If you’ve ever been thwarted in your attempts to reach a live customer service agent by Byzantine phone menus that led you in circles, then you understand Eric Strand’s pain. Eric, himself the founder of a top 500 E-commerce site, became so frustrated with the runaround he got while trying to cancel his AOL account that he launched www.CustomerServiceNumbers.com, a website dedicated to helping people get around the phone trees and talk to real service reps. Only six weeks old, the site has already developed a loyal following.
Click below to listen to my interview with him.
This story was voted up for coverage on the Fast Company Buzz pitch portal. Help us pick the stories for FC Buzz by voting HERE (instructions on the portal home page).
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I’ve been racking my brain trying to think of a clever way to write about this technology, but the bottom line is this service is far more buzzworthy than whatever story I can wrap around it. Just in time for the Beijing Olympics, web telephony company JAJAH just launched an automated English to Chinese/Chinese to English call-in translator. Here’s how it works. You call in, you speak English, and it automatically translates it back to you in Mandarin. If you speak Mandarin, it translates it to English. All you have to do is hand the phone to the person you’re trying to talk to, or turn on the speakerphone, and it’s like having a live translator with you. I asked JAJAH to provide me with a demo number for my readers and all I can say is try it. I’ve been showing it to my friends and everyone has been floored.
FREE DEMO U.S. - +1.718.513.2969
JAJAH will also have local Chinese dial-in numbers for travelers. They’re calling the service JAJAH.Babel and Trevor Healy, their CEO, asked me to mention that is was developed with help from IBM.
My apologies for being at a loss for words, but sometimes the Buzz just speaks for itself.
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The term “disruptive innovation” is quickly joining the list of meaningless buzzwords that companies use to hype their latest products. Marketing managers seem to use it to describe anything new, along with “breakthrough” and the ever-popular “revolutionary.” But true disruptive innovations have actually been clearly defined by famed Harvard business school professor Clayton Christensen as technologies and developments that open untapped market segments and have the potential to upend the status quo. In order to bring attention to companies that are truly disruptive – and therefore potentially game changing – I’ve partnered with Scott Anthony, a founding partner at Christensen’s consulting firm Innosight, to bring you a series of interviews and stories on companies that we’ve identified as legitimate disruptors.
Scott and I recently spoke with Rick Hess, the CEO of a solar energy company called Konarka. Up until now, solar panels were expensive sheets of rigid silicon that had to be made in a fabrication plant. Konarka has developed flexible, portable, and disposable solar cells by spraying or printing a layer of organic material on to a roll of plastic. This technology allows Konarka to place solar panels in places that were previously impossible. In other words, Konarka’s panels are tapping new markets instead of competing against incumbent solar panel manufacturers – the true definition of a disruptive technology.
To better illustrate how Rick has positioned Konarka as a disruptor, we asked him for a concrete example of how the technology is being used. Rick said the company is currently working with a maker of picnic table umbrellas to develop a true solar shade. Imagine sitting at an outdoor café and being able to plug your laptop into the umbrella shaft while the open canopy generated electricity. The umbrellas can be placed anywhere, with no need to run an extension cord or connect to a wall socket. In this application, Konarka has no competition. Silicon solar panels cannot be used this way and the umbrellas can be placed in areas where grid power is not available. Under these circumstances, the standard efficiency measurement of cost per kilowatt-hour become irrelevant. In fact, by positioning his company to attack and enable new markets with his flexible solar panels, Rick’s primary competitor is the battery. And when compared to the cost of using batteries, Konarka’s solar cells come out far ahead.
As a truly disruptive technology, Konarka’s opportunities are almost limitless. Scott asked what other avenues they were pursuing and Rick explained, “The biggest challenge we face is picking between different opportunities. We get 50 random calls a week. We don’t market, we just answer the phone. I tell my people our job is not to create opportunities but to filter them.”
If you are interested in truly disruptive innovations, keep up with Fast Company Buzz as Scott and I continue to identify and interview the companies that will change our world. To learn more about disruptive technologies check out Scott's latest book, The Innovator's Guide to Growth. This series will return as the schedule permits.
Submit or Vote on story ideas for Fast Company Buzz at our Feedback Portal and make sure you don’t miss a scoop by joining me on Twitter.
In the real world, most of us wear different faces for the different circles in which we interact. We have our “work” face, our “friend” face, our “relationship” face, and our “family” face. But in the transparent world of online profiles, we are limited to just one identity. Sure, some of us may use MySpace for friends and LinkedIn for business, but when someone Googles us they see them all – and by now we’ve all heard the stories about people getting fired for risqué vacation pictures posted online. Since we’ve lost the ability to wear the right face for the right crowd, does this mean we have to censor our own profiles and only post safe and sterile content? If we’ve reached the point where anything not G-rated puts us at risk for negative repercussions, then what’s the point of using the Internet to share at all?
Now, a Hawaii based startup called Chi.mp is working on a system that will give you complete control over your online identity. Chi.mp, which launches its beta September 1st, lets the profile owner decide on an individual basis who gets to see what. Imagine every picture, every document, and every piece of data on your profile being divided up into little lock boxes. When someone becomes your contact on Chi.mp, you can decide if they get to see your drunken vacation pictures or just your resume, and everything else in between. By giving us total control over who gets to access what, we will once again have the freedom to post personal items to share with friends and family without worrying about embarrassment.
While Chi.mp’s most appealing feature might be its ability to manage access to our information, ironically it is built to be an open network. Unlike current social networks like Facebook, which only allow you to interact with other people who have joined, Chi.mp lets you invite and interact with anybody while still letting you control what part of your profile they can see. Without getting into the technical details, which I can’t begin to understand, Chi.mp sets up each user with their own free unique web page that has a .mp domain extension. Using this page as the base of an aggregation and management platform, Chi.mp helps you build a profile page that is both accessible to the entire online world, while still giving you the power to limit access as you see fit. In that respect, the Chi.mp world is a lot like the real world where we can talk to anybody we want to, but we still get to decide which face we want to wear.
This story was pitched and voted on for coverage in the Fast Company Buzz pitch portal. To submit or vote on stories for FC Buzz Click HERE (instructions at portal blog)
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A few weeks ago I posted an interview with Matt Greeley, the CEO of a company called BrightIdea.com. Matt explained that his company had a turnkey innovation feedback portal that let users submit and vote on ideas, so companies can sort out the useful feedback from the fluff (full interview here).
After that interview I started thinking, “If Cisco Systems can use Brightidea.com to run their I-Prize program and collect, rank, and sort ideas from over 100 countries, why can’t I use it to engage my readers with an interactive pitch portal? That way you - the reader - or any interested party can submit a pitch for Fast Company Buzz and vote on other story ideas. On my end, I would be able to see exactly what you wanted me to cover.” I asked Matt if he would help make this happen and he agreed.
Two days ago, I soft launched the Fast Company Buzz pitch portal and it’s already getting traction. One pitch about a drug delivery device that talks you through how to save a life is dominating the voting with 4 times as many supporters as the next closest pitch. This story will obviously get a full write up here on the Buzz. On Twitter, PR and Marketing strategist Mark Tosczak described the portal as “Something like Digg for story pitches” and told people to post.
Since Fast Company Buzz looks for companies that are breaking new ground and changing the game, I believe it’s only right that FC Buzz also looks to break new ground. The pitch portal taps into true social media by letting everyone vote and pitch on what should be covered. All the pitches and votes are open to see, so just posting a story idea will get you exposure. By adapting the Brightidea.com portal for media, Fast Company Buzz is crowdsourcing its stories the same way Cisco Systems crowdsourced its I-Prize innovations.
Here’s your chance to take over the media and help me pick the stories that deserve to be covered. Join the conversation, read the pitches, vote on the ones you like, and in the process help me bring you the most buzzworthy stories.
Vote and Pitch HERE. Additional instructions are on the Pitch Portal blog page.
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Imagine walking through a dark hallway, similar to an aquarium, with a wall of glowing video screens stacked three high. The videos extend as far as you can see, and when you touch a screen that interests you, it expands and begins to play. Sounds like magic, doesn’t it? It’s real, and it’s available for your browser right now.
When Nvidia called me and invited me to their NVISION conference next month, I thought, “Hmmm, I sure hope they have some cool video games because a conference about graphics chips doesn’t sound too buzzworthy.” To make sure I wasn’t going to spend three days listening to speeches about the limits of silicon etching, I asked them to show me what kinds of things were happening in the world of graphics – or as Nvidia calls it, the world of visual computing. What I saw might be the biggest shift in user interfaces since the GUI replaced the DOS prompt.
Companies like Cooliris are taking plain flat page views and turning them into 3-D virtual reality experiences. Instead of getting your Google image search results on a static page or browsing YouTube one video at a time, Cooliris lets you see the images and videos on a virtual interactive wall. The most amazing thing is, they've done this with a free browser plug-in that works with any site that has an RSS media feed. From my brief preview, Cooliris is just the beginning of a new wave of companies bringing virtual reality interfaces to life. The difference between our current “point and click” GUIs and the immersive experiences created by these visual computing companies is profound. Kind of like the difference between reading a book about Disneyland and actually being there.
Have you ever come home from a tech convention with a bag full of schwag and wondered if there was a better use for it? Emerging media consultant Michael Liskin was wondering the same thing when he came up with the idea for the Schwaggin’ Wagon. Liskin thought, “What if we could collect all the leftover schwag from a convention and give it to charity.” This past April, without any formal plan, Liskin and a few friends rented a van, taped a Schwaggin’ Wagon sign to the side, and drove up to the Web. 2.0 expo in San Francisco to collect schwag. From that first outing, the response has been overwhelming.
I caught up with Michael and asked him about where the Schwaggin’ Wagon has gone since then and what the future holds. He told me they’ve been working with a charity called Operation Gratitude which makes care packages for the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and they use the schwag in the baskets. If you’re wondering how a care package full of key chains and pen lights is saving lives, it’s because the troops give these trinkets to the children to win their favor. In some cases, the children will tell the soldiers where the booby traps or bombs are set. Clearly this is a better use of convention schwag than what we’ve been doing with it. After all, how many “work out” T-shirts do we really need? Sometimes doing the right thing is the most buzzworthy thing of all.
Click below to listen to the entire interview with Michael Liskin.
When Mike Macadaan, a Silicon Valley based designer at AOL, decided to throw a tech exhibition, you’d think he would have done it locally. Instead, Macadaan did the unthinkable. He went to Los Angeles. Surely this would mean disaster. After all, the only tech companies in LA were celebrity vanity projects that made no sense, right?
To the surprise of many, Macadaan proved everyone wrong and in the process revealed Southern California as the undiscovered country of Hi-Tech. Right from the start, Mike’s Twiistup exhibitions have drawn huge crowds and brought attention to hot startups developing real technology. In only its fourth incarnation, Twiistup has become the anchor of LA’s unofficial Internet week, which opened with Brian Solis’ TechSet and closed with Mashable’s LA tour stop.
I asked Mike why he decided to throw his event in LA and what he expected to find there, and he explained, “I was asked to hire some design talent in LA so I thought I'd hunt around at some tech parties like I do in northern California. After hearing and reading about the tech boom happening in SoCal, I was shocked to learn that they didn't do much in the way of events that attracted creative people from different industries. I decided to throw my own event so that I could introduce myself to the tech community.”
Since the first event started as little more than a meet and greet, I asked Mike if he was surprised by the interest and response he’s received and he continued, “I wasn't surprised by the quality of the companies, but I was surprised by how many emerged. There are some incredibly smart people down here working on amazing things. This also inspired me to create an even bigger stage for them to “Showoff” so they can receive their much deserved attention. The people showing up at our events are genuinely looking to learn about new things, make new connections, and get some inspiration so they can bring some creativity back to their nest.”
What started as a local event is now drawing participants and sponsors from as far away as Boston, and even international inquiries from Europe. I asked social media maven Brian Solis, who was in town for both his own TechSet event and for Macadaan’s Twiistup, if he thought the balance of power has shifted away from Silicon Valley in the Web 2.0 era, and Solis said, “The balance of power isn’t shifting away from any one place, it’s distributing and expanding. Emerging tech regions are thriving because of the contributors who cultivate and define their community and the champions who organize and spotlight their culmination and rise. Mike Macadaan has done an incredible job showcasing the Los Angeles startup economy and it’s only continuing to grow.”
Mike’s Silicon Valley brethren may lynch him for taking his party to Southern California, but in the process he’s showing that Los Angeles isn’t just about Hollywood anymore.
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It used to be that venture capitalists either went big or went home. If the investment wasn’t $1.5 million or more, the deal just wasn’t interesting to them. Unfortunately, this often left early stage companies facing a funding gap between what they could raise from family and friends and the big money the VCs wanted to invest. Angels helped fill the gap, but this still left limited options for the entrepreneur looking for money in the $250K to $1.5 million “no-man’s land.”
Now, with the IPO market in shambles and big exit options becoming more limited by the day, a new breed of VCs is stepping in to fill the funding gap. I spoke with Don Rainey, a partner at D.C area Grotech Ventures, about this new trend. Don explained that many VCs are now willing to go smaller and earlier because it gives them the opportunity to get a much lower valuation and therefore a bigger upside. He also added that it gave the early stage VC an inside track on later rounds. We also discussed the funding/startup environment, which he felt was currently more balanced for the entrepreneur and less biased toward the VC, and how the investment criteria for early stage companies are different than for a larger, more mature investment.
Click on the link below to listen to the interview.
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Back in the days of Web 1.0, a.k.a. before the great crash of 2000, Scott McNealy, then CEO of SUN Microsystems was fond of saying, “The network IS the computer.” Now that we’re in the world of Web 2.0 where the term “network” is more likely to mean your online social connections and less likely to be referring to routers and servers, one company, BrightIdea.com, is helping businesses build social networks as an innovation tool. I interviewed Matt Greeley the CEO of www.BrightIdea.com and, paraphrasing McNealy, in Matt’s world the network IS the innovation lab. His company helped Cisco Systems collect ideas from over a hundred countries for their I-Prize competition and they just might be able to help you too.
Click on the Mp3 link below (FC Buzz) to listen to the interview.
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