Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Clara Shih, CEO of Hearsay Social (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click on this example a bit. Let me ask you a few questions that will clarify how you do it and how much of this is viable. What is the assumption? Are we talking about running these kinds of trigger analysis on Jimmy’s already connected set of friends or are we running this trigger analysis algorithm on a broader set?

Clara Shih: That’s a great question. On Facebook and on LinkedIn, we run this predictive algorithm on your existing connections. This is due to privacy policies. In a more public social network like Twitter where you can follow people without them having to follow you back, we can apply this analysis more broadly. Part of what Hearsay does is, we train our users on how to authentically connect with more people on their network whether those people are existing customers or not. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: FullBottle CEO Reed Berglund (Part 1)

Continuing with our Bootstrapping Using Services theme, FullBottle is an interesting social media marketing venture that taps into the reach and engagement capacity of influencers to attract customers.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of circumstances?

Reed Berglund: I was born in Manhattan and then moved to Los Angeles. I grew up in Los Angeles. I have a mixed European background and both my father and mother worked in media.

Sramana Mitra: What about school? Did you do all of it in Los Angeles?
>>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Darren Hill, CEO of WebLinc (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Besides geography, what other parameters do you personalize on?

Darren Hill: For a lot of our fashion clients, we personalize on sizes. For instance, if you have come to the website and you’ve looked for a specific pair of shoes, we’ll actually tag your account and we’ll know what shoe size you are. So the next time you look at shoes, we will filter and sort that specific shoe category. We will make sure that the shoes at the top are available and are in sizes that you indicated that you were interested in. That simple little tweak can increase the conversion rate by about double for specific clients. That is pretty significant.

Sramana Mitra: What else in fashion is interesting in terms of personalization? I’ve started one of the first Internet fashion companies about 15 years ago. I know this category cold. What are you seeing in terms of trends? I’m a big believer in online >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Darren Hill, CEO of WebLinc (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s fast forward to 2014. What is your business today?

Darren Hill: 2014 is an interesting transitional year for us. We had been in business for 20 years. All of the growth that we had, which was pretty significant, was organic. We invested all of our profits back into the business and never took any outside investment up until last year [2014]. Last year was the first time that we did take outside investments.

Sramana Mitra: What is your business?

Darren Hill: We have an e-commerce platform. Companies hire us to use that e-commerce platform for their business. It controls everything that their online store is doing. It controls the front-end—what the customers sees and what the customer interacts with. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Darren Hill, CEO of WebLinc (Part 1)

As you know, I am deeply interested in personalization as it applies to e-commerce & Web 3.0. In this interview, Darren Hill and I discuss the subject at length, especially as it pertains to fashion e-commerce, another area of significant interest for me.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to yourself as well as WebLinc. Tell us what you do and what you’re focused on.

Darren Hill: I started WebLinc with my brother in 1994 when I was 18 and a freshman at college. Before we started WebLinc, we owned a small mail-order business, which was a traditional mail-order business for mailing out catalogs. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Tom Hogan, CEO of Kony (Part 7)

Sramana MItra: The healthcare industry has been the most active in the history of the healthcare IT industry. It’s really moving and active right now. I anticipate that, within the next decade, the healthcare IT penetration is going to be humongous. There’s going to be huge changes.

Tom Hogan: I agree. I have a theory for why it’s going to happen for the next 10 years. Do you have a theory for why it’s finally kicking in?

Sramana Mitra: It got kicked off by the stimulus to begin with. Now the stimulus is actually going to end, but the momentum has already picked up. I think the stimulus is no longer necessary. It’s the same thing—consumerization of IT. The industry is facing a huge consumerization of their customer base so they have to play along and stay in tune.

>>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Tom Hogan, CEO of Kony (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: That is actually a segue into the kinds of opportunities out there that are open problems. It’s one thing for corporations to try to innovate and come up with new ideas and processes using all these technologies. It’s also that same activity and ideation process that is going on the entrepreneur side. I think people are thinking about how to take advantage of those kinds of capabilities as it pertains to enterprise mobility. Have you seen anything really compelling in that field?

Tom Hogan: There are ideas and approaches that we see everyday that you scratch your head and say, “I would have never thought of that.” In terms of big productized offerings versus use case ideas, I think it’s still early innings. In terms of opportunities at the entrepreneur level, I would think the best opportunities would come from use case ideas. The abused example is Uber. The reason everybody uses them is because it’s so pervasive. Who would have thought, even four years ago, that somebody was going to create a $40 billion business.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a $40 million market cap driven by very artificial valuation drivers.
>>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Tom Hogan, CEO of Kony (Part 5)

Tom Hogan: I was with our clients last week and have had multiple conversations like this in the last two months where they’re waking up and saying, “I better go figure this out. Forget about how to do it. First, we’ve got to figure out what we need to deliver and enable before we figure out how we do it.” We’re convening 50 of our top leaders tomorrow for two days. We’re just going to brainstorm and ideate on what we can and should do with mobile to transform our businesses because we don’t know.

Sramana Mitra: I think there are two categories of applications though. There are some that are actually re-engineering existing business processes to go mobile. Then there is this new category of applications that are possible because of the geo-location services available on the mobile. What kinds of capabilities does that offer as it pertains to a particular business? That requires original thinking and fresh approaches.

Tom Hogan: I think that’s right. In the former case, which is less difficult to get your head around, there’s still some subtle differences. I’ll give you the simplest example. I’ve got a CRM system or a general ledger HR system and I want to be able to render it on a mobile device. That’s fine >>>