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The Marlinspike* CEO by Jim McHugh, Consultant, Board Member and Member of Gerbsman Partners Board of Intellectual Capital

March 12, 2013 by Steven R. Gerbsman

header_02The Marlinspike* CEO by Jim McHugh, Consultant, Board Member and Member of Gerbsman Partners Board of Intellectual Capital
 

An in-depth management guide
for C-Suite executives, investors and advisors.

What to expect: Pivotal proven tactics to boost business performance, sharpen strategic focus and create lasting shareholder value.
Plus: Technology Telltales -Technology recommendations for entrepreneurs
Occasional networking events
Nautical references
Humor

  March 2013

CEOs:  Do You Run Your Company Well?

Here’s the question phrased a bit differently…What key elements turn your company into:
1.  an attractive acquisition candidate
2.  a great, fun place to work!
3.  a valuable asset for all shareholders
There’s no need to create your own list of key elements because the next section of this newsletter not only has the list of key elements called The Run The Company Well List, but there are suggestions on how to use it.

The Run The Company Well List
My list has fifteen key elements that encompass the business model, planning, leadership, people, customers, products/services, finances, operations and advisors. Does (insert your company name here) have:
1.  a clear, focused, comprehensive business model
2.  a cohesive and well-tested growth strategy
3.  an outstanding leadership team that works well together
4.  a problem solving culture that is based on trust, accountability and fun
5.  a motivated, loyal, skilled workforce that is well treated and compensated fairly
6.  unique, high quality products and/or services
7.  innovative go-to-market tactics
8.  happy customers, whose needs are well understood
9.  a diversified (not concentrated) collection of profitable customers
10. a strong and defensible competitive position
11. a balance sheet that is rock solid
12. a P&L that shows consistent growth, high margins and a justifiable expense structure
13. lean processes, effective information systems, strong financial controls
14. well cared for fixed assets
15. great advisors: Board of Directors and/or CEO Peer Group plus outside professional confidants

Today I’d like to dig deeper into #3 and #15 by reviewing the OPPOSITE of having great leadership and great advisors. What if an organization has a significant, persistent problem within the organization’s leadership ranks? I call this condition being Stuck in a Ditch. Getting Stuck in a Ditch is a result of having one or more of these 6 challenges:

1.  Weak, uninspiring leadership: The CEO does not have the necessary vision, leadership or management skills to direct the company.
2.  No respect: The CEO does not command the respect of the organization.
3.  The CEOs leadership style=strange behavior: The CEO’s (or could be the dominant, controlling shareholder) behavior causes constant anxiety throughout the organization.
4.  Corporate governance is broken: There is continuous tension about the ‘lack of alignment’ and ‘who we are’.
5.  Meddling: The constant, meddling actions of the controlling, outside investors in the day-to-day affairs of the organization have a direct, negative impact on the organization’s performance.
6.  No hands on the wheel: A good governance framework does not exist. There is no active Board of Directors or Board of Advisors; if one does exist, and it is only ceremonial in nature, that is almost the same (or worse) than not having one at all.

Any combination of these six issues clearly puts a major dent into The Run the Company Well List. People are perceptive; each one of these six situations is obvious to the employees. These Ditch conditions can lead to indecision, constant bickering or fighting and prevent the organization from moving forward with conviction towards common goals.

How can you put The Run The Company Well List to use in your company?

Lists can create conversation and discussion. More important,they can initiate ACTION.

Suggestions on how to use the list:
1.  As your personal pocket guide while you prepare your company for sale
2.  A roadmap to kick off a 2013 operational improvement plan
3.  An ongoing discussion tool with your Board of Directors/Advisors
4.  The agenda for an offsite meeting with your senior leadership team
5.  A quiz for the WHOLE COMPANY: Give it to all your employees, have them answer Yes, No, or Not Sure for each item, tally the results and publish the findings.
Download The Run The Company Well List by clicking HERE

* What is a ‘marlinspike’?


*The marlinspike is a nautical implement that is used to unravel nautical lines. It is also used to sew the lines together to join them, creating greater strength, or to create useful or decorative items from nautical line.

Detangling and sorting through the complex issues in a STUCK company is similar to using the marlinspike to detangle, sort through, and weave together a much stronger and long-lasting nautical line.  Whether trying to achieve a more secure future for a boat, or a company, the marlinspike approach may be needed. Jim enjoys the sea, its wildlife, and kicking around boats and marinas.

Connect with Jim

With a name like McHugh,
I couldn’t resist sharing
some March 17 shenanigans

CEOs: Do you need an objective look at your Run The Company Well List?

Nothing beats human interaction.
Here’s Jim’s offer for March:
1 Hour of Free CEO Coaching by Jim McHugh
by phone or online video chat (Skype or Google Hangout)
No strings attached
To contact Jim, go to steve@gerbsmanpartners.com and I will forward to Jim McHugh

The Marlinspike CEO is written by Jim McHugh. Jim is an Entrepreneur, CEO Coach, Optimist, Instigator of Positive Change…and Fixer of Stuck Companies.
CEOs, family owners, investors and Directors enlist Jim to be their ‘fresh pair of eyes’ and confidant.

Jim is also a long time friend and a person of high ethics and integrity.

Posted in Board of Directors, Board Of Intellectual Capital, boic, James McHugh- McHugh & Co., Management, McHugh & Co., Strategy, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Hangtime Looks To Be The Watercooler For Events At SXSW And Beyond

March 11, 2013 by Steven R. Gerbsman

Article from Techcrunch.

 

OK, so maybe we said it would be hard for an app to break out at SXSW this year. But that isn’t stopping several startups from trying.

One startup called Hangtime, from serial entrepreneur Karl Jacob, is looking to be the comprehensive Rolodex of events at SXSW and beyond.

It pulls in events from Facebook that you have permission to see, ranks them by overall popularity, popularity among your friends and distance among other factors.

When you open the app, you can use Facebook to find friends and pull in hundreds of events. You can say you’re “interested” in going to them by clicking a button in the app. The idea is to get people to interact without necessarily committing to going to something.

“People don’t necessarily know what they are going to. Nobody likes to commit,” he said. “So we had to make it lightweight and make it super easy for people to share things with each other, but not commit.”

In Hangtime, there’s a way to say you’re publicly interested in an event, and then there’s a way to privately share an event with a friend.

hangtime-3“That creates this bifurcation,” he said. “It’s a lightweight way of saying that you’re interested in something — but behind the scenes.”

Hangtime follows a long line of events-related startups like the now-defunct Plancast and another startup Sosh that try to help people figure out what to do on nights and weekends.

Jacob says that other events startups might have just been too early on the market.

“The biggest mistake in the past in the core event discovery space was that we had a data problem,” he said. But he said now that social platforms like Facebook have solidified, it’s become a nicely centralized source of data.

In fact, the issue now is that there’s too much data and there needs to be better personalization and recommendations, he argues.

“A hallmark of these mobile applications is that they shouldn’t require work,” Jacob said. “They shouldn’t require you to enter in things. You have to give people a good experience out of the box.”

To get that, Jacob used a pretty ingenious seeding and testing strategy.

The company bought ads on Facebook targeted at colleges in the Midwest, such as the University of Missouri-Columbia and others in Arizona, Nebraska and Alabama. They want to see if they could remotely seed an app on a college campus and have it grow organically.

So they bought Facebook ads targeted at freshmen who wanted to find out what was going on on campus. Once a few people joined, they could pull in publicly shared events on Facebook and offer a better first-time experience to others who joined. When they felt the retention metrics were good and that they could predictably make the app popular on college campus after college campus, they decided to launch it publicly.

hangtimeThe app has an Open Graph integration that puts a box on your Timeline of events you’ve been invited to and publicly expressed interest in. Whenever you interact with a Hangtime post on Facebook and like it, the person who submitted it will get a notification.

That early testing helped set up a good base for SXSW this week. As of Friday, Hangtime already had 2 million invitations for at least 1,700 SXSW events with 285,000 RSVPs.

Next on the roadmap is improving personalization. Currently, Hangtime ranks events by overall popularity and timing by the hour, which means events that are more socially relevant but later in the day can show up lower in the feed.

“We’re in the process of building machine learning systems that literally take what you’re seeing and present new events that are more to your liking,” he said.

The 10-person company has $3.5 million in funding from investors, including SV Angel, Charles River Ventures, Greylock, Intel Capital, Interwest, 500 Startups, Crosslink Capital, Freestyle Capital, Ignition Venture Partners, Science Inc., Disney’s Tugboat Ventures and Webb Investment Network along with angels like Path CEO Dave Morin, Facebook alum and Pinterest monetization head Tim Kendall, Zynga’s Mark Pincus, One Kings Lane’s Ali Pincus and Data Collective’s Matt Ocko.

Jacob previously founded Keen, which was sold to AT&T in 2007 under the name Ingenio, and Dimension X, which was acquired by Microsoft. He was also CEO of Wallop, a social-networking company that eventually pivoted into making covers for smartphones and BlackBerrys under the name Coveroo.

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The $25B App Market–and the Odds You’ll Get a Piece of It – by Erik Sherman TECHTOWN

March 9, 2013 by Steven R. Gerbsman

The $25B App Market–and the Odds You’ll Get a Piece of It

The so-called app economy is said to be worth billions. Sounds promising, right? Here’s a reality check.

Phone apps

The promise of the app economy can seem especially alluring to the tech entrepreneur set. Mobile is a hot market. The major smartphone and tablet platform owners have established marketplaces to let you get to customers and in exchange you give up only 30 percent in per-unit sales. That’s still better than retail stores. Plus, people are making bazillions. Well, an estimated $25 billion this year, according to Gartner, as reported by the Wall Street Journal.

Now everyone will want to become a programmer and take a chunk of that big number. The problem is, it’s a little too early to get excited. That big number is misleading, and most apps will be lucky to make enough to pay for their cost of development, never mind profits.

For years, the media, set off by Apple’s trying to tout the advantages of developing iPhone and iPad apps, have concentrated on the total money in the market. Only, there are some caveats.

One is that the $25 billion isn’t just money being spent on apps at the Apple or Google marketplaces. It also includes advertising and in-app purchases. That’s because Gartner also says that 90 percent of apps are free downloads. Why? Because if you don’t charge, you remove a barrier for people to at least try your app.

So, the $25 billion is being spread out over more than 1.4 million apps between both Apple and Google, according to Gartner. Time for some arithmetic: That translates into $17,847 dollars per app. That works out to $214,285 a year, or probably less than two salaries for full-time experienced developers, not counting benefits. In other words, two developers have to build that flashy and attractive app in one month. That’s a tight schedule.

Then you have to realize that the average amount listed is just that: an average. App downloads are not a level terrain. According to a report from analytics firm Distimo, in November 2012, the number of apps responsible for 10 percent of iPhone free app downloads was 31. The number of apps responsible for 10 percent of paid revenue was seven. The Journal refers to another Distimo stat that states only 2 percent to 3 percent of the top 250 publishers are newcomers.

According to iPhone app metrics firm 148Apps.biz, in November 2012 there were more than 721,000 active apps in the iPhone app store. Currently, there are 803,137 active apps.

Chances are slim that you’re going to make big money on paid apps. So say that you go the free route. That means you need people to keep using your application to see ads and place in-app purchases. Unfortunately, 63 percent of apps that people use daily are different from a year ago, and people focus on about eight apps at a time. Getting and keeping attention is far worse than a crap shoot.

It may be that you could have a hit with a new app. But keep those rose-colored glasses off the bridge of your nose. Not matter how attractive the total number is, making a significant amount of money on apps is a lot tougher than the media makes it sound.

Erik Sherman‘s work has appeared in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times Magazine, and Fortune. He also blogs for CBS MoneyWatch. @ErikSherman

Posted in Apple, Apps, Mobile Applications, Technology, TECHTOWN, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Fenwick & West updates free online funding docs – Silicon Valley Business Journal

March 7, 2013 by Steven R. Gerbsman

Fenwick & West updates free online funding docs by Cromwell Schubarth Senior Technology Reporter- Silicon Valley Business Journal


Ted Wang of Fenwick & West is curator of the free open source legal documents it offers to startup entrepreneurs.

Fenwick & West this week updated the free online early stage funding documents it has posted to GitHub.

The Series Seed documents have been used many times since they were first posted in 2010, Fenwick lawyer Ted Wang said.

“The most valuable assets for early stage companies are time and money,” Wang said in a prepared statement. “Series Seed endeavors to save both for young companies.”

The new version uses GitHub to manage discussions and updates to the Series Seed documents.

GitHub is a popular site where engineers post software projects and highlight their work. Fenwick chose this as a natural location to offer documents for members of that community who are raising money for startups.

“One of our core beliefs at GitHub is to open source (almost) everything: the community benefits from having more resources available and the projects benefit from having the input of the greater community,” said Tom Preston-Werner, co-founder and CEO of GitHub, in a prepared statement.

The Series Seed documents can be found on GitHub by clicking here.

Read the blog describing the changes that have been made by clicking here.

Cromwell Schubarth is the Senior Technology Reporter at the Business Journal. His phone number is 408.299.1823.

Posted in Fenwick & West, GitHub, Online Funding Docs, Sillicon Valley Business Jouranal, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

THE JIM HENSON COMPANY LICENSES CUPCAKE DIGITAL TO CAPTURE THE MAGIC OF CLASSIC FRAGGLE ROCK ANIMATED EPISODES REIMAGINED AS ENHANCED STORY APPS

March 6, 2013 by Steven R. Gerbsman

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THE JIM HENSON COMPANY LICENSES CUPCAKE DIGITAL TO CAPTURE THE MAGIC OF CLASSIC FRAGGLE ROCK ANIMATED EPISODES REIMAGINED AS ENHANCED STORY APPS

 

Cupcake Digital Joins the 30th Anniversary Celebration of The Jim Henson Company’s Fan Favorite Children’s Television Series Fraggle Rock

NEW YORK, NY/Hollywood, ca (March 6, 2013) This spring, Cupcake Digital celebrates the 30th anniversary of Fraggle Rock, the classic series created by Jim Henson, by bringing interactive mobile appisodes based on the animated series to new and existing fans everywhere.  Beloved episodes, including “No Fraggle is an Island,” “Mokey’s Flood of Creativity,” “The Best of the Best,” and “The Great Radish Roundup,” will be developed into enhanced story experiences featuring the wonderful adventures of the Fraggles, Doozers and Gorgs. The series of apps is slated for development and release in 2013 and will be available on iTunes, Amazon, Google Play and Barnes & Noble for the iOS, Android, NOOK and Kindle Fire platforms.

“Fraggle Rock has an enduring quality that has stood the test of time among parents who are eager to share the stories with their young children.  We are excited to be able to introduce the characters, their complex ecosystem and, most of all, the great music, in this new medium,” said Susan Miller, President of Cupcake Digital. “The stories of Fraggle Rock, the animated series, have a contemporary relevance that is perfect for engaging today’s kids in an interactive story experience infused with learning moments.”

Cupcake Digital’s mission is to deliver enhanced story app experiences that surprise and delight. Each app includes features such as three modes of reading, professional narration designed to help kids recognize words and sounds, opportunities for shared screen time for parents and kids, and educator-vetted learning elements within the apps and online that follow Common Core State Standards. Every Fraggle Rock app will be designed to take full advantage of the nostalgic graphics, timeless stories and fun interactions that are inherent to the original episodes of the television series.

“The team at Cupcake Digital has demonstrated a great affinity for Fraggle Rock and its original vision. It seems fitting that, as we celebrate 30 years of this great property, we have the opportunity to give it new life in a relevant and engaging way via these enhanced story app experiences,” said Melissa Segal, Executive Vice President, Global Consumer Products for The Jim Henson Company. “Loyal fans around the world have never stopped rocking along with Fraggle, and they will love that the spirit of the show and the music that is so much a part of the experience are fully captured within these apps.”

###

 

FRAGGLE ROCK Synopsis

Created by Jim Henson, the series features a quirky and fun-loving group of cave-dwelling creatures in a world where three diverse, yet surprisingly similar, communities learn to live and work in harmony. The Fraggles love to sing and dance, work just thirty minutes a week and spend most of their days dancing their cares away. They are joined by their industrious neighbors, the Doozers, tiny green workers that build elaborate structures the Fraggles find irresistibly tasty; and the Gorgs, giant creatures who live in the garden above Fraggle Rock guarding their cherished radish patch. Through the fun of the Fraggle five: the level-headed, practical Gobo; spiritual, artistic Mokey; exuberant, athletic Red; nervous, indecisive Wembley; and worrisome Boober and the unique mix of music, from folk, blues and gospel to country and rock, the series entertains and encourages an understanding and embracing of diversity.

Premiering in 1983, Fraggle Rock was seen in 80 countries in over ten different languages. Fraggle Rock continues to enjoy a loyal international fan following.  In its 96 episodes, the show encouraged an understanding and embracing of friendship and diversity and featured a unique mix of music from all genres from folk, blues, gospel, country and rock.

About Cupcake Digital

Cupcake Digital, Inc. was established in June 2012 with the intent of transforming children’s entertainment properties into deluxe story experiences infused with educational elements. Its first venture into digital applications was based on the Emmy Award-winning television series “Wow! Wow! Wubbzy!” These apps immediately rose to #1 and #3 among children’s book apps on Amazon and iTunes respectively. Since then, every subsequent children’s app created by Cupcake Digital has achieved a top 10 rating on Amazon. Headquartered in NYC, Cupcake Digital was founded by proven professionals in the fields of technology, family entertainment, publishing and brand marketing. In October of 2012, Cupcake Digital received its first round of private funding and has since gone on to partner with additional major children’s entertainment properties. For more information about Cupcake Digital Inc., please visit www.cupcakedigital.com.

About the Jim Henson Company

The Jim Henson Company has remained an established leader in family entertainment for over 50 years and is recognized worldwide as an innovator in puppetry, animatronics and digital animation. Best known as creators of the world famous Muppets, Henson has received over 50 Emmy Awards and nine Grammy Awards. Recent credits include the Emmy®-nominated “Sid the Science Kid,” “Dinosaur Train,” “Wilson & Ditch: Digging America” and “Pajanimals.” Features include “The Dark Crystal,” “Labyrinth,” “MirrorMask,” and “Unstable Fables” and television productions include “Fraggle Rock” and the sci-fi cult series “Farscape.”


With additional locations in New York and London, The Jim Henson Company is headquartered in Los Angeles on the historic Charlie Chaplin lot, complete with soundstage and postproduction facilities. Independently owned and operated by the five adult children of founder Jim Henson, the Company is also home to Jim Henson’s Creature Shop™, a pre-eminent character-building and visual effects group with international film, television and advertising clients, as well as Henson Recording Studios, one of the music industry’s top recording facilities known for its world-class blend of state-of-the-art and vintage equipment. The Company’s Henson Alternative brand has recently launched the national tour of “Stuffed and Unstrung,” a live puppet improvisational show named one of the top 10 “Best Stage Shows of 2010” by Entertainment Weekly. Visit henson.com, join us on facebook.com/hensoncompany, and follow us at twitter.com/hensonparents.

 

Media Contacts:

Carmen Hernandez/Cupcake Digital/ 310-383-4875/ carmen.hernandez@cupcakedigital.com

Ann Schwarz/The Jim Henson Company/323-802-1667/aschwarz@henson.com

Posted in Apps, Brad Powers, Cupcake Digital, Digital Marketing, Education Aps for Children, Entertainment Aps for Children, Fraggie Rock, Game Apps for Kids, Inetellectual Property, Jim Henson Company, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

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