Our Perspective

Roundup: 104 West Preferred Smartphone Apps

At 104 West, we love our smartphones because they give us the flexibility to check email, review projects and update clients. Sometimes, we even use them to make phone calls. But a smartphone can feel a bit like a tether making it hard to breakaway from work.

Fortunately, there’s an app store that makes using a smartphone a little more fun.

Below is a roundup of some our favorite apps that we use so that it’s not all work and no play around here. What is your favorite app?

“If you scroll through my apps, you will find they are heavily dominated by the likes of princesses, Dora, birds, painting and football. My phone has become the domain of my three kids. These apps come in handy on the way to school, soccer, or any long car trip being derailed by three children stuck in a confined space. While screen savers of Ariel and Dora now adorn my phone and cause looks of question from my colleagues, I have grown to love all of these apps for the fun they bring my kids.” ~ Jen Roane, vice president

“Epicurious is one of my favorite sources for stellar recipes so the Epi app was one of the first apps that I downloaded. This is my favorite app on my phone. The homepage makes it simple to search for easy-to-follow recipes from Bon Appetit, Gourmet and other sources. The interactive shopping list is the app’s best feature. By tapping the plus sign on any recipe, you can create a shopping list and check off items as you shop.” ~Joanie Kindblade, account director

“We love to use lots of recipe apps to come up with new ideas for meals and snacks for the family. We also love to use Skype to share our daily adventures with friends and family who can't be with us.” ~Johanna Erickson, account director

“I’m a sucker for loyalty cards and the discounts that they so faithfully provide, but no one likes holding up a line of people while you flip through your wallet or keys to find the right card (or even worse, being that poor person waiting in line). Enter Key Ring. Key Ring lets me store and access all of my loyalty cards on my phone, and also let’s me receive mobile coupons. It has made signing up for and using loyalty cards an immensely easier process. Bring on the discounts.” ~Kelli Flores, account executive

“I truly love Open Table and The Daily Beast. I travel a lot and entertain so Open Table lets me discover and reserve restaurants simply from hundreds of miles away. And I love the curated content model of the Daily Beast. I get a great cross section of news in one easy-to-navigate place.” ~ Patrick Ward, CEO

“I love to start my mornings with a Skype video call to my daughter and 7-month-old grandson in England. He has just started crawling and standing and when “grammy” makes her special goofy sound, he is all smiles. We have come such a long way since the pioneers who left their homes and rarely, if ever, saw their loved ones again. Alexander Graham Bell helped tremendously with the phone, but Skype has brought intimacy to my daily communication. The broad smiles and impish grins set the tone for my whole day! Thank you, Niklas Zennstrom!” ~Susan Sage, operations manager  

Patrick Ward’s Guide to SXSW

From the desk of Patrick Ward…

I’m about to leave on my annual trek to Austin for SXSW, which some think of as a geek spring break. Whether you’re a SXSW neophyte or you’ve been going for decades, here are my tips to help you navigate the excitement and chaos that embodies SXSW.

• Wear your walking shoes. If you have a car, just park it.
• Pick up your registration badge and SXSW bag and ditch the bag at your hotel room.  
• Create an agenda and identify which panels you want to see. For example, go to Startup Village and check out Smartling’s panel on Saturday, which also features Spotify, foursquare and Zendesk.
• Go to the happy hour events and skip the late night parties.
• Plan on eating breakfast and dinner, but skip lunch. A lot of great panels are scheduled during lunch and you don’t want to miss them. 
• Check out the Austin Food Carts blog for the best guide on food trucks.
• Crowds tend to congregate in hotel lobbies or hallways. This is the place to run into people and chat.
• Hit the Tradeshow block party to mingle with cool companies while enjoying free food and drink.

Hope these tips help you get the most out of SXSW. I’ll be tweeting from Austin so follow me on Twitter @patricknward. 

 

Social Networks and News

From the desk of Patrick Ward...

Recently we explored the current state of news consumption in print. We did that – as we said then — mostly as a way to wrap some perspective around where news consumption appears to be headed.  So now we’d like to turn our sights on that perspective.

Worldwide usage of social networking is plainly on the rise with both Facebook and Twitter experiencing dramatic increases in membership. Facebook has over 400 million users, according to its own statistics.  Not only are users increasing (Facebook alone had 130 million unique visitors in May 2010) but the time spent on these web sites now also averages over six hours per month. With such a large captive audience, social networks offer a multitude of opportunities, from making new contacts to sharing news and information.

Social network users are not merely connecting statically. In fact, many people who initially create a connection through a social networking medium are likely to follow up and maintain that relationship through the use of email, phone conversations, or in-person meetings.

A PEW Research Center report points out that news is increasingly becoming a social activity.  The report tells us that:  

·       71% of adults get their news online

·       75% of them say they get news forwarded to them through email or posts on social networking sites

·       65% of Internet users say they read at least some of this forwarded content; and more than half of those say they read all or most of that news

Of those adults who receive news through social networks, many say they pass it along. Social networkers are more likely to select a news source based on how easy it is to share that source’s stories through social networks. Of all social network users, 51% report that on a typical day they receive news from social networks, like Facebook and Twitter.

With the rise of social networking, users are becoming increasingly reliant upon these networks as trusted sources of news and information.  This has obvious implications on traditional news organizations but also portends the opportunities for other ‘brands’ to become sources of news and news content.  At present, the vast majority of the ‘distributors’ of news on social networks is comprised of individuals.  But, as more and more commercial social network pages emerge and attract supporters, those companies will certainly become sources of news and other information -- both their own and curated from other places -- for their communities. 

For some, the idea of individual companies circulating news directly to the public without the traditional filter of a news organization smacks of self-promotion.  It may also undermine journalistic efforts. And certainly some might take advantage  -- an iPhone gaming company was accused of pumping up supposedly independent reviews last year.  But, let’s not throw out the baby with the bath water.  There is no inherent ethical issue here, so long as companies exercise intelligence and judgment in what they share with communities.  There is a growing sentiment that content may define the next era of the Internet.  If so, then companies have an emerging opportunity to turn the growing affinity for online news into an opportunity to evince their market perspectives forcefully and effectively.

VCIR Winter 2010 - part 1

From the desk of Ben Johnson & Elaine Schoch…

Last week, we attended the Venture Capital in the Rockies Winter 2010 conference in Beaver Creek. With more than 20 early-growth companies presenting, the Park Hyatt in Beaver Creek was full of innovation along many industries including standouts in clean technology and companies introducing technologies to improve our social and online experiences, something we all can appreciate.

We’ll be posting a few conversations we had with companies in the clean tech space this week but wanted to first share some interesting trends coming from the social space.

According to a study done by the University of California, San Diego, the average American consumes 34 GB of data daily. That is over 100,000 words of information daily. New platforms connect us with friends, family, new business opportunities, customers, journalists, and the list goes on. With the most prominent social connectors being Facebook and Twitter, the list of ways to connect with people is becoming as long as the list of people to connect with. We’re now finding ourselves less worried about how to receive information and instead how to make the most of the information that is being pushed at us. Companies like Grooger and BlipSnips are working to make that 34 GB of data a little more manageable.

Grogger

Grogger provides a Grog “group blog” publishing platform that grants publishers tools to better engage with their audience and crowdsource their content. Content published to the blog can be selected to appear at the top and bloggers are rewarded with recognition. Crowdsource + curation = best content, most content, and better audience interaction. Founder and CEO NAME sat down with and us and explained the technology and how it came about. You can also check out the post TechCrunch wrote about them, which hit during VCIR.

 

 

BlipSnips

Video is the next big thing, sometimes too big, which makes it hard to share specific moments. BlipSnips solves that problem by enabling users to tag, syndicate and inspire conversations about specific moments of videos. It is currently in beta but there are possibilities to use its measurable data-driven statistics as ways for brands to target customers. Founder and CEO John Bliss sat down with us and explained the technology and how it came about.

 

We have several additional clips we’ll be posting this week from other conversations we had with entrepreneurs at VCIR Winter 2010. Stay tuned.