Category
Front-End Design Conference in St. Pete
Don”t forget to register for the Front-End Design Conference this Friday in St. Pete. This is a single day design conference focused on content, presentation and behavior. They have seven awesome speakers lined-up to lead what is sure to be some world-class discussions on the latest and greatest of web design tools and techniques.
When: July 23rd, 2010
Registration opens at 8:30 - Event starts at 9:30
Where: Hilton Bayfront
333 1st Street South
St. Petersburg, FL 33701
Register now to win an AppSumo Design Awesomeness Bundle
WuFoo Workshop – Converting free users to paid
Kevin Hale of WuFoo / Infinity Box will be leading a workshop to help web businesses convert free users to paid subscribers. This event is co-hosted by the Tampa WAVE & IdeaField Coworking.
The 2 hour workshop will help freemium model web businesses in the Tampa Bay area convert free users to paid users. The workshop is designed to be fairly hands on with exercises designed to show you how to look at your product and feature set to maximize your conversions. If you’re interested, please let us know you’re coming by registering here:
Register for the Freemium Workshop!
Kevin will be showcasing a number of examples and also present some of the research, strategies and best practices our company has gathered to inform what we do here at Wufoo. It should be a lot of fun and it’ll actually serve as a testing ground for some new ideas that will be presented at Kevin’s upcoming workshop at FOWA.
January 27th – 6PM to 8PM @ IdeaField Coworking
308 E. Oak Ave. - Tampa 33602
Limit 15 people
Stimulate Me
Why do I write about local politics and economic stimulus on a startup blog? As I see it, traditional economic development efforts and local “job creation” programs ignore and in many cases actually discourage startup activity. While almost all mid-sized metros boast about their readiness to be the next big American tech or life science hub, this is mostly lip service and actual investment (tax) dollars are spent chasing big name companies looking to relocate not on programs to assist the individuals most likely to develop innovative new products or services.
The second reason I rant about ecodev is because cities often behave like floundering startups. Do these sound familiar:
- No validation of market conditions or understanding of the actual customer
- Convinced they have a unique offering that is vastly superior
- A hyper-inflated “sales” plan with an almost magical string of mega-customer wins
- Belief that with enough marketing (rebranding), no one will notice the pig behind the lipstick
Tampa (in particular Hillsborough County) is no different, so over the past two months I traded my flip flops for wingtips and made an effort to play nice, observe and maybe even assist.
I want my iTV?
Just about 14 years after the Bill Gates “Internet Tidal Wave” memo changed Microsoft’s direction on interactive media, the cable industry is back in the game with a new initiative to shape the next generation of developers and content providers. Although Microsoft never fully abandoned TV as a operating platform and continued to work with set-top-box manufacturers, “The Memo” killed Project Tiger (iTV) back in mid-1995 and most of the talent in Redmond was reassigned to take on Netscape and a bevy of other newly emerging threats to the Microsoft way of life.
Does your market buzz sound like a squeal?
As a follow-up to my involvement in the FastTrac – TechVenture series co-hosted by St. Pete College & the STARTEC Accelerator, I am re-posting one of my all time favorites by Steve Johnson of Pragmatic Marketing “Stop Perfuming the Pig“.
Every exec team or wannabe tech founder needs to read this post and ask themselves some tough questions about the role of marketing in their company.
One of the slides in my presentation on Thursday night echoed a quote in Steve’s post “…the aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous. The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself.” If more exec teams took this approach earlier in their planning and development efforts, they would avoid a lot of frustration and save a lot of cash. Continue reading this post…
University Incubators…Here we go again!
The next economic development disaster is brewing up in Tallahassee. FSU officials there have Incubator Envy and are hell bent on keeping up with the Joneses (Tampa, Boca Raton, Orlando, Gainesville, Sarasota, etc.). In the process, they no doubt will lobby for tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to put up a shiny new building and blow wads of cash on marketing a facility that will at best only benefit a small isolated slice of academia. Continue reading this post…