How Anthill's first Cool Company Awards caused an icy reception
It's fair to say that the application proffered by applicant company Laybuy was the cause of an icy-reception. In fact, it was literal cause of an icy reception area. The dissertation on the reasons why Laybuy is ‘cool’ arrived embedded in a block of ice and spent two days in the office sink defrosting before we could get to it.
Is Internet access a basic human right? 7 out of 10 Aussies think so.
Nearly seven out of 10 Australians see access to the Internet as a basic human right, according to an online -- and not particularly scientific -- survey by Compare Broadband. But a basic human right? Really?
How to secure meetings with Silicon Valley investors [VIDEO]
In this edition of the Anthill Quickfire Question, I sat down with Nick Smoot, Co-founder of Here On Biz. Nick and his co-founder Allen Hartwig have only been out of stealth for a couple of months but, in that time, they've secured meetings with companies such as Seqouia, HP and LinkedIn. They are currently raising their series seed round.
Get the message
Do you like receiving marketing via text message? I don’t. When my BlackBerry rings like a bicycle bell, I get a warm feeling inside...
Anthill print back issues in the bargain basement basket already? That didn't take long.
Anthill print editions always had a pass-on rate -- i.e. how many people read the same copy -- that was well above the industry average. In other words, they had a great shelf life. However, it seems that, in some people at least, the desire to continue sharing Anthill back issues is more pressing than the desire to wait patiently for their collection to mature into a golden egg.
Do you really want to stuff up your LinkedIn profile? Here’s some advice: don’t...
There’s a really annoying trend that seems to have emerged lately where people have stuffed their LinkedIn profiles full of keywords -- kind of like the early black hat cowboy days of SEO. Keyword stuffing makes you look desperate for attention. If everyone does this it becomes a race to the bottom to get up to the top.
The fear of change – Cricket in the snow and other mysteries
Business leaders must learn to preserve the old while ushering in changes. The example of Test match, One Day and Twenty20 cricket is illuminating, writes Kim Wingerei.
Our first social media ‘experiment’ for online marketing month. Do you want to be...
The 'zing' factor that social media brings to any marketing campaign is the potential it provides for exponential growth. If one person likes the offer and is compelled to invite their friends to also register for the offer, and if their friends, in turn, feel compelled to register and invite their friends to register for the offer, then you suddenly have on your hands a campaign with significant reach, far beyond anything that traditional media can provide.
Make sure you're never too busy to read
Whether it’s audio books, eBook readers or actual real books (with paper, for Gen Ys reading this), books are still one of the best ways to really learn something new. The increasing trend towards shorter, smaller, briefer, 140 characters is great to a sense of what’s going on, but it’s insufficient to actually change the way you think.
So, you have 300 contacts on LinkedIn. Well, I’m not impressed.
I was at an event the other day when I met a very smart, respected, and likeable business owner, named Ron. We got to discussing LinkedIn, and I asked him how many connections he had. He mentioned he had around 300, and then went on to proudly proclaim that he knew “all of them personally, save three or four”. That's great for taking care of your existing customers, I thought, but what about attracting new ones?
Debt-hole Surfers. Let’s rat ’em out!
They surf the cusp of legality and debt recovery. They know that what they do is illegal but they are happy in the knowledge that the cost versus benefit of chasing them is too high. They know too that these same things will keep them off debt registers. What do you do to rat out the rats?
100 words that stop your emails getting opened (They include “friend”, “your family” and...
This is a list that came to our attention by way of an email. It's headline featured none of the words below.
That's because this...
Entrepreneurial success: Why a clear objective can make us narrow minded
I think it is safe to say that most entrepreneurs are pretty motivated people. To risk everything to create something new, you have to have a fairly clear idea of what you want to achieve.
Sebastien Eckersley-Maslin's $500 startup in 7 days… 133 days later [VIDEO]
Frequent Anthill readers may recall Sebastien Eckersley-Maslin's blog series, How to build a startup in seven days and under $500. I caught up with Sebastien in Sydney last month and had a great time sampling fine coffee and sharing war-stories. Of course, I also had to ask that important question: What has happened to his 7-day startup in the past 133 days?
Kids at work – Not making sneakers? What the?!!
Once again, our leaders have taken missing the point to a whole new level, after Senate President John Hogg removed Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young's two-year-old daughter from the Upper House last Thursday.
Yaro Starak, 2009 Anthill 30under30 winner
With no employees or office space, Yaro Starak makes half a million dollars a year sitting in a café typing on his laptop. He represents a new breed of digital entrepreneurs, one of just a handful of people who make good money from professional blogging.
What’s the most important entrepreneurship lesson you have ever learnt? Here’s mine.
I'm often asked, 'What's the most important piece of advice you can give new business owners?' After much thought, factoring in seven years of interviews and coffee meetings with hundreds of entrepreneurs, from single person operations to international masters of the game, such as Bill Gates and James Dyson, and having built my own business over this time, there is one piece of advice that trumps all others.
How Anthill turned a $900 blog into one of Australia's Top 50 Business &...
Like most would-be web-entrepreneurs, we discovered very early on that the 'Fields of Dreams' approach to web development is, unsurprisingly, flawed (i.e. 'if you build it, they will NOT come'). If building a profitable (or even sustainable) website were that easy, every web developer would be too busy swimming in their personal Jacuzzis of cash to apply their web-developing expertise to the many projects of small business owners and marketing professionals.
Still waiting for a return on your innovation investment? Find the low-hanging fruit!
In his previous article, Roger La Salle challenged innovation practitioners to examine the rate of return on their innovation investment. Here, he explains how to set a time scale to obtain this return: "If you can have an early win with innovation then you can be sure more budget will be forthcoming and still greater achievements can be obtained." To find the low-hanging fruit (and the lowest risk) for your startup, the best place to begin is with Process Innovation.
Was our Readers’ Choice Award hijacked? (Or was it always going to be a...
Can you remember the winner of TIME magazine's Most Influential Person poll in 2009? Was it Barack Obama? Oprah Winfrey? The Dalai Lama? No, it was Moot, the pseudonym of 21-year-old Christopher Poole, a college student and founder of online community 4chan.org. So, why the long winded introduction to this year's Cool Company Awards Readers' Choice Award? Did we get gamed?
