The Nest @ The Marina

A Few Great Websites to Help Your Business Harness the Power of CrowdSourcing

Nesty — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 06:37:58 +0000

What is crowd-sourcing? You don’t know? Well you do know if you run a website and have sought the input of your users for testing purposes. Thats crowd-sourcing. Using the collective brainpower of the crowd to provide you with feedback on your projects. It is a great alternative to the top down management and policy making style of allowing a small board of individuals to run/design your project.

Of course there is more to project development than just user testing, ect. What else can be tackled by crowd-sourcing? If happens there are tons of dedicated crowd-sourcing engines that you can harness for the purpose of developing your business. Here i have listed the ten best ones that will springboard your firm to a new creative height.

Check them out…

Logo design = 99designs

Coming up with a quality logo is not a problem when you turn to the creatives at 99designs. All that is need is the submissionof a brief so that the fee for the contest winner can be decided. (Minimum is normally set at around $150 ) After that you can sit back relax and watch the crowd go to word for you. 99designs has ver 45,000 designers that will hammer out the best design solution for you. What could be better than that? No more over priced work that is not what you asked for. I will be using this service quite often.

Brand names = namethis

Very much the same as 99designs, but more for creating a short contest to select a brand name for a venture. The crowd will make suggestions as to names and then everone votes on the best ones. Fees are paid out to the three best ideas. $99 is all you’ll need to harness the power of this unique crowdsourcing tool.

Business innovation = Chaordix

Offspring of the currently defunct crowsdsourcing company Cambrian House, Chaordix is a platform that is designed with the the entrepreneur in mind. IF you are looking to solicit the crowd for help finding the solution that is most likely to succeed for you, then Chardix is your man… or woman!

Brainstorming / feedback = kluster

Looking for great brainstorming ideas from some trusted and well qualified individuals? Kluster makes it possible to harness your very own tailor made crowd. More so a tool than a crowd engine, Kluster allows group decisions to be made by capturing the feedback from its members. Members submit weighted feedback based on their qualifications and trust.

Advertising = Poptent

A great place for you to go and access a creative video and t.v. production crowd. Need ads that aren’t basic piles of rubbish? Visit Poptent and fill out a brief. Allow creative mind access to your brief and watch as tons of producers vie for the win!

Zoopa and OpenAd.net are doing similar things.

Product redesign – redesignme

“The first platform where communities and companies collaborate on new / revamped products and services.”

This innovative website hooks up companies with creative thinkers to develop new product / service concepts. RedesignMe’s Design Critique section actively seeks out badly-designed products, which the community can rate. If the manufacturer is receptive, users are then invited to complete design challenges.

Software & usability testing – uTest

There are plenty of reasons why you don’t want to ditch your preferred usability agency, since offline user testing is absolutely essential to businesses of all sizes. But if you want to conduct online testing then uTest’s community of “18,000 QA professionals from 150 countries” might be the place to start. Web, mobile, gaming and desktop apps can be tested, and the service also supports agile developers.

Data cleansing & entry / content creation = Amazon’s Mechanical Turk

“Mechanical Turk is a marketplace for work. We give businesses and developers access to an on-demand, scalable workforce. Workers select from thousands of tasks and work whenever it’s convenient.”

There are plenty of occasions where the human brain works better than the fastest computer. Tasks that are better performed by humans can be outsourced to Turk. There are currently around 50,000 ‘Human Intelligence Tasks’ (HITs) available for its freelance workforce, including such gems as writing a review of a San Francisco street, or making a video about your coffee stories. Fees per task paid out range from a couple of cents to $30 (Amazon takes 10% commission). There are thought to be at least 100,000 Turkers from around the world.

So that’s it… but before you stagedive into the crowd there are a few cautionary tales out there, which you might want to familiarise yourself with.

I’d love to hear about your experiences if you’re actively crowdsourcing… please leave a comment below.

Finding an Ideal Program Developer for your Young Startup

Nesty — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 11:46:49 +0000

The last month or so has been very very hectic where me and my startup are concerned. With more and more that needs to be done it seems like everyday there are less and less resources and time available to get everything done.

If you are a startup the time may have come for you to seek out a programmer to narrow the labor gap until hiring a part time or full time employee becomes more feasible. When searching for a programmer you are more than likely sure to find a mixed bag of talent. This post will outline 3 major types of programing contract labor that you are sure to come across in your search for the perfect coder.

1. The Inexpensive International Worker

If $10 an hour software development sounds good to you then you are not alone. How lucky you would be to find a fellow American to proudly take care of your good old home bred programming needs, but chances are that your startup does not have the cash flow to sustain the development of anything meaningful at a rate of $25. What good is an awesome programmer if you don’t have enough money to pay him to finish? You can find quality offshore programming services at a very very affordable price, a lot of the time for as little as $5/hr. When the money is low it is hard to turn down action like that.

PROS: Most people love cheap. A lot of small stuff that has been sitting on the back burner can get knocked out while your core team focuses on the most pressing and important issues of your startups development.

CONS: It can be tough to explain what you’re asking for when there’s a language barrier. You may receive finished work that has small problems with it that are not significant enough to require more contract work, but nonetheless annoying enough to warrant some extra attention from a core member to get the issues dealt with before production.

VERDICT: Good for getting little things done, or maybe for giving you a place to start on larger features. Not to be relied upon for anything mission critical to your application. ALWAYS look over the code yourself before blindly including it in a deployment.

2. The Overpriced Genius

In your search you are sure to come accross this fellow. He is super smart and super capable. His code is pure perfection… he knows it, and so do you. So whats the problem? He’s normally asking somewhere between 70-$100 for his services. This guy’s very good at what he does, but cashflow waits for no man (or project). It shouldn’t matter if this guy has five arms and 4 workstations that he hacks on simultaneously 13 hours a day. There’s is no possible way he can produce anything that would be worth $100/hour to a cash-strapped startup.

PROS: This guy will normally get the job done fast and efficiently.

CONS: Your startup may not have the cashflow to mess with this fellow and have any hopes of becoming profitable. A lot of startups simply just can’t afford this kind of startup expense.

VERDICT: Better to leave this guy to work for the mature companies with deep pockets.

3. Local Schoolboy

Like most young people like yourself this guy has’nt had his shot in the real world yet. This is great for you bottom line right? Lets think on this… he has tons of academic training, right? More than likely this fellow is quite bright, correct? He is definitely not going to charge you as much as someone who has been in the industry for any length of time.

This could be a great move for your startup. You never really know the ability level of an individual until you give them a shot. In most cases however, the giant volume of intelligence of a student does not necessarily translate into a large amount of productivity. Why is this? Mainly because most of the experience a programmer gets from working in the industry is being able to tell when things have already been implemented or solved and not spending large amounts of time and stellar brainpower trying rewrite them personally.

PROS: Very inexpensive. Usually available for on site work which is ten fold better than working with a distant developer.

CONS: Be prepared to spend a large amount of time babysitting the student to make sure that they are on the right track.

VERDICT: Can consume as much time in supervision as they save you in implementation.

In conclusion you will probably find that the student and the off shore programmer are going to be the solution that fits the bill for your average unfunded startup. While there are many more avenues to turn down when looking for an affordable programmer, it couldn’t hurt to give one of these two a try when you start looking for your next piece of contract labor.

Intoduction to Twitter Marketing Techniques and Tools

Nesty — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 02:30:53 +0000

Startups face many challenges when it comes to marketing and branding their websites blogs and products. Spreading awareness about your product or projects is an essential task for any startup that hopes to enjoy any amount of success. There are many ways in witch this can be achieved, however today we are going to focus specifically on a social networking tool called Twitter.

Marketing on Twitter is a very easy to understand concept. Simply set up your account, find people you share an interested with and start posting tweets for them to read. A tweet is a short 140 character message that may or may not contain a link to your blog or website. You can think of a tweets as emails on roids – they come up on other twitters users radar quickly, however they also disappear from this radar just as quickly as they appear.

For a concept as simple as Twitter, you would be surprised at all the add ons, gadets, tools and add on funtionality that developers have created and distributed to make using twitter fast easy and effective. This is a list of some tools and apps that you cannot do without if you you are branding or marketing your startups website.

Tweet Later. This is an amazing service. It allows you to control all of your Twitter accounts (hey as a marketer you have more than one account right?) and send tweets to any or all of them on autopilot. You can set up bulk tweets and just sit back while they are sent out overnight, or better still you can set up recurring tweets with spinnable messages that send your message out to the maximum number of followers possible. With Tweetlater, there’s no more sitting at the keyboard sending messages out all day. Just set and forget.
Twellow. Basically this is the Twitter yellow pages. Its a huge directory of Twitter users organized by category with details of their biography, number of followers and a profile. Used correctly this is a twitter marketing goldmine.
TwitThis. You’ve got to love the names these guys give to the services, and TwitThis is no exception. Its basically a StumbleUpon service for Twitter. You can set this up to enable your followers to send on tweets with your URL to their followers. This can be a very powerful tool indeed and if a tweet goes viral the impending flood of traffic can be biblical in proportion.
Bit.Ly This is just one of many URL shortening services that have sprung up. With only 140 characters to play with, you really don’t want to be sending out long url’s in your tweets. These services shorten the actual URL and display something like http://bit.ly/7FM8hb. It may not be so attractive to your followers but Twitter users are used to clicking on these links, sometimes out of pure curiosity.
Twist. This is one of my favourite Twitter marketing tools. It tracks the use of keywords and the moist popular topics being tweeted about. Again, this is invaluable information for Twitter marketing and once you master it, you can ride the wave of popular topics that spring up on Twitter every day.

So, there you have it, Twitter marketing is simple concept but it has spawned many bells and whistles. Of course, these are just tools to enable you to market smarter rather than harder and should be in the arsenal of any serious Twitter marketer.

Project Management Solutions for Startups

Nesty — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 16:35:04 +0000

In todays fast paced entrepreneurial environment, startups with excellent ideas can get left behind if they can’t achieve efficient collaboration on their projects. Forming working groups and delegating tasks to team members greatly increases the ability for a startup to complete the work necessary to achive success. At The Nest we seek to provide entrepreneurs with the space and means to make this collaboration possible. While face to face collaboration on projects can be very easy and intuitive to manage and control, the issue of Project Management becomes a major concern when groups are seperated by distances that makes physical meetings and workdays impossible.

If you have a long distance relationship with your startup and its members then there are several tools at your disposal that can help you and all of your team members stay tasked and up to date on what is happening with your company and its projects. There are many tools available but here we will discuss two solutions that are free and readily available to the public.

Project Pier

Today there are several cloud based project management applications , ranging from paid hosted solutions to open source self hosted applications. There are several powerful open source applications available for download, however the best of these solutions require web hosting with root access to install. A good deal of startups are tech based and well equipped to handle installs of software on dedicated hosting machines, however a great deal of us only require shared hosting for our websites or will be acquiring hosting simply for the purpose of running the web application.

For the situations when upgrading to an expensive hosting solution and hiring an IT professional is not an option there is a great resource available from the folks at ProjectPier.org. ProjectPier is a flexible software script that only requires an ftp upload and quick database configuration using the DataBase Wizard in CPanel.

Once uploaded the setup is seamless. This software allows you to create users (team members) that can access projects that are created by team members with sufficient permissions. Once projects are created it is then possible to set certain tasks within that project to certain users. Any time a change is made to the status of a project or a task, everyone involved in that project or task is alerted via e-mail that there is action on that project.

Files can be uploaded and shared, as well as archived so that versions can be referenced well after changes have been made. The ability to set milestones for your project will keep your teams workpace on track with goals set in advance by project leaders. Project Pier also allows Integration with Outlook Express and other third party calendar and scheduling applications.

Managing and keeping track of workflow is super intuitive and almost exciting when working with Project Pier. Collaboration can be achieved on projects through other means such as forum software or email forwarding or even blog posting, however the targeted functionality of Project Pier is sure to help you optimize the performance and potential of your startup.

You can visit www.ProjectPier.org for more information or you can DOWNLOAD NOW to get started immediately.

There is also a Beta release of the newest version of ProjectPier available for download. This upgrade promises to add a significant amount of user feedback into the functionality of the script.

Google Wave

Google’s has developed a brand new online tool, Wave, that merges real time communication with language tools to let google users create a “wave” where users can be added, all of whom have access to a nicely formatted set of text, photo, and feed widgets as well and other gadgets and apps from outside developers.

Google has offered Wave accounts to developers, early adopters and select Google Apps customers for beta testing and development testing, but has not released the tool to the public at this time. While the developer preview has taken place in a sandboxed environment, cut off from the rest of Google’s services, the preview that’s about to be launched will take place on wave.google.com and will be the instance of the service that eventually gets opened to the public.

The funtionality of wave as it stands now is very impressive, but Google says that it is the open source app development that will make Wave completely change the way businesses and people communicate. One such app that is already available for Wave is Gravity.

Gravity, exploits the collaborative features of Google Wave allowing business process modeling activities to be propagated in near real-time to all other participants of the Wave, said SAP the creator of the app.

SAP has released a demo showing how two companies could re-map their product cross promotion model to capitalize on cross-selling opportunities.

This tool can prove especially useful for startups and entrepreneurs who’s main focus is delivering product/s or proprietary features to users for the first time. If your revenue process or marketing process needs the active participation of multiple individuals, Gravity allows you to organically create a process with all participants who affect it on hand and available for real time editing, updating and expanding.

This is just one of the many tools we will see developed for the Wave interface in the coming year. The bare bones Wave interface deserves an honorable mention here as it is still a powerful tool used free of any apps. The base configuration of Wave allows users to comunicate real time with other Wave uses added in a wave as well as update and edit documents real time with the help of your Wave enable startup team.

For information about enabling your Startup with Google Wave visit Google Wave Info. Currently Wave is in a Beta stage so it is available by invite only, however invites can be bought on e-Bay for very cheap. Be careful when purchasing invites on ebay, there are scammers out there that will try and get your $2.

Tips On Effectively Delegating Responsibility Within Your Startup

Nesty — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 17:18:02 +0000

Ipsum Lorem LOL!