VentureBeat

Top 10 hilarious and surprising viral videos of 2011
When an entrepreneur fails from lack of nerve
Hacker group Anonymous steals sensitive info from Stratfor security firm
How to manage your company’s online reputation (infographic)

Top 10 hilarious and surprising viral videos of 2011

Posted: 26 Dec 2011 07:00 AM PST

YouTube may have already picked the biggest videos to hit the web this year, but there’s a host of great videos that didn’t make the cut. From vigilante cyclists to deadpan taxidermists to obligatory cute kittens, the web was full of strange, funny, sad and infuriating events and characters.

We decided to cap off the year with a list of 10 viral videos we especially liked. While you’ve probably seen at least half of these, there’s a good chance you haven’t seen them all. In trying to define “viral,” we’ve decided not to count any stunningly made professional videos. No music videos starring the notorious Rebecca Black or mega-popular Katy Perry, no crazy views of Earth from space and no stunning visions of the future are in the mix here.

Here are the top 10 viral videos of the year:

Bike lanes in New York City

New York City has been cracking down hard on cyclists this year for not riding in designated bike lanes. Although there are some cyclists who blatantly ignore laws and streetlights (I live there and constantly worry about being biked down), there’s wide mix of violations from pedestrians, drivers and bikers alike. In a move of defiance, one cyclist who gets an unfair ticket decided to make a video of what happens when he only rides in the bike lane. The results are quite funny.

Cat mom hugs baby kitten

Even though it was included in YouTube’s year-end list, we couldn’t help but include this cat-and-kitten clip in our list as well. It’s one of the most watchable clips we’ve seen in a long while because it’s just so darn cute. As much as my grandmother and I have radically different tastes, we both really love this clip.

Chatroulette Love Song

The Chatroulette service — which lets people video chat with other random people — might have been a fad that died off in 2010, but the site and potential to use the service remains. One enterprising band decided to create the “Chatroulette Love Song,” which features a man and his band singing a love song to a girl he meets on the service. It might be the best thing to ever come from the service. Well, unless seeing random male genitals all the time is your thing.

Japan Earthquake: Helicopter aerial view of tsunami waves

The humongous earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan in March was one of the most-covered pieces of news of the year. The disaster caused more than 15,000 deaths and 5,000 injuries. Russia Today spliced some of the most harrowing early footage together while the event was still happening and posted it to the web. The result is a terrifying look at the power of a tsunami as it uproots homes and businesses like it’s nothing. It became viral because of the news, but it had staying power as a document to one of the year’s most important events.

Nyan Cat

Whether the flying rainbow “nyan cat” falls into the hilarious, surprising or infurating camp depends on your personal preference, but there’s no denying the song and video was a meme that wouldn’t go away. The nyan cat video has more than 54 million views to date and has inspired countless parodies and related videos. There’s even someone who liked nyan cat enough to turn the repetitive ditty into a 10-hour-long version, which has more than 9 million views itself. That’s a lot of nyan.

Click this link to see the final 5 viral videos of 2011!

Filed under: media, VentureBeat

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When an entrepreneur fails from lack of nerve

Posted: 26 Dec 2011 07:00 AM PST

Watching an entrepreneur fail is sad, but watching them fail from a lack of nerve is tragic.

Excitement

At the beginning of this year Bob, one of my ex-students was in entrepreneurial heaven. He had an idea for a new class of enterprise software insight-as-a-service based on big data web analytics as a Cloud and SaaS (Software As a Service) application.

Bob had taken to heart the business model canvas and Customer Development lessons. After graduating he put together a prototype and had quickly marched through Customer Discovery, iterating his product with the help of CIOs and Fortune 1000 IT departments.

I had made one of the introductions to a Fortune 100 CIOs so I got to hear his progress from both him and the CIO.

Takeoff

After 90 days, things seemed to be moving at startup speed. Bob had a backlog of users wanting to try his application, and the corporate IT people who were trying his early prototype said, "It's crude, we hate the user interface, it's missing lots of features — but we'll kill you if you try to take it away from us."

I pointed a VC who followed the space to the CIO who was testing the prototype. The VC told me the CIO wouldn't get off the phone. He kept telling him he couldn't remember when he had seen an enterprise software product with so much promise. The VC checked with other IT users and heard the same reaction. It was a "gotta use it, don't take it away, we'll have to buy it" product. After a demo and lunch, the VC (who normally did later-stage deals) wrote my ex-student a check for a seed round.

Life couldn't be better.

I followed Bob progress in bits and pieces from updates from the CIO, the VC and his emails and blogs. He seemed to be on the fast track to startup success. But pretty soon a few worrying warning signs appeared.

The first thing that I noticed was that Bob couldn't seem to find a co-founder. I wasn't close enough to know if he wasn't really looking for one, but given the early success he was having, it seemed a bit odd. But the next thing really got me concerned. Bob started hiring second rate developers. At best they were B- players.

Stall

Lessons Learned

Yes, premature scaling is a cause of startup death.
Yes, you need to get out of the building and test your hypotheses.
But, when an opportunity smacks you in the head for gosh sake grab it with both hands and don't let go.
If you can't, get out of the startup game.

A month went by, and the product stopped getting better. The user interface still sucked and new features had stopped appearing. The next month, the same thing. I got a call from my CIO friend asking, "what was going on?" He said, "It was a great prototype, we would have loved to deploy it company-wide, and I hate to let it go, but it looks like Bob company just lost interest in developing it. I'm going to dump it and look for a substitute." So I called Bob and suggested we grab a coffee.

I asked him how things were going and got the update on how the early evangelists were using the product. As I had heard, they were ecstatic. But Bob said he was worried he hadn't found the right customer segment yet. "I'm not sure I can get all of these guys to pay me big bucks," he said. "That's why I stopped coding, and I'm spending all my time out in the field still talking to more customers."

"What does your VC's say you ought to be doing?" I asked. "Oh, he hasn't had much time for me, his firm almost never does seed deals. It turns out I was an exception." Oh, oh.

The conversation was starting to make the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Bob had gotten to a place most founders never do — his product was a "gotta have it for people with big budgets." He should have been back rapidly coding, iterating and finding out what feature set would get him to paying customers.

Instead he had produced barely three weeks of progress in the last five months. His prototype was rapidly wearing out its welcome.

A lack of nerve

When I pressed Bob on this he admitted, "No I guess my engineers aren't very good. But I hired guys who were cheap because I wasn't sure if my hypotheses were right. Didn't you tell us to test our hypotheses first?" Now it was my time to be surprised. "Bob, you've validated your hypotheses better than any startup I've ever seen. You found that out in the first month. You got customers begging you to finish the product so they could buy it. You should have been hiring world-class talent and building something these CIO's will pay for. It's not too late. It's time to grab them by the throat and go for it."

I wasn't ready for the answer, "Steve, I've been reading all about premature scaling and making sure everything is right before I go for it. I want to be sure I get all of this right. I'm afraid I'll run out of money."

I thought I'd make one more run at it. "Bob," I said, "few entrepreneurs get the first time response you have from an early product. At your rate you're going to burn through your cash trying to get it perfect. It's a startup. You'll never have perfect information. You're sitting on a gold mine. Grab the opportunity!"

I got a blank stare.

We made some more small talk and shook hands as he left.

Bob was in the wrong business, not the wrong market. He wanted certainty, comfort and security.

I stared at my coffee for a long time.

Serial entrepreneur Steve Blank is the author of Four Steps to the Epiphany. This story originally appeared on his blog.

Filed under: cloud, Entrepreneur Corner

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Hacker group Anonymous steals sensitive info from Stratfor security firm

Posted: 25 Dec 2011 10:05 PM PST

Hacker collective Anonymous claims to have stolen credit card data and other sensitive details from U.S. security think tank Stratfor, with plans to donate $1 million in stolen cash to charity.

Austin, Tex.-based Stratfor is a research group that posts a daily newsletter on security issues and counts the Defense Department, Lockheed Martin and Bank of America as clients. But for being a so-called “intelligence company,” the organization did an awful job of protecting its internal data and website, which has been taken down by hackers. The company admitted today that a breach occurred yesterday and that personal client info was stolen.

“On December 24th an unauthorized party disclosed personally identifiable information and related credit card data of some of our members,” Stratfor CEO George Friedman wrote on the company’s Facebook page earlier today. “We have reason to believe that your personal and credit card data could have been included in the information that was illegally obtained and disclosed.”

Anonymous let the world know it had hacked into the company on Dec. 24th by defacing Stratfor’s website and posting messages to Twitter. The hacker group said it had credit card details for around 4,000 Stratfor clients and info on a total of 90,000 credit card accounts altogether. The @AnonymousIRC Twitter account posted a link to Pastebin for what it claimed to be a secret list of Stratfor clients and taunted the company by saying, “Not so private and secret anymore.”

Stratfor said that the only people who appear on the “private” list are those who have purchased a Stratfor newsletter in the past. “Contrary to this assertion the disclosure was merely a list of some of the members that have purchased our publications and does not comprise a list of individuals or entities that have a relationship with Stratfor beyond their purchase of our subscription-based publications,” Friedman wrote on Facebook.

The hacker group claims to have 200 gigabytes worth of data and says that info was especially easy to get because the data was not encrypted. Anonymous promises more leaks are coming and the @YourAnonNews Twitter account continues to post more documents via Pastebin as they are released.

Anonymous’ stated goal of the operation is to steal $1 million from individual accounts to give as Christmas donations to organizations like the American Red Cross, CARE and Save the Children. The company posted five receipts on Twitter of donations made so far, including $180 and $200 donations to the Red Cross.

In a point of contention, a “press release” sent out via Pastebin today says Anonymous is not responsible for the hacks. But an Anonymous Twitter account says the press release is a misdirect, saying, “Whoever heard of an “Emergency Anonymous PR”? LOLWTF.”

Filed under: security

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How to manage your company’s online reputation (infographic)

Posted: 25 Dec 2011 12:00 PM PST

Many of us are intimately familiar with the rigmarole of personal online-reputation control, especially as the 2011 holiday party season comes to a close. We know to delete any tipsy tweets and comb through Facebook to un-tag ourselves in embarrassing party photos.

Just like you, your business has a online reputation to worry about, and maintaining it takes work. For all companies, from hip startup to old-school enterprise, paying attention to online feedback is incredibly important. More than 92 percent of adult consumers will look-up a review online before paying for a product or service, and one wisp of negative commentary can have big repercussions.

There are a few steps every company should take to optimize its rep. To monitor what’s said about your company on social media sites, consider using a social search engine such as SocialMention.com or Kurrently.com.

Since you can’t usually remove negative content posted by third-parties from the Internet, you want to make sure the best possible information about your company surfaces first in online searches. That requires solid search engine optimization (SEO) for your website, online profiles and press releases.

Just as important as monitoring what other people say about your business is being mindful of what content your company puts online. To build a good online reputation, you need to have well thought-out blog posts and a smart social media strategy. Set high standards for internal communication as well, since you never know when a jokey all-staff email could end up posted online for everyone to see.

Here are some more tips to help your company craft and maintain a healthy, flattering online reputation:

Graphic courtesy of KBSD Digital Agency