As I have already mentioned in my previous post, this summer I worked in a start-up company. Moreover, I always wanted to become an entrepreneur watching all kind of shows like Sharks Tank or Dragons Den, come up with a great idea and start my own company…Hopefully, New Product Development and Creativity courses I am taking right now at UBC will help my dream come true :D. So this article seemed very interesting to me!

Basically, 15Five, a startup backed by the likes of 500 Startups and Yammer’s David Sacks that provides a platform to help the working world communicate better with its managers,lets them give feedback on a regular basis  that takes very little time to read, review, and respond. “For a CEO, it’s almost like being able to do one on ones with every employee in the company every week, and get all of the key highlights delivered with zero time and effort”. 15Five is $49 per month per business for the first 10 employees, and then $5 per employee per month, with different bulk-pricing options for larger teams. 

So what is so great about this tool? I worked in a small company where communication between employees was  rather fast. However, since not all of us were located in the same office, that made things complicated sometimes. That’s why I think that this kind of tool can improve communication in the company as well as deliver feedback much faster.

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Okay, I promised to write mostly about the publishing industry and probably this post is not related to it too much (even though I did find it on http://www.publishersweekly.com/ which is the main portal for the industry news), but I just had to mention it!:)

So there is this BigOven cooking app which, with an archive of more than 250,000 recipes available on almost any device has been downloaded 8 million times!!! Not bad for a cooking book in my opinion! So why is this cooking app interesting in terms of emarketing?

The app follows a Freemium model that we recently discussed during the class…Basically the app is for free. However, if you want an ad-free version or more functionality, such as e.g. nutritional information for each recipe, you have to pay 20$ per year.

The app has really cool functionalities! Just to mention a few of those… “Use Up Leftovers” section helps you pick three or more items from the fridge to see what can be made with whatever is on hand. Perfect for students, isn’t it?! Once a recipe is chosen, the ingredients and instructions are displayed . Ingredient lists populate a shopping list with one touch. The shopping list auto-sorts by grocery aisle, and places a checkbox next to each item so you can check off each as you shop. How awesome is that 😀

What’s also worth mentioning is there are many ways in which users can add and share their own content. There are three options. The first one is basic- you just  type in any recipe using a provided template. The second allows you to take a photo of a typed or hand-written recipe and upload it to BigOven which can be highly attractive to mums, young girls who love reading those hand-written recipes.The free version lets you do this thrice, while the paid version welcomes as many as you can snap (So the Freemium model feature once again). The third, and most “risky”option allows a person to navigate to any food website and import a recipe right from that page. Copyright infringement you say? Not really…When BigOven recognizes that a site is copyright protected, it still imports the recipe, but makes it available only to that user… I am not sure how they manage to do that, but seems to be working!

So dear everyone! If you don’t know what to cook for dinner tonight, go ahead and download this app! ( Probably I’m going to do the same)

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Hi everyone! My name is Veronika and, shamefully enough, this is the first time I am writing a blog. So, of course, this will require some patience from you! Give feedback and feel free to criticize me ( I hope it’s true what people say “Practice makes it perfect”).

To be honest, it was a bit hard to decide on the general topic of this blog…There is just too much you can write about! Plus (I have to make another confession) I am not really a social media pro (but striving to become one after this Emarketing course:D) so I wouldn’t want to bother you with my comments on all this high-tech stuff which I do not know much…for now…

So I really wanted to choose some topic which  I will be interested in and which, of course, will be related to social media, emarketing etc…And this is what i finally decided on : Publishing industry. The thing is…I did my summer internship at an online publishing company start-up where I learnt a lot about this amazingly interesting industry worldwide (In case anyone is interested, I worked here :http://www.mybestseller.co.uk/site/) I am still not a pro at it of course, but certainly I learnt a great deal in 2 months. What I also learnt is how important it is for the traditional publishing/book industry to adapt to new worldwide trends and take advantage of the technologies available.

So here you go! I will of course try stick to the publishing industry area news, however, something tells me this will be a bit of everything 🙂

Once again, leave comments and give feedback!:)

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