Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Todd Greene, CEO of PubNub (Part 3)

Todd Greene: In my view, there are only two kinds of startups. There are startups that are building a new product in an existing market. There are companies that are building new products in a new market. They both have different dynamics. In companies that are building new products in an existing market, you’re usually providing something that already exists but you’re making it faster, better, and cheaper. You’re probably stealing unhappy customers away from a very large incumbent.

In the world of PubNub, it’s very different. We are one of those new companies in a new space. We get to define the space and define the naming. We have the added task of educating the world about how you use this Data Stream Network to connect, deliver, and control for these real-time >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Todd Greene, CEO of PubNub (Part 2)

Todd Greene: From Athenahealth all the way to New York Presbyterian Hospital are built on PubNub. Our technology helps them create ways for doctors and patients to collaborate within a chat application or to share information. On the B2B side, companies like Docusign use PubNub for real-time collaboration during contract signing. Companies like HubSpot use PubNub to power the technologies they sell to their customers to do customer support chat and collaboration.

The other two use cases are device control, especially in the smartphone space, and real-time signaling, such as real-time maps, inventory, prices, and other apps that require real-time data updates.

Under the covers, we provide three core things to those customers. The first is the ability to connect to every device in the world and keep an always-on connection to those devices, whether you’re at home or behind a corporate firewall.  >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Todd Greene, CEO of PubNub (Part 1)

Connected devices are creating very interesting opportunities for new types of businesses. Read on for more insights.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by having you introduce yourself as well as PubNub to our audience.

Todd Greene: I am a multi-time entrepreneur. PubNub is a company that I helped start as one of the two co-founders. It was a side project for me until 2012 but full-time for my co-founder, Stephen Blum, who ran the company. In 2012, we raised our first angel round. PubNub is an interesting company. The best way to think about it is the infrastructure needed by developers for software that powers real-time experiences. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Ted Murphy, CEO of IZEA (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Do you have metrics that you can share with us in terms of what kinds of follower count and rates do people get on the per post model?

Ted Murphy: Sorry to be all over the board because a lot of that is determined by the creators themselves. The way that our marketplace works is that the marketer and the creator have to agree on a price. On the low-end, you could be talking about a couple of dollars for something like a tweet. On the high end, a tweet might go for $100,000 or more. It depends on who that person is and what they’re following and also what the brand’s larger strategy is.

Sramana Mitra: If you look at the industry in general, what are the key trends that you see and what are the open problems? >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Ted Murphy, CEO of IZEA (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to us about the different industry segments that you work with and give us some examples of the brands that you work with. Let’s take some use cases of how that particular brand in a particular industry segment works. Give us a feel for the numbers. What kind of reach are we talking about? What kind of messages are the brands trying to convey through them?

Ted Murphy: It’s pretty broad in its range. For example, we have Mercedes Benz, which is obviously a high-end luxury brand. The types of influencers that they tend to engage with would be a smaller group of influencers with larger audiences. On the other hand, CPG companies tend to engage more influencers that may have a lower follower or audience count. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Ted Murphy, CEO of IZEA (Part 1)

Influencer marketing and Content marketing are both big pillars of new media marketing. This discussion delves into those fields.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to IZEA.

Ted Murphy: I’m the Founder and CEO of IZEA. IZEA operates an online marketplace that connects creators – everything from journalists to bloggers – with brands for both sponsorships and content opportunities. One half of our business is helping brands produce content that may live on their blog or YouTube channel. The other half is amplifying content through the use of influencers. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Craig Powell, CEO of Motus (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What is your estimate in terms of timeframe when self-driving cars becomes legal on the road?

Craig Powell: I’ll go cliche here. Everything we think is going to happen fast actually tends to be five years longer than we think. My guess is probably somewhere between 5 to 15 years. I still think we’re still way out from the American psyche truly trusting self-driving vehicles. The early adopters and technologists like myself and many of your readers will be on the early adoption of that curve. But for my parents in rural Missouri, I suspect there will be a lag before they’re willing to turn their life over to a computer. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Craig Powell, CEO of Motus (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Are these on-demand services happening? Are you seeing somebody doing that?

Craig Powell: We’ve done some interesting tests on on-demand auto purchase – the ability to purchase your vehicle from your couch, deliver it to your driveway, test it for seven days, and turn it back in if you don’t like it. We’ve got something going on in on-demand tire services. We know where our drivers are driving and what their needs are. We know when their tires need to be changed. Certainly, there is some early progress on that front and an increasing attention to the fact that there’s a large segment of the population that wakes up and drives everyday for work.

Sramana Mitra: Any other thoughts? >>>