Facebook’s IPO may well be the biggest and most hyped IPO ever … and for good reason. Many people would like to have bought Google or Apple when they first went public, but they didn’t. Now they’re kicking themselves for it. Unfortunately, you can’t go back and undo the past.
With Facebook’s rapid growth and social media dominance, all the people who regret not making those two moves in the past are going to want to buy Facebook. Additionally, all the people who are excited about social media and see it as a key part of the future are going to want to own part of Facebook, too. Read the full article »
Whichever way you look at it, the web has become the place for commerce.
Online spending grew again over 2011, and the growth rate has outpaced that of traditional brick-and-mortar stores. While many chain retailers’ online sales are growing, their store sales are shrinking.
For the longest time, entrepreneurs wanting to venture off on their own would open a store downtown where foot traffic abounded. But that trend, it seems, is changing. Today’s equivalent of foot traffic is eyeballs. Much of this new traffic flows from search engines and mega-marketplaces such as Amazon.com and eBay. Today an entrepreneur contemplating a retail business no longer leases space on Main Street. She opens a website. Her market is no longer local. Read the full article »
Sramana: What was your strategy for funding appssavvy?
Chris Cunningham: Our strategy for raising money was basic. We started in early 2008 by bootstrapping. Both Michael and I put our American Express cards to the limit. We got buy-in to the business on our own dime. We were talking to friends and family as well as angel investors. We raised $650,000 in April 2008, but during that time we were talking to VCs about our business plan. Read the full article »
Sramana Mitra: The sectors that you talked about, are these sectors that you have major strategies to penetrate with onshore offerings?
Rick Ferry: Yes, we do. We identified those fairly early on. We’re working with the companies that have accepted our services, thankfully, not only to bring them up here in the U.S. and do the best job that we can do for them here, but also because there are certain subsets of those programs that we can’t offshore. Then when you blend that type of rate, there’s a significant savings that can be represented by blending. That’s another approach to the strategy. I don’t think any strategy has to be a one-way strategy. It doesn’t have to be an all-in type of strategy. There are certain parts of any of those applications that I just spoke of outside of the ones that have a regulatory requirement to be serviced in the U.S. that can be bifurcated. Read the full article »
As the U.S. economy continues to hiccup, large-scale entrepreneurship is a badly needed remedy. In transitioning hundreds of thousands of people to self-employment and job creation through entrepreneurship, incubators look like an extremely helpful tool. But we need to produce more of the most effective incubators. Read the full article »
Sramana: How do you price that model ? How do you sell an activity to an advertiser?
Chris Cunningham: We actually don’t sell an activity to an advertiser. We sell them an audience. Our ad is triggered by activity. Read the full article »
Sramana Mitra: Let me clarify a few things. Universities are not known to train call center reps. What are you talking about?
Rick Ferry: Not so much training the call center rep per se, but training the student with a desire to matriculate in a related field. So, maybe in computer engineering, computer sciences, marketing, sales and marketing management, that type of thing. For example, take a specific vertical, hotel/motel management. There are many universities around the world, ranging from Ivy League universities like Cornell in Ithaca, New York, to the University of Glasgow, that have degree-oriented programs in hotel/motel management. They place very highly educated people throughout the world. Well, one of our core verticals is hospitality management. Read the full article »
