Videos
Crowdfunding: is there safety in numbers? If you’re reading this, you’re probably someone who cares deeply about the movement of money. If you’re an entrepreneur, then you probably want that money to move from investors to you. And if you’re an investor, you want that money to grow significantly when (if!) it moves back to you.Well, the world has changed tremendously in the past three years. An investor is no longer just an accredited rich person or venture firm with a huge pool of money. With the advent of crowdfunding, your startup’s cash infusion can come from a large number of « tiny pools of money. » And with this trend, the expectations of investors and entrepreneurs alike have changed profoundly.The US government has added fuel to the crowdfunding fire with the SEC-blessed « Jumpstart Our Business Startups » (JOBS) act that passed in April. In this session, Randy Smerik—a serial entrepreneur, active angel investor, and widely sought-after speaker on both sides of the investment table—offers a no-holds-barred look at the good, the bad, and the ugly sides of how crowdfunding really works.
Be careful what you wish for: Imagine you built a piece of software that everyone uses hundreds of times a day. It’s installed on every computer and mobile device. The entire Internet relies on it. It’s the cloud, thirty years ago. That’s what Paul Mockapetris did when he created DNS, the naming system on which the Web is built. Oh, and he also wrote the first SMTP implementation. That’s email. In this candid session, hear what it was like at the beginning, when a little piece of code could have a huge impact on the world.
CTRL ALT DEL: The world isn’t changing, it’s already changed. Dramatically. Technology is transforming what was once extraordinary into the ordinary. To survive, business has to reinvent not only itself, but the entire industry it serves. And you need a roadmap. It’s an iterative process that is not taking place year by year, but moment by moment. What are you going to do about it? This is your reboot.
Sensing The Future: How Kinect-Inspired start-ups will change the world. When Microsoft released the Kinect, people thought it was a great gaming innovation. But it was the company’s decision to open up the platform that led to a Cambrian Explosion of innovation. The Kinect has won awards around the world, and it’s being used in dozens of new, and often unexpected, ways. In this session, Sheridan Jones, Director of Business and Strategy for Kinect for Windows, looks at some of the products and businesses around the world that have picked up the torch Microsoft lit, and incorporated natural user interactions into how they work. We’ll see how these creations are changing lives in often surprising ways. And ultimately, we’ll see that the dirty little secret behind any innovation is that while innovators are catalysts, it’s the ecosystem of businesses, developers, and end users that are the reagents producing real, lasting change.
Breakthrough Customer Feedback: Understanding customer feedback and motivation is a powerful way to drive breakthrough ideas for improving product, customer acquisition, conversion and retention rates. This session will teach you to ask the right questions to generate insights for driving success in your startup.
Gaming M&A: Today, the app economy seems obvious. It employs over half a million people, and buying small programs for a few pennies has upended the world of software development. Casual games are a big part of that revenue—but until recently, nobody took them seriously. Nobody, that is, until Farmville invaded our desktops and our lives.Farmville showed that casual games could work, at scale, across demographics that traditionally eschewed gaming. And riding that rollercoaster was Zao (Sizhao) Yang, who built Farmville and sold it to Zynga, and has since worked on M&A within the casual gaming giant. In this session, you’ll learn practical advice for how to get acquired, what acquirers are after, and why deals always take longer and are more complicated than you think they’ll be.
So this one time, I built a fax machine: Being in the right place at the right time makes all the difference. The rise of the personal computer spelled the end of the fax machine—but not right away. From 1988 to 1995, Delrina’s WinFax dominated the PC fax industry, fundamentally changing the economics of an industry and created a Canadian software company that was sold for over $450m. Mark Skapinker gives us a look at what it’s like to stand astride two huge industries, the fax and the PC, and ride their convergence to fun and profit. Mark will also relate this to current opportunities.
CTRL ALT DEL: The world isn’t changing, it’s already changed. Dramatically. Technology is transforming what was once extraordinary into the ordinary. To survive, business has to reinvent not only itself, but the entire industry it serves. And you need a roadmap. It’s an iterative process that is not taking place year by year, but moment by moment. What are you going to do about it? This is your reboot.
Chasing Big Ideas: In 2003, along with co-founders Erik Swan and Rob Das, Michael Baum set out to solve a big problem. The world was filling up with machine data, and humans needed ways to mine through it quickly. Nearly a decade later, Splunk’s IPO gave it a market cap of $3B. There’s no doubt today that Big Data is big money; but how do you see that coming years in advance? Even today, it’s a confusing term. Ask ten people what « Big Data » means and you’ll likely get ten different answers. Splunk’s founding CEO will talk about chasing big ideas, growing a multi-billion-dollar business and changing the world — all starting with a simple idea.
