The Essential Ingredient for Every Start-up's Home Page: Proof

If you're working at a start-up and you're finally, finally, finally ready to launch your product or service, be sure to ask yourself this hard-nosed question: why should anyone visiting your Web site believe that what you're offering is worthwhile?

Sure, you're convinced you've created something great or close to great (otherwise why would you be toiling in a start-up?). But why should anyone else give your company more than a moment's notice? There are hundreds or thousands of new companies launching every day, each convinced that they've created something unique and compelling. No one, not even industry analysts or business journalists, can possibly give all these companies due consideration. So what specifically are you putting on your home page to seize your prospect's attention and prevent him or her from clicking away?

You need proof. Proof that you really have created something valuable to others (not just to you). And to be credible, that proof must be offered by somebody else (not you).

Here's a list of the types of proof you should post on your home page to demonstrate that you really are as worthwhile as you say you are:

• Customer testimonials - The ultimate proof—and if this doesn't appear after a few months, it doesn't really matter what other proof you offer. Preferably the customers you're citing paying customers, rather than users of a free version of your product or service. Ideally, they're leaders in their markets, so that when other companies see that these guys have bought your product or service, they'll interpret that investment as a serious endorsement.
• Major partners such as OEMs - While perhaps not as compelling as direct customers, evidence you have signed with resellers and other partners can suggest that you've passed a minimum level of scrutiny. Of course, the partnership has to be meaningful. Simply joining the partner program of a major network equipment vendor or database vendor, for example, doesn't mean a lot. These companies have thousands of partners. You may have passed some minimal level of scrutiny, but you're not necessarily valuable.
• Independent studies or benchmarks - Objective evidence that you really achieve the results you claim to achieve. Even better if the study or benchmark shows you outperform major players in your market.
• Praise from industry analysts - Again, nice to have, because it suggests that you've passed a certain level of scrutiny with people who know your market well. But some analyst firms have a reputation for selling their praise, so some members of your audience (especially engineers) may be skeptical.
• Investors - Like analysts, investors study markets closely. Their investment signals a vote of confidence. Their approval can at least make you a company to watch.
• Management Team - If your co-founders are recognized experts in their respective fields, the whole company gains some creditability. Eventually, though, you need to offer evidence of market traction—proof that your talented team has really delivered on their promise.

Take a look at your home page. How are you proving your value to visitors? Assume your visitors are lingering for just a moment before clicking away to Facebook or some other site. Can you hook them and compel them to learn more? If not, it's time to go back to the drawing board. You're probably not ready to launch.
Updated: April 23, 2012

Gesture Control for Tablets and Other Mobile Devices

Sometimes it's nice to be able to set down even a small device, even a so-called hand-held device, and control it from several feet away.

Here's a demo of gesture control of a music app running on a small laptop. This is a prototype; final hardware would be integrated in a tablet or other mobile device.



I like the idea of being able to control the volume of music without touching the device playing it. Nice demo.

To learn more about TYZX, the company behind this demo, click here.

Buying a Square Meal with the Square Payment System

"Do you have cash?" my wife asked me as we were driving through southern New Hampshire the other morning. "If you do, we could stop at the Farmer's Market."

I did have a little cash (twenty-something dollars), so we did stop. Just inside the door, we ran into an offer too good to refuse:  a local farmer selling frozen guinea fowl (odd-looking birds that, when prepared right, are more delicious than chicken). We wanted to buy a pair, one for dinner soon and one for later, but that would have nearly taken all my cash.

"Do you take credit cards?" my wife asked. Farmers here hardly ever do. The overhead and expense just isn't worth the trouble. For small farms in New England, margins can be thin even in a good year.

"I do," said the farmer, and he pulled out a Droid phone with a small white square attachment on it. I recognized it immediately as a Square credit card reader. I'd read about Square, but I had never seen one of their readers in person. Certainly, they weren't common at farmer's markets last year.

I knew they could be attached to iPads and iPhones and now I could see they could be attached to Android phones as well. The farmer swiped my wife's credit card through the Square reader. He handed her his phone and asked her to write her name on the screen using just her fingertip.

"Would you like a receipt?" he asked. We gave him my phone number, and he texted a receipt to it. A moment later, I felt my iPhone vibrating in my pocket. The receipt had arrived.

We strolled through the market and visited with friends. About 45 minutes later, our friend Liz sold us some lamb and swiped my wife's card:  Liz, too, now has a Square reader now.

The Square software recognized my wife's card and automatically queued up my phone number for the receipt. Liz said that if she wanted, she could use the camera in your phone to take a picture and have it sent along with the receipt. Again, my iPhone buzzed with a text message from Square.

You know a technology is easy to use and affordable when it shows up at a farmer's market in rural New England. Square's early adopters were in metropolitan areas such as San Francisco (where Square is based) and New York City. But if farmers in small-town New Hampshire—as hard-nosed and practical a bunch of business people as you could expect to meet anywhere—are adopting this technology, I think Square is going to be hugely successful. I know some of these farmers, and I could never imagine them, say, meeting with a overdressed salesperson who's offering merchant services entailing a set-up fee and monthly charges. These farmers would, however, jump at the opportunity to get a free card-reader that attaches to a phone they probably already have. Square imposes no obligation on merchants; it simply charges a flat fee (2.75%) on transactions. The guinea farmer sold a brace of birds he would have otherwise taken home in his cooler. The fee: 2.75% of $28.75: about 80 cents. Worth the sale at a farmer's market. And if I hadn't bought the birds, he would have owed Square nothing. That's the kind of risk/reward pay-off that even a skeptical Yankee can accept.

Square is clearly catching on. Though they launched less than 2 years ago, they've gained over 800,000 customers as of December (USA Today). They're processing millions of dollars of payments every day.

I'll toast them when I cook those guinea fowl.

Beyond Busy: A review of "Betterness" by Umair Haque

Looking for a short, compelling book to read now to get your thinking straightened out for the rest of the year? I'd like to recommend Umair Haque's Betterness: Economics for Humans. It's a pithy book, only about 60 pages long, and it's available as a PDF from Web site of the Harvard Business Review. It costs $2.99. Skip a latte and buy it.

If you're one of the 171,000 people following Umair Haque on Twitter (@umaihr), you know he's exasperated by the state of Western economies. Legions of people are unemployed or underemployed, work has become a grind, and corrupt organizations are working diligently to tailor laws and regulations to abet further corruption—the list goes on. Haque thinks we can do better. Betterness is a his critique of the status quo and a crie de coeur for doing work that is more satisfying and more beneficial for everyone.

Haque contends that a lot of our present trouble comes from focusing on the wrong thing:  a bottom line that measures the monetary accumulations of an organization, rather than the long-term health of the organization, its employees, its customers, its community, and the world at large. Haque would have us lift our eyes from our balance sheets and take a hard look at the world around us. We should recognize the rampant dissatisfaction, the talent being squandered, a natural world in decline, and plenty of unseized opportunities for individuals and organizations to make a difference. Metrics like GDP and stock dividends are too narrow to serve as guideposts for most meaningful work. We need broader indexes that accurately assess our general welfare. Haque proposes a new formula: "real human welfare equals natural capital, plus financial capital, plus intellectual capital, plus human capital, plus social, emotional, and organizational capital."

"Well," you might harumph, "this is all well and good, but a lot of this human and community welfare stuff (emotional capital?!) extends beyond the mission of our company. We're focused on shareholder value, after all, and we're legally bound to be so. We're not a 501(3)c). What you're asking for is even beyond the scope of traditional economics."

Perhaps that's a valid response, but Haque wants companies and the field of economics itself to broaden their scope. A hundred years ago, he points out, psychology confined itself to the curing of mental ailments. Now it's a holistic science that helps people live richer, more fulfilling lives. Haque wants economics to effect a similar transformation, becoming in the words of his subtitle, an "economics for humans."

Some organizations have already broadened their thinking beyond the balance sheet and are now generating what Haque calls "real wealth." He cites Apple, Google, Pepsi, lululemon athletica, Nike, Pixar, and Whole Foods as examples of companies that are working hard to achieve something greater than simply crushing competitors and reaping profits at any cost. Their idealism doesn't seem to be inhibiting their success. All these companies are financially healthy, Apple and Google extremely so. Of course, even these companies still wrestle with the demons of 20th century small-mindedness. Consider Steve Jobs' professed willingness to spend every last dime of Apple's cash reserves crushing Google for its supposedly perfidious development of Android. Even though the company spent around $100 million on this legal venture last year, at least for now the company's primary focus still seems to be building insanely great products. I don't know enough about Pepsi to understand why a soft drink manufacturer is sharing top-billing for virtue with a company like Whole Foods. But I agree with Haque that there are successful companies around that do distinguish themselves by thinking about the bigger picture.

Idealism can pay off. Customers are loyal to companies like Apple and Whole Foods in part because they feel that these companies share their values. People everywhere are looking for ways to make a difference, and they'll buy from companies that are trying to be virtuous. These companies are exemplars of capitalist organizations on the road to Haque's ideal of betterness.

How can other organizations follow suit? First, they need to re-orient themselves. Their biggest adversaries are themselves. Haque urges organizations to jettison their vainglorious, self-centered vision statements, mission statements, and strategic plans, and instead adopt an approach based on ambitions, intentions, constraints, and imperatives. Haque expounds on these terms, contrasting each one to its 20th century capitalist analog. Thus:

• "Ambition specifies higher-order returns concisely and precisely: which kinds of higher-order capital an organization will return and to whom it wishes to return them." Ambition is more than dominating a certain market or being thought of a certain way. Ambition serves consumers and communities, not just company share-holders. In that way it's broader and more inclusive than a traditional vision statement.
• "An intention expresses how, through the act of exchange, an organization will enhance the self-determination and sovereignty of its constituents by making them more capable of seeding, nurturing, and harvesting all the many kinds of wealth, not just sell them stuff that merely satisfies their short-term needs." With its more sweeping goals, intentions replace the traditional internally-focused mission statement.
• "Think of constraints as negative rights: rights that we, the organization, don’t have because they damage the potential of any or all of our constituents." Whole Foods carrying junk food, for example, or Apple selling products that they themselves consider mediocre, even if they would be highly profitable. For Haque, constraints are a virtuous replacement of 20th century corporate strategies.
• "Imperatives are timeless: they are actions we will always take." Imperatives are "daily commandments"—things people should do every day. For example, at Pixar employees work every day to create movies in which the story comes first.

I found Haque's mixture of idealism and pragmatism both refreshing and bracing. I appreciated his diligence and methodicalness in spelling out ways that organizations can shift their thinking from traditional values to broader concerns.

Betterness is available at the Harvard Business Review.

Gesture Control Demo

One of the nice things about visiting clients is getting a glimpse of new technology that will be showing up soon in our offices or our living rooms.

Case in point: Here's a demo of a gesture control system that uses stereo vision to detect people and objects at 60 fps. The TYZX G3 Embedded Vision—that's the small white camera mounted above the flat-panel display—enables a user to manipulate images simply by moving his hands.



The TYZX G3 camera system shown here works both indoors and outdoors.

For more information, check out TYZX.

QA Cafe Looks Ahead

I had the pleasure of having lunch yesterday with Joe McEachern, founder and CEO of QA Cafe. Joe's company has two main product lines. The first, CDRouter, is a test solution for Customer Premises Equipment such as DSL modems and wireless routers. Over the past decade, a truly impressive list of customers have adopted CDRouter to ensure that their products comply with RFCs and industry standards and are easy and straightforward for consumers to use.

The second product, CloudShark, which the company introduced at the SharkFest Conference at Stanford in June, is a virtual appliance for securely storing, cataloging, and sharing packet-capture files. Instead of leaving capture files scattered over the network, enterprise IT teams and service providers can upload them into a secure repository and share them with authorized users over the Web. Which means, yes, you can now analyze capture files on your iPad.

What's new in Joe's world? In the past 6 months, droves of CPE vendors have adopted CD Router's IPv6 solution. QA Cafe introduced its IPv6 tests a couple of years ago, but it's been only recently that organizations responsible for consumer products have shown a lot of interest. Joe's conclusion: the SOHO networking industry believes it's finally time to bring IPv6 to consumers.

The other big news at QA Cafe is the ongoing development of CloudShark. Joe's team is working with prospects and customers to turn this into a truly enterprise-class IT management tool. Watch for more announcements about CloudShark in the months ahead.

Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2011: Scenes from a Growth Market

When I toured the Exposition area at this week's Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, two things quickly became clear:

• There are a lot of vendors offering nearly identical social networking products.
  
• For now, the market demand for these products seems is big enough that all these vendors are surviving, and a market shake-out doesn't seem imminent.
  

Heck, the market seemed crowded when I first covered this conference three years ago. Though a few of these vendors have had layoffs and restructurings, the field remains just as crowded today, giving customers a lot of products and services to choose from.

With products are nearly identical (Facebook-like interfaces, support for Twitter-like activity streams, configurable user profiles, etc.), vendors are differentiating themselves by emphasizing implementation details (SaaS vs. on-premise), go-to-market strategies, a few especially advanced features, and pricing. For example:

• Blogtronix differentiates itself in part through its enterprise-class security, highly configurable customer profiles, and low pricing ($1/user/month).
  
• ClearVale by BroadVision claims to be unique in its ability to share information across internal networks and external networks, such as support sites (though other vendors claimed they could support this, too).
  
• IGLOO Software, which spun out of the RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie's Centre for International Governance Innovation, differentiates itself by its SaaS delivery and (perhaps not surprisingly) its support for the BlackBerry platform.
  
• Microsoft SharePoint offers integration with Lync, Microsoft's unified communication client, and with Office programs such as Word. Additional social media services are available through integration with software from partners such as Newsgator. Incidentally, SharePoint is apparently the file technology "under the hood" for Microsoft's new Office Live services.
  
• The Port, which had focused on non-profits in the past, is now focusing on providing social media tools that could be bundled in business platforms such as Netsuite and SAP.
  
• ThoughtFarmer, whom I've written about before, positions itself as a provider of intranet solutions. Co-founder Chris McGrath told me they're still finding customers who have primitive intranets (just few static Web pages and a file server) and who know they need something more modern, comprehensive, and flexible. At the show the company announced a new SaaS version of their platform.
  

Similar feature sets, different approaches. Customers can compare the offerings and pick the one that best meets their needs.

LiquidPlanner 3.0

Another Enterprise 2.0 exhibitor that I've written about before is LiquidPlanner. This Seattle-based start-up offers project management software that works with estimates and probabilities, rather than forcing users to work with "hard numbers" that all-too-often turn out to be incorrect guesses. Considering the complexities of any team project, LiquidPlanner's probability-based approach to project planning Just Makes Sense. At this year's expo, the company was showing off a new UI and a new feature that enables tasks to be shared across projects. If you're interested in improving the accuracy of your project management efforts, I would recommend checking them out.

Final Thoughts

The keynotes at the conference featured stories from big companies such as Deutsche Bank, and there's no doubt that the Enterprise 2.0 revolution is making slow but steady progress in global enterprises.

But when I hear ThoughtFarmer's stories about small companies interest in replacing an old IIS server with internal wikis and blogs, and I hear the Blogtronix folks talk about 20,000 downloads of their open source Sharetronix software, I can't help think there's an even broader revolution taking place across thousands of small companies interested in finding better ways to communicate and collaborate. That's a good thing for these companies and their customers. And how fortunate for these small companies that so many vendors are working hard to create innovative collaboration platforms that get better every year.