paterlinimatias.com

Today I want to present you Altodot | Social Marketing Technology, my latest, biggest, and most exiting start-up that I’ve been involved so far.

Altodot is a company which develops technology over social platforms. We understand people, we understand virality, and we definitely understand the technology that allows us to get your company successfully inside the social world by making a great mix of those elements. Social Apps is our core business (specially Facebook Apps), and we’re working on our own social marketing platform, integrated to all major social platforms (Facebook, Twitter, OpenSocial) so that we can add value to lots of companies who are trying to get on board.

Altodot officially started in August 2009 when we hired our first employees and a small office in Belgrano, Buenos Aires (always staying lean), a few weeks later we were legally a real company. (An update of our new offices is coming soon).

My fellows, partners and friends that are fighting hard next to me at Altodot are Claudio Cohen (the most dedicated, honest and geekest guy I ever met) and Anton Chalbaud, who left his position as CRO at Sonico.com to start over again with us, which demonstrates once again his true entrepreneur vision of business and life (the reason I admire him).

In only 5 months we went from success to success, having a stable and growing company today that continuously adds value to our clients, full of energy to keep learning and becoming more professional each day.

To learn more about Altodot, visit www.altodot.com or our blog at blog.altodot.com. By the way, if you’re a challenge seeker, check out jobs.altodot.com for opening positions.

You can also follow us on twitter at twitter.com/altodot and our company profile at CrunchBase.

I invite you to read our welcome post at our blog here. Below there’s an interview at Ideando.tv about Altodot, and you can download here a PDF version of another interview on a regional newspaper made by Fernando Quiroz (both in spanish).

Stay tunned!
Matias

paterlinimatias Entrepreneurship, Facebook, Social Media altodot, facebook apps, social apps

A few days ago we started getting a “The URL … did not respond.” error in some apps that we were developing. We thought it could be caused by a Server Issue and we didn’t pay too much attention, but yesterday it started happening all the time, and there was no way to find a “pattern” of why was this being caused.

So we spent a couple of hours with Altodot’s hosting partner Atha Kouroussis ( Co-Founder at Vurbia Technologies) analyzing what was really happening, if it was a server problem, buggy code, or Facebook issue, and finally we found a way to fix this eternal errors thrown by Facebook.

One of the things we found is that some of the apps we made using IFRAME to run inside facebook were running slowly, but Ok anyways. So we started focusing on why would a FBML application fail when an IFRAME app doesn’t fail.

To confirm the post made by “Inside Facebook Blog” announcing Facebook’s API latency issues, when we started debugging the application we saw that the execution of the FQL queries was taking different response times, between 0.5 and three seconds generally, but suddenly appeared requests taking more than ten or even twenty seconds to run (including some other requests throwing zero records when they were supposed to retrieve existing records). The interesting thing was that it had nothing to do with the query itself, or the amount of records it was requesting…

That only explained why it was taking so much time to run the IFRAME apps, but why FBML applications were failing like that?… We took a deep look at the time it was taking to run all the FQL queries and we found that if the whole php execution was taking less than 12 seconds the FBML application worked fine, but if the response times of each FQL query (plus the time spent on the execution of the script) was over 12 seconds it failed.

The interesting thing here was that even when facebook throws the “URL did not respond” error, the execution of the script did not throw any exception and the logs on the web server showed a perfect delivery, instead of stopping the request it always finished it’s execution! no matter how much time it was taking to Facebook’s API to answer those requests.

We have the diagnosis so far, and it’s basically that facebook response latency is taking too much time, specially more that 12 seconds that it’s the time Facebook is going to wait for the output of your script before it starts parsing your HMTL + FBML tags on it.

Even when it clearly wasn’t our fault, that’s not an explanation that would make our clients feel happy or safe (Specially when we’re a company specialized on Social Apps), so we started brainstorming a few hours to get some kind of workaround.

We realized that we needed to do a redirection to the same page if the execution of the script takes more than 10 seconds to run, but since our app was built on PHP, we couldn’t check It the time elapsed after each query was less than 12 seconds, because only one query could take even 20 seconds and Facebook would throw the error before we have a chance to redirect the page.

The list of the possible solutions (after trying everything we found on Facebook Dev Forums) was too stretch, there were only three ideas:

1. Pray for Facebook to take care of the latency issue (or extend,the output timeout),
2. Change all the code to make the application run inside an IFRAME replacing all the FBML tags & FBJS scripts (obviously this was the latest thing we would do)
3. Paralleling the calls to FQL servers.

Finally, the way that I solved the issue was simulating php threading by making calls through CURL to a processor file that takes care of making the FQL call to facebook, and while all the queries are being requested by multiple calls on curl on the main script we’re just looping and asking if those requests finished before 10 seconds. If that’s the case, we just let our script finish it’s execution, but if Facebook slowed at least one of the several FQL requests more than 10 seconds we just make a redirection to the same page passing all the parameters along with the redirect again. That way (and because Facebook usually didn’t  fail two times consecutive) it only takes 5 to15 seconds for the user to get the application content (not the 35 that could be on an IFRAME app if facebook takes 20 seconds to respond a query).

That said, let me share with you a working PHP sample script (commented) similar to what we’ve used to avoid facebook latency that you can download from here. Feel free to post any questions or comments about it.

Best,

Matias Paterlini

paterlinimatias Development, Facebook, Social Network, Uncategorized altodot, facebook apps, facebook platform, latency

As you probably know, Facebook announced two weeks ago a huge roadmap of what’s coming to the FB Platform in the next 6 months. It quickly became a disturbing news for all the Million Facebook Developers out there… (according to Facebook Statistics revealed in the last FB Garage in SF).

Not only the 350.000 applications delivered during the last two years won’t work in the next couple of months months, but also the developers of those apps now will have to learn how to replace the original app features to something else, using the new viral channels, new API implementations, new methods, parameters, variables, and so on…

Not even mention clients who now need to pay extra money for closed projects to keep them living, all of these within 6 months, but wait, only two weeks after the announcement there are things that are no longer working, such as feed templates registration.

That said, I think there’s (at some point) a Good Reason about why Facebook is doing this to all of us. There are a couple of interesting points that I see as a great result on the Platform Refactor that we’re living right now, and I want to share one of them with you.

As a Start, what I call the “comments linking”. Suppose that you have some kind of content on your application, let’s say you have a Trivia game and you save people results. The way it worked so far, basically you could have a comment box associated with a “comment ID” related to some content (“the trivia result”). In addition to that, we also had a feature that allowed us to publish a Feed Story related to some kind of user action (made inside the application) to the users’ wall, such as beating a friend on a challenge. Both comment box & feed publisher were great tools, but all the likes, shares and comments made on the feed story weren’t reflected to the comment boxes and vice-versa… and that was pretty much disappointing.

With the new upcoming changes, we will be able to relate those tools to a certain “content ID”, which I believe it will definitely EXPLODE the virality of an app, absolutely more than the spamming notifications. If we are able to merge all the comments, likes and shares over the same content, it will definitely take less to appear as a hightlight on the new feed helping the user to remember about our app constantly!.

Perhaps we will need to start thinking on doing more serious apps based on user generated content”, instead of Viral Channel Spamming Apps which was the preferred model by many developers around the world during the last year.

The way developers were doing some money when the platform was released was providing virtual currencies and using micro-payments, but it was a hard and expensive job to develop those applications. A year ago people started this new revenue model that was based on generating lots of page views (exploding viral channels to the most) in order to get more money from ad networks.

I think behind this refactor made by facebook, basically they’re looking to go back to the first apps model which brought them high quality and engaging applications instead of the 1 day coding apps based on the second model.

I know virality is key to success, but once you get those million users on your app, what will you do to generate more page views?

A couple of months ago, I developed a viral application to study the way small apps grow, and it that took less than three weeks to get 2 million users using the app, and it took us 4 - 5 weeks to loose all the traction it gained during the initial three weeks.

Why is that possible? because the application basically did not allow you to do anything but clicking on a button to get more friends, and publishing stuff to the user’s wall.

And we found something interesting, the “One Action Applications” is a proved concept! Believe me, there’s some people out there who fell annoyed when you offer them lots of things to do inside an app. So, when they find that the only thing you can do is publishing something to your wall… well, you will pretty much feel like doing it, cause there’s nothing else to do, It’s Crystal clear!

That was our application model. We gained virality because each one of them published the feed story, but right after they clicked on the “Publish Button” they were GETTING BORED!

So, we gained virality, BUT were did all that go ?? nowhere! we lost them!. Somebody said once: “There’s only one time to give a initial good impression”.

The good thing on this equation is that there’s a “collateral benefit” that about 5% of users which used the application and got bored of it, BEFORE forgetting about us they leaved us a gift, They Pressed the RED Button (some to speak…) they became fans of our App. So, you must be asking yourself what is the pleasure of having bored users on your boring application profile… and I say, You Probably don’t have them Engaged with you, But they’re engaged for sure, cause now you will be able to share with them all the new applications that you will be releasing.

As a conclusion, viral based applications don’t usually have a long term relationship with their users, but they’re definitely a great marketing channel for new applications which still makes it an interesting business for some companies. On the other hand, Engaging applications are clearly what Facebook is looking for, and developers will find more and more tools to keep fluid communications with their users as the platform’s community grows day by day.

Matias Paterlini

Article Originally written for PulsoSocial.com
URL to Original Post: http://pulsosocial.com/2009/11/22/facebook-apps-virality-vs-engagement/

paterlinimatias Development, Facebook, Social Network Engagement, facebook apps, virality

At AltoDot Labs we created a simple tool that allows you to download videos recorded at Ustream.

Click here to see it working!

We believe this is a very useful tool since it allows you to get a direct link to the video file (in flv format) of every video recorded at Ustream.

Best!,

Matias

paterlinimatias Development altodot, ustream

Awesome post by Andres Barreto (Founder of PulsoSocial.com and Grooveshark.com) about Tweetboard, one of the latest startups I’m working on. Thanks my Friend!! Matias. —>

Tweetboard is a Twitter-powered “microforum”, different from any Twitter app in the same category, Tweetboard runs on your site rather than being a “destination” site.  In essence brings the twitter conversations to your website and viceversa.

paterlinimatias Social Media, twitter 140ware, pulsosocial, tweetboard, twitter

A few days ago I saw a really interesting slide from a presentation made by Dave McClure (founder of lots companies in Silicon Valley), it was called “How to pitch a VC (aka startup viagra)” , and I want to focus on one of those slides which really made it drastically clear how important is to have a great team with you, instead of just having great ideas. Your Team must be filled of superheroes, rockstars, etc. and the most important thing is that they all need to have “balls of steel”.

And when I was reading that presentation, it reminded me my first answer from a VC:

“Sounds great!, send me an executive summary!, oh, I almost forgot, send me a full detailed bio about each people on your team!!!”.

At some point you will be tested about the way that you’ll get your project done by the way you built your team before, and by your ability to find “exclusive” partners and employees!

I heard an interesting phrase a couple of years ago saying:

“It’s more important who’s going with you, than where you are going…”

Taking the right people with you will determine how far are you going to go. It’s not that if you have a clear vision of your goals and so much effort you will get there. It’s a lie, because, if you have the wrong people going with you, you could find yourself fighting the wind on an uphill.

Instead, if you have the right people on your team, they can amplify your vision, they can break your mental limits, they will make you think out of your box and you will probably have a new horizon at the end of the journey.

In coaching we use a very important phrase:

“Nobody goes further than their relationship network allows…”

We live in a relationship world, and this was so true even before Facebook and Social Media appeared. In some way, Mark and the other guys after him knew this and found a way to take advantage from it, and to add value to people by creating great tools that will help us hit the right person, that will help us make our project a successful company.

It’s more important to have a small percentage of something huge than having a big percentage of nothing. A great idea is nothing without a team pushing and pushing hard to make it real. Let them be part of your dream and they will spend their efforts non stopping!. People’s efforts are determined by their mayor compromises.

If your team believes in your project, then you’ll have too many possibilities of having success. Share your vision constantly, and get your people involved. If you have money, pay great salaries, if you don’t, be generous when you share your stock, let them work happy! That must be your mayor investment because their minds will only have place to think how to make your project an art piece, instead of asking themselves if it’s the right place to work.

And my last advice, pay attention to your peoples disadvantages and weakness, and check how malleable are they. If you are aware of this, you will have the possibility to work on those problems, but be sure to have malleable people on your team, and of course be sure they want to keep learning every day!

Matias Paterlini

Post written for YoungTechStars.com

Original URL: http://www.youngtechstars.com/entrepreneurship/the-importance-of-building-a-dream-team

paterlinimatias Entrepreneurship, Social Media company, compromises, employees, Entrepreneurship, heroes, team

Facebook 534, Twitter: 35, Linkedin: 34. If you’re asking what are those numbers, they represent how valuable are those projects for certain people (in millions dollars invested!!). Those are just a couple of samples of how much funding can get a web project. But how far is going to be yours?

I always liked to merge entrepreneurship with leadership. I think that an entrepreneur needs to be a good leader to be successful, and a leader by default, is generating new things all the time, he’s taking people to places that they couldn’t go alone (sometimes they couldn’t even imagine to be there) and that’s done by being creative, by looking forward, and staying sharp as a leader.

But “generate new things” it’s not the only job for an entrepreneur. The reason that companies like Facebook went so far, or that startups like Twitter or LinkedIn are going so far in the middle of this crisis, it’s not because they’re lucky, but it’s because they’re leading the process which includes overcoming difficult times.

I have failed sometimes in the past, even when there were great forecasts announcing really high revenues, I saw great ideas die after a hard reality hit them. But I reject to talk about this “crisis” that everybody’s talking about, I prefer to say “Silence, I kill you” (see Achmed video for reference) to the idea of a global crisis because the way we talk, the things we say, the conversations that we maintain have impact in our reality, that’s why I always prefer to talk about possibility. We need to understand our reality, but as entrepreneurs, as leaders, as people that live on the cutting edge technology we must talk about a possible future, always.

There’s a very interesting principle that the ontology studies which says something like: “The human being is a linguistic being”, which means that the second thing that we do all the time after thinking is talking. That said, we really need to think about what we’re saying!.

The second principle that I learned, is that “the language is a reality generator tool”, every time you declare something with your mouth, you’re generating changes, when a judge says Jail to somebody, he’s changing somebody else’s life. The same happens when you declare that you’re done with something, that 2009 is not the best year to start anything, or to invest time on anything. When you say that kind of things you’re actually “jailing yourself”, probably without being aware of that.

I always remember three advices that helped me be strong in those “critical times” in the past.

1) “If somebody did it before, then you can make it”. When I see countries rising up after very long wars, or after horrible events like 9/11, when I see them strong again, I think that’s a miracle, but it’s not. Whenever you feel like you can’t keep up, whenever you feel that you have spent too much effort on your project without any reward, think about this kind of events, they will show you that there’s nothing impossible, that there’s not a situation that you can’t overcome if you really strive with a strong entrepreneur’s vision, being focused on the future.

2) “A leader is never dropped, he’s always rising up”. As I said I had difficult times in the past, times where I didn’t have even one dollar for the bus to go to a meeting. But you can’t quit just because you feel tired, you can’t forget about your vision because it’s difficult to keep up. Leave your projects when you feel that it’s done, when you feel that the time has passed to that idea, but not because you’re holding fear about the future, or because someone else is saying you can’t.

3) “Go get the opportunity, don’t wait for it”. It starts in your language, it’s starts in your brain where you let your thoughts exist. Don’t believe that phrase saying that the opportunity comes next to the crisis. The real entrepreneurs are those who generate the opportunity with their efforts, their passion of what they do, and their constancy in those difficult times. You won’t find people touched by a wand, that didn’t happen to those companies that I mentioned before, they just remained strong, and as Steve Jobs said, they probably remained hungry and foolish too, that’s how they got so far!.

Two days ago I posted my goals for 2009 at Facebook and somebody told me: “isn’t that too much?”, that remembered me a great phrase that I want to share with you, specially today:

“We all live under the same sky, but we don’t all have the same horizon.”

Matias Paterlini

Article originally written for YoungTechStars.com

paterlinimatias Entrepreneurship, Social Media Entrepreneurship, Facebook, leadership, opportunity, possibility, twitter

The last two months have been really exiting!!!, I started writing as a columnist about entrepreneurship at YoungTechStars.com from it’s launch in early January, and I must say I was really impressed to have that offer from it’s founder Taylor Barr.

But in the middle of February, Andres Barreto gave me an extended opportunity to send a post to PulsoSocial.com (the “Mashable” from Latin America), and since they liked my posts about social media, I’ve been confirmed as a columnist which is such an honor to me!. In the same month I had a great meeting with Hernan Pablo Nadal, New Media Coordinator at Greenpeace Argentina, who after a few days added me as a contributor at his blog http://www.listao.com.ar which has a great community and more than 2000 daily visits, of course to keep posting and talking about social media!

Here’s a link to the news in Pulso Social announcing the new columnists: http://pulsosocial.com/2009/02/28/invitacion-a-columnistas-para-marzo-en-pulsosocial/

I also quit my job two months ago to start my own social media company with a partner from Argentina, and we’re just starting but the future looks so great! I’ll let you know when I can share some news about that.

Cheers!!

Matias Paterlini

paterlinimatias Blogging, Social Media Blogging, pulsosocial, Social Media

For some reason, all of the conversations I have had with entrepreneurs in the past two weeks, the main conversation that we’ve shared was about being or not being funded. Some people wants to sell advertisement cheaper while their project grows, some others prefer to get the funding before starting, and some others prefer a mix of both ideas.

I know this is a very difficult topic. As a matter of fact, one of the things that came up while I was talking to these guys was that there wasn’t an agreement between the associates and partners about looking for investors for the projects that they were working on.

Success without venture capitalists or angel investors is completely possible. Perfect case of this is Meneame in Spain, which created an amazing company with almost nothing. Even more, I understand that the context in which entrepreneurs and developers undertake their projects is completely different across the board. For example, People in foreign countries have to fight for their startups, while others make a couple of calls and meetings and that’s it. In any case, there’s always the question of going out to offer your idea, your dream, your efforts or not…

About this matter there are several stances:

• Those who are scared about having investors behind them.
• Those who think that their business is not ready for an investor, and those who think it’s ready when it actually isn’t.
• Those who want to be owners of the whole thing, without adding strangers into their magical circle.
• Those who want to wait some time before asking for help.

If  you belong to one of these groups , I want to share with you four “thoughts” that may help you in your decision to  look for funding or not.

1. The growing curve is not always the same. There are certain kind of tech projects that by default, require too much time to grow. The fact of having a angel investor accelerates the process of growing, but you have to be sure that your business is ready for a jump, and be sure that it will grow if you have that money on your back, because I insist, there are projects that will take time to grow even if you spent huge amounts of money and time.
2. Don’t let your business die of success. I have a friend who is a successful entrepreneur of 20 years old , and he always say that if you launch your idea when it’s still not ready for success, you will kill the idea, and it won’t get over. There are certain ideas that are so great, but if you push them when they’re not ready you can disappoint users, and it will be too difficult to make them give a try again. There’s a coaching principle that says “There’s not a second chance to give a initial good impression.”.
3. Show me your idea working, and show me what people think about it!. There was a debate at Le Web 08 (about two months ago) between a couple of VC and experienced entrepreneurs. One of the things that all of them completely agreed is that If you want to get an investment, the majority of the times VC’s are expecting you to show your idea working. The other clear result from that debate was that if people find your project useful, if people wants to get your product or service, then VCs just can’t say NO because it’s the market saying “I want it”.
4. Don’t loose the momentum. I’ve been working on social network applications the last year, and launching in time is so important. Google says “launch early and iterate”, and somebody also said “Keep is simple”. You shouldn’t expect to get the best service ever on your style before launching, because when you launch there will probably be 3 services already working with a growing community and it will be so hard to generate your own community after that.

I would have liked to have these tips before starting or launching some projects that I killed in the past, but now these are are my daily checkpoints list before starting or launching anything. I hope you can learn from them too, and it would be great to have your opinion about this topic. So please feel free to make your comments.

Matias Paterlini

This article was originally written for youngtechstars.com. Original URL: http://www.youngtechstars.com/entrepreneurship/to-be-or-not-to-be-funded

paterlinimatias Entrepreneurship, Social Media Entrepreneurship, financing, funds, grow, startup, success

If you want to create a rocket and put your flag on the moon, let me tell you it is late my friend. If you want to sell a million flying cars in the states, it’s probably not the right moment. One of the most important things that will make you successful is to be completely aware of what you’re doing, know exactly the time to do it, as well as the current status of the market.

“Finding the right idea is almost as important as finding the right time.”

When I was having my coaching training the first lesson that they gave us was “The future is all possibility!!”, but if we want to see the OPPORTUNITY, we need to be good observers of what’s happening around us. I saw many business fail because they didn’t take this in to account. I have a friend who wanted to put a computer shop together for years, but when he started his company it was a complete mess. 6 months later, he had to close the store.  Today, the idea wouldn’t be as succesful due to the fact there are big retailers with better prices in better places.

If I make a review of each of my four startups even when not all of them were successful and others are just beginning, I find that everyone of them was started when it came time. My first startup was a christian mobile contents company; it was the first one in Latin America and we’ve been alone in the market for more than 8 months. The second was a real state platform which provides websites to real state agents. We are still the only ones offering that service. The next was a new format to sell properties using videos over the internet and television- there’s nothing like that in Argentina yet. And the last one, a social media development company which was working on social media even when people didn’t know about Facebook in our country.

I really had that advice in mind before I started anything, but How can we know when It Is time??? Let me answer this with a short story in my own words.

“There was two rough fat woodcutters who were called the Kings of the handsaw. Nobody could beat them, till the day that two young and thin guys got into the business and started making twice the production that the kings were doing. Of course none of the woodcutters could understand what was happening, because they double their efforts to increase their production, but nobody could reach the young guys marks. So one day they decided to pay attention to the successful woodcutters and they found that they were taking 15 minutes every day sharpening their handsaw before doing anything.”

If we want to see when is the right moment for an idea or startup, we have to be sharp. How Can We Be Sharp?

Three “How-To” Methods of Staying Sharp:

• Take Advantage of Twitter Momentum: If you’re on the net, you have to be on twitter. There are at least two or three special moments in the day that have momentum and those are the moments between 6 and 7 AM PST (9and 10am EST). That is when people get up and check all the tweets from the people they’re following. In the morning you can see the biggest amount of hot news about technology, startups, and the market. Of course you can read blogs too, but tweeter works like a efficient filter of the hottest changes in the world. That early moment in the day people are concentrated on twitter, paying attention to the new followers, so that is the moment when you can find opportunities, where you can hear the world telling you “This is the moment”, or “Not Yet”.
• Take care of your blindspots. Our eyes give us 180 grades of visibility, that means that you always have blindspots where you don’t know what’s happening. So, I think that one of the most helpful tools is to follow someone that you respect on your field. In the past you had to go to a monastery, or to the heights on the mountains. Nowadays we have lots of ways to follow people such us twitter, blogs, rss, email newsletters, etc. If you don’t have at least one person from which you are learning constantly, try to get one because  that will allow you to see something that your probably not aware of.
• Never lose your passion. The passion will help you take those risky decisions in the right moment, it will help you make unbelievable efforts when it’s required, and to fight for that dream that you have. If you fell like getting unenthusiastic, then you should open your eyes and get in contact with passionate people who are going to show you that success is still possible, and will put fuel into your entrepreneur’s heart.

Matias Paterlini

This article was originally written for youngtechstars.com. Original URL: http://www.youngtechstars.com/?p=263

paterlinimatias Entrepreneurship, twitter Entrepreneurship, opportunity, passion, success, ventures