Interview with Foundum Co-founder

The entrepreneurial ecosystem in Europe is very fragmented but a new online platform is trying to offer better connectivity to help facilitate relationships among entrepreneurs, investors, and everyone else along the way. I recently caught up with Daniela Arens (@danielaarens), co-founder of Foundum, to learn more about the launch of this new project.
In one sentence, what is Foundum?
Foundum is an online platform creating the local, national and global entrepreneurial ecosystem by connecting innovative high-growth entrepreneurs and their startups with relevant private investors, advisors, service & funding providers that will fuel their growth and accelerate their success.

Design and Branding Inspiration

Need a boost of creative inspiration? There are plenty of online galleries and design blogs to help you source ideas and get you inspired. Below is list of some of my favorite resources to get the creative mojo going:
Creattica
Originally started as Faveup, Creattica is a comprehensive design gallery showcasing great works of visual design broken down into several categories: advertising, logos, business cards, typography, websites (flash and html), and a lot more.
Webcreme
Webcreme is a design-forward website gallery offering a selection of high quality, hand-picked CSS/HTML websites. It has been a staple in the design community for years and doesn’t offer many bells & whistles like other galleries, just a focus on great web design.

7 Tips for Marketing Your Lean Startup

Below is a presentation I recently gave for Luis Martin Cabiedes Lean Startup class in IESE with some tips and advice for startup marketing.
7 Tips for Marketing Your Lean Startup
View more PowerPoint from Babak Samii

Online Marketing Trends 2012: Opinions from the Experts

The online marketing landscape is changing quickly and dramatically – deeper marriage of Social and SEO, importance of influencers, heightened focus on content marketing, emergence of new social networks – and there’s a lot to consider in 2012. Here are a few opinions from experts that are at the forefront of online marketing…

Ashkan Karbasfrooshan (@ashkan)
Contributer at Techcrunch, CEO of Watchmojo
Having asked a number of professionals for their input re: predictions and also published a list of things that should happen but won’t, I think 2012 will be marked by a steady continuation of all of the main trends we have been seeing for a few years now:
- viewers shifting consumption from TV to web,
- advertisers following suit,
- flight to quality of programming,
- scale and brands mattering more than ever;
but I don’t see any one of these things accelerating overnight because the incumbent (TV) and biggest marketers are content with the [...]

Interview with SocialBro Co-founder

For those of you with an interest in social media and online communities, you probably have heard of SocialBro — a must-have Twitter analytics and community management tool that is exploding onto the scene. I had a chance to catch up with Co-Founder and CTO, Alfredo Artiles (@aartiles24), to find out more about their fast-growing startup.
Where did the idea for SocialBro come from?
SocialBro is the 8th app of a Social Media tools network called e24apps. We have a wide background in the development of Twitter apps: followfriday.com is just an example. Besides, we usually manage many Twitter accounts, so we realized that we needed a tool to manage its evolution and to know more about our contacts.  So, with this know-how with respect to Social Media, we identified a group of tasks and needs which was not covered by the market. We created SocialBro to provide the response to all [...]

How to Improve Your Website Conversions with A/B Testing [INTERVIEW]

Successful website optimization is a delicate balance of art and science that can have a drastic impact on your ability to generate leads, convert new customers and increase sales. The following questions were posed to Pete Koomen, an ex-Googler and now Co-founder of Optimizely – a fast-growing startup helping companies increase their conversions with A/B testing .
What is A/B testing?
The idea of A/B testing is very simple: make a change to your website, (or an ad, or a marketing email,) and then measure how this change affects visitor behavior.  A really simple example is A/B testing the effect of a text changes on your landing page call-to-action button: does a red “Buy now” work better than a blue “Learn more”?  How about “Get started”? These are questions that A/B testing can answer quickly.
Optimizely has made it dead simple to run A/B tests on your website, whether you’re an engineer or [...]

How to Add Facebook Like Button & Like Box for Different Languages

The Facebook Like Button and Like Box can easily be added to any page but the trouble is that the default display is in English. To specify the language, you simply need to include the “locale” parameter with the desired language value.
Here is a quick hack to display the Like Button and Like box in other languages using the iFrame.

1. Copy the Like Button code:
<iframe src=”http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?
app_id=185800681493185&amp;href=YOUR WEB PAGE&amp;send=false
&amp;layout=standard&amp;width=450&amp;show_faces=false&amp;
action=like&amp;colorscheme=light&amp;font&amp;height=35″
scrolling=”no” frameborder=”0″ style=”border:none;
overflow:hidden;width:450px; height:35px;” allowTransparency=
“true”></iframe>
and change the “locale” paramater (for your language):
<iframe src=”http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?
locale=it_IT&app_id=185800681493185&amp;href=YOUR WEB PAGE
&amp;send=false&amp;layout=standard&amp;width=450&amp;
show_faces=false&amp;action=like&amp;colorscheme=light&amp;
font&amp;height=35″ scrolling=”no” frameborder=”0″ style=
“border:none; overflow:hidden; width:450px; height:35px;”
allowTransparency=”true”></iframe>

Keyword Ranking Reports by Advanced Web Ranking

Advanced Web Ranking (AWR) is a comprehensive SEO tracking and reporting tool that has been getting more and more attention in the online marketing community in recent years. It’s a very robust and feature-rich SEO software that I particularly like because of its usability and reporting capabilities.
The product provides 6 reports for tracking your SEO efforts (Website Rankings, Keyword Rankings, Search Engine Rankings, Top Sites, Overview and Visibility) of which the Keyword Ranking Report I find to be indispensable.
There are three features I especially like about the Keyword Ranking Report…
Keyword Rankings
1. Evolution in Time – this is a visual snapshot of keyword rankings of your site (and competitors) over a specified range of time. The  chart display allows you to filter for selected keywords or all keywords and, similar to Google Analytics, you can include notes (annotations) for specific dates.
I find this to be [...]

Turntable.fm: Tremendously Addictive

Online music is a hot space that has evolved a lot since the Napster days. Whether it’s discovery, sharing or pure listening enjoyment there has been a lot of innovation over the last decade. Having said that, I wholeheartedly-without-any-hesitation believe that Turntable.fm is one of the most disruptive online music sites to date.
The guys at Turntable.fm have figured out a recipe that includes the best of discovery, sharing and listening and wrapped the whole thing up with a clever game layer that is highly addicting. The premise is simple: anyone can be a DJ and play music for users in various music-themed chat rooms (yeah, that’s right: chat rooms). If you play good music, users will reward you and you can earn points. If you play bad music, well, you get the idea..
Here are 5 features I really love about the site:
1) Earn points and build a fan base by [...]

Everything You Need to Know About Carbon Offsets

Reducing your carbon footprint is critical in the fight against global warming and impact on climate change. The following questions were posed to Luke Miller (@offsetluke), an expert on the subject and CEO/Founder of Offset Options – a startup helping companies offset their carbon emissions and achieve carbon neutrality.
What is a carbon offset?
A carbon offset represents a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Voluntary carbon offsets allow individuals and organizations to mitigate their own carbon footprint by funding projects that result in emissions reductions that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.
How do carbon offsets help the environment?
The idea behind carbon offsetting is that greenhouse gas emissions spread very quickly around the planet. As a consequence their impact on global warming does not depend from where they originated. So while the opportunities for reductions of emissions might be limited in one location for reasons of cost or technology, the next best option may be [...]