The increasing volume of geo-located tweets is revealing how international travel patterns vary in time across countries and cultures, say computer scientists.
The founding story of Uncover is long and made up of a lot of twists and turns. It’s always a long and bumpy road for a bootstrapped startup as you work to figure out what you’re building and whom you’re building it with. Uncover was incorporated in February 2012, but work on the product you see today wasn’t started until mid-January 2013. Uncover has replaced an original co-founder, gone through one complete product change and one customer-driven pivot. We’re currently in the process of adding a new component to our successful perks and rewards web app. A lot has happened in what feels like a short time.
This is the story of how I found my Uncover co-founders and what I look for when looking to work with others. Uncover is my third startup and I’ve worked with a total of five co-founders across all three startups. When I first set out to build Uncover, I knew that I wanted to do something in Human Resources. Along with being CEO in my previous two companies, I ran Operations and always found myself infuriated with the web applications I had to use to get things done. I saw a lot of opportunity to make a difference in employees’ lives.
In February 2012, I set out to learn to program and to build a web application for Human Resources folks. Something I always recommend to people looking for co-founders is to “try before you buy” a co-founder. Work on a little side project or hack on something small before you go all in. The guy I founded the original Uncover with was someone I had actually hired at my second startup for a one-month freelance gig. He was a very talented web designer and frontend developer. Not only had we worked really well together during that project, but we also got along well. Not so close that we were afraid of criticizing each other, but close enough to enjoy grabbing lunch and beers together every few months.
He had recently joined Twitter and had just finished dealing with the nightmare that is Human Resources at any big company. He was just as passionate as I was about tackling an aspect of it. We wanted to start small, release something that generated revenue and build on our success. We worked together for ten months on moderately successful application tracking software, but ultimately concluded that this was not the area of HR that we were really enthusiastic about. We wanted to focus on the current employees of companies and not the future ones.
But around this time, he decided to leave Twitter and explore other options. While we had worked well together, this was a natural time for us to go our separate ways, as I had started to brainstorm new ideas for Uncover based on the previous ten months of customer development and research. I just wasn’t interested in tracking resumes and everything that went into that. While I had learned to program from building this web app, my interests lay elsewhere. The two of us at that point actually sold the application tracking software and its client list. It has since been redesigned and re-launched, and three guys are now running it as a side project.
All this while, I had been working out of the office of my current co-founder’s company. The two of us would grab coffee daily – we were the only two coffee drinkers in the office – and we’d share notes. He agreed with my thinking and with the ideas that began to come together in November and December of 2012. I was becoming more and more preoccupied with ways of increasing employee satisfaction. Communicating and finding ways to improve office morale is something that companies forget to do as they grow. They’re so focused on product, they forget that quality of product and their bottom line will improve if their employees’ happiness increases.
Timing is crucial in the process of finding a co-founder, and as it happened my friend’s company was in the process of shutting down. They had had a solid two year run, but they weren’t able pull it off. Over a steak dinner at Quality Meats in New York City, we set out our goals and agreed to work together on the new Uncover. Since we had been “dating” over ~50 coffee breaks during the previous three months leading up, we knew that our thinking on product, team and sales was in alignment.
The two of us took the rest of November and December to brainstorm and figure out just exactly how we wanted to approach building Uncover. We prototyped a few things, did a lot of customer development and used the feedback we received to help shape what we wanted to build. In mid-January, we knew exactly what we wanted to do and began building it. What you see today at Uncover is the first half of the picture. The second half is coming out soon. We chose to split up our vision into two pieces to ensue that we were building something that people loved and would pay for. We’re excited to launch our full vision (hopefully) before the end of the year.
What I’ve learned having had five different co-founders over ten years across three startups is that being on the same page is the most important part of teamwork. It’s okay to have heated discussions and disagreements about product, team, sales and so on, but if you adamantly disagree about the business as a whole, then you’re going to have problems. That’s why it’s so important at the outset and then as you go along to work through all the difficult questions about what each of you wants to do with the business over its lifetime. You can’t wait until you’re months into your relationship to see whether you’re in fundamental agreement. I’m betting my company on the fact that open communication and employee happiness is vital to your company’s success, but you’ll never have a chance to get there if you’re not first in sync with your co-founder(s) about your goals.
The post How I Met My Co-Founders & What I Look For appeared first on Treehouse Blog.
]]>The increasing volume of geo-located tweets is revealing how international travel patterns vary in time across countries and cultures, say computer scientists.
Zain Abidin Mohammed Husain Abu Zubaydah, one of the highest-value detainees in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was building a network to wage a war that would "bring America to its knees" before he was captured in 2002, his personal diaries show. In the document, Abu Zubaydah recounts the chaotic aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on the United States and the toppling of Afghanistan’s Taliban regime, which provided shelter for men like him and Osama bin Laden.
After describing how he helped fellow fighters flee from Afghanistan to Pakistan, Abu Zubaydah writes of forming a network of trainers capable of teaching skills like bomb making in a new organization with ambitious plans to attack Israel. He notes that he returned to Afghanistan with $50,000 "to participate in any jihadist operation against the Jews" that he intended to carry out in Iran or Pakistan.
"I took them with me, from the flood, one or two individuals from each military science, just like Noah … two pairs from each … An instructor or two from each military subject, they are the nucleus of my future work, and I am starting from zero … I am preparing a safe location for us, so that we can start," he writes.
That failed plot is just one of the revelations to emerge from the diaries, a government translation of which has been obtained exclusively by Al Jazeera America from a former U.S. government intelligence official who worked with the CIA and FBI on Al-Qaeda’s rise to power. Despite being coveted by security analysts and journalists because of their participant-observer’s account of the decade before the 2001 attacks that claimed almost 3,000 lives, the diaries have never been officially released. They have been repeatedly cited by U.S. officials as key evidence for holding Abu Zubaydah and dozens of other Guantanamo prisoners.
Abu Zubaydah, a high-profile figure among Arab volunteers who had gone to Afghanistan to enlist for jihad a decade earlier, was captured in Pakistan in 2002. The U.S. government says the man who wrote the six volumes of diaries was a senior member of bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda. He is mentioned 52 times in the 9/11 Commission Report. The U.S. says Abu Zubaydah, whose diaries were captured alongside him, fingered Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks. President George W. Bush once characterized Abu Zubaydah as a "top operative planning death and destruction."
Abu Zubaydah's relationship with bin Laden is far from clear or simple. In his diary he writes of how the Taliban closed his camp in order to consolidate all the jihadist volunteers in Afghanistan under bin Laden — something that was clearly a blow to Abu Zubaydah’s ambitions. In an entry in 2000 he writes, “They closed our military camp … It’s different when you’re the one calling the shots than being a wheel that’s moving mechanically with other wheels as part of a specific machine.”
Elsewhere he writes of his frustrations over being lumped with bin Laden. In an entry on Feb. 4, 2002, he complains, "For five years (the media) has been attempting to connect me to anything, and the matter is growing bigger, until they lately said that I am the heir of bin Laden for the leadership of the Al-Qaeda organization. I hope they know that I am not even a member of Al-Qaeda, so how can I become their leader?”
The diaries show how Abu Zubaydah and his fellow fighters felt about the 9/11 attacks. “Happiness was not enough,” he writes. “As soon as the news came out on the radio, lambs were slaughtered, and juice and sweets were distributed for several days. News on the radio reflected American threats and preparation (for retaliation), close to a world war, while we were in a state of elation that God only knows.” That directly contradicts his March 2007 hearing at Guantanamo, which was called to determine his status as an enemy combatant. At that time, he claimed to have condemned the 9/11 attacks in his diary.
The volumes contain much extremist language and fantasies of violence, as well as many mundane details of Abu Zubaydah’s life and intimate reflections on his family and his emotions. In the document, he writes to “Hani 2,” an invented older, wiser version of himself. He uses that device frequently to complain about the hardships of his life’s path, his strong longing for his family and even his struggles to suppress his sexual desires. But he also admits — to the future version of himself — that he is self-censoring.
“My secret is well kept,” he writes in October 1998. “I cannot even divulge to you, for it is very wrong that in my situation, I should have a diary.”
    
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Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years, you’ve seen the smartphone and tablet explosion happening around us. This isn’t set to slow anytime soon and designers are now finding themselves with more and more projects that need to be built for multiple screen sizes.
This is because tablets are gaining ground on traditional PCs, the latter of which are seeing the worst decline in sales in their history. Add to this the amount of internet traffic which smartphones now account for, and it’s clear that design is evolving.
Tablets and mobile currently account for 15% of the world’s internet traffic and this has been projected to rise to 50% in four to six years’ time. As the below chart from Adobe shows, this has been a steady and consistent rise that shows no sign of stopping.
Source: Adobe
Bearing this in mind, designers and internet marketers can no longer afford to ignore smartphones and tablets and all new projects should be carried out with these devices in mind.
When it comes to mobile, you’re limited for space. That means that it’s necessary to pay keen attention to how that space is used. With that in mind, let’s first have a look at responsive design and scalability.
Some designers think that it’s best to use adaptive and responsive design in order to cover all eventualities, but this is open to debate. The difference between them is very little, but adaptive uses multiple fixed width layouts, whilst responsive uses multiple fluid grid layouts.
However, responsive checks the target device first to see what size screen it needs to display, whilst adaptive doesn’t. It’s important to have this scaling in any case, as there’s nothing worse for a user than having to pinch, zoom and scroll around a site to navigate.
You can use resources for this, such as unsemantic’s CSS framework, which allows you to work with percentages, rather than columns and Screenfly, which allows you to build wireframes directly in a browser. The latter is also a very useful tool for testing different screen sizes and building site maps.
So let’s get down to the nitty gritty of the landing pages. What is required of a landing page in general?
These are the essential elements to begin with, starting with your call to action (CTA). This should be clearly visible as soon as the visitor lands on the page, which incidentally shouldn’t take forever. This could be anything from a button and form for downloadable content, to a special offer and should be towards the top of the page for best results.
However, take care not to use too many fields when it comes to forms, as soft keyboards make these more difficult to fill in. Less is very much more in this case, if you want landing pages to equal conversions.
Likewise, buttons should be finger friendly and you should use your own fingers as a template to work out the optimal sizes. Apple’s developer guidelines state that tappable UI elements should be at least 44 x 44 points, but in practice, this is still pretty small.
Sketch out a design first, using your finger template for different device sizes to see what kind of room you have to play with. You can use carousels and accordions for this and it’s important to use the space that the eye is drawn to as natural places for touch. For creating touchable areas, you can find open source JavaScript modules online in plentiful supply, with Mobify being a great example.
You may want to consider using this if you have a lot of content and don’t want to clutter up the screen (recommended). Progressive disclosure basically allows a certain amount of content to be displayed, with the suggestion that there’s more information underneath when clicked.
Source: Campaign Monitor
However, it’s worth bearing in mind that the cleaner the landing page, the better the result will be, so you may want to save this for pages deeper in the navigation tree.
These should be kept to a maximum of three to four words in a clear font, preferably making use of the keywords that you want to optimise the page for. It’s also advisable to bullet point any further text and ensure that it’s large enough, which should mean that you can read the text with the device held at arm’s length.
As far as other content goes, stick with a maximum of one image, optimised for speed and keywords/alt tags, as well as little in the way of links as you can get away with. A great CTA for mobile is also to include a ‘dial’ button so that visitors can immediately call your business.
According to recent Google research, the Mobile Movement Study, 61% of smartphone users will call a business after performing a local search on their device, so the dial button is well worth it.
This is especially useful for local businesses and should be used alongside Google Maps and/or location services.
With regard to mobile sites, it’s essential that they are quick to load, as visitors don’t like to be kept waiting when using their phone. This means it’s important to consider HHTP requests and how many the page will make.
For mobile, it’s necessary that the site is somewhere around the 20 kilobytes mark and when using responsive design, this is something that will need tweaking. This is because responsive sites that are not optimised for performance tend to deliver the full desktop page to every device, even if a lot of the content isn’t displayed.
As mentioned, you should avoid the use of images and if you have to have them, then make sure that your code is tidy and use image sprites, or CSS instead of images altogether, if possible.
Make sure your buttons can pass the thumb test (can visitors comfortably use the thumbs to navigate?) and keep the number of clicks that a visitor has to make to find their way around to a minimum.
As far as accessibility goes, it’s also a good idea to make sure that you stick to content that can be displayed on all devices. Flash should be avoided as it’s not supported by Apple devices and isn’t great for SEO in any case. Use HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript/jQuery technologies for the best results.
The best way to approach mobile landing page design is very much with the user and ease of buying experience in mind. Don’t make your visitors pinch and zoom, this makes them leave. Do think about single column design and maximize on the current trend for minimalist design for the best results.
The post A Simple Guide to Mobile Landing Page Optimization appeared first on Treehouse Blog.
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