Monthly Archives: October 2013

Headlines matter (except this one, it sucks)

economic-headlines

Article headline matters. Not just for the obvious reasons – getting attention, shock the reader etc. – but also from search engine ranking point of view. Creating catching headlines has been the art of newspaper editors since day one, but the change from offline to online has put even more pressure on creating article headlines. In some ways it has gotten more difficult. Not only does it have to convert the reader, but it also has to help the article to rise as high as possible for wanted keywords in search rankings (of course there are other factors that effect this too).

Social media has adds some extra spices to the soup as well. A good headline gets a lot more attraction for an article and can gain a lot of shares, retweets etc. (the content obviously plays a role as well…), which can be a major traffic driver. And speaking of social media, now that we have tackled the reader and search engines, twitter adds another challenge: 160 character limit. In case the original header is longer, might be wise to think of a shortened version for twitter as well.

I started to learn the importance of an article headline, when I first started working on SEO back in Agoda days, but it was only when I started writing, I realized how difficult it actually was to create a good headline.

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What Are Crowdfunding Websites and How to Find Yours?

crowdfunding

Crowdfunding seems to have become more and more popular medium to source funding, as the number of such websites and funding niches grow. It all got started in it’s current form when kickstarter launched in 2009 to help artists, inventors and alike to make their ideas and products happen through small amounts of money gathered from individuals interested in the project. Since then Kickstarter has grown to be a very popular place to source funding: until today they have successfully gathered funding for over 50,000 projects worth total nearly $850M dollars[1]. Quite impressive, huh?

How do crowdfunding websites really work?

The basic concept is quite simple: a crowd of people all chip in their chosen amount to collectively gather the targeted sum of money defined by the project creator. Some sites require the project to reach target in order to the project to be funded. If not, the money is not taken from the pledgers’ accounts. The time to raise that money is usually limited.

There are various models what the investors get in return for their investment. In some cases it can be the actual product that the project is set to produce. It can also be equity of the company.

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Inside 3D Printing Singapore Event

Inside 3D Printing Singapore took place last week in Marina Bay Sands Hotel Conference facilities. Inside 3D Printing is a global 3D printing event series organized by US-based MediaBistro. The inaugural event was held in New York April this year and we were excited to attend it.

Marina Bay Sands

Obviously being a media partner for the events, we have been following every one of them closely, but we were really looking forward to this one. Partly as it was the first trade show for 3D printing in this region, but also because Ari Honka, my business partner from 3D Printing Industry, Ian Gibson from National University of Singapore and myself put the speaker program together for the conference and co-chaired the event.

The conference ran in two tracks, one larger room where the keynotes were also held. I was MC’ing track 2 in the smaller room, while Ari and Ian took care of the track 1. It was pleasing to see that everything we had planned program wise worked fantastically, all the speakers were on time, none of them failed to show up, and they delivered exactly what we hoped.

My personal highlight of the show was to see Phil Reeves from UK-based Econolyst lay out his incredibly high level of knowledge on 3D printing and this time focusing on medical and healthcare sector.

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Myanmar Trip

Myanmar Development week

I visited Myanmar recently. The main purpose was to meet some local business people but also to attend few presentation sessions at the Myanmar Development week held in Yangon and mainly organized by UN ESCAP and UMFCCI. My last trip to Myanmar was in 2005 and many things had naturally changed quite a bit since.

The Airport was functioning smoothly and I got through the immigration with no issues. Although I heard that one of the speakers at the development week had had some problems due to visa issues. A word of advice here, the tourist visa is easiest to apply, if you are visiting for a short time. (Also as a bonus you get much nicer treatment in the embassy than business visa applicants.)

We stayed at PARKROYAL Hotel Yangon, which exceeded my expectations. It was like a decent 4-5 star hotel in any Asian city. Everything worked perfectly. We booked a private city tour, which was really good. Of course we had to ask the tour guide to skip the pagodas and tourist attractions and to show us real Yangon life. Was really nice to have our own Wikipedia on Yangon for couple hours. Poor guy probably expected to do his usual routine tour.

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