What a week! It’s great to be a Micrsoftee in the SBG group: Startup Business Group.

After launching a major update for Microsoft Hohm yesterday announcing an energy score for every single home in the country, today, it’s about Microsoft Tag.

Microsoft Tag is officially coming out of beta with 1 billion Tag out there, check out where you can find a Microsoft Tag:

Coming out of beta we’ve updated our website, the Tag Campaign Manager and improved our Tag Reader clients and also introduced some cool new features that will enhance customers’ ability to create, execute and track creative Tag campaigns:

• A device ID feature will allow marketers to deliver a more personalized consumer experience across multiple Tags. For example, consumers can now receive customized content, such as a coupon or other offer from a retail outlet, based on Tags they’ve previously scanned
• A new .tag file format will make it easier to print and manage a large number of different Tags as part of a broad campaign deployment. Developers of professional printing programs can now generate the Tag graphic on the fly as part of their solution
• Tag has always been available worldwide and has been distributed and deployed globally. We have added localization in five new languages which include: French, Spanish, Turkish, Simplified Chinese, Italian
• And finally, we will be introducing a beta Heat Map feature in the next few days, available in the Tag Campaign Manager, that will help companies better measure Tag usage by location and make more informed decisions about their Tag campaigns and overall marketing spend

You can find more about how to implement these features and more over at the Microsoft Tag website.

Try it right now, download the new Microsoft Tag reader on your phone by going on http://gettag.mobi/ and scan this Tag:

If you have any feedback, feel free to reach us on our Facebook Fan Page or on Twitter

From my last post, you can check every single Hohm Home Score (A Hohm Score is a number from 0 to 100 (higher is better) measuring your home's energy efficiency based on home structure and your estimated energy use) in the United States. In addition, we aggregated all the Hohm scores per states to produce the below heat-map:

Below the bottom 10 states based on the Microsoft Hohm Score:

My Microsoft Hohm score is 61!:-)

Another great day, we’re proud to announce a major milestone from Microsoft hohm:

Starting today, more than 60 million homeowners will be able to answer one simple question: “Am I an energy hog or an energy miser?” Microsoft Corp. today announced the availability of the Hohm Score, an estimate of a home’s energy efficiency, offered as part the company’s free online home energy management tool, Microsoft Hohm. By simply typing in an address at http://www.microsoft-hohm.com, anyone can see the Hohm Score for almost any home in the United States.

“The Hohm Score provides an easy way for anyone to measure their home energy efficiency, and compare with others.  It’s important to note that the average Hohm Score here in the US is a failing grade,” said Troy Batterberry, product unit manager of Microsoft Hohm. “Fortunately, by making some simple changes to your household, consumers can easily achieve a passing mark, and save tens of billions of dollars each and every year.”

Hohm Scores are calculated by comparing a home’s actual and potential energy efficiency and is grounded with advanced analytics licensed from Lawrence Berkeley National Labs and statistical data from the Department of Energy. In addition to individual scores, Hohm Scores are available by zip code, city and state so anyone can compare their score with others around the country.

“The Hohm Score is the first step in helping us all make smarter decisions about our home energy use,” said Troy Batterberry, product unit manager of Microsoft Hohm. “If each of the 60 million households improved their Hohm Score by five points, collectively that would equal over $8 billion in savings a year.”

Available today for free to all U.S. residential energy consumers, Hohm is working to help everyone save energy and money by offering insight into home energy usage and by providing personalized recommendations. Hohm has established partnerships with utilities and the Ford Motor Co. and is actively working with these partners to realize a long-term vision of connecting just about anything that uses energy to help automate and optimize energy use for consumers.

The top 10 green places to live in the United States:

Check out your address now:

If you have any questions, ask us on Twitter and Facebook!

Share your Hohm Score, mine is 61!

Back from the Web 2.0 Expo Sf 2010 based in San Francisco, you’ll find below a couple of notes from the sessions but also some take away, quotes and top podcasts.

Take away:

• Startup Release rhythm is 1 week (Farmville / Dropbox / Facebook / Twitter / Google / …….., specs writing is the old model)
• Everything start with a great product, better your product is, less money you’ll spend in Marketing including PR / Advertising!
• One has become many! Turn your users to advocates(invite your friends, “sent from my iPhone”, get extra points…)
• You make a product for your audience not for your ego

Favorite quotes:

• “Even if you are smarted than me, if I update my product every week and you every month, you dead! – Eric Ries
• “Failure is a great quality equalizer” from Eric Ries who spent 6/7 months focusing on code quality and features instead of building a product that people wanted
• “Every time you improve your product experience by 10%, you increase by 50% your loyal users” - Drew Houston (Dropbox)

Must see podcast from the Expo:

• Web 2.0 Expo SF 2010: Eric Ries, "The Lean Startup: Innovation Through Experimentation. ..."
• Web 2.0 Expo SF 2010: Tim O'Reilly, "State of the Internet
• Web 2.0 Expo SF 2010: June Cohen, "Ideas Worth Spreading:

Notes from sessions:

SEO: From Soup to Nuts Eric Enge (Stone Temple Consulting), Rand Fishkin (SEOmoz), Stephan Spencer (Covario), Jessie Stricchiola (Alchemist Media, Inc.)

• Overall
• Use SEO browser to review your site and redirects: http://www.seo-browser.com/index.php?actionType=advanced&saveURL=true
• Use site explorer tools: http://www.seomoz.org/seo-toolbar  and http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/
• Important to use the right keywords / Phrases in Anchor text. Failed example with Bush : http://searchengineland.com/google-kills-bushs-miserable-failure-search-other-google-bombs-10363
• Better to have 10 links from different sites than 1000000 from 1 site
• The art of SEO
• When building website, use consumer keywords vs industry keywords. Use Search traffic keyword tools to measure search volume:.
• E.g: more search on “digital cameras” than “digital camera”
• Others tools:
• World tracker: http://www.wordtracker.com/
• Keyword discovery: http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/
• Suggestion tool: http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-information/
• Trends: http://www.google.com/trends
• Insights for Search: http://google.com/insights/search/
• Quintura : http://quintura.com/
• Link Strategy:
• 1. Manual requests
• Develop list of relevant websites
• Research contact
• Contact!
• 2. Competitive Research
• 3. Distribute cool tools such as Widget
• 4. Link bail and viral Campaign
• 5. Content and Data syndication
• 6. Link reclamation
• Command lines in Search Engines:
• Linkdomain: hulu.com –site:hulu.com
• Check site: http://www.seomoz.org/
• Social Media to leverage:
• Wikipedia: create a page for your business – Remember that you need to build credibility to keep content or find a top wiki user to get credit to your page otherwise your content won’t last
• Digg: Engage top Diggers to post your links and make the home page
• Youtube: Work on your title, description, Tags and add your links!
• Facebook fan pages: Indexed by Search engines, use it!
• Use Social Media Bookmarking  such as Delicious

From Zero to One Million Users Drew Houston (Dropbox), Adam Smith (Xobni)

• Saturate your community
• Media Resonance
• Have a great product
• Invite People
• Share with your friends
• Books: “Inbound Marketing”
• Every time you make your product experience 10% easier, you increase by 50% your loyal users
• Start simple and add feature after gathering feedback
• Email to get people back
• Usertesting.com to come to test your website
• Make people to give feedback via survey, rating system
• Make your product turns users to Evangelists
• “Sent from my iPad” every time someone send an email from their iPad
• Social game – Invite friends to make more points
• Share with my friends on FB, Twitter….
• SEM is good on an ongoing base
• Search impact the whole business funnel

It's been a while since my last post. Busy working and practicing Kitesurfing :)

That's it? Actually, no! I've been working with 3 friends on an idea that today is taking life! Freudit.com, a place to share and interpret your dreams! 

Dreams have been called names, ranging from "the royal road to the unconscious" (Freud), to " a royal case of indigestion!" (anonymous).

The average person has about 3 to 5 dreams per night, some up to 7 dreams in one night. During a full 8-hour sleep, roughly 2 hours are spent dreaming...

Freudit is a "social dreamscape"- a community, and social network where our "waking sleep" gets to enjoy a "second life", through the " insightful", and sometimes " hilarious" interpretation of fellow dreamers.

Freudit offers us the potential to go sheep-riding into our internal landscapes... We "are" what we think...what if we "become" what we dream?

For all those who love puzzles, enjoy a fun ride, and wouldn't mind digging "on-line" for some " off-line" answers, Freudit is the answer!


Freudit's Dream Team

Follow us on Twitter:@freudit

Become a Facebook fan here

Write us: info@freudit.com

Agree? By the way, if you want to connect with me… it’s really easy: Here I am: Facebook(Friends, Colleagues and Family), Twitter(Everybody), LinkedIn(Professional Network) or my Microsoft Tag!