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Oh, how long the path can be.
This note is a quick congratulations to Emile Cambry Jr. and the crew at Chicago start up, Soceeo. Soceeo enables anyone to create their own social network, free of charge. I'm still playing around with the site and understanding its concept, along with how it compares to Ning and others. It's a system that's easy enough for your grandmother to use, which is a perk I like.
Good luck guys! Today was Emile's official first day as an full time entrepreneur.
I paid a visit to new Chicago start-up, crowdSPRING last week. I met their community manager, Angeline, through Twitter and wanted to get to know the crew a bit better. After all, we start-ups in town like to know who's new on the scene and how we can help them out.
crowdSPRING's idea is simple: post a logo/design need of any sort and name your price. Creatives from around the world bid on the job by submitting their ideas. You provide feedback, collaborate, etc. and pick the winner. Pete, the team's Director of Marketing, mentioned that many of their designers have other full time jobs and the crowdSPRING model lets them compete on a global scale.
I talked to a few local designers about the model and some are fans, while others don't think it enables them to present their full portfolios to would-be clients. I can respect both sides on this one, but as a start-up I like the idea of naming my price and having the globe compete for my business. Author's note: I used local professional designers for my CondoPerks, Gals' Guide, Bsolutions and Chicago Tech Report logos:).
Here are the video interviews I shot at crowdSPRING's temporary offices on W. Lake Street. Highlights: meet the co-founders, the head of marketing, the team's community manager and get some VC tips.
UPDATE: The Yelp folks sent some points of clarification to this post, see below. Also, I've received some comments/concerns about 'drinking the Yelp Kool-Aid'. That's what comments are for folks. I write what I hear. If there are pieces of the story I'm missing, comment away...
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The Communications Director of Yelp, Stephanie, reached out to CTR to meet, chat and fill me in on Yelp, developments, etc. With recent questions I received from the local Yelp user base, I took her up on her offer. Yelp's Chicago manager, Andrea, also joined us.
We met up at Tempo and thanks to your questions, I had topics to discuss right away. The first question many of you had: 'It seems that Yelp's marketing blurs with user generated content. Are companies stacking the reviews?' The Yelp team reminded me that yes, advertisers can buy terms, similar to the Google Adwords model,and appear on top of search results.[ From Yelp: Qualified Yelp businesses can advertise with Yelp and part of that includes impressions in our search results based on category (not keywords) Here's a little more info on our sponsorship program."]
For example, I just typed in 'pizza' and got an orange shaded sponsored ad for Aurelio's Pizza. The word 'sponsored' is clear.
(video, what I can make of it, will be coming soon)
At 6:15, a line formed down Clark Street. The DIGG fans were out in full force and patiently waited to get in to see Kevin, Jay and the rest of the DIGG crew. I had the pleasure of having lunch with DIGG's marketing manager earlier in the day. By the time I got to the basement of SmartBar, I was thankful for the 'quality' time the two of us spent at lunch. Aubrey is one of those women that I could talk to all day long. A fellow Midwesterner, her dot com path took her to Google, Ask.com and DIGG.
I don't know who chose this particular meetup locale, but confused faces began to form as soon as we got into the space. SmartBar is typically a dark place. I think some DIGG folks requested a few lights to be turned on, which helped a bit. It was still difficult to see people, however, moving to another room made conversation and keeping track of friends easier.
pictured, Leah Jones, Aubrey Sabala, me
