Indie pop band OK Go debuted the music video for their song “End Love” this week. And I bet you’ve seen it already. Since its upload to YouTube on Tuesday, the video has had over 400,000 views. Arguably OK Go are the among the masters of the YouTube platform. Their famous 2006 treadmill video for “Here It Goes Again” clocks in with over 50 million views, making it one of YouTube’s most watched and most favorited videos. Certainly OK Go have been pioneering the ways in which artists can embrace new technologies – and use them to challenge the traditional parts of the record industry. And as pioneers, OK Go offer lessons for those outside the music business. Sponsor Clearly, the most obvious lesson that startups might take from OK Go is: make a viral video . But of course, that’s easier said than done. What becomes viral isn’t necessarily predictable (nor is it necessarily positive ). So here are some other things that startups can learn from OK Go: Focus on a Good Product, Not on Good Advertising. Despite it being the way in which most of their fans have been introduced to their music, OK Go do not see their videos as advertisements for their band. Rather, the band views the videos as artistic projects inextricable from the music, not simply promo pieces. And while the band is sometimes criticized for having videos that are more successful than their albums, lead singer Damien Kulash says in a New York Magazine

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Does your startup company culture really matter? It sure mattered to Zappos founder Tony Hsieh, as we noted last week, who describes in an article in Inc, the battles he waged with investors who dismissed his efforts to cultivate a supportive, worker-friendly environment at the company. The importance of preserving that company culture, Hsieh suggests, led in part to his decision to sell his company to Amazon . Sponsor Company Culture: A “Meaningless Platitude”? A startup has to have a lot of things in place: a strong team, a good product, and a market interested in it. Is the company culture another thing that startups need to have situated in order to succeed? Or is it, as Dan Shapiro writes in a provocatively titled post “a meaningless platitude”? Shapiro points out that the official statements about the company culture of GE, Wells Fargo, and Zillow, for example, all sound remarkably similar. And even though this sort of statement might be “put together after much employee feedback and deliberation, and carefully designed to capture the key things that make your company great. It’s also a load of well-mixed fertilizer.” Shapiro contends that a company culture is what makes your company different, not necessarily what makes it great. In the case of the Zappos company culture, Hsieh is pretty adamant that this is what makes the online shoe store great. He writes that “what distinguished us from our competitors was that we’d put our company culture above all else. We’d bet that by being good to our employees – for instance, by paying for 100 percent of health care premiums, spending heavily on personal development, and giving customer service reps more freedom than at a typical call center – we would be able to offer better service than our competitors. ” What Really Makes a Company Culture? Arguably, developing a positive community culture requires more than just the commitment to health care and professional development. And as Shapiro argues that despite frequent invocation of catchphrases like “hire the best, teamwork, ethics,’” that “real” company culture is comprised of four things: 1. Polarizing decisions 2. Excesses 3. Quirks 4. Dysfunctions It’s how startups handle difficult decisions, how they foster certain quirks or excesses, and how they develop dysfunctional responses to various circumstances that will truly define the company culture. Despite the provocative title “Your Company Culture is a Meaningless Platitude,” I don’t think Shapiro is suggesting that the culture itself is meaningless. Rather, the buzzwords are irrelevant if you don’t pay attention to the things that actually make your startup a great – or horrid – place to work. Of course, this begs the question: what do you think makes up a good startup company culture? Discuss

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This week at the 2nd annual Internet of Things 2010 conference in Brussels, British service Pachube announced a partnership with Current Cost – a producer of real-time energy monitors. Current Cost is using Pachube’s Internet of Things platform for the Bridge , an ethernet device which connects Current Cost electricity monitors to the Internet. Pachube Founder & CEO Usman Haque called this “a major step in making the ‘internet of things for consumers’ a reality.” Sponsor We’ve long been a fan of Pachube (pronounced Patch-Bay) and named it one of our Top 10 Internet of Things Products of 2009 . Pachube is an open platform for sensor data. We first reviewed it in May last year and since our last update in October , Pachube has followed through on Haque’s promise to develop a viable business model . The Current Cost partnership is a part of that evolution. The Move From Experimental to Commercial One of the most exciting things about covering the Internet of Things, is watching the slow but gradual move from experimental apps to commercial ones. I watched – and blogged – this same evolution in the years before Web 2.0 existed (2002-2004) and it’s happening again in 2010 with the Internet of Things. Startups like Pachube are literally inventing the business models as they go. As we’ve noted in previous posts, up till now Pachube has been mostly used for experimental applications . However, Current Cost may be its first important commercial case study. The Current Cost ‘Bridge’ enables users to analyze their energy use via a website dashboard, on iPhones and other smart phones, and via Google’s energy service, Google PowerMeter . Pachube is being used for data management on the Bridge, enabling the device to deliver tracking, notifications, comparison tools, and more. The Bridge also has “enterprise level features” such as privacy groups, statistics API, user management and a device provisioning server. Pachube’s New Revenue Models Pachube now has what it terms a “corporate” service – essentially a third party service for companies that want to connect devices to the Internet. For example Pachube provides bulk accounts to “web-enable thousands or millions of devices,” such as electricity meters. Other services include delivering ‘out-of-the-box’ tools for consumer-facing companies, building communities around products, and developing branded web portals for manufacturers. In addition, Pachube has added premium accounts to its consumer service offering. These include “value-added features” such as privacy options, statistics/aggregation, greater bandwidth, history and search. It’s great to see Pachube develop its business and we’ll continue to track its efforts! Discuss

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Steve Jobs, the co-founder and CEO of Apple , which leapt fully armed from the head of Zeus in 1976, spoke this evening at the D8 Conference near Los Angeles. The conversation was live-blogged on the conference site and elsewhere . All Things Digital ’s Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher moderating, feeding Jobs questions. Asked about Apple’s rejection of Flash , Jobs said he did not think it was unfair to consumers. Sponsor “Sometimes when we get rid of things, people call us crazy… But sometimes you just have to pick the things that are going to be the right horse to ride forward… And Flash has had its day… but HTML5 is starting emerge.” Apple, the live-blogs note Jobs as saying, was the first to drop both the floppy and use USB. However, Jobs also noted that “Adobe came after us” and his Flash letter was a response to that. “We’re just trying to make great products,” says Jobs.”We don’t think Flash makes a great product, so we’re leaving it out. Instead, we’re going to focus on technologies that are in ascendancy.” Top photo by Tom Bottom photo by Robert Gaal Discuss

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Technologist Tim O’Reilly likes to say that the software of the future will be cloud-delivered data, augmenting mobile reality, based on real-world sensor feedback, in real time. Peter Batty (left), VP of geospatial technology at Ubisense , showed what some of those technologies may look like in a presentation earlier this month titled Location and the Internet of Things . “Your phone is going to be a proxy for yourself,” Batty argues. For example, “before long our smartphones will open all doors for us, cars etc.” Location, sensors and the web aren’t limited just to our phones either. “As you’re driving along,” Batty says, “your [GPS and web-enabled] car will communicate with gas stations along your route and be negotiating for gas prices, doing things like reverse auctions. There will be factors involved like ‘how much gas do you have left?’” Sponsor See also: Tim O’Reilly Explains the Internet of Things Batty’s presentation was part of Colorado’s IgniteSpatial and was written up today at GISUser.com . Betty also writes an excellent blog called Geo Thought . Discuss

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