Is this it?  Really?  Facebook wins, cashes in its chips, and we all go home?
Of course, there is more to come and it’s a future filled with sheer awesomeness.  Within the next few years, technology will improve your life in ways you can scarcely imagine.  But if you’re looking for where we’re headed, it’s useful to know where we’ve been and most importantly, we should know the catalyst driving us from one phase to the next.
Though tech types tend to focus myopically on the laws of hardware innovation, including those written byMoore, Metcalfe and Kryder, these principles focus on infrastructure, which is only the first phase of a risingtechnology wave.  After infrastructure, technology waves enter a platform and finally an application phase.  It is during the platform phases in particular that entrepreneurs build world-changing companies without much initial capital, a la Gates and Zuckerburg.  How do companies change user behavior so profoundly and produce massive growth, seemingly overnight?
I believe we can we plot the growth of online media companies against a predictive trend, like Moore’s law does for hardware.  The percentage of users creating content is a function of users’ ability.  That is to say, the easier it is to create content the more people create it.  But why should we care about content creation?  Because content creation has exponential benefit to the community and is by definition how online media platforms succeed.  Platforms must enable users to create something valuable for other users; the business’ viability depends on it and the economics won’t work any other way. 
The trend line of the relationship between the percentage of users creating content and users’ ability, plots the history of the web and helps predict what’s next.  It was thegraphical user interface, developed by researchers at Xerox PARC and brought to market by Apple and Microsoft, which made hard-to-understand DOS terminals usable and hearkened the PC revolution.  The web browser commercialized by Netscape, took advantage of infrastructure used by academics to help create Web 1.0.  Next, Facebook took technologies likeBBS andRSS to the masses by perfecting the Feed.  Smart entrepreneurs, who took a technology mainstream by making it easier to use, spurred each successive phase of the web.  The interface drove innovation by making previously incomprehensible information useful, driving an explosion of new user behavior and creating huge companies along the way.


Welcome to the Curated Web

If you want to know what’s next for the web, look at where the interface is changing.  Listen for where non-technical people say, “There is too much going on!  Who can make sense of it all?”  That’s exactly the cry the founders of companies like Pinterest, Evernote re answering.  These companies mark the dawn of what I call the Curated Web.
The Curated Web is characterized by a fundamentally different value to users than the social web.  Whereas Web 1.0 was characterized by content published from one-to-many and social media was about easily creating and sharing content, from many-to-many, the curated web is about capturing and collecting only the content that matters, from many-to-one.  Like all successive phases, the curated web is a response to the weaknesses of the previous phase. Users inundated with too much content are looking for solutions to help them make sense of it all.  Curated Web companies solve this problem by turning content curation into content creation and, following the predicted trend line, they see unprecedented percentages of user participation.  Each re-pin, re-blog, re-tweet, creates a curated, easy-to-use stream for future information to flow.
By designing new interfaces, and suddenly making information accessible, innovative companies have just begun creating the Curated Web.  By extrapolating the trend line, we can expect new startups to engage even higher numbers of users in creating content by making creation even easier.  As our ability to create content increases, perhaps one day becoming nearly effortless, we are likely to see new interfaces to help us make sense of all the data, and hearkening the next phase of the web.

Michael Wolfe, CEO, Pipewise, Inc. http://www.pipe...CEO, Pipewise, Inc. http://www.pipewise.com3183 votes by Heidi Strom Moon, Flavio Gambardella, Jeremiah Fellows, (more)Let's take a hike on the coast from San Francisco to Los Angeles to visit our friends in Newport Beach. I'll whip out my map and draw our route down the coast:


The line is about 400 miles long, we can walk 4 miles per hour for 10 hours per day, so we'll be there in 10 days. We call our friends and book dinner for next Sunday night, when we will roll in triumphantly at 6 p.m. They can't wait!

We get up early the next day giddy with the excitement of fresh adventure. We strap on our backpacks, whip out our map, and plan our first day. We look at the map. Uh oh:


Wow, there are a million little twists and turns on this coast. A 40-mile day will barely get us past Half Moon Bay. This trip is at least 500, not 400 miles. We call our friends and push back dinner til Tuesday. It is best to be realistic. They are disappointed, but they are looking forward to seeing us. And 12 days from SF to LA still is not bad. 

With that unpleasantness out of the way, we head off. Two hours later, we are barely past the zoo. What gives? We look down the trail:


Man, this is slow going! Sand, water, stairs, creeks, angry sea lions! We are walking at most 2 miles per hour, half as fast as we wanted. We can either start walking 20 hours per day, or we can push our friends out another week. OK, let's split the difference: we'll walk 12 hours per day and push our friends out til the following weekend. We call them and delay dinner until the following Sunday. They are a little peeved but say OK, we'll see you then.

We pitch camp in Moss Beach after a tough 12 hour day. Shit, it takes forever to get these tent up in the wind. We don't go to bed until midnight. Not a big deal: we'll iron things out and increase velocity tomorrow.

We oversleep and wake up sore and exhausted at 10 a.m. Fuck! No way we are getting our 12 hours in. We'll aim for 10, then we can do 14 tomorrow. We grab our stuff and go.

After a slow slog for a couple of hours, I notice my friend limping. Oh shit, blisters. We need to fix this now...we are the kind of team who nips problems in the bud before they slow our velocity. I jog 45 minutes 3 miles inland to Pescadero, grab some band-aids, and race back to patch up my friend. I'm exhausted, and the sun is going down, so we bail for the day. We go to bed after only covering 6 miles for the day. But we do have fresh supplies. We'll be fine. We'll make up the difference tomorrow.

We get up the next morning, bandage up our feet and get going. We turn a corner. Shit! What's this?


Goddamn map doesn't show this shit!. We have to walk 3 miles inland, around some fenced-off, federally-protected land, get lost twice, then make it back to the coast around noon. Most of the day gone for one mile of progress. OK, we are *not* calling our friends to push back again. We walk until midnight to try to catch up and get back on schedule.

After a fitful night of sleep in the fog, my friend wakes up in the morning with a raging headache and fever. I ask him if he can rally. "What do you think, asshole, I've been walking in freezing fog for 3 days without a break!" OK, today is a loss. Let's hunker down and recover. Tomorrow we'll ramp up to 14 hours per day since we'll be rested and trained...it is only a few more days, so we can do it!

We wake up the next morning groggy. I look at our map:


Holy shit! We are starting day 5 of a 10 day trip and haven't even left the Bay Area! This is ludicrous! Let's do the work to make an accurate estimate, call our friends, probably get yelled at, but get a realistic target once and for all.

My friend says, well, we've gone 40 miles in 4 days, it is at least a 600 mile trip, so that's 60 days, probably 70 to be safe. I say, "no f--ing way...yes, I've never done this walk before, but I *know* it does not take 70 days to walk from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Our friends are going to laugh at us if we call and tell them we won't see them until Easter! 

I continue, "if you can commit to walking 16 hours a day, we can make up the difference! It will be hard, but this is crunch time. Suck it up!" My friend yells back, "I'm not the one who told our friends we'd make it by Sunday in the first place! You're killing me because you made a mistake!"

A tense silence falls between us. The phone call goes unmade. I'll call tomorrow once my comrade regains his senses and is willing to commit to something reasonable.

The next morning, we stay in our tents til a rainstorm blows over. We pack our stuff and shuffle off at 10 a.m. nursing sore muscles and new blisters. The previous night's fight goes unmentioned, although I snap at my idiot friend when he leaves his water bottle behind, and we have to waste 30 minutes going back to get it.

I make a mental note that we are out of toilet paper and need to stock up when we hit the next town. We turn the corner: a raging river is blocking our path. I feel a massive bout of diarrhea coming on...

• First time founders confuse getting feedback with convincing people.
• They question you only about VC/investment instead about product development.
• They seek too much advice from too many sources with too many conflicting views.
• They plan details about sh*t that never sees the light of day.
• They are clever and come up with great combinations of solutions.
• They do mental incest by bouncing ideas off the same people every time.
• They do meetings until all hypothetical problems are solved and all wishes are included into the product scope.
• They do social and/or marketplace startups.
• They have a society vision not a product vision.
• They get very philosophical about their startup vision.
• They have no clue about their market.
• They are too proud to simplify their startup because “then it would just be [insert their real problem here]”They don’t get feedback on VCs from portofolio entrepreneurs.
• They don’t get it’s one global scene and that you can reach the best people if you do your work right.
• They spend hours of pitching to VCs that don’t invest into startups in their stage.
• They cannot name failures in their product iterations.
• They optimize their ToS before launch.
• They have a CEO and two Strategy/Bizdev people plus one guy working on the product.
They found an “GmbH, SARL, OOD, DOO, LTDa, A, BVO, Sp. Zoo, SRO, TAA or OOO” and wonder why international VCs don’t bother.
• They pay shitloads of legal fees to make their exotic legal company entity form VC ready.
• They convert it to an LTD for even more money anyway.
• They write 100 pages to apply for state funds and get 15k for that.
• They work with – and even worse believe – local Investment consultants.
• They pitch to russian family funds at the red square for millions of euros before having one line of code written.
• They hire people for future position and roles and not for actual needed jobs that need to be done.
• They have a growth plan and execution strategy but not a proven product.
• They believe the Techcrunch posts about large investment rounds apply to them.
• They underestimate everything apart of one thing: Themselves.
• They don’t get that a low burnrate and being prelaunch doesn’t mean you have more time to waste.
• They spend more time on fundraising than on their product and value investment over traction.
• They validate their customer hypothesis with investors.
• They improve their product based on investor feedback.
• They write a business plans… and when they are done they rewrite it (in another language).
• They do financial models that consist of 14 pages A1 and are capable of accounting and balancing.
• They tell you that they first need to get to their “right“ customer.
• They are arrogant and ignorant to any feedback they don’t want to hear.
• They desperately try to increase their social media footprint. (Agree? Tweet this!)
• They are unaware of how little they actually know and cannot change that.
• They launch ‘in one month’.
• They spent too much time to speak with everyone but their customers.
• And last and most important: They think they won’t make the same mistakes as other first time founders anir advice.

The internet is the largest and easiest place in the world to start a business and many people want to take the jump to running there own web based business. If you are trying to become an internet entrepreneur then you want to start off by doing some basic research of your niche. Take a good look around Google and other search engines and see what else is out there in your niche.

In this post i will go through five of the best tips for internet entrepreneurs when starting up an online business. Following just these simple tips will get you one step closer to success.

Start with a business plan

Setting goals for your business is a must do. Its no good spending 5 minutes drafting up a rushed business plan. You need to plan every aspect of how your business plans on growing. Set dates and deadlines for objectives like braking even. You internet business will never succeed if you do not have a business plan to back you up.

Put your most popular content on the homepage

When getting new visitors to your website you want them to see the best of what your business is offering. This will hopefully build up customers once you have got their attention with your best offers. However as well as this you need to remember that not all users will land on your front door and some will find your website from Google with different search terms. For this reason make sure you are displaying offers on your other pages as well.

SEO -Search engine optimization

This is a must do to your website, even if it means paying a company to do this for you. SEO is key to the growth of your website. With out good search engine optimization you stand no chance of getting a good ranking with Google on search results. A search engine optimized website can get thousands of views a day from Google searches.

Social networking

Creating a Twitter and Facebook page for your website is a must do.Most internet users these days are using social networks yo share things that they like online. Create a nice looking Twitter account and start to build up some followers. From then you can start tweeting about your latest product offering etc…

Email marketing

Email marketing is another gret way of building traffic to your website. However the hardest thing to do is build up your mailing list. You can put space on your homepage where visitors can join your mailing list. Once you have built your mailing list then you can start sending out regular monthly new letters to your visitors.

BY CYNTHIA SCHMAE

Ready to leave your job behind and become your own boss? It takes a certain kind of person to make it through the first few years

To help you along, we've culled the best tips from our own members - people with years' of experience in running their own businesses.

Don't work for less than you can afford to, but do offer a discount to customers or clients who sign contracts with you.
Find people who will refer jobs to you. If they send you nightmare jobs, make sure they're balanced out with rewarding (profitable!) ones.
Surround yourself with supportive people and don't be discouraged by anyone. If your idea is good and you're determined to stick with it through the first few difficult years, your chances of success are great.
Be flexible in your thinking. Prepare to change the way you work, the products you use and the services you offer, in order to meet the demands of your customers.
Admit your mistakes, correct them and carry on.(For example, if you purchase a piece of equipment that does not meet your expectations, send it back, sell it or exchange it!)
Develop a good relationship with your bank manager and creditors. Show a genuine interest in solving problems. Pay as much as you can afford to, to everyone to whom you owe money.
Get trained! You'll be spending a lot of time doing things that have nothing to do with your area of expertise, like bookkeeping, marketing, and IT support!
Avoid isolation. Even if you work closely with your clients, you won't be part of a gang anymore. Develop your own network of entrepreneurs that you see regularly and bounce ideas off. Ideally they’ll allow you to vent your anger and share your successes.
Separate your work and personal life. Set your working hours and stick to a strict titable. When you're not available to clients, leave a message on your answer machine letting them know when they can expect a reply from you. Let them know how to reach you in an emergency.
Plan some ‘thinking time’ into every day. If you pack your diary with back-to-back activities, your business will never grow.

Guest Post: What Do I Do With this Customer Lead From My Social Network?

by KIT SEEBORG on NOVEMBER 9, 2011

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Editor’s note: Rawn Shah , Social Software Practices Lead at IBM, recently published the following article on Forbes.com. He has graciously given us permission to re-publish it here as a guest post.

As we expand how we can be contacted by others, we make it easy, almost trivial, for potential customers to connect and do business with organizations and businesses. Not everyone in an organization–however helpful they may be–is in a business development role or knows what to do with such a customer request. The dual predicament: it’s certainly become easier but most of us do not yet understand what to do with it; if you are in the marketing or sales departments, how do you handle such leads in the disintermediated, distributed world of social business?

If you are an active user of business-oriented social networking tools, you may often get requests directly from interested parties and customers who come across you online or at some event. You may notice that public social business tools sometimes have a premium paid version with advanced tools for mining leads from your networks. Not everyone needs these; more than that, a good many users with significant social networks do not actually need it themselves, but their sales team members might.

This is onwhere the world of Social and CRM are at odds per roles and responsibilities. Consider that many lead social users are knowledge experts or well connected, but not necessarily involved in the more mundane tasks of managing customer leads, even if they do talk to customers often. In other words, their activities are generally invisible to or left out of the enterprise process of lead generation and management handled typically by marketing roles.

The implications here is that any leads that come through this medium may be outside the system of tracking and passing leads between marketing and sales. There is the possibility that they get dropped somewhere along the way, and the customer left hanging. Another possibility is that there may already be a sales representative for that customer who may not find out about this activity. On a practical level in large organizations, leads going awry or out of channel communications happen frequently, but lets focus on how it could be fixed, especially when you consider that some of this system is already automated.

Consider, for example, LeadShare, a particular feature of Slideshare, the popular online service for sharing presentation and documents over the Web. Slideshare’s popular and free service allows anyone to upload their presentation onto the site, and then send a URL for anyone else to view the document. File sharing services have been around for decades but Slideshare was one of the first ones to successfully allow people to view, share and socialize an entire presentation directly on a Web page without any downloading necessary.

Slideshare users can also manage collections of presentations, documents, videos, etc. and watch the activity and comments for each file, in addition to other common social business features such as tagging content, following other users, sharing by email, and tracking how many people like or reshare the document. According to Ross Mayfield, VP of Business Development at Slideshare, the Pro paid premium service “provides social content marketing features that can be used in all stages of a demand funnel… from raising awareness with a branded Channel to closing a deal in a Zipcast web meeting.”
Frost & Sullivan, a leading growth strategy and market consultancy, has used a branded Channel on Slideshare to generate over $125,000 across over 1300 qualified leads over seven months, through their $299 per month investment in a customized Pro Platinum account. Slideshare now has thousands of Pro accounts, with industry leaders such as Cisco Systems, Dell, Edelman and IBM creating individual or a network of such accounts.

LeadShare is one feature that comes with SlideShare Pro that allows the content owner to add a few process steps to anyone viewing or downloading the document to support customer service or business development. For example, you can ask someone who downloads to fill out a short contact form or questionnaire; you can display a “contact me” button along with the document, etc. In more advanced steps, you could also track separate campaigns for different leads; for example, if you have presented the same content in multiple venues, you could maintain separate tracking campaigns for each venue.

For business development roles, this is a great way to turn social into business. However, re my original point, not all lead users are necessarily interested in developing leads even if their organization is. The real need here is to be able to integrate you’re your enterprise’s process for Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Slideshare does provide such APIs and one particular available to pass these leads to Salesforce.com accounts, called Slide2Lead. In addition, you could download this information in a spreadsheet format. Speaking in the more general sense beyond SlideShare, there is a growing opportunity and not a lot of awareness of what is possible.

Lead Generation in a Social CRM World

Beyond just tool integration is the process question: who is ultimately responsible for this customer? This is a quintessential Social CRM question that is still being explored. Common wisdom currently says that such relationships need to be in the hands of the points of contact. However, not all points of contacts see it that way, and not all want to handle such tasks as business development, or support.
Another question is that which department now gets credit for this? Is it the employee who is contacted, their department, the marketing department, business development, or some other entity? Ideally, it shouldn’t matter when you consider it from the customer point of view, or from the 10,000-foot view of the overall organization, but in many companies this still does matter on a departmental level. It reflects how budgets and responsibilities are mapped. In this time of transition to the new models of social business such aspects will still remain.
This is where traditional processes are at odds with the individualistic and reputational nature of social networks. It creates disintermediatione view: the customer and the expert may talk about and even work on issues together which may skip the normal channels of how these leads are handled. It would be naïve to say that we simply need to change the process to allow for this.

Looking more carefully, what it affects are several functions:
Offer creation and asset tracking that leads are related to
- the function of lead and demand generation marketing roles.
- the function of lead development representatives, or inside sales operations, or even direct sellers.
- the function of client executives or exclusive relationship managers with top customers.
- the responsibilities of experts and other influencers wherever they may be involved in the lead generation.

This is easy for small organizations which may not have to handle high touch, complex sales or complex portfolios, but as companies grow these roles emerge over time for a good reason generally focused on two factors: expertise in that aspect of the process for that particular role, and available time and resources to handle the responsibility.

Streamlining the social lead generation and management process is one key aspect of Social CRM whether from the marketing or the Social Selling view. From a business process view, what it creates is distribute across the organization where and how a lead can be generated, and therefore the process itself needs a transformation.

The first is to have a common process step that allows people to universally add some tracking information to the content or assets that they share. This is more complex than it sounds because such content can be anywhere on the Web, in live events, or other offline activities. Online, web URL shorteners like bit.ly allow you to simplify or shorten a link, but also allow you to track how this was used and where it came from. That certainly still requires people to first use the shortener, and also to let the lead management system know of the particular URL. This could be easier and we’ll leave it to the technology vendors to figure out how.

Beyond just tracking these assets, the question then becomes what to do with a potential customer request, which itself can also come through many avenues (email, the social tools, a web site, in person, etc.) This is followed by having an understanding of when and in what situation to hand this over in a natural transitional fashion to a sales representative to maintain the relationship. This is where employees need guidelines and perhaps training on how and when to do this; it applies to customer-facing roles certainly, but also to just about any employee these days.

On the receiving end of the lead pipeline, the lead development representatives themselves need to understand what to do when they get such requests. These can vary quite significantly in context, but this is why such roles exist: to understand the context of the customer request, to understand the role of point of contact (the expert), determine if this can be qualified and validated, and know how to progress this towards an actual customer engagement.

Transforming an organization and its employees into a Social Business brings many good things, but as part of this, there is a good degree of exploration that each organization needs to do of how it affects their current processes. Following this, they then need to understand how employees can help and share a common understanding of how the new model will work as well as why they need such changes. It becomes a common responsibility across the workforce, and organizations need to recognize that in doing so, they may be adding some workload to their employees. At this cost, employees need to be motivated and enabled to likewise support their organization. The secret is finding the right mix that supports both the individual’s and the organization’s goals.

Thanks again to Rawn Shah and Forbes. You can fRawn on SlideShare at
http://www.slideshare.net/rawnshah