Pixmac Founder Interview

Founded in September 2008, Pixmac is a fast-growing microstock site with a database of more than 10 million photos available for sale. The small team is based in Prague led by founder Vita Valka, a designer turned tech entrepreneur. Besides their flagship site, Pixmac also recently launched a stock photo site for people as well as vector illustrations. I had the chance to ask Vita a few questions about running his company…
Why did you start Pixmac?
There was a huge opportunity in the market. Traditional stock photos were declining, microstock was a rising star. I’m a designer and I was using sites like Pixmac for years. That was a great challenge for me.

Can you give me a brief overview of where the firm is today?
Pixmac is one of the Top 10 agencies in microstock worldwide. We have the best technology inside and we still refine it again and again to [...]

Site of the Month: Note & Point

Note & Point is a simple idea — a collection of well-designed presentations submitted by users. The gallery-style site follows the same principle of the dime-a-dozen CSS galleries but instead of showcasing websites, the site exclusively focuses on Powerpoint and PDF presentations.
Hopefully, this will inspire some of the cookie-cutter slide decks we see too often in the business world.
Aside from aesthetics, I was surprisingly pleased to find a lot of the presentations with quality content. Hmm, there could be unlocked potential here…

Spain Goes Groupon Crazy: 12 Sites To Find Daily Deals

I’m not much of a coupon guy nor have I tried Groupon yet. But the group-buying craze has entered Spain with a vengeance and it’s hard not to pay attention. It seems like every other month there is a new site that pops up but the game is still wide open and still too early to declare a clear winner.
For us consumers it could be considered good news because there are plenty of opportunities to find a deal if you know where to look. The compiled list below are 10 worthy sites that offer quality deals for major cities in Spain. Do you know of any other sites that offer deals in Spain? Add them in the comments!
1.) Groupon (CityDeal)

2.) Groupalia

3.) BuyTheFace

4.) Reduti

5.) Colectivia

6.) Offerum

7.) Ofertius

8.) LetsBonus

9.) Cuponing

10.) Groupola

11.) Amitad

12.) CholloCity

The Power of Online Communities for Consumer Brands

Online communities are increasing becoming a powerful source of word-of-mouth marketing and building long-lasting awareness for consumer brands. The following questions were posed to Maria Sipka, an expert on the subject and CEO/Founder of Linqia – a startup connecting brands, agencies and consumers.
Q: Why should brands engage online communities as part of their marketing efforts?
The simple answer is to get closer to their customers. Close to 1 billion people are engaging in online communities globally and spending a considerable amount of time connecting, sharing, discussing and learning. Mark Zukerberg recently said that “Communities already exist. Think about how you can help that community do what it wants to do”.
Q: What types of approaches do you think work best?
The first approach is to understand clearly what the objectives the brand wants to achieve. Does the brand want to create awareness around a new product? Conduct market research? Increase their sales? The [...]

Tesla goes IPO: Hype or Home run?

Tesla Motors, the electric car manufacturer and maker of the $109,000 Roadster, entered the NASDAQ yesterday surpassing expectations and closing 40% up at $24 (from $17) during first day of trade while the Dow plummeted 230 points. Not a bad start.
At the same time, there’s been a lot of hype around this IPO mainly because it’s the first American car manufacturer to go public since Ford (1956) and because Tesla has become a poster child of the clean tech sector, bringing hope and promise to other green companies. But many claim that this is all just hype and merely false promises for the industry.
On the surface, it may be a great company and they are, undoubtedly, doing something very positive for the automotive industry (and ultimately the environment) but there are some major beefs and concerns about the company that undermines their current $2.2 billion valuation.
Here are a few:
- [...]

Incredible World Cup Visual by Marca.com

The folks at Marca.com have broke down the World Cup tournament into giant interactive calendar that makes it easy to follow all the teams, game schedules, cities/stadiums and groups in the tournament. A simple rollover of the mouse changes the displayed calendar info and the visual can be viewed full screen.
This is definitely my go-to guide for the next couple weeks. Simple idea, fantastic execution. Muy bien hecho.

Site of the Month: IsItSunshine.com

IsItSunshine is a clever weather mashup that shows local weather conditions and answers a very simple (ungrammatically correct) question: is it sunshine? The site makes use of Google Maps with an overlay of large visual and very cheerful icons. No fuss, no feature overload. Just a simple idea providing useful information and executed really, really well.
A few other weather mashups already exist but here’s what I especially like about this site:

Scrollable time line of upcoming 7-day forecast
Filters for temperature, wind, cloudiness, precipitation etc.
Loads fast

There’s very little information about the site but it appears to have been created by a Swedish developer, Magnus Ottosson. Hey, Magnus… how about a mobile app?

3 Promising Startups Emerge from Startup 2.0

Another edition of the Startup 2.0 event (part of the Nonick conference) wrapped up in Bilbao a few days ago and three startups proved to be more worthy than others.
The winners, from top to bottom, include:

Paris-based SubMate is a “social commuting” site that helps people discover and meet people with similar interests that share the same commute on the subway. The site is currently available for Paris, London and New York. I give it a year before it morphs into a dating site…

Minube is a spanish social travel network (aren’t there already a lot of these?). With Minube, users can plan their trips, compare flights and hotels and share travel experiences.

Another Spanish-based startup, Askaro, is an information exchange site that lets users ask and answer questions related to specific geographic areas (cities, neighborhoods, etc.). I’d love to see a mobile app for this — could be extremely handy.

Hey Gary Vaynerchuk, It’s Just Not That Easy

I like Gary Vaynerchuk and give the guy a ton of credit. He’s full of energy, very passionate and good at inspiring people to get off their ass and do something. But (and a BIG but) I have to be critical because what he preaches is seldom reality for most people and usually just doesn’t work.
His story is something like this: 1) Follow your passion 2) Build a business around it 3) Cash in. To this, he adds stuff like “look yourself in the mirror and ask yourself ‘what do I want to do every day for the rest of my life?’… do that. I promise you can monetize that shit” Well, guess what? That shit doesn’t usually work.
I completely support the notion of following your passion (in anything you do in life). But building a business around it and, more importantly, trying to cash in is not [...]

What is an API and Why You Might Need One

There is a lot of buzz and innovation stemming from the rise of APIs these days so I wanted to dig in deeper to learn more.  The following is a guest post by Steven Willmot, an expert in the API arena and CEO of 3scale – a company that provides API management services.

I asked Steven if he could shed some light on what is an API and why you might need one. Here’s what he had to say…
Today’s web is 95% about web pages of one sort or another – content sites, ecommerce site or web apps which allow you to get things done. Running a great sight or service means getting people to your site and keeping them there (SEO ninjas wanted here!). However, what about this other 5%? It turns out there is another kind of web emerging which is pretty different – one which is driven by [...]