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Formlabs Starts Shipping Form 1 - Desktop 3D Printer

Keith Cline — Tue, 21 May 2013 01:10:59 +0000

Release Date:

Wed, 05/22/2013 - 08:00

Author:

Dennis Keohane - Contributor, VentureFizz

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Local 3D Printer Company Formlabs had quite busy last weekend. First, they were on the road repping their product at Maker Faire in San Francisco and the International Contemporary...

Local 3D Desktop Printer Company, Formlabs had quite busy last weekend.

First, they were on the road repping their product at Maker Faire in San Francisco and the International Contemporary Furniture Fair (IFCC) in New York. More importantly, however, was the company’s news that on Friday it began shipping their 3D printer to Kickstarter backers and pre-order customers.

With the stated goal of making affordable, high quality 3D printers for designers, engineers, or anyone, Formlabs is off to a great start.

Their initial Kickstarter campaign kicked off in September with a goal to raise $100,000. Amazingly, Formlabs raised nearly $3 million from over 2,000 backers. Over a thousand of the Kickstarter funding was from contributions of $2500 or more, the pledge amount to receive a Form 1, the first of Formlabs 3D printers, as a reward.

A product of the MIT Media Lab, Formlabs dreamt up the Form 1 to counteract both the expensive 3D printing machines as well as more affordable printers that produced low quality creations. The Form 1 relies on technology found in machines that sell for close to $10,000. The Form 1 uses stereolithography (SL) technology that produces high-resolution 3D models and, as Formlabs website states, ”a seamless user experience at a price affordable to the professional designer, engineer and maker.” Specifically, the Form 1 uses a laser to solidify a liquid resin and continually repeats the laser/resin hardening process as a platform gradually lifts the completed portion of the project away from the resin tray.

The printer ships with software as well as a “post processing kit.” The entire Form 1 printing process as well as the device itself is meticulously broken down, taken apart, and examined by Bunnie Huang on his bunnie:studios blog.

Shipping the printers is an enormous step for this promising, young company. Although they fell behind the expected shipment date targeted during the Kickstarter campaign, Formlabs was very apologetic on the company’s blog post announcing the news. On the blog, they thanked the Form 1 pre-order customers and backers for their “patience and encouragement,” for shipping a couple of months late.

Compared to the delays seen with the well-known Pebble watch Kickstarter campaign, Formlabs’ ability to manufacture and ship the Form 1, a far more complex product than the iPhone-connected watch, bodes well for the Cambridge company’s future prospects.

Introducing the Form 1 from Formlabs on Vimeo.

Dennis Keohane is a teacher, journalist and contributor to VentureFizz. You can follow Dennis on Twitter (@DBKeohane) by clicking here.

Zeppelin, the Inbox for Business Data, Launches New Mobile Version Product

Keith Cline — Tue, 21 May 2013 00:55:29 +0000

Release Date:

Tue, 05/21/2013 - 06:45

Author:

Dennis Keohane - Contributor, VentureFizz

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On Tuesday morning, Anže Vodovnik and Davorin Gabrovec are holding an event in Kendall Square to unveil the mobile version of Zeppelin, their one-stop data and analytics...

On Tuesday morning, Anže Vodovnik and Davorin Gabrovec are holding an event in Kendall Square to unveil the mobile version of Zeppelin, their one-stop data and analytics management tool for business.

Native Slovenians, Gabrovec and Vodovnik created Zeppelin in order to combine the key features of CRMs, business intelligence products, and collaboration tools on one easy-to-use platform. Zeppelin brings real time business insights to executives and managers in a wide array of sectors. Once they have important metrics from applications like HubSpot, Salesforce, or GitHub at their disposal, management can connect with key team members to update, fix, or push resources to a project, customer service ticket, or social media connection.

To better show the benefits of the tool, take for example a startup community manager as a prototypical user. Using Zeppelin, Community Manager X could monitor customer service tickets in ZenDesk, track Facebook and Twitter activity, and analyze current trends with MailChimp subscribers or check a blogs pages view data from Wordpress. Where in the past all of these tasks would require a constant bebopping around a desktop or opening/closing windows on a mobile device, Zeppelin provides this info in one accessible application.

Currently, Zeppelin integrates with seventeen applications including Google Analytics, Facebook, MailChimp, Twitter, Constant Contact, and Mixpanel. The web-based version of the product has been in private beta since last March with almost two-thousand users.

Gabrovec and Vodovnik are currently excited about the shift to mobile that they are announcing this week. The mobile tool will deliver key analytics and vital data to marketers, developers, executives, and pretty much anyone who needs business performance updates at their fingertips.

Gabrovec and Vodovnik haven’t always worked together; in fact, in Slovenia, they had competing startup companies. Once they joined forces, they saw the opportunity that existed for a disrupter in the business intelligence space and created Zeppelin. Figuring they needed to be able to connect with the most relevant business and social application makers, they hopped on a plane and headed to Silicon Valley. Almost as quickly as they headed to the Bay Area, they took an opportunity to join TechStars in Boston, and have now set up shop in PayPal’s Shark Tank.

Although they call Zeppelin an “Inbox for Business Data” their product is so much more; as they integrate with more applications, the viability of the tool they have created will increase exponentially. They told me that their current users are mostly “marketing managers and executives from tech-oriented companies.” Yet, they said that they “are now also exploring the advertising and e-commerce industries.”

Stop by Voltage on Tuesday morning at 8:30 and catch the unveiling of Gabrovec’s and Vodovnik’s new mobile version. Also, the event will give you the chance to meet the two innovative Slovenians who are trying to add another great B2B tool to the array of recent business-improving products that have successfully launched out of Boston.

Dennis Keohane is a teacher, journalist and contributor to VentureFizz. You can follow Dennis on Twitter (@DBKeohane) by clicking here.

Bonuses Are Toxic At Startups

Keith Cline — Sun, 19 May 2013 22:08:37 +0000

Release Date:

Mon, 05/20/2013 - 06:00

Author:

Eric Paley - Managing Partner, Founder Collective

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Venture backed startups are incredibly ambitious. A startup team comes together to try to create something highly improbable and well beyond what can reasonably be expected...

Venture backed startups are incredibly ambitious. A startup team comes together to try to create something highly improbable and well beyond what can reasonably be expected given the scarce resources at hand. Once financed, everyone at the startup should have a reasonable salary, but the real compensation for achieving the improbable is the equity that is typically shared between all employees proportional to the expected contribution of each person.

Inevitably, I get into a discussion with my companies about bonus packages. The idea being that startups are cash constrained and should limit the guaranteed salary costs, but that if the company is achieving goals, it should reward its employees with non-guaranteed compensation for a job well done.

The logic is compelling, but faulty. Bonuses are toxic at startups.

Outside of sales rep commissions, I don’t think startups should be giving employee or management bonuses in the early years and not until the company has very well understood financial performance. The problem is that bonuses don’t match well with the audacious ambition of the startup and aren’t fair to the company or the employees.

Inevitably, startups don’t quite live up to their goals. Using revenue metric.s because they are simple, consider the startup that has $3MM in previous year revenue and is hoping to 4X that this coming year to $12MM. Instead they do $9MM in sales. The team bonus is based on hitting or exceeding the goals. The team has worked really hard and, by all means, has done strong work growing the business. Yet they’ve fallen short of the goal. Unfortunately, somewhere over the course of the year, the team members start to assume that they will get the bonus. After all, the team tripled the business and worked really hard to do it. Yet the bonus was clearly for meeting or exceeding the goals. What should the company do now? Disappoint their hard working team by not giving a bonus or give the bonus and suggest that the goals are soft goals and the team will get paid as long as there is general progress and the team works hard. Add to the scenario that at $12MM in revenue the company would be positive cash flow for the first time and have cash to pay a bonus and at $9MM the company loses $1MM and will need to raise more capital and suffer additional dilution to cover the loss and potentially the bonus. It’s easy to imagine employees leaving the company and saying that the goals are crazy – “we tripled the business and didn’t even get our bonuses.”

Most companies just pay out the bonus anyway. Did that make the employees happy? Not really. They expected it. Did the bonus help set the ambitious goals for the next year? Not really. Paying the bonus below the goal suggested that the goals don’t really matter, which undermines the idea that the bonus is a form of motivation that leads to retention.

Worse yet, bonuses are not effective at recruiting employees. Most people that I know are a bit skeptical of bonuses before they join a company. They have no idea how ambitious the goals are or how likely they are to achieve the target bonus. On top of that, there is an ego element tied to salary that is absent in bonuses. All other things being equal, most people would rather join a company offering $100K a year in salary than make $90K a year with a potential target bonus of $20K. That isn’t so much an issue of risk aversion, but more of self assurance that they are worth $100K salary combined with the unknown of how likely they are to get any bonus at all.

Bonuses also create a culture of sandbagging and therefore are a bad motivation tool. Instead of wanting to achieve incredibly ambitious goals, employees start to consider whether the goal is likely and whether they will achieve their bonuses if they accept an ambitious goal. By arguing for lower goals, employees are optimizing for getting a bonus while actually working counter to the interests of the company.

Why are large companies different? At large companies goals are not as ambitious (10% growth vs. 200% growth) and employees typically don’t have the equity potential that they have at startups. Most importantly, financial goals are much better understood and typically achievable. Startups forecast based on what’s possible. Large companies forecast based on what’s probable. It’s esier to bonus employees on the later than the former.

So bonuses aren’t a good recruiting tool. Or a good retention tool. Or a good motivation tool. For these reasons, bonuses damage culture and focus the team on the wrong objectives.

What compensation tool is effective for recruiting, retaining, and motivating employees at a startup? Equity. Pay employees a fair salary for the stage of the company and keep everyone aligned to the extraordinary equity potential of huge growth. If the company achieves a 4X plan, the company’s equity has appreciated more than if it achieves a 3X plan. When employees don’t quite achieve plan, they understand that the equity hasn’t appreciated as much, but they are still rewarded for the forward progress with assumed appreciation of their stock. Employees have no financial incentive to sandbag because trying to achieve ambitious goals is how they maximize the equity reward. Best of all, equity has the potential of paying out orders of magnitude higher than any potential bonus.

Eric Paley is a Managing Partner at Founder Collective. You can find this blog post, as well as additional content on his blog called Anything's Possible. You can also follow Eric (@epaley) on Twitter by clicking here.

Throwing a Fastball Down the Middle

Keith Cline — Thu, 16 May 2013 21:39:28 +0000

Release Date:

Fri, 05/17/2013 - 07:30

Author:

Rob Go - Co-Founder and Partner, NextView Ventures

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Right after OMGPOP released DrawSomething to rave reviews (and traction), I was catching up with my friend Nabeel Hyatt and chatted a bit about the game’s meteoric...

Right after OMGPOP released DrawSomething to rave reviews (and traction), I was catching up with my friend Nabeel Hyatt and chatted a bit about the game’s meteoric rise. I joked that the success was eerily well timed with him joining Spark as a Venture Partner, although of course, the development of the game was well in the works before then.

I asked Nabeel (who was previously the GM of Zynga BOS) how the company developed the hit game after a number of years with more moderate success. His answer: “They just decided to throw a fastball right down the middle”.

What he meant was that the company had previously tried to be innovative in a number of different ways in their game development. That led to a catalog of beautiful games that were edgy and different on many dimensions, but ones that didn’t quite have the growth everyone was hoping for. With Draw Something, they took a pretty plain vanilla, tried and true playbook. They started with a popular and familier offline game (Pictionary), added asychronous social components (a-la Words with Friends), and of course, built it beautifully with good viral loops. They focused on building the best drawing game they could, instead of trying to be too cheeky, cute, or implement a bunch of other innovations on the edges. It helped Draw Something become one of the fastest mobile games of all time, even if that growth wasn’t sustained long term.

Since then, I’ve noticed that many really interesting companies start out as fastballs right down the middle. And many pivots look like that too. The reverse is that I often see less successful companies start out very complicated, or require customers to make too many leaps.

Mobile payments is a good example. A lot of companies have gone after this opportunity, and tried different versions of stored value on phones, wireless payments, etc. But what’s the company that has really broken out here? Square. They started with a little white dongle that allowed merchants to just take credit cards. They are moving beyond this, but they started with a fastball right down the middle. As Angus Davis (the founder of our portfolio company Swipely) has said, “millions of people are walking around with a mobile payment device in their pocket… it’s called a credit card.” Similarly, Swipely is starting to show terrific traction based on a that simple premise

Increasingly, when I speak with companies that seem to be in a promising space but aren’t quite getting the traction they hope for, I ask myself “what’s the fastball down the middle for this business?” It’s hard at time to give up on the elegance and innovative-nature of the more complicated solution, but sometimes, the best way to earn the right to be completely transformative is to do one simple thing really really well.

Rob Go is a Co-Founder and Partner of a seed investment firm called NextView Ventures. You can find this post, as well as additional content on his blog called robgo.org. You can also follow Rob (@robgo) on Twitter by clicking here.

Awesome.me Helps You Shine a Light On... YOU

Keith Cline — Wed, 15 May 2013 20:37:04 +0000

Release Date:

Thu, 05/16/2013 - 07:30

Author:

Dennis Keohane - Contributor, VentureFizz

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Patrick O’Quinn, the founder of Awesome.me, built his media-sharing-platform company with two personal beliefs in mind. The first is that everyone has greatness in them; second...

Patrick O’Quinn, the founder of Awesome.me, built his media-sharing-platform company with two personal beliefs in mind. The first is that everyone has greatness in them; second, he feels that people need a better opportunity to represent and be proud of what makes them awesome.

O’Quinn’s media/social media company, Awesome.me, aims to give anyone “a place to showcase, to highlight, and to shine a light on” anything positive that its users create or want to share.

As he explains, “For some, [greatness] is easily apparent. You meet someone and you’re able to recognize that this person is great at one particular thing.” “For others,” he continued, “it’s something that comes out once or twice a year, maybe once or twice a lifetime.”

Awesome.me started in the fall of 2011 and originally planned to cater to job candidates and hiring agencies as a way to create more personal, multimedia-rich resumes. Since then, O’Quinn’s project has morphed into something completely different.

Today, at its core, the company hopes to empower younger demographics to share their various talents, whether athletic, artistic, or musical. Some of the inspiration for this vision comes from O’Quinn’s own experiences with team sports. He feels that a great opportunity exists to become the “go to” source for young athletes to share highlights and hopefully attract coaches at all levels. Additionally, the possibility for young artists and musicians to showcase their talents is part of O’Quinn’s complete Awesome.me vision.

O’Quinn, who played soccer, hockey, and baseball at his Maine high school, continued playing baseball while an undergrad at Babson. The day after graduation, he hopped in his car and drove out to the minor league baseball hotbeds of Springfield, Illinois, and Chillicothe, Ohio, with hopes of furthering his career. After the professional stint did not pan out, he figured he would continue his dream of working in sports by becoming a sports agent. O’Quinn then went to Suffolk to get his law degree, passed the bar, and moved to Florida and began representing athletes from Puerto Rico, Venezuela, and the Dominican Republic. Eventually burned out by the agent lifestyle, he tried his hand in the business world; after attending the Fuqua School of Business at Duke, O’Quinn decided he needed to get involved in entrepreneurship.

The wild, pivot-filled stories of both O’Quinn and Awesome.me are beginning a new chapter as the company has enlisted the services and guidance of some other local success stories. For one, the company has turned to Terrible Labs and Jeremy Weiskotten in order to guide the technical side of Awesome.me’s expansion. After a few months working with Terrible Labs, Awesome.me is looking to come out of beta soon and are also hoping to conclude a Seed Round of funding in the next few months.

While the crew at Terrible Labs works on fine-tuning Awesome.me’s online platform, a pair of early-stage Facebook alums is helping to tell the Awesome.me story and develop its monetization plans.

PJ Solomon and Steve King were two of the first twenty-five employees for Zuckerberg’s social media giant. Now, they are trying to bring the experience helping Facebook grow to Awesome.me.

Both are advising O’Quinn and pushing to make Awesome.me “more of a brand,” as the founder said, “sort of a lifestyle brand and a media company.”

With Terrible Labs and the Solomon/King duo helping to define the company’s roadmap, Awesome.me hopes to bring O’Quinn’s vision to life.

“We want this to stand for something,” O’Quinn said of Awesome.me. “We call ourselves this community of inspiration and exploration.” Much like another local company and founder, Nataly Kogan and Happier, O’Quinn’s motivations are idealistic in nature. “There is feeling here, there is passion; we are trying to encourage the younger demographic, especially, to feel good about themselves, to appreciate the good things they do, to appreciate the good things other people do.” Awesome.me’s founder added, “Its all about welcoming, appreciation, and respect.”

Built on helping people, particularly trying to make younger generations feel pride in themselves, is a noble vision. O’Quinn seems like the right guy in the right town to create such an entity.

“We’ve seen it in the past month, people are as proud as ever to be to be associated with and live in the city of Boston," he said. He believes the company he created reflects the best parts of its hometown.

“Boston is a proud city and this platform is about being proud of who you are and what you do.”

Dennis Keohane is a teacher, journalist and contributor to VentureFizz. You can follow Dennis on Twitter (@DBKeohane) by clicking here.

Wondering What Colors To Choose For Your Brand? Take The Color Quiz!

Keith Cline — Wed, 15 May 2013 02:43:38 +0000

Premium Company:

Grasshopper

Release Date:

Wed, 05/15/2013 - 07:30

Author:

Emma Siemasko - Content Marketing Specialist, Grasshopper

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Color theory is nothing new. If you paint a room yellow, supposedly it creates anxiety. Grays and blues are soothing, but also depressing, and red is alarming and urgent. When our...

Color theory is nothing new. If you paint a room yellow, supposedly it creates anxiety. Grays and blues are soothing, but also depressing, and red is alarming and urgent. When our babies are born, we paint their rooms accordingly. We turn to pink and purple for girls, and blue and greens for boys.

When we start working on a new business venture, one of the first things we decide is what color to make our logo and website, but should we be considering this more carefully?

When I started Frog2Prince, my online dating consultancy, I made the website green for one simple reason: frogs are green. It wasn’t a well-thought out decision, and when I did some more research on color theory, I realized I’d made a mistake. I wanted my customers to feel safe and secure when they were buying dating services, but my bright green website indicated wealth instead of safety. Green makes people feel close to the natural world, and I want to make my customers feel digital, not environmental!

Thankfully, a variety of infographics and data points have been surfacing regarding buying behavior online. According to this stellar one from KISSmetrics, 93 percent of shoppers are affected by visual appearance when they’re shopping online. Eighty-five percent say color is a primary reason they buy a particular product. With numbers like these, we better be paying attention!

It turns out that red buttons make great calls-to-actions, and blue makes customers feel secure. I could go on with the data, but it won’t be long before your eyes start to cross. There’s tons of information out there, but it’s difficult to digest.

At Grasshopper, we’ve digested the information for you, and we’ve put it into a color quiz. We wanted to make it easy for business owners to choose colors when they’re updating their brand, sending out swag, building their websites, and creating email marketing campaigns. Even if your website and company already have a definitive color, you can still benefit from principles of color theory with other campaigns.

Take the Grasshopper Color Quiz to find out what colors are right for your brand. >>

Emma Siemasko is the Founder of Frog2Prince and a Content Marketing Specialist at Grasshopper, the entrepreneur’s phone system. Grasshopper makes getting a virtual phone system easy and fun. You can follow Emma (@EmmaFayeS) on Twitter by clicking here.

What You Need to Know About Unpaid Internships

Keith Cline — Fri, 10 May 2013 02:44:29 +0000

Release Date:

Tue, 05/14/2013 - 07:45

Author:

Michael Gaiss - Founder, ThinkB1G & EIR, UMass-Boston Venture Development Center

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The topic of unpaid internships comes up frequently in conversations that I have with companies looking to bring on young talent. It is an area where many people do not...

The topic of unpaid internships comes up frequently in conversations that I have with companies looking to bring on young talent. It is an area where many people do not have a full grasp of the rules and regulations that exist (which can vary by state).

The team at WilmerHale has just brought a lot more clarity to the area through a recent webinar that they conducted (“Legal Issues for Startups: What You Need to Know About Unpaid Internships”). It is an EXCELLENT resource that clearly articulates the legal requirements and risks associated with unpaid internships and how to best structure a compliant program if this is a route your company wants to pursue.

According to WilmerHale, more often than not unpaid internships today are not structured in a legally compliant way. The penalties can be harsh if it is proven that your company is in noncompliance with the regulations. Therefore, know what you’re getting into before you proceed.

Everything starts with understanding the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), a general law that determines the employee-employer relationship and what types of wages employees should receive. The FLSA has an exception for what they call “trainees” (i.e., unpaid interns). Here is the six factor test that companies must meet in order to qualify for this exception:

1. Internship must be similar to training provided in an educational environment
2. Internship must be for the benefit of the intern
3. Intern does not displace regular employees and works under close supervision
4. Employer derives no immediate advantage from the internship; operations may actually be impeded
5. Intern is not necessarily entitled to a job at the end of the internship
6. Intern must understand that he/she is not entitled to wages

In Massachusetts and California, employers just need to satisfy the FLSA six factor test. New York has an additional five criteria that companies must meet if operating in that state (which WilmerHale suggests is good advice to follow even if you are based elsewhere in order to really play it safe).

The above plus much more – best practices to follow, use of stipends, structuring paid internships as 1099’s, etc. – can be found at these links:

* Webinar Recording
* Presentation Materials

Everyone either currently using or contemplating unpaid interns should take 25 minutes and review this material if you are unfamiliar with the topic. The risks can be high if you don’t get it right and are found to be in noncompliance. For example, in Massachusetts, there are mandatory 3X damages if this is found to be the case.

Thanks to WilmerHale for pulling together such invaluable content as startups consider options for growing and scaling their teams.

Michael Gaiss is the Founder of ThinkB1G and an EIR at UMass-Boston's Venture Development Center. You can find Michael on Twitter (@MichaelGaiss) by clicking here.

Highlights & Pictures from our Scaling to 1M+ Users Event

Keith Cline — Mon, 13 May 2013 12:00:34 +0000

Release Date:

Mon, 05/13/2013 - 07:45

Author:

Dennis Keohane - Contributor, VentureFizz

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The members of the Boston tech / innovation community that attended VentureFizz / Dissero's "Scaling to 1M+ Users - Customer Acquisition Strategy" event arrived...

The members of the Boston tech / innovation community that attended VentureFizz / Dissero's "Scaling to 1M+ Users - Customer Acquisition Strategy" event arrived at Microsoft NERD with high expectations that they would learn how to acquire more customers for their businesses and startups.

The knowledge and experience shared by the panel that included Ed Macri of Wayfair, Scott Healy of Care.com, Sarah Welch of Gazelle, and Brian Carr of Springpad, was more than those in the crowd on Wednesday night could have imagined.

Moreover, the night presented unbelievable opportunities to network with hugely successful marketing pros, and to be entertained by the witty banter and expert moderation of Matrix Partner’s Antonio Rodriguez.

Here are some key takeaways from the event:

1. If you have any type of panel that is focused on entrepreneurs, startups, or technology... get Antonio Rodriguez as your moderator.

Rodriguez was on fire all night and had a laundry list of prodding questions for the panel.

He seemed excited to be hosting the event, and said as much, starting off by telling the crowd, “I couldn’t say no to this panel when I saw who was on it.” He added, “We can be a bit insecure on this coast when it comes to massively and happily acquiring tons and tons of users-but these folks can drop some knowledge.”

2. The panel was a perfect mix of marketing folks who know how to build buzz and attract customers in a myriad of different ways.

There were more references to the Googlebot and LTV CAC (Lifetime Value and Customer Acquisition Costs) than at any recent local event that I can remember.

But expertise in the marketing sector aside, all of the members of the panel understand the need for companies to experiment in a variety of different channels in order to find out the best variety of successful avenues to attain customers.

Where that will be in the near future can be inferred by the panel’s answers during the “Lightning Round”. Rodriguez asked about the best acquisition channel in the next few years and where the most future money could be earned from an investment today.

Springpad’s Carr was firm in his belief that “Content” is the future, but everyone else on the panel was bullish on Facebook. The general belief is that Zuckerberg’s company is going to figure out at some point how to harness the incredible volume of Facebook users. When that time comes, Facebook should become THE channel for companies who create “real” buzz to acquire customers.

Wayfair’s Macri summed up the current and growing reliance marketing has with the Facebooks and Twitters of the world. In response to a question about social media’s role in acquiring users, he responded, “We don’t view [social] any differently than we do search [engines, ie. Google].”

3. Springpad’s Brian Carr has so much knowledge on marketing and mobile that he can barely contain it.

Before the event explored user acquisition through mobile devices, Rodriguez and Carr had a couple of humorous exchanges as Carr waited in the wings for his chance to wow the audience with his mobile wisdom.

Some of Carr’s favorite tidbits of data:

* 7:00 PM is prime mobile usage time
* The average person has forty-three apps on their phone and uses eight on a daily basis.
* You can get a 6% increase on app purchases by changing the picture on the app store homepage.

4. Experience in the startup world is an irreplaceable asset, especially the experience of learning from mistakes.

Gazelle’s Welch typifies the story of how to become a master of marketing in the tech / innovation sphere.

Before her time at Gazelle, Welch spent a few years honing her marketing and media skills at TripAdvisor. Her time helping the internet travel giant grow gave her insight, both good and bad, on the best approaches to customer acquisition.

At both TripAdvisor and Gazelle, Welch learned from the highs and lows of SEO. Experiencing success and failure can be vital to learning how to maintain and attract users. She referenced a recent error during a site upgrade that bumped Gazelle down Google’s search rankings. As she said, “The pain from #1 to #8 for a week while we solved that problem was material to our business.” What Gazelle learned from this was very valuable in understanding how Google rankings can work.

5. We should be celebrating the success stories of the four companies represented on the panel.

Scaling to this level of growth is not an easy task and we need to show off these (and the many other) success stories locally.

* Gazelle has pretty much cornered the market on iPhone / device returns.

* Care.com is, in the words of Rodriguez, “A big ass business that doesn’t make nearly as much noise as many small businesses.”

* Wayfair is growing so quickly they are integrating their marketing with television and seeing great results.

* To describe Springpad, Carr referred to some of the love that they have been receiving from Mashable over the past couple of years basically identifying the app as the love child of Pinterest and Evernote.

Dennis Keohane is a teacher, journalist and contributor to VentureFizz. You can follow Dennis on Twitter (@DBKeohane) by clicking here.

Forrester - Office Tour [slideshow]

Keith Cline — Fri, 10 May 2013 18:51:46 +0000

Release Date:

Mon, 05/13/2013 - 07:45

Blog Slideshow:

Welcome to Forrester!

Campus View

WIM Way

LEED Certified

Greetings!

Lobby

Rock On!

"Call Me" from the Blondie Room

Plenty of Space, Great Views

Coffee is a Must!

Hendrix / The Stones

Ping Pong

Who Needs Video Games?

Global Presence

TV Studio

In-House Gym!

Yoga

Zagster (Boston TechStars Alum) Bikes!

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Welcome to Forrester...

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Introducing the Summer@Highland Class of 2013!

Keith Cline — Fri, 10 May 2013 19:09:19 +0000

Release Date:

Fri, 05/10/2013 - 15:00

Author:

Alex Taussig - Principal, Highland Capital Partners

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When we opened our call for Summer@Highland applications a few months ago, the entire Highland investment team pitched in to get the word out. We came bearing...

When we opened our call for Summer@Highland applications a few months ago, the entire Highland investment team pitched in to get the word out. We came bearing pizza to almost 30 university campuses in a little over a month. We held a couple Google+ Hangouts to connect with those we couldn’t meet with in person. Nearly 900 students applied from 85 universities around the globe, and we subsequently pored over each individual application looking for the top student teams to bring into our offices this summer.

Selecting the small number of teams we can host for the summer was an enormous challenge. We were blown away by not only the amount of applications we received, but also by their caliber. The majority of teams not only have a working product, but many of them have users, partners and have achieved some insanely impressive milestones – all while being full-time students.

We ended up selecting the following nine exceptional teams from across the country (PandoDaily also wrote a nice write-up here). Please meet and congratulate the Summer@Highland Class of 2013!

Alpha (Stanford University) – Alpha is a digital university for hackers that teaches experienced developers how to build actual applications for the “real world” through project-based learning in the browser. The team is also a finalist in the BASES (Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students) 150K Challenge

Butucu (Harvard College) – Butucu, an all-freshman team, aims to help retail stores improve the customer experience by allowing them to push custom, relevant content to in-store shoppers while providing high-level analytics

Connect.com (Harvard Business School) – What if all your connections from Facebook, LinkedIn and Gmail were shown on a map? Connect.com puts all your friends on a map so you can find people when traveling, plan events and visually explore your network. The company is co-founded by Ryan Allis, previously the co-founder and CEO of iContact (acquired by Vocus (NASDAQ: VOCS) for $169 million in 2012)

EagerPanda (MIT) – EagerPanda allows educators to easily build their own custom online courses, and enables learners to connect and communicate around this content

Phyre (Boston College) – Winner of the Boston College Venture Competition, Phyre is building a portable device that makes it easy to wirelessly connect and interact with large displays from any phone, tablet or laptop

Sension (Stanford University) – A computer vision platform that makes online content engaging for the user, Sension works with a simple webcam to let anyone make videos that respond to the viewer

SkylBridge (Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania) – SkylBridge is an online talent marketplace for businesses to find top-quality yet affordable business freelancers for short-term projects

Splat (Cornell University) – Splat is a small device that transforms a smartphone into the ultimate social-gaming console, letting users play physical, in-person, interactive video games

Technical Machine (Olin College) – Technical Machine is an embeddable platform for developers to make internet-connected physical devices

Congratulations and best of luck to each and every student who applied this year – we couldn’t be happier to now have you as an extension of the Highland family and look forward to working together in some fashion over the course of your career.

And stay tuned to this blog throughout the summer to follow the progress of the Summer@Highland Class of 2013!

Alex Taussig is a Principal with Highland Capital Partners. You can find this blog post, as well as additional content on the Summer@Highland blog located here. You can also follow Alex on Twitter (@ataussig) by clicking here.