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Your Philosophy for Social Media and Search Marketing

It's my first day back in the office for two weeks, after an exciting but tiring trip to five cities in Europe. So, just a short blog post today while I catch up with everything my clients have been waiting for. Here is a short video shot in Copenhagen on the philosophy you need to have when approaching both social media and search marketing. The rest of the post is in Danish, so I hope that it says something nice about me...

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Tue Feb 09, 2010 12:15 pm

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Adobe Announces Open-Source Collaboration with Sourceforge

Today, Adobe announced an expansion of its open-source activities and a collaboration with Sourceforge, called "Open@Adobe."

"Open@Adobe is a site aggregating Adobe's openness programs, which includes source code hosting, such as the Adobe® Flex framework, and contributions from Adobe to standards organizations, as well as specifications."

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Dave McAllister, Director of Open Source and Standards (OSS) at Adobe Systems said the company's "current repository was not meeting the desire to allow our projects to evolve in multiple directions simultaneously." So the decision was made to collaborate with Sourceforge, which recently rolled out an open source forge development platform.

The Geeknet-run web-based source code repository acts as a central location where developers can manage and maintain open source software.

"SourceForge," McAllister continued. "gave us the ability to support all of the things we needed and the flexibility to replace things we wanted to. SourceForge and the new development forge gives us the ability to connect our developer community to a global community."

The Open Source Forge is a new platform at SourceForge. The "first instantiation" of the new platform, according to Geeknet's Jeff Bate/> [...]

Wed Jul 14, 2010 21:25 pm

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Five Sources for Early Stage Funding

Having enough money is crucial for the success of a startup, and insufficient funding is one of the top reasons why new businesses fail. Too often entrepreneurs underestimate the amount of money they'll need - not just to get started but to keep running. And although you want to be able to raise the money you need, it's not always practical or possible or even advisable to seek venture capitalist funding right away.

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Nevertheless you do need enough money to get your startup through an initial period - until you are able to fund yourself or be in a position to secure a larger investment. Despite the notion that you can never really have enough funding for your business, it's important to remember that sometimes these early investments can be quite small. In other words, you don't need to have or ask for millions of dollars.

There are many considerations when deciding the avenue to pursue when you consider your funding sources. Do you have another source of income, for example? How might this early funding shape your exit strategy? How will it impact how future investors assess your business? There is no single universally correct answer here, it should be noted, as different types of businesses may find more or less success with different options.

Here are some of your options for early funding for your startup:

1) Self fund your startup using your own assets and equity. This can include money obtained by securing a second mortgage, tapping into your savings, and liquidating investment and retirement funds. And while it might be unwise, it is sometimes necessary to turn to your credit cards, for business purchases or to generate cash. As Bernard Lunn [...]

Fri May 14, 2010 16:55 pm

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Big Money in Facebook Marketing

Wildfire Interactive has received $4.04MM in Series A funding lead by Summit Partners. Additional investors include Jeff Clavier, Aydin Senkut and Gary Vaynerchuk. CEO Victoria Ransom tells WebProNews, "To our knowledge, we are the first fbFund company to raise a multi-million dollar round." fbFund is a $10M seed fund and joint venture partially run by Facebook.

Wildfire is a company that offers social media marketing technology to businesses, to help them create branded campaigns like sweepstakes, contests, coupons, giveaways, quizzes, and virtual gift campaigns, and publish them simultaneously to Facebook pages, company websites (integrated with Facebook), and on Twitter. The company recently sparked some buzz with its "Facebook-safe" sweepstakes service for those who "run a business and know the value of promotional campaigns on Facebook but have been stopped by the logistics, legal aspects and costs," as All Facebook's Raj Dash puts it.

"The timing couldn't be better - we founded Wildfire around the time of the last f8 and now here we are just a few days after the 2010 f8 reaching another big milestone for our company!" Ransom says of the funding.

Wildfire Founders Victoria Ransom and Alain Chuard

"Since the last f8, we launched an easy-to-use social media marketing platform for brands, agencies and small businesses, reached profitability within 1 month of launching our product and won the fbFund twice," she adds. "We serve thousands of companies and have/> [...]

Mon Apr 26, 2010 09:20 am

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