ThinkUp Montreal

When is a Start Up no longer a Start Up?

I find it interesting how long companies like to keep the “start up” tagline associated with their business. For example, take a look at the Facebook jobs page and you’ll note they use the term start up several times. Everyone knows their “start up” story, but a company that SIZE, in terms of finances, staff, and age, is it really cool to keep calling your self a start up? If you’re 40yrs old should you be wearing clothes meant for a 19yr old college kid?

Some people think a start up is defined by its lack of profitability, however some start ups are immediately profitable!

Some say that you are a start up until you “exit” in some fashion, acquisition, IPO, or failure.

Many people believe start up is a “state of mind”.

Personally, I like the idea of a building a business around start up “culture” or “lifestyle” and I am not against calling a business a start up if its roots and philosophy are fundamentally grounded by its hopes and aspirations to grow and make a difference.

As far as I know there is no formal definition of “start up” it is what you make it!

What do you think defines a business as a start up?

5 Ways to Kill Your Community - Slidedeck from meex6

5 Ways to Kill Your Community

A good community manger should stop thinking about how to build a community, and start thinking about how to ruin it!

Patrick O’Keefe of ManagingCommunities.com said it best in a SXSW 2011 presentation

You’ll become an expert in the quickest ways to kill your online community, using tips you can take and use today to kill yours as soon as possible!

Recently I’ve been getting back to my roots and doing a lot of public speaking again. Tonight I’ll be discussing this topic at meex6 and here are the 5 points I will cover:

• #killcommunity step 1 Twitter #fails
• #killcommunity step 2 Facebook f**k ups!
• #killcommunity step 3 frigging forums!
• #killcommunity step 4 I got a blog!
• #killcommunity step 5 - follow steps 1-4 and repeat!

Yes it’s broad, but that is the point! I’ll update this post with my presentation tomorrow.

If you had to add points below the 5 steps what would they be?

Side note: I’m breaking one of my the rules by posting this :)

Facebook & Instagram - the Future of Social Media Sharing Apps

By now everyone knows about Facebook acquiring Instagram, and honestly it comes as no surprise, now that Facebook is a publicly traded company the powers above must be pressuring Zuckerberg’s team to make some big moves - this is only the start.

I’m a  huge fan of sharing media on the go, especially pics, in fact I’m somewhat of a media hound and recently posted about one of my new favorite apps for this, Pixable.

I’ve been a fan and dedicated user of Instagram for a while now, I even designed a WordPress theme around it called InstaPress.

I wonder, like most Instagram users, what the future holds for this app. I don’t believe the situation is dire at the moment, so many people talking about deleting their accounts, but Facebook owning and controlling all that data  I have entered in Instagram does concern me somewhat.

My biggest fear is that Facebook will essentially swallow Instagram into its core and kill the app, or add it as tab or something on their, in my opinion, already bloated and buggy iPhone app.

I’m also not keen on the fact that Facebook will have acquired all of that location-tagged photo data from myself and other users and use it to target ads at us.

I’m hoping that Facebook will come up with a clever way to incorporate Instagram by adding deeper integration of photo sharing on my timeline, group, or page via the app. This way the app still remains significant and intact.

A bigger question may be which app is next? If Facebook kills Instagram where will Instagram users turn to share their photos? What is the future of social media sharing apps?

This could be a great topic for our first ThinkUp. What are your thoughts?

On a side note if you are planning to delete your Instagram account or just preparing for the end you should check out Instaport, a very cool web app that exports you Instagram library to you local machine.