Name: Jecca Cervero

Case Study

Chapter 28

James Currier

Founder, Tickle

James Currier founded Tickle in 1999. Tickle was originally called Emode.  It was a site that allowed the user to learn more about himself by taking various personality assessments online. James Currier got the idea for Tickle after completing a Meyers-Briggs corporate personality test in one his class at Harvard. He noticed that the test generated more conversation than any movie or book ever had amongst Harvard students. He was looking at the web as a delivery medium and thought that he could administer these assessments online. Banking on the fact that “we are our own favorite subject” and people would tell their friends when they learned something interesting about themselves, he set out to build the site. He figured the data he collected would likely be very accurate and everyone would naturally answer the test honestly because if they’re taking the time to complete it, they want to find out truthful results about themselves. He believed that the Internet would allow you to have a media experience about you and the people you know. And he thought that this testing could be incredibly powerful because people love talking about themselves, love talking about people they know, and it could be viral.

James Currier comes up with what the product would actually do. And then he started talking to people about it and getting their ideas. He became paranoid because he thought this idea was incredibly obvious. It seemed like this was the best thing to do online. It would be deep because you’d get so much data on people. You could help them find the right job, get a great date, and help them facilitate conversations within the family. Because of this great idea,  Tickle was launched.

When tickle have been launched there was a time when IVillage started copying Tickle. Currier was very worried about it for probably a year, and then it just faded away. The competitors just gave up on copying Tickle.

I think the users want tickle because it was all about the willingness to communicate with people and understanding of someone’s need to form their brains and their language around their relationships with each other.

Tickle was acquired by Monster in 2004 for about $100 million. Shortly after this interview, Currier founded Ooga Labs, a digital media studio that develops consumer internet applications.

Three Things I Learned

·         I don’t know anything about Tickle. And when I  read this chapter I knew that it was really fun site. It allows you to learn more about yourself by taking various personality assessments online

·         Where you are is never enough for the people around you

·         Starting a company is the act of collecting and organizing the human energy

Name: Jecca Cervero

Case Study

Chapter 29

Blake Ross

Creator, Firefox

Blake Ross and Dave Hyatt started Firefox as a side project while working at the Mozilla Foundation. Firefox has security, speed and new features that will change the way you use the Web. Ross started working on the Mozilla project in 2000. it was an open source. Anyone could work on it. He started working closely with the Netscape team, because they were basing their product on Mozilla. He was just helping  them fix bugs, and they invited Ross out for internship one summer, so he went out to Netscape, which was a pretty cool first job.

Firefox was something just for them in the beginning. To make something that they knew they could make, but not inside Netscape. It was an outlet for frustrations.  That time, they were working to revive the struggling Netscape browser, but became frustrated by the constraints imposed on them. So Ross and Hyatt decided to build a browser that they would actually want to use.

            On their spare time, they began developing a new browser that was fast, simple, and reliable. In 2002, they launched the initial version, called Phoenix. They quickly encountered trademark issues. In this case, Phoenix Technologies complained because they had some kind of web browser, too. So, they renamed it Firebird, because it’s the same imagery, but there was an open source database already called Firebird, so they renamed it again. At that point, it was fairly popular so they wanted to keep the “Fire” part of the name. They just went through Fire anything names for a couple of months, and somebody came up with Firefox, which is actually the Chinese name for a red panda. And in 2004 they released Firefox 1.0, which was an instant hit.

Firefox was different from traditional startups. Companies usually worry about competition for financial reasons, but when they did Firefox, money was just always sort of there.

People loved the simplicity and went crazy over tabbed bowsing of Firefox. It was something new. It was an open source project run like a startup, both in the concern for the end user and in the attention paid to marketing. The results were impressive. Firefox has cut into the formerly overwhelming market share of Internet Explorer, and dominates among technical users.

In 2005, Ross took a leave from Stanford University to start a startup with fellow Firefox developer Joe Hewitt.

Three Things I learned

·         Blake Ross is the creator of Firefox and Firefox is Mozilla Corporation's popular open source web browser.

·       Firefox is considered to be much safer to use than Internet Explorer. Also, Firefox lets the user customize the browsers' behavior, thus leaving the user exposed to less "web frustrations" such as popup advertising.

• Firefox, is actually the Chinese name for a red panda