New texting platform provides direct-to-mobile communication

Westwood, Kan. —Tommy Ryan wanted a way to communicate with his Pizza Shoppe customers that wasn’t annoying or would go unnoticed. Ryan recently found the solution when he signed up for BuzzMeDo, a direct-to-mobile communication tool created by Kansas City web development company Red Nova Labs.

BuzzMeDo is still in beta and in the process of going from local to national. The marketing tool provides businesses with the ability to collect mobile phone numbers from their customers and send out alerts.

Ryan has used the product for four months and already has 14,744 subscribers at his 16 Pizza Shoppe locations throughout the Kansas City area that are on BuzzMeDo. Three more locations are set to join this month.

Ryan started with one store on Dec. 1, 2011, and the results have convinced him to continue adding the rest of his stores. On Leap Day in February, Ryan ran a buy-one-get-one-free text campaign that had nearly a 1,000 percent return on investment. Pizza Shoppe had 117 BuzzMeDo customers visit the restaurant, accounting for 43.8 percent of tickets that day with gross sales of $3,881.19 and a net sale of $2,712.36.

“BuzzMeDo drives traffic,” Ryan said. “It’s that simple.”

What makes BuzzMeDo different from other direct-to-mobile communication tools, which typically use short codes, is the use of long codes instead. Long codes allow for the use of unlimited keywords and the ability to send out a message to only a segment of a subscription base.

How BuzzMeDo works is businesses collect phone numbers through their customers opting in with a unique keyword, such as “pizza.” At Pizza Shoppe, Ryan has encouraged customers to opt in with table tents and a server-incentive program in which servers encourage their tables to opt in, using the server’s name as a keyword. After one month at Ryan’s store in Platte Woods, Mo., they had 2,145 active subscribers and 1,950 of those subscribers came from the server incentive program.

When Ryan is ready to send an alert – BuzzMeDo suggests two to three alerts per month – Ryan can pick and choose which subscribers to send a message through who opted in to which keyword.

“We analyzed numerous text messaging platforms prior to partnering with BuzzMeDo, who is hands-down the ideal organization for my company's needs,” Ryan said. “BuzzMeDo’s professional, turn-key program combined with our exclusive deals have definitely had a positive impact on our businesses.” 

Unlike a service like Groupon, the power of BuzzMeDo rests entirely with business owners and managers. They write and send the texts; the BuzzMeDo team only assists with best practices.

“We can’t tell people what’s best for their business,” said Katelyn Stone, BuzzMeDo Project Manager. “They do.”

The BuzzMeDo beta had mostly restaurants on board, along with several grocery store chains. Grocery stores can handle a larger capacity of clientele in one day than restaurants and they saw an even better return on investment.

Country Mart sent out an alert at four locations for a pound of bacon for 99 cents. The alert prompted 323 customers to come in for the bacon, and managers said it increased the guest check average and overall traffic that day. 

“BuzzMeDo has created excitement with our customers,” said Dante Passantino, Country Mart owner. “They look forward to receiving their text messages. I have had customers make comments to me about how convenient the messages are as they consider them like paperless coupons.”

Red Nova Labs built BuzzMeDo using the latest in database technology, powered by MongoDB. MongoDB is part of a movement in technology that powers some of the most popular and successful web companies, such as Facebook and Google.

The back-end of the site is built for owners and managers to easily schedule texts with real-time analytics to check who is opening the messages, subscribing or un-subscribing. Text messages have a 97 percent open rate, compared to only approximately 4.8 percent for emails.

“The BuzzMeDo platform is simple to use,” Passantino said. “When you want to set up a campaign, it only takes a few seconds. It graphs out all the statistics for each store so we can track exactly how many subscribers we have at each store which is extremely helpful.”

If your business is interested in using BuzzMeDo, contact Katelyn Stone at kstone@rednovalabs.com. 

About Red Nova Labs
Red Nova Labs was founded and self-funded in 2009 as a web development and marketing agency as well as a technology think-tank, creating original, cutting-edge systems for web and mobile. On the service side, the company supports interface design, backend programming and online marketing. On the product side Red Nova Labs invents, builds and launches its own web-based platforms for various applications and vertical markets. To support both business models, its growing team of development engineers conceives resourceful code generators which add practical ease to complex programming — enabling unprecedented speed in creating vibrant, multidimensional environments and utilities. Once a product is launched, each business operates autonomously as an independent unit, with full engineering and marketing support from Red Nova Labs on the back end. The company is open to collaborative opportunities.

Usually, I would call something like this bogus. Work isn’t killing you; you’re killing yourself. That’s always been my line of thinking. Get some exercise, you bum.

But lately I have found it incredibly difficult to stay active, especially in the winter. I spend probably 10 to 16 hours per day in front of a computer. I’m a writer. I can’t avoid it. And it seems like this winter I can’t avoid getting sick. Exercise, if I’m lucky, happens twice a week — usually once.

The best solution I have found is to exercise as soon as I get off work. That’s a lot easier when the weather is nice and you can go for a jog as soon as you leave the office.

The solution in the winter is a gym membership, but I hate gyms. Hate the crowds. Don’t like to wait in line for a machine or to play a basketball game. Don’t like being around the dudes watching themselves in the mirror as they do curls. The douchebag-to-non-douchebag ratio is just too high for me.

So what’s the solution? Well, the weather getting warmer will help. But I need a solution in the winter. I’m to the point where I’m thinking some guy yelling at me on my TV might be my only hope.

• If you have suggestions, please share in the comments. But first, check out these links. I promise; they won’t kill you.  
• Technology and forward-thinking like this are what have made Sporting KC games the hip thing to do in Kansas City.
• No one is spending any time on Google+. As long as you’re signing up, Google doesn’t really care. And if you’re a business, you should make a Google+ business page.
• The importance of strong content, a lesson from non-profits.
• How businesses are driving traffic from Facebook’s Actions. Also, Facebook is making changes. Here are 6 changes marketers need to know about.
• According to our app developer David Howe, this could turn into another big privacy deal for app developers to worry about.
• 37signals is no longer developing for IE8. Will others follow their example?
• mongoDB, everybody’s doing it. That’s what my nerd friends tell me.
• What they left out of this video was the male monkeys repeating over and over again: “I want to party with you. I want to party with you!” And the females: “Do you hate me? Why do you hate me so much?”

• This is how you promote a movie.

• I’ll have what he’s having.

• I’m not sure whether to be impressed by these kids or buy them a cheeseburger. Maybe I could hire them (or their psycho dad) to be my personal trainers.

• This isn’t quite as cool as a hoverboard, but it’s close. The future is apparently here.
• My 2012 peaked early. Read this, and you’ll understand why. 

Google doesn’t care if you sign up for Google+ and never come back – just as long as you’re signing up. This is the conclusion that Josh Constine of TechCrunch came to after a recent ComScore study showed that users are spending about three minutes per month on Google+, compared to 405 minutes on Facebook.

Constine says that Google built Google+ to get users’ biographical data, something they are unable to do with Facebook users because of Facebook’s privacy policy. Google takes the biographical data from Google+ user profiles, Gmail activity and search history, and the search giant uses that info to provide better targeted search results and ads. They call it “Search Plus Your World.”

So, the question for business owners becomes, how does this affect me? With no one spending any time on Google+, should you care about having a Google+ business page? It doesn’t make any sense, right?

Logically, it doesn’t. It’s like building a storage facility in the middle of the desert. But you should build a page and maintain it for the same reason Google wants users to sign up for Google+: Search.

Search Plus Your World has changed the way that Google provides search results. They’re personalized to you. At the top of the screen under the search bar, any people in your circles who have info in their profile that relates to your search term will show up. Another new grouping of social results, labeled “People and Pages on Google+ related to (Search Term),” will show up in the top right side of some searches. This isn’t the case for all results. The personalized results only show up if you are logged into Gmail or Google+. Even when not signed in, social results still show up.

For example, here are my results for “Basketball” when I am logged in to Gmail.

Here are the results for “Basketball” when I am not logged in.

When you use any sort of specificity in your search, such as search “Kansas Basketball” instead of just “Basketball,” the personal and social results no longer show up.

“Self storage” is one of the terms that does not include personal or social results, and why would it? There is not much of a social aspect to self storage and there are not celebrities attached to the term like there are for basketball. Here are the results I receive for “Los Angeles Self Storage.”

So what’s the point in having a Google+ page for your self storage business if the search terms that you're battling for don't show up in Search Plus Your World? For one thing, the more places you’re found, the better. And slowly, I believe, Google will begin to give more credence to someone listed on Google+. Think about what Google has done with maps. Google no longer lists or pulls data from map listings or reviews other than its own. What’s to keep them from doing something similar in social media?

Facebook and Twitter can see it coming already. Both have complained that that the social results (results on the top-right side) that Google provides are not fair to users, because these are not really the top social results. Engineers from Facebook, Twitter and several other social companies built a tool (Focusontheuser.org) that provides the actual top results in that space. It takes the top social results that come up organically and place them there.

Here are the results for “Basketball” using the Focus on the User tool.

So the argument is that even Google, in its organic results, is giving more credence to Facebook or Twitter results than Google+. This is one reason why you should not abandon your presence on Facebook and Twitter; Google still recognizes personal and business profiles on both.

As for giving more power to Google+ in search, that’s already happening with +1s. We got close to 100 +1s for the StorageFront homepage, and during the two weeks the +1s occurred, StorageFront’s ranking for the search term “Self Storage Units” jumped up two spots on Google.

Even if you don't get that many +1s, it is still beneficial to make a Google+ business listing. Google is king when it comes to search. You should do everything in your power to please them. Building a Google+ business listing is simple and it’s going to help you show up higher in search — maybe not yet, but certainly down the road.

Plans to go off-site and mix up the format are in the works for 2012

Westwood, Kan. — What started as an experiment has turned into a hip event for Kansas City’s startup scene.

They call it Venture Friday, and it began in the summer of 2011 as a way for Kansas City startup Red Nova Labs to demonstrate that the coasts weren’t the only areas that could foster entrepreneurial spirit. Word quickly spread around town and the last two meetups have met capacity in Red Nova Labs’ private office lounge.

“We have been blown away by response,” CEO Dan Miller said. “We thought it would just be something fun we tried out through the summer. But I think if we had shut it down in autumn as planned, we would have had folks waiting on the steps for our doors to open.”

To keep the event fresh after a year of hosting, Red Nova Labs decided to mix things up in 2012 with new formats and a few off-site meetups. Previously, the standard format was a two-hour happy hour with two entrepreneur presenters each month.

The changes are not happening simply for the act of changing. By breaking routine, as CMO Carrie Royce explains it, the hope is to reach a new group of people, help foster collaboration on new ideas and further grow the startup ecosystem in the Midwest.

Most of the ideas for new formats are coming from group members, who had the chance to suggest new formats on the Venture Friday meetup discussion page or in-person at past meetups.

The first experiment of 2012 landed in February’s happy hour: a Startup Roundtable that featured eight local projects. Each company had its own table to show off its venture to any interested attendees.

“I thought the Startup Roundtable was a unique format to the usual networking type events I've been to,” said Austin Brown, CMO of Hurrdat, a new social media company who participated in Startup Roundtable. “The roundtable format allowed individuals to have more in-depth discussions about each featured business, which was beneficial to both sides of the conversation.”

Other Kansas City-area startups that participated in the roundtable were Leap2, Lucky Orange, ShownHome, Ruxter, Tech Orchard, My Turn Books and Wilderness Brewery. Attendees kept busy learning about each venture.

“I really liked how the different businesses were on display and highlighted,” said Jill Heisterkamp, who attended her second Venture Friday. “I would love to see this done again. The open networking was also fabulous, as always.”

Brown came away from the event with several contacts and ideas to take back to his partners.

“After the event I was pleased to take away some valuable feedback from a variety of business-minded individuals,” he said. “People asked questions that led to great discussions about our endorsement platform. I was excited to share the vision and opportunities ahead of Hurrdat, and receive positive feedback as a result.”

The next Venture Fridays experiment is in April, when the meetup group will go off-site for the first time at Snow & Co. in Kansas City’s Crossroads district. The event, which will be limited to 50 attendees, will have a Speed Meeting theme, where a number of members switch tables every few minutes for rapid intros. Then people will break up into casual happy hour as usual.

“Two hours isn’t enough time to become friendly with more than a handful of people. But more than two hours can wear on you,” Red Nova Labs’ CMO Carrie Royce said. “So we thought it might be cool to try something where everyone can meet each other, like speed-dating for entrepreneurs. It might come off like a sack of doorknobs, but we won’t know until we try. Booze, as always, will be involved, so I anticipate free-flowing conversation.”

In May, Think Big Partners has volunteered to collaborate and cohost at their swank location in downtown Kansas City. Talks have started with several other startup-supporters to cohost, and the Red Nova Labs team is still kicking around ideas for future events, including the popular idea of Failure Night where entrepreneurs swap failure stories.

“We don’t want this to be all about Red Nova Labs,” Royce said. “That was never our goal. Our goal was to bring marketers, developers and entrepreneurs together to talk over what we’re all working on in a casual atmosphere. It boosted our energy and introduced us to great minds in the area, and we want to do the same for others. We hope that by ‘mixing it up’ this year, we can help smaller social circles of entrepreneurs and supporters find each other — create a bigger circle. As anyone who’s ever launched a company can tell you, a large, diverse network can really make a positive difference when you’re going through the phases of a startup.”

The next Venture Friday on March 9 will be the last one at Red Nova Labs’ Discovery Lounge until at least June — possibly longer. Aaron Sloup with Lantern, who talked last November about his work and his product’s Beta launch, will return to show off the progress his startup has made. A new company called 4 First Names, which originated at Startup Weekend last year, will also present. Venture Fridays regular Nate Allen and Wes Mikel are the brains behind the startup.

Startup Roundtable was such a success that Red Nova Labs is considering bringing it back in the spring. The meetup group is also open to new ideas. Entrepreneurs who are interested in attending or have meetup ideas are encouraged to visit the Venture Fridays page on meetup.com.

About Red Nova Labs
Red Nova Labs was founded and self-funded in 2009 as a web development and marketing agency as well as a technology think-tank, creating original, cutting-edge systems for web and mobile. On the service side, the company supports interface design, backend programming and online marketing. On the product side Red Nova Labs invents, builds and launches its own web-based platforms for various applications and vertical markets. To support both business models, its growing team of development engineers conceives resourceful code generators which add practical ease to complex programming — enabling unprecedented speed in creating vibrant, multidimensional environments and utilities. Once a product is launched, each business operates autonomously as an independent unit, with full engineering and marketing support from Red Nova Labs on the back end. The company is open to collaborative opportunities.

You can picture how your big idea could take off, and the dreaming helps you grind day after day. Most the time, you fail. It happens to almost everyone. Fail once. Fail twice. Succeed.

This brings me to the story of Jeremy Lin. If you haven’t heard about Lin yet, you are either 1.) Not Asian; 2.) Hate sports; or 3.) Hate the news. Lin is an amazing story on so many levels. If Disney had made a movie based on his story before it happened, I would have made fun of the most unrealistic plot ever written.

What’s even more amazing than the fact that Jeremy Lin is an Asian-American who went to Harvard and is now starring in the NBA, is he failed. Not once. But twice. Twice Lin was cut from NBA teams, and the Knicks probably would have cut him eventually if a bunch of injuries had not forced them to give the kid a chance.

Now, Lin is Google. At least, in the next year, he’ll probably have as much money. Lin is the entrepreneur that failed, failed again and succeeded. Giving us all a little hope.

Some linkage to get you to the weekend:  

• Need help communicating? The Bureau of Communication is here to help. They had me sold at the Airing of Grievances. What will really come in hand is the formal apology. I’m going to need a lot of copies. I’ll start with a note to my girlfriend apologizing for my devotion to Valentine’s Day. Apparently, getting a card about loving every minute with her, even “the dumb-ass” activities; then when she asked what dumb-ass activities we do, me saying “celebrate Valentine’s Day,” was not what she had in mind for Valentine’s Day! I’ll also be sending an Airing of the Grievances to Hallmark. 
• Remember when I linked to that weird KickStarter project for a running from Zombies app? Well, they are about to launch, and my coworker Nadine informs me that she will be giving a full report on how it feels to run from zombies.
• Advice for do's and don’ts on social media, and this isn’t the typical, “Don’t post scandalous photos of yourself or use profane language.”
• Cool way to simplify search in Google Chrome.
• This video reminds me that I need to find all of the family videos from my childhood and destroy them immediately.

• Oh Parrot, you dog you.

• Scratch “stocking over my head” from the list of new looks I was going to try.

• From Chris Klein, compliments of Reddit: Remember that "amazing instrument" video done in CGI? (I don’t.) Yeah, well Intel actually built it!

• Yes, I’m a Jayhawk, but this is a pretty cool story about a little girl who is now a hero to K-State fans.
• To balance the K-State love, the only thing close to the out-of-nowhere story of Jeremy Lin is the emergence of KU 7-footer Jeff Withey. My story over at Basketball Prospectus.
• Sony Music increased the price of a Whitney Houston album on iTunes after the singer died on Sunday. You stay classy, Sony.
• How the Blackberry became irrelevant.
• Big brother (ahem, I mean Google) is watching you.
• Apple about to hit 25 billion app downloads.  
• The Double Dream Hands guy has made another video. Enjoy your weekend. I’m off to hit up the club to try out these moves. Ladies beware.

Before you know it, a second level of complexity can muck things up: How far do you take your mobile experience? Do you focus strictly on mobile devices, or do you also offer a completely unique experience for tablets like the iPad or the Kindle Fire? If you do decide to go with a Web App or a Mobile Website, how much legacy support does your product need to offer? Can you get away with only supporting the latest and greatest devices (thus going full HTML5 and CSS3 support)? For now, it's best to put off these extra questions and focus on the core issue: How will you build your new mobile offering?

Let's take a closer look at each of these options in greater detail.

Native App

Building a native app means utilizing the Software Development Kit (SDK) that powers all of the applications that come with your phone. This is by far the most powerful of the three choices, as it has full access to all of the tools the original developers had (or most of them, anyway). The slickest applications you've played with to date are almost always built as native apps.

Take Clear, for example, a to-do list application that just launched on the iPhone this week. While it does not do anything that your standard fare to-do list applications already do (in fact, it does less than most), it excels at what it does by adding some extra "wow" factor to its user interface. By supporting true multitouch gestures and doing some pretty clever animation tricks, Clear takes full advantage of the iPhone's SDK in ways that would not work very well (if at all) as a web app.

Another app that has an especially over-the-top user interface is Path. Although it has been getting some hot press lately about storing a user's contacts without first asking permission, this social networking app is a definite standout for its clean but sophisticated UI. While a lot of what Path does well can be emulated as either a web app or even a mobile website, its "flair" features simply wouldn't be possible with strictly web-oriented toolsets. Take a look at the video below: the little animations the app performs between interactions with buttons like the "+" which results in a swivel rotation effect are what take it to the next level.

Okay, so if building a native app results in so much power, why doesn't everyone simply go that route? Time and money. Building a native app is considerably more difficult than building a web app or mobile website. Moreover, native apps are native to the device they were built to support. In other words, creating an app for Android means it only works on Android; the vast majority of the code and UI work you do for Android is not compatible with the iOS SDK, nevermind the Windows Phone 7 SDK.

Here's a short list of the pro's and con's to choosing a native app over its web-based counterparts:

Pro's

• Extremely powerful, can do just about anything the device is capable of
• Best performance, user inputs generate real-time responses
• App's feel natural, as if intended for the device family they are being used on (because they are!)
• Can be used if the user is online/offline
• Can charge money for the app (one-time purchase, in-app purchase for new features, subscription model)

Con's

• By far the most expensive option, in terms of both cost and time to build
• Native only to the device family you build for (iOS, Android or WP7) – supporting more than one family requires nearly 2x, 3x the work
• Need to be updated fairly frequently whenever a new build of the operating system is released to ensure no new bugs surface
• At Apple/Google/Microsoft's mercy – if they don't like your app or find a problem with it, it doesn't go online or can be pulled at any time

Web App

First of all, what is a web app? There are technically two meanings to the term: one is a website that behaves more like an app (think Gmail.com or Twitter.com), while the other is closer to a native app in that it is downloaded from the App Store (or similar) and installed on the device, despite being powered by web technologies. For the purposes of this article, I'm considering the former to be a mobile website, while the latter is a true web app.

Web app's beat native apps in one key area: they are predominantly compatible with just about every major smartphone or tablet on the market today. Using what I call "mobile bridge" kits like PhoneGap, Rhomobile, Sencha Touch, and many others, you utilize HTML5, Javascript and CSS3 to build your application and deploy a product that works very similarly on all major devices. I say "very similarly," because like building websites, you still have to deal with slight (sometimes not-so-slight) differences in how HTML objects are rendered via CSS. It's like optimizing a website for Mozilla Firefox, then also having to optimize it to look the same in Internet Explorer 7: hopefully it looks similar, but oftentimes you have to refactor your HTML or CSS to make it work properly in both browsers.

Additionally, because building websites has been around for so much longer than a lot of these mobile SDK's, and because the languages used are simpler and easier to learn, it is generally easier and cheaper to find or build your own development team for web apps than it is native apps. Likewise, updating a web app is substantially simpler than a native app, as a lot of these mobile bridge kits serve as an intermediary API: they go out of their way to ensure that new operating system updates don't break old application code. Thus, you should theoretically not have to keep as sharp an eye on your older web apps that have been available for awhile as you would for native apps.

Here's a couple example web app's. The first, Diary Mobile, was built using PhoneGap, while the second, SugarCRM's web app, was built using Rhomobile.

It's important to note that there are some companies out there with new solutions to this entire debate. Appcelerator, for example, has a product called Titanium Mobile which is supposed to take the compatibility features that a web app platform provides and bundles it with the power that a native SDK provides. If you'd like to learn more about it, you can visit their website.

Let's take a quick look again at what separates a web app from the group:

Pro's

• Highly compatible with all popular smartphone and tablet devices
• Fast and relatively inexpensive to build – learning curve is less than native development
• With HTML5 and CSS3 coupled with Javascript, provides a lot of the functionality a native app can provide
• Can be used if the user is online/offline
• Can charge money for the app (one-time purchase, in-app purchase for new features, subscription model)

Con's

• Not quite as robust (feature-wise) as a native app
• Cannot currently do some of the higher end UI tricks
• Oftentimes feels like you're using a website, instead of a true, native app
• At Apple/Google/Microsoft's mercy – if they don't like your app or find a problem with it, it doesn't go online or can be pulled at any time

Mobile Website

Arguably a totally different type of mobile offering altogether, mobile websites are typically extensions of your current desktop-designed website. In many cases, these are just stripped down versions of your regular website, oftentimes with some cut features and a layout that is optimized for a smaller screen. Visiting ESPN.com on your mobile browser, for example, presents you with a mobile website.

Because the same technology (for the most part) is used to create web apps and mobile websites, a lot of the same arguments can be made for going this route over a native app. The big defining difference between building a mobile website vs a web app is your user's access point: Does a user interested in your product/brand going to think, "Hey, let's open my mobile web browser and go to their website!" or "Hmm, let me go check the app store and see if there's an app for that!" If it's the former, then your decision is easy: go with a mobile website. This is good news for you: you get to avoid all of the App Store (and Android Marketplace, etc.) hullaballoo with getting your app submitted and approved: just throw up a web server and call it a day!

You'll find that the pro's and con's are similar to that of a web app:

Pro's

• Highly compatible with all popular smartphone and tablet devices
• Fast and relatively inexpensive to build – learning curve is less than native development
• With HTML5 and CSS3 coupled with Javascript, provides a lot of the functionality a native app can provide
• No need to deal with the App Store and its counterparts
• Fast turnaround for site updates – just code the changes and deploy, no need to wait for your changes to be approved by a third party

Con's

• Not quite as robust (feature-wise) as a native app or web app – does not have access to all of the API features a native or web app does
• Cannot currently do some of the higher end UI tricks
• Users will have a slow experience with new page loads (worse depending on their current Internet speed)
• Can only be used and accessed if the user is online (through a cell or WIFI signal)
• No built-in way to monetize

Great. Now what?

For most, choosing the right way to go at this point is fairly straightforward: if you have the resources and time available to build a robust, native app – go for it! Provided you design a compelling user experience that takes advantage of the power each device has, you are setting yourself up for the best current technology can offer. If the user experience isn't as important, but reaching the entire mobile market immediately while maintaining an App Store presence matters, then a web app is the best choice. Perhaps you aren't interested in building an app at all, though. In this case, just extend your current website to be better suited for mobile devices. Remember, you can have two websites at the same address that are viewed entirely differently: ESPN.com looks great on a desktop browser, and it works equally well on a mobile browser thanks to the magic of CSS. Also keep in mind that building a Native or web app and a mobile website are not necessarily mutually exclusive options! You might decide to have a mobile website for accessibility, while also building a Native or web app to tap an entirely unique market. Twitter.com and Gmail.com do this very well: despite both offering native applications for use, they also have full-blown HTML5 mobile websites too.

*I value my job.

The definition of a problem solver is fairly loose, and Dan understands that. He asks oddball questions like how many barbers are there in the United States. The answer is not important to him. What’s important is how someone gets to their answer.

When building a company, it’s important to find problem solvers who all come at problems from different angles. You don’t want everyone thinking the same way, because that plan of attack might not always be the best way to answer a question.

As silly as this sounds, I started thinking about this when listening to some friends debate sports this week. The debate was whether a KU basketball player who is making a poor percentage of his 3-pointers, should stop shooting 3-pointers. One group argued the numbers, and they believed you couldn’t argue with the numbers. He should stop shooting.

The other group argued that by telling the player in question, Elijah Johnson, to stop shooting, that would kill his confidence. And their eyes tell them that Johnson shoots more 3s than anyone else on the team because he has the best shot on the team. The only way to get back on track was to keep shooting. To tell him to stop shooting would also change roles that were established for a reason.

Many logical arguments were made on both sides, and both groups made a lot of sense. I fell somewhere in the middle. I’m sure similar debates go on inside the walls of Allen Fieldhouse, and it’s important to have those arguments. It’s important to have both sides and important to be able to use all the numbers/visual evidence and come to a decision.

In a startup, you want people who come at a problem or a debate from multiple angles. Yes, there will be disagreements, but eventually if you have problem solvers, everyone will be able to come together and make the best decision for the company. The formula for failure is to make a decision without even thinking about it. Just like the wrong answer to Dan’s question, in my opinion, is to shoot out a guess without thinking it through.

This life lesson has been brought to you by the Sweet Linkage, now let’s get to the links…

• If content is not part of your marketing plan, you should probably take a look at this graphic.
• If I could have done science experiments like this video below in school instead of dissecting rodents, I might have liked science.

• Our sales guy Bobby called this and this “the sweetest linkage yet.” Little on the nerdy side for me, but I’ll include them – if only because Bobby walks a lot on his hands and sometimes I’m afraid he might kick me in the face.
• Pretty cool music video (if you’re into Bobby music).

• From the nerdy to the really good reads… I was embarrassed to admit that I had never heard of John McLendon, Jr. until I read this story. If you like basketball, KU or appreciate history, this is a must-read. McLendon, as the author was told by his biographer, is “the forgotten Jayhawk.”
• And if you appreciate great writing, this Super Bowl column on Tom Brady from Dan Wetzel is well worth your time. Enjoy. 

• What brands mean to a 5-year-old. 

• As you watch the Super Bowl on Sunday, you might notice that, typically, Eli Manning is confused.
• Props to Honda for its Ferris Bueller commercial. 

• This can-say-anything-backwards girl is pretty entertaining, but my favorite part of the video is when the kid says “crappers” at the end. 

• Using news logic for design. I’m going to start telling our designers to run things past me since my Editor skills obviously make me a design expert.
• What’s freedom? Sometimes it’s watching porn in a library. U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.! (Editor’s note: I do not support watching porn in a library. I think it’s disgusting… and sort of funny.)
• This is what it’s like when I play basketball against half our sales team. 

• They say this product is for taking naps at work; I want it for when one of our sales guys decides to make a call near my desk.
• Ants: nature’s architects.
• Funny Super Bowl commercials from the past. I say nothing beats Terry Tate.
• Something about Mozilla hiding URLs with a project they call Pancake. I’m not sure about this, as I feel like the URL is like the syrup to my web browser. (nerd jokes)
• Another one for the nerds that’s actually pretty cool. 

• Explaining what is an IPO (initial public offering) with the story of the “Three Little Pigs.” That’s pretty good, but if you want a good Three Little Pigs story, ask me sometime about the Three Little Bachelor Pigs.
• Like I said before, the final three videos are in honor of my coworker Tim Banks, the lone graduate in the office from the University of Missourah. 

• Here come the best and the brightest.

• The actual best and brightest.

• Be sure to watch this right before tip-off.

Three programmers and a search engine specialist join the fast-growing team

Westwood, Kan. — Red Nova Labs is always on the lookout for programming talent in the Kansas City area, so CTO Bob Zhou put a feather in his cap when he found and hired two new web developers recently.

A few years ago, Zhou created an assessment for programmers that tests applicants’ knowledge. Passing the assessment is not the only qualification to code at Red Nova Labs, but Zhou says it helps him hone in on top prospects. After new developers Eric Hankins and Tim Banks performed well, Zhou could not hire the two fast enough.

“Our goal isn’t just to expand our talent pool to cover capacity; we want to increase our ability to tackle new challenges,” Zhou said. “Eric and Tim stand to make a big impact. They scored higher than any other applicants, and they have great energy. They’ll improve our team across the board.”

Hankins and Banks are just two of the four new technology-focused employees who have joined the expanding startup in Westwood in the last few months. Andrew Heuback joined the engineering team as a Quality Assurance Tester (QA), and Ashley Burgener joined the operations side as a Local Search Administrator.

Each new hire has a distinct role that filled a need within the company. Hankins, Senior Software Engineer, will help the company streamline maintenance and upgrades to its web platforms through his expertise in server automation. Banks, a Front-End Developer specializing in Javascript and HTML5, will improve user interaction with Red Nova Labs’ platforms for self storage and local commerce.

With the increasing number of web platforms that Red Nova Labs builds and manages, Heuback’s position in QA was a top hiring priority. Heuback stood out from other applicants because of his coding experience, which is an asset in website QA.

“Andrew has a mixed role here,” Zhou said. “He veers into front-end website development as well as QA, which makes him proactive toward issues as well as reactive to problems. That’s a big deal.”

Burgener will embrace the ever-changing discipline of Search Engine Optimization. Her skills from her previous career in accounts receivable made her a good fit for handling clients’ Google listings, which requires a lot of attention to detail.

Red Nova Labs, which has tripled in size in the last year, plans to continue to grow in 2012. In the next quarter, they will look to add additional developers, marketing resources and sales reps.

“Our abilities as a web development and marketing company continue to grow,” CEO Dan Miller said. “Every piece of every project we work on, we handle in-house. It is extremely important that we cover our bases, that we have the best people to do it, and that we work ahead of mainstream technology.”

About Red Nova Labs
Red Nova Labs was founded and self-funded in 2009 as a web development and marketing agency as well as a technology think-tank, creating original, cutting-edge systems for web and mobile. On the service side, the company supports interface design, backend programming and online marketing. On the product side Red Nova Labs invents, builds and launches its own web-based platforms for various applications and vertical markets. To support both business models, its growing team of development engineers conceives resourceful code generators which add practical ease to complex programming—enabling unprecedented speed in creating vibrant, multidimensional environments and utilities. Once a product is launched, each business operates autonomously as an independent unit, with full engineering and marketing support from Red Nova Labs on the back end. The company is open to collaborative opportunities.

It’s worth remembering that to some extent, these accusations of laziness and narcissism in “kids these days” are nothing new — they’ve been levied against Generation X, Baby Boomers and many generations before them. Even Aristotle and Plato were said to have expressed similar feelings about the slacker youth of their times.

My take: every generation has bums. Every generation has hard workers. Quit generalizing and find the hard workers. They’re out there.

On to the linkage…

• Spending money at local business. What a novel idea! I like this.  
• Entrepreneurs fail. A lot. What we learn from those failures can help us down the road. This is a great read from former TechCrunch writer Mark Hendrickson examing why his startup, Plancast, never took off.
• Cool story from National Geographic about identical twins and how sometimes technology can’t even tell them apart.
• Really, really old stuff.
• The guy who sent this to me conceded that these are the types of things that he does that make him a real dick.
• A look at the best Super Bowl ads from the past.
• Speaking of really cool commercials…

• Google is penalizing sites with too many ads at the top of pages. Uber like.
• From Senior Marketing Manager of Klout: How to build a community around your startup.