Yeah, Blogging is Hard

By Mark Evans in Blogs 4 Comments Tags: , , , ,

Gawker had a small item yesterday on how “blog millionaire” and Mediabistro.com founder Laurel Touby conceded via a Twitter update that “blogging is harder than I thought”.

For anyone who writes a blog on a regular basis or attempts to write a blog on a regular basis, Touby’s confession is not a surprise. Blogging is hard even if you’re a natural or trained writer. It’s difficult to write and write well on a consistent basis, let alone every day.

This is why I admire bloggers at ReadWriteWeb, GigaOm, TechCrunch, VentureBeat and Mashable who are pumping it out every day all day. It’s not uncommon for some people to write five or six posts a day. While it must be exciting to be in the eye of the hurricane, it must also be a grind to keep feeding the blogging beast.

The need to feed is probably the biggest reason that most new bloggers fall by the wayside after the honeymoon period is over. At first, writing blog posts is exciting but the sizzle disappears after all your initial ideas have been exhausted. Then, you’ve got to grind it out, and somehow come up with a blog post that offers some kind of value.

Truth be told, blogging is not for everyone. It helps to have good writing skills; it helps to be meeting with people who have interesting ideas; and it helps to have enough time to not only read what other people are writing, but have the luxury of time to come up with your own new thoughts and ideas.

All the above “requirements” go a long way in explaining why Twitter has resonated with so many people. It’s short, it’s snappy, it requires a lot less work and writing, and it provides the platform that many people need or want.

As I’ve said before, blogging is dinner (multiple courses, takes a long time to get through), while Twitter is desert (quick, easy, doesn’t last very long).


Why Do Some Online Services Thrive?

By Mark Evans in Web 2.0 12 Comments Tags: , , ,

Last week, TechCrunch reported that Dropbox had attracted two million users, just four months after it reached the one million active user mark. It got me thinking about why some online service become so popular, while the vast majority struggle to get any kind of traction no matter how hard they try.

Now, if anyone had the definitive answer, they’d be sitting on a pile of gold. But there are some fundamental things that wildly popular online service have in common.

1. They meet a basic need that quickly resonates with users. For Dropbox, it’s a simple proposition: the ability to synch files across multiple computers. For people who work in multiple places or have multiple computers, Dropbox is a service that quickly strikes a chord.

2. They’re user-friendly and easy to use. These kind of services do what they need to do without unnecessary frills or feature creep. There’s nothing that kills a good idea than developers who believe that more (features) is better. This only confuses users by giving them too many options. At the end of the day, KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) is a much better approach.

3. The barriers to entry are low because the basic service is free, while premium services are available for people who want more features, data, etc. For all the talk about freemium, the most successful online services seem to thrive because they make it easy for users to join the fray.

4. They have a user-friendly, intuitive interfaces that are accessible. Services that feature this kind of interface make it easy to people to quickly climb on board. Once people start using the service, they tend not to leave. In other words, the “bounce rate” is pretty low.

5. They tell great stories. There’s so much competition that success can often hinge on how well their stories are crafted and delivered. The ability to tell a good story can make a huge difference compared with other services that may be as good but don’t tell their stories as well.

Any other things that help make online services successful?


Wise Words from Yossi Vardi

By Mark Evans in Venture Capital No Comments Tags: , , , ,

DemoCamp 22, which happened last night in Toronto, was really the “Yossi Vardi Show”. Vardi, a successful Israeli high-tech serial entrepreneur, regaled the crowd with insight, advice and a series of entertaining stories. His first answer during an on-stage interview lasted 37 minutes.

Perhaps the best insight Vardi gave last night was how innovation and entrepreneurship is not a result of education or tech savviness or government policies but a culture driven by the need to excel.

“Without this culture, it is hard to have innovation and entrepreneurship,” he said, adding that a healthy entrepreneurial ecosystem starts with thousands of “small buds” that eventually lead to the creation of strong, viable companies.

Vardi, who is probably best known for selling Mirablis (the creator of ICQ) to AOL for $400-million, said his enthusiasm for investing in start-ups has much to do with how much he likes working with smart, young people.

As for what how he decides to invest, Vardi said his approach includes not reading business plans, which he sees them as a “sub-genre of science fiction”; talking to entrepreneurs rather than letting them open their laptops to do demos, and investing in people with good character.

Perhaps the biggest takeaway from last night is how Canada could really, really use a Yossi Vardi – someone with a passion for start-ups and the financial ability to fund and support them.

The Canadian high-tech landscape is chock-a-block with smart entrepreneurs who could do a lot with a minimal amount of investment. Unfortunately, the financial ecosystem doesn’t exist to do it, at least not yet.


Assetize Aims to Monetize Twitter

By Mark Evans in Twitter 3 Comments Tags: , , , ,

For Twitter, advertising is low-hanging fruit to generate revenue. But Twitter continue to insist it’s not something being actively considered. So while Twitter makes up its mind about whether or not to place ads into Twitter streams, there’s a growing number of companies doing just that.

A new player is Toronto-based Assetize, which emerged from Extreme Venture Partners‘ Extreme University, a 12-week program done last summer to nurture and incubate start-ups. Assetize bills itself as a smarter way for advertisers to tap into Twitter because its technology does a much better job of connecting ads to relevant content than players such as Magpie.

Assetize offers a self-service platform for advertisers and Twitter users looking to have ads within their Twitter stream. Using a pay-per-click model, advertising can configure the keywords they want to target and their budgets. For Twitter users, they get paid every time a link with an ad is clicked – much like AdSense on blogs.

Although the platform looks interesting, the biggest challenge facing Assetize is attracting enough advertisers and Twitter users to make it a vibrant platform. With advertising within Twitter still in its infancy, Assetize needs to aggressively move into sales, marketing and education mode to nurture the marketplace.

More: TechCrunch reports that Glam Media is going to be launching a Twitter ad network, while Ad.ly is launching an network to connect high-end brand advertisers with celebrity and high-profile Twitter users.


$100 Million for Twitter. Now What?

By Mark Evans in Social Media No Comments Tags: , , ,

According to the Wall St. Journal, Twitter could raise as much as $100 million from a group of seven investors that includes T. Rowe Price, Insight Venture Partners, Spark Capital and Institutional Venture Partners.

It was originally thought Twitter was going to do a $50-million raise but clearly there was so much demand that Twitter decided to take the cash on the table. The deal reportedly gives Twitter a $1-billion valuation.

So the $100-million question is: what does Twitter do with all that money given it still has about $30-million in the bank?

The most obvious option is Twitter can continue to aggressively grow its users without having to worry about pesky things such as a business model or generating revenue. It can strengthen its infrastructure and systems to support hyper-growth, which will, in theory, create more revenue opportunities down the road.

Another option is acquisitions, although to date this has not been part of Twitter’s corporate DNA. That said, there are some attractive targets that could be picked up that would barely leave a dent in Twitter’s cash reserves. Some of the leading candidates include Tweetdeck, Seesmic and TwitPic.

So what do you think Twitter will do with $100-million?

We’re Becoming Digital Pack Rats!

By Mark Evans in Main Page 1 Comment Tags: , ,

A couple weeks ago, there was an interesting article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine about the self-storage industry, which has now grown to a staggering 2.3 billion square feet in the U.S.

The self-storage industry concedes there’s a lot of “junk” being stored, but as long as people are paying to store all this stuff, companies such as Public Storage are happy to let you store stuff to your heart’s content. In fact, they will let you do pretty much anything with a storage unit other than live in it.

The article resonated with me because I was in the process of looking to buy an external hard drive to store photos, music and my personal and business documents. Although my digital “assets” account for less than 200GB GB, any external hard drives of less than 500GB were quickly dismissed as inadequate. At the end of the day, I bought a 1TB hard drive that will likely more than meet all of my back-up needs for years to come.

The question that begs to be asked is why we feel the need to have so much storage when, in fact, most of our needs pale in comparison. Part of it has to do with the fact storage is cheap, and the difference in price between 500GB and 1TB drives is so small that buying more than you really need is a no-brainer.

As well, humans, by nature, are pack rats. As the growth of the self-storage industry illustrates, we love storing stuff even if we have no need for it. There are all kinds of different reasons why we need to store so much rather than giving it away, recycling it or disposing of it.

The same attitude prevails in the digital world where people hang on to everything. We all have documents that are no longer relevant or needed. There’s lot of music within our collections, for example, that could easily be trashed given they haven’t been listened to in months or years.

But most people never get rid of their data because they have a strange attachment to it. After all, you never know when you’ll need Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like the Wolf” for a presentation. As well, it’s so easy and cheap to store data rather than delete it.

As a result, we’re turning into digital pack rats happy to keep everything for as long as possible. It’s great news for the external hard drive industry, which keeps fueling our need to keep stuff by launching bigger and faster drives at prices that no real pack rat can resist.

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