Archive for category Startups
Quick Reviews: BunchBall and BigDoor, social gamification service providers
I had the opportunity to evaluate BunchBall and BigDoor, two of the leading social gaming service providers, aka gamification. Here’s a quick low down:
BunchBall – Great demo by Kevin Spier, Director of Sales. Bunchball has a mature toolset and has been around since 2005. They have many well known clients such as Comcast, Victoria’s Secret, and NBC. I was quite impressed by their capabilities and analytics. It’s rare that service providers surpass my expectations but BunchBall did. BunchBall is backed by Granite Ventures and Adobe Systems Incorporated. The downside is that their current pricing model reflects their targeted clientele. Bunchball has a set pricing model in the mid 4 figures per month for up to 1MM unique vistors. All in all, a great value for established customers who have the budget to drive traffic to their site in a meaningful way – because let’s face it, gamification works if properly implemented. Kevin was quite helpful and introduced me to several of his connections who are interested in the space of my new venture.
BigDoor – Good demo by Keith Smith, CEO of BigDoor. BigDoor recently scored a $5MM venture round led by the Foundry Group, so they are playing catch up in some ways to the more established BunchBall. They have a toolset that will be able to get me the gamification features I desire, albeit with more massaging from my own development team than BunchBall. One plus about this is that BigDoor provides their technology more like an open source library so I can customize the features to fit my needs. Keith also has been quite helpful and BigDoor has a huge advantage for two reasons: First, I, too, am a Seattle based startup CEO, so I am biased towards supporting local businesses and startups and Second, their pricing model, while based on API calls, scales with my business. This is an almost unarguable advantage for a cash-strapped startup and ultimately led towards our choice to go with BigDoor.
Do yourself a favor if you need to drive traffic and participation to your site and check out these two Companies, both offer superior value-added services.
Dan Hall
Quorus – helping sites connect with their users
Posted by Dan Hall in Adding Value, Startups, social media on June 18, 2010
Had a great meeting last at Caffe Umbria with Michael Dougherty, the CEO and Co-Founder of Quorus. They are doing some very cool stuff helping sites connect with their users including a couple of tools that allow real time chat between users viewing the same page (very helpful in allowing users to discuss products in real time) and simplified member sign ups. It is a great way to add value to your site. Get in touch with them to help drive engagement and conversion especially if you are in the e-commerce space.
Dan Hall
Sourcing Seattle
Sourcing Seattle – a Shift in Focus and Topic
Since March of 2008, I have been posting on and off again on Sourcing Seattle mostly about human resources and organizational dynamics. In May, I made the transition from the government sector back to the Seattle startup space, and I am quite excited to be back. The Seattle startup space is full of interesting, passionate individuals working on a number of very cool ideas. To mirror my professional transition, Sourcing Seattle will now be focused on these same topics.
Stay tuned to hear about my journey in the Seattle startup space and the interesting people and companies I meet.
Dan Hall
Seattle startup, Qworky, offers a web app for better meetings
Posted by Dan Hall in Adding Value, Creating Efficiency, Startups on April 14, 2010
My wife sent over a clipping from TechFlash’s article about the Northwest Entrepreneur Network’s First Look Forum, which included Qworky, a Seattle based startup looking to “develop software and advanced technologies to help individuals and organizations design a better workday, beginning with better meeting.” She knows how much I despise meetings.
I am always intrigued with companies using technology to improve processes so I decided to take a deeper look at Qworky’s website to see if they had a demo or more information about how they actually plan on help me have better meetings. Here’s what I found out:
1. “Easy to access agendas ensures your meeting tells for years to come. ” Mmm. Okay.
2. “A shared central location for meeting information means Qworky reduces email overhead, all while integrating email for clients and colleagues who live and breathe their inbox. ” Gotcha, central meeting location online.
3. “By incorporating positive cues proven to increase collaborative participation, Qworky Meetings is your ultimate brainstorm companion. Bring Qworky to the Table and the Ideas will follow.” Apparently, you haven’t met some of the people I sit with in meetings.
And that’s all they’re sharing. Fortunately, the meeting preview they used at NWEN is still available here. You can also go to their preview site and register to set up your own test meeting. It was pretty straight forward. Below is the end result.
So, here the problem. You are asking me to use another artificial process (Qworky) to better another artificial process (the meeting). I assume, eventually, you will even ask me to pay for it. It looks much like a B2C play which is a difficult play when tackling processes within organizations. You may get some adopters here or there but more than likely there will be significant obstacles for widespread use.
I like startups, I like them a lot. I also like to see them tackling cool issues like making meetings better. For that, I wish Qworky luck.
Dan Hall
Dean Graziano, Co-Founder, leaving Visible Technologies
On Friday, April 3rd, it was announced that Dean Graziano, one of the co-founders of the company, was leaving Visible Technologies.
Dean was always pushing the company forward; he is amazingly passionate and loved VT. Many of our biggest deals started with Dean “hunting elephants.” In my opinion, he was the heart of Visible Technologies.
Dean, I wish you the best.
Dan Hall
Creating Efficiency – Rypple and ActiveWords
Posted by Dan Hall in Creating Efficiency, Startups on January 31, 2009
I had the pleasure of interviewing the co-CEO, Daniel Debow, of a Toronto based startup, Rypple. He reached out to me after I had posted my initial thoughts about them in a previous blog post, Making Rypples in Performance Management. He took 45 minutes talking to me about Rypple, what they are doing and where they are going with their Company. I got chills. The full write up of that conversation is forthcoming.
Meanwhile, check out ActiveWords. If you are like me and do a lot of organization of files into folders or a lot of repeative actions (like sourcing candidates from LinkedIn), this simple program is a must have.
Dan Hall
Big News at the Office Today: Bill Baker named as Visible Technologies’ new CTO
We were finally able to announce Bill Baker as our new CTO. He was one of 30 some odd distinguished engineers at Microsoft. I had the chance to spend about an hour with him a couple weeks ago discussing his new team and various issues. I am totally excited with having him come on board.
Check out the story at Brier Dudley’s Blog
Dan Hall
Seattle Human Resources Manager
Re: When recruiters tell you the opposite of what you are looking for
Posted by Dan Hall in Startups, recruiting, social media on July 5, 2008
A friend of mine who is connected within the Seattle Startup community, sent me this post by Marcelo Calbucci on the Seattle 2.0 blog discussing the frustrations and shortcomings that Startup Managers have of recruiting agencies in general.
I felt compelled to respond, having gone through a similar process, while recruiting for my Company as an internal Seattle HR Manager.
My response is below:
I am the Recruiting and HR Manager for a Social Media startup in Seattle. In the past six months I have personally recruited dozens of employees.
Being in-house, I have a distinct advantage because:
1. I passionately care about the future and well-being of my Company.
2. I recognize that I am the first person a potential candidate hears outlining my Company and our products. I take that responsibility very seriously. If I am not passionate to be here why would a candidate? People want to work at a Company people are passionate about; this gives me a huge advantage over some of those Companies you listed in your post.
3. A lot of candidates don’t use recruiters, nor care to. I work with contingent recruiters and recruiting agencies at times. There are some good recruiting agencies out there but most only try to fill the req and don’t have a large stake in the fit.
4. Recruiting agencies rarely (and I mean rarely) go below 20% placement fee structures. Their candidates better be 20% better than anyone I can source (which is not a normal occurrence – again I know the culture and fit of my Company and evangelize it passionately).
If you plan on hiring more than 5 or 6 employees in a year, do yourself a favor and hire a good fulltime HR and
Recruiting Manager, not only you will get better candidates, but you will also reduce liability (which there is, and don’t kid yourself, a lot from a HR standpoint), and save money.
Plus every candidate who doesn’t get a job, now knows our Company from someone who loves it and they have a positive lasting, impression, which has cascading effects in the long term.
Dan Hall
Seattle Human Resources Manager