Want to see a robotic ball controlled by a smartphone? Take a look at the Orbotix Sphero Sneak Peek Video below.
Sphero Sneak Peek from Paul Berberian on Vimeo.
My friends at Orbortix will be at CES in Booth #5422 North Hall from January 6th to 9th showing off real working robotic balls. So psyched.
Gist just released their Chrome extension for Gist in Gmail. Chrome is my browser of choice for Gmail and I’ve been anxiously awaiting this release. It’s just awesome.
It’s tightly integrated with both consumer and enterprise Gmail. It’s fast, light weight, and takes advantage of the huge amount of data discovery that Gist does via the cloud (rather than in-browser).
It’s been really fun to watch my friends at Gist really come into their own in the past six month. With the release of Gist in Gmail on both Firefox and Chrome, along with the Gist Gadget for Google Apps, they’ve got Gmail now totally wired.
If you haven’t tried Gist, give it a shot. And if you are a Chrome and Gmail user, make sure you grab the Chrome extension.
I’m super proud of my friends at Gnip. Last week they announced that they had closed another $2m investment from Foundry Group and First Round Capital and signed a deal with Twitter to become Twitter’s first authorized data reseller.
Via Gnip, you can now get three new premium Twitter feeds in real time for non-display use:
Gnip provides access to over 100 other social media feeds but has spent a lot of time in the past six months optimizing and tuning their system for Twitter-related data.
While Gnip has had its public ups and downs, including a reset of the technical approach and parts of the team about a year ago, co-founder and CEO Jud Valeski has done a magnificent job over the past two quarters of accelerating the business with real customers, adding huge depth to the technology stack, building a team that is continuing to scale nicely, and solidifying a long term relationship with Twitter that has been in the works for a while.
If you haven’t look at Gnip recently or didn’t know they exist, sign up for a free trial and take their social media API for a spin for 72 hours. Or just contact them directly if you are interested in any of the new premium Twitter feeds.
Yesterday, Gist released their new Gist for Gmail Firefox plugin (the Chrome plugin will be out in two weeks). As a long time Gist user and investor, I’ve been anxiously awaiting this as it makes Gist available to anyone using Gmail (vs. previously just Google Apps users.)
Since I just finally completed my move over to Google Apps, I decided to start over with Gist (by resetting my account) and document the experience of getting it set up. Over the past year I’ve found Gist to be increasing indispensable to me and with the Gist for Gmail implementation, I think it’s in a position to become a critical use application for many people. If you haven’t tried it in a while, or have never tried it, give it a shout. Here’s how.
Five minutes from start to finish. Give Gist a try – feedback welcome!
My friends at Orbotix, a TechStars Boulder 2010 company that Foundry Group invested in recently, are having their second hackathon on 11/13 – 11/14 at their office in Boulder.
Orbotix is the gang that is “reinventing the ball” while also creating smartphone apps that control robots. The November Hackathon is all about hacking Android apps and there will be a contest that I’ll be judging on Sunday afternoon along with Paul Berberian (Orbotix’s CEO) and Julian Farrior from Backflip Studios.
The Orbotix guys understand that beer and pizza are required at a two day hackathon and there will be plenty of it. If you are interested, all you need to bring is your Android phone and computer (with Eclipse and the Android SDK) – Orbotix will supply everything else.
If interested, contact Adam (adam [at] orbotix [dot] com).
Simplification and iteration are two key themes that repeatedly show up in the stories from Do More Faster. Today I’ve been watching a real-time case study of those two themes unfold from our portfolio company BigDoor. The guys at BigDoor are trying to build a platform that powers game mechanics for any site or app, and they recognized early on that this isn’t as simple as just adding badges to your site and calling it good. So they built a powerful and flexible API that allows site owners and developers to create a meta game that will compliment and promote the site experience, not just be a tacky add on. That is the right approach, but with flexibility and power comes complexity and as a result there has been fairly high learning curve for a publisher or developer to use their system.
After getting live with their first dozen companies they learned that the gamification process shares some very key characteristics with social gaming, most notably that the game experience for your users can’t be built in a vacuum and the best way to implement gamification on your site is to implement something relatively simple, see how (and why) your users react, and then iterate and improve the game mechanics from there.
So BigDoor iterated their own approach and made the initial gamification implementation process much simpler. This morning they announced the “5 minute gamification process.” They even posted a video (with a timer running within the video) to prove that you really can add game mechanics in under 5 minutes. That may sound absurd to game developers, but the concept behind that simplicity is right on. Get initial gamification on your site quickly and easily, see how the community on your site reacts, and then iterate and improve your game. The response from their customers so far has been really positive and they’ve already increased their registered partners by more than 20% since this announcement just a few hours ago.
It will be exciting to watch the gamification movement unfold over the next few years, but from my experience its pretty clear that simplicity by itself won’t be a good solution. However, a flexible, powerful solution that provides an easy on ramp makes a lot of sense.
Try it yourself, gamify your site in 5 minutes.
This summer I made two new friends who completely blew my mind – Ian Bernstein and Adam Wilson. I met them through TechStars – they were founders of Orbotix, one of the 11 teams to go through this TechStars Boulder this summer. Today, Foundry Group announced that it has led an investment in Orbotix.
I’m always on the lookout for what I consider to be genius level software engineering talent. As an MIT graduate, I’ve been around plenty of it, but I also know that it shows up in unexpected places. A few weeks into TechStars, I realized that not only was I hanging out with genius level software talent but that Ian and Adam thought about hardware and the combination of hardware and software in unique ways. For example, take a look at a robotic ball controlled by a smart phone.
As part of my involvement in TechStars, I choose one or two companies from each program to mentor. We believe the magic of TechStars is the mentorship and while I tried to work with all the companies in the first two Boulder programs, given that there are now over 40 companies a year going through TechStars (10 each in Boulder, Boston, Seattle, and New York), I realized I needed to act like every other mentor and focus at most on two companies per program.
While Foundry Group has investment in two other TechStars companies (both from the TechStars Boulder 2009 program – Next Big Sound and SendGrid) this is the first company that I’ve mentored that we’ve invested in. One of my goals with my mentorship is to work with companies that are both within our themes and outside of our themes – this keeps my thinking fresh in other areas. So, I set the expectation early with the companies that I mentor that it’s unlikely we will invest. For example, the company in the TechStars Seattle program that I’m currently mentoring is absolutely killing it, but it’s far outside any of our themes. But, I’m learning a lot and they are also.
In the case of Orbotix, I knew they’d be within our human computer interaction theme, but when I started working with Adam and Ian, I didn’t realize how profound what they were doing was. Fortunately, by mid-summer I did, and began encouraging one of their other mentors, Paul Berberian, to engage more deeply with them. Paul, Adam, and Ian quickly started talking about teaming up and used the last four weeks of the program to “pretend” they were partners. By the end of the program they decided to join forces with Paul becoming CEO of Orbotix.
While this investment has resulted in endless teenage humor for my inner 14 year old, it is also another step in my personal strategy of making sure that if the robots actually do take over some time in the future, I’ve helped create some of their software.
In April I wrote a post about Rally acquiring AgileZen. I’ve been an investor in Rally from the very early days and am incredibly proud of what the team there has created. As I’ve written in the past, I encourage companies I’m an investor in to continually explore small acquisitions when entrepreneurs have created something that is on their roadmap. AgileZen was one such company and the acquisition has been a successful one for everyone.
Recently AgileZen has topped the leaderboard for TwtPick.in’s survey on tools and services for a lean startup. Ryan Martens, Rally’s founder, thought it would be a great opportunity to do some Q&A with Niki and Nate Kohari, the founders of AgileZen. As I’m spending a lot of time these days talking with first time and young entrepreneurs around the release of my book Do More Faster, I thought this would be a fun interview to add to the mix. And, if you are a software developer using Lean or Agile methodologies, take a look at Rally and AgileZen.
1. Why did you start AgileZen? We built AgileZen because we felt like there were a lot of tools on the market that served large organizations, but many of them weren’t designed to support the needs of small teams and startups. As a software developer, Nate had experience using other project management tools, but none of them seemed to work well for the small teams that he worked on. The original idea behind AgileZen started with feeling that pain. When we learned about kanban and understood how others were applying it to project management, we recognized that it would be a great way for small teams to visualize their work. After showing an early version of AgileZen to a few people, we got some very strong positive reactions, so we felt like we were on to something. We originally built AgileZen with software teams in mind, but the more we talked with people the more we realized that it could be used for any project-based work. We felt confident that there was a large enough market for the product, so we took the plunge and decided to launch AgileZen as a startup.
2. What is your mantra and secret to success? We think our secret to success is an obsessive focus on simplicity and usability, so we make every feature fight very hard to be included in the software. We also think that if the feature can’t be explained in a few minutes, it doesn’t belong in AgileZen. In software it’s often very difficult to say no to unnecessary features or complexity, but knowing when not to do something can be the difference between success and failure.
3. What is your goal with this solution? When we started working on AgileZen, our goal was to build a product that helped people work together to become more productive and that remains our focus today. We feel we’re successful as long as AgileZen makes our users more efficient, regardless of what industry they work in. To this end, we’re focusing on improving the product to make it as intuitive as possible. We’ve got some great ideas brewing and we’re excited to start sharing them.
4. Why did you join up with Rally? After meeting with the Rally team in February, we found that their ideas about company culture and vision for AgileZen matched up surprisingly well with our own, and it felt like working together was the right decision for the product and our customers. With Rally’s additional resources and guidance, we can set our sights higher and achieve our goals faster, so it’s a win for everyone.
5. What would you tell other start-ups about being acquired? AgileZen was acquired about nine months after our public launch. We never thought much about acquisition until Rally approached us about a potential partnership. Acquisition isn’t really something to chase from the beginning because it can distract you from what really matters, which is building something great that your customers will pay for. The idea of a big exit might be really appealing, but it’s more important to consider how well the organization’s values fit with your own. If you don’t agree on where the product is going then an acquisition isn’t going to benefit anyone—least of all your customers. Also, in a lot of cases, you’ll end up working with the acquiring company so you need to make sure you’re on the same page from the beginning.
I went on vacation for a few days to celebrate Amy’s birthday and those sneaky scarf makers at Big Red Scarves expose me on the Internets.
I’ve been trying for months to discover their secrets to no avail. I’ve even had Amy take up knitting to try to figure it out.
But now I know. It’s Trada. The real secret is out – Big Red Scarves has been using Trada for their search engine marketing campaigns. I should have been able to figure it out from the previous videos on the Internets staring Niel Robertson and Seth Levine, but I guess I missed them because I was too busy sheering sheep and cleaning off my sneakers.
I’m not done with them yet – just you wait. Bwahahahahahahahaha.
– Vladamir Schlockfeld, Chief Researcher at Globoscarf (Brad’s evil twin)