It’s that time of year – nominations are open for the 5th Annual Crunchies! The Crunchies are an annual celebration of startups and technology hosted by TechCrunch, GigaOm and VentureBeat.
We’re asking all BigDoor supporters, fans, enthusiasts, friends, family, partners and more to show your love and cast your vote for Best Overall Startup. The great news is you can cast your vote every day between now and December 13 - now THAT’s LOVE!
We just heard that our upstairs neighbors in the Techstars program are teaming up with Microsoft to offer a Kinect Accelerator program for ten firms early next year. The three month Kinect Accelerator program will provide $20,000 seed money as well as an Xbox development kit, the Windows Kinect SDK, entrepreneur mentor-ship, technical training and support to all ten companies. The participants, like past participants in Techstars, will work towards a demo day, which will allow them to pitch to investors, venture capitalists, Microsoft professionals and industry professionals.
In an introduction to the program, Microsoft wrote, “Microsoft is supporting entrepreneurs, engineers and innovators like you to bring to life a wide range of business ideas that leverage the limitless possibilities Kinect enables.” It’s awesome to see the success of Techstars team up with a company like Microsoft to further expand and enable the tech community here in Seattle. We can’t wait to see what participants in this program come up with!
If you are interested in applying for this program, you can find more information on Microsoft’s webpage for the program here.
Today we’re taking a stance along with companies like AOL, eBay, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Mozilla, Twitter, Tumblr, Yahoo!, and Zynga against Internet censorship. November 16th is American Censorship Day and Congress will be holding hearings on the first American Internet censorship system. Two bills in particular, the Protect IP Act (PIPA – S.968) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA – H.R.3261), are really aimed at online censorship and as Brad Feld points out, these are also “anti-entrepreneurship bills.” Both bills focus on the Justice Department taking down websites and limiting free speech. We are against the Internet Blacklist bill and encourage others to take part in this Internet-wide day of protest, find out how you can take action too.
A very special thanks to Brad Feld for taking the time to have lunch with the BigDoor crew today. We know he’s really busy when he visits Seattle and we’re honored that he made some time for a quick Q&A with the team! Thanks Brad – we found this Office Space clip with one of the two Bobs…enjoy!
We have said before, but will say it again, that the location of our office amongst other tech companies has consistently proven to be a good asset for us. Currently, our office is located in the same building as the TechStars Seattle program. We love being close to everyone in TechStars, a few of us are TechStars mentors, and we enjoy learning about each company as they come in.
Later today ten TechStars Seattle companies will be kicking off their demo day. After a rigorous 12 week program, TechStars companies have a chance to pitch to potential investors. Prior to demo day, TechStars has collectively raised about 3.5 million in funding, and hopes to raise an additional 5.75 million after the demos (see their great infographic). We wish all of them the best of luck and look forward to hearing about how demo day turns out!
Tomorrow we are excited to have a visit from our investor, Brad Feld of Foundry Group. With his busy schedule, we feel lucky to get the opportunity to sit down with him over lunch and have an opportunity to ask questions. Last time he visited, we discussed everything from the business to how he stays sane with such a demanding schedule. If you aren’t familiar with Brad, check out his blog feld.com.
Recently, Brad gave a lecture for Stanford’s ‘Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Lecture Series’. You can view the entire lecture here, but we had to share his insight on ‘trying’ and how it can undermine entrepreneurs from the start. We think any VC who quotes Yoda in a lecture for Stanford is pretty awesome, but take a look for yourself.
This week we continue our developer profiles by highlighting Brian Oldfield, a member of BigDoor since June of 2010. Enjoy!
What do you do for BigDoor?
Design and execute tests for the API and moonlight in systems management/dev-ops.
What do you like most about BigDoor?
The work and the people. The work is great, and I get to collaborate with amazing people to get it done. The passion and drive that everyone at BigDoor shares for the company and product is unmatched.
Technology you couldn’t live without?
The obvious answer: my cell (smart) phone.
The not so obvious answer: Manual transmission. If I had to drive an automatic I’d go insane.
Technology that needs to be invented?
The next generation of human interface devices. Keyboards on touch screens… really?
And my stylus doesn’t play too nice with my iPad, sad times.
iPhone or Android?
Nothing beats the reliability and ease of use of my iPhone, except maybe my *next* iPhone.
Star Trek or Star Wars?
If it’s got ‘Enterprise’ or ‘Next Generation’ in the title, Star Trek.
If it’s got (episode) 4, 5, or 6 in the title, Star Wars.
For all other permutations, Firefly.
This is a cop-out, I know.
Favorite Jimmy Johns sandwich?
Club Tuna on 7-grain, no cucumber or sprouts. Dill pickle the size of my head on the side.
Dog, Cat or Monkey?
Cat, without question (monkeys smell =/). I have two, one three year old named Linus, and a yet-to-be-named six month old.
Last movie?
Cinderella Man
What was the earliest game you played?
Can’t remember what was first, but it was probably an old school Sierra game: Hero’s Quest (Quest for Glory), Space Quest, or Kings Quest.
Game you’re currently playing?
L.A. Noire- XBox 360. Quality. Looking forward to picking up GoW 3 too!
Favorite music to work to?
Oohh, that depends on my mood.
Sometime’s it’s hiphop (Blue Scholars/Common Market), sometimes something a little more mellow (Matt Nathanson/Head and the Heart/David Bazan/Pedro the Lion), sometimes its something a little heavier (Gruntruck/Phishbone).
And don’t forget the Mother Love Bone.
Other fun facts:
I’ve been dubbed the ‘doctor’ here at BigDoor because of my diagnostic skills.
Software usability evaluation isn’t at all a new concept, nor is it exclusively the realm of bespectacled folks in lab coats, deftly avoiding eye contact behind one-way mirrors. Far from it – “discount” usability testing methods and tools have democratized the process nearly as much as cloud computing has done the same thing to scaling a business’s online infrastructure. (User interface evaluation is even being crowdsourced by companies like UTest.). But your fast-paced market probably demands that you be incredibly nimble and “launch first, ask questions later” – and hope your analytics, some A/B variant testing framework, and direct feedback optimize an initial design. But if you don’t take time to show really early, rough sketch stuff to potential users, “head slappers” – painfully obvious mistakes visible only once you stop protecting your early design from exposure to its intended audience – will lie in wait.
We recently tested portions of a major design update to our tools for publishers who design and deploy BigDoor’s gamification solutions to their sites. The goal? We wanted to learn if our introductory “onboarding” process demonstrated this new experience effectively enough to potential publishers to persuade them to sign up.
Findings? Nope. It did not.
But that’s really good news. Because we had several potential publishers attempt to complete this sign up process and share their frustrations/confusion, we were able to:
This post should also serve as a shameless plug for Silverback, a stylish, clever tool for video recording a participant’s face and the screen they’re working on, picture-in-picture style, using a Mac laptop’s standard video camera. The impact of the results above was much easier to demonstrate to the entire company with some key video highlights, and all the raw footage was right there on my laptop to work with the moment we wrapped up testing. Hugely useful.
Some imposter dramatizes a dialog box
The barriers to quick, in-house (and crowdsourced) methods for finding out how many head-slappers your early UI designs are lower than ever before. Huge ROI for a relatively tiny investment of time and effort awaits teams of any size.
- Matt Shobe, BigDoor Chief Design Officer & early stage mistake-maker
This weekend BigDoor’s co-founder and CEO, Keith Smith shared his thoughts about core metrics that really matter with the online publication Geekwire. Keith walked through the four KPI’s that every site should focus on: Loyalty, Engagement, Virality and Revenue. As Keith stated in the article, “The simplicity provided by these 4 golden metrics allows us to focus on the key drivers of our business, no matter the size and scale of our audience.”
We couldn’t do what we do without an awesome team. This week, we profiled Conor Ryan, one of the newest members of our team.
What do you do for BigDoor?
I’m responsible for managing all of the gamification content that faces the end-user in the form of quests, rewards, copy, images, and so forth. I create the structure of the quests and program them into our partners’ engagement economies, and then monitor how the quests perform. Since BigDoor only succeeds if our partners succeed via gamification, we are incentivized to make the most engaging quest experience possible, and so the quests are constantly being tweaked with an eye on analytics.
What do you like most about BigDoor?
I like that BigDoor strives to be the leader in its field. Every company wants to be the leader and talks (and talks and talks) about it, but every day I see BigDoor making the kind of choices — from hiring high-caliber people to joining the philosophical and intellectual debate about gamification — that convince me of its seriousness.
I say “seriousness”, but it’s a really fun place to work. Every day I look around and I’m like, wow, I really work here!
Technology you couldn’t live without?
Yelp. I’ve had a lot of really memorable dining (and drinking!) experiences in many otherwise unfamiliar cities thanks to Yelp. If it didn’t exist, I would have to invent it. Or use Citysearch or something.
iPhone or Android?
Android currently, but it’s my first smartphone. I’m kind of dispassionate about the whole iPhone versus Android thing, probably because I’m stuck with my Droid 2 for awhile.
Star Trek or Star Wars?
Star Wars.
Favorite Jimmy Johns sandwich?
#12, the Beach Club.
Dog, Cat or Monkey?
I used to be a dog person, but cats are more suited to apartment living. My wife and I have a cat named Zeitoon, which is Arabic for “olive”. It was also the name of a Middle Eastern restaurant in Belltown whose happy hour was our absolute favorite (another Yelp find!), now since closed. Anyway, I’m a cat person now.
Last movie?
The last movie I saw was Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris. If you haven’t seen it, you should!
What was the earliest game you played?
Probably Pong — when I was in first grade our teacher would pull out an old Atari set for rainy day recess. I remember being sort of unimpressed — this was the early ’90s, way before retro games were cool again.
Game you’re currently playing?
Angry Birds. It passes the time at the bus stop and at the same time it turns my phone into a handwarmer.
Favorite music to work to?
Slave Ambient by The War on Drugs or the new Bon Iver album.
Other fun facts:
I’ve got the travel bug pretty bad — in the last 7 months I’ve been to New York, Paris, and Prague. My wife Andrea and I are planning a trip to Portugal next year, and we really want to visit Beirut, where her family is from. My great-grandparents immigrated from Ireland and Norway, so those countries are high on the list too.