Women control $20 trillion on average of annual consumer spending, according to an article published by the Harvard Business Review. The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) reports that women have been outspending men in consumer electronics since 2007, when women spent $55 billion, compared to $41 billion by men. It seems like a no-brainer to develop electronics geared towards women. Right? I’m not looking for pink tablets, necessarily. Brands should be more creative than that. I'm not talking cases either. I’d like some real, useful, women-friendly technology.
Stellé Audioinspired my post today. I met the woman-owned portable speaker manufacturer during CE Week this year. Not only have they created speakers that pair easily with other devices and have quality sound, but the package is also a smart designer clutch for the fashionable woman on-the-go. The Stellé Audio Clutch comes in various skins, from leather to Python to Eel-inspired designs and totes, from fashion great Rebecca Minkoff. This speaker would be great for a day at the beach with your family or for a discreet conference call at the lunch table with your staff. (Don’t act like I’m the only one).
Stellé Audio has pioneered the move from the bulky black speaker collecting dust on your desk to something usable, wearable, truly on-the-go, and that most importantly includes the forgotten few: Women!
All Stellé Audio products are available for purchase at www.stelleaudio.com and Fred Segal retailers in West Hollywood and Santa Monica.
Zappos CEO and head of the Downtown Project talks about the formation of Delivering Happiness, the organization designed to spread Zappos's cultural insights to companies and organizations across the world.
RoundPegg makes software to help companies measure and adapt culture, and hire the right employees. In this video, Baumgartner explains when you should focus on company culture, what its goal is, and what really determines it.
Tech Cocktail received investment from the Downtown Project.
I think that if the Cohen Brothers’ Jeff Lebowski were real, motivated, and professional, he would be Chuck Longanecker. The founder of Digital Telepathy maintains a Zen-like atmosphere where those around him actively work to reach their own goals while helping him reach his.
It is the common problem that we all deal with when starting a new project: how do I determine what my goals are - what is my true north? Longanecker and the folks at Digital Telepathy believe that you must design a map that points to your ultimate destination much like a compass.
By putting soul into your work, empowering others' potential, and living life to the fullest, we can continually strive towards betterment. Remember to celebrate hitting your waypoints, follow your values, and eliminate friction along the way.
Longanecker and his team have put it all into a formula so that we might set, follow, and reach our true north on our journey:
Betterment = (Simple + Compelling) - Friction
So, design your own direction - Here is the video:
Last night was the Tech Cocktail Week Mixer and Startup Showcase in downtown Las Vegas. As always, we held our Hottest Showcasing Startup series, including the pre-event Reader's Choice online poll, as well as the Best Pitch award, as determined by the Live SMS poll.
This week, one startup won both!
Tech Cocktail Week's Hottest Showcasing Startup
Drinkboard- Drinkboard is a carefully curated, hospitality-centric mobile gifting app. They see themselves as the Anti Groupon and position themselves to support local businesses and communities at full retail price.
Congratulations to Drinkboard! As part of their victory, they receive recognition in Tech Cocktail's Weekly newsletter, invitation to a future Tech Cocktail Week, and move onto the next round with the chance to qualify for Tech Cocktail Celebrate, our national startup showcase event.
In the startup world, failure is cause for celebration. This is true for three reasons.
Although not the preferred outcome, failure is a byproduct of risk taking. Taking risks is the only path to success.
Celebrating failure reduces the attached stigma. Many fail to take action out of a fear of how it will reflect on them.
Failure is synonymous with experience. As Thomas Edison famously said, "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."
That’s why, each Friday, we bring you a new story of an entrepreneur’s “failure”. Failure Friday is about helping you avoid common startup mistakes, it’s about squashing the stigma, and it’s about peering inside the minds of entrepreneurs who’ve achieved success because of their failures.
This week’s failure comes from Andrew Cross, founder of Tripzaar.
Failure Friday: Biting off more than you can chew and curing with customer service
A couple years ago, when I was working on my first startup, GooseChase, we landed a partnership with the BlackBerry blog CrackBerry to run a massive scavenger hunt for their community. We’d only run a couple hunts at this point and our BlackBerry app (don’t laugh, it was a couple years ago) had only been available for a few weeks, so landing a partnership like this was huge, but also very risky.
Before now, the most concurrent users we’d had was about 10. Now we were going to be tossing thousands of participants into the app at once. Easily a recipe for disaster. Regardless, it was too good of an opportunity to pass up, so we went with it.
Sure enough, within minutes of the contest launching, the comments section on the announcement post started filling up with error reports & complaints.
For example:
"the app wont let me upload a pic (10:11am)"
"it seems that i am getting an exception every time i take a pic (10:25am)"
"Whenever I try to register I keep getting network failure…..(10:34am)"
Additionally, we’d created the bulk of the missions to have you take a picture with/of a BlackBerry. The part we forgot – you had to take the picture with your BlackBerry. We’d created a catch-22 unless you had a second BlackBerry. Sure enough, people clued into this oversight and let us know.
"I don’t think the people at GooseChase have thought this through. How can you take a photo with a BlackBerry with the Blackberry in the photo? Only possible if you have another one or working with someone else. Stupid. (2:45pm)"
The bugs were so bad that it took us a couple days and countless patches/hot-fixes before we got the app functioning properly for the majority of the participants. Even then, the extra volume kept killing our servers, grinding the game to halt. Not exactly a classy first-showing.
The only thing we did right was personally responding to everyone who posted, giving them our personal phone numbers & email addresses. It wasn’t a pre-meditated customer service strategy, but we were so embarrassed by our failure that we felt we owed it to the participants to make it right.
And it made all the difference. People who were ripping us up in the comments became our advocates. Even though the app was still shaky, being able to talk directly to our team made them want to support us.
"Wow. Already got my pictures sent to me with a personal message, not from a robot. Well done Goose Chase. Class act all the way with a great, fun experience to boot."
That lesson – real, personal customer service trumps all – has stuck with me ever since. So much so, the 1-888 number on my current startup’s site, Tripzaar, redirects directly to my iPhone.
Providing real, personal, empathic customer service not only diffuses a bad situation, but often reverses it into a highly positive experience. And having people walk away from an experience with your company with a warm, fuzzy feeling is the best outcome you can hope for.
Heard about anonymous chat sites to talk with strangers? Sounds creepy? Zumbl was launched a few months ago to let users engage in meaningful conversations with strangers while maintaining anonymity. Just in time for Americans to alleviate some of the prying eyes of the NSA electronic snoops.
Zumbl recently introduced a feature to talk about "specific topics," or to talk with a specific group of people, and launched their iPhone application. But something that immediately draws the attention is their focus to build virtual identity, albeit anonymous.
"We are creating a pseudo-anonymous identity of a person where we don't associate one's real information like real name, country, etc. to the Zumbl profile, but associate the interests, list of preferred movies, books, etc., and on the top of that identity enable a very different kind of people search," says Abhishek Gupta, who co-founded Zumbl with Kumar Saurabh. The pair dropped out from their college to accept incubation at Digital Media Zone, Toronto.
"And this is why we associate with a person an avatar descriptive of his/her qualities on Zumbl, as perceived by the people he/she chatted with. So, if someone marked you nerdy and geeky, your avatar would automatically be updated to a nerdy avatar (by use of machine learning algorithms)," says Shinja Singh, who has been designing their avatars and is studying engineering in mathematics and computing, but shares passion for design. Jack Dorsey happens to be her inspiration for the nerdy male avatar.
The company claims to be adding a new user every 90 seconds, while a new chat session starts every 20 seconds. Started from the dormitory of Gupta and Kumar, currently eight students are working on Zumbl. The youngest of them, 17-year-old Kumar Abhishek, was added to the team after he discovered a potential loophole in their offline messaging system.
Zumbl is a moderated platform, moderated by top users and inspired by Wikipedia and Quora.
I'm looking forward to seeing how Zumbl shapes up, given their pitch that they are trying to move a step beyond Facebook graph search, and let people search for people anonymously. Though ensuring meaningful conversations involving millions of anonymous people seems a crazy bet to me.
A couple years ago, when I was working on my first startup, 
WAYS TO WORK TOGETHER
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