Florent Peyre

So how much should you look at your direct competitors and the overal ecosystem? Personally, this is something that drives me a little crazy. I can go nuts on it.

I usually set up the classic Google Alerts on all my direct competitors, make sure I check their site every couple of days to see if there’s any tweak or redesign, follow their blog posts etc. Well… Sometimes, I even go deeper and start monitoring the new connections on LinkedIn that their main sales guy is making or check their twitter feed. Borderline creepy right?

For many years, I strongly believed that staying on top of that was the right strategy. I did a little bit of thinking on that subject over the last few weeks and realize that this was extremely intoxicating and paralyzing. There’s something really stressing about it – it always looks like the competition is going faster than you, that they’re better funded, that they have better advisors, better website, better clients and convos… It really plays into your own internal fears as a startup founder. 

I found 3 ways to get out of that panicky feeling:

1. Remember what makes your product or your strategy so awesome. There’s a couple of key differentiators in your favor between you and your competitors. If not, maybe you’re better funded, have better advisors, are getting smarter about specific verticals where you’re crushing it.

2. Talk to your co-founder, or your confident and rationalize: I found that really useful to go back to reality so to speak. Detail with him/her what the competition is pushing out and come up together with why you should stick to your current strategy (or maybe tweak?).

3. Go see your clients, go talk to your sale guys or your customer support team and listen, make sure you’re still executing well, that you don’t lose clients to that new offering from the competition, that you’re still acquiring new ones etc.

And then finally, just breathe… Being too close will usually push you to mimic competitors instead of innovating.

Saw David Cancel present the other day at Dogpatch Labs New York his data driven startups thesis. That guy goes straight to the point, no time lost on details. The whole presentation is really a must-read: how you need, from the start, to install a data driven culture in your startup (or in any project you’re starting to that matter). Test everything, get data for everything, and then iterate, iterate and iterate.

The 3 stages you need to go through (and in that order, this is critical) is to first get yourself operational dashboards (simple please! the simplest the better, if not nobody pays attention to it).

Once these are working reports used throughout the organization, you can move to getting yourself some funnel analysis and then move on to cohort analysis.

It’s all pretty clear in his presentation that I’ve embeded below. Direct link to David’s original post here.

30 slides of explanation on where we stand on the ad ecosystems and the intersection of data / display / search / ad optimization.

Presented at the IAB, this is from Terence Kawaja, an MD at GCA Savvian.

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At last night’s NY Tech Meetup, the show got kicked off by some demos from university students. I particularly liked the mashup of Steve Lehrburger leveraging Foursquare API and showing a heat map of your checkins.

Here’s the heat map of my 759 checkins in Foursquare. As I could expect, the 2 big heat points are midtown, where my office is based, and Soho / Nolita / Bowery where I spend most of my time outside of the office. I couldn’t include Brooklyn where I live (doesn’t fit on the map). Anyway, little but neat app…

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This was the past year of my life. Thrilled to see it launched today and amazed by the look and feel of the site! Check it out for yourself on Glo.

It’s all about bringing personal “me-time” and personal time for women on the web while presenting that in a visually very aspirational design package.

Full press release there.

I was listening to the Technology Podcast from the NPR that relates results of a study from Laszlo Barabasi, a human behavior researcher from Northeastern University. Laszlo negotiated access to full blind data from 50,000 cellphones subscribers to study their travelings and movements throughout a defined period (all cellphone signals transit through nearby cellphone towers, enabling the tracking).

The key finding is the extremely high percentage of predictability in day-to-day patterns. On average, he was able to see a 93% rate of predictability. That means that in 93% of the cases, you could in theory predict where that specific user would be. A lot of us might tend to believe that we’re fairly diversified creatures but when it comes to daily patterns, you’re pretty much the same as the one sitting next to you in the subway.

But what caught my attention was that phrase from Laszlo:

“We were seeing an average of 93 percent predictability across the user base. What does it mean? That means that for the vast majority of the people, you could, in principle, write an algorithm that could predict 93 percent of the time, correctly, their present location.“

Now imagine what you could do with that, once your algorithm is build and you don’t have to rely anymore on actual data (hence getting rid of the immediate issues of privacy, data collection and storage and other Big Brothers driftings). The services you can bring to any organization managing large infrastructures, being it roads, trains, subways, local development etc. If somebody could convince carriers to open all anonymous and blind data through an APIs and let the hordes of developers coming up with applications on top of it, it would probably spur a great deal of innovative services.

The full 4 minutes of the interview are there.

Upon the sharing of a friend on Facebook (ahhh… the power of social recommendation…), I discovered a new service called  in Flavors.me which enables anyone to build a personalized page on himself or anyone else and then link to it the main social content production factories. They currently carry 14 services including Facebook, Tumblr but also your DVD queue from Netflix, your checkins from Foursquare or the last tracks you’ve been listening on Last.fm.
Once you’ve added all services, the user coming to your page can click on the services you’ve added and a window will display whatever stream of activity you’ve had on that specific service.
Testing it yesterday, I mechanically added all the services I’m using including Netflix and Foursquare. Once I realized that everybody could then follow my physical traces around NY through Foursquare or all photos that I posted to Facebook (and where these only get displayed to a selected list of people), I freaked out and decided to limit that to only the safer LinkedIn and other Twitter feeds.

Well, boy, it was easy to add services but it was a nightmare to remove them. Flavors.me doesn’t include a “Remove The Service” option… Sure, they’re in beta but given the nature of their business, that should probably be part of your MVP feature… So then I went to all the services I wanted to get off my Flavors.me page and remove the authorization for Flavors.me to access these data. But even with that, Flavors.me kept the latest stream of data imported. Sure, nothing new was going to get published but all of the content previously imported was visible.

I ended terminating my account at Flavors.me to clean it. Don’t get me wrong, I think the service is pretty neat (rebuilding a page right now), but I was a little taken aback by the difficulty to keep track of all your social traces. That comes around a fairly large debate, initially provoked by the launch of PleaseRobMe which list empty homes by tapping into Twitter API. While Foursquare is a closed network (you need to approve your friends), more and more people link it automatically with their Twitter account which is an open network, all of a sudden revealing to anyone who wants to find it whether you’re at home or not. Foursquare countered back on that issue but this is just the beginning of more and more debates around open systems.

One of the key improvements there would probably be for the main companies that offers to link your accounts to open systems like Twitter to state clearly that you pushing out data on the open. I also think that the details of permissions given to 3rd-party services should be much more detailed on networks like Facebook and Twitter. You basically should be able to have the same detail of what you’re authoring and to whom as you have in your Facebook privacy settings. For once, I might be pretty ok (actually I know I would…) to display on Flavors.me my Foursquare badges, but not necessarily all my checkins…

The photo above shows my welcome screen on Flavors.me with my Tumblr blog feed open

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I’m the new happy owner of an iPhone. One of the first thing that I did was trying to find the right application to bring back all of the feeds that I carefully manage on my Google RSS reader. Because living in Brooklyn means sometime fairly long commutes, reading trade news and the bloggers that matter to me when traveling was critical.
And the app that I found works fairly well (seamlessly download all of the latest articles when I’m connected, that I can then “comfortably read” while commuting).

But the problem that I have is that a bunch of publishers (never bloggers I have to say, either by lack of tech knowledge or maybe because they’re just more open to the social web) think it is smart to parse their feeds and only include abstracts. Here are the usual reasons brought on and why it doesn’t make sense:

- “We need to have the user on our site, if not, people tend to not go anymore to our site…”
Who cares where the media is consumed? The key thing is make sure that you aggregate all of the analytics (and not only your site’s analytics). Most of the analytical packages now include that as a standard. And you might even learn interesting things about your audience (where is the media consumed, through what device or what platform etc.). In the end game, what matters is that the user is in contact with your brand, whether connected or disconnected.

- “We’re losing money since we can’t serve ads…”
While that was true for a long time, there’s more and more solutions coming down the road for publishers to monetize their RSS audience (see the good article from Dosh Dosh on that). And even if it’s not fully perfect, you can actually come up with new interesting packages for your advertisers that would, for example. include location-based services / promotions / coupons etc.

- “Our content is beautiful and should really be consumed on a full screen rather than a micro device…”
True again for a long time but the irruption of smart phones and e-readers is going to revolutionize that radically in terms of media consumption usage while potentially increase the rendering of your content (you might even stretch that argument to say that in some large e-readers that include color, the rendering will be ultimately better than through the current web experience).

There’s also a couple of downsides on the abstract method. The main one (realized from my own use) is that I tend to skip the feeds that are just a couple of lines long. It’s very very frustrating to start reading the abstract, get excited and then being unable to finish the article. Sure, I can always save it for later, but unless that 3 lines abstract was crazy interesting, I’ll never go back to it. So, first effect, I don’t use these feeds anymore (and therefore, I actually stop reading that specific publication, relying on the rest of the feeds to get me informed – good example at Silicon Alley Insider).

You have to follow your users instead of trying to shoehorn them into what you believe is good for you.
In the long run, I realized that with the help of an e-reader and/or a smartphone, I actually consume more media than before. It’s an exciting feeling to board on a plane with no internet connection (that’s getting rare though) and know that you’ll be able to catch up on all these great articles you’ve been saving for a moment like that, a moment when you’re not connected. And that’s also probably a moment where you, as a media company, want to be in the mind of the mind-free user, especially when that user is actually available to connect with your brand.

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