Pinterest is the latest darling in the consumer market, so if you’re wondering if you should use it to promote your business, please check the infographic below. 

More and more businesses are turning their head to Inbound Marketing, as a more valuable and scalable way to create a connection with their existing and potential customers.

Inbound marketing consists in creating useful content that attracts, helps or entertains your customers. Common examples are: blogs, whitepapers, ebooks, infographics and in general any other way you can offer valuable information to your prospects. This helps create a bound and once they know you it’s easier to make their decision to start/or keep doing business with you. 

In 2011 the infographics took of, it was one of the most used way to attract eyeballs. For 2012 I think they will still gain ground, but maybe we’ll also see something now, like for example fun and engaging, easily produced (but high quality) videos. 

Check out the infographic below for more information on what inbound marketing is. 

Nowadays we are faced with a lot of options for our gadgets, from our work PCs(or Macs) to phones and tablets, we have plenty of options to choose from. And there lies a problem, when faced with so many choices it gets pretty difficult to choose something and get everything in sync. I’m talking about the fact that now, for example I have a laptop running Windows, an iPhone in my pocket, and I’m pretty interested in getting a tablet, the iPad is looking fine but a bit too expensive for what I’d like to use it(browsing and reading). But here comes soon the announced Amazon Tablet at a price point I’d be willing to take my credit card out of my wallet. 

So… I’ll end up with 3 gadgets, running 3 different OSs: Windows, iOS and Android. At this point things can get pretty difficult in terms of apps I buy and use on my devices, also data synchronization can become a real pain. 

I’m a casual business user, my daily activity(at work and at home) involves a lot of browsing(Chrome), emailing(Gmail), working with documents(GoogleDocs) and a lot of webapps, so most of my data aggregates in the cloud. I have however about 60Gb of data gathered in the past 10 years, that I’d like keep. 

Given what I stated above, the ideal scenario for me would be to have one device, a smartphone(no bigger than the iPhone 4), with about 60-80gb memory, a dual core processor, that I carry with me all the time. When at work I would connect it to a big monitor, and wirelessly to a mouse and keyboard. When on the go it would be a smartphone. At home I’d love to connect it to a small 10” LCD and use it for reading and browsing. 

I really don’t know how easy would be to build an OS that works well both using touch and also using a keyboard and mouse. The cost of my whole “IT infrastructure” would be significant lower as I’d have just one device with processing power, plus 2 displays. I’d also have all my apps and data in just one place, no need for synchronization anymore. If someone pulls this off, I’m sold. Windows 8??

UPDATE: It seems that Microsoft is actually unifying the PC and Tablet worlds with the new Windows 8. Read more what I’ve wrote on Mobiversal blog. 

I recently needed to grab a screenshot from a playing movie, I was already scared thinking about complex movie editing tools and then I was struck, hey! with Shelfster I can capture/crop anything on my desktop, so there I was, problem solved.

And the picture is below, Ovi our top iOS programmer at Mobiversal, smiling as he installs a brand new iMac.

More and more businesses start to realize the potential that mobile apps offer. The ways that customers interact with the business offer are more direct, very targeted.

So you decided you need a mobile app, hiring developers and doing it in-house it’s not worth it, unless your business is built on or is promoted mainly using the mobile channel.

Working with a freelancer, it’s a tricky thing because reviews and recommendations can be easily manipulated. At Shelfster, an online project I’m involved in, we developed the iPhone app inhouse, it took us some time, but it turned ok. For the Android app however, we hired a freelancer that was building apps in his free time. It took him almost 6 months  to send us a functional version, still is not as good as we wanted and we have to fix it inhouse. It was cheap, but in this competitive market can you afford to lose half a year? I think you know the answer.

The third option you have is to build your app with a professional development agency. These are companies focused only on developing for mobile platforms, some of them have also designers hired. You can work with them hourly but most companies prefer pricing on project. The price will be higher than hiring in-house or with a freelancer, but the chances of having your app done quickly and at a good quality are bigger. Make sure you carefully check for references and sign a contract with all specifications and deadline. 

Best resources I found to look for app developers are theymakeapps.com (I really like their design), studiolist.org and www.getappsdone.com.
If you want to share your experience when trying to have an app done, or other good resources, please do in comments. 

Mobile app analytics firm Flurry released a new report comparing the daily engagement of smartphone users on mobile apps vs. web browsing on the PC. The report was made based on 500 million aggregated, anonymous use sessions per day across more than 85,000 applications.

I’ve received recently a lot of unwanted calls from some sort of “robot”. I searched for an option on the phone to block calls, called the service provider Vodafone, no solution, then I googled and found some reviews about an app called iBlacklist. I went on the AppStore, searched and found iBlacklist, great! bought the app with 1.59 Euro and started the app to get it to work.

Unfortunately I discovered that the app I bought was from a developer called CXI Gaming and not the one I’ve read the reviews about http://www.iblacklist.com.br/buynow.php. The app I bought(from CXI Gaming) doesn’t worth 2 pennies, I emailed the developer with a question but haven’t received an answer. 

Why 2 apps have the same name? Why the good one is not listed in the AppStore(or can’t be found using search)? The bad one is clearly profiting from the iBlacklist name. 

It was back in 2009, just after my partners and I successfully sold a 3 years old business(Titan Backup, a backup product sold to GFI.com) that I took the CEO role at PCDistrict.com. The site was around 2 years old, more specifically was a download and news portal and had around 30k visitors a month. We wanted to transform the site and to turn it into a social network, based on your preferences for software and electronics. The idea was simple and I still feel the need today for a product that could recommend me stuff based on products I already use.(partially Amazon does something for me in this direction; Gdgt.com is also in the space)

But getting straight to the point of this post here are the mistakes starting with the biggest one I made, a mistake I often see at other startups:

Planning too many features into the product. 

It seems very obvious but the temptation to add few extra bells and whistles is very big and without feeling you’ve pushed the deadline 1 month later or worst. The way to go is to build just the core functionality, get the product out there and test it with real users, because otherwise you can be at great risk of adding features no one will use.

Focusing on small things. 

In the inception phase as a CEO the main focus in my opinion should be on
:- building the team with passionate people that have a positive attitude
:- creating a pleasant working environment and ensuring there’s a good communication between team members
:- setting the main business vision and market it successfully to the whole team
These all look good in retrospect but being in a startup you can easily end up doing work it shouldn’t be necessarily CEO work. We were a 4 member team(me, 2 developers, 1 support-community person) and sometimes I worked on marketing campaign details, responding to support emails, beta-testing etc. etc.

Pulling the plug too late

After over 12 months of development we launched the site but because we built a very big site, it was very hard to be agile. When there was a modification to be done, it slowed us down a lot. We did a bunch of campaigns to increase user engagement but to tell you the truth it’s not an easy thing to obtain. After another 6 months we managed to get to 130k uniques/month but this was done by hiring over 20 part-time content managers that added tens of thousands of electronics on the website. Being a bootstrapped startup funded by our own money, It became immediately obvious that we won’t be able to keep up with the content creation cost, advertising using Adsense was a joke, so the only solution was to pull the plug on any development of the website. Be careful and pull the plug if you see you’re on a dead end.

I hope the above will help you avoid these mistakes.

I’d love to hear your experiences, what affected your activity the most?

Many years ago there was a moment when it became imperative to all businesses to have an online presence. Every day I see more reasons why any SMB to Enterprise level business should have a mobile strategy. Whether you use mobile to better serve your clients or your employees, you better start now.

Worldwide mobile device sales to end users totaled 1.6 billion units in 2010, a 31.8 percent increase from 2009 (see Table 1), according to Gartner, Inc. Smartphone sales to end users were up 72.1 percent from 2009 and accounted for 19 percent of total mobile communications device sales in 2010. 

“Western Europe and North America accounted for 52.3 percent of global smartphone sales in the fourth quarter of 2010, with smartphones accounting for close to half of all handsets sold in these regions,” said Roberta Cozza, principal research analyst at Gartner. Read more about this report here.

Do you have a mobile strategy?