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Stanford is continuing its ultra-popular course series on creating tech startups. Starting this month, LinkedIn billionaire Reid Hoffman will be teaching a specialized version of the course on scaling businesses from small product ideas to large companies (or what he calls “blitzscaling”).
“When you examine the history of iconic Silicon Valley companies, they quickly grew their customers, revenue, and organizational scale to fit a global market,” he explained in a company blog post. “Most of the impact and value creation that Silicon Valley companies produce actually occurs during this scaleup phase.”
Interestingly, Hoffman is permitting select non-Stanford students to apply for the class. Interested parties can fill out the application form here. (Warning: It’s lengthy.) For those who don’t get in, or can’t fly to the Bay Area, lectures will be placed online for Course CS183C.
A Novel Approach (At Least For Stanford)
It’s not very often that world-class schools allow non-matriculating students to walk into their halls and intermingle with students. They usually keep outsiders at arm’s length with online lectures. But much of the value of a university comes with the networks between students and professors—such as former Stanford grad students Larry Page and Sergey Brin (who, I’m told, went into the search business).
Unfortunately, this gated philosophy can also perpetuate insular networks that exclude the most needy students. Opening up the course to public application is one way (albeit small) to break down these barriers.
The lectures themselves will cover everything from hiring an executive team to managing through an analytics dashboard. You can learn more about the course here.
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For every structural breakthrough with carbon fiber or nanotubes, it’s interesting to see we still haven’t maxed out the capabilities of more common materials. A trio of origami-minded researchers have discovered that if you cut common paper into a particular zig-zag pattern, then join it with another sheet of the same shape to form a kind of zipper, you get a freakishly strong structure. Even better, “The structure folds up flat, yet rapidly and easily expands to the rigid tube configuration.”
It’s difficult to understand this “Zippered Tube” technique by looking at photos, but this video demonstration should make it more clear:
The far-flung researchers–grad student Evgueni Filipov from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Georgia Institute of Technology professor Glaucio Paulino and University of Tokyo professor Tomohiro Tachi–published their research this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.
I’m hoping they’ll release the patterns into the wild, allowing an army of curious makers to experiment with zippered tubes in paper, wood, plastic and metal. Can you imagine what an Izzy Swan, a Matthias Wandel or a Jimmy DiResta might be able to create with the technique?
There are not many designers who could take the concept of a 19th-Century writing desk and turn it into a modern-day soldering station with a built-in computer. There are fewer designers still who could then actually build the thing. But take a look at this:
As you can see, Gothenburg-based Love Hultén is not your average designer. What you see above is his piece called Tempel, a combination storage unit, soldering station and computer workstation.
The integration of electronic equipment such as a built-in high-end computer and a 2.1 speaker system really enables it to function as a high-tech working environment. The inside also features a motor driven hidden pop-up 24? monitor covered in a walnut frame and a built-in soldering/electronic working station with customized tools, tailored after the owner’s needs. Every detail is processed and adapted to fit the concept in whole. The tech panels may look like something taken from a James Bond movie, but everything displayed has a function. The backlit reservoir hosts an effervescent liquid down the left panel, which exposes the the computer’s beautiful cooling system.
Take a look at how he’s rigged the monitor to pop up:
I think it’s safe to say your design and craftsmanship is well-respected when Sweden’s own School of Design & Crafts commissions you to create pieces just for them. Tasked with creating lecture podiums, Hultén whipped something up that stores a light for reading off of paper, a flatscreen monitor, and even the speaker itself (done pop-up style) to broadcast the speech:
The Hultén piece currently making the blog rounds is a real show-stopper: What appears to be a walnut briefcase actually unfurls to reveal his Battlecade, a two-person gaming machine that references the classic “Battleship:”
Wondering how he reconciled the joysticks and the folding action? Like this:
Hultén, by the way, is a one-man operation, designing and constructing everything himself in his Gothenburg workshop. Please check out more of his stuff here.
This sponsored post is produced in association with Citrix GoToWebinar.
We’re living in a technologically empowered age where smartphones, tablets, laptops, wearables, and e-readers reign supreme and customers are spoilt for choice not just for the content, but for the platform they wish to view it on.
Fortunately, content is still king for consumers. And the top marketers in the industry are the ones that can tap into the power of connected data and understand what sparks and sustains user interaction across different platforms.
The key to building a solid multi-platform content strategy is to have a keen understanding of the limitations of new technology and how you can create tailored content for each platform. And that demands a highly dynamic content strategy that offers a unique experience to users across each channel.
Your customer is a moving target, and you need to be fully tuned into their content consumption habits and device preferences to actively adapt your content strategy for attracting the right audience.
Making mobile a priority is non-negotiable
At this point, denying the impact of mobile marketing is like trying to contest the existence of gravity. According to a 2014 comScore report, 31 percent of content published by top media entities is viewed solely on smartphones and more than half of U.S. users spend the majority of their time consuming digital media with mobile apps. Google, Amazon, Apple, Yahoo, and Facebook collectively topped the list for highest combined platform usage.
A recent study conducted by Millward Brown revealed that nearly 60 percent of buyers use mobile devices to research their purchases.
It is becoming increasingly evident that the intrinsic value of your content in the eyes of mobile-savvy users instantly shoots up if your brand maintains a consistent multi-platform presence. However, you need to keep in mind that content relevance means a lot more than multi-channel presence.
Here are some of the most rewarding practices used by content marketers to captivate mobile users:
1. Make it locally relevant
Whether you’re setting up a mobile-optimized website or a mobile app, location plays a monumental role in determining your audience’s content consumption habits.
According to a mobile media consumption study done by Pew Research Center, 74 percent of adult smartphone owners ages 18 and older say they use their phone to get directions or other information based on their current location. Location-enabled services in apps allow marketers to target consumers at the right time – and right place – giving marketers a golden opportunity to serve location-specific content to consumers and make their brand interactions worthwhile.
For example, Blis Media helped Spotify produce excellent results by serving ads in airport coffee shops based on the assumption that people would be inclined to purchase last-minute travel entertainment.
Foursquare, Waze, Tinder, and Google Now have also done a splendid job delivering high quality location-specific content through the efficient use of big data. You can easily entice people walking by your store to walk in simply by offering a sweet check-in deal on Facebook or Foursquare.
2. Optimize for push messaging
Thanks to this newfound context-driven approach, content marketing through messaging for apps has become a lot more productive.
The highest click rates come from short messages (10 or fewer words) packed with words like “offer,” “super,” “ends” and “deal”. A 2014 Localytics report on push messaging revealed that there’s a 66 percent higher click rate on push messages that are sent on weekdays, and the ideal time to send them to users is between 12 p.m to 5 p.m.
Make your content relevant and timely by sending offers and updates on products users have viewed before. For instance, a user may have abandoned their online shopping cart with a few Burberry clothing items for some unknown reason in the past. By following up with a notification like “Your favorite item: Burberry Check Coat – now 20% off”, you have a high chance of rekindling the transaction.
3. Prioritize visual content
Social Bakers looked at the top 10 percent of posts made by more than 30,000 Facebook brand pages and found that posts with photos saw the most engagement—accounting for a whopping 87 percent of total interactions.
Mobile consumers strongly prefer rich visual content over text-heavy content due to the limitation of screen space and straightforward nature of the brand communication. Therefore, opting for catchy infographics and visually striking banners to promote your brand will prove to be a lot more engaging.
4. Champion responsive design
If you’re aiming to deliver a seamless content interaction experience to your customers across different platforms, then investing in responsive design should be on the top of your priority list – particularly if you haven’t yet invested in a mobile app. It allows automatic optimization of content across devices for effortless navigation and eliminates the need to create a mobile version of your website.
Big players in the media industry like USA Today and Disney have implemented responsive design across a number of their properties to streamline the cross-platform content experience for audiences.
Here are some of the key elements involved in implementing responsive design for marketing content across mobile devices:
Readability –to make sure that your message is easily visible, use at least 14 point fonts.
Navigability —to accommodate finger tapping for navigation more efficiently, avoid cluttering the page with unnecessary elements and create big buttons.
Adaptability — to target users more effectively, leverage the power of big data to change specific elements of your website, ad, or email body based on the past interactions of the user. Amazon’s brilliant recommendation engine is one of the best examples of dynamic content strategy.
Granularity — to deliver your content effectively across all platforms, plan it in such a way that you can break down your content into shareable tweets, Facebook posts, quotes, etc. without losing the authenticity of your brand message.
Action Potential — to focus your reader’s attention on the key points, use a single column to structure your content and place your call-to-action at the top of the screen.
It’s not easy to ignore that the always-on nature of social media can be a really intimidating factor in devising your content marketing strategy, not to mention the need to continually feed other content across your owned properties. However, if your content is crisp and you know your consumer profile and the best way to reach them, then delivering a seamless multi-platform content experience is not a dream so far-fetched.
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