Tuesday, January 30, 2018

How Emotionally Intelligent Are You?

We are honoured to have Ush Dhanak talk to us about "Why we will need Emotional Intelligence in the Future Of Work" on Friday 28 July in Sydney.  
Emotional intelligence has helped businesses explain why some of their best performing staff and leaders don’t necessarily have the best academic qualification or professional skills.
But many leaders are still confused by emotional intelligence and its importance to the workplace. They are asking:
“How do I know if I am emotionally intelligent?”
“How can I measure it in myself and what do I look for in others?”
In order to answer these questions, it helps to first understand the main traits of emotional intelligence. Once you know these, you can start looking for them in yourself and others and assess how you measure up. You can then take steps to improve those that you are weakest on, if you want to raise your EQ.

Below, Ush Dhanak identifies 15 initial questions you can ask yourself to self-assess your level of emotional intelligence:



  1. Do you have the ability to listen to others?
Blindly ploughing your own course with no regard for others is no sign of EQ! Instead, emotionally intelligent people are able to listen and take in the thoughts, feelings, and opinions of others. They actively seek these out and are able to process them without judgement.
  1. Can you identify and express emotions?
We all experience a multitude of emotions – but people with EQ recognise what these emotions are and are able to label them and express what they are. Labelling emotions has the effect of diminishing their intensity and creating clarity – which can lead to better decision-making in the workplace.
  1. Are you curious about others?
Because you have the ability to empathise with others, you are also curious about them, if you have high emotional intelligence. This connects with the first above: you listen and care about the responses of others – which makes you curious about what they’re going through.
  1. How self-aware are you?
People with EQ are comfortable in their skin. They know what they’re good at and what they’re not so good at. They certainly don’t think or act like they are the best at everything. They are also better able to handle situations when their weaknesses may be exposed – because they are prepared for them.
  1. Do you display confidence?
Because of high self-awareness, emotionally intelligent people have a confidence about them – but not excessive or misplaced confidence. It comes across as an air of authority and balance. 
  1. Do you view change as threat or opportunity?
Emotionally intelligent people don’t feel threatened by change; because they are comfortable, aware, prepared, and confident in their abilities, they are flexible enough to approach change as an opportunity. They can help others to see it positively too: partly for this reason, high EQ points to strong leadership qualities.
  1. Are you easily upset – or unruffable?
People with EQ are thick-skinned and can take a joke; that of course doesn’t mean that they are immune to emotion – they are just not offended easily or over-sensitive to criticism and can control their emotions. The balance and confidence that they exhibit makes them seem more ‘unruffable’ than most.
  1. Do you build strong relationships?
Another trait is the ability to build strong, lasting relationships. Emotionally intelligent people don’t waste time with partnerships that won’t bear fruit; instead, they focus on working on the relationships that do matter.
  1. Are you good at finding compromises?
Every social situation has people we don’t get along with. The difference with emotionally intelligent people is that they don’t get angry, irritated, or frustrated by them. Instead, they are able to recognise emotions brewing up and to then rise above them. This makes them better able to see the other person’s point of view and more likely to find a compromise.
  1. Are you a good judge of character?
Being aware of your own traits and emotions also helps you see qualities in others. This can make you a better judge of character. You are able to scratch the surface and to see what really lies beneath with other people: a very useful skill when you’re a leader hiring employees, for instance.
  1. Do you find the positives in all situations?
Emotionally intelligent people are able to get over mistakes, negative experiences, and setbacks more easily than others. They see things positively and realise that most events in life are learning experiences; so they pick themselves up and get on with it. This also makes them more likely to take calculated risks – because they are less fearful of making mistakes.
  1. Can you say NO?
People with EQ know where to draw the line and realise that saying ‘yes’ to things actually means saying ‘no’ to other things (which may be more important). They are clear about priorities and so are not scared to say ‘no’ when necessary. This avoids the stress associated with agreeing to things just to please others.
  1. Do you know when to disconnect?
Emotionally intelligent people may often be hard-working leaders – but they also know when to switch off and disconnect from the working world. They know that family time, rest, and ME time is important to their wellbeing and they will make time for it. They have work-life balance.
  1. Are you usually in a good mood?
You’ll usually find emotionally intelligent people in a good mood and pleasant to be around; they don’t get too stressed and seem generally content with life. This is because deep-down they are in a ‘good place’ and the day-to-day stresses don’t get to them too much.
  1. Do you trash talk?
Finally, you won’t find people with a high EQ talking people down; they avoid negative conversations about others and don’t indulge in gossip. They implicitly know that focusing on the negative actions of other also brings your own energy down – so they prefer to focus on the positives.
Hopefully the above questions help you get clearer on the attributes of emotional intelligence. Apart from these observational measurements, there are validated tests you can take that will provide an indication of your level of emotional intelligence.
Want to assess emotional intelligence in your workplace? Or measure your own EQ?



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The Leibovich boys make another catch of the day with Matt Berriman’s Unlockd



The next Aussie Unicorn? 


Matt BERRIMAN and Unlockd  - now $20m annuity revenue  - high growth company - can it build to an annual annuity revenue of $200m? 


Sophisticated investors, Lachlan Murdoch backed , Peter Gemmell , Margaret Jackson and catch of the day boys 

Hazi and Gabby Leibovich think so.


Unlockd is an advertising play - members release their phone in exchange for advertising. Every time they unlock phone - they get an ad every 3rd time and get points


Surveys,  watching videos etc , complete surveys and tasks is another feature that is gaining traction .


Priya Dobra - ex m and a guy at time Warner joined the board - adding governance and opportunity for acquisition growth to the board.


Exciting times for this startup! 


 


Monday, January 29, 2018

Summer 18 Spark Magazine is a great read


Decimal raises $857k with a $10m val

Digital advice provider Decimal has received $867k from global fund manager IFM Investors, with the placement of 28,900,000 ordinary shares at $0.03 a share,  skiing the business at $10m.

Decimal enables the superannuation industry to seamlessly transition into providing members with comprehensive financial advice solutions online .

Aussie Fintechs compete with the worlds best!

Source:- https://www.businessinsider.com.au/10-australian-startups-just-made-the-global-fintech100-2017-11


Ten Australian tech companies have made the annual KPMG and H2 Ventures Fintech100 list for 2017, while China took out the three top spots.


Sydney online lender Prospa (Greg and Beau)  was the highest-ranked Australian startup, landing in number 24 after a year that saw it close a $25 million capital raising round led by AirTree Ventures and secure a $20 million debt facility from Partners for Growth


Larry Diamond’s ZipMoney, entered the Fintech100 at number 37 after a massive 2017 that saw Westpac invest $40 million into the “buy now, pay later” venture, and rival NAB offer a $260 million debt facility deal.


Afterpay Touch ( “buy now, pay later” fintech ) came in at number 44 after its February merger with Touchcorp saw it become a $350 million player. 

The service is starting to enter mainstream retail, with its integration with Jetstar.


Foreign exchange provider Airwallex, artificial intelligence specialist Hyper Anna, home loan provider Tic:Toc, insurance distributor CoverGenius, cash loan provider MoneyMe, Business loan broking platform Valiant and investment firm Macrovue also made the list.


Two New Zealand fintechs – Xero at number 16 and Pushpay at 42 – made the main list while Banqer also featured. 


The USA contributed the most number of fintechs to the 100 with 19 companies, but China was the big winner with the top 3 spots:- 

Third party payments provider Ant Financial, property insurance tech firm ZhongAn and electronics leasing startup Qudian.


Lending and payment dominated this year’s Fintech 100, with 32 lending businesses and 21 payments companies making the cut.

KPMG and H2 Ventures said the 100 companies were chosen on 10 metrics, with total capital raised, rate of capital raising, geographic diversity, sectorial diversity and a subjective “X-factor” used as the five core judging factors.


The top 10 companies in this year’s Fintech100 were:



Thursday, January 25, 2018

These are 13 tips to successfully market an ICO

 
The Bob Pritchard Column .
 
 
1.        Determine your market
Integrate digital tokens into your business model. If it doesn’t inherently add value to your product or service offering, then don’t do it.
 
2.        Learn the SEC rules
In July 2017, the SEC ruled that some digital coins are actually securities.   The SEC will not let ICOs fly under the radar. For a successful ICO, you must be aware of the SEC’s criteria for what constitutes a security.
 
3.        Keep your ICO secure
Be prepared to be a target for hackers who could steal our user and ICO participant information and funds.   Security should be a top priority:
a) Use different randomized passwords for key accounts so that if one account is compromised, the rest of our accounts are safe.
b) Ensure web host admin passwords are ONLY shared on a need to know basis.
c) Mandate 2-Factor Authentication for company staff to stop hackers even if the account password is compromised.
d) Have a full time community manager monitoring ICO slack & telegram chats. Proactively ban members with suspicious names or throwaway email addresses  and ignore phishing message.
e) Release your crowdsale address in advance and inform our community on it. Use the Ethereum name service to purchase an address that can be easily remembered.
f) Use a hardware wallet, to access your ICO smart contract/wallets or store funds.
 
4.        Know your audience
You will be speaking to two distinctive audiences: those with digital currency knowledge, and those who don’t.  Your marketing and PR materials must speak to both sides of the spectrum. Through thought leadership, social media, and more traditional PR hits, carefully define and tailor your messaging.
 
5.        Give people a strong reason to get your tokens
Clearly explain the rewards your token holders are entitled to. The token can be used to purchase services or products and ensure there will be sustained demand for the token. Don’t structure it as an equity/debt token, which will make it a regulated security. Create a sincere emotive story in order to compel a desire to support your cause.  69% of Millennials want businesses to better facilitate customers getting involved in social issues, and many investors do, as well.
 
6.        Social Media Accounts
– You need at least 3 VERY active on answering questions and moderating the spamming, trolling and other unpleasant behavior.   In order of importance (Email/Form Contact, Telegram, Slack, Twitter, Steemit, Medium, Facebook, Linkedin, Youtube, Instagram,etc…)
 
7.        Announcements in popular ICO calendars
Place information on special calendar sites. There are a couple  of dozen resources where you can publish a schedule for your planned ICO.
 
8.        Update your website
Make sure your website is up to date and current with your company’s latest news.
 
9.        Collect every possible email 
Collect the email address of anyone who could be remotely interested in your project.  This will become the channel to send out official information and provide a powerful voice to our investors.
 
10.     Promote your information
Investors want evidence — and concrete proof that your business will excel. Moreover, we will gain additional exposure and be reported on regularly.
 

11.      Free and Effective Marketing

We need to take advantage of free public channels to promote the ICO.  We must List the ICO on multiple websites
 
12.     Publications in professional communities
 
13.     Native advertising, general topic media, and blogs
 
14.     Create a pay per performance model
Each investor needs to get a chance to spread a discount to their connections.  They can get something for referring friends…and the friends get something too!

Tuesday, January 23, 2018

How Tencent became the world’s most valuable social network firm with barely any advertising

From Smartcompany THE CONVERSATION / 

By Salvatore CantaleIMD Business School and Ivy BucheIMD Business School

The Chinese technology giant Tencent recently overtook US rival Facebook to become the world’s most valuable social network company, with a market capitalisation of US$540 billion ($675 billion). Yet it is sitting on an advertising goldmine. Just 18% of its total revenue in the 2016 fiscal year came from online advertising. Compare this with Facebook’s model: advertising makes up 98% of its total revenue. So why hasn’t Tencent yet made the most of its advertising potential?

To answer this, we need to understand Tencent’s monetisation strategy – and its philosophy on user experience. And to do that we need to go back to the company’s early days.

Co-founded in 1998 by Ma Huateng (better known as Pony Ma) and four friends, Tencent launched its first product in 1999 – a free PC-based instant messaging service called OICQ, later renamed QQ. It secured one million users in the first year but the company remained unprofitable. It was only in 2001, following the launch of the MobileQQ messaging platform for mobile phones, that Tencent turned its first profit: US$1.2m on sales of US$5.9m. Three years later, Tencent was listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

In 2005, it introduced Qzone – a multimedia social networking service. By 2010, thanks to Pony Ma’s decision to open up Qzone to apps from third-party developers, Qzone was the largest social networking platform in China with 492 million active users.

Capitalising on the growing importance of mobile, WeChat was born in 2011. Since then, Tencent has added official accounts, payment services, a game centre and even an office chat app to WeChat. The app has become a central part of modern Chinese life.

WeChat is ubiquitous in China. Chonlachai / Shutterstock.com

Investors rewarded the company for its successful growth. The company’s market capitalisation grew with a five-year compound annual growth rate of 40% for 2011-16 and it broke into the league of the top ten most valuable listed companies in the world in April 2017.

Counter-intuitive

Tencent’s monetisation strategy so far has been counter-intuitive to the traditional way of doing business: where companies first create a product or service and then seek customers. In contrast, Tencent started with a distribution platform and built its reach before moving on to monetise its diverse applications.

Its biggest revenue stream through the 2010s has been value-added services. Chiefly from smartphone and PC-based gaming, and also from social networking (digital content subscriptions, membership subscriptions and selling virtual goods) – accounting for over 70% of its total revenue. The rest has come from online advertising and e-commerce.

Gaming has thus developed into Tencent’s core revenue stream. By 2020, mobile gaming is expected to be larger than all traditional platforms for games (such as console and PC) and Tencent has positioned itself at the forefront of this race. Since the inception of online gaming, Tencent has meticulously worked towards securing its position as the largest developer and operator of online games for desktop personal computers.

It turned its attention to mobile gaming in 2013 by launching game centres in Mobile QQ and WeChat, giving it a large mobile games user base. Then over the past few years it has focused on the global gaming market, buying stakes in or making large acquisitions of overseas gaming companies, thus becoming the world’s largest online gaming company – controlling a 13% market share. Its game revenues passed the US$10 billion mark in its 2016 fiscal year.

In mid-2017, when the Chinese government accused it of causing gaming addiction with its mobile game Honour of Kings, the biggest game ever in China, Tencent restricted play time for younger users at home. But at the same time, it brought the game to Western markets, launching Honour of Kings in Europe, North and South America under the new name Arena of Valor. Clearly, the world is Tencent’s playground for the online gaming business.

Highly addictive: Honour of Kings. Tencent

A cautious approach

In this context, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Tencent hasn’t yet felt the need to leverage the advertising potential of WeChat – it’s had plenty of other profitable revenue streams to focus on. That being said, advertising revenue has increased at more than 50% year on year since 2013, to make up 18% of total revenue in 2016. It is clear that this is definitely a growing revenue stream.

Tencent launched ads in its WeChat official accounts, which brands use to interact with customers, in mid-2014, and WeChat Moment (the photo sharing app) in early 2015. In 2017, Tencent claimed that it had the ability to build “a whole advertising ecosystem”, providing tech, data, content, media and so on.

But it has exercised careful control over the number of ads on people’s feeds to ensure they wouldn’t have an adverse effect on the user experience. For example, WeChat limited the number of native ads shown in a user’s WeChat Moments feed to one per day. It is highly conscious of the challenge to balance its monetisation efforts with the tolerance of its user base for advertisements.

The ConversationAccording to news reports in late 2017, Tencent was still not getting more aggressive on advertising because it was working on understanding its users for better targeting – to increase the likelihood of people clicking the ads. Hence, targeted advertising using behaviour data can become Tencent’s engine for growth in coming years. Tencent is just beginning to scratch the surface of the potential advertising goldmine.

Salvatore Cantale, Professor of Finance, IMD Business School and Ivy Buche, Business Transformation Project Manager, IMD Business School

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Sunday, January 21, 2018

Canva - another Ozzie Unicorn



Canva, a startup which offers pre-made templates and modern stock art, raised a $40 million Series C. Its last raise, a $15 million Series B, was announced well over a year ago. In total, the startup has raised nearly $83 million, according to Crunchbase. The latest round values the company at $1 billion - another Aussie Unicorn 

 According to Fast Company, “more than 13 designs are created every minute.” This is likely an important metric. The startup makes money based on how many assets are used in each graphic, with each asset typically costing $1. The design platform startup also launched “Canva for Work,” a subscription service that offers team collaboration and increased access to templates.

Canva has attracted high-profile Guy Kawasaki, known for his evangelist work at Apple and his status as a seed investor during the Web 2.0 boom. Canva has also attracted celebrities as investors, including Woody Harrelson and Owen Wilson, both of whom participated in the company’s Series A round.

In its latest round, Canva has added Sequoia Capital to its roster as a lead investor. And a handful of other investors have followed the company through its raises, such as Australia-based Blackbird VenturesFelicis Ventures, and Matrix Partners.

Canvas plans  to use this to expand its global footprint and accelerate growth.