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Immigration Laws Still Need Fixing for Entrepreneurs

Most of the talk surrounding immigration reform in the U.S. these days is coming from my home state of Arizona where controversial laws like Senate Bill 1070 have the nation divided. For entrepreneurs, there are other laws - mainly those surrounding work visas and green card acquisition - that are in dire need of reform if the nation is going to rebound on the back of innovation. Thursday night, the tech community was again reminded of this need when Robert Scoble posted a blog and video interview with a pair of foreign-born entrepreneurs who shared their varying but equally troubling stories of immigration.

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The first is Aye Moah, a native of Burma - one of the poorest nations in the world - who found herself accepted to MIT within nine months of just learning that the institute existed. Though she is one of the smartest students from her country and despite nailing a perfect score on the SAT, her chances at employment in the U.S. are slim due to the current state of our immigration laws.

"Even if she were to get a work visa, it probably would be from a bigger company that would treat her poorly (I keep hearing stories of how immigrants are treated like crap and can't leave, otherwise their work visa will be yanked). These laws are unjust and not American," writes Scoble in a passionate post from Thursday night. "Worse yet they are anti innovation because it's these smart, highly educated, people who will start the next companies."

The other interviewee is Ronald Mannak, a living example of just why so many foreign entrepreneurs want to come to America. According to Mannak, Dutch laws have left him responsible for repaying $200,000 he received in venture funding for a startup that went under. Though there is some argument in the comments below Scoble's blog regarding these laws, Mannak's financial law example is one of the prime reasons entrepreneurs want to set up shop here.

As we have mentioned before on ReadWriteStart, the Startup Visa movement has been lobbying law makers in Washington to open the nation's doors to entrepreneurs. We first wrote about the potential benefits of the bill in December of last year, and this year updated you when the bill was officially introduced by Senators John Kerry and Richard Lugar.

The stories highlighted by Scoble Thursday night are just a few of the numerous examples of both the need and demand for this type of immigration reform. More entrepreneurs means more companies which means more jobs for Americans. While Moah and Mannak may be a pair of fringe examples that coincidentally wound up infront of Robert Scoble's camera, their stories still shed light on how America is shooting itself in the foot on growing entrepreneurship.

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Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2010 11:30:00 -0800
Author: Chris Cameron :: Category: Analysis

Strategy Roundtable: Startups In Malaysia

This week's roundtable was organized in collaboration with my partner MAD Incubator, a technology incubator in Malaysia that is dedicated to giving technopreneurs a chance to succeed and make a difference.

First up was Max Teoh presenting GetToDo, a real-time, vicinity-based sales and promotions solution for the Malaysian lifestyle market. It enables retailers and brands to promote their products to consumers interested in lifestyle products through Internet and mobile channels. In terms of target audience, the company targets trend-conscious Internet savvy consumers in the teenagers to working adult segments.

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Max came with a few specific questions around pricing and content strategy. On pricing, his assumption is that retailers and brands will be paying for promotions, and he has checked with about 100 retailers and brands to validate this assumption. However, the pricing model he suggested - $.01 per minute of promotion highlight - doesn't sit well with me. Elsewhere in the world, promotions pricing models generally revolve around CPM, CPC, CPA, and similar metrics. I have not seen a time-based promotion metric ever.

Even though Max wants to undercut the price-points of Google and Facebook, which may be a fine strategy, I just don't feel comfortable about this cost-per-minute metric that I have not seen before. Readers, if any of you have seen it, please let me know. If not, then I would advise Max to stay within industry-standard pricing models like CPM, CPC, and CPA. Max also had questions about his user-generated content strategy, and how to ensure that UGC quality is maintained at a high level. Well, to that my advice is to introduce a layer of human moderation.

Social Walk

Next Tham Keng Yew discussed SocialWalk, a Web-based solution for managing conference and meeting registrations. Keng Yew has introduced a level of differentiation in this solution by helping the registrants connect with people with related interests from a business networking point of view, which I thought was quite clever. The company already has a number of good customers, and is a validated business.

His questions for me were around how to increase his sales momentum. Currently, most of their leads are coming in from referrals from event organizers. My response is to do a focused direct mail and email campaign, or even telemarketing campaign, targeting the conference and event organizers. We also discussed how to engage the attendee community further, and to that, my response was to build an event recommendation engine that promotes related events to their community.

Xilnex

Ooi Boon Sheng then presented Xilnex, a retail business software catering to the Malaysian SMB space. The company already has 200-plus customers, and a validated subscription-based business model. The product, however, needs some high-touch, hands-on support to drive adoption, which is why Ooi is selling the product through a couple of national distributors.

His problem is that distributors are lukewarm because of the low initial payment due to the subscription business model. Ooi needs to, therefore, make it as attractive as possible for distributors to sell the product, and the way to do so is to invest in some marketing and lead generation himself. And as the leads come in, pass them onto the distributors, so that they can service and convert those leads efficiently.

For a new product, the ISV needs to do some demand generation on behalf of the distributors, and thus make it worthwhile for the distributors to engage with them. And once again, direct marketing against very tightly segmented lists is one of the cheaper ways of demand creation.

Parking Management

Up last was Roslee Ali for Abbassy Sdn Bhd who has a comprehensive parking management solution. Roslee's customers are municipal parking owners and also building owners with parking lots. There are about three existing competitors in the market who have deep relationships with the target customer base, even though their products are relatively simple, non-comprehensive, and commodity-based. Nonetheless, it is proving hard for Roslee to penetrate the market because the buyers tend to rely on these older vendors, and are reluctant to change into a new vendor or a new system.

My assessment on this scenario is that Roslee needs to partner with the existing vendors and extend their solutions, and sell to the customers with these vendors. Competing with them and trying to replace their solutions won't work. We discussed a variety of issues about this business including financing and cash-flow challenges.

I started doing my free Online Strategy Roundtables for entrepreneurs in the fall of 2008. These roundtables are the cornerstone programming of a global initiative that I have started called One Million by One Million (1M/1M). Its mission is to help a million entrepreneurs globally to reach $1 million in revenue and beyond, build $1 trillion in sustainable global GDP, and create 10 million jobs. In 1M/1M, I teach the EJ Methodology which is based on my Entrepreneur Journeys research, and emphasize bootstrapping, idea validation, and crisp positioning as some of the core principles of building strong fundamentals in early stage ventures. In addition, we are offering entrepreneurs access to investors and customers through our recently launched our 1M/1M Incubation Radar series. You can pitch to be featured on my blog following these instructions.

The recording of this roundtable can be found here. Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here. You can register for the next roundtable here.

Sramana Mitra is a technology entrepreneur and strategy consultant in Silicon Valley. She has founded three companies, writes a business blog, Sramana Mitra on Strategy, and runs the 1M/1M initiative. She has a master's degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her Entrepreneur Journeys book series, Entrepreneur Journeys, Bootstrapping: Weapon Of Mass Reconstruction, Positioning: How To Test, Validate, and Bring Your Idea To Market and her latest volume Innovation: Need Of The Hour, as well as Vision India 2020, are all available from Amazon.

Photo by Ramasamy Chidambaram

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Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2010 10:00:00 -0800
Author: Sramana Mitra :: Category: StartUp 101

Study: Youth Not Only Care About Facebook Privacy, They Do Something About It

Over the past year, Facebook and privacy are two topics that have become practically joined at the hip. The site has changed its privacy settings again and again and last winter CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared the death of privacy. One of the leading arguments behind all of this has been that we live in a new era, beyond the "age of privacy", and the new social norm for the next generation is to share, freely and without regard for such antiquated concerns as privacy.

New research released today from Eszter Hargittai and danah boyd shows that instead of disregarding privacy, youth have increasingly modified their privacy settings on Facebook over the last year. The age of privacy over, indeed.

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The paper, titled "Facebook Privacy Settings: Who Cares?", examines "the attitudes and practices of a cohort of 18- and 19-year-olds surveyed in 2009 and again in 2010 about Facebook's privacy settings". From the abstract:

Our results challenge widespread assumptions that youth do not care about and are not engaged with navigating privacy. We find that, while not universal, modifications to privacy settings have increased during a year in which Facebook's approach to privacy was hotly contested. We also find that both frequency and type of Facebook use as well as Internet skill are correlated with making modifications to privacy settings.

The research finds that "most" Facebook users modified their privacy settings at least once in 2009, with this practice only becoming more common as time went on, increasing for both frequent and less frequent users. "This suggests that either Facebook's changes to the site or the public discussion about them that took place between 2009 and 2010 -- or a combination of the two -- may have influenced people's practices," reads the report.

One table in the report helps illustrate how privacy has increasingly become a concern of users, even the 18- and 19-year-olds the research focuses on. The table shows how, over the past year, the number of users modifying their privacy settings has increased dramatically. The most interesting changes come in the first and last columns, with the number of users who had never changed their settings dropping to almost none and the number of users who changed their settings four or more times nearly doubling for all current Facebook users.

In addition to looking at how often respondents altered their Facebook privacy settings, the report also examines their confidence in doing so. The researchers asked respondents to rate, on a scale from one to five, their confidence level performing a number of online tasks, from changing their privacy settings, to posting a comment on a blog, to uploading a video to a site such as YouTube. Surprisingly, the changing of Facebook privacy settings beat out every other of nine online activities.

In the end, boyd and Hargittai paint a picture of a generation of users that not only care about their privacy, but take steps to ensure it.

Overall, our data show that far from being nonchalant and unconcerned about privacy matters, the majority of young adult users of Facebook are engaged with managing their privacy settings on the site at least to some extent. The frequency with which they adjust their settings and their confidence in doing so may vary, but most report modifying their settings.

If actions speak louder than words, it certainly doesn't look like the age of privacy has ended. Only that small percentage that didn't modify their privacy settings seem to be agreeing with the idea of broadcasting their information to the world. The rest, it would seem, still like to keep some things private.

There goes that argument, huh?

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Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2010 09:23:00 -0800
Author: Mike Melanson :: Category: Facebook

Move Over Taylor Swift, Occipital Brings Real-Time Panorama Creation to the iPhone

Taylor Swift has nothing on Boulder software startup Occipital. The pop star has been seen recently in an ad for the Sony TX7 Cyber-shot whose selling-point is the ability to create a panoramic image by sweeping the camera once from side-to-side. Occipital, makers of the popular RedLaser app (which eBay recently purchased from the startup), has brought this very same functionality one of the best selling cameras on the market today - the iPhone. Launching today in the AppStore, 360 Panorama (or just "360" for short) will allow iPhone users to do their best Taylor Swift impersonations by creating panoramic images with one sweep of their phones.

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Available for $2.99 in the AppStore as of right now, 360 Panorama should make an obvious addition to any avid iPhone photographer's collection of camera apps. Photography is a small hobby of mine, and I'm always on the hunt for hot new camera apps for the iPhone. When Occipital co-founder Vikas Reddy told me about the company's new app, I was very excited to get my hands on it and test it out in the field.

Previously, my favorite option for creating panoramas on my iPhone has been an app called AutoStitch. To make panoramas in AutoStitch, I have to first snap a series of pictures, making sure to leave enough overlap for each image to fit together with the next. Then I would fire up the app, select the right pictures, and wait about 30-60 seconds for the app to complete the stitching process.

With 360 Panorama, the time it takes to create a panoramic image is significantly reduced. Once the app loads, simply hold the phone up in the position you wish to begin the panorama, tap the screen, rotate the view either left of right and tap the "Save" button to store the panorama. Panoramas are created right before your eyes in real-time as you pan side-to-side, eliminating the uploading and waiting time in other apps.

"Literally every single frame is used. Behind the scenes, our computer vision-based system is processing every frame and calculating precisely how much you moved," says Reddy. "The vision system is extremely fast and precise, and there's nothing like it on the iPhone period -- panorama or otherwise."

So how well does the app actually work?

As for capturing and saving panoramas, the app works as advertised - at least on the iPhone 4 where gyroscopic readings help the app better determine movement. The speed and ease at which it can create panoramas is the selling-point of this app, and is the only area in which it beats apps like AutoStitch. The overall quality and resolution of the images, however, doesn't come close that seen from AutoStitch.

The example below is a 360-degree panorama captured in front of my house. Upon closer inspection, we can see vertical lines representing the various images captured by the app. Additionally, the app realigned the start and end points of the panorama (just right of the tree) to the middle of the image, causing a jarring overlap. On other attempts, the app misjudged where the images should begin and end, causing a large black void to fill the middle of the image.

The resolution of the images created with 360 Panorama is also much smaller than those that can be created using an app like AutoStitch. The above 360-degree shot is 2048 pixels wide at full resolution while this AutoStitch panorama of less than 90 degrees I made a few weeks ago is 3222 pixels wide.

AutoStitch also includes several handy features which 360 Panorama lacks - namely the ability to crop images. Users will need a third-party app to crop their images from 360, and will also be missing features like export settings and AutoStitch's advanced exposure blending.

The verdict for 360 Panorama is a bit of a toss-up. If you want the speed and ease of creating panoramas with the steady wave of a hand, then this is definitely an app you need to try out. But if you want higher quality and resolution from your panoramas, then you might be better off sticking with an app like AutoStitch.

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Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2010 09:00:00 -0800
Author: Chris Cameron :: Category: Mobile

Tests Confirm "Death Grip" Unique to iPhone 4, Consulting Firm Says

International management, I.T. consulting and technology firm PA Consulting Group claims that the so-called "iPhone death grip" (the method of holding the iPhone 4 to degrade antenna performance) is a problem unique to the new iPhone. After performing tests, the firm confirms that the phone's wireless performance was generally in the same range as other smartphones except when held in the "death grip" - then, it performed significantly worse than its competitors.

According to Simon Tonks, the consultant who led the testing, "Our tests indicate that the 'death grip' issue is real, and is worse for the Apple iPhone 4 than for other smartphones."

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PA Consulting Group: "Death Grip Worse for Apple iPhone 4"

The death grip issue is aggravated by the fact that the radio performance on the iPhone 4 was already fairly poor, the firm reports. "The iPhone 4's radio performance was also found to be generally at the lower end [of the range]," said Tonks. "This means it will tend to drop calls earlier than other phones and may suffer more in areas of weak signal. Though, overall it's still within the normal performance range for similar products."

In addition to testing iPhone 4 signal strength itself, the firm also compared the iPhone 4 to other leading devices, including the Blackberry 9700 and the HTC HD2. The results of the tests were recorded in a snazzy YouTube video which features an upbeat rock n' roll track, padded test rooms and humorous clips of people attempting to use the iPhone 4 by taping it to their head or augmenting the signal strength with a wire coat hanger.

The silliness of the video (at least until the halfway point) may detract from what are actually legitimate tests from the firm, an award-winning group known recently for its work with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to reduce methane emissions, work with the Butan government in using biometrics in border control, its design and development of the first disposable medical injectors for automated injections and its work in saving companies millions through supply chain optimization, among other things.

Is That Horse Dead Yet?

The group's experts confirm that ultimately, the iPhone 4 represents a trade-off between product design and innovative features versus ensuring a product works effectively. They also noted that a rubber band placed around the antenna provides a significant performance improvement.

While reporting on the iPhone 4 "death grip" seems a bit like beating a dead horse at this point, considering that Apple has already acknowledged the issue and announced it would offer free bumpers to iPhone 4 owners, it's notable at least for the fact that these iPhone complaints have now gone worldwide (PA Consulting Group is UK-based). This news confirms that the issues with the antenna aren't just a problem primarily affecting U.S. users dealing with AT&T's poor network performance, but also affect iPhone 4 owners in other countries as well.