Co-workers are the people we sit next to every day all day. Does everyone sit quietly at their cubicles and focus solely on their individual tasks? If you work at a start-up the answer is: yea right! When your team is small everyone’s opinions matter, from small details to big decions, everyone has something to say. That is part of the beauty of working for a small company.

Team bonding is a phrase used often to describe bringing individuals closer together in order to improve the overall performance of the team. Here at Tinypay while our team is very small, it is very diverse. We have people born in The Netherlands, Russia, Italy, and the U.S., with only one California native (me). Everyone has different upbringings, cultures, and most importantly personalities.  Some are more timid, some loud, and some in between. It is a beautiful thing to have so many different people coming together to create something new (and awesome).

When it comes to expressing opinions, everyone does things in their own style. Some people are quiet and otherswell, not so quiet. While one person might focus all their attention on the smaller details, someone else might be looking more at the big picture. Everyone is different and the more we get to know the people we work with the better we can work together.

This weekend Tinypay (most of us) did some team bonding on the ski slopes in beautiful Tahoe. After some crazy wind and snow, sore muscles, and sunburned faces…this team has never been better!

The Birch Cabin where we stayed

Let’s do this!

Matching outfits? Tinypay gear all day everyday!

The way business is done has shifted. We are no longer in the age of just purchasing new products by watching commercials on TV,  thinking about that brand, then purchasing that product. The social media age has created a shift and continues to shape the way business is done on a day to day basis. The article “Facebook’s 6-Point Plan for Building Brands in the Social Media Age” gives us some insight on how Facebook has helped to change the way consumption and purchasing happens in this day and age. In this article they propose two different diagrams,

the way purchasing behaviors used to be,

and the way things are now. 

It is true that we now get information coming at us from every direction, and our friends’ purchasing habits have a huge influence on our own. I think the model is still the same as it always was, however “awareness” and “consideration” have changed from just one or two outlets, like TV or Radio, to every person we are connected to on any social network. Depending on how many social networks you are a part of and how many friends you have, that could be hundreds or thousands of possibilities to influence your purchasing behavior.

We all know that our friends’ opinions matter to us. When they like a new company’s page, post a video of a cool commercial or share an article, the chances are we want to be in on what they are talking about. So clearly our awareness of products or services has changed, as well as our consideration, taking into account how our friends feel about a product without ever having to ask them.

The consumer’s behavior has changed, so that means companies need to change their selling and branding strategies to fit the bill. Most companies are on board, and this article from Mashable gives some great steps in how to build your brand on Facebook (or any social media outlet). One example used is a viral video that Coca-Cola released last month. The video fits in exactly with their brand image, it targets their audience perfectly, it’s engaging, and it brings a smile to your face.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=hVap-ZxSDeE 

The only problem with this video…I had not seen it until I read this article. In the world of Social Networks, getting your brand image out there can be more difficult than it seems, but it can also bring your brand’s awareness to whole new level on a scaled down budget, if it’s done right. It seems even the biggest of companies are still trying to stay up to date with the ever changing business environment social media has created.

We already know Facebook and other Social Networks are changing the way companies get their brand out there and people interested in their products; so why not take things the next step. You create brand awareness and sales strategies through social networks, why not actually sell your products on that social network as well. Here at Tinypay, that is what we are working on, with our new service MarketPage you can sell directly on a Facebook page. Not only can you sell, you can promote your product through social sharing, and you can create a community where others can buy and sell related products. Sign up for an invite today and grow your brand through social media.

**We will be launching to the public very soon, stay tuned!

Managing your JavaScript and CSS can be a pain sometimes, especially for front-end heavy web applications. How many times has your JavaScript or CSS turned into a rat’s nest? We here at TinyPay are using several technologies that help us organize our front-end code so it’s not as painful.

Backbone.js is a lightweight JavaScript framework. Rather than tying your data with the DOM, they are stored in Model.  Whenever the model is updated, all the Views that display that model are notified, and update themselves accordingly.  No longer will you have to worry about creating all the necessary selectors and callbacks to sync data in HTML, JavaScript, or database.

Sass is a CSS3 extension that provides programming concepts like variables, nesting, and functions.  Variables can be used for fonts, colors, numbers, or anything you want to reuse.  Sass allows you to nest attributes and rules, avoiding repetition.  Mixins act like functions where you can reuse style blocks with other rules and even supports arguments.

So why not check out these technologies, you can save yourself the headache for more important things.

Backbone.js: http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/

Sass: http://sass-lang.com/

We are pleased to announce today to have hip-hop superstar Snoop Dogg as the first to use MarketPage!

MarketPage allows anyone to have a shop on their Facebook Page and invite others to sell there. We’ve quickly discovered that it doesn’t make sense to create a shop just for your friends. People seem to be coming together at Pages that promote a certain artist, brand or community and attract a lot of fans. That’s the place where you want to sell.

Snoop Dogg announced his partnership with us while performing at a surprise performance at SXSW. Snoop will be the first to have his merchandise for sale on his “Snoopermarket” that can be accessed through his Fan page by over 15 million of his fans on Facebook. He has opened his marketplace for other merchants to sell on his page and plans to open it up for everyone in the near future. Snoop says he’s excited to let his fans “get all their Snoop swag on”.

So go check out Snoop’s MarketPage! Wanna have your own MarketPage? We’re in closed beta for now, but you can request an invite!

http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/29/how-to-use-timeline-for-pages/

Facebook released the new Timeline look for profiles and pages. For some this is old news, so I’m talking to all the stubborn FB users out there. There have been mixed reviews about the new Timeline layout, but soon everyone will be forced to make the change. I will admit I am on the side of complainers about any Facebook changes, or changes in general, because it just doesn’t seem necessary. Well whether it’s by choice or not, change is here, and to be honest…it’s kind of cool.

The look of Timeline is different, you can choose a big cover photo which is great for branding and Company pages. Under your name you can write a quick pitch, description, or favorite quote. The timeline breaks things up into when things happened, and posts pictures and links more prominently. There is no doubt that the new Timeline is more business/company friendly.  For personal profiles the changes are mostly just visual and while it takes a little getting used to, two days after switching, the complaining subsided.

The future of Facebook is business. Of course it’s a social network and always will be, but now there is room for more than just talking to friends. For company pages the Timeline offers a brand friendly viewing. The new Timeline helps display new products and will be useful for our new product, MarketPage. MarketPage lets you easily turn any page into a marketplace where people can buy and sell. MarketPage allows anyone to use Facebook for business. In just a couple weeks everyone will automatically be switched to the Timeline, so why not get used to it now and sign up for MarketPage today before the big launch!

MarketPage – Your own marketplace on FacebookSeven people have hardly slept in the past 5 months, working on the next big thing in e-commerce. As we crunch the last pieces of code we are very much thrilled to reveal our latest piece of web ingenuity.

via Getmarketpage

A lot of articles have been written lately about e-commerce failures on Facebook. This happened after some vendors announced that they were going to close their shop because of disappointing conversion rates.

The consensus in these articles seems to be that selling stuff to Facebook users simply doesn’t work and they usually have 3 or 5 bullet points to prove their point. A lot of these arguments attribute Facebook itself as the main reason why e-commerce seems to fail.

Let’s take a look why a lot of these so-called “arguments” are wrong:
- “Nobody clicks these like buttons, they’re broken.”
Hey.. maybe your products are broken?
- “We just didn’t get the return on investment we needed from the Facebook market, so we shut it down pretty quickly”
Hmm.. Facebook market.. really?
- “You go to Facebook to find other people, not to find a product”
I visit Facebook multiple times a day, and none of those times do I intend to find other people.
- “People aren’t used to buying on Facebook.”
Seriously? This is your argument? People weren’t used to driving before Ford came along. Heck, you know that scary word, e-commerce, that thing that is a $680 billion yearly business right now, people weren’t used to that either.

Sarcasm aside, it’s clear that a lot of these arguments suffer from the same fallacy: ‘My webshop normally works, and when I try the same thing on Facebook, it doesn’t, ergo, Facebook is broken.‘ These people ignore the fact that they themselves are part of their perceived problem.

There are a lot of similarities to the approach established businesses initially had towards the internet: ‘Whoa, we can reach a lot of people at virtually no cost, let’s put our paper catalogue online and watch business explode!‘. Everybody now knows that’s NOT the way it works.

Facebook is basically the same to your FB shop as the internet is to your webshop. Just because there are a lot of people on it, it doesn’t mean your business will automatically be a success. Just like with any other website, you need to adapt to the wishes of your audience.

So I hope we now can come to the conclusion that the old way of doing e-commerce on Facebook doesn’t work yet, simply because e-commerce on Facebook has not adapted to the wants of the user. The big question is, is there a solution out there that DOES work? We’re working on that.

How many hours a day are we linked in? Today we use the internet for everything, and especially if you are in the tech industry, we are constantly connected to any outlet that allows us the get the latest information as soon as it’s available. Sometimes we can barely remember when we aren’t connected; how often is your smart phone actually turned off, or your computer out of sight?

This week at Tinypay we had a meeting that offered thought provoking discussions, team bonding, and enlightenment. Enlightenment? Doesn’t seem like your average Monday morning meeting, well we had a little help from the wisdom of Eckhart Tolle, and the video of his interview at Google.

Eckhart Tolle who is the author of “The Power of Now” starts off the interview with big statements like, “what ever you experience, ever, is the present moment”. This seems like a concept we can pretty easily grasp, what we are experiencing is happening now, in the present. In this society of goal setters and future expectation makers, it is often very difficult to comprehend that this moment, right now, is all that matters.

Eckhart goes on to let us in on the “most incredible secret of human life…at the bottom of it all, you are conscious…” and that is it. That consciousness is our inner being, where everything is quiet and we just are. That is the secret to it all. If we can find that inner being, that place of stillness, then we won’t need to always reach for something more; more excitement, future plans, whatever it may be that we think will make us happy. Eckhart continues to tell us that we will be more at peace if we increase the time when we just are, versus the times when we are doing(or thinking).

This is the time in the interview when Bradley Horowitz asks ” is there a place for technology” on our path to finding our inner stillness and creating a world for ourselves more at peace? The answer from Eckhart was quite profound, first he compared technology to a Frankenstein like monster, our own creation might destroy us. He says that eventually technology could lead to the total breakdown of all human civilization! Technology and being linked in to the collective mind(the internet) can create so much mental noise and confusion that we will cease to create anything new.

One of the reasons we had this meeting is because here at Tinypay we are constantly innovating and trying to make things easier and better, and this takes creativity on everyones part. Eckhart explains that mental noise leads to losing connectivity with who you are, and if we lose this connectivity, we lose our sense of creativity. In order to stay creative, you have to take time to just be…or you can just have enlightening meetings like this .

So will technology destroy the world? Well Eckhart did not forget to mention that technology allowed us to watch this video and have his word and wisdom spread, which could lead to the awakening of others. The flow of information is no longer restricted to the few and powerful, which is something generations have been striving for and is nothing to belittle.

The information is all around us, and we all know we are not going to unplug or disconnect (because we would probably lose our jobs), but maybe once in a while we need to take the time to just be, because really isn’t that enough?

After many months of drawing flowcharts, having sprint meetings, designing interfaces, crunching code, a heavy Kimchi noodle diet and very, very little sleep, there’s no way we can properly describe how excited we are to come out with our latest piece of web ingenuity. We certainly hope our users will feel the same.

Our goal at Tinypay is to make buying and selling online as easy as possible. With 15,000 sellers and counting we are proud to be one of the emerging platforms in the e-commerce space. Besides our amazing growth, a lot has changed in the first year right after we launched. One of last years important developments in the web space is the further, ecstatic growth of social networks and of course one in particular: Facebook.

Today almost a billion people spend a lot of their internet time on Facebook and half of them are on every day. It’s a huge market where consumers, brands, communities and merchants come together to share all kinds of information. Until now, most of the information has been free content like images, music and videos. This has definitely contributed to the success of platforms like Facebook and Tinypay, and right now it’s time to take both a step beyond.

We feel that nobody has introduced e-commerce to Facebook in a proper way yet, utilizing Facebook’s many great sharing, aggregation and timeline features. That’s why in the last couple of months we have been working on something that we think will change the way people engage in e-commerce, socially.

We think that selling and buying on Facebook will bring huge opportunities for a lot of folks including musicians, artists, athletes, and more. Therefor we are launching a brand new product, enabling everyone with a Facebook page to start selling on Facebook: MarketPage.

Sign up to be the first to try it out and get exclusive access to MarketPage.

What’s one nice thing about working at a start-up?

Food.

Here in the Tinypay office, we have a fully stocked fridge, a full size kitchen, and we often like to have family style meals. Today, I (Kelley) cooked for the first time in the office. I usually don’t stay late enough to eat dinner with the rest of the team, but the one time I did, Val made Filet Mignon…let’s just say I felt a little pressure. I decided to make lunch and went with salmon, rice, and collard greens.

While the feedback wasn’t overwhelmingly superb, it was all eaten, and I heard a couple “I could go for more” comments and I will call that a success! I have to say it is nice not having to leave the office for a quick bite and being able to share a meal with coworkers that we spend so much time with anyways.

How do you eat while at work?

Any suggestions for easy meals we can make here at Tinypay?

Tinypay has added its first female hire to the team, me, Kelley! I would first like to say Hello and how excited I am to join the Tinypay team! I will be acting as Community Manager which includes everything from Office Manager, HR, hiring, party planner, making sure everyone is happy while the coding ensues.

Great things are happening over here at Tinypay, the first being we have moved out of RocketSpace and into our new private office! Our new address is:

580 Howard St. #402   San Francisco, CA 94105

Now some fun facts about me….

I am from Kenwood, a tiny town of 2,000 in the heart of the wine country(and yes of course I like wine). I Love to travel, I spent the entire year in Brazil last year.. AMAZING(eu sei como falar portugues..se quiser falar, vamos, eu adoro!) I love food and cooking( some favorites include sushi, anything pickled, all salads, and anything I haven’t tried before). My favorite color is green, my favorite sport is soccer, I love reggae and Hip Hop…if you would like to know anything else feel free to ask!

Here is a semi-crazy photo of me for your enjoyment.