Dec 3

I’ve been making an effort to share more on Twitter (Follow Healy Jones on Twitter if you want.) Some of these tweets have been popular:

Not too surprising that a lot of the clicks are on VC/seed investing topics. I’m happy that people seem to like mobile as well – I probably spend half my day thinking/doing mobile related marketing, so it’s good to know that my tweeps are aligned with my interests that way as well.

Nov 30
LocalCoaster
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My friend has just launched a new venture that sounds really fun called LocalCoaster. LocalCoaster is a startup social venture that produces beverage coasters to help stimulate local commerce and at the same time support local charities. We are working on a new advertising model that engages the community and gives back. Basically, LocalCoaster provides coasters to local bars and restaurants that have cool local messages on them; messages that support local charities or local retailers. As the company says, “Coasters are an unexploited medium for delivering messages in a unique, engaging, social way. LocalCoaster brings an advertising message to beverage consumers within the community while donating a significant portion of proceeds to a local charity.” They are launching today in Portsmouth, NH, and are also on Twitter here.

Nov 29

So Apple continues to beat Google in terms of revenues from app sales – by a factor of four. However, Google Play’s revenue is growing an amazing 311% ytd vs Apple’s 13% ytd growth.

This info is from a cool report by App Annie (which I have never heard of but am about to sign up for cuz it sound cool) that I saw written up in thenextweb here.

At that pace, Google app store revenues will catch up to Apple in something like a year (my calc).

Will it really be a year that Google Play really be as big of a revenue driver as Apple is as little as a year?

I think it will.

The OfficeDrop iOS Apps were driving over 4x as many daily new users as the OfficeDrop Android app was in July of last year. Now they are basically neck and neck, with Android just a good PR event away from leading the pack.

Why is Google Catching up?

In my opinion, Google Play has become a real contender for several reasons.

  1. Tablets. Our user data shows that there are a lot of aggressive Android tablet users out there. The first gen of Android tablets really didn’t do the trick, but in a post Nexus world there are a lot of dedicated Android tablet users, reducing the iPad volume bump that iOS has had historically. It’s since we released the tablet friendly version of our app that Android caught up with iOS (note that we intentionally timed the launch of our tablet app with the launch of the Nexus tablet; kind of like building the hotels on Boardwalk as your opponents round the “go to jail” corner.
  2. Foreign markets. Android really seem to be big outside the US for OfficeDrop – for us in Spanish and Portuguese speaking countries. The App Annie report references Android’s dominance in Asian countries with the following charts (Our results are clearly a little different, but we have focused first on translating our file search engine into romance languages prior to hitting Asian characters):
  3. Android devices are just getting better and getting more share (although the iPhone  recently staged a market share comeback after the new iPhone came out.)

I do hope that mobile doesn’t become a two horse race. I’d love it if BlackBerry or Windows Mobile achieved meaningful marketshare. But, maybe the smartphone market will be like the computer market, with Apple and one other company pretty much controlling the entire market.

Nov 29

I found this great infographic on Entrepreneur, listing various legal structures available to startups and showing each legal structure’s pros and cons.

update: OK, so this infographic did not paste over very well, so click on that link above to go see it!!

What's the Best Legal Structure for Your Business

Nov 27

We had a fun recently with a video marketing effort, putting on a “webinar” on document backup that was taken over by Mayan doomsdayers. It’s pretty funny, you can read it below and see me attempting to be a comedic actor.

Webinar Taken Over By Mayan Apocalypse Believers

November 26th, 2012 by Healy Jones

To Save Important Files from Doomsday, Act Now and Let the Cloud Protect Your Files

Cambridge, MA. — November 26, 2012 — A recent webinar by cloud storage provider, OfficeDrop, was quickly and unexpectedly taken over by those who believe doomsday is imminent on December 21, 2012. Webinar participants held a common theory that, as the Mayan calendar ends next month, so will the world as we know it. Those who voiced questions had similar a similar concern: “Is the cloud a good strategy to save my documents after the Apocalypse?”

Calmly understanding the concern, OfficeDrop vice president, Healy Jones fielded questions on how to best approach a Mayan doomsday, from a document-management viewpoint. “The big thing is [that] you want to get your files and docs into the cloud now, before the Apocalypse – which is why we have OfficeDrop sync,” explained Jones in the webinar.

Jones, who was later contacted for questioning insisted the public know that OfficeDrop sync is available for both Mac and Windows, what he described as a “common courtesy.” It appears Jones is no stranger to the Mayan Apocalypse belief, airing another opinion: “The only reason this should be newsworthy is that people actually attended a webinar, nobody attends webinars! The chances of the Mayan Apocalypse actually happening are greater than someone attending a webinar.”

Know as meticulous and precise keepers of time, the Mayan civilization has pinpointed December 21, 2012 as the end of the 13th b’ak’tun, a time that marks both an apocalyptic change and rebirth of Earth. Flimsy paper documents aren’t expected to survive, those which do will certainly become unorganized and unusable.

Jones points out that through optical character recognition (OCR), files uploaded into OfficeDrop’s cloud before December 21 will be searchable by word, phrase or number in the OfficeDrop search box. This allows users to focus on more pressing matters, like securing family, food and firearms, rather than remembering document names.

It’s clear that Jones has a professional strategy to access his important personal and business documents after the Mayan Apocalypse. As an expert on both the cloud and world-changing doomsday events, one has to wonder – What does Healy Jones know that he’s not telling us? Read the rest of this entry »

Nov 26
Tablets as TV
icon1 Healy Jones | icon2 mobile, Tablets | icon4 11 26th, 2012| icon3No Comments »

No surprise here, but tablets are growing quickly as a medium for viewing TV programming. I came across this cool infographic pointing out how quickly video on the tablet is growing:


via Ooyala

Have I mentioned before that it’s tablet time? Or that tablet sales are surpassing PC sales? Or have I mentioned how fast tablet growth is happening or pointed out tablet growth numbers? Maybe I have, just a little bit… :)

Nov 23
The Kids want mobile
icon1 Healy Jones | icon2 mobile | icon4 11 23rd, 2012| icon3No Comments »

Wonder if Santa will face supply chain issues getting iPads to all those little kids?

In a related note, I also want a new iPhone for Christmas.

Of course, the bigger thing is that 1/2 of the top 10 things are mobile devices.

Nov 21

I’m enjoying reading more and more of the technology press who are starting to recognize that the enterprise is the next major area of software/internet/mobile innovation. The latest read on this topic was on TechCrunch.  I am curious to see how cloud based, outside the firewall, type solutions will eventually stack up against more “controlled” opensource solutions. Only time will tell!

However, one thing I do see happening that isn’t being talked about enough is that small businesses are starting to lead technology adoption – in particular mobile adoption. I think we’ll see more and more of small business mobile solutions creep into the enterprise as end users within enterprises start bringing technology in with their BYO devices. Since it’s easy for a individual within a big company to sign up for a small mobile or SaaS app, they will likely choose products that have effective marketing directed towards entrepreneurs/small business owners. I’ve blogged before about how small businesses are embracing mobile technologies, and from one of those previous posts:

“2/3 small businesses have seem increased efficiency from mobile technologies and 60% believe that mobile technologies are completing functions that other technologies can not accomplish.  This is pretty exciting, as it proves that mobile will create new, exciting markets that have never before been contemplated! Wahoo mobile developers!

Mobile Creates Efficiency

Mobile Creates Efficiency”

I believe that the marketing techniques that worked on small businesses will start to work for large enterprises – getting end users to try out new products that they download from an app store, getting them to engage with the product, and potentially start paying without real corporate oversight. Next step would likely be to bring in an enterprise sales force to call into the CTO/CIO and bring the control back to the home organization.

Nov 14

Google’s decision to hide search terms in analytical reports for people who are ‘logged in’ is proving to be a pain for a lot of marketers. Marketers have come to rely on keyword analysis to help create compelling content for their sites so that they can drive customers to their business… but as Google is starting to create arbitrary privacy rules they begin to make the marketer’s job a lot harder. MediaPost points to a recent study that shows that “Not Provided” is now 40% of traffic for most organic search marketing analytics reports – thus providing absolutely no data for marketers.

MediaPost says more about the privacy change here: “Last year, Google gave signed-in search engine users an option to encrypt their search queries using Secure Socket Layer. The process encrypts Google search queries, meaning that data about visits from organic search queries no longer provides information, such as referring keywords, on each individual query. Rather than the exact word, Google began passing publishers the term “not provided” as the referring keyword for visits from search engine queries and clicks.”

As you can see, OfficeDrop has almost 50% of our search traffic as “not provided.”

What a pain. I guess I wouldn’t be upset about this if Google didn’t still make the info available in Google Webmaster tools. Why allow it to be displayed to marketers/webmasters in one place but somehow not in another? Are you really protecting anyone’s privacy? I don’t get it.

Dealing with Not Provided as a search term

In order to see what your true traffic driving search terms are (and unhide that annoying “not provided” term) you need to be a webmaster of your site. If you aren’t the webmaster then this won’t really help you; ask the person in charge of your site to invite you to be a webmaster.

  1. Then go to Google’s Webmaster login here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=en
  2. Select the site that you want to research
  3. Select “traffic” on the left
  4. “search queries” should become an option below “traffic” – select that
  5. The last month’s search terms that drove traffic to your site will now be listed. You will probably want to sort them “clicks” to see the traffic that they are driving to your site; the default sort order is … well, I’m not sure.

These search terms are only kept in the webmaster tools location for a month or so, so you’ll need to download the results into a spreadsheet or something if you want to keep historical numbers! Again, it’s a pain.

 

 

Nov 12

A friend of mine, William Sulinski, has recently started a cool new project called From Holden. The concept is pretty basic – Will like to wear quality clothes (he’s way more fashionable than me!) but he, like me, is on a startup person’s budget. So he’s decided to start a verticalized men’s clothing company focusing on high quality shirts. It’s a cool concept, and I like the style of the shirts that he’s working on.

From Holden V Neck T Shirt

from holden v-neck t shirt

From Holden V-Neck T-Shirt

Will is on the cusp of a new trend in internet retailing, which combines manufacturing/sourcing with internet distribution in the goal of driving down the cost to the end consumer. I like the concept and will be asking for a few shirts for my birthday…

He talks more about what he’s trying to accomplish in a video on his Kickstarter campaign.

 

Please check out the From Holden Kickstarter campaign and, if you like the shirts, help Will out!

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