The CulCharge, a super-small USB charger and data cable, was created to help the world keep their smartphones charged and full of life. Currently ranked the second most popular Indiegogo campaign, it has already racked up more than 2,000 funders, raised $48,000, and has 24 days left on the clock.
The initial goal for the Slovakia-based startup was to raise $15,000 in their campaign, and they absolutely crushed it. Individual funders have played a big role, but their targeted strike at distributors, with an all-in-one display station Culbox, pushed them over the edge.
Founders Jozef Zemla and Viktor Reviliak designed the CulCharge with a USB plug on one end and a phone charger on the other. You can choose an iPhone attachment, both 30-pin and lightning, or the micro USB for Android phones.
What separates this USB charger from the herd is the flexible silicone casing that allows it to bend over a 180 degree arc. Pair that with an overall 6cm length, and no USB port will ever be out of reach for you again.
Slip it onto your key ring, slide it into your wallet, or stash it in your shoe. Leave your outlet charger at home, and never worry about leaving it at work again. CulCharge will give your phone the life it needs when it needs it.
Authors, comic artists, rappers, porn site creators – we need outside-the-box thinking in many professions these days.
Startups celebrate outside-the-box thinking, too, which is perhaps why the personalities below are all so popular with the tech crowd. Expand your mind a bit this weekend and check out our interviews with Tim Ferriss, Matthew Inman, Chris Guillebeau, Jermaine Dupri, and Cindy Gallop.
The author of The $100 Startuptalks about being a non-conformist and what he's learned about entrepreneurship from his travels (to all 193 countries in the world).
The rapper explains his journey through social media – from MySpace to Twitter to founding Global 14 – and his hope to bridge the music and technology industries.
The spunky creator of MakeLoveNotPorn talks about her hiring philosophy of "great and nice," her favorite part of startup life, and her biggest motivation.
Do you remember the last time you finished breakfast without knowing the day's weather, sports scores, and headlines? What about giving up on an argument over movie trivia because you couldn't recall an actor's name?
Can you remember ever being unaware of what was happening in the lives of your friends and co-workers on a daily basis?
Mobile technology has transformed the way we interact with information. We have a world of data at our fingertips - at all times. Information is an on-demand commodity, and unfettered access is changing the way we live our lives.
This is the mobile mind shift phenomenon, and it's reshaping our brains. For many of us, a smartphone has become a vital part of our basic thought process. Immediate access to information gives us instant gratification, so we constantly seek it out.
What It Means for Business
Think about the impact this phenomenon has on your business. Your customers expect a continual stream of robust information from your company. If you don't provide them with an on-demand relationship, you could lose them.
If that sounds dramatic, it is. But the mobile mind shift can also be a tremendous asset. When you help your customers satisfy their hunger for instant information, you're bolstering the relationships that fuel the growth of your business.
Here's how to adapt to this new reality:
1. Keep Screen Size in Perspective
The range of screen sizes your customers use to access your online content is staggering. Therefore, it's critical that your content is easy to navigate on any phone, tablet, or computer.
Utilize a responsive design structure to ensure a uniform look and feel across devices. You can also integrate multiple versions of your website for the same purpose. Just make sure that, no matter how your customer chooses to access your site, the social media sharing functionality is always simple and prominent.
Screen size also impacts the way the customer will process your information. (There's nothing less appealing than having to read a fat brick of text on a phone screen.) By creating content in bite-size nuggets that are easy to digest, you are inviting your customer to engage whenever and wherever he so chooses.
2. Create a Communications Process to Ensure Quality and Consistency
The prospect of creating new content on a daily basis can be daunting. If you don't stick to a solid process, you'll often find yourself pushing communications to the back burner.
Dedicate part of every day to communicating with your customers. If you're working with a team, designate communications roles and responsibilities so nobody is overburdened and no tasks fall by the wayside.
During the communications process, be transparent. Try to see your company from an outsider's perspective - what do people actually want to know about you? What information do you have that's interesting? Asking yourself these questions will enable you to develop high-quality content.
3. Listen, Respond, Innovate
Your customers' need for instant gratification is also a need to be heard. Use social media to listen to your customers - not only does it give them the validation they're seeking, but it also gives you direct insight into what they really want.
Listening is just the first step. It's what you do with the information your customers provide that gives you the edge. When you make decisions based on what your customer actually wants, you become relevant in his eyes. You also become an active, responsive company - and this is the cornerstone of innovation.
The Opportunity to Become Second Nature
If you can provide customers what they want when they want it - via their preferred channels of information - you can engage them in ways that were never before possible. Interacting with your business will then become second nature.
Treat the mobile mind shift phenomenon as an opportunity, not a threat. Harness the global demand for immediate access to information. Catering to your customers' need for instant gratification will yield long-term results.
Alex Friedman is the President of Ruckus. Alex has grown its digital and technology practices, serving clients such as the United States Green Building Council, Honda Motors, HSBC, and more. In addition to Ruckus, Alex is a majority partner in the $30-million "Brewers' Hill" development project. He currently serves on the Board of Advisors for Yumani.com, as well as BrandNewBody.com, and he is the Managing Partner of the Ruckus Brewing Company. Connect with Alex on Twitter.
If you’re a parent, you are probably running out of ideas for keeping your kids busy at this point in the summer. Once the family vacation and summer camps are over, you’re likely seeking entertainment for the little ones that will keep them engaged, especially with recent hot temperatures limiting outside play.
Why not hook your kids up with an app that promotes creativity and positive problem solving skills? Elka Palka Production’s Magical World of Elfishki book series is free for iPhone and iPod, and available for purchase for iPad, with 25 apps and over half a million downloads so far.
Elka Palka Production was formed in Southern California in March 2011 by book illustrator Inessa Kirianova, author Elvira Baryakina, and IT project manager Pavel Mamaev. The company focuses on creating a world where art, magic, and technology combine to create visually stunning products for elementary school-age children. The Magical World of Elfishki features little fairy tale creatures who live on the beautiful Rainbow Island in the middle of the Sparkling Sea. Elfishki can fly like butterflies or swim like mermaids.
Even better, there are no bad characters in the stories. Each character has his or her own perspective, and readers learn to appreciate the differences in points of view and figure out how to create win-win solutions.
The stories are published in English and Russian, and Elka Palka Productions will be adding more languages soon. Elfishki come to life with interactive illustrations, original music, and sound effects. And, each fairytale includes a set of comprehension questions and a bonus game to boost children’s creativity and imagination.
Elka Palka Production aims to go beyond merely building a business. According to the team, “We are building a magical universe around Elfishki. We work hard, learn a lot, take care of each other, and make every effort for our children to inherit from us a better world to live in.”
You can check out this universe for yourself on the series’ website.
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.
My startup company launched our mobile app during Superbowl weekend in New Orleans this past year. It seemed the perfect opportunity for us to reach thousands of people in our market at once. So after we graduated from our accelerator program, we moved directly to New Orleans to begin planning for the Superbowl. We invested a lot of time and money into organizing a street team, making connections with the local community leaders, and printing tons of flyers and swag. What actually happened that weekend was every founder's worse nightmare. People simply did not want to talk to us about our startup. Everyone seemed intoxicated and unable to have a coherent conversation about our app's benefits. People were rushing from one party to another. They were busy snapping photos for Instagram, and updating their Twitter accounts. Loud music drowned out the conversations we did have with people who stopped by our booth in Jackson Square. What seemed like the perfect plan became a perfect disaster.
Although our launch didn't go as we planned, I learned a lot about marketing that weekend. First of all, don't market your app during an event that involves a lot of partying and drinking. People simply don't want to stop and talk about your new app. And if they do stop, they probably won't remember the conversation in the morning, which defeats the entire purpose.
Next, don't print flyers or t-shirts promoting your startup with specific event details. We printed 2,500 flyers with 'New Orleans' on it, but only handed out 1000 of them out. Now we have 1,500 flyers in our car that say 'New Orleans' here in Los Angeles. As a bootstrapping startup, of course we're not going to throw them away—we still use these flyers at events. However, it confuses a lot of people to see 'New Orleans' randomly on our flyers. We were also left over with 50 t-shirts that say 'Superbowl February 3, 2013' on them two weeks after the big game had passed.
Next, put your resources into the markets you've had success with. In our case, that has always been college students. Instead of trying to go after the 'big sea' of social media users and hope to convert the masses at once, we should have spent our resources on creating a strong presence on college campuses. Often entrepreneurs have these huge goals and think everything you do to reach that goal has to be big as well. Go big or go home, right? Wrong. The likelihood of us becoming an overnight sensation after one event is almost non-existent. Plus, your ultimate goal should always be self-preservation. Don't put all of your resources into one big event. If that event doesn't work out, you don't want to be left with nothing. Plan small events where you can continue to improve your tactics and message, and slowly, but steadily reach more and more people.
Finally, one of the most important lessons I learned from this experience is to preserve your cash. Never run out of money. Just because you have the money doesn't mean you should buy or pay for something. Look for free or very, very cheap at all times. Don't pay for something just because it's convenient. You're a startup founder. 'Convenient' should not be in your vocabulary right now. If it is, you're not working hard enough. You should be so uncomfortable right now, you'll do whatever it takes to be successful. We often couch-surfed with complete strangers in order to save on housing and lodging. As a startup, every dollar counts. Plan for the future. Think about how much your very bare and necessary bills cost each month (server, hosting, developers, etc.). Multiply that by 2, and set it aside in a DO NOT TOUCH account. Get a credit card and use it for daily purchases and bills. Not only does that build your company credit, but many of these cards have reward points that can be redeemed for things you'll need as an entrepreneur, such as restaurant and store gift cards. Pay off the bill each month to avoid interest.
The running theme in all of these lessons is to plan for the future by living and working modestly. Don't focus all of your attention and efforts on one big event. Stretch your dollars further by printing flyers and company swag that is universal and can be used for any company event. Save money whenever possible by opting for cheap over convenience. Remember, running out of money is the number one reason why startups fail. Don't let your company be part of that statistic.
One’s ability to focus is often tied to his or her capacity for greatness. Or something like that. I don’t know – that’s a thing, right? I have a difficult time focusing on anything other than eating food, which is probably indicative of my future success (read: failure). But being focused and having a focal point are essential in running a successful business, and no one knows that better than the guys at bizHive.
For Dave Walker and Derick Thompson, the cofounders of bizHive, focus is something that runs throughout every level of the company. It starts with their focus on small businesses. BizHive – in a nutshell – is a central resource and marketplace for small businesses who want to attract new customers or increase their sales using new media.
“New media has made it difficult – frankly, even for big companies – to attract consumers,” says Walker, citing consumer behavior to today’s marketing strategies.
BizHive focuses on helping small businesses find marketing solutions in new media, anything from creating Facebook business pages to setting up customer royalty programs with the help of mobile tech. According to Walker, small businesses often don’t dedicate a lot of time creating comprehensive marketing strategies to attract new customers or increase sales; they’re concentrated on the products or the services that they offer to their communities.
“It’s not the failure of the product or the service or the passion…it’s a failure on the marketing and the ability to keep up,” remarks Walker.
This focus on small business is most notably seen in the way bizHive charges them: it doesn’t. The resources and advice they offer is free, and getting quotes from the marketing product and service companies listed on bizHive’s “intelligent marketplace” costs absolutely nothing to the small business owner.
Internally, the two have very distinct roles in the company: Walker doing the hustling and Thompson doing the hacking. Even then, though, staying focused is one of the difficult lessons that Walker and Thompson have had to learn.
“When you’re a startup, the hardest thing to do is to stay focused…several [possibilities and ideas] excite you, but if you can’t restrain yourself and focus, then you’re unable to recognize what opportunities you should be pursuing and what you shouldn’t,” says Walker.
Walker says that startups need to find some method to remain focused; otherwise, you end up wasting time on a project or idea that wasn’t essential to your business’ overall focus. “Time is your precious resource, and startups don’t really have those.” Well, with just nine months under their belt, it seems that bizHive has done a good job focusing, having already made over 1,000 different connections between local businesses and marketing service providers on its marketplace.
My startup company launched our mobile app during Superbowl weekend in New Orleans this past year. It seemed the perfect opportunity for us to reach thousands of people in our market at once. So after we graduated from our accelerator program, we moved directly to New Orleans to begin planning for the Superbowl. We invested a lot of time and money into organizing a street team, making connections with the local community leaders, and printing tons of flyers and swag. What actually happened that weekend was every founder's worse nightmare. People simply did not want to talk to us about our startup. Everyone seemed intoxicated and unable to have a coherent conversation about our app's benefits. People were rushing from one party to another. They were busy snapping photos for Instagram, and updating their Twitter accounts. Loud music drowned out the conversations we did have with people who stopped by our booth in Jackson Square. What seemed like the perfect plan became a perfect disaster.
WAYS TO WORK TOGETHER
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