Never mind the metrics! You should have a play with Sugru!

So cool that we will have Sugru to give to everyone at CEO Tales with Balsamiq’s Peldi on 17th April. If you don’t know what it is, prepare to embrace something very cool. 🙂

The only thing cooler I have seen today was this BLN Easter egg that Marcin made…

Blinded by metrics? Think about customers.

We are pleased to invite you to participate in some of the best entrepreneur and investor networking in central London. Join us and founders, investors, senior executives from high growth businesses for quality networking and stimulating debate.

In this edition of BLN CEO Tales, we hear from Giacomo ‘Peldi’ Guilizzoni.

Peldi is the founder and CEO of Balsamiq, makers of Balsamiq Mockups, a fun little wireframing tool for programmers, UX experts and yes, even business types. Balsamiq has been a bit of a poster child for a new wave of tiny but ambitious bootstrapped tech startups, netting over $9M in sales in the first 3 years of operation, no external funding and still gathering rave reviews.

Balsamiq Mockups wireframing tools are used by over 80,000 different companies to help them design gorgeous software with ease. Peldi will be talking about how Balsamiq has become, in a very short time, one of the world’s best loved software companies.

He will also be discussing why he thinks too many software businesses are being blinded by metrics when they should be thinking about what their customer is doing. 

He will explain why he thinks the current fashion for data-driven software businesses is a bad thing and offers an alternative approach to software development – understanding what a customer is trying to achieve. An interesting counterpoint to the relentless drive to test everything, Peldi shows how understanding what customers want to do is just more important.

Peldi is a champion of the “radical transparency” trend that’s sweeping the Internet, through his posts on the popular Balsamiq Blog. You can read Peldi’s story in this blog post, or get to know him more through these interviews and his LinkedIn profile.

We promise you an evening of great food, drinks, sparkling conversation and some of the best views in London at the offices of Taylor Wessing – or your money back.

There is a small charge to attend. As ever, we offer a no questions asked refund policy if you attend and feel it wasn’t worth it.

Drinks: 18:00

Keynote Talk: 19:00, followed by networking drinks until 21:00

Address: Taylor Wessing, 5 New Street Square, EC4A 3TW, London.

Let people know you’re coming via LinkedIn and Lanyrd.

Just to get in the mood, take some time to view Peldi’s great Business of Software talk from October 2010 where he talks about what you should and should not worry about when growing your business.

REGISTER NOW.

Want do Business of Software attendees want us to talk to them about this year? These are the most common words used by Business of Software delegates this year when asked, ‘Talk to me about’ to be put on their badges.

Here is a ‘Wordle’ of the first 150 responses…

Nice that tea, beer and Mom feature more regularly than VC.

#BoS2012 takes place over 2 and a half days 1st-3rd October, 2012, at the Intercontinental Hotel, Boston. We advise booking accommodation early, whether you stay at the conference hotel – we hope you do and have a special conference rate – or choose another location. There is a $900 discount on the full ticket price till midnight 3rd April. If you didn’t make it to last year’s event, you will also get access to all of the talks from BoS 2011 when you register for BoS 2012.

Early Bird Registration Deadline midnight PST Tuesday 3rd April.

Interesting perspective on the size of the global advertising market from Martin Sorrell at WPP at this week’s 4A Transform event. In a discussion about whether the Internet has created more value than it has destroyed, (he argues it has created more), he gave the following numbers that represent WPP’s forecast advertising spend in 2012.

As WPP manages approximately $75 billion of marketing $ around the world, he gets a pretty good insight.

WPP Ad Spend Forecast 2012

• Twitter (2011) – $6,000,000 (He didn’t know 2012 number, perhaps inferring it wasn’t big enough for him to care about)
• Facebook – $400,000,000 (Up from $200 million in 2011 – 100% growth).
• Google – $2,000,000,000 (Up from $1.2 billion in 2011)
• News Corp – $2,500,000,000
• Other – $70,094,000,000

• Total Spend – $75,000,000,000

This event has finished. 

Blinded by metrics? Think about customers.

We are pleased to invite you to participate in some of the best entrepreneur and investor networking in central London. Join us and founders, investors, senior executives from high growth businesses for quality networking and stimulating debate.

In this edition of BLN CEO Tales, we hear from Giacomo ‘Peldi’ Guilizzoni.

Peldi is the founder and CEO of Balsamiq, makers of Balsamiq Mockups, a fun little wireframing tool for programmers, UX experts and yes, even business types. Balsamiq has been a bit of a poster child for a new wave of tiny but ambitious bootstrapped tech startups, netting over $9M in sales in the first 3 years of operation, no external funding and still gathering rave reviews.

Balsamiq Mockups wireframing tools are used by over 80,000 different companies to help them design gorgeous software with ease. Peldi will be talking about how Balsamiq has become, in a very short time, one of the world’s best loved software companies.

He will also be discussing why he thinks too many software businesses are being blinded by metrics when they should be thinking about what their customer is doing. 

He will explain why he thinks the current fashion for data-driven software businesses is a bad thing and offers an alternative approach to software development – understanding what a customer is trying to achieve. An interesting counterpoint to the relentless drive to test everything, Peldi shows how understanding what customers want to do is just more important.

Peldi is a champion of the “radical transparency” trend that’s sweeping the Internet, through his posts on the popular Balsamiq Blog. You can read Peldi’s story in this blog post, or get to know him more through these interviews and his LinkedIn profile.

We promise you an evening of great food, drinks, sparkling conversation and some of the best views in London at the offices of Taylor Wessing – or your money back.

There is a small charge to attend. As ever, we offer a no questions asked refund policy if you attend and feel it wasn’t worth it.

Drinks: 18:00

Keynote Talk: 19:00, followed by networking drinks until 21:00

Address: Taylor Wessing, 5 New Street Square, EC4A 3TW, London.

Let people know you’re coming via LinkedIn and Lanyrd.

Just to get in the mood, take some time to view Peldi’s great Business of Software talk from October 2010 where he talks about what you should and should not worry about when growing your business.

Event partners:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SOLD OUT. WAITING LIST IN PLACE.

Want to meet the guy behind the ‘Think Different’ campaign and the guy who put the, ‘i’ in iMac? Want to know what he knows that could be relevant to your business? Here is your chance!

Our fourth CEO Tales of the year, May 31st, 6-9.00 pm, features the fabulous and fantastic Ken Segall who just launched the bestselling book, ‘Insanely Simple: the Obsession that Drives Apple’s Success’. You shouldn’t miss this if you care about product marketing, branding and focusing your business on the stuff that really matters.

If you register to attend before 5pm on Friday 25th May, you will also get the chance to be selected to attend an exclusive pre-event workshop/round-table discussion. Details here.

See who is already coming here.

See what people want to ask Ken here.

Who the heck is Ken Segall? In his own words:

“I’m a creative director who’s had more than a few adventures in technology marketing, including branding, product naming and strategy. I have a long history with Apple and NeXT — where I took a blood oath to uphold the principles of simplicity.”

In fact, Ken was the marketing Svengali bought back to Apple by Steve Jobs when he returned to the Apple fold when he was named interim CEO in 1997.

He revolutionised Apple with his ‘Think Different’ campaign and added to the world’s vocabulary that powerful little ‘i’ which stands unabashedly before thousands of Apple products.

As well as Apple, Ken has been involved in some of the most successful brands of the past 20 years including IBM, BMW and Intel. So he has done some cool stuff and knows a lot about marketing, Apple and a whole bunch of other great technology businesses. He also runs the Scoopertino blog. We think he is the kind of person that you want to hear from. We can’t wait.

The BLN CEO Tales with Ken Segall offers participants the chance to hear Ken talk about his experiences within Apple and witness the UK launch of his much anticipated book ‘Insanely Simple: the obsession that drives Apple’s success’, followed by a lively Q&A and networking.

You will receive a copy of Ken’s book ‘Insanely Simple: the obsession that drives Apple’s success’ with our compliments.

Date: 31st May 2012

Time: 6-9 pm

Venue: Sir Alexander Fleming Building. Imperial College London. South Kensington Campus. London SW7 2AZ

For more on Ken’s work and thoughts, take a look at his blog or just watch this video for a sense of some of the stuff that Ken did…

Tickets are £35 + VAT for entrepreneurs and investors and includes a copy of the book. Light refreshments provided. As ever, we offer a no questions asked refund policy if you attend and feel it wasn’t worth it. We are confident that you will.

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