Alexandre.gillier

2013 est l’année des impressions visibles. En effet, il faut différencier les bannières vues par les internautes de celles qui ont certes été diffusées par l’intermédiaire de l’ad-server mais que l’internaute n’a pas pu voir comme par exemple lorsque la publicité est affichée en bas de page.

Le phénomène est assez important pour mériter notre attention puisque seulement 50% des bannières sont vues plus de 1 seconde selon l’IAB. Les raisons pour que la bannière de soit pas vue sont multiples : diffusion en bas de page, l’internaute change de page avant que la bannière ne soit complètement téléchargée, le navigateur est équipé d’un plug-in « anti-pub », la page est affichée sur un smartphone qui ne permet pas par exemple de diffuser du flash…

Alors que l’investissement dans la pub en ligne représente environ 100 Mds $, près du quart de ces investissements est effectué sur le display soit plus de 21 Mds $. Si on estime que 54% des bannières sont « invisibles » c’est 12 Mds $ qui passent à la poubelle, oui, 1 Mds $ par mois. L’infographie ci-dessous fait la comparaison du display entre 1994 et 2012 où plus de 4 trillons de bannières ont été diffusées.

Les études montrent que les bannières visibles enregistrent un CTR 2,5 fois supérieur à celles qui ne le sont pas. En se focalisant sur les impressions visibles le CPM devrait croître de 76% d’ici à 2016.

AM

There are four parts to every career. To illustrate them, I’ll use Elon Musk, since his personal brand is strong enough to inspire superhero movie characters.

It starts with discovery:

1. Who is Elon Musk?

Then demand:

2. Get me Elon Musk.

Then, the person becomes too successful to be easily accessible:

3. Get me someone like Elon Musk.

Lastly, a person’s legacy:

4. Who was Elon Musk?

Most people get stuck at No. 1. The best way to grow beyond it, according to writer and consultant Michael Parrish Dudell, is with a strong personal brand. “People don’t take personal branding seriously. But if we do a focus group for a bottle of bleach, why wouldn’t we do it for ourselves?” he said to a crowd of founders and digital media-ites at WeWork’s Summer Camp event in upstate New York.

Certainly the idea of developing one’s “personal brand” sounds narcissistic, and maybe even a little slimy, like the kind of wisdom peddled by the social media gurus and ninjas of the world.

But it’s worth caring about, because if you don’t develop your own personal brand, others will do it for you. (VC Mark Suster recently wrote about this concept as well.)

The concept is comparable to the social media argument held in board rooms of large corporations five years ago. Do we really need a Facebook page? Do we have to hire someone to do Twitter for us?

That attitude quickly evolved as companies realized that customers were already talking about them on social media, publishing things about their carefully crafted and maintained brand. They could choose to ignore the conversations, or they could participate and help to shape them. And thus, an entire new marketing sector was born.

Personal branding isn’t dissimilar. Everyone has a personal brand, i.e., an image of themselves that others hold. Some people just take a more active role in shaping that image. Those that do are better positioned for success, argues Parrish Dudell. In recent years, he has made a career out of his brand as a content marketing consultant and public speaker (though he admits to not doing much in the way of social media).

If you want people to invest in your company, work for your company, hire you for their company, support your efforts in any way, or even just use your product, you need credibility and a good reputation. That’s even more true in the tight-knit circles of the tech and venture capital community.  Sure, Elon Musk may not have ever sat and down thought about his personal brand, but most of us are not 1 percent the bad ass as Elon Musk. For anyone striving to make a name for themselves and expand their network, personal branding can help.

Parrish Dudell believes it starts with self-awareness. You have to understand how you’re perceived before you can communicate your strengths to the world. When he first started taking personal branding seriously, he went so far as to do a focus group on himself, asking a friend to show a video of him to strangers and gather keywords about himself. He established that his brand is about being friendly, smart, charismatic and funny. Anyone trying this out can’t be self-conscious about their flaws, since there will negative perceptions too. You can’t change who you are, but you need to be aware of your best qualities in order to promote them.

“I would love it if you told me I was rugged, cool and suave, but that’s not how people see me,” he says. Ergo, promoting such an image would be inauthentic. “You can only communicate your brand it if makes sense,” he adds.

Those qualities seem pretty high level and generic, but it works, Parrish Dudell says, because people need to understand you in the simplest possible terms. “People only remember one thing about you. … People aren’t interested in the whole package, they want that one sentence (about you).”

After listening to his talk, peppered with jokes and some friendly audience Q+A, I’d say his focus group got it pretty much right. Charismatic guy. Funny, too.

[Illustration by Hallie Bateman for Pandodaily]

Erin Griffith

Erin Griffith covers New York startups for PandoDaily. She's worked as staff writer for Adweek and a private equity blogger for peHUB. Her writing has appeared in VCJ, Time Out New York, Huffington Post, FT.com, and BUST. She plays keyboard in a band called Team Genius and Tweets as @Eringriffith.

I'm working with a variety of tools and services to keep up with my daily research, curation, analysis and ultimately publishing of stories from the world of APIs.

Over the last six months I've migrated to an approach I've called Hacker Storytelling. My goal is to efficiently discover, organize and publish as many meaningful stories around the best practices in the business of APIs, as I can, while encouraging the widest possible distribution as I can.

Hacker Storytelling currently centers around publishing of micro project sites as Github repositories using a simple, blog-aware, static site generator called Jekyll. You can do a lot of storytelling with static markup or markdown via pages and chronological blog posts.

Even with pages and blogs, I need more fuel for my stories. I use Mustache + JSON to display everything from simple bulleted or numbered lists, t company and tool listings. Mustache allows me to maintain a central data store, which I use as efficiently as I can across all the stories I tell.

To help me acquire this data, I depend on multiple APIs, but when it comes down to it, a lot of my data is harvested or scraped. To manage my harvesting I use ScraperWiki, to acquire, cleanup and deliver in a structured data in a JSON format. I maintain a vast archive of data as JSON files, across multiple Github repositories where I use JSON Editor Online to edit in a quick and dirty way. Adding the essential, human element to my curation algorithm.

In addition to my projects, I do a lot of speaking. I have a standard approach to publishing content from my central content and data stores as presentations. Each conference keynote or session I do, as well as presentations for meet ups, hackathons or even internally at various companies is centered around a presentation i custom build at the moemnt of delivery. I use either deck.js or reveal.js for my presentation delivery tool, as opposed to a classic Powerpoint or newer Google Presentation.

Once I create static pages, blog posts and presentations using content and data I've curated and written, I need a place to put it. I usually start with a Github repository, using Git as the central project management platform. After that, if I want a project to have a public life, I will publish to the web using Github Pages, Amazon S3 or Dropbox, depending on my goals around the project.

You can find a list of services and tools I'm currently using on the Hacker Storytelling Toolbox page. I will keep it up to date as I find new tools and services. If there is anything you think I should consider, that contributes to your own storytelling process, please let me know.

Indoor Location and Positioning technology is the Next Big Thing. It is bringing the power of GPS and Maps indoors. We spend most of our time indoors, working, shopping, eating, at the mall, at the office, on campus, etc. Apple and Google are competing on street maps, but are also working on Indoor Location. Lots of startups are going after this market too. In this post I will mention all that I am aware of.

One or two winners, and a hundred broken hearts - Most web or social app markets are dominated by one or two big early players due to “First Mover Advantage” or network effects and scale of the user base. Indoor Positioning Systems will be different for two major reasons. First, there are so many potential vertical markets for applications it is unlikely one company or application could serve all the needs of those markets. Second, there are hundreds of thousands of mobile apps that can use Indoor Location in different ways. No clear leader exists today, and isn’t likely to emerge for a long time.

Since no single technology is ubiquitous some companies are employing multiple technologies in their product. Many of these companies are technology providers aspiring to be ILPS platforms with APIs for application developers. Some companies may show up in multiple categories below. They are presented in alphabetical order, not order of importance.

There are trade-offs to each of the technologies. WiFi is low cost and ubiquitous, but not very accurate. High precision location usually requires higher cost and infrastructure work. Proprietary technologies can be very accurate, but cost more and aren’t ubiquitous...so the apps only work where that infrastructure is installed.

High accuracy today is considered to be 1 to 5 meters. Medium accuracy is 6 to 10 meters, and low accuracy is over 11 meters. Cost is a subjective thing but I will attempt a rough guess in the Low, Medium, or High cost range for each, with the symbols, $, $$, or $$$.

WiFi Triangualtion - WiFi Triangulation measures signal loss or strength from three or more WiFi hotspots to triangulate position. The app doesn’t need to access the WiFi, it just pings to measure signal strength.

• Ekahau (Medium/ $$) 
• Meridian - acquired by Aruba Networks - (Unkown) 
• Navizon (Medium/ $) 
• Proximus Mobility  (Unkown) 
• SenseWhere (Scotland)  (Medium/ $) 
• WiFiSlam – acquired by Apple (High/ $$) 
• ZOS Communications (Unkown) 

WiFi Fingerprinting - Smartphones turn on WiFi for a few seconds to get a WiFi Fingerprint and associate it with a Check-In location. Compares the current WiFi Fingerprint to a known database of Fingerprint/Location pairs.

• Aisle 411 (High/ $$) 
• EveryFit (Unkown) 
• Guardly (Unkown) 
• Indoo.rs (Austria) (Unkown) 
• Insiteo (France) (High/ $$$) 
• Lighthouse Signal Systems (Unkown) 
• PoleStar (High/ $$$) 
• PointInside (High/ $$$) 
• Qubulus (Sweden)  (High/ $$$) 
• WalkBase (Finland) (Low/ $) 
• Wifarer (High/ $$$) 
• WiFiSlam (High/ $$) 
• Yfind (Singapore) (High/ $$) 

Beacons - Cheap, low power, radio beacons located at known positions within a building. Could be Bluetooth, High frequency radio, radio inference or other proprietary radio signals. Uses the same location triangulation methods as WiFi.

• BlinkSight (France)  (Unkown) 
• Ekahau (Medium/ $$$) 
• Insiteo (High/ $$$) 
• InvisiTrack (Unknown) 
• Locata (Medium/ $$$) 
• OmniSense (England) (Medium/ $$$) 
• Quuppa (Finland)  (Unknown) 
• Teldio (Canada) (Medium/ $$$) 
• UbiSense (England) (Unknown) 
• WiseSec (Israel) (Unknown) 
• Zulu Time (Unknown) 

BlueTooth - Many electronic devices contain Bluetooth radios, including every smartphone. Bluetooth sensors can read signals from dedicated beacons, or dynamically create a mesh network of Bluetooth signals that refines location.

• Newaer (Medium/ $) 
• PoleStar (High/ $$$) 
• Proximus Mobility  (Unknown) 
• Quuppa (Unknown) 
• SenseWhere (Medium/ $) 
• Wireless Werx (Unknown) 

Sensors (Accelerometer, Gyro, Compass, Barometer, etc) - Most smartphones contain multiple sensors that can measure your direction, turns, speed, and height above sea level to create a three dimensional view of your location. Starting with a known position from other methods such as GPS, cellular, or WiFi, the smartphone sensors can be used to track your position inside a building. 

• Aisle 411 (High/ $$) 
• BlinkSight  (France)  (Impulse Radio - Chip set) (Unknown) 
• EveryFit (Low/ $) 
• IndoorGo (Israel) (Unknown) 
• Lighthouse Signal Systems (Unknown) 
• Loctronix (Medium/ $$$)  
• Movea (France) (Unknown) 
• NaviSens  (Australia - moving to California) (Under development) 
• PointInside (High/ $$$) 
• SenseWhere (Medium/ $) 
• Senion Lab (Sweden) (Unknown) 
• Trusted Positioning (Canada) (Medium/ $$$) 
• TRX Systems (High/ $$$) 

Indoor Lights - LED lights in the ceiling can be programmed to pulse in milli-seconds, so fast the human eye can’t detect the pulse. Your smartphone camera can detect the pulses and distinguish between different lights and triangulate your position.

• ByteLight (High/ $) 

Magnetic Field - Magnetic sensors can pick up the Earth’s natural magnetic forces to determine lat/long position similar to the way a compass works, but two dimensional, and much more accurate.

• Indoor Atlas (Finland) (Unknown) 
• Indoo.rs (Austria) (Unknown) 

Cell Tower Signal – Triangulates approximate position using cell tower signal strength.

• Artilium (Medium/ $) 
• Combain (Medium/ $)

Low Orbit Satellites – Works like GPS, but lower orbit, higher power signal can penetrate inside buildings.

• NextNav (High/ $$$) 

Camera Technology - A ceiling or wall-mounted camera within a building compares auto-generated snapshot photos from your Smartphone. Object recognition software uses pattern matching to compare those smartphone snapshots to the wall-mounted camera to determine precise location.

• WhereLab (Unknown) 
• Omiimii  (Israel) (Under development) 

Indoor Mapping (not location) – All of these positioning technologies need indoor maps to plot your position. A few companies have been creating indoor map floor plans for thousands of public buildings.

• Micello 
• RFSpot 

Most of the companies above are technology providers, not application developers. An exception is Aisle411 which has both Indoor Location technology and an application for consumers and retailers. Most application developers will choose to support multiple technologies/companies in their applications to ensure that at least one of them will be available at any given venue.

Market Segments - Applications will emerge that target Indoor navigation, Location sharing, Location based games, Shopping list routing, Location based advertising, coupons, offers, Manufacturing, inventory, asset tracking, Workforce tracking, Defense/Intelligence, Police/Fire/First Responders.

There will be hundreds of new applications that no one has though of yet because the technology hasn’t existed. Think back to when GPS and web maps first emerged. No one knew what to do with it beyond some trivial apps. Today location and maps are built into hundreds of applications and millions of web sites. The same will happen with Indoor Positioning technology. It will ride the wave of Smartphone market dominance.

Some of the companies listed above will be big winners. New startups will emerge and rocket to leadership as the Indoor Location & Positioning System market develops. There is room for lots of winners. An exciting place to be for the next 5 years.

Disclosure: I was an investor in WiFiSlam before it was acquired by Apple. I am currently an investor in ByteLight, and an advisor to Aisle411 and Navisens. I work for Google which has, and continues to develop, Indoor Location technology.

Subscribe - To get an automatic feed of all future posts subscribe here, or to receive them via email go here and enter your email address in the box in the right column. You can also follow me on Twitter @dondodge and on Google+ 

EchoEcho finds your friends at SXSW even indoors!

Startups play poker, big companies play chess

Leaders in Indoor Location Positioning technology

Why Indoor Location will be bigger than GPS or Maps, and how it works

Wi-Fi Indoor Positioning Firm YFind Launches Analytics Tool

In this video, stats guru and political forecaster Nate Silver (author of The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail —but Some Don’t) reveals why most predictions fail, and shows how we can isolate a true “signal” from a universe of increasingly big and noisy data.

Sponsor Farnam Street in July.

Your smartphone's video camera shoots somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 frames per second. Seems pretty fast, doesn't it? Could you blink your eyes 30 times in one second? You couldn't.

But forget about that wimpy camera for a second. There are supercharged high-grade cameras out there that can shoot over 60,000 frames per second.

When you play these shots back at a much more familiar 30 frames per second, the image is so dramatically slowed down that you notice a wide world of detail that's been escaping your camera since the beginning.

You need to see it to believe it.

The largest water balloon pop ever?

No one hits a golf ball like Tiger Woods.

Unless, of course, you fire one into a steel plate at 150 MPH.

Tester la traction d’un besoin en lançant une page Facebook, tel était le pari de la page Facebook Plan Appart Sans Agence, qui réunit à l’heure où nous écrivons ces lignes, plus de 20 900 fans. Il y a quelques jours, après avoir testé le besoin et réunit une communauté forte, les administrateurs de la page ont lancé SomHome.

Mettre en relation les particuliers en recherche de locataires ou en recherche d’appartement, tel est l’objectif de SomHome, qui se définit comme étant le “site d’annonces conçu comme un réseau social”. Afin de limiter les frais d’agences immobilières, les interminables files d’attentes pour visiter un appartement, ou encore l’impression de multiples dossiers, ce réseau social d’un nouveau genre a su en amont grâce à sa page Facebook, percevoir un besoin actuel que des sites comme PAP, ne proposait pas jusqu’à maintenant: établir une relation de confiance entre les propriétaires et les éventuels candidats à la location.

SomHome se intègre également une fonctionnalité intéressante, très en vogue dans l’économie collaborative. Il est alors possible, un peu à la manière d’Airbnb ou Séjourning, de proposer son appartement à la sous-location. La rédaction de Maddyness attribue une mention spéciale à ce projet, comme étant une source d’inspiration pour tester et lancer son entreprise: donner des bons plans gratuits, fédérer une communauté solide et qualifiée, détecter la traction autour du produit, puis enfin lancer son service. Chapeau!

It's not just about making good stuff, it's about the presentation. 

While electronics stores like Best Buy struggle, Apple Stores are on a roll, with new locations popping up all the time. Most recently, Apple opened a gorgeous new store in Berlin to massive crowds.

It's just the most recent example of how Apple takes as much care with its retail locations as it does with its products. Retail is detail, as they say.

Here's a look at some of the best.

This is the Apple Store in Berlin. It opened in May 2013 and Apple fans lined up for hours to be among the first to enter. The building used to be a fancy movie theater.

See? Look how many people showed up for the Berlin store's opening.

The Apple Store entrance in Shanghai is truly unique. Guests enter through this crazy-looking glass cylinder.

Waze’s big exit to Google proved one thing: if companies can harness the power of the crowd to deliver real-time, granular data, big tech corporations will be watching them closely as potential acquisition targets. There’s another category ripe for the picking, even if the problem being solved isn’t as apparent or immediately useful as traffic and navigation data: weather. A few apps are trying to harness the crowd to provide accurate, ground-level forecasts and conditions, and they’re catching on with consumers, too.

Montreal-based startup SkyMotion is one such firm, and it recently launched its 4.0 update, which not only harnesses crowdsourced weather reports, but also allows other businesses to plug into that data using a public API, to integrate real-time reporting data from SkyMotion’s users into their own products. That provides an up-to-the-minute forecast, one that probably won’t show you weather conditions completely dissimilar from the ones you’re actually feeling outside at any given moment, as can still be the case with apps that pull weather data only from specific weather monitoring stations.

SkyMotion has had considerable success harnessing the crowd to populate its real-time forecasts, with over 200,000 people currently submitting observations according to the company. Over 50 percent of those who download the app actually keep it and use it, and 65 percent of all users are active between 15 and 200 times per month. The company is now close to reaching 500,000 total downloads, and anticipates being well over 1 million by the end of the year should the pace remain near its current rate.

SkyMotion isn’t alone in crowdsourcing weather data. There’s also Weddar, the “people-powered” weather service and mobile app that encourages location-based reporting with a very human element, since it asks people how conditions generally feel on the ground, instead of seeking out specifics. The Weddar team, which is based in Portugal, launched its app back in April 2011, and where once you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone using it outside of its home market, now you’ll probably see results just about anywhere you open it up.

Crowsourced weather data could appeal to big tech companies for the same reason that crowdsourced data does; it greatly improves the quality of consumer-facing products. But it also offers a lot more besides, by providing services that can be combined with other local data including maps and traffic, as well as shopping and advertising information, to give a much more accurate, much more complete snapshot of any given location at any given time. Weather affects everything from the average user’s day planning, to marketing, to budgeting, and companies that are improving the quality of that data will no doubt be on the radar of anyone who makes those things its concern.

Une bonne idée, peut-elle être une bonne idée de startup? Selon le Founder Institute, il existe 10 points importants montrant qu’une bonne idée peut être à l’origine d’un projet solide de startup. Si la pensée moderne tend à dire que l’idée n’est rien et que tout se retrouve dans l’exécution, ces 10 rappels semblent nécessaire pour croire à son projet.

Tout d’abord, il est nécessaire d’être passionné par son projet par son idée, qui doit être la plus simple possible à expliquer. Se concentrer sur une seule source de revenue est la clé du début de l’aventure de toute startup, qui se doit de mettre de côté les 3 ou 4 autres projets qu’elle peut avoir. Prendre le temps de définir et cibler ses clients et son marché, sont certainement des rappels importants qu’il ne faut pas négliger.

La suite dans l’infographie ci-dessous:

Crédit photo: 7 Ceries