Note: This article was originally published here by The Huffington Post. BostInnovation.com and The Huffington Post have a content partnership. Chase Garbarino, BostInnovation and Pinyadda founder & CEO, contributes to a weekly column on entrepreneurship for the Huffington Post.

On Christmas Day in 2005, during my junior year of college, my mother gave me a copy of the Small Business Opportunities magazine in my stocking. To this day, I can still remember the headline jumping out at me: “College Student Makes $300,000 In A Month.” After briefly skimming the article about the student setting up an affiliate shopping site, my mind was was made up – I was going to start an internet business.

The stack of resumes and cover letters prepped for internship opportunities at Lehman Brothers, Goldman and other financial companies never ended being mailed. Instead, a friend of mine and I created an internship position on several job recruiting sites calling for the nation’s top collegiate journalists and media makers to join “The New York Times of college publications.” That night, as I went to bed, it hit me like a ton of bricks: Did I seriously just bail out on applying for legitimate internships to start a national collegiate news site with absolutely no technical or media experience?

After several beers, a night of tossing and turning, and 24 hours of avoiding internet access, I finally checked my e-mail. We had received over 100 applications within a day and ended up receiving a total of over 300 by the time the listing expired after three days. The magazine headline that planted the seed for my interest in entrepreneurship quickly faded to the back of my mind. I was hell bent on giving students at the peak of their intellectual curiosity and development, a platform to share their new ideas and beliefs with the world, and CampusWord was born.

The next 18 months of my college career could be described as fearlessly trying to row the boat and plug the holes at the same time. I andCampusWord’s other co-founders, Greg Rogan and Kevin McCarthy, had little technical experience on our side, so running our website in the early days was always an adventure. With little to no money, we were forced to outsource our development efforts to countries like China, Vietnam and South America.

To give an example of what life in the tech fast-lane was like, at one point during the summer I was on my way to meet the parents of my then girlfriend for the first time. They knew little about me other than that I “ran a news website.” As I walked in the door ready to turn the charm on, the conversation quickly moved to CampusWord. I began giving my best speech about the importance of hosting an open platform for students across the country to share ideas and opinions. I was really on a roll. As we migrated over to their computer to view the site, I continued to ramble on as I typed in the domain. My gaze turned to the screen and rather than seeing a vibrant homepage of student contributed articles, there was simply a black screen with a picture of a masked man with a ticking time bomb and some questionable text in a different language. Needless to say my confident rambling quickly turned to broken and confused sentences as the grandmother’s face turned white. I assured them this wasn’t our site, I wasn’t a radical extremist of any sort and that we must have been hacked. Soon after, our hosting company confirmed a number of sites had been hacked and they corrected the problem. Regardless, the dinner conversation was stilted to say the least.

At its peak, CampusWord’s network included over 100 of the nation’s top collegiate journalists and media makers and drew an audience of over 100,000 unique visitors a month. Ultimately, though, CampusWord didn’t end up turning into a big, successful business and never made $300,000 in a month, as promised by the Christmas stocking magazine. This was mainly due to my lack of understanding of true marketing scale, and partly because of our team’s ideological desire to keep CampusWord in the hands of students — not to mention that we decided to pursue what we believed to be a bigger opportunity in creating a large-scale news aggregation technology that now powers our current properties, BostInnovation and Pinyadda. We are, however, proud of the fact that our staff of contributors from CampusWord have gone on to work for top media companies like Politico, CNN, Mashable, NY Daily News, TV Guide, The Onion and many others.

I consider an entrepreneur to be someone who creates something out of nothing. Good entrepreneurs create something of value out of nothing. While we certainly would have liked to have created more monetary value from CampusWord, we created value developing the foundation for our current business and in helping launch some very promising careers for others. When you see true value delivered to your users and customers from work your team has done with little to no resources, or your former employees enjoy success, there is no better feeling. And that is why I am an entrepreneur.

You can contact Chase at chase at pinyadda dot com

Here’s a quick tour of the new features and a little description of each:

(Please note: A small fraction of the Pinyadda community is using Internet Explorer 7, and we are experiencing a few issues on this browser. Please bear with us as we work through these bugs.)

New Left Hand Navigation

This area is really the nerve center of your Pinyadda interface, and we wanted to add a hefty dose of customization as well as make this component easier for new users to navigate. We added drag-and-drop organization for sites and topics,a dead-simple folder structure to help you customize your news even more, and made sure that when you follow something new your navigation updates instantly. For those of you who’ve been concerned about leaving your RSS reader behind, this update should help ease the transition. Now you can keep your organizational standards and get all the great perks that come with a system that’s been built social from the ground up.

Notifications Functionality

We know that constant email updates can get annoying. But we also know that you like to be told when something cool happens, or if you’ve achieved a cool new reward. Our solution to this Catch-22 is the new notifications feature, which lets you know when good things happen without interrupting your experience on the site. Now, when you get a private message, unlock a reward, receive a recommendation or gain a new follower, you’ll get a notification that lets you easily view the update and take action. If you want to see all your notifications, just click on the link to at the bottom of the dropdown. And don’t forget to share!

Recommend Sites, People, and Topics

After seeing so many people evangelize their favorite sites on Pinyadda,  tell us about their go-to topic feeds and suggest users your friends should follow, we wanted to be sure to provide an easy way to recommend the stuff you’re into to your friends and colleagues. Now, all you need to do is go to an individual site or topic feed or someone’s profile, click the gears button at the top right, and click “Recommend.” You’ll be prompted to select whether you want to send a recommendation to all your followers, or just to individual people (you can even enter an email address of a user not on Pinyadda). They’ll receive your recommendation in their notification tab at the top.

Redesigned Search Feature

We all have a pretty good idea of how a search function is supposed to work, and we needed to make ours do what our users thought it would. You gave us a lot of feedback on this one and the result is a simplified search box, auto-suggest feature, and redesigned results page does a much better job of helping you quickly find what you’re looking for. Whether you’re searching for articles, people, sites, or topics, just type your query into the box and we’ll do our best to read your mind. If you don’t see what you’re looking for in the auto-suggest field, just hit the enter key and you’ll be given a full page of sortable results.

Updated Information Architecture

This is a fancy way of saying we moved a few menu options to a place where they make more sense. If you’re trying to add a link to Pinyadda or submit an RSS feed for your favorite blog, you can now find those options under the Newsstand dropdown. See what we did there? The newsstand is as much yours as it is ours, and we wanted to make sure we made that clear.

While we know change is sometimes hard to deal with, we hope you all like these updates. They’re drawn in large part from your fantastic feedback and we continue to be incredibly grateful to have a such an engaged, dedicated, and thoughtful community. And please, let us know what you think! There’s a whole lot more great stuff on the horizon and we’ll be sure to share more soon.

Love,

The Yadda Squad

Become a Fantasy God with Pinyadda

Desperately trying to fill the gaps in your fantasy roster? Looking for a few sleepers to make a play for in pre-season trading? Trying to find the hidden gems in your league and come up with ways to beat them? Look no further. Whether you want to read fantasy news from around the web or just keep up with specific teams, Pinyadda’s got you covered. Here’s a quick look at five potential fantasy spoilers and everything you need to follow them on Pinyadda.

1. Sam Bradford, St. Louis Rams. Though it pains me to say it, Bradford looked sharp against the Patriots last week and has proven to most analysts that he has the skills necessary to post numbers at the NFL level. He’s not a fantasy starter, but if you can pick him up on the cheap I’m willing to bet he’s got a couple of big days up his sleeve this year, especially given the Rams’ relatively weak schedules. Follow the St. Louis Rams topic to keep up with Bradford’s progress throughout the year.
2. LaDainian Tomlinson, New York Jets. LT is getting old, but he’s not done yet. Rex Ryan’s strange coaching mojo seems to have breathed some life into the organization and it appears that Tomlinson’s buying whatever he’s selling. While Tomlinson may not get the bulk of the carries, expect him to break at least one a game for 20 or more. And don’t forget that he led the league in receptions a few years ago – he might do better than your #1 receiver on some weeks. Follow the New York Jets topic and the Jets Blog to track LT’s work as a Jet.
3. Clinton Portis, Washington Redskins. Mike Shannahan knows how to get the most out of his backs, and Clinton Portis is undervalued in most leagues this year. If he can (and his offensive line) can avoid the injury bug this year, Portis will get plenty of chances to gain quality yards and score valuable fantasy points. He’s a known quantity and offers predictable point totals during most of the regular season. The Washington Redskins topic and the Redskins Blog have you covered with all the latest on Portis, Shannahan, and the rest of the Skins.
4. Michael Vick, Philadelphia Eagles. The Eagles, no matter how you slice it, are still a mess. Anyone who thinks Kevin Kolb is going to last the whole season has a better sense of humor than I do. Will Vick’s output be predictable? No. Does he have legitimate potential for a few insane weeks that could make or break your matchup? Absolutely. If you can pick him up late, do it. If you can afford to hang on to him he might make the difference in close heat down the stretch. Follow Philadelphia Eagles and the Bird’s Eye View blog in the Philly Enquirer to stay up on the latest drama in Philly.
5. Pierre Garcon, Indianapolis Colts. When you catch balls thrown by Peyton Manning, it can be easy to be overshadowed. But Garcon’s ability can’t be doubted, and though he may not yet be a name-brand receiver just yet, anyone who’s suffered a spanking at the hands of the Colts can tell you that Garcon is one of Manning’s favorite targets. He runs a lot of 15-30 yard seam routes that Manning thrives on against cover two zone defenses in the middle of the field. He’s a great pickup who’s almost guaranteed to have a decent performance every week. Follow the Indianapolis Colts topic and Stampede Blue to see how Garcon can help you score this season.

Pinyadda is your place to find all the pro football news and updates you can handle from across the web. Follow the teams you want, discuss articles with other fantasy gurus, and never miss an injury report or roster change again. For more information on using Pinyadda to help you crush it this fantasy season, check out our post on using Pinyadda to dominate your fantasy draft. And don’t forget to follow the Fantasy Football topic to keep up with the latest trends and analysis from fantasy blogs and commentators all over the internet.

Featured Top Yadda:

Click to read the full discussion on Pinyadda.

Cheryl Morris pinned this to Twitter.

BP turned down Cameron’s deep sea expertise and contacts…

Bill McBain pinned this.

Good. I’d be furious if I were an engineer that had spent decades in the environmental or energy sector and my bosses (or the Obama administration) forced me to try to implement the pipedream ideals of some hollywood blowhard. I really like James Cameron’s movies, but I think he should stick to what he knows.

I’m not going to ask Ellen Pompeo to scrub in on my grandfather’s kidney surgery.

Cheryl Morris pinned this to Bill McBain.

Really? I’ve been reading more about it. He (and by he I mean his friends, many of whom are engineers, too) actually have a lot of experience in depths even lower than the well. Robots and underwater vehicles and moving things really precisely in that context.

My take is that BP turned it down because they don’t want Cameron grabbing unbelievable footage (perhaps to make a movie with down the road) if he were to help.

Not sure what BP’s reasons were for declining his help and contacts, but in my personal opinion they should take the time to vet ideas and brainstorm more since they clearly are at a dead end. And especially considering they’re taking the time to put together and execute on a huge social media strategy to help their reputation… would much rather they spend the time and energy solving the problem and sitting with Cameron’s top-notch contacts and highly creative people.

Ben Jewell pinned this to Cheryl Morris.

The Abyss was cool but I think his real expertise is now in mining on other planets.

Anton Fewa pinned this.

The fact is BP refused his help because they still hope to get all that oil back. We have microbes that can break down the oil and turn it into food for marine life rather than killing them… BP’s engineers are being payed to think of ways to collect the oil and STILL make profit off of it. People should be furious, yet I still drive by and see people buying gas at BP.

http://www.opposingviews.com/i/oil-spill-idea-microbes-can-eat-the-oil-in-six-weeks

Josh Whinery pinned this.

this is just terrible James Cameron is the perfect person to help solve this problem. You can read my rant on another article I responded to yesterday dealing with the same..

Colin Kennedy pinned this to Twitter.

Hmmm. Anton, I don’t know much about the bacteria, but it DOES sound like something out of a Cameron film… Maybe the creatures in The Abyss are just colonies of them?
Releasing a non-native species always has risks – microbes could have an unforeseen risk on the environmental system – but does it outweigh the damage the oil will do?

As for Cameron’s assistance, even if he were to get down there with a camera to monitor the situation, or he knew some top-tier ROV pilots, he’d be making a difference.
Refusing resources is often a bad move.

Chris Ercoli pinned this to Facebook.

BP turned down Cameron’s deep sea expertise and contacts…

Cheryl Morris pinned this to Anton Fewa, Colin Kennedy.

Do you know by chance if these microbes have been featured in larger media outlets, or if there is a particular group advocating for their use? I am surprised I haven’t read about it before. And you’re probably dead on in regard to BP trying to collect the oil.

Also, have you read anything about Halliburton’s involvement? I know BP is getting the brunt of the blame, but weren’t they contractors in the gulf well when it exploded, doing the cementing.

Colin does pose a good question – have there been any long term studies on the microbes? …Perhaps they could move on to eating the plastic in the Atlantic when done with the oil. : ) Regardless I presume microbes would be safer than pouring on more chemicals that have been shown to make rats eyeballs fall out after several mins of digesting the chemicals. YUM- count me out of eating seafood.

Chris Ercoli pinned this to Cheryl Morris.

And now enters common sense (although large-scale applications sound a bit far fetched)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5SxX2EntEo

Cheryl Morris pinned this to Chris Ercoli.

Wow. Thanks for sharing that – it does look too easy/good to be true. I like the idea of cleaning up oil and concurrently providing farmers with some much needed revenue.

So this video was posted May 5th and has 1.5 million views… 2nd most viewed video on YouTube when searching for “bp oil spill” or “gulf oil spill”. I’d like to say this is the power of social media, but has the idea moved past the video to be implemented/tested at a larger scale? Doesn’t appear so looking at the comments.

Chris Ercoli pinned this to Cheryl Morris.

I actually came across that video through an email from my father… and let me say… my father is never on top of the news! So it’s making it’s rounds.

But from my understanding, the oil isn’t just located on the surface, but in larger pockets underneath the surface. I’m certain it’s not so cut and dry.

Anton Fewa pinned this.

“But from my understanding, the oil isn’t just located on the surface, but in larger pockets underneath the surface. I’m certain it’s not so cut and dry.”

That’s their excuse for continuing use of a chemical dispersant to collect all the oil. What a joke.

Ben Jewell pinned this.

I don’t think the math adds up for caring about collecting surface oil. Current estimates are that 46 million gallons have been spilled into the gulf. There are 42 gallons in a barrel of oil, so ~1,100,000 barrels. Current price estimates for a barrel of crude are 75$. So say they could gather all the oil currently on the surface, the value is only around 85,000,000$ Seeing they have already spent over a billion trying to clean up and lost billions in market share from falling stock prices, I doubt they care about collecting the oil on the surface for profit. They need to worry about collecting the oil coming from the leak so it doesn’t get any bigger. Not that I’m defending BP, I think they are a bunch of fools, but to think James Cameron could come in and magically fix everything is about as believable as Avatar…

seth hayward pinned this.

I think BP probably turned down Cameron’s offer because they had to know Cameron would go rogue with the fantastic footage he would shoot. Cameron’s underwater cameras would/could capture evidence that BP is lying about the flow rate. At the very least, it would provide more publicity to the spill.

BP is desperately trying to control how this spill is spun – note that they got the White House to straight up believe the spill was only doing 5,000 barrels a day for a whole month. BP had to know it was far more than that, but they needed to keep it quiet.

If I were Cameron, I’d give BP the finger and send the subs down myself.

Phil Arscott pinned this.

I don’t care who they’re talking to, but they need something new. FAIL, FAIL, FAIL, FAIL is not a good track record for the BP engineers. I think that they have the best ability to come up with a solution, but that doesn’t mean that no one else has it.

Austin Gardner-Smith pinned this to Twitter.

Should BP have taken James Cameron’s help?

Chris Ercoli pinned this.

Honestly I think BP would have gotten more negative press if they did take his help.

Anton Fewa pinned this.

If you believe the current estimates for the amount of crude oil you are being naive. BP has not once been truthful about the amount of oil leaking.

Linda Smith pinned this.

I know that on the surface it sounds absurb to have a film director solving catastrophic environmental problems but what Cheryl points out is accurate, as the result of his film efforts he has done much research and information gathering with experts in the field. Why not, at the very least, tap into and explore his contacts. BP is keeping everyone at arms length because they do not want to control what information gets out and what doesn’t to protect themselves both financially and legally. It’s a clear cut case of the rat guarding the cheese, and I cant for the life of me understand how it has been allowed to continue.

Linda Smith pinned this.

make that “BP is keeping everyone at arms length because they want to control what information…” I get so exorcised when I even think about this my fingers go nutty!

Will Flanagan pinned this.

Cameron just wants to plug his poneytail into the hole.

Anton Fewa pinned this.

“Cameron just wants to plug his poneytail into the hole.” Funny you say that, hair actually can absorb oil rather well

History shows us that BP will avoid paying for this disaster as much as possible:

http://climateprogress.org/2010/05/27/exxon-valdez-bp-oil-disaste/

sanj k pinned this.

cameron’s ideas can’t be any worse than what bp has come up with! though cameron should have just used google to upload his story…http://www.google.com/crisisresponse/oilspill/

Click to join the full discussion on Pinyadda.

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Follow breaking news from thousands of sites & blogs across the web in one feed on:

• Oil
• Environment
• Energy Policy

Follow breaking news from this source in one feed: VFZ Filmmaker

The Newsstand

Our users needed a better way to find new people, sites, and topics to follow that allowed them to do three main things: find a known quantity (e.g. a person or site whose name they were sure of), find unknown quantities with a known criteria (e.g. sites that have content about cars), and browse content by category in a way that was intuitive and fun. We’re pretty happy with the way it came out and we’re eager to hear your feedback about how to make it even better.

New Badges

If you haven’t heard about the release of our partner badges, go check out the May 19th series of posts. Today we pushed three new badges of our own with the intent of fostering bigger and better discussions, and having a little bit of fun with some of the great publishers and topics that make up Pinyadda’s unique content ecosystem.

The Watercooler Badge is awarded to all participants in a conversation that really takes off – like this one about the Cape Wind project – so that we can reward the users that really drive dialog around particular items. More voices in a conversation means more points of view get represented and shared, and that’s really what Pinyadda is all about. Pick an item you’re passionate about (or one that’s really funny) and make a push for the Watercooler Badge today.

The You Got Iced Badge is our homage to a new social phenomena that’s sweeping the country, pioneered by some true visionaries down South. We won’t tell you exactly how this badge is unlocked, but we think it’ll be pretty self-explanatory after a few of your followers get cyber-iced on Pinyadda.

The Zuck It Badge, awarded in honor a certain CEO who’s been in the press quite a bit lately, is unlocked by following – well, we think you can figure it out. Needless to say, this is a badge you’ll want to make sure you share on Facebook.

Updates

There’s also a ton of little stuff we’ve been cleaning up on the site – everything from new Follow buttons and badge-sharing features to some language changes (‘My People’ in the lefthand nav area is now ‘Home’) and performance enhancements. If you’ve got questions, or find one of those pesky little bugs, let us know. Because sharing is caring.

As the temperature rises this summer and your desk job starts to get more and more intolerable – head on over to the ‘Yadda. We’ll hook you up with great content, better conversation, and our own digitized version of a frosty cold beverage. While you’re at, bring some friends – because unlike your ugly Aunt Gertrude, we love new visitors.

As the web has evolved, and we have evolved with it, we have started to see that “one size fits all” doesn’t apply to graphing our personal connections online, and more particularly it does not apply when hosting different types of user behaviors.  This is why we manage and engage with our business connections on Linkedin and not typically on Facebook, to give one example.   Considering that social media is still a very young medium, it is safe to expect that more platforms will emerge hosting different connection types and user behaviors.

In the past several years, the Internet has turned the news and greater media industry on its head – everything from content creation to distribution has completely changed.  This has created problems for both consumers and publishers.  For consumers, discovering and accessing the news that is most valuable to us has become overwhelming.  For publishers, developing a strong community and converting that community into hard dollars has become incredibly difficult.   At Pinyadda, we have designed our platform specifically focusing on the evolved news and media landscape, hosting what we call the “news graph“.

The individual parts of the news graph have existed for a long time (post about this coming soon).  With Pinyadda, we are focused on connecting these critical parts and providing more value to the different entities within the news ecosystem.  We have studied how our behavior as news consumers has changed and have provided simple tools for enabling each individual user to get the information they need from the sites they like, the topics they follow and from interesting people.  For publishers, we have focused on providing an open distribution platform aimed at extending publisher’s reach and exposure through automated distribution and organization.  This framework will provide the foundation to enable publishers to capture more critical data and eventually monetize the distribution of their content.

While we have experienced tremendous growth in the short time our platform has been open, we are still young and focused on making improvement to best serve our community of users and publishers.  Our intention for this post is to start of on-going discourse regarding the evolution of the news graph, which we invite you all to contribute to.  We believe the news graph is a critical component to ensuring that consumers have an effective way to access the best information available for their unique interests and needs, as well as enabling publishers to capitalize on providing quality content.

Coming soon: The Working Parts of the News Graph

This weekend I coached students as part of Babson College’s Coaching for Leadership and Teamwork Program. The program is designed to help first and third year students hone their oral communication, listening, teamwork, leadership, ethics, and decision-making skills. It’s one of the many distinctive programs Babson offers in addition to it’s truly unique, cross-disciplined business education. I’ve recently more keenly appreciated how Babson’s education fosters entrepreneurialism — regardless of if you decide to take specific classes in the entrepreneurship academic division or not.

Babson was a rigorous and rewarding experience for me. I didn’t concentrate in entrepreneurship, but the implicit learning I gained from being around motivated, aspiring and current student entrepreneurs certainly left it’s mark. Babson teaches it’s students to take risks, to figure out complex business problems, how to succeed in a highly demanding environments, among many other skills. All of these skills I’d qualify as essentials to being an entrepreneur. After going the traditional consulting route after graduation, I’m now navigating my way through the startup scene in Boston and Cambridge. There’s so much I find myself applying from my education and the programs at Babson in this scene. Here are a handful of the programs that set me up best to help make Pinyadda a success:

Foundations of Management & Entrepreneurship

This is a required year-long course for freshmen, in which 60 students start with rocket pitches and vote to narrow down the pitches to two business ideas. The class splits, determines roles and positions, receives a $3,000 loan, and runs the businesses through the semester. At the end of the semester, they donate all profits to a non-profit of their choice. My company, Greenback Card Co., raked in $12,500 in revenues and donated $7,500 in profits to a local YMCA.

The biggest learning from this experience that I’m applying now at Pinyadda is know that no matter your age and experience, starting and running a business is possible.

Intermediate Program

This program includes a capstone project your junior year that runs and is administered across disciplines: finance, organizational behavior, marketing, strategy, etc. A self-selected team of students choose a company and analyze and address complex issues facing that company, ultimately presenting strategic recommendations to a panel of professors at the end of the semester. My team chose Home Depot, as Lowe’s market share was steaming ahead. We recommended a variety of strategic initiatives and answered tough questions from the panel about how these would be financed, how much we knew about the markets we were entering to name a few.  We had no problem answering these questions given the thorough research we had done (we even spoke with management at Home Depot).

This program taught me the power of research and data analysis in strategic decision making. As a startup, no one tells you what to do and how to do it. As a result, we rely on data and research to drive this decision making more than anything else.

Management Consulting Field Experience (MCFE)

This advanced course pairs self-selected groups of students with an MBA student project manager. The group works with an area organization and provides consulting services. The team presents their recommendations to their client at the end of the semester. My team worked with Top Floor Learning, an adult education center facing a funding loss of $30k. They asked for our recommendations on how to make up for that loss. We performed pricing analyses, competitive analyses, demographical research, customer research, and ultimately provided implementable recommendations for making up for that loss.

MCFE allowed me to appreciate the importance of individual strengths and weaknesses in effective teamwork, especially amidst a group of friends. At Pinyadda, where we are all friends, we focus on working collaboratively towards a common goal by appreciating and honestly evaluating each others’ individual strengths and weaknesses. By doing so, we capitalize on strengths, and reach goals and develop initiatives in the most effective ways.

Honors Program Thesis

The Honors Program at Babson includes everything from advanced courses to networking events to a semester-long course on research methodologies. It provides an incredible support network and opportunities to get to know professors outside of the classroom. The capstone of the program is a three-semester long thesis project. My thesis analyzed the factors influencing Gen Y’s adoption of mobile payments. This thesis project taught me more than anything else how to self-start. No one was looking over my shoulder to complete the project; it was done independently and on my own time.

In a startup, you learn that the ability to re-energize and self-motivate is crucial — and entirely on your shoulders. No one is pushing deadlines and telling you when to work (maybe it’s why most startupers just work all the time?). Learning how to self-motivate is undoubtedly critical to startup success, so important that we’ve written it in our company conduct guidelines.

Woman’s Leadership Mentor Program

This program selects top well-rounded women undergraduate students at Babson and provides them with a scholarship and a vibrant support network throughout their years at Babson. Similar to the Honors Program, this program provided unmatched access to faculty, conferences, networking opportunities, a truly phenomenal support network of women, and a year long mentorship program with a seasoned female business leader in arguably your most busy time at Babson — your junior year. My mentor was an entrepreneur herself, truly got to know me as a person, and wanted nothing more than to see me find happiness and success. She helped me through a tough semester of juggling work, full course-load, several extracurricular activities, internship searching, and honing in on what exactly I wanted to do post-graduation.

The mentor program taught me how to balance things in my life. Startup life is 24-7, and when things are more crazy than “normal,” there’s no better lessons I learned from the Women’s Leadership Program than to immediately ground yourself by believing in your abilities.

As I mentioned, I took only a couple courses in entrepreneurship at Babson and didn’t take advantage of all the student-run entrepreneurial communities on campus like the E-Tower and Invenio Group. And while I knew I wanted to build a company down the road, I never anticipated doing it so soon out of school. I’m realizing now that regardless of my limited interaction with the entrepreneurially centered organizations and academic division, Babson still bred me to be an entrepreneur. The skills to succeed as an entrepreneur are built into so many of the school’s programs and classes, although I may have overlooked at the time the care at which Babson designed these programs and it’s curriculum in this way. The programs and learnings outlined above are without a doubt helping me navigate the startup scene and build Pinyadda. I now truly appreciate the #1 in entrepreneurship ranking.

Max heard about Pinyadda from the brother of one of his friends who told him he’d really like it. In true GenY social media form, he tweeted out asking for others’ first impressions with the platform before signing up.

Can’t get enough content, can’t share it quickly enough

Why Max’s friend suggested he’d love Pinyadda so much became very apparent once I started following him on Twitter. Max LOVES content and LOVES to share it. He describes sharing as something “innate in all of us” and is why he’s so impassioned about social media. He’s interned at Digitas, iMax in LA among several others and is looking to work for an ad agency focused on digital strategy. (After speaking with him at length about the future of social, I’ll shamelessly plug that he’d absolutely be a great hire.)

In this context, Pinyadda allows Max to “consume and share content more efficiently.” Always on the go from internship to class to tweetup and more, with Pinyadda he doesn’t have to go to 10 different sites and blogs (and which usually have “really bad sharing functionality”) to stay on top of his Twitter and information game. Pinyadda’s “simple feed interface” and easy pin to a social network integration means he can quickly scan relevant headlines and sources to soak up lots of information. (As a GenYer he remarks that it’s his generations perogative to “know about and be good at everything; not great at one thing.”)

Max likes that after scanning relevant headlines he can click on the select few he’d like to read more deeply, and then easily share those with his followers on Twitter with commentary. The motivation behind this is that he wants to provide value to others, considering himself a source of quality content. He had used Google Reader, but stopped because he found it too difficult/clunky to share and he wasn’t able to take a quick snapshop of what is trending.

Sharing is great, community is powerful

While the ability to easily share is most important, Max noted that the community Pinyadda enables around individual content items is truly powerful. He says he tries to have individual content item discussions on Twitter every now and then, but is incredibly annoyed with the character limits and irritation of having to go back and forth over 10 tweets to have a decent conversation.

As a result, Max has found himself interacting with LinkedIn groups for discussions around content. Fascinated with the integration of online and offline, he loves the ability to have conversations and make connections among people with shared interests. He thinks Pinyadda offers a better platform for that — what he describes as a “crowd-sourcing of your own information.” As a result, he wants us to bring back the “most pinned” and “most discussed” functionality. This was a feature we really enjoyed from the onset, and in an attempt to simplify our UX, removed. It’s great to hear a user who had not seen those features early-on now requesting it.

What a Twitteraholic wants from Pinyadda

As for his suggestions about making Pinyadda better, it’s no surprise it has to do with his avid use of Twitter. Number one, he’d like shorter Pinyadda URLs. (We’re working on it, Max, so thanks for bearing with us!) He’d also like to see an implementation of character counts when sharing to Facebook and Twitter.

Related, for individual link pages (where people land when they click on the Pinyadda links he shares), he feels a brief summary of the article would provide even greater value to the people he shares his links with. His followers could then come to the individual link page, get the gist of the article and quickly decide if they’d like to hop into the conversation around the article with Max. Since people can @ reply Twitter followers from Pinyadda, he noted this would effectively solve his frustration of not being able to have meaningful conversations around content items on Twitter.

These suggestions and insights are really important to us, especially coming from such a keen Twitter user. We pride ourselves as being the easiest way to find and share links on Twitter, and are constantly iterating to make that experience better. We’re looking forward to discussing Max’s suggestions at our next product meeting.

Max, thank you for dropping by our offices and for a really great discussion about Pinyadda and the future of social media and content sharing. You are officially a member of the team Yadda squad!

Pinyadda users, for great content recommendations and commentary, here are some topics I’d suggest you follow Max on:

1. Advertising
2. Media
3. Boston Celtics

A serious need for information

The first user I interviewed is Rob Gonzalez, a Senior Project Manager for Endeca Technologies. Endeca is a leading search application technology company in Cambridge, Mass. that powers 250M+ people to more quickly and easily access information. He started in an engineering role and moved quickly up the ranks to Senior Project Manager. In this role, he plans future releases, meets with both customers and partners, evaluates 3^rd party technologies, and more generally is responsible for anything Endeca does in the ETL space from technology to sales. So, he has what he describes as “a serious need for information from a variety of sources to stay on top of my game.”

To stay on top of the information and breaking news in this context, Rob currently uses a plethora of tools: FeedBurner, Reddit, Google Alerts and general search. He also emails and discusses links on a daily basis, and subscribes to a bunch of newsletters. For him, these various outlets pose a problem – what he describes as a “multi-tool” problem. It’s a pain for him to visit all these outlets to stay up to date on his industry, so he often just skips the process if he doesn’t have time.

Pinyadda as a solution: What the iPhone did for mobile

Pinyadda solves a lot of these problems for Rob by “consolidating the values” of these various sites and platforms into one place.  He describes Pinyadda solving what the iPhone did for mobile and mp3 players: “instead of carrying an RSS reader and email client and web browser around for my news, I can just use one site.”

Always stretched for time, he likes that he can come to Pinyadda, easily see headlines, click through on a few articles and get on with his life. He also appreciates the efficientcy of not having to log into another application like Facebook, Twitter, or an email client to share what articles are most pressing to his job with his colleagues.

A lurker, but also a discoverer

While he notes he’s a “lurker” on Pinyadda, checking in on what other people are reading, I was excited when he noted his favorite feature was the Topics feed. This is generally the feed we see users finding value in after they’ve “lurked” a bit. He akins Topics to some of he keywords he uses in Google Alerts. This is great learning for us, and a use case we hadn’t prominently thought about. It certainly puts more momentum behind a feature on our product roadmap – the idea of building saved searches into your topic feed to follow more obscure or specific topics.

My new favorite user, because he has great ideas and isn’t afraid to provide specific critiques

Rob is candid. We love that. Viewing Pinyadda as a tool, he has lots of ideas of some changes he would like to see that could add a lot of immediate value to the product.

1. The Pin, everywhere on the web. Rob wants to be able to click the Pin It icon from anywhere on the web to share his article recommendations, without having to login to Pinyadda. Easily sharing and recommending information is important to us. Awesome idea.
2. Pinyadda on the go.  Rob wants Pinyadda on the plane. He even offered up a solution of using Google Gears to help make this happen. Another awesome idea.
3. RSS integration. An avid FeedReader user (and complainer of it’s limitations), this is what Rob wants most. He sees tremendous opportunity in making the switch from an RSS reader like Google Reader to Pinyadda frictionless by providing users a simple one-click import of all of their feeds. He also described the way we allow users to add sites as his “biggest annoyance.”

The feedback on #3 is particularly important to us. We realize we can’t grow our index without our community’s help. Accordingly, Rob reiterated that we need to make it easier for them to help with this. As structured now, even for someone familiar with RSS, it can be difficult to add your own feeds. I can imagine what it’s like for someone not familiar with RSS.

Engineer by nature, Rob offered some specifics on how we might consider making the process better. For example, simply entering the site’s URL instead of having to search for a site’s RSS feed. We’re going to look into solutions for this, and welcome ideas from others who may have ideas about how to make this happen. Having encountered a few RSS submission failures, such as with Atom feeds, we’re currently working diligently on accepting all flavors of RSS (thanks for bearing with us!).  He also offered a good perspective on how to make the “flow” of adding a site a lot easier — such as adding his own topic tags — and we couldn’t agree more. We’d like to give more credit to the users who are adding knowledge and great sites to the platform and make the flow, in general, more fun. Allowing our community to create their own tags, for example, will allow everyone to receive more personalized content and have more control.

Rob, again, thank you for being so candid with us and for your perspective as a “multi-tool” user! Looking forward to looping back with you on your feedback as we rollout new features.

If you’d like to follow Rob’s article and blog post recommendations on Pinyadda, here are the top 3 topics I’d recommend following him on:

1. Semantic web
2. Software
3. Strategy

We use several sets of tools to measure data, and each has its own strengths and weaknesses. In order to ensure validity, we often cross-reference these data sets against each other to make sure we’re getting the most accurate numbers possible. While I often wish there were a single solution to this problem that could provide reliable and accurate data in one place, I do find some sort of sick comfort in knowing that outliers and tracking errors can be mostly avoided by the built-in redundancy in our tracking methods. But however much satisfaction, validation, and useful insight comes from looking at the compiled data sets, there’s no doubt that tracking and gathering data can be a huge pain in the ass.

Here’s a rough outline of what we track and how:

- Traffic acquisition: We use Google Analytics for most of the basic stuff, and when I’ve taken the time to check it against some of our other sources the numbers on a high-level basis seem to be fairly accurate. Lately it’s seemed to have a hard time grabbing accurate absolute referral numbers, but the search term referral information can’t be beat.

- Conversion: This is a huge metric for any startup so it makes sense that we use every tool in the arsenal on this one. Some high-level goals are tracked through Google Analytics, but the process of hacking javascript events to resemble pages and then setting up URL-oriented funnels really doesn’t work well for us, since almost all of our pages are dynamically loaded and changed. This is where KISSmetrics really shines, and we’re using it a lot to track our specific conversion funnels. Since we load different value props based on referral, it’s really important to have  Javascript-based tracking, especially at the top of conversion funnels. We can use database events to construct records for true conversion events, but the views and clicks that lead up this are really easy to define in KISS Metrics. Like I said, we cross-check a lot of these numbers against our own internal tracking of insertions and server requests, but so far we’ve had little to no discrepancy between our numbers and KISS Metrics. Which is sweet. Check out this killer post if you want a more detailed breakdown of what KISS can do.

- A/B and Multivariate Testing: If conversion is our most important metric, then A/B data is our most important weapon. Google Website Optimizer rules the roost on this one and it’s a great tool. One thing we do that’s really helped to accommodate easier implementation of GWO is to write the page variations dynamically using PHP. By adding fields to the database we’re calling that are set up specifically to handle the GWO tracking code, as well as any elements we want to test we can create new experiments without ever having to touch the actual code. It’s not rocket science, but it certainly makes it easier to quickly set up an experiment.

- Retention, Engagement, and Referral: Most of this we track using our own internal systems, but we’re using KISS Metrics again to track some very specific action funnels (how far users get in various setup processes, the various ways in which they send invitations) that are primarily Javascript-based. Again, we could probably use Google Analytics for  this, but it’s hard to resist the simplicity of the KISS Metrics reporting interface. We do use Google Analytics for some basic pageview numbers and for some of our external link tracking, to give us a broad sense of how people are using the product. When we identify something we want to take a closer look at, we’ll build a little component or move to an event-based tracking system.

There’s more to it, but those are the basics. For what it’s worth, here’s a quick analysis of the two tools we use the most, as I see them:

- Google Analytics:

• PRO Powerful. I mean, wow. You can do pretty much whatever you want with this tool, provided you can figure it out.
• CON It’s impossible to really figure out all the way. I’m sure there are some gurus out there using every single feature, but I often spend so much time navigating the interface that’s hard to remember what I was actually trying to track.
• CON Constant fear of reliability failure. We’ve had to reset our tracking code a couple times for no apparent reason, and occasionally get data that reflects strange outliers. This probably happens with any analytics suite, but the fear of data voodoo sometimes keeps me up at night.
• CON Kills load times. Watch the activity monitor in almost any site you visit. That ’13 of 14 items, still waiting’ text? Yeah, that’s the GA code.
• Conclusions: A lot like owning a Ferarri with mediocre tires that sometimes won’t start. In other words, lots of power but hard to steer and just unreliable enough to keep you on your toes.

- KISSmetrics

• PRO Event-based tracking. It’s built from the ground up to accommodate dynamic sites and rich web interfaces. Simple Javascript syntax makes tracking any event a cinch.
• PRO Reporting interface. They built it for regular people to actually use (an amazing concept), and they give you data where the main metric is ‘People’. As in ’20 people clicked on this button.’ So simple, makes such a big difference.
• PRO Customer service. They’re a startup, and they roll lean-style, which means you can get answers to your questions. And quick. My last inquiry on twitter was answered in about 15 mins.
• CON Limited functionality. Ideally I want this simple model to be able to do some more powerful things. But they’ll get there soon, no doubt.
• Conclusion: More like owning a slick new Mini in Beacon Hill. Perfect for what it does, looks great, easy-to-use; probably not the right tool for bigger jobs.