We’re very excited to announce two major updates that just went live today: new versions of our IE and Firefox toolbars, which are substantially faster when loading WebNotes in your browser, and a new Beta invite system that allows any user to invite up to 10 others to join WebNotes.
We hope that these updates will make it even easier to use WebNotes and to invite your friends and colleagues to try us out. These updates were based on your feedback, so keep the comments and suggestions coming!
A while back we went to the MIT career fair. I took some pictures but neglected to put them on the site! Here are the handsome mugs of Matt Long and Ryan Damico.
Unfortunately, once again this was taken with my camera phone. They are far less distorted in real life.
Thanks again to all of our users who have been submitting bugs and providing us with valuable feedback on how we can improve WebNotes. We’ve been spending a lot of time lately making adjustments to our
toolbars,
bookmarklet and
"My WebNotes" site to address the issues you’ve brought up, and today we rolled out a major update that takes care of many of them.
If you’re using the WebNotes toolbar for IE or Firefox, you should be notified of the update automatically, and if you’re using the WebNotes bookmarklet, these changes will take effect the next time you run it.
Keep the feedback coming!
I was just reading Seth Godin's blog where there was a little cartoon quote saying "the market for something to believe in is infinite". Some of you might know that I was in Vegas for the weekend, and nowhere else is this philosophy more evident. We all want the big lotto ticket to hit, we want to believe that betting our 401k on the 40 to 1 odds is the right thing to do, but it almost never works out. Heck, Casino War (or alternatively "high card") is even offered, where your odds are exactly 50/50 in the long run and effectively zero in the short run (unless you have excessive amounts of cash to ride out the streaks of bad luck). Now, there is nothing wrong with having the big dream as long as it comes with the understanding that to get there, 90% of the time you have to grind it out.
An apt poker quote from the movie Rounders:
"Guys around here will tell ya...you play for a living. It's like any other job. You don't gamble. You grind it out. Your goal is to win one big bet an hour, that's it. Get your money in when you have the best of it, and protect it when you don't. Don't give anything away."
The same applies to product development, startups, etc. There is chasm between you and the big dream and hard work lays in between. Of course, Mike McDermott goes on to say:
"But finally, I've learned this...If you're too careful, your whole life can become a grind"
Grinding is a good way to get you inch by inch to your goal, but there comes a time when you need to take a risk, double up when the odds are in your favor and hope for the best :-)
As a side note, it probably helped that I won a bit this trip. My attitude could've been very different had I lost big!
Forbes and Gartner recently published a study called "Day in the Life of C Level Executives" where they studied how lower level executives get their information. OVERWHELMINGLY, executives found their information from the Web. Not actual newspapers, not actual magazines or trade journals. The web is considered to be their most important source of information. 60% + of those surveyed consistently use the web for research and over 80% will utilize a search engine.
My question is, what do you do with all this information? How do these executives organize their thoughts? WebNotes certainly will help 100% of the businesses and executives become more efficient in their day to day struggles with information overload, and it will certainly help the 50% + of the executives who youtube consistently to watch more online video in their free time. :-)
Some of our users are students in investment clubs or in professions where they have to research various equities. Many of these people have discovered how WebNotes can help them organize their research and thoughts. In the attached pdf file you'll see some of the research I compiled for Hewlett Packard (HPQ).
Typically for my own investing purposes I start at Google Finance, discover the various lines of business that a company is involved in, look at the performance of the stock over time, look at dividends, and figure out what other investors think about the stock. After this, I can typically make some good decisions as to whether I want to delve into much deeper analysis. Note that this is for the fundamental analysis of a stock (as opposed to the technical analysis).
Best of luck in your investing, especially given the current stockmarket volatility.
HPQ Equity Analysis.pdf (136.80 kb)
Sorry for the massive amount of posts on marketing, but that's my job so you're stuck with it :-)
For the last several weeks I've been pondering the differences between inbound and outbound marketing (i.e. creating and sharing information so people search for you vs. cold calling, direct mailings, and commercials/advertising where you go to people) and it's amazing to me how much more effective inbound marketing has the potential to be, yet how few businesses are employing these techniques. In my previous life as a consultant all marketing attempts were focused around direct mailings and taking people out to dinner, yet most of the business that I saw come in was through referrals, or people who saw the website and found it interesting or from conferences where our experts were giving talks.
If you can't tell, I've been reading a lot of blog posts from hubspot and have clearly been drinking the "juice". Creating a wealth of information which inspires people to go to your website means that those visitors have been primed for your product. Its not a direct mailing for them to throw away, they are WANTING more information! Sharing more means people also will link to you more and thus your Google Search Rankings will go up!
If you are in a business and don't have an ACTIVE web presence then I suggest you start. It's a lot more time consuming but the end result is not only cheaper but more efficient.
Last night was the latest iteration of WebInno and it was much better than the previous one in terms of being able to hear the presentations. Three companies presented and while none of them blew me away, I wish them all the best. Here is a picture from the presentation of "Pixily" who won the best product award. It's taken from my phone so the quality is rather horrible.
Every once in a while I have an experience with a company so extreme that it makes me either never want to deal with them again or makes me a customer for life. In the last 2 months, I've had both kinds of experiences.
Bad Experience:
A little over a month ago, my Treo started malfunctioning. It would put people on hold at random intervals and would text people blank messages constantly. Needless to say I was peeved, but it had been *almost* two years since I had gotten it. In fact, I was about 4 days shy of two years. Thus, I went to my friendly neighborhood Sprint retailer to see if I could qualify for my "two year discount". After a lengthy wait I was told that they couldn't give me the discount on a new phone, but if I were to call their 800 number, they could give me the discount (I obliged, but why can't the store manager give me this discount?? I've been a customer for over 10 years...don't ask why). So I called, waited on hold for 30 minutes, and was put in touch with a woman who decided that I while I didn't qualify for the discount I did qualify to fill out a claim on my Treo. I spent an additional 20 minutes on the phone with her, was told I couldn't buy a new phone even if I wanted to, and had a fairly miserable experience. So miserable that I just hung up. Regardless, I called back again, and kept getting pushed from person to person until I finally got my discount. In total, I wasted about 2 hours of Sprint's time, and 4 hours of mine. How much did this cost both of us in the name of bad customer service??
Good Experience:
Luckily, I've had two great experiences in the past month. The first was with Zappos. I ordered a pair of shoes which they overnighted for free. Turns out they were the wrong size, so I called up admitting to my mistake and they offered to overnight the correct size for free! They also gave me free return shipping which was fairly easy to take care of.
My second good experience was with newegg. I ordered two optical cables for my entertainment center at home. Unfortunately, I didn't do the due diligence required on my receiver and after-the-fact realized that my receiver didn't have an optical input for my DVD player. Bah. So I email Newegg so as to order the correct cable. Newegg then emails back saying that not only will they ship me the correct cable for free but they don't even want me to return the original cable!
I am forever a customer of both companies, and will recommend them to everyone I meet. Good customer service is possibly one of the best marketing schemes that companies can employ. They don't have to waste valuable employee time dealing with customer complaints and repeated phone calls, and they also get their customers to rave about them to all of their friends!
Hopefully we can employ this knowledge with WebNotes to give each of you a better experience.
As the resident marketing “expert”, I have needed to learn a few tools to help WebNotes understand where our traffic is coming from, how users of our webpage are behaving and how to make our site better for our visitors. Thus, I have been playing around with Google Analytics.
http://www.google.com/analytics/
I’ve enjoyed the tool thus far, though it does have a slight learning curve. I’m not proud to admit it, but it took one of our programmers and me about half an hour before we realized I wasn’t able to edit our diagnostics because I hadn’t been given administrative access! So step one, make sure that you have access.
Initial problems aside, I then went on to watch a few videos to get a feel for how I should be using Analytics. The following video was pretty helpful.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5XpYm-B5Fs
We then created a few “goals” for our webpage. They include:
1) Seeing when our users click the registration button but either stop the registration process or continue onwards. We also want to see how many people demo the software on our homepage before clicking to register.
2) Seeing when our users create an account and successfully download our software.
After creating your goals you can then see people as they “funnel”through your site. i.e. How many people get to your homepage, then how many click through to register, then how many continue on to install. High “bounce” rates signal something is wrong, and high “conversion” rates signal immense success.
Obviously there are a whole host of other features that Google Analytics has, but I’ll leave it to you to check out. As usual, if you find cool resources explaining additional functionality, highlight and send them on to aking@webnotes.net!