Jeff Nolan

My name is Jeff Nolan and I write Venture Chronicles. What started, in 2002, as a simple initiative to understand this thing called “blogs” that I kept hearing about has evolved into something much more significant. Home About Venture Chronicles About Venture Chronicles My name is Jeff Nolan and I write Venture Chronicles. What started, in 2002, as a simple initiative to understand this thing called “blogs” that I kept hearing about has evolved into something much more significant. Along the way to becoming a bona fide blogger I started to understand the implications of user generated content. At the time I was a venture capitalist for SAP, the enterprise software company, and in my travels in the enterprise software market it became evident that blogging would be a powerful communication channel for enterprises to use, what we now call social media, and a powerful information collection mechanism for bottom up corporate intelligence. Combined with search technology, social networking software, and wikis, I was witnessing the inception of an entirely new generation of knowledge management software. I am currently the VP Product Marketing for Get Satisfaction, the simple and effective way to build online communities that enable productive conversations between companies and their customers. Over 50,000 companies use Get Satisfaction to create a social support experience, build better products, realize SEO benefits, and take advantage of brand loyalty behaviors that results in strong word of mouth marketing experiences in the market. I can be reached at jnolan-at-gmail-dot-com.

Latest from Jeff Nolan

Novel Idea of the Week, Freemium!

Arment’s more traditional take is built largely on the idea that if he puts out a good product, there’s no shame in asking customers to pay for it. And the more they pay, the less he needs to rely on outside investors. Arment said many developers are of the mindset that they need to amass ...

The Shift from Creating to Liking

Yesterday the NYTimes came out with a story outlining how younger generations are moving away from blogging to social networks such as Twitter. The Internet and American Life Project at the Pew Research Center found that from 2006 to 2009, blogging among children ages 12 to 17 fell by half; now 14 percent of children ...

GroupOn on the Superbowl Ad: “My Bad.”

From what we’ve heard, the Chicago-based company doesn’t believe the commercials were misguided, but rather that it made a mistake by not directing folks to a Web site, where it was raising money for certain causes and matching up to $100,000 in donations. The site,SaveTheMoney.org, should have been mentioned in the commercials instead of expecting ...

The Ascent of Q&A as Community

Q&A communities have become grown in popularity in recent years with consumer and business offerings being developed at a blistering pace and established players emerging with their own offerings. The Q&A interaction model has existed for years, as long as search engines have been around and this is not a coincidence. Q&A takes advantage of ...

3 Tech Products I’m Really Happy With

Here are 3 products I use everyday that I am exceptionally happy with: 1) My Evo mobile hotspot… yeah the Evo is a great handset and if the batter life were better it would rise to the level of amazing but for me the mobile hotspot feature that Sprint enables through this device is the ...

Year of the Electric Car

When I hear people say “this is the year of such-and-such” I am reminded of the mobile industry. Since at least 1999 people have been saying that, finally, this was the year of mobile and sure enough, 2009 may have finally been legitimately the year of mobile… which only proves that it is best to ...

Smallcompanyitis: Death by a Thousand Committees

I realized something recently that in all my years had thus far escaped my attention and it is direct commentary on the distinction between large and small company culture. A common belief is that small companies (startups in the Valley vernacular) are nimble because they can’t afford to waste time. This is quite true but ...

Sony PS3 Still Can’t Get Any Love

Sony’s PS3… what can anyone say at this point? Inspired by the aggressive ad campaign that they have been running and the fact that I haven’t written anything about this train wreck in quite a while, I decided to check up on game console statistics. Not. A. Pretty. Picture. For. Sony. In March 0f this ...

Secondary Markets Bring Liquidity

This quote in an article about Zynga blocking sales of stock through secondary markets caught my attention: As we have been consistently reporting on SecondShares, we believe we are now witnessing the emergence of a more liquid marketplace akin to how markets like the high yield market got started in earnest in the early 1990’s, ...

Standards of Excellence and the Committees that Love Them

I realized something recently that in all my years had thus far escaped my attention and it is direct commentary on the distinction between large and small company culture. A common belief is that small companies (startups in the Valley vernacular) are nimble because they can’t afford to waste time. This is quite true but ...