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Stupid Invitation Mail by Yelp (in German)

This one is in German since I started to use the German Yelp.

Ich hab mich heute bei Yelp angemeldet, um mir dort ein paar Dinge anzusehen und ob die deutsche gegenüber der englischen Version Unterschiede aufweist. Neben den Tatsache, dass ich sehr viele Informationen bei der Anmeldung von mir Preis geben musst (Postleitzahl – dabei würde die Stadt oder Region reichen). Der Gipfel war diese automatische Mail, die ich meinen Kontakten schicken solle:

“Wie geht’s? Hast Du schon von Yelp gehört? Ich bin abhängig davon.

Yelp ist die neue und spaßige Möglichkeit, herauszufinden und Beiträge darüber zu schreiben, was in Deinem Stadtviertel und darüber hinaus toll und was nicht so toll ist – von coolen Restaurants und Kneipen bis hin zu Ärzten und Fitnessstudios.”

Also ganz ehrlich, dass glaubt doch kein Mensch! Gut, dass Yelp weiß, dass ich 60 Sekunden nach meiner Anmeldung süchtig von dem Serivce bin…

Moi Moi Nokia

Today I had my last day at Nokia. The acquisition of cellity by Nokia brought me to this company known as the world’s largest handset manufacturer. I met many interesting people from various backgrounds and countries and also got into the Finnish way of corporate life. Now it is time to move on and start something new rather than keep working on exciting projects.

Leaving Nokia also means leaving Berlin, most likely currently the most amazing city in Europe. This city is changing so fast and so much creativity is currently located there (the relatively low living costs and the party scene support this very much).

Moi Moi Nokia and Moin Hamburg!

Questions and Answers

facebook has joined the Q&A game. But what does the rise of those question and answer sites mean and where are they useful?

Well for facebook it seems quite clear, because they want to get the brands to use more facebook as the best way to communicate with their user (and thus spend their marketing budget for facebook campaigns). Most of the other sites in this field are more keen about the unique content which means in return more Google traffic (longtail).

So these sites are doing the job most forums where doing in the past and it seems to work (so many people must have so much time…). Anyway I really think they are useful in terms of answering everyday life questions. But for the questions that need expert opinions and thus quality answers this just doesn’t work. If you have ever looked at the answers in the medical field or any technical sophisticated field it is quite scary (sometimes even dangerous) what you read.

Expert sites are kind of the answer to this problem, but they try to charge for an answer I don’t know how useful it might be (upfront payment). I think the companies itself should support places for answering very specific questions for free and let the brands pay for the service. This would be better for the user, the brands who can position themselves in a very specific situation and for Google traffic anyway. I am 100% sure that people are more likely to refer to an expert opinion than to another Q&A site and this means that these links could drive even more traffic to the expert site.

Focused expert Q&A site

A focused site doesn’t require much work in the long run (expect for the medical field). You just need to post the answers public and after a while I am pretty sure most of the questions have been answered and you just need to answer with an email that has already been written before.

Here is an intersting post about Quora, a larger site from the US.

habits x time x location = recommendation

These days many start-ups are focused on location based services or making money with the local merchants (many of them in the coupon field). Well, even though everyone is pointing to the incredible big yellow pages business most of might seem to not really think about two mayor issues:

1)      The local merchant

The owner of a Pizza restaurant or a fashion shop around the corner is a professional in his field, but (most of them) have very little understanding of online business and how much they can spend on user acquisition (average turnover per customer, customer life time value etc…). Until a couple of years ago there was only the representative of the yellow pages and maybe one local newspaper/magazine that were asking for some of his money in return of the shops appearance in their media. But today this person is getting calls/visits not only from the Yellow Pages guy, but also from Qype, Foursquare, Groupon, Google and numerous of other companies. But his Media Budget is limited and for the services itself the User Acquisition Costs are relatively high (without subscription it wouldn’t be affordable). However, he needs to decide to whom he should give his money to. I bet that most merchants are still going for the Yellow Pages since they know the sales rep very well and the rest of them might go with the bigger and well known ones. So why should this person deal with another partner?

(My personal view on this that it is time for a local business hub – someone who is doing the sales and then distributing this through the different channels. Look at all the groupon clones and how much they have to spend on sales.)

The merchant wants to spend his money wisely and he wants to drive more customers into his business. That’s why it also important to take the customer into this view, because without the right audience the merchant doesn’t even considers paying for it.

2)      The user

I really like sites who help me to discover things around me that otherwise would be literally invisible to me. So the review sites are doing a great job for me. Coupons are only relevant to me if I know the business, because I don’t want to spend anything on a bad service/restaurant etc.

The big advantage of the new services is not that I can search for something but that I get recommendations of what I might like. This is real value to me as user- Location based service should be more focused on recommendation than search (even though a good search is mandatory). So this leads me to the headline of this post: one killer feature for mobile lies in this business. If a service knows my behavior (I love Italian restaurants, but I really don’t like Indian restaurants) it can match this information with its database and check for similar results. This is very closely tight to my location and to make it even more useful to the time of the day. So this means:

Habits x time x location = recommendation

Such a service would be my daily guide and hopefully would surprise me with many new ideas about where to go. And this could drive many customers to new places. This is only possible with a large database companies like Yelp in the US or Qype in Europe have. So to all the Start-Ups in this field: Create a compelling product for the user, focus on the mobile usecase and when this is working it might be much easier to ask the local merchant for some money.

Rules for Business Success

I just found an printed copy of a Gigaom article about the the Rules for Business Success in Any Market by Paul Polak. I do not fully agree with his point, that he doesn’t invest in a company that can’t pay for itself in a year, but he made some good points about the customer. I very much like his attitude about listing to your customers. Here is some of his wisdom:

1. Go where the action is. “Spend significant time with your customers. This is how you learn what they need,” he says. Not hours, days. Polak lived with his farmers for 6 months.

2. Interview at least 100 customers a year. You do it. Not an employee. Listen to what they have to say. “Too many entrepreneurs build the product they want to build — not the one that’s needed.”

3. Context matters. If your solution isn’t right for the context, for example, if it costs too much for the customers you’re trying to serve, you won’t succeed.

4. Think big. Act big.

5. Think like a child.

6. See and do the obvious. Others won’t, which is opportunity for you.

7. Leverage precedents. If somebody has already invented it, don’t do it again.

8. Scale. Your business must have potential to scale. Remember, your market must include at least 1 million customers.

9. Design to specific cost and price targets. Not the other way around. (Celeste: it means — Do not price to your design, design to the price you need to hit to make your product appropriate to your customer.).

10. Follow practical three-year plans. Two years is too short. Ten is too long.

11. Visit your customers again. And again. “Any successful business in this country is based on talking to your customers all the time. A good CEO spends half his time ‘in the field.’”

12. Stay positive. Don’t be distracted by what other people think.

Source: http://gigaom.com/2008/11/01/paul-polak-15-rules-for-business-success-in-any-market/

Viral Video: Nokia’s N8 Foosball Fever

Today I saw a new Nokia commercial, usually this is not that amazing to write about (this is true for almost any commercial by a big company). But this commercial by Nokia (disclaimer: I work for Nokia) for the new phone N8 is just amazing. I am sure that this one will be huge success, because it is the male audience will love it. Foosball, Kicker or however you want to call it is so popular and especially now when the soccer world cup is starting soon. I posted it right away on facebook and twitter.

What I also really like is that you can watch the different tricks/moves separately at the end of the movie and they even called the tricks by their name. Great work!

My favorite Apps and Tools

I am sure that everyone has their favorite tool or App. Yesterday I was thinking about the Apps on my mobile phone and the Tools on my computer that are most important to me.

Mobile (Android OS)

• facebook (because it is great to kill some time)
• NewsRob (a very lean and efficient feedreader, so I catch up with the latest news on the go)
• Evernote (very good piece of software that helps me to write down very quick everything that comes to my mind while I am not in front of my computer)
• Qype (my guide for restaurants and bars)

On my computer

• Balsamiq (currently I have to make a lot of mockups of websites and this tool helps me to do this as fast as anyhow possible)
• Pivotal Tracker (a very good tool to coordinate a software project)
• Google (Mail, Docs, Calendar > everywhere accessible)
• Spotify (because it is just so convenient)

New user boost for citydeal and Zalando

Today is a big day for citydeal (the groupon clone started by internet entrepeneurs samwer bros.). They offered a Zalando (a german zappos clone also started by the samwer bros.) voucher worth € 50 for the price of €15! This is a pretty good deal for anyone who needs a new pair of shoes within the next 6 month (at least any woman). Today many people were saying that this will again costs tons of the invested money. But is this true?

Lets have a closer look at the voucher: It says that the voucher has to be redeemed within the next month for a purchase of at least €60. Lets take the usual 50% profit on each fashion item (in this case shoes). Zalando offers mostly shoes at the suggested retail price so the margin should be around that. Most of the user won’t hit the €60 target since they buy the pair of shoes they like most no matter what they cost. I would like to assume an avarage price of €80 per purchase.

€ 80 turnover

- € 50 for the voucher

+ € 15 paid for the voucher on citydeal (in the case citydeal hasn’t subsidised this voucher)

= € 45

This means that they do not make a loss on this deal (the costs for returned goods might be covered by the vouchers that people might forget to redeem within the 6 month period.)

On top of that has Zalando gained at least 10000! new customer with this coupon special. Zalando is already somehow known in the public due to a heavy advertising campaign but I bet that most of the user today are new customers. So you can add the average user acquisition costs on top of my calculation. The timing of this is even more important because the Otto group (the German Mail Order Giant) recently launched Mirapodo (similar concept to Zalando).

The deals citydeal has offered so far support the estimation I made about the Groupon clones in January – this business is tough. The companies out there already burned a lot of cash and only the well funded might survive and get sold. But today this deal might has be different – anyway a big day for both companies in terms of user acquisition.

2010 – also known as the year of location

You hardly can find a newssite about the internetbusiness these days that is not writing about location based services and location based advertising.  Currently foursquare seems to be the most coveted investment opportunity for some VCs and an endless amount of new companies want to enter this space recently. But who will benefit from this trend most?

This market will be dominated by the big players who have access to the map infrastructure. Why? Well because soon the map will be one of the most used feature on any phone because more and more content and apps will be based on location data (plus free navigation for the user).  It is almost like Apple and itunes. Apple provides the infrastructure and the user and tons of developers are fighting for the audience and thus generating money for the gatekeeper (in this case Apple with its 30% revenue share).

I see Google and Nokia in the best position. Whereas Google is the leader in the webspace with its search and Google Maps, Nokia is in a strong position in the mobile space with an amazing market share and the NAVTEQ map data. No matter how those companies will evolve their products they are the gatekeeper for many revenue streams (like location based advertising) in this field.

2010 will be very interesting for location based services with many new companies entering this market, with big players who are working on their products and some more mature startups (like Yelp) who either sell their business or start to make some good money.