some things to keep in mind when you walk into the shark tank: 1. Do your homework. It’s not enough to go in with a well-researched business plan, slide deck or financial model.