A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

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Why large companies acquire small companies

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Facebook asserted publicly that their future was in mobile. Facebook mobile usage was already clearly eclipsing desktop, and the dominance of mobile in developing countries makes this trend permanent. Yet mobile advertising revenues were paltry. So the shift to mobile meant Facebook’s business model was breaking.

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The rise of the “successful” unsustainable company

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Witness, for example, this terrific Fast Company article on Bill Nguyen , serial entrepreneur who’s seventh startup “Color” famously raised $41m for a new mobile app before it even launched. They said I don’t understand mobile. The launch, by the way, was a failure. And it’s now bankrupt.)

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Trends: Follow or flee?

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Mobile device usage will increase. Surely building a story around a “geo-mobile app with viral social gaming” stacks the funding deck in your favor. How much should you care about “trends?” ” A lot of predictions are easy. “Old Media” will be consumed less. Attention spans will shrink.

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Smart Bear Live 4: Nick from PinfoB.com at AZ Disruptors

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

And so, I guess PinfoB is something that locates where all those things are so that when drivers are going around making their deliveries like UPS, but also other guys, they know where to go, they’ve got it on their mobile devices and it optimizes their routes. That was great.

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Better for whom?

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Older PM tools understood that use-case, but they’re clunky install-only implementations where online collaboration, mobile and even the Mac is a bolt-on afterthought. But that means they’re no good for large, complex, distributed, multi-user projects. PM tools were built in the installed- or web-based-eras.

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Austin in San Francisco

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

When people can devise their own lifestyle, career, and mobility more than at any other time in history, it’s interesting to ask how a startup can support and encourage its employees beyond a paycheck.

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LARGE x RARE == DIFFERENT: Why scaling companies is harder than it looks

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Not to mention 10 minor incidents with degraded performance, or a DDoS attack somewhere in the data center affecting our network traffic, or some other thing that sets pagers a-buzzing in our Tech Ops team and mobilizes our Customer Support team to notify and help customers.