Agile In Everything Web And Mobile – AgileStorm

Mobile Web will finally be realized the next platform after years and years of hype.   It becomes easier to browse the web using a smart phone(thanks to the revolutionary iPhone).   Location-based service on the go through mobile phone is a reality.

Mobile Web Usage Becoming A Daily Activity

The blog post highlights that twice as many people access mobile web with more frequency from Jan 2008 to Jan 2009.   Users are mostly interested in time sensitive news and information as well as accessing social networks and blogs.   “The demographic most active on the mobile Web are young males between the ages of 18 to 34 who consume mostly mobile news and information. Forty percent of females in the 18 to 24-year-old age group accessed the mobile Web at least once in January.”

Mobile Browsing by Platform Market Share – iPhone takes 66% of market shares in Feb 2009

No wonder there’s a gold rush to iPhone apps and iPhone specific web sites.

Scarborough Research finds that El Paso, Salt Lake City, Dallas and Memphis are the Top Text Messaging(SMS) Markets in the U.S.

“Text messaging could be largely disproportionately appealing to marketers because it delivers a
young, multicultural audience. Additionally, texts can provide a very locally targeted vehicle for
marketers wanting to reach people in the right place at the right time, ready to make a purchase.”

“Texters are more likely than the average cell phone subscriber to live in a household that owns – or plans to buy – a wide variety of hi-tech items, from HDTVs to MP3 players to video game systems. ”

“Texters are also leading online spenders. One-fifth (20 percent) of Texters spend more than
$1,000 online annually, versus 17 percent of all cellular users. They are avid online users overall,
as Internet applications permeate all aspects of their lives, from household tasks (such as bill
paying) to entertainment (such as downloading movies or TV programs) to interaction (such as
blogging and downloading a wide variety of content).

When not online or shopping, Texters are active, on-the-go consumers. They are 37 percent
more likely than all cellular subscribers to have played basketball (as a leisure activity) during the
past year; 29 percent more likely to have gone jogging/running; 29 percent more likely to have
played tennis, and 23 percent more likely to have practiced yoga.

Their interests reflect their youthful demographic and active nature. Texters are 12 percent more
likely to have attended a professional sports event, and 57 percent more likely to have gone to an
R&B/Rap/Hip-Hop concert during the past year.”

admin Mobile iPhone, Mobile web, SMS

Entrepreneurs often come to AgileStorm with great ideas and visions and are very passionate about them.   They have some ideas about their competitors in general.   We often advise Entrepreneurs to do more in-depth competitive analysis when we feel the ideas and visions can take more time to be flushed out.

It’s super important to do user/market segmentation.  You may think you compete with a company on all fronts, but you may be able to target different user bases and market segments once you have done the competitive analysis.

There are lots of free resources on the Internet that you can use to do competitive analysis yourself.  Let’s say your main competitor is The Motley Fool:

• use QuantCast to see The Motley Fool’s user segmentation, monthly traffic figure, the traffic trend, what other sites, and what categories of sites The Motley Fool’s visitors are likely to visit.
• use Google Web Site Trends to see what search terms drive users to The Motley Fool, the traffic trend, which regions or countries drive most of the traffic,  and what other sites The Motley Fool’s visitors are likely to visit.  Some shortcomings of Google Web Site Trends are that it doesn’t work on sub-domain(eg:  mail.yahoo.com), and it doesn’t have any stats for Google itself.  If you already signed in with your Google account, the traffic figure in absolute value is also shown.  You can also compare traffic on different web sites:

• Use Compete to see traffic snapshot.  The free version of Compete doesn’t give out much good stuff though.
• Definitely check out Competitive Intelligence Analysis: Google Trends for Websites

One of the nicest things using these tools is the ability to find out more sites that are related or similar to your competitor.   Often, we find lots of sites that we didn’t know about.

That’s it for this post.  We’d love to hear how you are doing competitive analysis.

admin Competitive Aanalysis Competitive Analysis, Google Trends, Quantcast

I went to the Stanford Entrepreneur Week event in Feb. One session is around “Pitching and Presenting Workshop: How to Make Your Story Compelling”.  The session was so crowded, but it’s really good as I practiced my pitching skills in a couple of the round in a group fashion.   Here are my learning and thoughts around a good pitch:

1. What is pitching? In Silicon Valley, it’s very common for entrepreneurs to pitch their ideas to VC for funding.  But pitching actually has a much broad meaning.  The goal of pitching is really on how you can get enough attraction from telling your story to generate new relationship or to get some one’s buy-in .  It is actually such an important and common task that we deal with every day on about everything.
2. Pitching is not just a business activity. It happens at work, at home, at movie theatre, among colleagues, between wife and husband, among friends, online and offline…  When you and your friend were discussing if they would all go to the movie you want, it’s your pitch. You want to persuade your husband or wife to buy a Graco car seat versus a Chicoo brand, it’s a pitch. You have an innovative idea on how to improve one project and you need to get your boss’ buy-in, it’s a pitch. You run into a person at a bar, who could be your potential client, and you want him/her have more interests in your offering, it’s a pitch…  You can practice your pitching skills whenever
3. The secret of a successful pitch is so simple, yet so few people know how to make it work. There are three basic elements of a good pitch, and the goal is to make these three elements clear and short! Below is a great presentation from the session:
   • what is the problem you are trying to solve
   • why it matters /why it is a problem
   • how you are going to solve the problem and why it’s different
   Stanford E Week 2009 Pitching&Presenting Workshop

   View more presentations from agilestorm.
4. A very practical way of practicing pitching that I found useful is: have a live elevator pitch for yourself (who you are & what you do). Practice this often (daily or weekly); write it down in a piece of paper; keep it in your pocket; revise it while you are in a car or waiting for lunch…

Have a great pitch next time!

admin Entrepreneur business, Elevator pitch, Entrepreneur, pitching, Stanford University, startup, VC Funding

When you need to have a web site, a web application or a mobile application(it still needs to communicate your own server) online,  you need to decide what hosting service you need.  For starters, it boils down to the following three choices:

Shared Web Hosting

• The cheapest option.  Service is managed.  Provider takes care of security patch, and system-wide software updates
• No guarantee of resources – providers generally pack as many accounts as possible in one box.  They’d shut you off when your site becomes popular as it eats up too much resource.  Your site’s performance will also degrade when another site on the same machine gets popular
• Very limited control of environment.   You can’t install your own software which depends on system software that the server doesn’t have.  Shared hosting providers are reluctant to install not-so-common software

Dedicated Hosting

• You rent a physical machine from your hosting provider. You can install whatever you want with the machine
• It’s generally more expensive than VPS.   They are mostly self-managed(you takes care of security patch, and system-wide software updates), but you can pay more to get managed dedicated hosting
• Hardware cost is going down every year as new hardware comes out(Moore’s law).  Providers generally don’t low the price on your plan or upgrade even though the hardware of your machine has depreciated a lot. So you may get stuck with a outdated machine for a while.  It’s generally easy to have your provider upgrade the memory
• If you want to upgrade(moving to a new plan),  you generally need to transfer all the data on your own and reinstall everything.
• If your server is sitting idle most of time(your website/web application doesn’t generate enough load/traffic), you can’t really scale down the server resource(reduce the memory, downgrade the CPU) so that you can pay less

VPS(Virtual Private Server

• A physical server is partitioned into smaller isolated containers(VPS) using virtualization software.  The virtualization software allocates resources(CPU, memory, bandwidth, etc) to each VPS.  Each VPS has its own operation system you choose.  You can install whatever you want in VPS
• VPS is generally cheaper than dedicated hosting, but it really depends on the server spec
• Sometimes, a VPS is more powerful than a dedicated machine because the VPS sits inside a very power machine
• Hosting providers can generally give you more resources when you upgrade to your hosting plan, or take away resources when you downgrade your hosting plan
• Some VPS providers let you clone your VPS.  One common use is that you can set up one VPS, then clone it to have a cluster setup
• It’s easy to back up a VPC by taking snapshots.   Whenever before you upgrade/patch software, take a snapshot so that you can  roll the server back if something messes up(this happens more often than you think)

Our recommendation

We recommend going with VPS instead of dedicated hosting because VPS gives a virtualized dedicated hosting environment with more flexibility in regard of resource and backup.

We never recommend clients to use shared hosting because it’s too easy to grow out of it.  Lacking control of the hosting server really tights our hands.

When you grow your business after the above options are no longer good enough, you can go with colocation(bring and install your own hardware in data center.  Data center takes care the power and network connectivity), or scale up/down on demand with cloud computing(eg: Amazon web services such as S3, EC2)

admin IT Dedicated hosting service, Shared web hosting service, Virtual Private Server, Web Hosting