Author Archives: Ken Yeung

There are a lot of talented people not only in Silicon Valley, but also in the tech world. From entrepreneurs to developers to investors, there’s always someone looking to help change the world for the better. As I look at all the people that I’ve met over the past few years, I’m in awe at their dedication to the profession and often times their contributions to giving back to their community–no, not the community in the sense of social media, but to neighbors, your family, and those around you–that community. This post is about one of those people that I’ve come to know recently…

This morning, I read an amazing and poignant post by Menlo Ventures‘ managing partner Shervin Pishevar, about how he was recently selected by the United States government to be named as an Outstanding American by Choice. This award, was created by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services six years ago to help recognize the significant contributions and achievements of naturalized US citizens. Throughout the life of this award, over 80 men and women from a variety of backgrounds and nearly all sectors of society have been recognized. Notable Americans like former US Secretary of Commerce Carlos M. Gutierrez, Author and Nobel Peace Prize Winner Elie Wisel, former NASA astronaut Franklin Chang Diaz, and Founder of Citizenship Counts, Holocaust Survivor, Author, and Human Rights Activist Gerda Weissmann Klein, have all been bestowed this great honor.

From what I know about Mr. Pishevar, he’s done a great deal to deserve this award. He says that as a venture capitalist and entrepreneur, “he’s so blessed to see a constant flow of incredible talent from all points of this planet who dream of coming to America and building their companies here.” From visiting foreign countries to help those less fortunate to taking his philanthropy, Mr. Pishevar has definitely helped out his community. And during President Barack Obama’s recent trip to San Francisco, Mr. Pishevar had a chance to sit down with the President along with other tech leaders to talk about things important to them–one can only speculate what, but I’m betting it’s probably about technology and the economy. And his continuing support and evangelism of his startups that are disrupting industries, like Uber and Shaker, for the better is another sign that the country is better having him here.

Just read his community service, as taken from his Menlo Ventures bio:

Shervin is one of 10 members of the UN Foundation’s Global Entrepreneurs Council, serves as an Entrepreneurial Ambassador on several State Department delegations and at the President’s Summit on Entrepreneurship. Giving back is very important to Shervin and is the reason he dedicates time to traveling abroad to Africa to volunteer with Invisible Children and charity:water. Shervin is a graduate of the University of California (BA, Interdisciplinary Studies Field Major), a published researcher in JAMA and Neuroscience Letters and the author of several US patents.

Now that is absolute dedication and an outstanding American. Cheers to you, Shervin! But don’t just take my word for it…watch his presentation at a conference called the Fourth Estate hosted by Invisible Children and listen to his message:

Photo Credit: Shervin Pishevar, Managing Director, Menlo Ventures @ LeWeb 11 Les Docks-9368 by @kmeron

One of the most talked about startups over the past year when dealing with content curation has got to be Storify. When something major in your life breaks and you want to find a good way to summarize it through the use of social media, then look no further than with Storify. Founded in 2009, this seven person company has done a remarkable job surviving the market and being one of the major players in the world of content curation. Just like Twitter has their trending topics, Storify’s service allows people to keep track of the relevant social media trending topics. Users are able to tell their own story about these major events (like Whitney Houston or Greece’s economic downfall or even Madonna’s Super Bowl halftime performance), and embed them on their own website. Be your own crowd-sourced storyteller, by dragging in tweets, status updates, photos, and videos from a variety of social networks in order to help you create a better story and telling experience.

But for the several years, the only way that Storify has been able to be used was through a personal computer–you had to be physically sitting in front of a computer in order to put something together. Well, that is…until now.

Today, Storify announced that it was bringing its service straight to the iPad. For a service that has been used by 22 out of top 25 news sites in the United States, this is a pretty big move because it will allow for much more curation on the go. Chances are that most people will be traveling around town or the country with an iPad rather than a laptop or desktop computer. With this new platform available to users, expect to see much more storytelling happening on the web in real-time. Already, tech publications are praising the way that this has been done. Not since the roll-out of social publication Flipboard has publications like ReadWriteWeb and tech pundit Robert Scoble clamored over an application. Jon Mitchell from ReadWriteWeb explains that Storify’s iPad app is a marvelous piece with the workflow and interface truly realized–almost as if it was always intended for the iPad rather than the computer.

I tend to agree with Jon Mitchell’s assessment about Storify for the iPad…if you’re in a meeting or event and you want to curate what’s being said and do it in real-time, the fact that you have it on a much better interface, not only for aggregation and curation, but for presentation purposes, will be invaluable. Right now the service has become a major boon for media sites and most certainly will now become at least 10x more valuable (I think it’ll open the door up for talks about acquisition pretty soon). Take, for example, the next upcoming presidential debates for the Republican nomination. With all eyes on Arizona and Michigan coming up, the news media will be wanting to collect a wide variety of opinions from people watching and get their take. By simply taking out their wi-fi or 3G enabled iPad devices, the media will be able to curate the information and post it pretty quickly allowing their web teams back in the broadcast studios to share it with the world. Businesses will also be able to take part in using the service when they have major events as well.

Don’t miss any of your favorite social media trends ever again. This is the new generation of social bookmarking…with Delicious, you just had text links with little fanfare or care for the interface. Now with Pinterest you have some more visual appeal to your bookmarks, but often without threaded conversations and context. But with Storify, you’re able to share the entire conversation with whomever you wish and within one thread have plenty of media to help tell your story.

The Storify app is free to download right from the iTunes store or you can go to Storify’s website to read more.

Here’s a great video by Robert Scoble about Storify’s iPad app and a video tour:

Photo Credit: Evolution of reading by Alfred Lui/Flickr

Tech blogs are buzzing today about one of the biggest things to hit photo-sharing mega-service Flickr: an impending redesign. BetaBeat is reporting that the site’s new head of product, Markus Spiering, is set to unveil some good and much-needed changes. After being nearly a year on the job as Flickr’s head, it’s being said that next week, we will probably see some remarkable things–the first of which is a new design for the photo view with enlarged images and a less than traditional structure. What other changes lie in store for the once-proud photo giant? Who knows…we must wait and see.

But these changes are indeed coming, says Mr. Spiering. It’s easier to say that change is coming but it will be a tough sell for the skeptics. Photographers like Thomas Hawk have, for the longest time, complained about the apparent disrespect the service’s parent company,Yahoo, is giving. And when people look at the amount of photos being shared on Facebook, 500px, and Google+, is it any shock that photographers are ripping on Yahoo with reckless abandon, with some actually deleting their accounts and moving exclusively to other services? Flickr might be trying to convince others that they’re listening, but first they’ll need to convince themselves. They’re honestly haven’t been doing a great job either, with accounts accidentally being deleted and then shutting down services like Snapjoy in order to prevent people from exporting their own photos. Call it self-preservation or whatever, but there’s definitely mixed feelings on whether Yahoo is interested in it or it’ll just be yet another sunset service in their portfolio.

It might surprise you to hear that Yahoo hasn’t forgotten about Flickr–well that’s what Mr. Spiering says. He continues by saying that since its purchase in 2005, the search engine has continuously made improvements to the site. Perhaps the biggest and most noticeable change was two years ago when the photo page was redesigned and then Flickr’s service was looped in through the rest of Yahoo’s products. Now, this new update, set to happen in about a week, will mark the beginning of a new renaissance for Flickr and get people talking about it again…or so people hope.

Flickr screenshot of new photo page

Famed photographer, Thomas Hawk, has published a post about his thoughts relating to Flickr’s new redesigns. In it, he says that while he hasn’t played around with it, he still feels that he’s liking what he’s seeing on this screenshot.

The new design looks much more interactive with a focus on larger photos, hover over pop out magnification, and a jigsaw sort of layout that allows the photos on the page to take the maximum space possible with very little white space. It looks quite a bit more like what Google+’s photo pages look like actually and feels like a much more elegant design. Now how cool would it be if this new page also had infinite scrolling as well.

And while everyone is probably raving about how good the redesign will be, one thing that folks like CrunchFund’s MG Seigler is talking about is the lack of a mobile presence. Coming from a mobile background, Flickr’s head of product has yet to make any mention about Flickr’s attempt to enter the foray of mobile photo-sharing and whether there’s going to be an attempt to take on services like Instagram, Hipster, PicPlz, Path, and more. Yahoo apparently has a “mobile first” strategy in place and it’s being shared with Flickr, but one thing still remains – where is the plan? Flickr’s API is one of the most popular public APIs available on the Internet. With more than 3.5 million photos uploaded each day, you would think that there was some way to increase that level using not only the desktop application or Internet, but also a mobile application as well.

Right now, Flickr’s management is taking a good step forward into helping to change the way people think about their service. However, lots of people are not expecting a miracle redesign or revolution this year–Flickr will need to do way more to cause people not to second guess its intentions. As most of the photography blogs are saying, this first attempt has an aura of being a little bit like Google+. Flickr shouldn’t be copying Google+, it should be surpassing them. But as BetaBeat says, this could be a first major sign of an attitude adjustment sorely needed within the service.

Photo Credit: Snap? photo by Andrew Rennie

For any business with tangible product, one of the things that can probably drive them crazy is the ability to track all of it and make sure that they have enough or know when to re-order them. This is one of the problems that Stitch Labs is trying to solve with their inventory management service. With it, businesses are able to manage contacts, handle fulfillment and invoicing, and generate powerful reports and analytics–know what you’re selling and what people are interested in buying. Small businesses will find this pretty useful since the data isn’t stored in some database in their office. Rather, Stitch’s service hosts all your data right in the Cloud allowing you unfettered access from anywhere you are. Customer satisfaction and redemption is just right around the corner!

This service seems almost like a god-send for some businesses and the investors have definitely paid attention. Announced today on TechCrunch, Stitch Labs just raised $1 million in seed investment led by True Ventures. This is a welcome boon for a company that was started because its founder, Brandon Levey, just couldn’t find “a satisfactory SaaS to manage his own business”. It turned out that Mr. Levey wanted something more than just accounting software and not just an inventory management platform. Well, if something isn’t available, create it yourself…and that is exactly what Mr. Levey did with Stitch Labs. TechCrunch’s Alexia Tsotsis spoke with Mr. Levey and according to her post, Stitch Labs is “dedicated to working with [our] customers to make sure Stitch is powerful and intuitive…” so one can imagine that this $1 million in funding will go a long way into helping scale the service and create something “awesome”.

So how exactly does Stitch Labs work for businesses?

Stitch Labs is a paid service that gives you a free 30-day trial to see if it works for you. If you have an account with services like Etsy, Shopify, or even Quickbooks, you’ll be glad to know that those services will work with Stitch seamlessly. All that you need to do is simply sign up for an account and then you can begin to build and manage your entire product catalog and inventory right from Stitch. The service will even allow you to create professional line sheets, build full product lines, handle unlimited pricing structures, and even attach images to products. Basically, Stitch gives you the power to grow your business without resorting to shelling out thousands and thousands of dollars just to market yourself. Take power back into your own hands and make these services work for you, not the other way around.

Users of Stitch will gain access to their very own dashboard that gives quick sales statistics to the business so that they know what’s going on in near-real time and what needs to be done. From being notified of low stock inventory to being able to manage all expenses and user activity on your site, it all winds up with your business being able to be paid a lot quicker. The dashboard also offers users the ability to help manage their contacts so that they can manage and keep track of the people and other businesses that they do business with. No longer will you need to search for a name or address in another system–Stitch will keep track of it for you. And with their service being stored in the Cloud, you’ll always have access to it no matter where you are. And as an added bonus, you can even use it as a file-saving mechanism as well. Stitch will allow you to take a contact and attach distribution agreements, resale licenses, purchase orders, and other relevant documents so it’s all in one secure and central place available for easy access.

There’s a lot more to Stitch that is available if you are a member, but this inventory management service is probably a good thing to consider when you’re running your own business. If anything, it helps make you more efficient: the faster you are, the more money you save and gain, and the more you’ll be able to grow your business. Everybody wins!

The cost of doing business

Right now, there are only three plans available to businesses interested in being part of this service. If you’re a entrepreneur and a very small business, you can go for the Solo plan which will run you $12 per month and give you up to 2,000 products and 1 GB of storage.  But if you’re in a business with partners and employers. then try the Group plan for $24 per month, giving you a 3 user license, 3,000 products to display, and 1.5 GB of storage. Lastly, for larger businesses who still want something affordable but with a bit of a kick, try the Business plan for $79 per month allowing you up to 10 users, 5,000 products to display, and 2 GB of storage.

Each plan that you choose will have its own unique custom domain, secure 256-bit SSL encryption, unlimited companies, contacts, and people, user permissions, multiple daily backups, free phone & email support, reporting, invoicing, and a helpful dashboard.

So since there are paid options available, what will Stitch be doing with the $1 million in seed funding? Well, they’re looking to bring on some “awesome developers” to help grow the business and offer bigger and better services. The company will be working on developing a shopping cart and marketplace integration and get new partners on board in the near future.

Not bad…

Photo Credit: SheKnows.com

In one of several announcements he’s expected to make over the next few weeks, proud Mashable alumnus and their former Editor-at-Large, Ben Parr, has posted on his blog that he is joining tech publication, CNET, and its parent company, CBS Interactive, as a contributing columnist and commentator.

Offering social commentary about tech news and interests isn’t anything new for Mr. Parr. For more than three years, 2,446 articles, he has been at the forefront of the tech industries news, often breaking them and conducting the necessary investigations needed to get the real scoops and information his readers really care about. He intends to continue on with this type of journalism in his new CNET column that will follow the footsteps of his Mashable one–The Social Analyst, but it promises to have a bit more of a bite to it and he vows to keep the tech industry’s biggest names honest.

In joining with tech powerhouse CNET, Mr. Parr explained that he believed in the “ambitious vision” that CBS Interactive CEO Jim Lanzone, and CNET General Manager Mark Larkin, have with the company and publication. It’s a great outlet for Mr. Parr and we wish him well in his journey with CNET. The publication will definitely get some solid readership from his writings and also help add some insights into the tech world besides gadgetry and products.

But don’t worry, Mr. Parr’s multiple activities and projects will not die off with this new adventure. No, he explains that while he’ll be able to continue to reach millions of people with his thoughts and insights on technology, CNET’s deal will give him the ability to retain the flexibility he needs to be an entrepreneur and build amazing products–ultimately to “change the world”. And that’s good, because if you look at all of his activity, he’s busier than any average entrepreneur…he’s working on a yet-to-be-revealed startup (announcement pending), is an advisor to several startups like NerdsUnite Productions, Tracks.by, Code Academy, and Women 2.0. Keep on, keeping on, Ben Parr!

Congratulations Ben!

Photo Credit: Ben Parr @ LeWeb 11 Les Docks-9036 via LeWeb 2011 by @Kmeron