Rami Alkarmi.Entrepreneur. Invest. Business Models

Everyone knows there’s enough change in marketing today to put corporations everywhere on edge, but there are a few big things happening that are providing a clear path to the future.

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Everyone knows there?s enough change in marketing today to put corporations everywhere on edge, but there are a few big things happening that are providing a clear path to the future.

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(For other news from Reuters Global Technology Summit, click on http://twt.lu/10tcB23)

SAN FRANCISCO, June 19 (Reuters) - A year after Facebook Inc’s fumbled IPO, Wall Street remains slow to recognize what Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg argues has been an across-the-board improvement in its business.

Facebook’s ability to deliver ads to mobile phones, improvements in measuring the effectiveness of its ads and increasing user engagement have all put the world’s largest social network in a better position than before the IPO, Sandberg told the Reuters Global Technology Summit on Wednesday.

“When I look back at the last year since we went public, I believe we are unequivocally a much stronger company today than we were on literally any metric I can think of,” Sandberg said at the Reuters Global Technology Summit on Wednesday.

Facebook became the first U.S. technology company to debut with a value of more than $100 billion, in May 2012. Its shares have lost almost 40 percent of their value since.

“I can’t speak to the stock price but I do feel strongly that we are a better positioned, stronger company than we were a year ago,” she said.

With 1.1 billion users, Facebook is one of the Web’s most popular destinations for consumers and advertisers. But growth in the company’s revenue has slowed sharply from two years ago and some investors fret that a new crop of mobile apps aimed at younger users could chip away at Facebook’s hold on consumers.

Analysts also wonder if the company’s depressed share price could dampen morale and hamper its ability to attract talent in Silicon Valley’s ultra-competitive talent arena.

“I don’t think it’s actually had a huge impact,” the ex-Google Inc executive said, adding that while there had been some worries in the company about it, she was less worried as she had been through it before.

The cool investor reception to Facebook and other recent consumer dotcom debutantes from Groupon to Zynga has helped chill the Silicon Valley IPO train.

“If you miss in the first six months of being a public company, you’re in the penalty box for a very long time,” Sequoia partner Roelof Botha said at a panel about the fate of Silicon Valley public offerings.

“If you beat too much, you’re an idiot because you should have forecast higher.”

OLD AND NEW

Under co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s new mission is to carve out a dominant position in smartphones and tablets to keep up with shifting consumer habits.

The company’s mobile ads, which appear directly in users’ newsfeeds and now account for 30 percent of Facebook’s overall ad revenue, command higher prices than its previous PC ads and are tougher for competitors to replicate, Sandberg said.

It has recently introduced new features that have been popularized on rival service Twitter, such as verified user accounts and “hashtags,” which make it easier for users to follow activity on the social network.

Within the last year, Facebook made its largest acquisition ever, paying about $700 million for Instagram. Sandberg said the company was in no hurry to generate revenue from the mobile photo-sharing app.

Facebook will at some point monetize the popular picture-postings service, Sandberg said. But for the near term “we all think it makes a lot of sense for Instagram to be focused on growth” in users.

Another untapped opportunity is China. Facebook remained interested in offering its service in the world’s largest Internet market, where the social network is banned.

“It’s an ongoing conversation with the government. At the end of the day it’s their choice,” she said. Sitting on the sidelines too long did not mean Facebook would cede the market to local competitors, she insisted.

“We were not the first entrants in our space to any market I’m aware of. There were markets like Brazil where Orkut had huge penetration, we’re now over 80 percent penetrated into the Internet population,” Sandberg said.

Sandberg, 43, joined Facebook as chief operating officer in 2008, overseeing business operations and transforming the fast-growing social network into a multi-billion company, while Zuckerberg focused on product strategy.

A former Google sales executive who also served as chief of staff to former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, Sandberg is credited with bringing valuable business experience and organizational discipline to the company.

With her new book, Lean In, currently the No.2 bestseller in the New York Times hardcover non-fiction list, some wonder whether Sandberg might be ready to take on a new challenge, perhaps in the world of politics.

She dismissed the notion of political aspirations, noting that she has already been in government and had no plans to leave Facebook.

Follow Reuters Summits on Twitter @Reuters_Summits (Editing by Edwin Chan, Ed Tobin and Edwina Gibbs)

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It is common sense for any business to provide good customer service. But “good customer service” is a relative term. It does not make sense for every organization to provide best-in-the-world service. Instead, the winning approach is to gear service levels to your particular customers’ expectations. Here’s how this works:

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A forest fire blazed its way through my Colorado hometown recently. It tragically claimed more than 500 homes and two people. As fear, destruction and uncertainty took hold, something beautiful happened: A community came together on a social networking site. If we look closely at this social media phenomenon, we, as marketers, can learn how to inspire and be more relevant to our communities.

http://twt.lu/12MRpEx

Ideas can be the easy part of innovation.  If innovators define challenges rigorously, they face a reasonably straightforward task in creating exciting concepts.  Walls can get covered with provocative stickies, and a handful of winning notions may be simple to spot.  Time to high-five!

http://twt.lu/15mpCqo

Ideas can be the easy part of innovation.  If innovators define challenges rigorously, they face a reasonably straightforward task in creating exciting concepts.  Walls can get covered with provocative stickies, and a handful of winning notions may be simple to spot.  Time to high-five!

http://twt.lu/11O2Vcz

If you’re a Dungeons & Dragons purist looking for the latest PC adaptation of the classic fantasy tabletop game, Perfect World Entertainment’s Neverwinter probably isn’t what you’re looking for.  If you’re looking for a modern MMORPG with fantastic combat and high accessibility in the world of Forgotten Realms – Look no further.  Neverwinter combines aspects of traditional MMORPGs such as EverQuest or World of Warcraft and blends them with qualities of fast-paced ARPGs.  It’s an electric mix that succeeds admirably, marking Cryptic Studios’ best MMO to date.

http://twt.lu/11oKa3W

Siemens, the industrial conglomerate based in Munich, Germany, is shutting down its solar power division, which has suffered nearly $1 billion in losses over the past two years.

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NVIDIA has been a busy technology bee recently. Its Tegra SoC (System on a Chip) is at the heart of an increasing number of Android-based gaming products, including the Kickstarted OUYA and (likely) Mad Catz’ MOJO, announced last week at E3—not to mention numerous smartphones and tablets. But NVIDIA, which issued the first Tegra chip back in 2008, is is no longer content to produce components for other vendor’s products. At the end of June, the Santa Clara-based company will be releasing its SHIELD game controller/console, which it showcased to the public at E3.

http://twt.lu/15lNk61

Google likely sees more data than any company on the planet. And that obsession carries through to hiring and management, where every decision and practice is endlessly studied and analyzed.

In an interview with The New York Times’ Adam Bryant, Google’s Senior Vice President of People Operations Laszlo Bock explains that some of the biggest stalwarts of the hiring and recruiting world, the interview, GPA, and test scores, aren’t nearly as important as people think. 

Google doesn’t even ask for GPA or test scores from candidates anymore, unless someone’s a year or two out of school, because they don’t correlate at all with success at the company. Even for new grads, the correlation is slight, the company has found.

Bock has an excellent explanation about why those metrics don’t mean much.

“Academic environments are artificial environments. People who succeed there are sort of finely trained, they’re conditioned to succeed in that environment,” he says.

While in school, people are trained to give specific answers, “it’s much more interesting to solve problems where there isn’t an obvious answer,” Bock says. “You want people who like figuring out stuff where there is no obvious answer.”

As for interviews, many managers, recruiters, and HR staffers think they have a special ability to sniff out talent. They’re wrong. 

“Years ago, we did a study to determine whether anyone at Google is particularly good at hiring,” Bock says. “We looked at tens of thousands of interviews, and everyone who had done the interviews and what they scored the candidate, and how that person ultimately performed in their job. We found zero relationship.”

Google also used to be famous for posing impossibly difficult and punishing brain teasers during interviews. Things like “If the probability of observing a car in 30 minutes on a highway is 0.95, what is the probability of observing a car in 10 minutes (assuming constant default probability)?”

Turns out those questions are”a complete waste of time,” according to Bock. “They don’t predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart.”

The only thing that works are behavioral interviews, Bock says, where there’s a consistent set of questions that ask people what they did in specific situations.

Many of the assumptions and practices we have about hiring came about because we didn’t have anything better. For decades, the only (relatively) consistent data point among hires was GPA and test scores. It was an easy way to sort, and because that’s the way it was always done, people stuck with it.

We can do better now. And though Google has something of a head start and a lot more data, more and more companies are catching on. 

The best thing about data? It’s hard for people to contest. Even when people don’t want to believe that they’re underperforming, it’s hard to dispute years worth of numbers. “For most people, just knowing that information causes them to change their conduct,”  Bock says.

SEE ALSO: MONEYBALL AT WORK: They’ve Discovered What Really Makes A Great Employee

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ScaleIO, an Israeli startup with offices in Palo Alto, has reportedly been bought by EMC for between $200 and $300 million, says Avi Schneider at the Israeli Geektime blog, citing unnamed sources.

We contacted ScaleIO and were told, “no comment.” TechCrunch reports that the companies aren’t talking yet because the deal is still in its final stages.

ScaleIO was founded in early 2011 but just came out of stealth in December with the news that it had landed a $12 million investment led by Greylock and Norwest Venture Partners. So, a $200-$300 million acquisition would be an impressive return.

ScaleIO is one of a wave of hot storage startups that could disrupt storage stalwarts like EMC. Its software makes the inexpensive disks in a group of computer servers act like an expensive “storage array,” meaning that the disks act like one big pool of storage, instead of being dedicated to a single server.

In that way, a server with a disk that is hardly being used can share capacity with one that needs more. 

As companies generate mounds of data, they are in a constant need for more computer storage. ScaleIO says that its tech can save them up to 80% over buying other types of enterprise storage.

Cofounder Erez Webman had joined XtremeIO as chief architect in 2009 before it sold to EMC 2012 for $430 million. Before that, he founded Topio, which sold to NetApp in 2006. The rest of the team of cofounders, Boaz Palgi, Lior Bahat, Eran Borovik, and Erez Unga, have a long history in the storage market, too.

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Earlier this month, TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington sued an ex-girlfriend, Jenn Allen, for defamation, after she publicly accused him of physical and emotional abuse.

Allen has now officially responded to Arrington’s suit, court documents from her lawyers show. The documents were posted online by Valleywag Wednesday.

The documents show Allen defending her statements about Arrington, not backing down from them.

She is denying Arrington’s major claims in his lawsuit, namely that she was trying to “to destroy his reputation.”

Allen admits that she made most of the statements that were attributed to her, and that she believes them, although she now says that she got a date wrong (“pleads that she was incorrect in stating the date on which the incidents” occurred). A lot of Arrington’s evidence in his lawsuit are pinned on the dates and the communications Allen sent to him after the date she says she was raped.

One odd thing that Valleywag points out, is that Allen denies “for lack of knowledge” a Facebook comment from her account that went into depth about her accusations, with no explanation for that denial.

Arrington, who is now a prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist, has categorically denied all accusations. In his lawsuit, his lawyers produced a string of messages from Allen that suggest that Allen’s claims were motivated by frustration that he had discontinued their relationship. We’ve documented those messages here.

Arrington is seeking “general” and “special damages.” He also wants the cost of the lawsuit covered and “any other relief the court deems just and proper.”

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The “sharing economy” — the notion of collectively getting more use out of things by increasing the number of people who can use them — is nothing new. 

People have been sharing tools for all of human history. Most people have even let a friend borrow a car before. 

But as Le Web conference founder Loic Le Meur noted recently, the Internet, smartphones, and location-aware apps are letting people share like never before. You can hop on Airbnb and rent an empty townhouse in France for the weekend at a fraction of the price of booking with a travel agency.

Can’t get a loan from a bank to start your business? You can create a Kickstarter and raise all the money you need from the people who’d be interested in your product in the first place.

It’s amazing to see the ways people are coming up with to better take advantage of the web to collaborate on and share the things that we used to have to pay for ourselves.

The Sharing Economy

It’s going to be big

Loic’s first example is housing rental service Airbnb: Look how many people use it, even though it’s still brand new.

Apple recently unveiled its latest mobile operating system for iPhones and iPads called iOS 7. 

The operating system has a brand new look and several new features, but Apple didn’t have time to go over all the changes during its big presentation last week.

So what didn’t Apple tell us about iOS 7? We’ve been using the beta version of the software for a few days now and uncovered a few lesser-known features.

Here’s what you can look forward to.

Apple is experimenting with an easier way to move back a screen in apps. There have been signs that you’ll be able to use a swiping gesture instead of tapping a “back” button.

When you set the timer in the clock app, the countdown appears on your lock screen. It’ll also show much time you have left on your alarm if you hit the snooze.

The App Store now has a wish list. This is perfect for situations when you don’t want to purchase an app right away but want to remember it.