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Introducing Textline – text messaging for businesses

Posted on December 15, 2015 by alanb

We invite you to try out Textline, the newest product from The Giant Pixel Corporation. Textline is a customer service tool for text messages. It works like this:

  1. When you create a Textline account, we’ll give you a new phone number for sending and receiving text messages.
  2. Put your new Textline phone number on your web site, email footer, Yelp listing, or wherever your customers will see it.
  3. When a customer texts you, we’ll notify you with a desktop notification or a text message to your phone (or both if you like).
  4. Reply to your customers using the Textline web dashboard on your desktop or smartphone. Mark conversations as “resolved” to distinguish them from customers who are still waiting for a reply.
  5. Invite teammates to Textline so they can help you reply to customers.

Textline also lets you set up auto-responses and shortcuts to save you from typing the same responses over and over.

Get started with Textline today »

Giant Pixel Event: The Future of Audio

Posted on February 5, 2015 by Elliot Loh

On January 15th, 2015, The Giant Pixel Corporation hosted The Future of Audio, a meetup designed to bring together audio startups and media companies to explore listening trends, innovative startups, and emerging business models in the last untapped online frontier: sound.

The focus of the evening was a discussion moderated by TechCrunch’s Sarah Buhr and featuring these five panelists:

  • John Swartz, SF Bureau Chief, USA Today
  • Erik Torenberg, Founding Team at Product Hunt
  • Hooman Khalili, Radio Personality, CBS Radio & ALICE FM
  • Matt Pope, Product Co-founder, Talko
  • Elliot Loh, Founder, Antenna & Giant Pixel

The panel covered a wide range of topics, including the emergence of the hit podcast Serial, how traditional news and radio organizations are adopting podcasts, and how audio and in particular voice allow listeners to feel more connected to the personalities they hear.

Below are the first five clips from the panel, recorded live at Giant Pixel’s offices just off Mint Plaza.

Giant Pixel hosts visiting entrepreneurs from U of Illinois

Posted on February 3, 2015 by alanb

On January 14, 2015, The Giant Pixel Corporation hosted 32 visiting students from the University of Illinois’ Technology Entrepreneur Center. Giant Pixel engineers and Illinois alumni Alan Braverman, John Cwikla, and Brett Trimble regaled the visiting students with stories of success and challenges from the past two decades of working on internet startup technology.

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In 2015, Software Eats the Wearable World

Posted on January 8, 2015 by Elliot Loh

Giant Pixel’s Kunal Agarwal and Elliot Loh penned an original post for TechCrunch that explains why wearable technology hasn’t yet made a huge impact for users, and why software will push the segment into lasting success. In it, they also give a few clues to the latest project at Giant Pixel.

Read the article at TechCrunch »

Alan Braverman Receives Distinguished Service Award at his Alma Mater’s 50th Anniversary

Posted on November 10, 2014 by krissytgp

Alan Braverman, co-founder of The Giant Pixel Corporation, moderated a panel discussion at his alma mater, The University of Illinois on October 24, 2014. The panel focused on entrepreneurship and touched on topics like the evolving attitude towards entrepreneurship in the Department of Computer Science, staying in Illinois versus moving to California to work in startups, and starting a company straight out of school versus working at a larger company to get some real world experience.

After the discussion, he received a Distinguished Service Award from the University of Illinois’ Computer Science Department.

John Pletz from ChicagoBusiness.com wrote a great article about Braverman and his time in Illinois.

Read the Article »

Sobo was featured on Product Hunt!

Posted on September 29, 2014 by krissytgp

Hey Giant Pixel Followers!

The Giant Pixel’s newest product, Sobo Social Soundboard, was featured on Product Hunt last week! Be sure to check it out, vote for our product, and leave a comment about it as well!

Vote for Sobo on Product Hunt! »

Why Frameworks Matter

Posted on September 29, 2014 by krissytgp

A few weeks ago, INC magazine ran part 1 of a six-part series from one of our founders Alan Braverman, that tracks a new Giant Pixel business from idea to launch.  The first article in this series focused on how The Giant Pixel decides on what ideas to actually pursue.

I’ve been getting a lot of questions about the framework Alan referenced in the article so wanted to answer the 3 questions I got asked the most.  Hopefully this will provide clarity and help others going through a similar process.

Question 1:  Why do you have a structured framework around deciding on which ideas to pursue? Isn’t this restrictive?

The Giant Pixel is built so all our employees will be eventual founders of companies born here. To that end, we encourage everyone on our team to submit their product ideas (via a lean canvas).  Since people can sometimes get emotionally get attached to their idea and fall into the trap of stating “We can build this!” vs asking “Should we build this?”, we wanted to create a process that helped remove emotion from the decision and provided a uniform analytical framework.  Borrowing on my experience as a technology investor, we created this TGP new idea evaluation framework so we have sufficient data points to allow us to make an informed decision about which product(s) to pursue.

Question 2:  How do you determine market size and why is it relevant?

For a lot of entrepreneurs, market size data is one of those things you only start paying attention to when you frantically need to include it for a VC pitch deck.  The reason investors and I find this important is because it provides insights into the size of the opportunity and potential growth prospects for your company or idea.  No one cares about the exact number you come up with for your market size.  What people do care about is a) your addressable market is large enough to matter and b) the underlying trends in the market suggest positive growth indicators.

There are multiple ways to approximate market size.  If you want a quick and dirty number, you can search online for industry / research publications that may have some relevant metrics.  Be aware though that the source of the information is paramount (always show the source).  Not all data is created equally and making sure you’re getting data from reliable sources that outline how their methodology is critical.

If you want to get more detailed use a bottoms up approach to build market size.  Instead of just googling “market size for x”, and restating their number, think about methodically building up your market size with a series of assumptions.  You will find this a useful exercise that helps you understand who your potential customers are and what key assumptions you need to make. Check out this link for a good walkthrough of this process.

Question 3:  What’s the point of building a financial model at such an early stage?

The financial model I create for each company is not intended to be an in-depth projection of financial results. Its a quick and dirty projection of how the business model may work with some sensitivities built around major assumptions (i.e. what happens to revenue if we charge a customer $xxx instead of $yyy).

The major purpose of this exercise is to highlight the key levers (# of subscribers, cost of various tiers, annual user monetization, etc) of the proposed business model.  It also helps make clear, that in order to hit certain revenue targets ($1M, $5M, $50MM, etc), what is it that we need to believe.  This enables us to think realistically about whether we think this product is scalable and highlights the main risk factors we need to be focused on.

Hope that is helpful. If people have more questions about any part of our TGP framework, please let me know and I’ll be happy to discuss.

By: Kunal Agarwal

Introducing Antenna Radio 3.0

Posted on September 4, 2014 by Elliot Loh

Today we’re happy to introduce a whole new Antenna Radio for iPhone – faster, more robust, and easier to use than ever before. For the past several months we’ve been quietly observing our users and listening to their feedback. Now, in Antenna Radio 3.0, you can see and hear the difference.

Continue reading at the Antenna Radio blog »

When you can build virtually anything, how do you decide what to create?

Posted on August 26, 2014 by krissytgp

Alan Braverman discusses the criteria that is used by The Giant Pixel for deciding what to build next: “Giant Pixel’s strike team of programmers, designers and marketers start with a simple, age-old technique: the power of lists. We maintain a big list of potential projects contributed by individuals or emerging from brainstorming sessions. We kick the ideas around internally, refining some, eliminating others, and always adding new ones.”

“We review them at weekly meetings, eventually pick one, and crank out a prototype. The process is continually repeated, generating multiple embryonic startups gestating in parallel. Successful ideas grow into independent businesses that are spun out of the studio, and failures are discarded.”

Continue reading at Inc. Magazine » 

Introducing Nama – Achieve Project Management Nirvana

Posted on July 30, 2014 by thegiantpixel

Today Giant Pixel is glad to announce our latest product, Nama.

At Giant Pixel we’re developers and product designers with a start-up mindset who have successfully built products in companies of all sizes. In our experience we learned that:

  • Existing tools were complicated and didn’t actually help manage projects
  • There was no way to easily give the entire company visibility to what was happening with projects
  • Schedules were hard to adhere to because dates were arbitrary, requirements kept changing and too many stakeholders caused competing priorities
  • We found ourselves using multiple tools to keep track of tasks and conversations about them

We are developing what we believe will be the best software for helping your organization prioritize, resource and meet your goals – and give you the earliest warning when that won’t happen so you can do something about it. We’ve been developing Nama with feedback in mind, feedback for everyone at your company – not just your development team. We know this will make your company more efficient, more transparent and ultimately more productive. The days of asking “is it done yet”, “when will it be done” and “why wasn’t this done” will be a thing of the past.

We are still in the very early days of Nama, so pardon our dust! We are rapidly improving Nama to meet your needs, and we hope to rely on you to give us feedback either by using the feedback form to your lower right, or by sending an email to feedback@namapm.com. If there is something you really like, something you don’t like, or something you think would improve your use of Nama, let us know – we will be delighted to hear from you, even if it is something you don’t like 🙂

From all of us on the Nama team, we look forward to bringing you the best project management software possible.

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