Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

For meaningful growth, startups must completely change the rules of traditional marketing and innovate outside of those growth channels. You should be thinking growth when building your app. Companies like Dropbox, Mint and the recently sensational Slack incorporated sharing into their functionalities.Mailbox used the waiting list to their advantage and it worked.

Lot of startups now look beyond AdWords, SEO or popular marketing strategies to find users. These are a collection of products, tools and apps to grow your startup or new business....

Nothing screams “summer!” like a bag full of beer and ice. The messenger-bag gurus at Timbuk2 know this, and have re-clad and re-released their stealthy party-in-a-bag bag, the Dolores Chiller Messenger — this time in Pilsner Urquell’s signature green and white colors.

You may be asking “can’t I just dump all the stuff out of my own messenger bag and fill it with beer and ice?” Why no, you can’t. Your bag’s interior isn’t insulated; and more importantly, your bag doesn’t come with a handy bottle opener....

When no electricity is available, a new self-powered emergency smartphone charger juices your smartphone with simple hand cranking. You could have all the apps in the world to prepare you for survival when disaster strikes — flashlight, emergency contacts, GPS and first aid tips — but they'll be entirely useless when you run out of battery juice on your phone.

If you're camping in the boondocks or preparing a disaster survival kit, you might want to consider a low-tech emergency smartphone charger. Seattle-based SOS Ready has designed the pocket-sized "SOSCharger," which is powered by you. With the gadget's built-in generator, all you do is connect to your smartphone via USB connection and hand-crank the handle. The SOSCharger has a 1,500 mAh Lithium Polymer battery, and depending on your phone and network, the company claims three to five minutes of winding will translate to five to 12 minutes of talk time....

After 36 hours of research, testing eight different devices in a number of real-world settings and then playing the audio we collected to a four-person blind listening panel to evaluate its sound quality, we’ve determined that the best audio recorder for taping meetings, lectures, and interviews is the $100Sony ICD-UX533. It recorded the most intelligible and truest-to-life sound clips of all the recorders we tested. It’s easily pocketable and its intuitive, easy-to-press function buttons combined with a legible, backlit screen gave it the best user interface out of all the models in our test group.

Who is this for?If you want to record a lecture, meeting, or interview, this pick is for you. It’s ideal for students, radio journalists, and anyone who needs to record meetings for future reference. On the other hand, if you’re a musician, a professional podcaster, a radio journalist or if you belong to some other profession that requires the use of a high-quality audio recorder on a regular basis, this pick isn’t for you....

The Segway. The Bluetooth headset. The pocket protector. What do these three technologies have in common? They all pretty much work as promised. They all seem like good ideas on paper. And they’re all too dorky to live.

Now, far be it from me to claim that nerdiness equals lack of popularity potential. But I contend that dorkiness and nerdiness are two different qualities. While nerdiness implies a certain social awkwardness that’s ultimately endearing, dorkiness connotes social obliviousness that opens you to deserved ridicule.

Guess which category Google Glass will fall under when it goes “mainstream?” Forget about the privacy concerns for a second. I don’t think you have to get that serious to recognize the inherent antisocialness of Google Glass. All you have to do is look at the guy in the picture at the top of this post. Or any of the rest of the guys on White Men Wearing Google Glass, a new Tumblr that serves up the data needed to transform the hypothesis “Google Glass is too dorky to succeed” into a proven scientific theory. Disagree? The floor is open for falsification. Start your own Tumblr: People Who Look Cool While Wearing Google Glass....