We all know music sampling. Like the song “Take Care”, which began with Gil Scott-Heron, then passed through Jamie XX and ultimately on to Drake, who sampled it and pulled in Rhianna for vocals.

Listening to all of its permutations the other day, inspiration struck — sampling occurs in startups, too! Like Fancy, which I blogged about the other day; it feels a little bit like Pinterest, Svpply and Fab all rolled into one. And Pinterest – isn’t that a little bit Tumblr and Polyvore? Obviously/ironically/interestingly enough, I’m not the first one to have this idea : ). After a quick search, I found Everything is a Remix.

The four part video series, produced by Kirby Ferguson, covers the phenomenon of “Copy-Transform-Combine” as is applies to songs, movies, and technology. Here’s Part 3, detailing how the computer came to be:

Also, here are some awesome sketch notes by Craighton Berman from Austin Kelon (author of Steal Like an Artist) & Kirby Ferguson’s recent 2012 SXSW panel: Everything is a remix, so steal like an artist.

Using Kirby’s Copy-Transform-Combine, I applied it to a few more of my favorite startups:

• Facebook = Hot or Not + Friendster + MySpace
• Twitter = SMS + Blog
• Tumblr = Blog + Delicious + Twitter
• Spotify = Napster + Pandora + iTunes + Last.fm
• Pinterest = Tumblr + Polyvore
• Fancy = Delicious + Tumblr + Gilt + Pinterest + Svpply + Google + Fab

This sampling of functionality, interface, and identifiable structures has allowed startups to earn quicker adoption, integration and utility. The most creative people have figured out how to copy, transform, and combine a wealth of ideas to create unique value.

What are some of your favorite startup remixes?

If you’re one of those guys thinking Pinterest is just for girls, and can’t bring yourself to adopt it despite its stunning growth, you might check out The Fancy – part store, part magazine, part bookmarking – a tool to curate the things that define you. It’s a bit like Pinterest, but sleeker, cooler, more minimal, and more provocative. It’s luxury. And women, don’t be shy; you can Fancy as well (the break down is about 60:40, male:female). Backed by the likes of Kanye, Jack Dorsey, Andreessen Horowitz, and PPR, Fancy is certainly not lacking street cred or style.

Aside from demographics, monetization is another characteristic that separates Fancy from Pinterest. Fancy members can browse deals and sales – literally shop the photos. The entire checkout process takes place on Fancy, rather than linking out to the merchant’s website. Ultimately, Fancy plans to “support a Google-like bidding system, except instead of keywords, merchants will be bidding on the demand surrounding users’ clipped postings” as detailed in a recent TechCrunch piece.

Pinterest has shown some promise for monetization as well, with functionality to tag images with prices making them more shoppable. But, as Jeremy Levins acknowledged, their strategy “isn’t in the oven and it’s not even off the baking table”. Some of the more inventive efforts have been from the brands using Pinterest rather than Pinterst itself, such as Gilt Baby & Kids’ “Pin it to Unlock” campaign. Group buying, meet pinning. Gilt posts an image, and once it’s been re-pinned 50 times, the pin links to an exclusive, hidden sale on Gilt.com.

So while Pinterest and Fancy share some common functionality, their strategies are entirely different. It’s a race to see who can crack the social commerce nut first.

It’s been days now since Facebook erupted the tech world with their $1B purchase of Instagram. Since then, bloggers and reporters alike have been trying to determine the causes and ramifications of the deal. Popular theories include:

• Defense/Offense: Facebook bought a potential competitor and prevented other competitors from doing the same. As David Carr said in the New York Times, “Good for Facebook for buying a bandwagon before they got ran over by it.”
• Mobile UX: Facebook’s mobile app is perhaps its weakest link and has been “publicly labeled as a risk to its bottom line” as reported on Inc.com. Instagram has mastered the platform with its simple, well-designed & loved app as proven by its 5 star App Store rating, based on more than 80,000 reviews.
• Photos are the future: People love looking at and expressing their lives through photos, and Facebook has always been a popular platform to share these images. “Instagram is helping users create an image of themselves they’d like to be seen” quips Cliff Kuang in Co.Design.

But if we humanize Facebook, as we often do with brands these days, then their purchase of Instagram really just mimics users own adoption of the app.

Users like Instagram because it adds instant cool to photos. Without any skill, one can quickly apply a filter to create an artful image. Instagram is well loved by designers for its aesthetic and developers for its language.  So if you think of Facebook as a person, then buying Instagram for its coolness factor totally makes sense. Even they are delighted by the slick photos, smooth interface, and seamless functionality. And I’m sure they hope having Instagram in house will give them more street cred.

Furthermore, Instagram helps users construct an (apparent) authenticity – albeit, a rosy colored, vintage-romantic glimpse of their lives, carefully curated one image at a time. Facebook on the other hand, whether disliked for their privacy policies, straightjacket UI, or even their sheer size, lacks this authenticity-factor. Something that Timeline hasn’t even been able to fix completely.

And so Facebook bought the thing that is hardest to fake. It bought sincerity. – Paul Ford

So what can we expect from this recent union? Hopefully an improved mobile app, better sharing for Instagram photos (maybe even tagging), and perhaps a rebuilt Facebook? One can only dream.

The intersection of fashion and tech has long been an interest of mine, as you can see here, here and here (and here). Much to my delight there’s an entire mini-section of fashion-techie panels at this year’s SXSW.

Kicking it off yesterday were: Alisa Gould-Simon, Pose; Allison Kellman, Ideeli; Claire Mazur & Erica Cerulo, Of a Kind; and Lauren Sherman, Lucky Magazine. During their panel titled, The Fashion Fog, they discussed how commerce and content could coexist.

Ecommerce and brick and mortar fashion brands alike, are leveraging popular social content platforms like Pinterest, Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and even Foursquare to create personality for their brands. When it comes to being heard in a saturated social landscape, Lauren Sherman of Lucky Magazine believes in spontaneity; hit people with a tip when they least expect it.

Or as we like to say at KA+A, “surprise and delight your users.”

Some of the biggest challenges for these companies are in UI/UX space. It’s not pleasant to click outside of the editorial environment to buy. That red “buy” button may test better, but how does that fit with the brand?

And this is where the fashion and tech intersection gets really interesting. Building great experiences online through creative and user-focused design is the domain of tech-led companies, largely because that’s where their products live, wrapped up in services.

So what can fashion ecommerce companies do to create a more seamless experience? Part of the solution is getting to know customers better, to deliver great product recommendations. And fortunately there’s technology for that.

My Best Friend’s Hair
If you’ve spent a day in Broad Ripple, it’s likely you’ve noticed the abundance of hair salons. With so many options, how do you choose? Enter My Best Friend’s Hair, where consumers can search for stylists based on their criteria (price, specialties, location), and stylists can be found by consumers.

Quipol
Quipol makes it easy to gauge your audience’s sentiment. While not specifically designed for fashion, this flexible tool certainly has a future in it! What better way to explain why, than to show you. Here’s some new glasses I’m considering from Warby Parker (another fashion + tech love story). What say you?

Apparel Media
These guys aren’t from Indy, but with IU as an alma mater and Chicago as their HQ, they’re pretty darn local. What started as a custom apparel printing business, has now transformed into a high caliber solution to help global brands connect with a hyperlocal audience. Companies like AXE have used Apparel Media to get in front of their target (male, 18-24) by co-branding shirts, bundled with product samples or QR-enabled insert cards. (Read more on Forbes)

Roboto Wear
A self described “clothing company with a mechanical heart,” RobotoWear has created a line of robot t-shirts, polos, hoodies and hats, perfect for the tech-minded.

Connect with me to talk fashion (and tech):

• Twitter
• Tumblr
• Svpply

Do you remember Del.icio.us? Or Delicious as it’s been simplified to today. I’ve been a longtime user now (since ’07). Their simple, but powerful, tagging system immediately became a trusty aid for me to catalog and organize my project management apps, blog inspiration, gift lists, wish lists, wedding, trips, and more. Delicious was a gateway solution for me (and millions of others) to tame the web and cull it according to my personal tastes.

Quickly after joining Delicious, I discovered other, more specialized apps to help me collect & share the web.

First there was Tumblr: a beautiful, engaging, simply designed and very compelling microblogging tool. Links became alive when you could display them as videos, photos or quotes – providing a sort of beauty and depth that Delicious lacked.

Then I found Svpply, a tool to catalog, share and discover things I wanted to buy. I was doing this before on Tumblr, but Svpply makes it so easy to capture the category (clothes, shoes, media, home goods, etc.) and price of a product. And I can follow other users, search their lists, and find new things that match my tastes.

When I recently took a trip to Paris, I signed up for Duffel, a travel app to collect lodging, restaurants, and activities that I was planning for the trip. Only it’s more than a list; coupled with a virtual cork board and Google Map integration, it is a comprehensive dashboard for easily planning your travels.

Then of course there’s Spotify (pre-cursored by Last.fm), which I can use to build playlists that portray my musical personality and share with the world at any moment what I’m listening to.

These are all wonderful tools, and I use them often. But I feel that despite all of these solutions, I’ve lapped back to my original problem: how to organize my corner of the web. My interests, albeit quite a bit more organized now, are still divided at best. And many of them could happily coexist if given the chance.

With the recent rollout of the new Delicious, I had hope. After being sold by Yahoo, Delicious went back into beta to introduce Delicious Stacks – Playlists for the Web. It feels sort of Tumblr-esque. You can create a stack dedicated to a theme, associate photos with your links, and view them in a grid layout. You can share stacks and follow stacks. It’s easy to see how one could turn back to Delicious as a more appealing place to keep your repository.

But there’s too many other specialized traits of Tumblr, Svpply, Spotify and Duffel that I don’t think I could give up. I love Tumblr‘s aesthetic and affinity for fashion; Duffel‘s integration with Google maps is clutch; no one makes it quite as easy to catalog your shopping list as Svpply; and Spotify is a straight up specialist in music. So Delicious Stacks, while I applaud your leap, I’m not sure you’re the answer to streamlining my collections.

When I think of my dream solution, I think of those folks over at Salesforce. They were on to something with their app store – allowing other people, who can satisfy a niche need better, develop that solution and plug it into their platform so their customers can enjoy a single ecosystem. The platform is key.

There’s a “Gang of Four” warring to create this platform. Google owns information, Apple the device, Amazon the cloud, and Facebook the identity. Facebook recently gave us a glimpse of their strategy at the f8 conference: Facebook Timeline. With the promise of “all your apps in one space” it could be just the trick. I’m eagerly awaiting the possibility!

—-

Last.fm
Founded 2002
Last.fm lets you effortlessly keep a record of what you listen to from any player. Based on your taste, Last.fm recommends you more music and concerts. (Last.fm)

del.icio.us
Founded in 2003
A social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. (Wikipedia)

The Facebook
Founded 2004
A social network where users can create profiles with photos, lists of personal interests, contact information, and other personal information. (Wikipedia)

Polyvore
Founded 2007
Polyvore is a tool that helps you clip, style and share digital collages of products you find while shopping.

Tumblr
Founded 2007
A microblogging platform that allows users to post text, images, videos, links, quotes and audio to their tumblelog, a short-form blog. (Wikipedia)

Spotify
Founded 2008
Spotify is an online music streaming service. Like a growing number of distribution applications, Spotify uses peer-to-peer technology to stream music to its users. (Spotify Forum)

Pinterest
Founded 2009
A vision board-styled social photo sharing website where users can create and manage theme-based image collections. (Wikipedia)

Svpply
Founded 2009
Use Svpply to keep track of the things you want to buy, or browse a personal feed of products from across the web, curated and filtered by the people and stores you find interesting. (Svpply)

Duffel
Founded 2009
Duffel is place to collect your ideas on where to go and what to do while you’re traveling. Comprehensive, centralized trip-planning dashboard – with tools that enable travelers to drag and drop information on lodging, dining and activities from across the Web, get travel inspiration by viewing other members’ public itineraries, and plan group trips involving multiple destination experts. (Duffel)

The New Delicious
Released in 2011
With Delicious you save, stack and share the web. Instantly save your favorite links, collect your discoveries in stacks, share what you find, and dig deeper into your favorite topics. ( Delicious)

Facebook Timeline
Text Released 2011
Timeline is a new way of presenting yourself on Facebook, that dives deep into your past, but also makes your history dynamic while giving apps a new lease on life and works just as well on mobile as it does the desktop. (Gizmodo)

But there actually may be a third, more exciting value prop to amplifying your list: innovation, or even invention, of products.

The post details the common scenario of proposal writing:

For example, let’s say you have to draft up a contract for a client project, a rather humdrum task. Applying N-dimensional thinking, you decide to transform this task by increasing its overall efficiency (one new dimension), improving the contract template design (a second dimension), and learning a new application that will add value to your general skill set and resumé (a third dimension).

It’s a familiar story, and it’s one that for some of our colleagues, inspired the launch of Tinderbox, a web-based application that helps you create, manage, and track proposals more efficiently.

Task lists just got a little more exciting. What do you get to do today?

After signing up the whole team for paid accounts, I let my other test login expire. I had forgotten about it until today, when I had the chance to see some of Flow’s remarketing efforts.

I have to say, their campaign was pretty compelling (and this is to an already converted customer). They tell you straight up that the app has changed; try it again – for free.

In the world of software, where iteration is key to developing the best product, this is a brilliant move. I’ve tried many apps, where it was just a missing key feature or two, between me and a paid account. Or, I thought it would be good someday, but it wasn’t the right fit, right now. Usually, I stay signed up with their newsletters – but rarely have I felt that I, the non-customer, am being spoken to. I love that this campaign has a clear audience and content that resonates.

Give former users a second chance. You’ve got nothing to lose, and a great chance to win them over.

When my friend Jenni and I started IndySpectator, we decided to base our business on email. Not a blog, Tumblr, Facebook, or a custom platform. Just plain jane email. Each week we send a few issues to our loyal readers exposing them to new things to love about Indy – food, arts, startups, music, events, and more.

The result has been a very engaged audience, that I don’t imagine we could have gained through a web-based platform. Our readers like us, because email offers the excitement of exclusivity and being the first in the know. No one feels special “discovering” what’s been broadcasted to millions. Additionally we come to our readers, versus having them come to us. Life is hectic enough to remember to read that post and social streams are updated so often that it’s easy to miss a pertinent piece of news.

Email has been good for our business. It’s familiar for us and our consumers, and with simple software like MailChimp we can create and send campaigns with minimal involvement. It’s a repeatable, executable and lightweight model that Jenni and I have been able to manage and moonlight with just a few hours each day.

Email has also been a good source of data. Our audience is a known quantity and the stats from each campaign are user-centric: open rates, unsubscribe rates, forwards, clicks, etc. Amalgamate the results, and we can begin to see our readers’ personalities: behavior patterns, likes, dislikes, and with social integration, we even know what they are saying about us on Twitter and on Facebook. This data is invaluable not only to improve our content and product, but also to quantify and qualify our audience to potential partners and advertisers.

In their recent Email X-Factors report, ExactTarget details the advantages of email as a marketing tool (and in our case, as a product):

• FAMILIARITY
  Because email isn’t new, consumers are familiar with the technology, are comfortable using it, and know exactly what to expect.
• MANAGEABILITY
  Many consumers wait until the evening or weekend to catch up on email. So while they like the immediacy of sending an email message, they appreciate the ability to read or respond at their own pace.
• PRIVACY AND TRUST
  Subscribers have chosen to engage with you, and in return expect that you won’t share their email address and that they can unsubscribe anytime.
• RELEVANCY
  The biggest difference between valuable and non-valuable email programs is whether or not the information provided relates to the interests of the customer.
• EXCLUSIVITY
  Becoming a Subscriber is like becoming a member of an exclusive club, and they expect members-only perks: deals & promotions; early notification – being the “first in the know”; education – keeping informed on topics they’re interested in; and content tailored to their interests.

Download the full report on ExactTarget.com.

The one glaring weakness of publishing our content exclusively through email, is missing out on SEO potential and capturing a new audience through search. Not wanting to compromise the strength of our core email offering, we’ve began to explore a few ways to augment it with online content. Several months ago, we launched an exclusive Facebook campaign – 365 Ways to Love Indy. Each day, we post bite-size things to do around Indy. They’ve been crafted to stand on their own and engage those who don’t subscribe to our email, or to re-engage with our loyal subscribers who are just looking for a little bit more to love about Indy.

Email certainly isn’t new, but it’s potency as a communication tool has continued to prove itself.

Yesterday morning I attended the monthly Linking Indy Women event. (A great event if you’ve never been!) I had the extreme pleasure of listening to Nicole Misencik from WTHR share her professional experience. Nicole is an active user of both Twitter and Facebook professionally and personally. As she walked us through the benefits and challenges she faces in having such an active social media presence a common theme presented itself in the Q&A:

How do I find what I am actually looking for?

Many of us enjoy using Twitter and find it to be an additional bonus to our professional lives, and many of us also find it to be an additional task that seems unmanageable to stay on-top-of throughout the day. Either way, we can all agree that unless you are able to dedicate 90% of your day to following your Twitter stream it’s hard to keep up with all the information flying around.

If you’re like me, then you often find yourself logging on and skimming the mass of tweets that have piled up over the last 10 minuets, last hour, or last day – searching for relevant information worthy of your time. I haven’t given up on trying to manage it, but I knew I needed a more effective way to take advantage of all that information within the small time frames I’m available. I read a great article on Macworld.com by David Chartier that has given me perspective and a strategy to do what it is I am really trying to accomplish – find, share, and respond to interesting relevant content.

I’d suggest checking out the article, How and Why to Search Twitter, in it’s entirety, but if you’re short on time here is quick overview:

Why To Search:
There are millions of Twitter users that are tweeting around the clock about anything and everything – it’s physically impossible to follow it all. With so much content passing in front of your eyes it’s important to take advantage of the search functionality within Twitter and additional applications that can help get you what you are looking for faster.

Where to start:
Use search.twitter.com as a starting point for basic searches like a name, company, product, feature, trendy topic, etc.

Hashtags – you can’t over use them enough. A # it makes it easier for everyone to follow the same conversation!

Incase you didn’t know: ”Twitter only provides access to a few days’ worth of archive.”

Don’t fear there are other ways to search for information that are farther back in history. For example, Google’s social media specific search engine Realtime allows you to find relevant information on Twitter and Facebook. Bing offers a similar solution, www.bing.com/social/, but with less depth into the past than Google.

Specific Searches:
Twitter allows users to search for information with the traditional “or” and, “and” functionality but it goes a step further in it’s advanced search features which you can access at search.twitter.com/advanced.

Search Tools:
Twitter’s Search Widget allows you to paste a customized code into your website that will return tweets on a specific topic you tell it to.

“For example, you could run a query like “yourproductname ” which will return happy tweets from users who mention your product.”

There are many additional apps like Twitterific that allow you to search and save your results to refer back to later. The article can give you a few more places to look pending on what your needs are.

Hootsuite is a great app for businesses that manage multiple accounts and need to keep tabs on searches and keywords.