sebastian troen

I’m about to start a summer internship position with Coast Capital Savings on Monday as an e-business strategist. Ostensibly my role is to focus on developing a mobile strategy, however I’m sure my role will include getting involved in various areas of Coast’s e-business operations.

As it turns out I wrote a business plan based for my Technology Entrepreneurhsip class on the concept of enabling credit and debit card payment using smart phones. I worked with a great team on this project (hey George, Alan and Ali!) so I was able to dive into all the challenges that involve working with the existing financial infrastructure. Suffice it to say it’s a complicated, complicated space.

But one filled with opportunity for improvement! Read the rest of this entry »

I recently signed up to Groupon. If you haven’t heard about it, you really should check it out. It’s free to sign up and then they send you a daily offer. The offers all appear to be 50% or more, for local restaurants, bars, services and things like that.

Groupon’s the big name in the space, having recently raised $135 million to fund its expansion into Europe (it just announced that it bought CityDeal in Europe expanding its reach to 20 countries). The other big kid on the block is LivingSocial which is trying to challenge Groupon in this billion dollar market. Yes, billion dollar market!

Since Groupon has launched in Vancouver while LivingSocial hasn’t, I’ll focus primarily on my experiences with Groupon, but assuming that their offering is fairly similar, it’s probably worthwhile to look into using both services to market your products.

Read the rest of this entry »

Dear Fellow MBA’ers,

After spending 8 months with you kicking butt and taking names, I feel like I have to point out a few things about how you use email. Why? Because although we’ve learned a ton about how to calculate net present values and when using archetypes in marketing can be effective, we’ve never been given a simple lesson in how to use email effectively (and I can’t in good conscience let you leave the program without at least trying to edumacate you about a few things):

1. Only use Reply All when you want everyone to actually receive your message. On a mailing list of 125 people, I guarantee you that not everyone needs to see your message about finding a project partner or your super witty reply intended for the initial sender. No, really… we don’t!

2. Use spell check before hitting “Send”. Even better, most email clients allow you to turn it on to check as you type. Most people are somewhat forgiving about grammar, especially with non-native speakers, but in today’s world there’s no excuse for not spell checking your emails.

3. Change your email settings so your email shows your full name. When glancing at my inbox, the goal is to know who the message is from based only on the “From” field. If I have to open the message, or worse yet read the entire message, to know who it’s from then there’s a problem.

4. Subject lines are meant to be clear indicators of what the message is about and why I should read it. Be very clear and don’t be afraid to use a longer subject line. We all have widescreen monitors these days, odds are that you’ll run out of words to put in your subject line before my screen runs out of real estate. Bonus: you can set up smart filters based on subject line keywords.

5. When replying to an email make sure the original message is quoted below so it’s clear what you are replying to. Email is supposed to facilitate communication but if I have to dig around in my sent box to see what you are replying to then there’s a problem.

Why am I writing this post? Because email is the primary communication tool that we’ll be using out there in the “real world” and none of us like having our inbox filled with useless messages. In addition, poor use of email reflects poorly on you and you didn’t rock this MBA program just to undermine yourself with poor emailing.

(Note: I’m not implying that I haven’t made these mistakes myself, but I do try to follow these best practices as much as possible.)

Thanks to Seth Godin for his thoughts on the subject.

What email practices do you dislike or would like to see improved?

A good friend of mine recently launched a free eBook entitled “The Entrepreneur’s Social Media Workout eBook”. It’s a short, informative read packed with simple steps to getting your small business “social media fit”.

As a so-called social media “expert”, I confess that even I found useful tips that were new to me… and many valuable tips that I knew I should be doing!

If you’re an entrepreneur (or even intrapreneur), check out this eBook to learn the following:

• What is social media?
• How to use Facebook to promote your business (for FREE)!
• How Twitter can let you engage with potential customers (and potential partners).
• Ways to controlling email effectively (instead of letting it control you)!
• Tips on using email newsletters to grow your business.
• Using LinkedIn to expand your business connections and leverage the experience of its network to answer your pressing business questions.
• How to simply use video to generate fresh, dynamic content.
• How to create quick and painless websites for your business.

Best of all, this eBook is FREE (a great price all entrepreneurs) so there’s no reason not to check it out. It took me about 10-15 minutes to read, though there’s enough content in there to keep you busy doing the exercises for weeks or even months. Full disclosure: Natalie is a friend and I’m a big fan of hers (however, I’m not endorsing it just because of that).

Have you downloaded her book? What do you think of it? Do you see it helping your grow your business?

With all the recent success of LBS (Location Based Services) companies, like Foursquare, 2010 is quickly turning into the year of ‘the check-in’. That’s the term used for the voluntary location broadcast by users on these services. So if I’m sitting in a coffee shop and want to let my network know (or part of it), I check in at that coffee shop and voila, now my location is broadcast in the feeds of those that are subscribed to me.

Very cool!

Except there isn’t one LBS that does this. Like mushrooms after a rainstorm, they’re popping up everywhere: Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, and now even Twitter and Facebook are getting in on the game. With the exception of the last one, none of them have the network reach to be an all-encompassing solution. By which, I mean, if I use Foursquare but some of my friends use Gowalla, the system doesn’t work. And even in the case of Facebook where it’s likely that 98% of my contacts are registered (except for those two friends of mine that still believe modern society died with the advent of the push-button telephone), there’s the issue of me broadcasting my location to the wrong people. Ooops, didn’t want my coworkers knowing that I’m on a sunny patio drinking a beer on my ’sick’ day.

Coming out of SXSW this year, numerous people commented on ‘check-in’ fatigue: trying to keep all your networks abreast of your location was too damn tiring! And there’s at least one company, Check.in, working on a universal…ummm, check-inner.

But the thought of trying to organize my network of friends, business contacts, Twitter contacts and random hangers-on into groups that I feel comfortable broadcasting my location to, well it gives me a headache.

Instead, why not take a page from Caterina Fake’s newest venture, Hunch.com, and develop an algorithm that learns, based on your location, time of day, day of week, and relationship to contact, whether or not to automatically broadcast my location using whichever service I’m plugged into. That’s a scary word, isn’t it? Automatically! The idea of automatically sharing our location has been a barrier to LBS growth for more than a decade. The security implications are enormous.

But what I’m envisioning is an engine that learns, based on your behaviour and the aggregate behaviour of others (a la Hunch: if most single 34 year old males tend not to broadcast their location on Friday nights to their mom and coworkers, we can probably assume that’s a given – unless it’s manually overridden by that single male 34 year old at that specific location). What my system would have is a simple learning mechanism that would learn from you whether or not it should broadcast your location to certain people.

So you enter a restaurant and the system politely asks you if you’d like to share you location at all. If you say no or don’t respond, no location will be shared. If you say yes, it’ll ask you through a set of simple steps whether those contacts that previously had access to your location can get it again, and then prompt you with a few other suggestions, based on who the algorithm thinks you might want to broadcast to. At any time you can of course manually share your location via the traditional check-in.

Through this learning process, the system will gradually learn your preferences to the point where it can automatically broadcast your location (with your permission, or by prompting you for approval) to previously approved contacts.

The benefits of this system versus the current manual check-in process are: less time spent on checking in, more people will try using location based services (particularly on Facebook) given this big hurdle is removed and potentially more people in your network receiving access to your location (most of us have connections that we forget to include in invitations or location broadcasts because we haven’t seen them in awhile and so they’re not top of mind, but you would love to see them if you had the chance).

So although I’m a huge fan of LBS and am really excited to see it grow throughout 2010, I can’t wait for someone to solve this tedious check-in problem using simple, smart technology.