The Oleboo blog

Our favorite user reaches new record! 2000 MVP titles!

Emily Epstein, one of the early adopters of Oleboo, and the most loyal user a product can dream to serve, is going to earn her 2,000th MVP. That's quite amazing! Congratulations Emily! Anyone wants to challenge her? :) 

What's up at Oleboo?

Since we launched Oleboo in June last year, we had some great times. We met some fantastic people, users and partners, who helped us get where we are today. We have more than 20K downloads, and several hundreds active users. We’re proud of what we’ve achieved, especially since we’ve done it with 0 investment. Now we’re at a crossroads. Raise money to go big at it, or keep it as a personal project and develop it slowly but surely. 

We decided not to raise money, but keep developing it on the side. Why did we make such a decision, when investment money seems cheap and accessible? 

Well, first of all, we still think there is too much risk raising money with Oleboo. The business model hasn’t been proven yet, and we feel that we have more chances to succeed if we stay the only investors and owners, and don’t have to provide any type of return to anyone else but us. 

Second, we want to see more growth before pitching Oleboo. We have tons of features we want to build that will help grow Oleboo. We’ll take our time to make sure those are done and well done, to make Oleboo the best second screen experience possible. 

Third, we’ve been working on another project on the side, Whitetruffle, which is seeing some very good traction. We decided to spend more cycles on Whitetruffle for the time being since it will help us continue support Oleboo in the long term.

What does it mean for Oleboo? It’s all good news actually. The service will stay up and running, and we will continue to improve it.  We’ll always be there for our users and do all we can to build the best experience for them. We will just not pursue any distribution partnerships in the short term and solely rely on word of mouth to grow. So tell your friends to use Oleboo! 

Ole!

 

Why 22% of users doing 90% of tweets is a good thing

via www.readwriteweb.com

Readwriteweb just published this info: 22.5% users post 90% of tweets. It just confirms that, like most consumer product, the 80/20 rule applies for Twitter as well.

Now, what's really interesting is the growth of people follow more than 100 friends. It went from 7% on 2009 to 21% in 2010. That's a huge achievement. Those folks are much less likely to churn.

It's easy to think that those are probably also the same who contribute tweets. But let's be crazy. What if not?

What if Twitter is becoming a reading tool where you pick your topic(s) and just watch? This is just a personal opinion and an intuition, but I feel more and more people are just reading Twitter vs contributing to it.

We may start to see two very distinct categories of twitter users: the publishers, and the readers, while in the early days, everyone was contributing.

The interesting part for Twitter is to create an experience for those readers, making it easy for them to access relevant information and consume it.

The new Oleboo is now available in the app store!

Great news! The new Oleboo is now available in the app store. You can all download the new version and enjoy a total new companion experience while you're watching sports. 

The main improvement is really cool. It's called Twitter Noise: you can now follow what's being said on twitter about the game you're watching, answer the tweets or retweet them. We've tried to make this very easy. You can also share your shouts with twitter. And if you don't want to type anything to stay focus on the game, just boo or ole the team, and we'll share it with twitter, adding automatically the # tag of the team to allow you to get as much exposure as possible. 

Here are some other things we've introduced:

- Follow a team: when you follow a team, you'll receive alerts when they're about to play. 

- Notifications: receive alerts when your team is about play or someone comments on your shout. 

- Performance improvement: we've done several fixes that should enhance the overall experience and the speed of the app. 

- Invite: you can now invite your friends directly from the app, by email or text message. 

- Design: we've made some tiny tweaks to make the app look better in general!

You can download it here, and don't forget tell us what you think! Don't forget to rate and review the app in the app store! 

When victory lap celebrations go horribly wrong

via sports.yahoo.com

We probably shouldn't laugh, but that one is funny.

If the Twitter community was 100 people

via www.kelblog.com

Pierre Chappaz (French entrepreneur who sold Kelkoo to Yahoo!) reposted this drawing Gizmodo put on their site earlier.

What's interesting, as Pierre highlights, is all the grey people. The 80-20 rule applies to most consumer products. 20% of your audience drives 80% of your traffic. It's not surprising that 5% of Twitter users generate most of the tweets, nor that 5% of Twitter users have more than 100 followers. Also, the little green ones show the potential of Twitter. Those are people who may use the product once a month or so, and therefore can be activated and turn into more engaged users.

That being said, I believe this is where Facebook is very powerful. Even though I don't have the number, I could easily imagine that the percentage of users on Facebook who contribute often is much larger than 20%.

What if FIFA uses the serie of 5 format?

After the Baseball World Series, we're also now in the middle of the MLS playoffs. I got to watch San Jose beat New York 1-3 and qualify for the final of its conference against Colorado. 

The format the MLS has chosen for its playoffs is a similar format than most football competitions. It's basically 2 games, one at home and one away, with the team scoring the most goals qualifying. In case of a tie, they go in extra time and then penalty kicks. 

I'm used to this format, and quite like it to be honest. I think it provides enough time so the best team should win, but at the same time, offers opportunities to the underdog to make something happen. 

Now, I was debating whether football shouldn't use a longer serie format for a final. For ex, best of 5 or even best of 7. In other words, the first team who win 3 or 4 games is declared the winner. 

At first, I'm sure all the folks who've been watching football for a long time will say this is totally absurd. I'd tend to agree with them. After all, the beauty of football is that the underdog can always win and such series tend to favor the best team. So in spirit, it's easy to just ditch the idea. 

Now, let's look at the previous FIFA World Cup. What if the quarter-final and semi-final would be played with a serie of 5, and the final with a serie of 7? 

1. We would get a much longer competition with more of the top games. Who would complain if we get to see Brazil & Spain 5 times more? It's harder to organize, but would generate a better show for fans, and more revenues for the federations and the host country. 
2. You're guaranteed to see the 2 best teams of the world in the final. With direct elimination, while the emotions can fly high, a team who doesn't play well can go through (one could argue that this is what happened with Netherlands).  It's not the case with a serie of 5. 

So it's not totally silly. Not saying that it must be done, nor that I won't miss the emotions that direct elimination can create, but I'd be curious to see what this could do if implemented. 

Should the winner of the World Series be called "World Champions"

A lot of my europeans friends are making fun of the fact that the Giants are now called "World Champions" after their win yesterday night against the Rangers in game 5 of the World Series. It's actually a huge discussion on Facebook and other forums. 

I have to say that the first I heard that, I was also amused. Back in Europe, World Champions are usually countries, and international competitions usually involves countries, not teams. And of course, we love to joke that the US think they're the center of the world. 

But I would say that there is actually a very good argument to be made to justify why the Giants should be called World Champions. 

First of all, teams can be world champions, it actually happens in football (soccer) as well. So let's get this one out of the way. 

Second, the MLB actually includes two countries not one. Canada and the US. 

Third, the MLB is the best baseball league in the World, where all best players from all over the world play. If you're good, you play in the MLB. If you look at the Giants yesterday, some of its players come from Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, etc... The best players want to play here. There is no other stage comparable in the world of Baseball. Japan has its own league, and also has some protections to keep its best players, but even that is not enough (there are currently 14 active Japanese players in the MLB). That's what's very different from many other sports. In football (soccer), best players play in the UK, in Spain, in Germany, in Brazil, in Argentina, etc... They don't play in the same league, so you need to create an event to make that happen (which is the awesome FIFA World Cup). 

So if you have the best league, where all the best players from all over the world compete (and is recognized as such by all), then I think you should be entitled to call its winner World Champions. The same way the winner of the UEFA Champions League is called European Champions. 

Well done Giants, you're great World Champions! 

The Pirate analogy

Michael Arrington posted a great article on Techcrunch today. 

I barely consider myself an entrepreneur, since I've started my own company early this year, and I don't have the experience that so many folks have in Silicon Valley. That being said, I really agree with his Pirate analogy (basically, Pirates had more chances of dying than becoming rich and yet, they still decide to go for it). 

In my opinion, becoming an entrepreneur is an emotional decision. It is not rational. You have to be absolutely crazy to decide to start your own thing. Let me list here all the reasons why it doesn't make any sense at all:

• your chances to succeed, as good as you are, are barely above 0.5%.
• you're going to spend money and not save money. And you can triple what you think you're actually going to spend.
• every hour, you're going to realize why you're doomed for failure.
• you're going to compete with folks who have (much) more money, and a better network than you.
• your network of people that you thought would help you is actually 5 times smaller than you thought. 
• it's going to take you much longer than you thought to get the product right (i'm still in that process).
• hiring people for no cash is hard and things will go slower than you want. 
• users will show you every day why your product is not right.
• your family is the first one to suffer from your decision.  

See, it doesn't make sense at all. Why would someone do this, when they could work in a good company, save money, build their future and the future of their family? 

The answer is simple: the journey. An ex boss of mine told me one day:

"it's not the tasks you've accomplished in your work that matters, it's who you meet, what you learn and whether or not you became a better person". 

I believe entrepreneurs care more about the intensity of the adventure, than the comfort of their daily lives. It doesn't matter whether or not we succeed (even though we all kill ourselves to win). The thrill of starting something from scratch, taking each hour as it comes and making sure we're closer from being the next google right now than we were 30 minutes ago. Every little success becomes a tremendous gratification, and every mistake is yet another obstacle to overcome. 

The mental game is what's really different. We take all those hits (I'd say several every hour), and we have to keep going. There is no turning off our computer and going back home for a break and somehow things will be better tomorrow. It's like golf: we hit a bad shot, we can't go down. We have to think how we can get out of it and focus on our next shot. 

That journey makes us so much richer. Of coure, it's no material wealth. But I can tell you that the bonds we create with the people (friends) who are working (helping) with us (most of the time for free!) on our product are much stronger than any other relationships we would tie in a big company with our co-workers. The thrill of the first user hitting our product are going to be way much more rewarding than hitting our quarterly target. That feeling that we're on to something, while a few minutes ago we thought we were doomed... 

Yes, we're crazy. And I don't think everybody can (nor should, nothing wrong with it) accept the deal terms of being an entrepreneur. But it's such an amazing adventure. I have no idea where I will be in 2 years, nor guarantee that the work we're doing on Oleboo will pay off (fingers crossed!), but one thing is for sure:  I will be a better person. 

The NBA is on Oleboo

Today is the start of the new NBA season, and fans can cheer for their team on Oleboo during every game.

Don't let your team be boo'd more than the other team. Bring your friends, ask them to help you become the MVP, and join the fun!