About distribution SendHub Now a Strong Google Voice Contender with 1 Million Texts and Exploding User Growth By Trevor Gilbert On July 17, 2012 SendHub started out slowly as a mass communication underdog, but with a million texts under its belt and 100% monthly user growth, it’s quickly becoming a viable Google Voice alternative. The company’s desktop and mobile services enable users to reach an unlimited number of contacts simultaneously. This comes in handy for everyone from conference organizers contacting attendees to team coaches trying to contact players. The Y Combinator-backed company recently added calling and voicemail to its basic broadcasting and text messaging services. True, there’s an endless supply of calling-enabled iPhone apps (thanks, Twilio), SendHub allows users to do it from two phone numbers — for free. That’s because SendHub believes in the divide between business and personal communications. It’s a difficult market to crack because of the carrier stranglehold on the market, which has even forced Google to move slowly. SendHub is also tweaking its message.
Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing The rise of the Growth Hacker The new job title of “Growth Hacker” is integrating itself into Silicon Valley’s culture, emphasizing that coding and technical chops are now an essential part of being a great marketer. Growth hackers are a hybrid of marketer and coder, one who looks at the traditional question of “How do I get customers for my product?” and answers with A/B tests, landing pages, viral factor, email deliverability, and Open Graph. On top of this, they layer the discipline of direct2 marketing, with its emphasis on quantitative measurement, scenario modeling via spreadsheets, and a lot of database queries. If a startup is pre-product/market fit, growth hackers can make sure virality is embedded at the core of a product. This isn’t just a single role – the entire marketing team is being disrupted. The stakes are huge because of “superplatforms” giving access to 100M+ consumersThese skills are invaluable and can change the trajectory of a new product. Looks simple, right?
Emoji cheat sheet for Campfire and GitHub Google Play lag after Apple Store Android devs, you can now get your app running on a Mac Get ready to get nekkid and sing kumbaya, because the lovefest is starting. On the eve of the Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference a couple of weeks ago, we told you about a new tool that brought iOS apps to Windows-using developers. Today, we bring news of a tool to let you run an Android app on a Mac. Doesn’t it just make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside? BlueStacks, a company that specializes in mobile app/operating system emulation, is today launching a tool that will let you run any kind of Android app on a Mac. BlueStacks launched a similar tool for running Android apps on Windows devices earlier this year. To announce the launch, the startup has set up shop in an enormous “wedding” tent across the street from Moscone Center, where the Google I/O developer conference is taking place, and it’s wooing developers with Android/Apple “marriage announcement” signage. [vb_gallery id="481314"] The BlueStacks software will be free for users to download from the company’s website.
Why is Facebook blue? The science of colors in marketing 33.5K Flares Filament.io 33.5K Flares × Why is Facebook blue? According to The New Yorker, the reason is simple. It’s because Mark Zuckerberg is red-green colorblind. This means that blue is the color Mark can see the best. “Blue is the richest color for me; I can see all of blue.” Not highly scientific right? After all, the visual sense is the strongest developed one in most human beings. So how do colors really affect us and what is the science of colors in marketing really? First: Can you recognize the online brands just based on color? Before we dive into the research, here are some awesome experiments that show you how powerful color alone really is. Example 1 (easy): Example 2 (easy): Example 3 (medium): Example 4 (hard): These awesome examples from Youtube designer Marc Hemeon, I think show the real power of colors more than any study could. How many were you able to guess? Which colors trigger which feeling for us? Black: Green: Blue: For green, their intuition was this:
Case Studies Best Practices Powered by Mobile Roadie, The Jonas Brothers app has been downloaded over 221,000 times and is a great example of... Launched at the start of 2011 in Google’s Android Market and Apple’s App Store, the Major League Gaming (MLG) official... Case Study With more than 5 million visitors each year, the San Diego Zoo is one of the most popular zoos in... Since the 1960s, the Los Angeles Kings have been playing on ice rinks across the world, captivating hundreds of thousands... 111 million YouTube video views 3 million Facebook fans 663 thousand YouTube subscribers 634 thousand Google+ circles 355 thousand Fluffy Guy App users 194 thousand...
13 Critically Important Lessons from Over 50 Growth Hackers I’ve had the incredible privilege of interviewing over 50 of the most-gifted growth hackers working today. People like Neil Patel, the co-founder of KISSmetrics; Ivan Kirigin, who helped Dropbox grow 12x; Elliot Shmukler, who helped LinkedIn grow from 20m-200m users; and of course, Josh Elman, who led growth at Twitter during its period of massive expansion. After spending countless hours conversing with the geniuses of growth, here are 13 things I’ve learned: 1. It’s a rookie mistake to focus on customer acquisition instead of customer retention, especially early in a startup’s life. Early visitors exist for one reason, and one reason only – to show you how broken your website really is. 2. Growth is like the proverbial skinning of a cat – there are a million ways to do it. 3. A large part of lean methodology is customer development: the activity of talking to your market and your users before you actually build something. 4. Data is good. 5. You can do things to drive traffic. 6. 7.
Red Foundry | Mobile Made Easy. 9 Ways To Make Your Startup Grow Virally Vinicius Vacanti is co-founder and CEO of Yipit. Next posts on how to acquire users for free and how to raise a Series A. Don’t miss them by subscribing via email or via twitter. If you want your start-up to become the next big thing, it’s not good enough to just build a great product. The difference between getting one of your new users to convince one friend to sign up and that person getting two new friends, is huge. Below are 9 ways your start-up can grow virally: Get Your Users to Spread the Word Get users to tell others about your app simply by using it. Get users to push content they create on your app to Facebook, Twitter. Increasing Conversion Adjust your product to become more mainstream. Conclusion Building a great product is only half the battle.
What Language Should You Build Your App With? Mobile developers across the globe have developed and released more than 650,000 iPhone apps, 400,000 iPad apps, and 600,000 apps for Android. Are you thinking about building an app? A key step in the process is choosing the right programming language, which depends on how scrappy you're willing to be. Make sure you've researched cross-platform app design and reviewed the common pitfalls of developing your app. Decide on your audience and what platform you'll use, and then weigh your options to select a language. What languages have you used to build your app, and why did you choose that one? Objective-C Objective-C is the iOS standard, considerd the "correct" language, according to Stephen Kaliski, who works for NYC-based start-up Poptip. Advantages of using the iOS standard of Objective-C are the following: It's high performance, so you get to make use of the phone's actual functions, such as the camera. However, there are some difficulties with Objective-C programming. Node.js Ruby
Indexation and Accessibility - The Advanced Guide to SEO Welcome to the first chapter of my guide to Advanced SEO. In this section you're going to learn some advanced techniques for evaluation and optimization of your website for indexation and accessibility. This doesn't just mean accessibility for the search engines but accessibility for humans too. That's why this section covers best practices for both engines and users - with this like installing Google translate to making AJAX crawlable. After applying to techniques in this section to your website where most applicable, you should have an exceptionally crawlable and accessible website. Browse Your Site Like a Search Engine When optimizing your site for SEO, wouldn't it make sense to put yourself in the shoes of the search engine? Disable JavaScript in FireFox Go to "preferences" and "content" and uncheck "Enable JavaScript". We do this because items like menus, links and drop downs need to be available to Googlebot without JavaScript. Disable CSS with the Web Developer Plugin Why disable CSS?