Do you need a running partner? How about the world famous ultra-marathon man, Dean Karnazes? Zozi’s new program makes that possible. This San Francisco-based startup recently launched Guru Experiences, where celebrity experts conduct unique adventures for small groups.  National Geographic Explorer Mireya Mayor and world record kayaker, Tao Berman, are among the ranks of professionals that zozi found to kick off their service.

Since their launch in 2009, providing new experiences has been the goal of the company.  Now serving most major cities in the U.S., their daily deal service includes a broad range of activities for people looking to get out of their comfort zone.  Dance classes, cooking courses, and exclusive tours have been the norm for zozi, but the Guru program takes it to a new level.

For the Dean Karnazes experience, guests will run all morning in Big Sur along the California coast.  Dean will share inspiring experiences, advice, and insight. Afterwards, a healthy lunch is served overlooking the Pacific. Sounds great to us, but we might need to hit the treadmill a bit to prep for that one.

Here are the other current Guru Experiences: Snowcat or Squaw Valley Skiing with Jonny Moseley, Sunset Safari with Mireya Mayor, Find Your Stride with Eric Orton, Whitewater Skills with Tao Berman, and coming soon…Chris Lieto-Ironman Champion, and Maya Gabeira-Big Wave Surf Champion.

These exclusive experiences come with a nice price tag, but their rarity makes them hard to pass up. There are set dates for each of the opportunities, so check out the zozi website and register for your own one-of-a-kind Guru Experience.

Here at ABCey, we’ve found that adventure can be just clicks away! Zozi is great for the brave, Sōsh finds all the hot spots, and Wanderfly gives guidance when you’re on the road. How do you find things to do? Which zozi Guru Experience would you like to try out? Let us know in the comments or say hello on Twitter!

We are super excited about GROWCO 2012 and wanted to share this info other business leaders who want to take their business to the next level.  Inspired by the success of the Inc. 5000 community, Inc. now brings us GROWCO: Grow Your Company Conference, a three-day conference which brings together over 600+ entrepreneurs. GROWCO speakers include Guy Kawasaki, Daymond John, Eric Reis and other founders and CEOs of fast-growing companies, icons in the business community, and authors. They will offer advice, discuss proven strategies, and real-world solutions that will help your company grow and flourish!

The conference will be held at the Hyatt Regency in New Orleans with room rates at $209. This is awesome as I haven’t been since the Jazz festival there in 2004! Reminder: Register prior to January 6th (just two days away) for #growco and save $300. This is a must-attend event for growth-minded leaders of private companies and we hope to see you there! Please let us know if you will be attending and what you think about this event. We love to hear your thoughts, so leave us a comment or send to events@abcey.com.

Social media has clearly become a main medium for many businesses. Therefore, it is highly important to stay on track and avoid mistakes.  At ABCey Events, we are always using social media to connect with our clients and community, and to share our local knowledge. Brian Solis, tech guru and social media connoisseur, offers some great tips that we think are very helpful.  Here is a quick recap of what he shares with us.

1. Showing Up Isn’t Enough: While it is important you have a social medium and make a name for yourself, it is most important to learn how to engage with your followers.  Whether it be through Twitter, LinkedIn, or any other social medium, make sure you really engage in conversation to attract potential consumers.
2. You Can’t be Everywhere, Nor Should You: With the extensive new up and comings of technology and new social mediums, you may be really excited to try everything. Don’t.  Be where your followers are and excel within that medium.
3. Authenticity and Transparency are Nothing Without a Connection: Authenticity and transparency are the two very important aspects to social media.  They act as a “guiding light” more so than an effective form of engagement.   Therefore, it is most important to make sure you add value and content to your social media, and in return, authenticity and transparency will support your content.
4. Talking to People Isn’t a Business Strategy: Make sure you have a purpose before you engage in conversation! It is important you engage in conversation and make people who don’t know about you, find out about you.  You want the people to start talking about your brand, so engage, engage, engage!
5. Keep Your Customers Tuned in: Adding one video is not going to make you go viral.  According to Solis, “Companies believe that uploading a video to Youtube is the key to anything going viral. What they don’t know is, 48 Hours of video is uploaded every minute to Youtube. The chance of your video going viral naturally is basically nil”.  So if you want to go viral and you are sure that going viral will help your company, seek out people that will help you share and make yourself known.  ”If it creates lift, leaves an imprint or if it drives action or outcomes, that’s when you’re going viral. “

What other common mistakes have you made as part of your social media strategy?

We recently saw the launch of a new lifestyle brand, HelloBrit.com which aims to find helpful, yet creative new ways for busy people to live more simply, beautifully and imaginatively. Brit Morin (wife to Dave Morin, the founder of Path) has been working in the tech world for several years now and was a former Apple and Google employee. She is already being touted as the Martha Stewart of Silicon Valley and has recently been featured in The LA Times, Huffington Post, and TechCrunch. Brit gives new ideas and tips to live a more simple and creative life whether it be through technology, food, style, health that she either created or curated from scouring the web, something that is becoming very popular! Brit says “The ideas should come to you, and they should come through a channel whose expertise and taste you trust.”

Her site is looking like a cross between Real Simple and Wired Magazines with videos showing you how to make Christmas tree cheese appetizers, how to use electrical tape to make candy cane cups, DIY Holiday welcome mats, wearable dinner party napkins, and more. She recently featured a great gift guide for the holidays and showcases 20 of her favorite products and apps. Thanks Brit!

The brand’s first offering is a wedding app called Weduary, which was inspired by the process that Morin and her husband used in planning their own ”Pixel Cowboy”- themed wedding this summer. This will be a new service for brides and grooms, and will hopefully make for a more interesting experience for guests online and off. Make sure to sign up on the website to be notified when the new site arrives! There will be some other apps launched in the future which will likely be centered around ways to be creative around the home and novel ways to perform everyday activities like cooking, decorating and shopping.

We hope you enjoy and use Hello Brit for a little inspiration into your own creativity! We know that at ABCey, we will be keeping up Brit’s innovative ideas and using them for inspiration of our own, especially this holiday season.

Who would have thought that you could “collect people, places, and things with a touch”? Poken, is a small device that stores all of your personal information, such as, your name, business, and contact information. This information can be traded with other individuals at the touch of another Poken. This would be great for an event! Rather than trading business cards, you can simply exchange your information through the Poken, and in return, Poken creates a timeline of the people you met with all of their information. This is a great way to generate business leads and gather brochure information at your next event! Here are some of the benefits:

For You:

• Generate high quality business leads
• Simple and easy to deploy infrastructure
• Reduce paper waste and send a message of social consciousness
• Minimize printing and logistics costs of leaflets
• Track networking success with post-event analytics

4000 people were hosted in Orland, Florida and participants were allowed to collect information via Poken, click here to see the results. ABCey Events hopes to use Poken at our upcoming events!

We all know that in this day and age, websites are extremely crucial for companies.  That being said, it wasn’t t until the past couple years that Typography for the web has become important.  We, at ABCey Events, are currently updating our brand and website, and we want to choose the right typography.  Here are some helpful tips that Kelli Shaver, has outlined for us:

• Readability:  Make sure that the typography you choose is readable! There is no point in having a font if no one can read it.  Therefore, sometimes sticking to default fonts for your body might be your best bet.  Although, it can be “boring”, it is easy to read and gets the point across.  So, keep it simple, stick to around 13px, and keep the font at a medium weight.  If you want to make your headline fancy, go ahead, but keep the rule of thumb: make sure it’s readable.
• Mood and Message:  Fonts illustrate the mood and message of your website.  Bold fonts can portray strength and it immediately grabs the attention of the reader, whereas lightweight fonts can portray a freedom to read and think as you wish.  Just like you shouldn’t have a variety of different font types, make sure you don’t have too many font weights as well. Pick a style and stick with it.

Google has finally made it possible for Google+ to have brand pages so businesses can merge and communicate with Google’s social network. Rather than having a Google+ profile, it will be much easier for companies to promote themselves via their own page. This will make it easier for followers to interact with the company and hopefully will increase the brand’s followers.  Users can choose to follow brands, such as specific, news, games, or restaurants, and be able to interact with that specific brand.  Ben Parr states that “when users add a brand to their circles, it increases that brand’s follower count”.  Hopefully this will be beneficial to businesses! This is very similar to Facebook and we are curious to see how and if it will affect Facebook’s brand pages.

Zeny Huang, Emerging Media Strategist at JWT New York, thinks that Google+ will be better and more successful than Facebook for four reasons:

1. Better Search Opportunities: There must be better search benefits for Google+ users because of Google.com domain.
2. More Customization: Google+ users will be able to use the excess white space on the sides of the profile for custom skinning of the brand page as well as space for advertisements.
3. Better Analytics: Google Analytics will help guide brands in organizing and specifying content on their page to direct towards their followers.  Also Google Analytics will allow advertisers have space for media placement that and will create more interaction between their followers and media spending.
4. Google Can Learn from Facebook: Google can learn from Facebook’s advantages and weaknesses and make Google+ better.

We haven’t been to an SF New Tech Event in a little while now, and this one just caught our eye. Some of Japan’s top emerging startups will be demo’ing their latest and greatest apps. SF New Tech is the Bay Area’s largest, longest-running, and most-loved monthly technology event and networking mixer for people who can’t get enough of technology. It’s made possible thanks to Myles Weissleder (Founder, Producer & Host) , Matthew M. Gonzales (Deputy of Propaganda), and Amy Higgins (Social Maven).

SF New Tech’s stage is a platform for young startups and established companies alike, to show off what they’ve been working on in front of a room full of people who actually care. Most demos are done by the founders, CEOs, or lead developers of some of the most innovative companies around.Each company (or developer) gets 5 minutes (sharp!) to strut their stuff under the spotlight and on the big screen and then another 5 minutes (sharp!) to answer tough questions from the audience. Live demos and hot-seat discussions are what it’s all about. When tough questions from SF’s digerati cause the presenters to squirm, they know they are doing something right. Hundreds of companies have taken to the SF New Tech stage and thousands of companies have been in attendance. Tickets can be purchased via Eventbrite. If you’re lucky, there still may be some discount codes available on the SF New Tech website.

Here’s tomorrow’s schedule:

Facematch

By Director : Jun Ikouga

The best service in Breakthrough Camp 2011 Summer. This is the App where we can meet opposite sex friends on Facebook. The app helps you try to connect with people of similar interests by using the Facebook Friend API. Additionally, Facematch is expected to present a selection of discount coupons from restaurants and various merchandise.

Facebook Page @FaceMatch_Tweet

midokura, Inc

By President & CEO, Co-founder : Tatsuya Kato

Midokura is a cloud-enabling company developing a technology to replace the conventional physical devices, such as routers, with a virtual entity that can be managed on the web. This is software that can make, manage, control the effective network infrastructure of high cloud age without using the expensive network tools.

http://www.midokura.com @midokura

PIRIKA

By CEO, Dreamer, Cleaner : Fujio Kojima
This is App which help us pick up the trash and clean the environment. User can provide their location and information when they picked up the trash through smart phone. It is used in over 600 places in 24 countries.
http://www.pirika.org/ @TeamPIRIKA

Grow! Inc.

By International Business Development : Ryu Sakuma

Grow is a social Tipping platform that allows blog readers to submit tips to blog publishers. It works like Twitter’s retweet button or Facebook’s Like button embedded in a blog post, but by clicking on the Grow! button, you can tip the blog author.

http://growbutton.com @GrowBt

Joho Planet, Inc.

By Founder & CEO :Tao Yamamoto
If you use multiple computers (such as a laptop, a desktop PC at home, and a desktop PC at office)
Synclogue helps you synchronize the configuration of plug-ins for apps you’ve specified in each computer.
http://www.synclogue.com @Synclogue

 

LinkedIn can be used for a variety of different reasons. For example, it can be used to post your résumé, network, promote your business, and conduct research.  A perk to having an account with LinkedIn, however, is trying to win new business.  Ann Handley, offers some tips for how companies might use LinkedIn to gain new clientele.

• Target Searches:  Keywords that are most important about your business.
• Track:  Who looks at your profile? Find out, then send them an agency portfolio.
• Research:  Find new companies that might be interested in a new agency!
• Set up a Company Page:  Give your company some presence.
• Discern Patterns:  Recognize who is connected in your industry and make sure they see your brand.
• Participate in LinkedIn Groups:  Find groups in your target market and engage in conversation.

How are you currently using LinkedIn?  Let us know if you think these tips are helpful… ABCey Events will be sure to try them out!

New York Times Bestseller Enchantment offers some great tips on How To Increase Your Likability and Guy Kawasaki sums it all up for us! Enchantment is a guide for advancement. From teaching us how to smile and give a proper handshake, to lessons on leveraging today’s technology, Guy’s directives are not only clear, they make sense. Enchantment is not a guide for becoming an instant hit. It’s about building relationships atop strong foundations. While some may not care what others think of them, for those of us with businesses it’s pretty much at the top of the list. We all know that investors and clientele aren’t always investing in the product or outcome, but in the individual. Therefore, it’s important to get along well with others. Here are some things that might help you become just a little more “Likeable.”

• Make Crows Feet: Smile like you mean it!
• Use the Right Words: Use a simple active voice & keep it short. Big words don’t impress people, they just confuse them;)
• Dress for a Tie: Easy- don’t overdress or underdress. Equal dressing says “We’re peers.”
• Perfect Your Handshake: Make eye contact, smile, be strong!
• Get Close: The most important factor in getting to know someone new is proximity. Social media is great, but make that connection in person. Eating lunch will never go out of style!
• Don’t Impose Your Values: This one can be tough and will probably have the opposite effect than what you are going for.
• Accept Others: People are not binary. We all have strengths and weaknesses.
• Pursue and Project Your Passions: People who are passionate about what they do are more interesting.
• Find Shared Passions: Do your research! The best negotiators spend 40% of their prep time finding shared interests with the other party.