Bill Solominsky

The Era of Crowdsourcing: Guiding Principles

Bright and early at 9:30… turned into about 15 minutes late for me. I blame it on that crazy Austin Saturday morning traffic. Wish I had seen the beginning of this, as I missed the talk about crowdsourcing from the user perspective. A big theme was sustainability. Sourcing exists in sprints, it has a definite start and stop, and it can be sustained if people are willing to do that multiple times.

On the business end, there were some creative ways to describe the risks:

Discount Sushi – make sure users will want to come back, not “it was a good idea at the time”.
Football Team vs. Strip Club – must be a team mentality, and an incentive to help others, which will also help yourself
Careless Engagement – do not want to create apathy in user base; quality vs a numbers game
Wasted Neurons – was checking my phone during this slide, but the theme was that a lot of work and effort is wasted
No Contextual Reputation – resumes don’t matter; level playing field

Big Brother in your Brain: Neuroscience and Marketing

Jam packed session, surprising to me. Really cool to hear about some more “harder” science and how it relates to business. This blended closely with behavioral analysis, but is was explained that neuro-marketing is differentiated by figuring out the subconscious reactions that cannot be observed by behavior.

Some facts that interested me: people prefer curves to straight lines (iphone); the brain automatically counts to 3-5, but not higher (for number of products to display); use expressionless faces, the brain does not recognize the emotion so it spends more time on it. Another tip was to have kids do their homework right before bed. This is because the first stage of REM sleep consolidates memories, and school work is better to be consolidated than TV shows.

There was one part that I disagreed with. It was claimed that neuro-marketing identifies which part of an experience is most enjoyable to a subject. For example, this is used to determine what part of eating chips and salsa is most gratifying, which turns out to be the second of anticipation as you bring the chip with salsa to your mouth. The part I disagree with is when he said that music and songs are impossible to identify the exact part of the song that you like. I can think of a number of songs where there is a specific few notes or lines that make the entire song for me. For songs that I marginally like, sure, I don’t know what part of it appeals to me. However, for songs that I really like, I think its easy to identify the portion that makes it.

Playing with Place: Location Based Games and Services

Interesting things going on in this space that do not involve GPS and smartphones… although both of these elements played a big role in this session. A big theme here was to move off of the couch, go outside, explore and be active.

Keynote with Danah Boyd

Missed the first 20 minutes of this due to an extended lunch. Topic was privacy and publicity. Talked about the generational change of older people needed to make an effort to make information public, while today’s kids need to make an effort to make their information private.

From the Kitchen Table to Million $ Business

Conversation style session that talked about some of the issues that start ups have to go through. Good to hear another story on this, but I got no new info from this.

Unsexy & Profitable: Making && Without Hype

Wish I had seen this entire session, just caught the last few minutes. While lots of people are chasing “what’s sexy” and the latest trends, there is lots of money to be made in unsexy businesses. An example was a company that sells just nuts, bolts, and washers, and makes millions. My takeaway is similar to what Mark Cuban said in his session yesterday, recognize when there is a lot of competition in your space and move on. If your claim is that you are faster, better, smarter, etc, you are not unique and there is not much of an opportunity.

How to Unplan Your Business Idea

Good session talking about the usefulness of business plans, for the investor or the entrepreneur, and then tools that people with idea can use to quickly get their business up and running. A woman in the session make an excellent point: ask yourself what you would pay for the product you sell. Better yet, would you buy the product you sell?