All posts tagged business

  • February 6, 2013

    Lulo wants to make business sweet

    OnLuloOne of the companies that we’re accelerating at Socialatom Ventures is called Lulo.  That happens to be the name of a tropical fruit as well as a new startup focused on making running a small business fun.  They’re starting out with the sales process and, although us techies like to talk about terms such as CRM and Marketing Automation, they’re objective is to provide the simplest and easiest to use tools to nontechnical business owners.  Sure, they’ll include functionality that crosses some product categories, but that doesn’t mean that their target customer will be interested in such categorizations.

    The company was founded by Andres Felipe Chavez, CEO, and Javier Santiago Lozano, CTO.  Both are in their early 20’s with a passion to create an impact on the small business sector.  They’re families are small business owners and Lulo is the result of the lack of high quality web tools for nontechnical business owners.  Though companies such as SohoOs and Xero are also targeting this segment, both believe that the space still holds much promise.

    They are constantly improving the project and have opened the beta program up today.  If you’re interested in providing direction to the team on how to improve this product, please sign up for the beta program.  There are 30 invites for readers of TropicalGringo and you can click here to get your invite.  You can send them your feedback or post a comment on this blog post.  Lozano is a passionate coder and if your suggestion is aligned with creating a powerful, yet simple tool to small business owners, I have no doubt that they will implement it.

    Sign me up for Lulo, now!

    No Comments / English, General /

  • December 20, 2010

    Excellent way to end the year – with a workshop

    Digital Innovation WorkshopLast Wednesday, a group of 16 people and myself had an excellent time during the Digital Innovation Workshop that I directed at Microsoft’s offices in Bogota, Colombia.  For me, the best part was the interaction between the participants as well as between them and myself. It was a truly rewarding experience as I’m sure the next workshops will be also.

    Each day, I’m astonished by the continual disruption happening in industry after industry where new competitors pop up from unexpected places in the same way that a computer company (Apple) disrupted the music business and the way that DVD rental-by-mail company (Netflix) disrupted the cable business.  We looked at these and many more examples and discussed the implications for each particpants’ businesses.  Participants came from companies such as Colmedica, Banco de Bogota, Belcorp, Legis, Intergrupo, Federacion de Cafeteros and others.

    Finally, we ran through three interactive and stimulating exercises so that everyone would leave the workshop with the necessary tools to start rethinking their own businesses and collaborating with colleagues on how to proactively anticipate innovations in their own industry and innovate with new business models. It was truly a great group of people and I thank them for the stimulating discussions and the energy and passion that they put into this unique learning experience.

    Digital Innovation Workshop from Tropical Gringo on Vimeo.

    3 Comments / English, Strategy /