Brilliant Business Acumen Show at Tech Event

For all the tech geeks out there, it’s time to come out from behind your tablets, mobiles and PC screens and into the real world.  Because neither emoticons nor chat messages can substitute the real you. Whatever you have to sell, it will be have to be through your physical appearance. And Mark Zuckerberg will vouch for that.

TechCrunch is a media platform that covers all things technology. TechCrunch Disrupt SF is an annual global event. It serves as an introductory platform for startup ventures. (Yammer started off here). The event concludes with a grand trophy, which is a cash prize of USD 50,000 to the most innovative startup of the year.

This year, Disrupt SF 2012 attracted scores of startups (estimated at 300) and angel investors from all over the world. For instance, the all-women run Forerunner Ventures. Another business initiative was presented by Hacker Rank as “The Olympics of Programming” for “building the largest   collection of the world’s most interesting problems for hackers to solve.

The presentation of each has been aggressive on the Battlefield. Microsoft GM Rahul Sood criticized p (k) Prior Knowledge, a cloud-based predictive database startup for application developers. Sood suggested a balance of business with creativity and for p (k) to include marketing professionals in their all-engineer team.

With tough competition, the judges’ panel, which includes CEO, Yahoo! Marissa Mayer, had a hard time deciding this year’s trophy winner.

The Facebook legacy

The highlight of this year’s TechCrunch Disrupt was the Fireside Chat with Facebook’s CEO. With 950 million users, there’s no looking back for Facebook’s CEO. This was his first appearance following the IPO plummet, which seems to have cleared the air a bit. It wasn’t just about what he spoke, which he could have sent on an e-mail.

Zuckerberg presence seems to have reassured investors that the social network has a viable future worth considering seriously. No sooner had his conversation ended with Michael Arrington of CrunchFund when Facebook shares rose by 4.6%.

Zuckerberg spoke of deeper mobile integration and monetization, work on “long term projects and build good stuff,” and plenty of opportunities in gaming and search conduction. He added how Facebook applications drive morale, such as on Instagram.

The interview also dispelled rumors regarding a Facebook mobile. Facebook is keener on integration on “all devices” than invest in hardware, Zuckerberg confirmed.

Referring to his own codes, Zuckerberg said “Everything we do breaks, but we fix it quickly.” It emitted laughter from the audience, but Facebook users still criticize the cost of such ‘mistakes’ that resulted in irreversible privacy loss.  However, Zuckerberg admitted to “betting too much on HTML5 than native” being their “biggest strategic mistake” in mobile development, now rectified on iOS with Objective C as programming language.

With all said and done, all startups and seasoned businesses should learn from this: there is no room for mistakes in the tech world, whether it’s one user or 950 million of them.

Salman Ghaznavi is the founder of Avenuesocial Inc. a company focused on social media marketing and tool design & development. Avenuesocial is one of the premium Facebook App Consultants, and My role is to actively pursue a global strategy, create and help roll-out Avenuesocial social tool, the AS Pathways. The AS Pathways tool offers social media marketing and analytics with integrated campaign management (on Facebook and Twitter), multi-channel execution, engagement reports and user management.

Facebook’s Messenger 1.9 is all Smiles

Facebook’s attempts are not just to go mobile, but partner with the most successful feature services. However, making apps for Facebook for mobile platform is not just challenging for third-party developers. Facebook’s own in-house team feels just as challenged.

 

This need for external support was also strongly felt for their messenger service as well. Which led to their acquisition of Beluga, a popular group messaging service. Facebook Messenger that became a standalone Facebook app for the PC and smartphones. But to compete against other social networks such as Google’s Chat as well mobile devices in house text services proved that something more than just words was needed. So now we have their updated Facebook Messenger version 1.9 for iOS and Android, which allows users to add emoticons such as smileys and hearts.

The change may not sound like a big deal, but will definitely thrill the teenagers. Apparently, Facebook has been pretty thorough in their research and the reason for this latest development: Renowned research company Pew’s recent report shows a rising trend of teenagers prefers using social network’s messaging services to interact with their each other on a daily basis. The percentage exceeds those using IM, phones or e-mails. Use of emoticons complements text in a quick and easy way. Some even go as far as to say they give ‘life’ to a message.

But why Emoji? The use of emoticons to complement the text changes the appearance and meaning of the Apparently, this Japanese artwork seems to have gained more popularity around the world more than any other emoticons. This led to the alternative keyboard on the iPhone dedicated exclusively to Emoji.

What next? With every update comes another new challenge, which is how to improve it further. Some comment suggest how adding video to messages will be another plus point for Facebook Messenger. Google on the other hand has the video chat, but not emoticons yet. So it’s highly likely they will borrow the idea from each other.

Unless of course Facebook decides they would much rather go for another acquisition. The first one that comes to mind is Skype whose users have exceeded 40 million. And they have a great set of emoticons too. Earlier both Google and Facebook had considered buying the company on more than one occasion. That is until Microsoft purchased it. If Skype is reconsidered, it will involve incentivizing the partnership with Microsoft. Except for one drawback: Skype is just as weak in their mobile strategy as Facebook and right now, Facebook is in a state of panic in going mobile.

The best and, as was mentioned at the beginning, the most difficult choice would be to make a Facebook application which would be combination of all of the above.

Salman Ghaznavi Originally Found this on Avenuesocial

Salman Ghaznavi is the founder of Avenuesocial Inc. a company focused on social media marketing and tool design & development. Avenuesocial is one of the premium Facebook App Consultants, and My role is to actively pursue a global strategy, create and help roll-out Avenuesocial social tool, the AS Pathways. The AS Pathways tool offers social media marketing and analytics with integrated campaign management (on Facebook and Twitter), multi-channel execution, engagement reports and user management.