Argenware: Juegos argentinos hechos a las brasas de Android

Dos clásicos argentinos, de la mesa a la pantalla

Tras el éxito del Carrera de Mente, llegó la versión del TEG para iPad y hoy se estrena para tablets con Android

Por Fernando Massa  | LA NACION

Camilo Fogliatti (18) le ha dedicado unas dos horas semanales al TEG Móvil. Foto: Marcelo Gómez

Para Camilo Fogliatti (18), estudiante de Ciencias Políticas, la conexión con el TEG viene de chico. Sus padres se lo regalaron una Navidad cuando él tenía unos 8 o 9 años. Nunca lo dejó de jugar: es ese juego que lo divierte y lo hace pensar. Cuando meses atrás se enteró de que venía la versión digital, la tentación de tenerlo en su iPad fue tan irresistible que se volvió un asiduo visitante del Facebook de Widow Games, la empresa que lo desarrolla, para estar al tanto de las novedades. Ahora ya lo tiene ahí, en el display. Y, no duda, es la app de entretenimiento que más usa. Lo que no quita que una vez por mes se dé el gusto de echarse una partida con amigos de TEG de tablero, esas que duran toda la noche.

Primero el Carrera de Mente, ahora el TEG. Los clásicos juegos de mesa argentinos se han insertado en la era digital. Y con buena respuesta: con diez días disponible para iPad, el TEG Móvil -así se llama- ya tuvo más de mil descargas. Y desde hoy estará disponible para tablets con Android.

En Yetem, marca que patentó el TEG en 1976, ese clásico que le plantea a los participantes la posibilidad de conquistar el mundo o alcanzar un determinado objetivo bélico mediante alianzas, estrategias y algunas dosis de azar, la decisión de insertarse en el mundo digital de la mano de su juego insignia la tomaron hace dos años. Desarrollo, prueba y error hasta que apareció un socio que ofreció un modelo de negocios interesante: Martín Spinetto, fundador de Widow Games.

Spinetto, ex director de comunicaciones de Microsoft, había advertido eso: que existía un gap para cubrir con todos aquellos juegos de mesa muy reconocidos en el país que no le habían encontrado la vuelta para dar el salto digital. Y Widow Games, la start up que fundó en marzo de 2012, podía ser el vehículo para hacerlo realidad.

"El propio jugador había evolucionado más rápido que el juego de mesa -dice Spinetto-. Y nos encontramos ante un escenario donde el 40% de las personas que tiene un smartphone lo usa principalmente para jugar a los juegos, algo que crece al 70% cuando se trata de una tablet. Además, nuestro modo de vida nos dificulta sentarnos en una mesa y encontrar ese momento. La idea entonces fue brindar la posibilidad de jugar en cualquier momento y en cualquier lugar, y tomarlo o dejarlo cuando quieras."

El TEG Móvil, fruto de esa alianza entre Yetem y Widow Games, estrenó su versión para iPad hace diez días y desde hoy ya está disponible para tablets con sistema Android. La idea es que en unos seis meses también lo puedan bajar los usuarios de smartphones.

¿Cuánto difiere del TEG clásico de tablero? Poco y nada. Las reglas y la dinámica son las mismas, aunque ahora las modalidades de juego son tres: jugar online con hasta seis contrincantes; jugar contra la inteligencia artificial de la máquina, donde una partida puede durar tan sólo 20 minutos (algo imposible para una partida clásica de tablero) e incluso con la chance de presionar la opción de fast foward para que la máquina piense más rápido; la tercera, la de usar el display como tablero, pasándose el dispositivo de mano en mano para que los participantes de carne y hueso puedan leer sus objetivos y decidir dónde poner sus fichas para atacar a sus contrincantes.

Para el tándem Widow-Yetem, la respuesta del público resultó muy positiva: no sólo reflejado en descargas, que ya suman más de 1000 en estos diez días, sino en los comentarios que dejan los usuarios en el Facebook de Widow. Como el que les dejó hace poco un muchacho: "Yo lo jugaba con mi viejo cuando era chico. Y... qué loco, ahora lo tengo en la tablet".

A Lucas Olmedo, cordobés de 25 años, le pasó algo similar unos meses atrás con la versión digital del Carrera de Mente. Lo había visto sugerido en el app store de Google Play y se lo bajó. Lo jugó un par de veces solo. Pero fue ese fin de semana en el campo de su familia, en Córdoba, cuando le sacó jugo de verdad. Alguien se enteró de que lo tenía y de repente se vieron doce personas, el más chico de 16 y el más grande de 55, divididos en equipos de a dos y sentados en una mesa pasándose su smartphone de mano en mano para preguntar y responder mientras avanzaban casilleros en busca de las seis estrellas para ganar el juego.

"No fue sólo jugar en familia, fue revivir ese juego que vos jugabas de chico, con esa misma energía. Ese mismo día compramos los paquetes enteros de preguntas y respuestas para poder jugar toda la tarde. Los viejos estaban tan copados que se lo bajaron para jugar con otros amigos", cuenta Lucas.

Spinetto fue quien le tocó la puerta a Carlos Ruibal, director de la compañía que lleva su nombre, para presentarle esta idea con la que enseguida se embarcaron y que vio la luz seis meses atrás: el Carrera de Mente versión digital. Una app que ya cosechó 250.000 descargas, 10 millones de minutos jugados y un millón y medio de juegos iniciados. ¿El público? Se dividió en dos grupos: adolescentes entre 15 y 18 años, para los que bajar un juego nuevo es lo más natural del mundo, y los de alrededor de 30 años, esos que mientras juegan están reviviendo los juegos de su infancia.

¿La clave del éxito? Spinetto cree que la razón fundamental es que son juegos con una carga emocional que pasa de generación en generación; a diferencia de aquellos con una mecánica más simple que se ponen de moda y se viralizan rápido para llegar a millones como pueden ser el Candy Crash o el Angry Birds, juegos que tienen su momento.

Cuando se planteó el desafío de monetizar el Carrera de Mente digital la respuesta surgió bastante rápido: una aplicación gratuita que requiere desembolsar dinero cuando se buscan nuevos paquetes de preguntas y respuestas. Pero, ¿cómo podían hacerlo con el TEG? En ese caso la respuesta fue que desde el principio se tratara de una aplicación paga: un pago inicial de 4,99 dólares para el iPad y 2,99 dólares para la versión de Android.

Pero abrir camino a los clásicos juegos de mesa en la era digital era un fenómeno ya experimentado en el exterior. En Estados Unidos, hace unos cinco años, Hasbro firmó un acuerdo con Electronics Arts para llevar a los celulares sus propios clásicos también conocidos acá: el Scrabble, el Monopoly, el Trivial Pursuit. No resultaba un desafío tan descabellado si se tenían en cuenta algunos datos estadísticos: como esos que arrojaba un informe de Nielsen donde puede leerse que las apps de juegos son la categoría más bajada por usuarios de celulares, por encima de aplicaciones vinculadas al estado del tiempo e incluso de redes sociales.

La pregunta que inevitablemente surge ahora en el mercado de los juegos es si, en consecuencia, los de tablero han muerto. Marcelo Vilches, director de Yetem, asegura que no. Y lo argumenta haciendo un paralelismo con lo que sucede con los diarios. "El rito de tener el diario a la mañana con el café es muy diferente al de tener una pantalla adelante. Ambos van a convivir. Y con los juegos sucede lo mismo. Esa es la experiencia europea, en países muy jugadores como Alemania o Francia, donde los juegos de tableros son aún importantes. Los dos mundos conviven perfectamente. Y es más, en los últimos años se ha producido un despegue de las ventas de los tableros, muy a contramano de ese pensamiento de que las versiones digitales los iban a matar", dice.

El desafío de los juegos de mesa según Vilches es mejorarse a sí mismo: aumentar su creatividad y no perder esa premisa esencial de movilizar las neuronas de la gente. Con ese objetivo han desarrollado recientemente Adigma, un juego de tablero con un alto componente educativo.

Esa convivencia de los dos formatos resulta muy natural para Camilo Fogliatti. Que cuando tiene un tiempo muerto o está aburrido agarra el la tablet y juega una partida de TEG contra la máquina. O que recuerda perfectamente la última partida de TEG tablero que jugó hace un mes con cuatro amigos desde la una hasta las seis de la mañana. Esas que, por cuestiones de tiempo, no pueden jugar tan seguido como quisiera, pero que, según confiesa, tienen ese gustito especial de compartir el momento con otros y, especialmente, de estar cara a cara con tu enemigo.

DISTINTAS OPCIONES PARA ENTRETENERSE

• El TEG, juego de estrategia bélica inventado por el argentino David Jiterman en 1976 y patentado ese año por Yetem, está disponible en su versión digital para iPad desde hace diez días a 4,99 dólares. Hoy se estrena la versión para tablets con Android a 2,99 dólares. En unos seis meses estará disponible para smartphones

• El Carrera de Mente, de Ruibal, un clásico argentino de preguntas y respuestas, fue el primer juego de mesa local en dar el salto digital. Hay una versión gratuita, y la posibilidad de descargar más preguntas y respuestas de forma paga. Disponible en la Tienda Windows, en App Store y Google Play, para celulares smartphones, tablets y PC

• En 2008, tras un acuerdo entre Hasbro y Electronic Arts, se hicieron versiones digitales del Monopoly y el Scrabble, entre otros

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Expertos, amigos e instinto

Experts, Friends, Instinct

GUEST MENTOR Neil Blumenthal, co-founder of Warby Parker: How can you gauge the market’s demand for your startup without marketing funds and pricey tools? Not easily!

At Warby Parker, we bothered experts, surveyed the hell out of our friends and used our gut to assess the market for selling glasses online .

Experts

The term expert is definitely a loaded word, but there are certainly those with deep knowledge of the market you’re about to enter. Reach out to them to learn about the market, specifically how they size and segment the market and what they know about customer behavior, and the competitive landscape. It always helps to get their opinions on your business idea, but don’t get discouraged if they turn out to be naysayers. Experts tend to be “inside” a particular industry and insiders are often the last ones to accept new ideas and see the change that is about to transform their respective industries.

Friends

Friends are often underutilized tools for your business. If you’re friends are prospective customers, learn from them. Survey them; hold focus groups with them; interview them. If they’re not prospective customers, they probably know people who are. Ask them for introductions. Ask them about your idea. What are their gut reactions? If negative, learn why and ensure your business addresses those potential issues.

Instinct 

Ultimately, you’re excited to start a business because your gut is telling you to. In fact, your gut is preventing you from sleeping because it’s so excited by the idea. Trust you gut. If you’re a potential customer for your product, how many people are just like you? What is the best way to serve people like you? If you’re not the target customer, who is and how do they behave? Where do they live? How many of them are there? How easy is it to reach them? Data is the hottest buzzword right now and for good reason – data helps us answer questions. Your gut has arrived at an answer because of a lot of data – thousands and thousands of observations and learnings that you’ve had. Don’t discount that data. Don’t discount your gut!

WSJ

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Investigación de cliente de guerrilla: Un ejemplo

Guerrilla Customer Research Is Easy

This simple approach to market research reveals what customers really want when they buy your product. (Hint: It's not the product.)

Guerrilla customer research is easy. To prove it, we just need 4.5 minutes of your time.

That's how long it takes to watch Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen--the guy who coined the term "disruptive innovation"--explain one such technique in a video on the Forum for Growth & Innovation's website.

Christensen (@claychristensen) describes how his team learned why a fast food chain's customers were buying so many milkshakes for breakfast. News flash: It wasn't because they wanted milkshakes.

That's interesting, but it's not the point. The point is how Christensen's team unearthed what motivated this seemingly odd behavior. The method was cheap, simple, and highly replicable. So replicable, we're outlining it in three steps.

1. Before you interview, observe. Christensen's team spent a long day taking notes on milkshake buyers. "It turned out that nearly half of the milkshakes were sold before 8 o'clock in the morning," Christensen says. "The people who bought them were always alone, it was the only thing they bought, and they all got in the car and drove off with it."

2. Ask the big-picture question. The next day, they asked customers "What job are you hiring the milkshake to do?" The answer: The customers "had a long and boring drive to work, and they just needed something to do." They didn't want a milkshake, per se, but something easier to consume than a greasy doughnut or a dry bagel.

3. Conduct research face-to-face. "What job are you hiring the milkshake to do?" is a deceptively complex question. If you ask it in person, you can explain what you mean by "job," ask follow-ups, and drill down. Posed via e-mail, the question might yield a useless answer. Asked in person, it revealed something surprising about commuters' preferences.

Inc.

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Celulares: Nuevos modelos de bajo costo

Los celulares de bajo costo siguen dando que hablar

Te mostramos los nuevos modelos de baja gama que Nokia acaba de anunciar para el mercado mundial. Mirá las fotos, el video y contanos qué opinas de este tipo de teléfonos. 

Está claro que los smartphones de alta gama han copado el mercado con tanques como el iPhone o los Galaxy S de Samsung, eclipsando al resto de los teléfonos de menos cartel. Pero a pesar de la preponderancia de los teléfonos inteligentes en el mercado móvil, también existen otros teléfonos, no tan inteligentes. Hablamos de los llamados feature phones, móviles de gama baja que brindan todo lo necesario para aquellos usuarios que no precisan grandes prestaciones ni diseños y prefieren un teléfono que permita el acceso a internet, no se rompa a la primera caída y tenga un precio razonable. 

En este caso, Nokia -que tiene una rica historia en esta franja- acaba de anunciar la salida de dos nuevos modelos que siguen esa línea: el 207 y el 208. Ambos teléfonos cuentan con conectividad 3G, Bluetooth, radio FM, reproductor de Mp3 y tienen pantallas de 2,4 pulgadas QVGA. Además, desde la empresa finlandesa, hacen referencia al punto fuerte de estos teléfonos: su batería. Según los datos oficiales, ésta es capaz de tener una autonomía de 30 días en modo stand by. 

Las diferencias más significativas entre estos dos modelos, es que el modelo 207 no tiene cámara y usa una sola SIM y el 208 posee cámara de 1.3MP y cuenta con una variante con dual SIM. En tanto, ambos teléfonos estarán equipados con el sistema operativo de la compañía llamado Symbian y tendrán instaladas una serie de aplicaciones como Twitter, WhatsApp y Facebook. 

El lanzamiento está previsto para el tercer trimestre de este año en Europa a un precio de 68 dólares. 

Conexión Brando

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Usando datos para conocer mejor a los clientes

Make Better Decisions Using Customer Data

Gathering data is not enough--it's what you do with it that drives profitable growth.

Never underestimate the power of your business's database or customer relationship management (CRM) system. These tools hold valuable information that will help you understand your customers, better meet their needs, improve your service performance, and expand to other, underserved customer segments.

Our work with a large client underscores the importance of mining customer data at a granular level in order to create profitable growth. The client had an abundance of customer and market data but very limited insights into those customers and markets. The management team had a view of performance only at the business-unit level, so it was nearly impossible to identify individual segments that were strong or weak.

We quickly saw a need to shift from this high-level financial view to a more granular view of profitability and growth by customer, market, product, and geography. To do this, we had to clearly define the problem we were solving, the questions we needed to answer to get there, and where to find the underlying data. From there, we needed to develop insights that made sense to business users--and that were actionable.

Uncovering Trends

By analyzing the information in our client's database, we were able to identify a number of trends that had been buried in the numbers. After piecing together data from many different systems to get a complete picture of a customer, we noticed that significant pools of profitability were concentrated in just a few key segments, products, and customers. However, our client's resources and incentives were not aligned with these key segments. The sales team was not incentivized to attract and maintain the most profitable customers, management teams were aligned with the wrong segments, and resources were not distributed across the highest-growth geographies.

Additionally, the client had a few large customers that were wildly unprofitable. These customers were valued internally as the highest revenue generators, but what our client didn't know was that it was losing money by serving them each year.

By updating these customers' outdated systems and renegotiating contracts, our client was able to save millions of dollars in costs serving them. Armed with more granular information, our client was able to make better business decisions about its customers, products, and markets.

Gathering a lot of customer data doesn't directly translate into meaningful information. You need to know what business problems your teams are looking to solve and how to use the data to find the solutions to those problems. Many companies make uninformed strategic decisions because they don't have clear visibility into their customers, products, and business segments. It is critical, therefore, to get your arms around the data you have, translate it into meaningful information, and distribute this information across the organization to drive more informed decision making.

Inc.

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Los cupones móviles disparan las ventas por celular

How Mobile Coupons Are Driving An Explosion In Mobile Commerce

JOSH LUGER - Business Insider

As recently as late 2010, mobile commerce was only 3% of e-commerce. By the end of last year's holiday shopping season, that number had risen to 11%, according to comScore. That's approximately $18.6 billion in consumer spending - and that doesn't even include travel-related purchases, which comScore counts separately. 

BI Intelligence

New mobile merchandising trends — merchandising being the art of selling people products they didn't know they wanted — like mobile catalogs and coupons are helping to drive this explosion.

Thanks in part to this new ecosystem of retail and shopping apps, mobile-generated retail spend could rise to 15% of retail e-commerce by the end of this year.  

In a new report from BI Intelligence, we examine the main reasons why mobile commerce is exploding, dig deeper into the numbers underpinning the explosive growth, and analyze the new mobile merchandising trends — like mobile catalogs and coupons - that are contributing to this growth. 

Access The Full Report By Signing Up For A Free Trial Today >>

Here's a brief overview of why retailers and brands are offering mobile coupons:

•  Driving digital revenue: Successful coupon campaigns can help e-retailers acquire customers and drive online sales. By 2014 the number of mobile coupon users is expected to increase to 53.2 million a year. At roughly 10%, the redemption rate of mobile coupons crushes that of print coupons, which hovers around 1%.
• Increasing offline sales and foot traffic to physical stores: Effective coupon strategies can lure more consumers into bricks-and-mortar locations. Mobile coupons are also proving to be a path into mobile for large consumer packaged goods brands that have previously shunned the medium.
• Gathering data: Because they are received on phones but often redeemed offline, coupons are a perfect medium for acquiring consumer data. It is a great way for them to collect data on offline purchases and close the mobile-to-offline purchase loop. In a world where the linking of offline and online consumer behavior is still a daunting challenge, that's a valuable resource. 
• Building relationships: Coupons are essentially just another channel through which to communicate with consumers. It's useful to think of coupons less as a discounting vehicle, and more a piece of content with an offer appended. If coupons are done right, they will weave a customer and a retailer or brand more tightly together. 

In full, BI Intelligence's report on Mobile Commerce:

• Examines the three main reasons why mobile commerce is exploding
• Digs deeper into the numbers underpinning the explosive growth
• Analyzes new mobile merchandising trends — merchandising being the art of selling people products they didn't know they wanted — like mobile catalogs and coupons - that are proving to be successful in driving mobile business

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Organigramas: Jerarquía planas

Why I Run a Flat Company

I've always kept hierarchy to a minimum. Then an employee said, "Promote me," and I was forced to reevaluate my organizational structure.

Something strange happened at work a couple of months ago: We parted ways with an employee. That doesn't happen too often at 37signals, the Chicago software company I co-founded. In 11 years, we've lost just five people—and one of them came back seven years later.

But the really strange thing was the reason this employee and I decided it was time to part ways. The issue was ambition—not a lack of it, but more of it than we could use.

She had been in our customer service department for about three years and had always done quality work. Her smarts, initiative, and productivity had never been in question. Now, she wanted that performance to be rewarded with managerial responsibilities and a new job title. It wasn't about the money.

You may be wondering how this possibly could be a problem. After all, what business owner doesn't crave an office staffed with motivated people looking to take on more work? In fact, companies often go out of their way to create positions, responsibilities, and job titles to hang on to their most ambitious employees.

At 37signals, however, we have a different position on ambition. We're not big fans of what I consider "vertical" ambition—that is, the usual career-path trajectory, in which a newbie moves up the ladder from associate to manager to vice president over a number of years of service. On the other hand, we revere "horizontal" ambition—in which employees who love what they do are encouraged to dig deeper, expand their knowledge, and become better at it. We always try to hire people who yearn to be master craftspeople, that is, designers who want to be great designers, not managers of designers; developers who want to master the art of programming, not management.

Instead of rewarding high performers with managerial responsibilities—which often drives people further away from the job they are actually good at—we reward with responsibilities closer to the work. We also throw in above-market salaries and generous benefits, including four-day workweeks in the summer, as much time off as they would like (within reason, of course), and plenty of freedom to make their own decisions about the projects they're working on.

This has served us well over the years. But recently, as we've brought on more people, that model has been showing signs of strain. We're now at 26 people. And, as many entrepreneurs have learned, once your business reaches a certain size, matters you didn't have to consider before become difficult to ignore. In our case, HR terms likedepartments, managers, and titles have begun to pop up more often.

Besides being small, 37signals has always been a flat organization. In fact, flatness is one of our core values. We have eight programmers, but we don't have a chief technical officer. We have five designers, but no creative director. We have five people on our customer support team, and no customer support manager. And because we don't have a marketing department, we don't have a chief marketing officer.

Even as we've grown, we've remained a lean organization. We do not have room for people who don't do the actual work. Nearly everyone at 37signals touches our products at one point or another. From writers writing and updating support documentation to designers designing the user interfaces to programmers writing the code to our operations people, who make sure the servers keep on serving, we don't have delegators who get paid to tell other people what to do.

We've experimented with promoting a few people to manager-level roles. In some cases, this has worked out; in others, it hasn't. But one thing we've found is that groups that manage themselves are often better off than groups that are managed by a single person. So when groups do require structure, we get them to manage themselves.

For example, back when we had three people working in customer service, we hired someone to manage the team. His responsibility was to review everyone's tickets, keep an eye on tone, make sure our customers were getting prompt and proper responses, interact with our developers to let them know what our customers were requesting, and measure our overall support performance. He might jump in and handle a few tickets here and there, but his main responsibility was to step back and improve the department.

It didn't work out. This isn't a knock on that particular manager (he was a great guy who knew how to run a department, and we helped him find another job). It wouldn't have mattered who was in the role; the role itself was unnecessary. But because we expected the department to grow, we thought it would be a good idea to get some structure in place. After all, everyone knows that as you add people, you add structure.

What we learned is that adding a dedicated manager and creating a hierarchy is not the only way to create structure. Instead, we decided to let the team be entirely self-managed. There's still a team leader, but that role rotates among the team every week. Each week, a new leader sketches out the agenda, writes up the notes about problems and performance, and steps up to handle any troubled customer interactions.

One of the things I like about the arrangement is that it frees us from the often toxic labor-versus-management dynamic, in which neither party truly understands what it's like to be on the other side. This is where you'll find a lot of conflict in companies. But because we rotate management duties weekly, everyone is more empathetic toward one another. When you'll be management soon, you respect management more. Same with labor. It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes, by the philosopher John Rawls: "The fairest rules are those to which everyone would agree if they did not know how much power they would have." Our support has gotten better, and our customers are happier. We've measured the difference, and we know it works.

Observing the performance of the customer service team reminds me that promoting horizontally instead of vertically can benefit everyone involved. Moving ambitious people upward tends to lock down other capable people on the team. If there are three or four people capable of managing (in a traditional sense) and we promote just one of them, the teammates might feel stuck. We would rather everyone work together in an environment in which everyone has a chance to move proudly and thoroughly sideways.

In the end, no one here is happy when an employee leaves. But as a business owner, I have to think about the long term. Moving someone up to a managerial position just because he or she outgrew his or her current position isn't reason enough. Adding managers to the mix sends a strong cultural statement about flatness giving way to hierarchy. We're definitely not ready for that now. I hope we never will be.

As it happens, this story has a happy ending. Our ex-employee didn't find another job—she launched her own business. She runs the show, and she's having a blast. We've even provided advice and helped her promote her new business. It definitely was the right move for everyone.

Jason Fried is co-founder of 37signals, a Chicago-based software firm, and co-author of the book Rework.

Inc.

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Una guía de principiante para hacer estudio de mercado

A Beginner's Guide to Market Research

Want to get to know your customers better? Here are 23 topics you should explore to uncover what they love about you, what they hate, and what they want you to do different.

“Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.” -Zora Neale Hurston

 What if tomorrow your best customers were in charge of your business? That’s right: you’re out, they’re in. Your CEO is now the customer whose loyalty card whizzes like a finely oiled European sports car. And your management team has been replaced by a cadre of heavy users, students of every nuance of your business.

Ask yourself: What would they change? And further: Why? After all, what is it that makes these customers choose you over a bevy of competitors, time and time again? And of greater import: What do you need to do in order to continue to earn their allegiance in an increasingly competitive marketplace?

Far too often, the term “market research” conjurs images of clichéd focus groups from 1980s romantic comedies, which is unfortunate given that there have never been more tools and options available to gain meaningful insights into your relationship with consumers.

So, whether you are considering a formal quantitative study (e.g., online survey) or a more informal qualitative examination (e.g., direct interviews with customers), here are 23 market research topics to help you mine for inspiration.

Key Drivers: Where’s the Love?

Start by taking a “fresh eyes” look at your brand vs. its competitors through the eyes of your customers.

• Where do you truly excel?
• What are your best moments as a brand?
• What are your best stories?
• How do these look in contrast to your competitors?
• What adjectives do your brand champions use to describe you--and what role does your brand really play in their lives (beyond just “a product” into deeper, richer meaning)?

 Further still, look at the life cycle of your brand.

• What does the initial purchase look like?
• How has this changed in the past few years?
• What new influences are driving this initial transaction and beyond?
• What (and who) are the key influences on this decision?
• How does your brand interact with consumers at every point of contact; where are the conversations happening and where (and how) are they truly “feeling the love” in a way that you never want to lose?

 Key Barriers: Where’s the Hate?

OK, maybe hate’s too strong a word…or maybe it’s not. So, where are the areas that you’re, well, deficient? Lacking? Frustrating consumers and putting off prospects?

• What are your worst stories?
• What does your worst day look like?
• Where are you clearly “less than” and what direction are the trends in these areas heading?
• How loud is the noise in these areas (and where and from whom is it coming)?

 Dig deep into your competition as well.

• What are they doing well--and where are their own relationships in jeopardy?
• Compare and contrast your brand with your competitors at every step of the purchase process and at every interaction point as well. How do you stack up?
• Why do consumers choose their brands over yours?
• What are you missing? Is it functional? Emotional? A social force at play? What does it mean to be part of their club?
• Bottom line, what barriers are standing in the way for greater meaning, and market share, for your brand?

Key Opportunities: Where Are the White Spaces?

Create a culture that doesn’t just seek insights for drivers and barriers, but that also engages consumers in a discussion around “what’s possible” together. While Starbucks has gained a great deal of acclaim for its “My Starbucks Idea” campaign, you don’t need a fancy microsite or social media campaign to ask your customers to help you build a better mousetrap. While consumers are far from experts at predicting their own future behavior, they can certainly be a fountainhead of inspiration for potential white spaces.

• What if you were just starting up today--without any limitations for how you go to market--what would the ideal offering look like, in every interaction with consumers?
• How might you do things differently if you doubled your costs? Where would you drive incremental value? What are the implications on how you drive value?
• Where are the big moments for customer delight that you’re missing? The little ones? What are the lowest hanging fruit?
• What other brands do your customers and prospects love, and why? What can you learn from them, and these relationships?

Dig deep for incremental gains, large and small alike. And listen hard--because the answers are often found in the spaces between the words.

INc.

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5 cosas que busca un inversor en un emprendedor

Straight from the VC’s mouth: 5 things I look for in a CEO

This guest post was written by Mitch Rosich, a partner at Athenian Venture Partners.

I’ve worked with many IT companies over the course of my career. Between two decades of experience in product and engineering development and a decade in venture capital, I’ve experienced working with a variety of leaders, some more effective than others.

IT startups need a lot of positive ingredients to get off the ground, including a sustainable vision, focused and realistic goals and, perhaps most important, a deep management bench. Since it is just starting to build towards the future, the IT startup needs a leader with a set of attributes that can contribute to leading the company to success. In the startup stage, the company is constantly evolving and lessons are being learned, and the CEO must be able to show the way during this change, sink with the ship, or be cut loose so that the right leadership can steer clear of the perils being faced.

Based on working with dozens on C-level executives, here are some characteristics that I have identified that contribute to producing an effective IT startup CEO:

• Experience growing a small, preferably venture-backed, company
  The reality is that the skills needed in a large company don’t always translate into success at a small start-up. We have found situations where CEOs who operated effectively within the infrastructure of a large organization cannot manage within the fluidity of a more bare-boned organization. Conversely, CEOs with start-up experience tend to be more adaptable without an established framework already in place to ground them and guide them.
• Demonstrated execution ability
  A start-up is all about execution and getting to the end goal as quickly as possible. Some CEOs are strategic, and some are tactical.  A more strategic CEO may be able to look at the big picture, yet not be able to get from where they are at present to the end goal. This ability to execute plans is absolutely critical in a small company environment.
• Ability to attract and retain top talent, and experience leading such talent
  The saying “A managers attract A talent, and B managers attract C talent” is absolutely true. This takes knowledge and experience on the CEOs part, but also respect. Management teams want to work for CEOs whom they respect and admire. Certain CEOs have this reputation, and they draw others in. This is absolutely critical. In a small company, a CEO also has to be willing to pare down the poor performers. No one can ever be 100 percent perfect with hiring. While leadership respect is earned through good hires, others in the organization gain as much or more respect when ineffective employee situations are dealt with quickly and professionally.
• Vision and ability to adapt and change if the vision is off-target or market conditions change
  Plans are very rarely perfect the first time around. With a start-up, effective CEOs must have a unique vision, and see things that others don’t. They must be able to solve problems in unique ways. However, even visionaries are rarely 100 percent correct in what they perceive the market conditions to be, and what will drive customers to their product. A good CEO must listen to what his or her customers are saying, and accept that their vision may have to change and adapt to such customer-driven market conditions. In other words, the CEO must recognize the need to change, and be willing to change.
• Ethics, integrity, confidence and ability to earn trust and respect
  Small companies are inherently transparent – everyone sees what everyone else is doing, from top to bottom. Similar to ineffective job performance, questionable ethics and integrity also can’t be hidden from the rest of the team.  Because the expectation amongst most start-up employees is that everyone is working hard and fully committed to the company’s success, if integrity is compromised in any way – particularly by the top leader – the effect is more profound. Too often, the people with true integrity leave, and the ones without it stay – resulting in a corrupted culture often heading down the path of disaster. Sometimes VCs find out about this in diligence – for example, during document review in which ethical breaches by the prospective portfolio company are uncovered – which will most likely result in the VCs walking away from the deal.

Mitch Rosich began consulting for Athenian Venture Partners in 2000, joining the firm as a partner in the IT investment practice in 2002. In addition to a decade of technology venture capital experience, Rosich has over two decades of industry experience in product and engineering development, and in the management of 3 start-up technology companies, including Omnia, which Rosich and his team sold to CIENA for $498M. Rosich has been awarded 11 computer technology patents for software and hardware, 8 of which have been used in commercial applications. Currently, he represents Athenian as a director on the boards of Manta Media and Comet Solutions, and as an observer on the board of Sendio.

Venture Beat 

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Como los autos sin conductor podrían cambiar el paisaje urbano

Disruptions: How Driverless Cars Could Reshape Cities

By NICK BILTON

Jeff Swensen for The New York TimesA self-driving car at Carnegie Mellon. Researchers have been contemplating how cities could change if our cars start driving for us, including having narrower streets because parking spots might not be necessary.

SAN FRANCISCO — By now, seeing one of Google’s experimental, driverless cars zipping down Silicon Valley’s Highway 101, or parking itself on a San Francisco street, is not all that unusual. Indeed, as automakerslike Audi, Toyota and Mercedes-Benz make plans for self-driving vehicles, it is only a matter of time before such cars become a big part of the great American traffic jam.

While driverless cars might still seem like science fiction outside the Valley, the people working and thinking about these technologies are starting to ask what these autos could mean for the city of the future. The short answer is “a lot.”

Imagine a city where you don’t drive in loops looking for a parking spot because your car drops you off and scoots off to some location to wait, sort of like taxi holding pens at airports. Or maybe it is picked up by a robotic minder and carted off with other vehicles, like a row of shopping carts.

A test of Google’s self-driving car.

Inner-city parking lots could become parks. Traffic lights could be less common because hidden sensors in cars and streets coordinate traffic. And, yes, parking tickets could become a rarity since cars would be smart enough to know where they are not supposed to be.

As scientists and car companies forge ahead — many expect self-driving cars to become commonplace in the next decade — researchers, city planners and engineers are contemplating how city spaces could change if our cars start doing the driving for us. There are risks, of course: People might be more open to a longer daily commute, leading to even more urban sprawl.

That city of the future could have narrower streets because parking spots would no longer be necessary. And the air would be cleaner because people would drive less. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 30 percent of driving in business districts is spent in a hunt for a parking spot, and the agency estimates that almost one billion miles of driving is wasted that way every year.

“What automation is going to allow is repurposing, both of spaces in cities, and of the car itself,” said Ryan Calo, an assistant professor at theUniversity of Washington School of Law, who specializes in robotics and drones.

Harvard University researchers note that as much as one-third of the land in some cities is devoted to parking spots. Some city planners expect that the cost of homes will fall as more space will become available in cities. If parking on city streets is reduced and other vehicles on roadways become smaller, homes and offices will take up that space. Today’s big-box stores and shopping malls require immense areas for parking, but without those needs, they could move further into cities.

The Autonomous Intersection Management project, created by the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin, imagines cities where traffic lights no longer exist but sensors direct the flow of traffic. Although a video showing off the automated traffic intersection looks like total chaos, the researchers insist that such intersections will reduce congestion and fuel costs and can allow cars to drive through cities without stopping.

Of course, getting to a utopian city will take a little longer than circling the block looking for a spot. A spokesman for Audi said a fully automated car would not be available until the end of the decade. And the regulatory issues to be addressed before much of this could come true are, to put it mildly, forbidding.

But the pieces are starting to fall into place, at least enough to excite future-minded thinkers. Last year, Jerry Brown, the governor of California, signed legislation paving the way for driverless cars in California, making it the third state to explicitly allow the cars on the road. And federal agencies are starting to consider their impact. In May the Transportation Department made its first formal policy statement on autonomous vehicles, encouraging cities to allow testing of driverless cars.

But to some, this promise — or overpromise as the case may be — sounds familiar.

“The future city is not going to be a congestion-free environment. That same prediction was made that cars would free cities from the congestion of horses on the street,” said Bryant Walker Smith, a fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School and a member of the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford. “You have to build the sewer system to accommodate the breaks during the Super Bowl; it won’t be as pretty as we’re envisioning.”

Mr. Smith has an alternative vision of the impact of automated cars, which he believes are inevitable. Never mind that nice city center. He says that driverless cars will allow people to live farther from their offices and that the car could become an extension of home.

“I could sleep in my driverless car, or have an exercise bike in the back of the car to work out on the way to work,” he said. “My time spent in my car will essentially be very different.”

“Driverless cars won’t appear in a vacuum,” Mr. Smith said. Other predictions for the future city imagine fewer traditional-looking cars. Taking their place will be drones and robots that deliver goods.

Oh, and that food-delivery car double-parked outside? That, Mr. Calo said, will be replaced by a delivery drone.

E-mail: bilton@nytimes.com

BITS NYT

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