David Crow

Design

NYC vs SF – Startup Costs

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The team at Focus.com has provided a fun infographic about the operating costs for a startup in New York versus San Francisco.

Toronto for Comparison

  • Coporate Income Tax Rate – Small Business 15.5%
    • Canada – 11%
    • Ontario – 4.5%
  • Salaries for Employees
    • Software Engineer – $75,000
    • Executive Assistant – $35,000
    • Graphic Designer – $50,000
    • Project Manager – $75,000
    • Web Developer – $55,000
  • Personal Income Tax – 31.15% (assumes range from $40k-$81k)
    • Federal – 22%
    • Ontario – 9.15%
  • Cost of Office Space – $1.67/square foot/month ($2o/square foot/year) (using general listing for A grade space from OfficeZilla)
  • Cost of Utilities/Taxes/etc – $12/square foot/year ($1/square foot/month)
All in all we’re not too bad.

Startup Costs - NYC vs SF

SMASH Summit in NYC

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SMASH Summit East 2011Dave McClure and the 500 Startups folks are producing a great looking conference focused on “hack-tics” of customer acquistion. They ran a similar event in April 2010 in SF. – check out tthe presentations on SlideShare and the feedback. At the event speakers provided examples based on real usage and data. David Cowling provided a list of the social media statistics by different speakers (stats current as of May 2010 — so you hope they are crazier 14 months later), they reinforce the power of mass media platform and while fragmented the web/mobile is a great way to reach people (customers, prospects, leads, fans, haters, almost everyone).

  • Twitter has 105,779,710 users. 300K new users per day. 600 million search queries per day. 175 employees.
  • Salesforce thinks that their Youtube channel has the ROI equivalent of 35 super efficient sales reps
  • Facebook says sites that have added Like button have seen triple growth of fans
  • Stumbleupon 2010: 10 Million users, 115,000 Facebook fans, 600 Million stumbles/month, 1 Billion ratings, 45 Million URLs, 50,000 discovers/day
  • Top 5 countries after the US for Facebook usage/traffic: UK, Indonesia, Canada, France, Turkey
  • 70% of Facebook traffic comes from outside the US, 10% increase in the last year alone
  • 37% of tweets originate from mobile devices
  • Most of YouTube’s views are from videos older than 6 months old, invest in a content strategy.

I am hoping that Michael McDerment might apply to tell the FreshBooks metric story at the SMASH Summit. He first gave this talk at DemoCamp back in 2007 but he continues to evolve it based on the FreshBooks business. It’s one of my favs. And given the updated focus on both acquisition and retention it makes it a perfect opportunity for FreshBooks.

SMASH Summit will feature presentations and case studies on strategies, tactics, and “hack-tics” used in successful internet campaigns across multiple platforms—from search to social to mobile. Led by both tech geeks and savvy marketers, you will walk way with new tips and tricks for pumping up your customer acquisition and retention. In 2010, SMASH Summit debuted to a sold-out audience including speakers and attendees from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Apple, Google, Virgin America, National Geographic, Mint, Twilio, Sony, Slideshare, and many others.

I am hoping to attend because I want to see some of the approaches used to acquire customers for $0 dollars. Why? I spent part of Monday, in my role as EiR at VeloCity, asking students and entrepreneurs how they could get to 10,000 (or 100,000 or 1,000,000) users in 30 days with a $0 budget. I’m curious to see both the tactics and the tools that other high traction startups are using to attract and retain customers. Apparently I’ve been spending time understanding marketing and sales automation (again).

Great list of speakers including the infamous Dave McClure (@davemclure), Charlie O’Donnell (@CEONYC), Victoria Ransom (@wildfireapp) and others.

The Science of Word of Mouth

Windows Phone 7 Design Resources

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MS Holm Daylight app from Clarity Consulting
MS Holm Daylight app from Clarity Consulting

I updated my Open Source Icons post earlier to include updated list of icons. The interesting part was this brought up some great mobile design and development resources. With the list of available mobile icons being just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Speckboy provides an unprecedented list of resources for mobile developers and designers it includes: Android, iPhone & iPad, mobile web & app testing, .PSDs of different phones, and other mobile platforms.

Tools

Training Materials

UX Guidelines & Tools

WP7 CS4 Design Template
WP7 Design Template for Clarity Consulting

Panorama Navigation

Panorama Navigation on Windows Phone 7

Icons

Firefox 4 Design Challenge – The Home Tab

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Mozilla Labs has announced their Winter 2009 Design Challenge. It is focused on improving the starting experience for the “Home tab” for Firefox users.

In the upcoming releases of Firefox, we’ll move the Home button to be a “Home tab” instead. We will keep the existing functionality where you can display a web page of your choice — or disable it altogether — but since we’re moving this page to live in Firefox instead of on the web, there are some interesting opportunities.

This page will have access to a lot more of the user’s information since it never leaves the browser — history, add-ons, bookmarks, and pretty much anything you can see in Firefox at the moment. This opens up a lot of possibilities, and we’d like to see what you can do with this new-found superpower.

I’m thinking this might be a fun design challenge to create a prototype and submit. The challenge has an explicit non-goal that is not to build a clone of My Yahoo/iGoogle/Netvibes, but to look at building something new. Something beyond the thumbnail/speed-dial interfaces we’ve seen in Opera, Safari and Chrome.

An explicit non-goal of this challenge is to design something like My Yahoo, iGoogle or similar start pages that let you put widgets/gadgets. This is not because we don’t think this use case is valuable, but we’re much more interested in what a browser start page can do with full access to the browser. An interesting example is something like the about:me extension, which shows you trends in your browsing habits. Unlike mainstream portals like Yahoo and MSN, the locally hosted Firefox home tab can potentially offer users an experience that is innately personal, and tailored to each user’s incredibly unique personalities and interests.

Around the web

I’m Looking for Design Intern

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I’m looking for a young web designer. This is for paid contract work. The position will be to help design and implement the front-ends for a number of web properties including DavidCrow.ca, DemoCamp.com, FoundersandFunders.org, StartupNorth.ca, StartupIndex.ca, StartupIndex.ca, etc. Basically, the majority of the work is visual design and front-end web implementation. The goal is to to help design and build visual presence and update the front-end implementation of these sites. (Yes, I’ve started to look at HayStack and 99designs.com and other sites).

  • The designer needs to have an online portfolio. The portfolio should include examples of both web and mobile-optimized design.
  • Experience creating, maintaining and deploying WordPress/Drupal/Moveable Type/etc. themes.
  • Experience with web standards compliant HTML, xhtml, css, and Javascript implementation (preferably Prototype or JQuery).
  • Experience with skinning/theming hosted online applications, e.g., EventBrite, GuestListApp, MindTouch, etc.
  • Experience implementing front-end code in MVC frameworks, e.g., Django, Rails, ASP.NET MVC, CakePHP, etc.

My preference would be to find a student or recent graduate. I’d like to help find the next Scott Boms, Ryan Feeley, Matt Brett, Dave Shea, Daniel Burka (yep, they’re all Canadian).

So if you’re a young Canadian designer, that is looking for some contract work, fill out the form below.

[gravityform id=2 name=GreatestDesign Intern in the World]