CHECK OUT OUR FOUNDER HOLDEN STEINBERG IN FORBES  http://blogs.forbes.com/women2/

Female Founders To Watch: “Silicon Beach” Edition

Angie Chang, Contributor

+ Comment now

Tech startup founders who happen to be women come out for Silicon Beach Fest this weekend in LA.

By Angie Chang (Co-Founder & Editor-in-Chief, Women 2.0)

There’s Silicon Valley in the San Francisco Bay Area, Silicon Alley in New York – and now Silicon Beach in Los Angeles.

We heard about Silicon Beach Fest, the first festival and hackathon organized by its tech community to celebrate LA tech, entertainment and startups running today and tomorrow in Venice and Santa Monica.

Where are the women in tech starting companies? We took a quick look at the schedule and zeroed in on the following speakers at Silicon Beach Fest representing LA’s startup scene:

Allison Beal (Founder, StyleSaint)
Former VP of business development at Scandinavian Design House, Allison Beal launched StyleSaint, a community-curated fashion platform for online fashion consumers. Follow her on Twitter at @stylesaint.

Bettina Korek (Founder, ForYouArt)
The Princeton-educated art impressario Bettina Korek left a career at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art to start ForYourArt, curating opportunities to see, collect and learn about art. Follow her on Twitter at @bettina_korek.

Elizabeth Stewart (Co-Founder & CEO, The Hub LA)
Serial social entrepreneur Elizabeth Stewart started up Los Angeles-based shared office and event space called The Hub LA. Prior to that, she started up CAUSEmopolis to enhance urban places worldwide. Follow her on Twitter at @elizinla.

Holden Steinberg (Co-Founder & President, PageWoo)
Designer Holden Steinberg co-founded PageWoo to provide full circle mobile performance advertising, building sophisticated web applications and developing mobile designs for her company. Follow her on Twitter at @holdicon.

Jean Chong (Founder & President, Starbates)
Serial entrepreneur Jean Chong built a company that provides B2B services to restaurants. Now she’s working on Starbates, a platform for restaurants and customers to connect. Follow her on Twitter at @StarbatesApp.

Joselle Ho (Co-Founder & Creative Director, Miso Media)
Designer Joselle Ho co-founded music educational startup Miso Media, developing mobile and iPad apps. Miso Media is funded by Google Ventures. Follow her on Twitter at @joselleho.

Sarah Pollack (Founder, SimplyStylist)
An experienced public relations rofessional and style expert, Sarah Pollack started Simply Stylist to explore her passion for educating fashion and style enthusiasts by connecting them to style experts. Follow her on Twitter at @sarahpollack.

Sophia Viklund (Co-Founder, BackCode)
The talented Sophia Viklund can code in Python, Django, RoR, Unity3D, PHP and ArchiCAD. She runs BackCode, an app development company out of Pasadena. Follow her on Twitter at @backcode.

Stacy McCoy (Co-Founder & CEO, Give To Get Jobs)
Social impact strategist Stacy McCoy started Give To Get Jobs as an information hub for jobs in the for-profit sector with a social and/or environmental mission. Follow her on Twitter at @stacymccoy.

Startup advice: Perfect your pitch PPT, find mentors and investors, and assemble a rock star team, said panelists on our Digital LA – Female Founders panel.
Our panel is the first-ever panel in LA featuring all women founders of tech companies. Most played major roles in our recent Silicon Beach Fest, and had been featured in the Forbes article Female Founders of Silicon Beach.

HIGHLIGHTS

YOUR PITCH
- Your Idea: Your startup idea should solve a problem and make money
- Your pitch deck Powerpoint should br 10-15 pages, including your idea, description, revenue model, competitors, customer acquisition, marketing strategy, and founder bios. “Your investment deck is the first thing,” said Joselle Ho, Miso Media.
- Your demo should always be ready to go – make sure it works!
- If your initial idea doesn’t get traction (investors/customers), be flexible, change, pivot, and do something new. Most of the panelists’ companies companies are slight shifts from their initial idea. “You’re going to have to constantly change to be successful,” said Amanda MacNaughton of PromoJam.

YOUR TEAM
- Find good people who are passionate about your startup
- Get your tech together. Build your site in a language that makes sense for your product with available developers u will find. It helps to have a tech co-founder to help you build a scalable product. Avoid outsourcing to a developer who may disappear or get busy with other projects.
- Keep the right people on your train/ team and kick off the bad eggs because they will bring down your team. “Hire slow and fire quick,” said Heather Mason of A Caspian Production.

GET MENTORS, INVESTORS, CUSTOMERS
- Find a mentor to give you advice on your product and pitch, and introduce you to potential investors
- After u meet with a mentor, if they don’t follow up in a few days with an email or meeting intro to one of their friends to help, that’s a sign they don’t fully believe in or support your idea. Improve your pitch and try meeting with them again, or move on to find another mentor.
- Consider joining an accelerator to help meet mentors. Holden Steinberg, whose company PageWoo joined StartEngine, has met dozens of valuable mentors who’ve given important advice.
- ‘Take smart money,’ said Amanda MacNaughton of PromoJam, She found an investor who focuses on female-founded startups for some initial investment
- Reach out to investors who are interested in your industry. Do your research to see who’s investing in what (industry, level of funding, etc.)

- Get your advisors to invest. That’s proof they really believe in you

- Get customers fast to fine-tune your product and show investors you have customers.
- Get a key well-known significant industry player to use your product event if means giving it away at a deep discount or free, so you can tell potential investors: “Well so-and-so uses us / is a customer / client.”

WOMEN’S ISSUES

- Being a women is an advantage in tech because you get noticed more, said many panelists. “Plus there’s no line for the women’s bathroom at tech conferences,” joked one of the panelists.
- “It’s super cool to be in tech right now as a woman,” Holden said. “It’s awesome.” She said doing startups rewards doing high quality work instantly. If u can build/design a good site or product, you’ll get attention right away.
- While there are fewer female developers, organizations like Sophia Viklund’s PyLadies, a group for female Python developers, helps with support and networking.

- Just go start your company. Sometimes the only thing holding u back is u.
- If u encounter “boys network” or “cigar syndrome” in VC board rooms, just do your best pitch and move on. You have a company to build, so don’t get wrapped up in things u can’t control. If u have a male co-founder or president, bring them into meetings with potential bias.

“Sometimes my male co-founder can get doors open, and then I close the deal,” said Elizabeth Stewart of the Hub LA.

SILICON BEACH FEST

- Most of our speakers played major roles in the Silicon Beach Fest and were featured in the related Forbes – Female Founders of Silicon Beach article http://tinyurl.com/forbesff

THANKS TO OUR PANELISTS
- Holden Steinberg, @PageWoo, Co-Founder @holdicon
- Amanda MacNaughton, @PromoJam. @AmandaMalia
- Sophia Viklund, BackCode, Founder. @BackCode
- Heather Mason, A Caspian Production, Owner. @ACaspian
- Elizabeth Stewart, Hub LA, Co-founder/CEO. @thehubla @elizinLA
- Joselle Ho, Miso Media, Co-Founder. @joselleho @misomedia
- Babette Pepaj, BakeSpace, Founder and CEO. @BakeSpace @CookbookCafe

Co-Moderators:
- Kevin Winston, Digital LA, founder @DigitalLA @kevinwinston
- Shira Lazar, What’s Trending, host and creator @whatstrending @shiralazar

THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS: A Caspian Production (venue), and PulsoViral and Castle Cruz for the Twitter wall.

THANKS TO OUR ATTENDEES for great TWEET-NOTES via #DigitalLAff

RT @DigitalLA Startup steps: 1) Good PPT w how u make $ 2) Find a lead, mentor, support 3) Get someone significant to use your product #digitallaff

RT @searchkidd #digitallaff panel-7 women, 7 stories & 7 “kick ass” companies, Pagewoo, Miso Media, Caspian, Promojam, Backcode, The Hub, Bakespace. Cool!

RT @suzywillow @amandamalia “Take smart money. Investors that challenge you, inspire you, & help you build strategic relationships” #digitallaff

RT @annieholly: learning so much from amazingly smart women at #digitallaff Female Founders Panel – absolutely love it!!

RT @kateshaw27 One trend being heard from these successful women is that plan B is often superior and more successful than plan A #digitallaff

RT @stevens1 #digitallaff female founder advice: raising money is horrible, like a date not calling back @PageWoo @holdicon

RT @searchkidd #digitallaff “have a viable product that can make money”- “a VC is serious when he/she introduces you to a interested friend”= Panel advice!

RT @greatdawnini If investor introduces you to friends or advisors they are serious. Otherwise #moveon #digitallaff

RT @suzywillow: @acaspian “Hire slow, fire fast.” Simple. As. That. #digitallaff #entrepreneurship

RT @lindanicolai @ACaspian I LOVE YOU “If you suck at hiring get out if it!” Let a pro take over #recruiting. #DigitalLAFF @DIGITALLA #FemaleFounders

RT @suzywillow: Girl power. @DigitalLA Female Founders.Treasure chest of of experience in #tech and #LIFE #digitallaff

RT @kateshaw27 food for thought & motivation for us to innovate: “what can we do to establish LA as an even stronger more notable tech city?” #DigitalLAff

RT @girlyantics Huge THANK YOU to Kevin @digitalLA for bringing together such inspiring women for the Female Founders Panel. An LA first! #digitalLAff

RT @BrianAllman @dig italLA #digitallaFF, nice work on event last night; strong content, interesting panel. thx.

  ]]> http://pagewoo.com/company-news/digital-la-female-founders-tech-startups/feed 0 http://pagewoo.com/announcements/does-your-website-need-a-mobile-makeover-8-mobile-optimization-tips-to-improve-your-sites-ux http://pagewoo.com/announcements/does-your-website-need-a-mobile-makeover-8-mobile-optimization-tips-to-improve-your-sites-ux#comments Fri, 04 May 2012 20:43:36 +0000 admin http://pagewoo.com/?p=725

Check out our KISSmetrics guest blog post HERE

When it comes to startup demos, more is better. So incubators YouWeb and StartEngine are combining their efforts to host a joint demo day for 20 startups funded by the two.

The event, dubbed Double Demo Day, brings together a couple of the most interesting personalities in tech funding: Peter Relan (pictured right), chairman of YouWeb, and Howard Marks (pictured below), founder of Los Angeles-based StartEngine.

Relan made his mark in social gaming by spinning out or starting companies such as OpenFeint, Sibblingz (now Spaceport.io), CrowdStar, and iSwifter. Marks, the former chief executive of Activision, was an executive at Playdom and served as CEO at Acclaim Games and eMind.
The demos will take place on May 1 at YouWeb’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. The invite-only event will feature presentations from a variety of startups, including a number that are in stealth mode. The companies hail from industries including mobile, social, gaming, education, entertainment, and e-commerce.

“This is Hollywood and Silicon Valley actually working together,” said YouWeb Chairman Peter Relan. “We think that StartEngine taps into a different eco-system that complements ours here in Silicon Valley. In fact, our event is a vanguard of the inevitable convergence of technology, education, entertainment, and gaming.”

Relan said he believes that education, entertainment, and gaming will all converge soon, and that’s another reason for the alliance.

YouWeb was founded in 2007 and focuses on gaming, education, and entertainment ventures. It sold OpenFeint to Japan’s Gree for $104 million.

Click HERE for original VentureBeat article written by Dean Takahashi.

Click HERE to see the full video interview by Giang Biscan.

In-app spending by advertisers in the United States and western Europe, where there is a high concentration of smartphones owned by affluent consumers, is set to overtake spending on display ads on mobile websites this year, research firm Strategy Analytics says.

The economy in apps, many of which are free, has taken time to establish itself since Apple first launched the App Store for the iPhone in 2007. Google also has a thriving app store for its Android phones.

At first it seemed that most developers would have a hard time making enough money from their small software programs, which were made for anything from playing games to checking the weather or recognizing songs.

But advertisers are now increasingly using them to reach the consumers of those apps. Strategy Analytics estimates that advertisers will spend $2.9 billion on in-app advertising this year, while consumers will spend $26.1 billion buying them.

The number of apps downloaded globally is expected to grow 38 percent to more than 32 billion this year.

“Advertisers chase eyeballs, so the fact that brands spend more on in-app advertising than the mobile Web is a clear sign that apps are what consumers are glued to for an increasing range of activities,” said David MacQueen, the firm’s director of wireless media strategies.

In less affluent economies, consumers tend to use more basic phones that may not have access to app stores, but browse the Web instead.

Figures from InMobi, the world’s largest independent mobile ad network, confirm that mobile advertising is taking off, after grappling for years with the small screen size and perceived invasions of privacy on phones.

In a report to be published on Monday, InMobi says the number of ads seen by consumers on mobile phones grew 21 percent in January-March over the previous quarter to 283 billion.

(Reporting by Georgina Prodhan; Editing by Gary Hill) Original article HERE.

There are 5.3 billion mobile subscribers around the world, meaning 77% of the world’s population uses a phone. The majority of those users — 3.8 billion or 73% of the group — live in emerging economies.

Yet mobile advertising dollars spent around the world do not begin to compete with traditional platforms or Internet ads.

As the Internet spreads throughout the developing world, it’s arriving on phones before traditional computers. Some 70% of Internet users in Egypt, 59% in India, 57% in South Africa, 50% in Ghana and 44% in Indonesia get online via mobile phones alone.

This Jana infographic poses a question for advertisers — how will relevant content be delivered via mobile device?

One idea: in Brazil, 74% of mobile users said they would like to receive advertisements in their devices in exchange for voice minutes.

Original post on Mashable by Zoe Fox. Click HERE

Brands have just a “six month window” to invest in mobile and tablet advertising before prices significantly rise from their relatively cheap cost per click (CPC) compared to desktop ads, according to a report.

Adobe’s digital advertising update for the first quarter of 2012 says tablet and mobile search ads are currently an “under-invested opportunity” and that marketers should shift spend to these areas in the short term as consumer ownership of such devices increases.

In the first quarter of 2012, tablet ads on average cost 20% less and mobile about half as much as traditional desktop search ads, according to Adobe’s digital advertising update.

In the UK, mobile and tablet search ads’ conversion rates were 25% less than their desktop counterparts – but when cost and tablets’ average order values are factored in, ads on these devices are likely to offer better return on investment than traditional digital formats.

The company projects that the percentage of total search spend on mobile and tablet could get up to 15-20% of all search spend by the end of the year, with the increased demand likely to drive up CPC rates in the auction-based trading environment.

Jonathan Beeston, Adobe’s director of new product innovation, says: “Any advertiser worth their salt has already built a mobile or tablet strategy, or is in the middle of planning it now, but I think the window of opportunity [in terms of low-priced CPC] is short – in six months we’ll see a different marketplace as demand rises.”

Helen Southgate, Sky’s online marketing controller of strategy and planning, says: “The possibility of mobile and tablet accounting for 15 to 20% of search spend by the end of 2012 doesn’t surprise us at all and we’ve been working hard on our mobile and tablet strategy to avoid the risk of under serving a highly-profitable, fast growing market segment.”

The report also finds that user engagement on Facebook has increased 176% year on year in the first quarter, partly due to the social network’s recent platform changes and the release of Timeline for brands.

Marc Blinder, director of European operations for Adobe’s social media strategy team, says this is because Timeline for brands provides a far more personalised experience for users.

“Most notably,” he adds, “The ‘friends who Like this brand’ unit is larger and much more central to the design and Facebook is surfacing your friends interactions with the brand right below it. Studies have shown that seeing friends faces in websites or ads increases conversion, so it shouldn’t be any surprise that the same would hold true for brand pages.”

Adobe suggests that brands should now be investing in how this increased level of engagement relates back to their bottom line, by investing in analytics.

Original post by Laura O’Reilly for Marketing Week.

The migration of audiences toward digital news advanced to a new level in 2011 and early 2012, the era of mobile and multidigital devices. More than three-quarters of U.S. adults own laptop or desktop computers, a number that has been stable for some years.1 Now, in addition, 44% of adults own a smartphone, and the number of tablet owners grew by about 50% since the summer of 2011, to 18% of Americans over age 18.

Each of these technologies offers a separate set of features, conveniences and potential uses. But less is known to date about how people use these devices — whether they behave differently on different platforms and what the move to mobile might mean for news and journalism and the notion of a common experience or public square. Past research found much of the desktop news experience was built around search — people looking for what they need or want to know right now, which tilted influence (and revenue) toward aggregators such as Google. To what degree is that true in mobile? Have apps (or applications) and social media networks altered that? And do consumers favor one way of accessing news on their tablet, another their desktop and yet another on a smartphone?

A new survey of more than 3,000 U.S. adults by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism finds that rather than gravitating toward one device, a growing number of Americans are becoming multiplatform digital news consumers. These “digital mavens” get news on all their devices — and even more so if they own all three types of devices. In other words, digital devices appear to be an additive experience.

The data also find that the reputation or brand of a news organization, a very traditional idea, is the most important factor in determining where consumers go for news, and that is even truer on mobile devices than on laptops or desktops. Indeed, despite the explosion in social media use through the likes of Facebook and Twitter, recommendations from friends are not a major factor yet in steering news consumption.

There are some signs that the way people interact with news on mobile devices is quite different than news behavior on the desktop/laptop computers. Data from Localytics, a client-based mobile analytics firm, analyzed by PEJ reveals that people spend far more time with news apps on the smartphone and tablet, visit more pages at a sitting, and return more frequently than they do on conventional computers. That data reinforce findings from previous PEJ research in 2011 that people read more long-form news articles and go to new news sources on tablets.

Taken all together, the growing body of data suggests that the move toward mobile holds some promising options for news producers, including increasing the amount of overall news being consumed.

To capitalize on that potential, however, the industry will need to do a better job than it did in the desktop realm of quickly coming to understand audience behavior and developing technology and revenue models to adapt to it.

Among the major findings of this research:

The majority of Americans now get news through at least one digital, web-based device. While the desktop or laptop computer remains the primary digital platform for news (54% of Americans get news there), the number of consumers who get news on multiple digital devices is growing. Nearly a quarter of U.S. adults, 23%, now get news on at least two devices–a desktop/laptop computer and smartphone, a computer and a tablet, a tablet and a smartphone, or on all three.
The most common way that people get news is by going directly to a news organization’s website or app. About a third of desktop/laptop news consumers and smartphone news consumers get news this way “very often.” Even more tablet news users, 38%, follow this path. On desktop/laptop computers, going to a news site directly is statistically tied with search (30%). Yet even these numbers may understate those seeking out news home pages. Previous PEJ studies have shown that many people who access news through search engines are typing in some variation of the home page name, not searching by topic across different news sources.
Social media, while clearly a part of the digital news experience, is not nearly the driver of news that many have suggested. Just 9% of digital news consumers follow news recommendations from either Facebook or Twitter “very often” on at least one of the devices asked about here. Of the two networks, Facebook garners about twice as many news followers than Twitter. Still, though, the rapid growth is striking. As written about in the Digital chapter of this report the percent of traffic that comes to news sites from social media platforms increased 57% since 2009.
For those who get news on both the smartphone and tablet, social networking is a much more popular way to get news. Among that group (13% of all digital news consumers), fully two-thirds (67%) have ever gotten news recommendations from Facebook. That compares to 59% who get news on just one of those devices and 41% who only get digital news via the desktop/laptop. Similarly, 39% follow news recommendations on Twitter, compared with 24% who just use a smartphone or a tablet and 9% who use only the desktop/laptop.
Consumers who still only get digital news on the desktop/laptop computer have a very different set of behaviors. This group is less likely to get news in any of the ways asked about in the survey than those who get some digital news on a smartphone, a tablet or both. Only about half (48%) get news using key word search “very or somewhat often” compared with at least 70% of those who use a smartphone, tablet or both for news. Similarly, 54% go directly to news websites or apps somewhat or very often, while 80% or more of those who get news on other devices do so.
Commercial data tracking online usage reinforce the findings of this survey. Localytics shared its proprietary data with researchers involved in this study, and that information shows that people using mobile devices tend to spend more time with news on mobile devices than they do on computers. They go to news sites more often, spend more time per session and read more articles per session.

Original article HERE. By Amy Mitchell & Tom Rosenstiel of PEJ, and Leah Christian of the Pew Research Center

Check out the fun we had last night at the RealTech Startup Showcase we co-hosted with Kevin Winston of Digital LA! This was our second showcase and it focused on tech companies doing good and green things for the community!

http://digitalla.net/rt2.htm

Make sure to stay posted for next month’s event!