PVS-Studio has a mascot that became inseparable from the brand - a unicorn. Lately we've been getting many questions about our magic steed: why the unicorn, why has he changed so much, does he have hooves, how come he doesn't wear pants, and how do we draw him. The answers are finally here, in this very article.
Attention: there will be a lot of pictures. And I mean A LOT.
Introduction
It was 1989 when 2 editors of Inc. magazine, George Gendron and Bo Burlingham made the nervous drive to Palo Alto, California. Not long beforehand they’d decided on who to name as Inc.’s Entrepreneur of the Decade, and finally, they would get a chance to interview him.
As they entered the offices of NeXT, their interviewee approached them. In his trademark jeans and turtleneck sweater, Steve Jobs led them up the stairs to his office and the interview commenced.
Securing an interview with Steve Jobs was rare, even in 1989. And, wanting to make the most of their time, the editors got straight to the point with their very first question:
“Where do great products come from?”
After a slight pause, and a shuffle in his chair, Jobs replied:
“I think really great products come from melding two points of view; the technology point of view and the customer point of view. You need both. You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new.”
Silence overshadowed the room. Three decades later, and this powerful answer Jobs gave is something that still isn’t often internalized in companies.
Collecting user feedback is incredibly important. As you’ll see examples of later in this article, launching surveys, asking onboarding questions, and conducting customer interviews are all vital tools for improving your product.
But the true lesson that Steve Jobs gave all this time ago was that user feedback isn’t as simple as asking what users want, or what they think about your product, and making those changes. You have to dive much deeper.
Content marketing is an endless endurance race. You can’t put a cap on business growth, even if you’re a tech industry giant. A single success is not enough — every time you reach the finish line, it moves further away. Retaining your existing customers is no walk in the park either. When you go silent, you are actively ignoring your audience. There’s no way around it — you need to pump out content.
However, doing that day in and day out requires a lot of stamina. So let’s look at why we get tired in the first place, and figure out how to avoid it. [Previous article: The true cost of free labour].
Starting a startup can be tricky. To make money, you need clients. To attract clients, you need a portfolio. To have an attractive portfolio, you need to… Well, you see where I’m going with this. A lot of founders offer their services for free to escape this cycle. However, there are plenty of issues with this approach. It’s certainly not the silver bullet it might seem. Here we are discussing this topic in detail.
Techstars Startup Digest was designed as a discovery tool for entrepreneurs looking for tech events in their area. It was founded in 2009 by Chris McCann who just moved to the Valley. He created an old-school newsletter, featuring promising events in the Bay Area. There was no website, all the events were hand-picked by Chris himself, and the newsletter had 22 subscribers. People liked the idea and that number quickly grew. In 2012 it was acquired by Startup Weekend. Three years later, Startup Weekend’s parent company UP Global was acquired by Techstars — and that’s how the project got its name.
Startup Digest can be a useful tool for startups and event coordinators. If you can successfully leverage it, your event, blog post and/or tech product can reach thousands of people at no cost.
Entrepreneurs make for easy targets. Whatever your business is doing, it’s guaranteed to ruffle some feathers. But don’t be quick to blame the public. Most times, being sceptical of change is only logical.
Even those who buy into your product will probably expect it to fail. 20% of businesses shut their doors during their first year, and less then half survive for more than five. We may not know these numbers, but we know it from experience — most of them overpromise, underdeliver and ultimately disappoint.
As such, it’s no surprise that the internet is full of passive-aggressive tech coverage. No matter what you do, your business is going to be attacked and demeaned. No one is immune.
Look no further than the original iPhone’s early reviews. It generated a lot of negative coverage for the sake of negative coverage. CNET’s main complaints revolved over a lack of physical buttons, completely missing the entire point of having a touchscreen. A Techcrunch columnist went even further and outright damned it to failure. Sounds funny now, but 14 years ago these people were dead serious.
Of course, these days everyone is an expert and the comment sections matter more than the articles they follow. Unlike traditionally restrained media professionals, the overconfident amateurs on popular UGC platforms openly take pleasure in attacking whatever they come across. It might be their way of letting off steam from being bullied at work or having financial difficulties, but no matter the reason, you still have to deal with a bunch of people trying to paint you in a negative light. And that’s not easy.
AngelList is a social network designed to connect startups with investors and vice versa. The founders of it were dissatisfied with how opaque the VC world was, and found a way to increase the amount of available data. The project began in partnership with just 50 volunteer investors wishing to allocate $80 million in capital, and has grown to be the leading website of its kind. Over the past three years more than 75% of startups that received seed funding from American investors used AngelList to make it happen.
Product Hunt is a Y-combinator backed discovery platform, founded by Ryan Hoover in 2013. Conceived as an email list, it has gone on to become one of the most popular directories, raised $7.5 million in backing and was acquired by AngelList — a social network for entrepreneurs — in December 2016.
Exposure on the platform contributed to viral successes of Yo and Ship Your Enemies Glitter, and brought multi-million dollar companies, like Robinhood and Gimlet Media, to the public eye.
Introduction and Context
So you’ve just finished developing the next mobile gaming smash hit. You’ve already planned to launch your game worldwide and win the hearts of gamers everywhere. But what you haven’t done yet is think about how you’re going to make any money from your success and hard work. Of course, you’ve imagined becoming an instant millionaire, but you just don’t know how to get there.
Fear not, intrepid developer! Instead of just rehashing the tired headlines and beating the same old drum, we’ve tailored our Ad Monetization write-up for developers who are gearing up to publish their game or app in China. We’ve scoured the internet, grabbed insight from ad giants like Google, Smartyads, and PocketGamer.biz and combined it with our own hands-on knowledge of what works in China—knowledge that we have gained from the past 5 years in the industry.
We need to briefly explore how monetization functions as a utility within the context of game design. This is especially true when examining how developers in China have made meaningful design decisions that have both shaped and been shaped by user habits. Unpacking the utility of Chinese game monetization will help developers understand why Ads Monetization or Hybrid Monetization strategies have become so popular, especially in China.
Moving from monetization design, we’ll examine some of the best practices regarding Ads Monetization. Finally, we’ll turn to specific case studies in the Chinese market that show how powerful Ads Monetization, specifically Rewarded Videos, can be in a well-balanced monetization strategy.
Designing Monetization as a Utility
Recently Epic Games’ Fortnite was removed from the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. The main reason being Epics bypassing of in-app purchases instead of using the officially sanctioned system for both platforms. While it is still possible for you to download Fortnite directly, this large scale case brings to light the duopoly of Apple and Google in the mobile market.
For most developers, these two stores account for almost all of their revenue and userbase. While Epic Games will be fine to go without, for the time being, what about the other 99% of developers who rely on these two stores for distributing and monetizing their apps. In this article, we’ll provide some of the alternative stores available for both developers and consumers for finding or distributing apps.
For one reason or another, you may have found yourself wondering, ‘where are some other places I can go to find and download new apps and games for my mobile device’? Or ‘are there any other marketplaces for me to share my apps’?
2020 broke in brazenly and audaciously with its rights to our quiet and measured everyday life. It seems like the whole world has gone online, making life easier for millions of people including event managers. But not so fast...
In this article, I will tell you how our PVS-Studio team started its year in the field of business events, conferences, what experience we gained and what mistakes we want to protect our readers from. Whether you are a CEO, a hoster of business meetings, a developer, a teamlead, or etc, our experience will be useful to everyone in case you somehow relate to conferences.
Blockchain is a decentralized technology that maintains a record of all transactions occurring over a peer-to-peer network. Due to Blockchain's several different high-level use cases, numerous industries described Blockchain as the 'magic beans.'
Blockchains store the record in a decentralized system that is interconnected. This technology lessens vulnerability and enhances transparency in all industrial sectors as information is stored digitally, and it does not have any centralized point to carry out the transactions.
Do You Know?
How much does your privacy cost? Your medical information, your home address? How much is your browsing and search history? You might have never thought about that.