Seeking Strategic Consulting Gigs

Image via CrunchBase

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Paramendra Bhagat
Date: Fri, Jul 27, 2012 at 12:11 PM
Subject: Courtney, seeking a Strategic Consulting gig
To: Courtney Bolton

Please help find some gigs. Thanks.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Paramendra Bhagat
Date: Fri, Jul 27, 2012 at 10:26 AM
Subject: Timo, seeking a Strategic Consulting gig
To: Timo Ewalds

Please help out if you can. Thanks.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Paramendra Bhagat
Date: Fri, Jul 27, 2012 at 10:25 AM
Subject: Shane, seeking a Strategic Consulting gig
To: Shane Snow

Hi Shane. Can you please help me land a gig? Thanks.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Paramendra Bhagat
Date: Thu, Jul 26, 2012 at 6:54 PM
Subject: Hi Eric, seeking a Strategic Consulting gig
To: eric@foursquare.com

Hi Eric.

I seek a short term strategic consulting gig with FourSquare. Can you
please help out?

Thanks.

Paramendra.

(I hope I got your email address right. I guessed it.)

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Paramendra Bhagat
Date: Thu, Jul 26, 2012 at 5:16 PM
Subject: Hi Albert, requesting help
To: Albert Wenger

Hello Albert.

Can you please help me land a few strategic consulting gigs?

Thanks.

Paramendra.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Paramendra Bhagat
Date: Thu, Jul 26, 2012 at 5:15 PM
Subject: Fred, need a small help
To: Fred Wilson

Hi Fred.

If I manage to get through your inbox impossibilities and you do end
up reading this email....... Can you please help me land a few
strategic consulting gigs with some of your portfolio companies? Would
be a big help.

Thanks.

Paramendra.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Paramendra Bhagat
Date: Thu, Jul 26, 2012 at 5:10 PM
Subject: Seeking A Strategic Consulting Role
To: Dina Kaplan , Mike Hudack

Hi Dina. Hello Mike.

I was at your guys' Holiday party in 2010.
http://technbiz.blogspot.com/2010/12/bliptv-how-do-they-ever-get-anything.html

I seek a strategic consulting role with Blip.TV along these lines:
http://technbiz.blogspot.com/2012/07/a-politician-in-redmond.html More
about me here: http://www.linkedin.com/in/paramendra I was Barack
Obama's first full time volunteer in NYC, and the campaign in Chicago
picked up specific advice from me three times, each documented at my
Barackface blog.

I am someone working to launch a tech startup in the microfinance
space down the line. But I do consulting gigs right now.

I hope my services will be worth it to you.

Thanks.

Paramendra.

--
http://gutkhaconsulting.com
http://www.paramendra.com
917 512 5445

But It's An Ad

Cover of William Shakespeare

For Foursquare, It’s Not an Ad, It’s a Promoted Update

a Promoted Update from the Dos Caminos restaurant, part of BR Guest, could feature “an offer for a secret omelet that only Foursquare users can get”

What's in a name? That which we call a rose - Shakespeare Quotes

Juliet:
"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet."

Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2)

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Promoted Tweets, Promoted Updates

Logo for Foursquare (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Someone said FourSquare was the next Twitter. But that was a long time ago.

Foursquare Launches Promoted Updates, Its Newest Effort To Generate Revenue

Foursquare has partnered with about 20 merchants, from small mom and pop shops to national chains like Best Buy, to launch the pilot program. In the next few months, Foursquare hopes to turn Promoted Updates into a self-service tool merchants of all sizes can use on its platform..... Foursquare's 20 million users are checking in 5 million times per day. Foursquare currently has 120 employees.

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Asana's Inbox: Work Email

English: Low-resolution image of the Asana logo. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Announcing Inbox: A Step Towards A Post-Email World

Email is a 40-year-old technology designed to send electronic letters, yet we rely on it to communicate and coordinate nearly everything about our work. ..... Because anyone can add anything to our email inbox, it robs us of our sense of control. ..... Redundant meetings, tedious summary reports, endless streams of status updates, all replaced by the flow of Asana’s shared task list, with all the related thinking and documents right with each task. .... the biggest “work about work” time-sink of all: using email to stay on top of everything that has changed. .... Months later, if a new teammate wants to know how a decision was made, they can just search for that task, without needing to bug you to forward them the email chain. ..... Add yourself as a follower to exactly the set of tasks that you care about. If someone adds you to a thread and it’s no longer relevant, drop off in one click. ..... every read message is archived by default, making “inbox zero” the path of least resistance. ..... Since turning on Inbox for ourselves, we’ve seen over half our email disappear. Many of us have gone from checking email multiple times an hour to a couple times a day. ..... Business is ready to evolve to a post-email world. We believe Asana is the first credible post-email application.

Death to email! And meetings, too. Asana’s new inbox takes aim at “work about work”

fake-work .... a Utopia where email doesn’t exist. ..... “People spend an enormous amount of time in their inboxes, compulsively checking,” he said in an interview yesterday at Asana’s San Francisco HQ. “And it’s slow, distracting, and inefficient. It’s almost a counterproductivity tool.” ..... Asana Inbox is hot. Hot like an assassin who is killing every namby-pamby piece of B.S. in your corporate life and letting you get back to being a creative genius. ..... “It’s incredibly satisfying,” Rosenstein said. “You have a very real sense of clarity on what you’ve done, what everyone else is working on, how to get to your milestones, how far away you are from accomplishing your project… It makes you calmer and faster, and it emboldens you to take on even more ambitious projects in the future.” ..... “Email isn’t going away tomorrow… but it wasn’t designed for the coordination of complex tasks,” he said. “It’s the lowest common denominator, you can do anything poorly in email… ..... “Our meetings are not status meetings. They’re about talking about intellectually meaty design problems or product ideas. It’s stimulating, and it leaves the coordination to the robots.” ..... would transition him from a manager to a leader — inspiring, interacting, and doing the higher-order things that he really does enjoy.”

Asana tries to end email frustration with Inbox

a huge productivity suck: email .... Users subscribe to and unsubscribe from the feeds as they want to see them ..... betting that social networking tools transformed for the enterprise will not fill the bill. It claims big customers, including Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter, use the service to minimize extraneous meetings and to cut down on distractions. ..... “We don’t really see things like Yammer, SocialCast and Chatter as competitors but we also don’t see them as particularly useful. They just took something popular in the consumer space and ported them over, but research shows many people don’t see the value in them. We’re about a work graph, not the social graph,” Rosenstein said ..... Asana’s service is free for up to 30 users ..... a central column of new information flowing through, showing you all the activity happening with you and your colleagues ..... So if Peter Ha marked a task you assigned him as complete, you’ll know that he’s finished editing a guest post.

With New “Inbox” Feature, Asana Is Looking More Like That Email Slayer We’re All Longing For
Asana’s answer to email puts ‘inbox zero’ within easy reach

a few email chains, a handful of phone calls, one to two hours of meetings, and a dozen text messages later, you have a better but painful idea of what’s happening. The evolving state of the office and the increasing popularity of remote workers as well as the many, disparate pieces of technology we all use has complicated the matter intensely.

Asana’s Inbox a step towards ridding offices of “work about work”

"Each email is an isolated random string of text without any context" ..... All keystrokes happen in real-time on everybody's computer screen, just like in a Google Doc. ..... In fact, Facebook still manages internal operations using a custom version of Asana that Moskovitz and Rosenstein built while at the company. ..... Asana's Inbox looks like your Facebook News Feed, except without all the pictures, and without all the stuff that isn't deliberately shared with you. Inbox contains updates to tasks, comments, due date changes, and other status updates people would normally reserve for email...... So Asana has built a new communication client with tons of metadata, file storage, and organization tools, but the place most people are increasingly checking for work-related messages is on a smartphone. ..... "Mobile is the weakest part of the experience right now," Rosenstein admitted. "It's our top priority." Asana also isn't yet an email replacement because it's catered to team communication. Random one-to-one emails with cat picture attachments between friends don't yet have much of a place on the service, but Rosenstein says that the long term goal is to kill email entirely. "Email isn't going away tomorrow," he said. "It was originally designed to mimic the way the post office sends messages. We've only gotten by because it's the lowest possible denominator."

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Google Plus Is Google's Bing

Image via CrunchBaseTechCrunch: How The IPO Ruined Google

I never thought Google Plus was going to one up Facebook. Facebook is the social king. And that will stay. Just like Google is the search king and that will stay. Facebook tried to one up FourSquare, and failed. It gave up. But Facebook can not ignore the location space, and Google can not ignore social.

But I do think Google Plus is an arrival of sorts. Google wanted a player in the social space, and now they got it. They needed an also ran, and they have it now. Google badly needed a social layer to its services, and now they got it.

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• Facebook Promotes Bing Search Even More

• Australian Marketing Students Create "Bing Automatic" Concept To Beat Google [Video] (thetechnologycafe.com)
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More To The Naveen Story

Naveen Leaving FourSquare

You don't want to believe everything you read in the media, but obviously there is more to the Naveen story than first emerged. My only sources of information are what are publicly available.

Business Insider: Co-Founder Naveen Selvadurai 'Tried To Fight' His Departure From Foursquare

A source who spoke with Selvadurai during his final discussions with Foursquare says Selvadurai feels pushed out – pushed out by his cofounder Dennis Crowley and the Foursquare board of directors....... Selvadurai told the source he was financially "screwed" when he was forced out too. ........ It's unclear how Selvadurai was financially damaged. When an employee leaves a startup, their salary stops and stock options stop vesting....... The severance was complicated enough that Selvadurai had to bring in a lawyer to help...... "[Selvadurai] tried to fight it," says this source. "It was a contentious thing. He was pretty f---ing upset." A second source familiar with the situation tells us Selvadurai's departure wasn't a simple firing or a resignation: "These things can be very gray." ...... one source tells us Selvadurai and Crowley "hadn't been getting along" for some time now. ...... Another source close to Selvadurai tells us he has, for a while now, felt lost at Foursquare and he has been frustrated about his role....... "Foursquare has a CEO; that job is taken" says a source briefed on Foursquare's founder divorce. "Might Naveen be happy about that or not, I don't know. I can see that as being hard." ...... Selvadurai worked hard to make Foursquare what it is today. But Foursquare has always been Crowley's dream. Crowley has been working on this company in some form for years, even before iPhones or his first startup Dodgeball existed. ...... Selvadurai, Foursquare PR, and Crowley declined to comment....... Jack Dorsey, who some have called the next Steve Jobs, was pushed out of Twitter. The board didn't feel he was ready to be CEO....... The exception may be Google's Sergey Brin, who heads "special projects" while his cofounder, Larry Page, runs the company as CEO. ....... When cofounders do stick around, it's often in non-operating, lower-profile roles. Yahoo's David Filo still works in a cubicle, even though he's a billionaire. Apple's Steve Wozniak never wanted a say in running that company. ...... A source close to Selvadurai can't imagine him being happy with a role like Filo's....... "Naveen is a proud guy and a real entrepreneur -- someone who probably wouldn't want to remain in a situation that wasn't fulfilling for him," says a source.

AllThingsD: Checking In With the Foursquare Founder Parting: More “Tense” (Of Course)

In a terse note, Sevaldurai wrote that he would remain on the company’s board and as an adviser, as well as the “single most vocal user” of the popular check-in service. ...... according to numerous sources inside and outside the company — the impetus for Selvadurai’s departure was a lot more complex and fraught than he or the company indicated. ...... Twitter went through the mother of all contentious partings — twice, in fact — in an ongoing battle among its founders. ...... Selvadurai and Crowley, who had together become New York’s highest profile entrepreneurs in recent years ...... they had come to the conclusion over a series of talks over the last several months that there was no place for Selvadurai any longer at the fast-growing start-up. ...... “This company grew very quickly and a lot of senior management has been added,” said one person with knowledge of the situation. “It got to the point where Naveen was not in charge of much.” ....... since Foursquare began adding execs — I have a list below — he had become ever more sidelined, ending up with a small team focused on platform efforts and supporting APIs. ...... “Naveen was no longer heading any meaningful area of functional responsibility, so things got tense” ....... the departure was not ugly or closely related to either a recent stock sale by employees or its most recent funding in June that valued Foursquare at $600 million. ...... “Dennis and he don’t hate each other — things just changed” ....... “When you look at all the external stuff, Naveen’s leaving was really not tied to anything in particular. The business was really starting to mature … and there is eventually a line in the sand between building a product and building a company.” ...... Foursquare now has 111 employees ...... the discussions about roles at the company became more pronounced. ..... Naveen and Dennis agreed that there was not a place for him day to day ...... Crowley’s public goodbye on Twitter was short and, yes, sweet

After 3 yrs, my @foursquare co-founder is moving onto new projects & big ideas. Can't wait to see what's next @naveen! naveenium.com/stream/next

— Dennis Crowley (@dens) March 5, 2012

Naveen Leaving FourSquare

Image via CrunchBaseI just read the headlines. I have not read the full length articles yet. But I must say I am very, very surprised. This was so unexpected, to me it was. Unless the split between the two cofounders was quite tilted, or if by now after having raised several rounds of money Naveen's percentage ownership in the company had become really low, or the guy has come up with the next big thing, I mean. I have thought of FourSquare as a company that could end up with an IPO.

Now let me go read. The guy himself has a blog post on the topic, I think. Let's hear straight from the horse's mouth. If I were him I'd have left my equity still in the company. Because that money is growing. I wonder what he did.

GigaOm: Naveen Selvadurai, Foursquare co-founder is leaving
Business Insider: The Co-Founder Of One Of New York's Hottest Startups Is Checking Out
Pulse2: Foursquare Co-Founder Naveen Selvadurai Stepping Down
TheNextWeb: Foursquare co-founder Naveen Selvadurai announces he is leaving the company to work on new projects
AllThingsD: Foursquare Co-Founder Naveen Selvadurai Leaving
Naveen: Next
VentureBeat: Cue violins: Foursquare co-founder Naveen Selvadurai leaving the company
CNet: Foursquare co-founder Selvadurai to leave company
TechCrunch: SV Angel Also Buying Up Foursquare Stock. Dennis Crowley Emerges As Big-Company CEO

Okay, so the guy sits on the FourSquare Board.

Looks like the guy sold his stock to Spark Capital, one hopes only some of it.

Okay, so the guy feels like he has done all he can and he needs to move on.

It is possible some of the VCs in the picture have been gently working towards this end.

Pinterest Competes With Twitter, Instagram With FourSquare
FourSquare Should Rent A Stadium
FourSquare, I Was Not Here
Instagram Now Bigger Than FourSquare
FourSquare SMS Based Check Ins: Sometimes Messed Up
436 Friend Requests On FourSquare: Accepted
FourSquare's New Round
FourSquare Has 6000000 Users

Pinterest Competes With Twitter, Instagram With FourSquare

Image via WikipediaLies, Damn Lies And Statistics: Instagram hits 25 million users – you heard it here first

I am talking in terms of my web diagram. I think Pinterest has the potential to surpass Twitter just like Instagram has surpassed FourSquare.

Pinterest feels mainstream like Twitter never did. Twitter has always felt a little nerdy. A very smart friend once asked me what the hashtag was. The idea of checking in can be a barrier. But sharing photos? Photos with twists and tinges? That old adge about a picture being worth a thousand words. And the whole thing about social. Fred Wilson once derisively referred to Facebook as "a photo sharing network." Another way to look at it is that was a compliment.

At universal gigabit speeds there might be video versions of Pinterest and Instagram. But something tells me photo has staying power. A photo can be consumed in a split second. But short videos can play. And there are so many details to a video. There is room. There will be room.

Mayor Of TicketMonkey

I just became the mayor of TicketMonkey on @foursquare! 4sq.com/wJW4UK
— Paramendra Bhagat (@paramendra) February 29, 2012

Manick Bhan: The BhanMan Of TicketMonkey
TicketMonkey "Monk-A-Thon"

Dennis Crowley: FBI Background Check

Image by Getty Images via @daylifeI knew there was something special about this guy. Now I know.

Dennis Crowley: I Underestimated Him
Craig Newmark, Dennis Crowley, Jennifer 8 Lee: Koreatown
FourSquare Should Rent A Stadium
Dennis Crowley: Role Model For Kids?

Business Insider: The $600 Million Social Life Of Foursquare Founder Dennis Crowley

..... his success didn't happen overnight .... a series of failures and disappointments .... Crowley convinced the school to let him blog for the remaining credits. Teendrama, where Crowley was already writing about his college antics, became his independent study...... "People flocked to Dennis. He wasn’t up in the front of the room saying, ‘Hey, follow me.’ He just did stuff that was fun and people wanted to be with him. He’s always been that way, and that has never changed.” ....... “I remember thinking, what a cool life this guy lives,” says Jonathan (J) Crowley of his brother. “He was working at a hot tech company, going out all the time, he had lots of friends … and then it all disappeared.” ....... In 2001, the week Crowley turned 25, Vindigo went through a series of layoffs and Crowley was let go. That same week he was evicted from his apartment. .... Crowley spent the summer trying to line up interviews, but jobs were scarce. ...... On September 11, Crowley watched the twin towers crumble before his eyes. ..... Crowley's life, it seemed, followed suit. ...... In a matter of months he lost his job, his girlfriend, his home, his direction and eventually New York City and all the friends it held. Crowley was forced to move home to New Hampshire. He hadn’t a clue where life would take him next....... Crowley remained in New Hampshire for the next seven months. It was a tough transition and his spirits were down. ...... “He went from living in New York to living in a tiny little ski house in New Hampshire, and from making a good amount of money to making about $6 per hour teaching kids to snowboard,” says J.......... Dodgeball had continued to transform as Crowley’s side project, but up in New Hampshire he didn’t have the heart to work on it. ....... Bored, alone and broke, Crowley survived by making a few ground rules. From his blog:

Note to fellow unemployed kids: (aka Rules to Live By)
1. Leave your apt before noon every day.
2. No drinking before 5pm.
3. No watching TV before 5pm (except during lunch).
4. No taking taxis.
5. No eating meals when drunk.

Resilient, Crowley turned the bad times into jokes and wrote haikus for his troubles:

unemployment check.
you never showed up this week.
please come again soon.

every month i throw
eighty dollars towards this gym.
towels should be free.

atm machine
i already know i'm poor
keep your damn receipt

hello girl from nerve
i wish you were half as cute
as you looked online

99 cent nugs,
junior bacon cheeseburger
and a frosty, please.

ex-girlfriend. birthday.
send a card - or just "forget"?
my heart she broke. twice.

...... Crowley introduced the game to other NYU students and worked with a professor, Clay Shirkey, to develop it during an independent study. Rainert and Crowley refer to Shirkey as the Patron Saint of Social Media. With his help they tested out social and mobile features for Dodgeball, like Shouting, where messages were sent within a 15 block radius. ......... That summer Crowley learned about finance and angel investing. Their pursuit of capital led them to Google’s doors in September........ Google was fresh out of its IPO and it wasn't in the habit of investing in startups. When Crowley and Rainert met with Google they were told, according to Dennis, "We don't really finance companies but maybe you guys should just come and work here."
That moment was one of the high points in Crowley’s career........ He wrote about it on his blog, of course......... “Hey kids, my grad school thesis project (and what seems like my life's work), dodgeball.com, was acquired by Google today!........“Special shoutouts to everyone that's helped out. Tallboys for everyone. Forever!”..... But the high didn’t last, and selling to Google ultimately put Crowley at another low point....... “Everyone sees this side of Dennis that's so electric but there was a phase when he was in a rut. He was in a tough position. I don't think he could find the energy to get himself excited.” ..... Selvadurai had a desk around the corner from Crowley....... “He was the one guy who knew how to make iPhone stuff. He liked hacking city apps,” recalls Crowley. “I was doing a lot of mobile work and I also liked city stuff and we just started working together. We were experimenting for four to five months. It wasn't until January 2009 when we said, ‘Let's get serious about this and launch it for SXSW.’”....... The ordinarily social Crowley became reclusive.......“When Dennis stops socializing, you know he’s working on something really big,” says J. ......One week in January, a rare event occurred: A Friday and Saturday night passed with no sign of Crowley. ......An entire week passed and J still hadn’t heard from his brother.......“Then a group of us got an email that said, ‘Hey guys, I built this, what do you think?’ It was the first version of Foursquare; it was originally called Jimmy Disco,” says J. ...... Foursquare wasn’t always smooth sailing for Crowley. ..... “Everyone thinks the Foursquare experience is this rocket ship that started at SXSW 2009 and it hasn't let up, when in reality it was a little spike and then a summer of nothing,” says Crowley...... It took him and Selvadurai about nine months to raise the first round of capital for Foursquare. ...... “Then it spiked back up and it plateaued, and it spiked back up and it plateaued,” he says. “Of course if you average it out [the Foursquare experience] looks like a nice hockey stick curve. If you zoom in a little bit it is super, super rocky.” ....... “My whole career is a bunch of sizzles and spikes,” says Crowley. “I'm still trying to make sense of all of it, but when you look back it all starts to connect. Everything connects in hindsight. Of course you don't realize any of that going forward, you only realize that when you look back.” ...... last month he traveled across the country with five ridiculous-looking corn cob pipes to surprise his friends in Lake Tahoe. ...... "I've been trying to solve the same problems for many years and build software that helps optimize downtime. Of course the problem set keeps evolving and changing."....... Perhaps Crowley’s life-long wrestle with Foursquare stems from the fact that he so deeply embodies the product. Life, for him, is a constant game of checking in with people he loves. The personal reward he gets from being with friends and discovering new ways to have fun is what he wants every Foursquare user to experience.

The Best NYTM After Party Ever

I have been to numerous NY Tech MeetUps over the years. Biggies like Tumblr and FourSquare have all demoed at the NYTM. I don't remember Tumblr's presentation though. Maybe that was a MeetUp I missed. (Dennis Crowley: I Underestimated Him, Dennis Crowley: Role Model For Kids?)

I started going to the NYTM when it was six people at a bar on the Lower East Side, one of them the MeetUp.com CEO. And that was only a few years ago.

I have said several times at this blog that Digital Dumbo beats the NYTM after party. No more. Not after last night. (Digital Dumbo 18: The Dumbo Loft)

What made the difference?

It was not at a bar. It was in the same building. You left the hall and you went upstairs. When people have to walk three blocks to the after party, many of them leave.

The space was huge.

Free drinks, free food. Worth seeking out sponsors.

And that was pretty much it.

I think the NYTM should stick to this venue forever.

Following 2700 People On Google Plus

Image via WikipediaA few weeks back I discovered this list. That gave me a start of sorts on Google Plus, even though I still don't show up daily like I do on Facebook and Twitter and Gmail of course.

It is like I signed up for Tumblr early, not long after it was launched, because I read about it in the news. And then I forgot about it. When someone convinced me to "get on Tumblr" I believe in February 2010, when I went to sign up, there already was a user by that name, and that was me. But Tumblr for me took off when I came across a list by David Noel. I ended up following most people on the list. These were tech entrepreneurs and VCs.

I have gone passive on Tumblr since summer. I still reblog once in a while, but I probably came across the tumblog post somewhere else. My primary blogs hosted on Blogger still feed into my Tumblr, so I still provide fresh content.

When I show up on Google Plus, my stream always surprises me. I follow so many great quality people. If I want some intellectual company, Google Plus is that place. Google Plus has displaced Tumblr for me for now. Even though I got inactive on Tumblr before Google Plus came along, and I am not doing the daily thing yet on Google Plus that I used to do on Tumblr.

Google Plus does not compete with Facebook, just like Twitter does not, Tumblr does not. They occupy different spaces. It is like when I got active on Quora I realized the FourSquare guys were on there, active. On Google Plus that person has been Alexis Ohanian. I see him often in my NY Tech circle. He is there, and he responds. I think he circled me back.

I mean, there is the MIT Media Lab circle, for instance. Joi Ito is really something. And it is an honor to be able to follow his crew.

FourSquare Should Rent A Stadium

@paramendra
Paramendra Bhagat Are there @foursquare and @bliptv holiday parties this year? Or are they going cheap? There seems to be no public info. @dens@dinakaplan
Dec 11 via webFavoriteRetweetReply

paramendraParamendra Bhagat

Are there @foursquare and @bliptv holiday parties this year? Or are they going cheap? There seems to be no public info. @dens@dinakaplan

Dec 11FavoriteRetweetReply

in reply to @paramendra↑

@dens
Dennis Crowley@paramendra We did an employees and +1s only party this year. We getting big!
Dec 11 via Twitter for iPhoneFavoriteRetweetReply

paramendraParamendra Bhagat

Are there @foursquare and @bliptv holiday parties this year? Or are they going cheap? There seems to be no public info. @dens@dinakaplan

Dec 12FavoriteRetweetReply

densDennis Crowley

@paramendra We did an employees and +1s only party this year. We getting big!

Dec 12FavoriteRetweetReply

in reply to @dens↑

@paramendra
Paramendra Bhagat@dens Rent a stadium. I heard you raised some money. I want my party. There's still time! ;-)
Dec 12 via webFavoriteRetweetReply

December Events
Dennis Crowley: Role Model For Kids?
Blip.TV: How Do They Ever Get Anything Done?

Evite Cries Y(h)elp! Copies Paperless Post Pixel By Pixel

Mike Arrington still has that thing that made him build the top tech blog in the world. Now no longer with TechCrunch, look at what this dude has dug out!

Mike Arrington: Uncrunched: Embattled Evite Clones Startup Paperless Post In Quest For Survival: For the last few years, though, a small startup called Paperless Post has emerged that lets people create beautiful event invitations online. Paperless Post isn’t free. In fact, that seems to be part of the attraction....... There’s been very little tech press about Paperless Post ...... The company has sent some 50 million invitations, has raised $6.3 million in funding and is break even with 35 employees in New York and San Francisco. Marissa Mayer uses Paperless Post for her events. Metropolitan Museum of Art, The White House executive branch, The National Gallery and even The Prince of Wales have all used the premium invitation service. ...... It’s a fascinating case study against the notion that people will always choose free over for pay online services. ..... an outright rip off of Paperless Post’s business. Evite’s Postmark hasn’t officially launched yet, but they promote it on the evite home page and people have noticed it. ...... “Evite’s Postmark looks like someone hired a programmer and told them to copy every aspect of Paperless Post,” says the person who pointed it out to me. And that’s true. The business model is identical – charge for every invitation sent, plus optional fees for specialized designs and other customizations. The pricing is nearly identical. ...... Evite has also copied the exact look and feel of a number of the Paperless Post invitations as well. ...... I particularly like the line they use at the bottom of the Postmark website – “The comfort from knowing that Evite Postmark is as reliable, effective and innovative as Evite.” .... Innovative, indeed....... And I certainly don’t weep for Paperless Post. In fact, this is great for their business. As much as Postmark has retreated from the stain of the evite brand on its website, most people will still understand where this service came from and remember the years of horror using the evite service.

What is happening to Paperless Post now has happened to FourSquare several times over, and they are stronger than ever before. Paperless Post knows this space, and Evite is just imitating. It feels like a total copy and paste. When you did that with term papers at college, you got into trouble.

In elementary school the guy sitting next to me in an exam copied everything I wrote down without my realizing he was doing so, including my name! That is how he got caught! Hello Mohan! You want to know how Evite got caught? Check out this video.



I agree with Mike Arrington's conclusion.

My guess is Postmark will just raise awareness of Paperless Post, and even more people will flock to the service when they want to send a premium event invitation.

The day Facebook Places was launched FourSquare had its best day ever. That's there, but I still have a bad taste in my mouth. Somebody explain why! Mikie?

Evite is Plaxo, no disrespect for Sean Parker intended. This stunt will not save them. I think this episode, at the end of the day, will go down in history as someone else having launched a PR campaign on behalf of Paperless Post.