Creating a company logo

Among the many requirements for launching a new company, one of the more fun and frustrating ones is coming up with a logo for your start-up. This is an area where everyone seems to have an opinion and in my opinion much too much effort is put into the early logo at the expense of more pressing issues. (It reminded me of my days in the record business when bands would come in and start arguing in front of the company over what the album cover should be and this would be prior to it even being recorded–note that this typically only happened on debut albums after which bands who make it through the walk of fire to get a follow-up album were generally pretty savvy).

Anyway I think it’s human nature to want to have input in the logo so I generally just accept that there are going to be a lot of opinions to factor into the logo decision. In response I just try and make the process as easy as possible by having as many examples as possible laid out in front of everyone. I do this so people are not at a loss for words trying to describe what they have in their minds with everyone visualizing something completely different.

More importantly, looking at a large collection of logos allows people to quickly see trends that and conventions that are overused such as colors (light blue anyone?) or certain icons (e.g., clouds or talk bubbles). It also allows the group to zero in on attributes they like and don’t like so that the graphic artist (who is often the girlfriend or wife of one of the founders) has something concrete to go on.

Three good links (at least at the time of this writing) for logo collections are:

The Font Feed

Flickr Collection of Web 2.0 logos

Web2Logo.com

This is how we came up with the LifeTwo logo above. In our case it wasn’t a wife or girlfriend doing the logo but a very accomplished print design shop that was doing us a big favor. As such we wanted to be as judicious as possible with our use of their time so we looked at the logos linked above, wrote out what we liked and didn’t like in a logo, picked colors we thought would work and gave a general description of the audience we were going after. They came back with 6 possible logos one of which we liked quite a bit. We asked for one round of variations on that (made the circle a little bigger and changed colors) and we had our logo. Is it the logo that we will have for the rest of our company’s life? Doubtful, but we got a very good logo at minimal cost and allowed us to focus on the more pressing needs of the time.

Good luck and remember you can still have an awesome company with an average logo. If you don’t believe me just follow those links and judge for yourself.

Why would someone conduct a DDoS attack on my website?

This morning I was trying to upload a post to LifeTwo but couldn’t access the site and knew it was not just our servers but something that was affecting many other sites at the hosting facility. This message was then posted in support section of our host:

This afternoon [our] engineers successfully mitigated a fairly sophisticated network attack aimed at several of our services. This distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack appears to have originated from China and other sources along the western Pacific rim.

We have upgraded our load balancing system and made various other network configuration changes to prevent disruptions like this in the future. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused and thank you for your patience.

So now I know the reason but not the motivation for why people do this. You read about DDoS attacks all of the time but it is a different feeling when one hits your own servers.

Ageism in Silicon Valley

I just wrote a lengthy piece on ageism in Silicon Valley over at LifeTwo.

This is the “analysis” done by ValleyWag. Unabashedly unscientific but noteworthy nonetheless.

I’m going to use this blog to clarify points as they come up. First, is that while I believe that Silicon Valley is inherently (at least currently) ageist, I’m not passing judgment on them any more than I would pass judgment on the music business for not signing new acts that are in their 40s. Both are simply playing the odds as they figure out where to place their bets. If experiences have been better for VCs with younger founders then why shouldn’t that be a legitimate factor? If they turn out to be wrong then whoever has the foresight to look past age will then end up generating superior returns over the ageists. Then other VCs seeking those superior returns will stop using age as a factor. Unless and until that happens, expect Silicon Valley ageism to continue.

Here’s an interesting take from Rob Hyndman:

I’ve also noticed that older clients tend to be much more negative and cynical about the world. There are many exceptions to this, thankfully. But as a general rule, what I hear from younger clients is “yes, let’s try it”, and what I hear from the older ones is “no, it won’t work” or “here are a bunch of reasons why not”. Smart, well-thought out reasons, to be sure. But obstacles to success, nonetheless.

For background on the ageism meme go to this post.

LifeTwo and the Future of Blogging

Darren Rowse’s Problogger has a post called Future of Blogging and contains observations on current blogging behavior, described generally as a “period of consolidation and extension”:

• adding authors - group blogs are the new black
• clustering blogs around verticals - bloggers extending their blogs by adding sibling blogs on related topics
• networking - 2006 was really the year of the blog network but it continues to happen in both loose and formal ways. Many of the blog networks didn’t really survive but there are quite a few that continue to bubble away and sustain themselves
• adding services and features - whether it be video, podcasts, forums, job boards, classifieds, chat features, voting tools… many bloggers are beginning to add interesting features to their blogs that attempt to add value to blogs. I think what we’re seeing is bloggers more willing to see the limitations of blogs and wanting to blur the edges of what is and isn’t a blog.

Problogger couldn’t be more right and using LifeTwo as an example we are doing every single one of those. For those of you who don’t know, LifeTwo is my online media company/blog that is focused on issues relating to midlife. Over the past year we have taken the traditional blog model and:

• Added authors. We now have 5 contributors including David Houle (a noted futurist) is now a contributor and is providing advice to would-be career changers on what industries they might want to avoid. We also have the “Dating Goddess” (a best selling author who blogs anonymously on midlife dating).
• Clustered blogs around verticals. We use an open source platform called Drupal that, among other things, allows us to create virtual blogs on the fly around any topic, keyword or person. We then present this in a manner that makes it appear to our readers that there is an individual blog (or cluster of blogs) on each vertical (which for us is a “topic” such as “Job and Career“). My partner Greg Yorke gets credit for this and he laid the groundwork for us to be able to reconfigure the site on the fly to reflect changes in interests of our readers.
• Networking. In terms of becoming part of an official blog network we have no interest. But working closely with other like-minded independent networks focused on the same market is very interesting to us. Unfortunately, this has been a bit more of a challenge since the real opportunity of LifeTwo was the dearth of blogs or media companies addressing issues of middle age. If you are interested in learning about parenthood there is no shortage of quality sites with more launching all of the time. And there has always been sources for senior information (such as AARP), but looking for a comprehensive information source on middle age and it was a vast wasteland. That said, little by little we come across quality blogs tackling one aspect or another of middle age and we love to work with these sites since it gives our readers more resources to turn to as they look for answers to whatever is ailing them.
• Adding services and features. Just last month we published our first podcast and we will become extremely active in that area. Video is coming and we’ve been working on a number of tools that will provide a richer, more useful experience for our visitors.

Another area we are starting to tackle though it is not on Darren’s post is syndication. We spend an inordinate amount of time sifting through RSS feeds looking for stories relevant to our audience. It turns out that these stories are relevant to the audiences of other blogs as well so we are starting to see bloggers capture these feeds and post the headlines (or better yet have them continually scrolling) on their blogs. Of course people don’t even need our permission to do this and can grab our feed and do with it as they like but we are finding that blogs are using this as the first step in a content/audience sharing partnership.
Of course there is much, much more for us to do but this gives an idea of what we (and by observation other bloggers) believe are the most important to do.

blogging

web 2.0

TV networks may form anti-YouTube cabal

The likelihood of this succeeding is zero. Think pressplay and MusicNet versus iTunes.

I can’t say it better than this so I’ll just lift it:

First, you can’t build anything interesting by committee. Second, this is not TV, this is the web. This is about rejecting everything about TV. Third, I watched and rooted for NBC to get their NBBC initiative right and they just messed it up. It’s not about content. It’s about context, convenience, and community. It’s about letting the audience dictate the experience, not having it dictated to them.

It’s also been proven to be much easier to say sorry than to get permission, though at some point you have to say sorry (right Napster?).

In the comments to the above post a few examples of successful industry collaboration were given (Orbitz and Career Builder being two) but the general consensus is that it’s a doomed effort. It is entirely possible that the announcement is just a negotiating ploy with Google/YouTube but my money is that it will either never launch or if it does it will be so crippled as to be laughable.

Of course YouTube is not immune to poor thinking either.

YouTube’s phone-based version will require a $15-a-month subscription to a Verizon Wireless service called VCast.

and

And instead of choosing what to watch from a vast library of clips, VCast users will be limited to an unspecified number of videos selected and approved by the companies.

Oh yeah, Verizon gets to vet the videos first to make sure that they meet their standards.

As Fred notes in his blog concerning the Verizon deal.

 This deal violates the entire ethos of YouTube, not free, not open, exclusive, no community, limited, censorship, etc, etc.

Protecting Users From Spam is an Obligation not an Option

If you are planning on launching any form of web company, one of the first things you need to consider is how you are going to protect your users from all those who will want to use your site to barrage them with unwanted advertising messages. Failure to do this and you will lose your audience just as fast as you get them. If you offer comments then you better have a system to protect from comment spam. Ditto with trackbacks and so forth.

AOL never effectively did this with email and in the words of one observer they ruined email. Here’s how:

My kids grew up on AOL. It’s where they first went online. It’s where they learned how to dial up. It’s where they learned how to surf the web. It’s where they learned how to do email, instant messaging, download,  build a homepage, etc.

And it’s where they learned to stop usiemail.When

hen you are ten years old, you don’t get much email. Maybe a message or two per week. When you log in to check your email and you see this it’s basically a non starter.

(that is my current AOL inbox but I assure you my kid’s mailboxes look pretty much the same)

So they found other ways to communicate where the messages weren’t surrounded by spam. Primarily that was/is instant messaging. Then came text messaging. And site messaging. Basically any messaging paradigm where the signal to noise ratio was at least one one.

My kids check their email at best once a week. And it’s a chore. Because its mostly an exercise in deleting spam. Email is for old farts. And they wonder why we uit.

And I blame AOL for that. Not that I think it’s a big deal. They get by just fine with other messaging systems, maybe better than I do with email.

But I am sure that AOL is the reason they don’t use email and never will.

I’ve seen VC’s on panels asking companies “But how are you going to fight spam?” This is as important of a question as “What’s your business model”?

Be smart, have a solid answer before you go out for funding and certainly before your public launch.

Embedding vs. Linking; Letting Your Users be Publishers and Why it Works

In the blog A VC, the writer talks about the growth of MySpace and YouTube and correctly attributes much of their success to the ease by which both allow their users to be publishers via easy click-to-add functionality. (Pete Cashmore calls it “Feeding the MySpace beast” illustrating you can either work to leverage MySpace’s immense reach or be slayed by it).

For MySpace, instead of having users link to music, they allowed them to broadcast it immediately from their own page. This simple embedding feature became an enormous differentiator. Similarly, anyone with a MySpace page or blog could play a YouTube video directly from their page without sending people away from their site. Outbound links to third-party sites became “old school,” something done only by sites who either didn’t care about empowering users or were too clueless to know how.

From A VC:

People don’t want to link to media like audio and video (and photos), they want to run it right there on their own pages. They want to be the TV station, the radio station, the newspaper.

But we can also learn that the easier it is to add something the better. My gold standard is the MySpace music player. If you have the MySpace music player on your page and you find some music you like, you simply click “add” and its on your page.

They are exactly right. If a blogger wants to talk about a song or video, they want you to experience it as they write about it. If, as in the case of MySpace, they want the music as an expression of who they are, then they certainly don’t want to send you off to a third-party site with the hope that you come back and if you do you remember what you were doing. It’s hard to have a conversation with someone who isn’t even in the room. It’s also human nature that given the chance humans like to personalize their surroundings. Sending you to Yahoo Music to listen to a track isn’t personalization but having a song blasting while you poke around their space is. Making it so that one can do this and more with a few easy clicks is what enables the mass adoption that we’ve seen.

YouTube has grown because it lets people promote and experience their videos without ever having to go to the YouTube site. Of course, once one gets used to seeing YouTube videos around the net the natural step is to add one of their lists to to one’s RSS reader and thereby becoming a daily consumer of YouTube. They gain in every possible way. (I’m ignoring the ongoing discussion about their ability to monetize these experiences as this is a wholly separate discussion).

Embedding exemplifies an important tenet (or perhaps “best practice”) of Web 2.0. Namely, don’t force users to come to your location to consume whatever it is you are providing, let them consume it wherever they are and in the manner that they choose. Give people every possible way to consume your product–wherever they are. For example, let’s say you you are a dating site. It goes without saying that you are only too happy to have people actually come to your site. But After signing up, they should be able to accomplish whatever it is they want to do via RSS feeds. They should also be able to take whatever they want from your dating site that pertains to them and publish it onto their own blog or space. Think of Amazon and the benefits they get from the hundreds of thousands of “affiliates” that they have or the millions (?) of people who publish their wishlists or “top” lists on their sites. Quite a difference from the late 90’s when many web start-ups thought the way to reach consumers was via Superbowl ads or when AOL and others worked to create “walled gardens.” All very expensive and not surprisingly all ended up failing.

The lessons of YouTube and MySpace and many others are easy to see and relatively easy to implement so why don’t more people do them? I believe the biggest reason is the desire to hold on to dated business models and to keep trying to apply the marketing lessons of the past to a changed landscape. In traditional retail, the goal is to get prospective customers in the door. With the rise of the web, it is natural (though misguided) for people to apply their hard-learned lessons from the “real” world to this new medium. Look at search. Conventional wisdom was for the portals to use search functionality to bring people to their sites where they could be monetized. Non-traditional wisdom was to let every site in the world have their own little search box. Which model won out? (Hint: look at the upper right hand corner of this blog).

tags: web 2.0 myspace my space youtube

Eons Deconstructed

Note to readers: this is a very long post because I find Eons to be an interesting site and worthy of a somewhat detailed deconstruction. Eons are part of a new wave of social networks targeting niche audiences. This one is targeting boomers and seniors.
++++

Eons (http://www.eons.com/) launched this week. Eons was founded by Monster.com entrepreneur Jeff Taylor with a reported $10m war chest. It’s easy to see where the money was spent and there is a lot there. So much so that TechCrunch, who reviewed the site yesterday, noted “Eons is trying to do way too much and I’m at a loss as to what it actually wants to be.” Eons was also reviewed in Mashable and has also received mainstream press. The site was having some trouble when I used it and I got a few “Rails” errors. These probably were the result of the significant traffic from all of their PR as well as being “Dugg”.

Not being on the receiving end of an Eons PR package promoting the site, I’m not sure how hard they were pitching the “MySpace for old people” concept but it is certainly the parallel everyone is drawing. As Mashable noted, the comparison to MySpace isn’t all that accurate given the immense amount of producer-provided content (as opposed to user-provided content) making them more of a “portal”. Think of it as a “Yahoo” for the 50+ crowd more than an age targeted MySpace. There is also a question of how much the 50+ crowd even wants social networking activities such as building profiles, blogging, etc. Since the founder is from another tech company not to mention below the target age, it’s possible that Eons has put too much stake in treating the over 50 crowd as if they were the under 35 crowd and thus providing tools that may be of no interest to them.

Eons has several nice touches showing that a lot thought went into even basic tasks. For example, when you register Eons asks you the basic questions one gets when registering including your zip code, age, etc. But as you key in the information it gives you immediate feedback on how your information compares with other Eons who have registered. For example, when I typed in my zip code I learned that 21% of Eon’s users are “nearby” (though this is left undefined) and 1% are my same age. This makes the normally dry process of registration a little bit more interesting. (By the way, I’m not so sure about the age data they report. I tried keying in several different ages from 30 to 90 and they all reported to be 1% of their users). When I put my real age (which is under 50) I was bounced because users have to be 50. This was easily rectified by keying in a new birthdate making me over 50 but the ease by which I did this (and their essentially forcing me to lie to use the site) raises questions about the accuracy of their demographic profiles.

Building a profile, uploading a picture and other minor housekeeping tasks were all easy to do.

Once registered I started to play with the site.

First off, in addressing the “chicken vs. egg” that all true social networks face, Eons has done something I like very much. Namely to add useful applications and utilities so that even prior to the network effect kicking in individuals will will find useful things to do.

The first such utility is the “longevity calculator“. This is similar to the Real Age calculator but instead of giving you your “real” age (as opposed to calendar age) the Eons test calculates your expected longevity (mine was 88 though I had hoped it would be in the 90s).

The next utility is their Obituary Alert. This was one of the most written about parts of their site in their launch press. With this utility you can create up to five alerts (think of them as Google News alerts) that let you know if someone’s name, school or other trigger comes across in the obituaries. Kind of creepy but cool. I once read that the obits are one of the most read sections of the newspaper so Eons may be on to something. The publicity Eons is getting from just this one utility has probably paid for the cost of making it.

Speaking of obituaries, they have an entire obits section with pictures and tributes to deceased famous people sorted in various ways (by name, year, and most popular). It was here that I found a tribute to Billy Barty. Other obits items included humor (I’m not kidding), a “loss and grieving” advice section, and a section for sending sympathy gifts, no doubt through affiliate “arrangements” (pun intended).

Another utility is the “LifeMap” which plays on the (probably true) stereotype that the 50+ crowd loves to sit around and reminiscence. The LifeMap uses a time-line and icons to represent major milestones in one’s life. Here is an example of one that Eons created for former President Bill Clinton. The LifeMap utility has a very nice series of prompts and it looks easy to build. However I was unable to tell what one did with their LifeMap when it was done. Presumably it can be accessed by friends and others that you allow to see it from your profile but I didn’t see this option in the profile builder. Also, it’d be nice if there was a way to export it. I can imagine someone putting a lot of time building their LifeMap (including uploading photos) and then wanting to print it out in some fashion or have it be able to be shared through a method other than just through Eons. What happens if Eons goes out of business or decides to start charging for LifeMaps? Similar to the debate over at Flickr, users should own their content and be able to easily take it with them where they want.

Yet another utility is a goal generator/tracker. I builds off of the belief that one should make a list of all of the things they want to do before they die–a popular topic with self-improvement authors and life coaches. Instead of saying “die” however Eons sets the deadline as before you are 100 years old. Like the applications above, Eons has made the process easy with simple instructions and interfaces. The basic process is that you key in whatever goal you want and Eons looks in a database to see if others have the same goal. If not it offers up goals that might be similar (for example “sail around the world” and “sail a boat around the globe”). You match up the ones that make sense or otherwise signify your goals as unique. If you are stumped and can’t think of very many goals you can see what others have put on their lists. The most popular is “lose weight”. By clicking on that I can see the names of some of the people who have this goal (which is a little odd). Presumably this is useful with a goal such as “run a marathon” since I can communicate and maybe even train with people with the same goal. Goals can be made private or public and are accessible from your profile (note this was either not working or not working well when I tested it). There is a lot more that they can do with this area and presumably ran out of time before launching.

One of the most interesting parts of the site is an age-relevant search engine, which they call “cranky.” If you type in a basic word like “book” or “triathlon”, the results are sorted by what has/has not been reviewed by users or editors (which presumably is what they use to determine relevance). “Triathlon” served up Triathlete Magazine, relevant yes but hardly age-relevant. I’ll have to spend more time on this but to me it appears that they are going to use the community to “teach” the engine what is and is not relevant. For example, when I typed in “senior” to cranky I got AARP (very relevant) and not “high school seniors” (not relevant).

In addition to the above mentioned applications/utilities, Eons has sections entitled “Fun,” “Love”, “Money” and “Body.” They contain some combination of articles, tips, blogs, pictures and affiliate deals–lot’s of affiliate deals. For example in “fun” they have a movie section that lists movies in theatres via online ticketing agent Movies.com. The entertainment section contains a nice mix of current and nostaligic offerings–something that is quite appropriate for their target market who is probably more interested in music and TV shows of 30 years ago than what is out today. The games are also demographic appropriate (Suduko, solitaire, etc.).

Eons also has a blogging capability. It is a very clean and easy process. However, like other sites that have targeted the older-than-the-MySpace crowd (such as ThirdAge), it is uncertain whether this age group really wants to blog and it will be interesting to see what adoption rate they experience.

Eons has “groups” functionality and already had several age-relevant groups started like antiques, knitting and golf. (No group for “puttering around in the basement” however). I tried setting up a group and it was a very easy process until the site locked up I got an error message. Not sure if my group made it or not. Presumably this bug is related to the server loads they are getting and will be rectified shortly.

Now that you see how much is there, it is easy to understand why Techcrunch had this to say in their review:

It’s too much to throw at people at once, and this age group is perfectly capable of using Yahoo for a portal, Vox for a blogging platform, etc. I would have started out with just the Myspace angle and added functionality from there as users grew, a model that has worked well for many other start-ups. Do one thing better than everyone else.

The Eons’ business model is focused on advertising with a lot of affiliate deals thrown for good measure (including Amazon books throughout the site and suggested sympathy gifts for the recently departed). Eons had one big banner ad centered on the home page and banners and smaller Google adSense ads on other pages. Certain sections are sponsored, for example the “Body” section is sponsored by a company called Humana.

In all it is a good site. But I there is too much there for most people and by spending as much as it appears they did they have set the bar very high for themselves to justify the expenses.

For the record, I’m a big believer that the over-40 crowd is under-served and believe there are a variety of opportunities to serve segments of this group in different ways. I am part of LifeTwo, a company that is focused on addressing the “life transition” years of 40-55 and particularly focused on midlife crises.

Update: The Rearview Mirror, a midlife-focused blog written by Micki Berthelot, had this to say.

We all agree that marketing to Boomers is a good and necessary thing. The Boomer demographic, particularly the female part, is generally ignored. Monster is making the attempt to attract the Boomer demographic with its new web presence - Eons. Eons is brand new and has a lot of evolving to do, but it is a shallow attempt at attracting advertising dollars. It is obvious that the only purpose of the site is to attract advertising dollars that the company isn’t attacting with other products. Boomers are too smart for that Monster - we see the obvious right away. The site is making an attempt to provide valuable content, but it is a substandard effort.

This tactic leaves the content weak and unattractive to me. … the “fun” page introduces a Brain Builder section designed to “stave off cognitive decline”. Oh yeah - just loads of fun. Thanks Eons - I really needed that. Sorry - but the whole concept is just boring and lame.

Follow this link for her entire review.

tags: eons

Evidence of a Web 2.0 Bubble: ‘hot or not’ for pets

The very existence of Pikapet is evidence of just a little bit too much 2.0 going around. Dogs and cats have their own profile pages and visitors can vote for them in a ‘hot or not’ fashion.

Google Talk: No one’s listening

One gets the feeling that if AskJeeves launched an IM client they’d do better than Google. But why is Google doing so poorly and how poorly are they doing? From TechCrunch:

The user numbers coming out on Google Talk are staggeringly terrible. Comscore usage numbers show that nearly a year after launch Google is a distant, distant 4th after MSN, Yahoo and AIM. They hold a pitiful 1% of total instant messaging market share, with 3.4 million unique users in May 2006. See the Comscore chart below for more details (I wonder where Skype IM falls in those stats). Note that Comscore does not include Google Talk usage within Gmail itself (where it is embedded), but even factoring that in, the numbers are just awful.

Even factoring in the chatting that goes on within Gmail and which were not included in these numbers, GoogleTalk is a failure by most measures. However Google has been mum on the strategy of their IM client so one doesn’t know what priority, if any, Google placed on the success of their downloadable client.

Marketing and prioritization aside, why haven’t more people switched to Google? The most likely reason is the combination of inertia, switching costs and interoperability. Those that are comfortable with AIM see no reason to deal with the hassle of moving IM systems (despite AIM being bloated and ad heavy); Yahoo and MSN are now interoperable which has opened up new contacts for people on those systems. Since no one even talks about ICQ anymore we’ll just skip them. This leaves GoogleTalk.