Wed.Sep 07, 2011

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Five Skills You Need for Startup Success, According to Ethernet Inventor Bob Metcalfe

ReadWriteStart

Ethernet inventor and generally accomplished tech super-guy Bob Metcalfe gave a great opening keynote talk at this morning's Capital Factory Demo Day in Austin, Texas. The event has been good so far and is live streaming online for free. Metcalfe offered a wide ranging talk to open the day but included some tasty tidbits in the form of two lists: five personal skills that entrepreneurs need to develop in order to succeed in building tech companies that scale and six types of people a startup eco

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The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Boston Tech Community, Sept 2011

Rob Go

Boston is a great place to start and build a company. There is a wealth of resources that are unique to this town and a vibrant community of hackers, business people, and investors at various stages in their career. However, Boston is a transient town, especially for the student population that refreshes a large population each year. It’s also surprisingly difficult for students to get plugged-in to everything that is happening in the local tech ecosystem.

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‘Out of Control’ Startups Fail on 8 Key Processes

Startup Professionals Musings

Even when your startup is a one-man show, you will soon find that you are “out of control,” unless you start organizing and writing down how and when key things need to get done. Like it or not, you are now entering the dreaded realm of “formal business processes.” The right question is “What is the minimum that I need?” The simple answer is that you need to implement one process at a time, starting with those things that are most critical to your business, until you feel a relief that things ar

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IBM: SAP, Sabre and Smart Systems

deal architect

Kudos to Vijay Vijayasankar for saying “he is very proud to be an IBMer” as he continues a debate we have been having for a while now about whether IBM is innovative or not. He cites SAP and Sabre (the.

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Building Healthy Innovation Ecosystems for Your Projects

Speaker: Nick Noreña, Innovation Coach and Advisor, Kromatic

Every startup and innovation project exists within an ecosystem that either helps or hurts that project. As innovation managers, we need to keep a pulse of that ecosystem and make sure we're helping those innovation projects we're managing every step of the way. In this webinar, Nick Noreña will walk through an Innovation Ecosystem Model that he and his team at Kromatic have developed to help investors, heads of product, teachers, and executives understand how they can best support innovation in

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Tonight’s Interview With Phil Weiser – Reflections On Serving In The White House

Feld Thoughts

Tonight I’ll be interviewing Phil Weiser , currently the Dean of CU Law School, on his experience serving in the Obama Administration. We will be doing this in the Wittemyer Courtroom, Wolf Law Building, University of Colorado from 6:30 – 7:30 pm. Admission is free, but please register here. Phil has been instrumental in the development of the Boulder entrepreneurial ecosystem as the founder of and motive force behind Silicon Flatirons for many years before going to DC.

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20 US Startup Trends: Get Inspired and Launch in Your Country

VC Cafe

“The key question to keep asking is, Are you spending your time on the right things? Because time is all you have.&# - Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture. Alley Insider, one of my favorite tech blogs, published an interesting post yesterday, titled “ If We Hear About Any More Startups Like These, We’ll Scream “, listing some of the latest startup trends in idea buckets.

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More Trending

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Give us a taste

Start Up Blog

I was recently flying with Emirates and got talking to the cabin crew. When I later asked for a cappuccino they gave me a nice little extra effort. See below: For the uninitiated, that is the Emirates tail logo as the chocolate on my coffee. I was impressed so much I didn’t want to put sugar in and mess it all up. She did mention that it was normally reserved for 1st Class passengers, but they thought I might appreciate it in business class.

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The September cS Award and The August cS Award Winner

crowdSPRING Blog

Earlier this year, we announced that we would issue a monthly cS Award to honor quality work by designers and writers in the crowdSPRING community. September cS Award. The September cS Award of $1,000 will be given to a creative who posts the most useful and interesting content to crowdSPRING’s Facebook fan page during the month of September. Every day on our Facebook page, we share interesting tutorials, freebies, inspirations, and much more.

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In Praise of Small Business Development Centers (SBDC)

Up and Running

Yesterday I had the pleasure of spending all day with about 90 people who teach and advise entrepreneurs and small business owners at various Small Business Development Centers ( SBDC s) around the country. This was as part of the annual conference of Small Business Development Centers, starting today in San Diego. The conference reminds me of something I say frequently in ask-the-expert emails and answering questions about entrepreneurship: when in doubt, if you live in the United States, and y

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I’m a VC – Behind the Music

VC Adventure

Yesterday we released a video written, produced and directed by my partner Jason, that attempts to capture “the human struggle of four venture capitalists trying to make the world a better place.&# From the response on Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere on the web it seems to have hit a chord with people; and I hope has been taken for what it was intended – a parody of lives as VCs (certainly no one can accuse the four of us of taking ourselves too seriously!).

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Are You Making These 3 Common Conversion Testing Mistakes With Your Sales Copy?

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak

Copywriting 101: How To Refine Your Sales Letter In previous articles I led you through how to construct a sales page. From the heading , presenting your offer with body copy , and then rounding off the sales process with your guarantee and calls to action : Part 1: How To Nail A Killer Headline Part 2: How To Nail A Killer Headline Part 2 Part 3: The Art Of Good Storytelling Part 4: 4 Crucial Elements Every Sales Letter Needs If you were like most marketers you would probably leave it there.

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Capital Factory Demo Day

Austin Startup

Today marks the 3rd Capital Factory Demo Day! About 300 investors, entrepreneurs, and press have shown up to see the five companies that have gone through the program this year. Watch the live stream here! Here is a brief summary of the five companies that went through the program this year. StoryMix Media Taking advantage of the trend of personal video exploding everywhere, StoryMix is helping people preserve their video memories.

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The Last Lean Startup Bundle: 48 hours to claim $3,000,000 in prizes

Startup Lessons Learned

The Lean Startup Book launches in just under a week. How many copies will this book sell in its first week – real, hardcover, paper copies? If that number crosses some unknowable threshold, the book will debut as a bestseller, and then an awful lot of people are going to read it. People who would never bother with an entrepreneur’s blog, who may not even see themselves as entrepreneurs: shopkeepers and policy makers, CFO’s and private equity managers, and even future entrepreneurs.

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InfoChimps Acquires Keepstream

Austin Startup

Two of my favorite companies have now combined forces. Today in my email I received a message from the founder of Capital Factory company Keepstream. I will re-post it here for you. Congratulations to everyone involved! Keepstream is joining Infochimps! We are excited to announce that Keepstream has been acquired by Infochimps, leading API provider and data marketplace!

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Small Business Spotlight of the Week: RawFoodHomeRecipes.com

crowdSPRING Blog

The worst part of cooking is deciding what to make. Everybody has their fall backs, but there comes a point where you just wanna try something new. A great way to do this is to try to make something from a specific cuisine. But in a world filled with interesting fare, what cuisine do you go for? Might I suggest this week’s spotlight: RawFoodHomeRecipes.com.

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Why I Love My Board, Part III

OnlyOnce

Why I Love My Board, Part III. My prophesy is starting to come true. In Part I of this series four years ago, I asserted that. Fred may be the only one of my directors who has done something this dorky, this publicly , but quite frankly, I could see any of us in the same position. Now, Brad Feld is no shrinking violet. As far as I’m concerned, he made his film debut in the memorable “ Munch on Your Bones &# video (short, worth a watch if you’re a Feld groupie) something like

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Top 3 Metrics to Measure Customer Engagement

Guy Nirpaz

Businesses these days are making significant efforts to delight their customers, and for good reasons. One of the key areas where businesses focus their efforts is in creating online self-serve applications with a great user experience in order to help customers get what they need and when they need it. But how do businesses know if they are successful?

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Authenticity Is Easy

Duct Tape Marketing

Authenticity Is Easy This content from: Duct Tape Marketing. I find it amusing that businesses strive to be authentic, or at the directive of the CEO, more authentic. The thing is, authenticity is the easiest thing there is. kiara_ via Flickr Every business is authentic, what choice is there? Authenticity is simply the manifestation of what you truly believe, the core values, the basic identity of the leader of the business.

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I’m a VC – Behind the Music

VC Adventure

Yesterday we released a video written, produced and directed by my partner Jason, that attempts to capture “the human struggle of four venture capitalists trying to make the world a better place.” From the response on Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere on the web it seems to have hit a chord with people; and I hope has been taken for what it was intended – a parody of lives as VCs (certainly no one can accuse the four of us of taking ourselves too seriously!).

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Are you guys cool if I keep Twitter spamming you? #tweetoldpost

Jeff Hilimire

Is Twitter the new spam? I’ve had this problem figuring out how to use Twitter as an awareness tool for my blog. Outside of Google search and people directly typing in the URL (including RSS or bookmarking it), Twitter is by far the next greatest source of traffic. I personally use Twitter more as a communication forum than I do anything else, but the fact that it was driving a lot of traffic to my blog was not lost on me.

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Groupon Goes Back to Roots, Sells College Tuition Deal | The Chronicle of Higher Education

Campus Entrepreneurship

The idea of a site organizing group action came to Andrew Mason while a graduate student at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy. Looks like the company is now employing the ‘campus as market’ concept that is at the core of many student launched ventures (ie Facebook, Dominos Pizza, Crooked Monkey) From The Ticker at The Chronicle of Higher Education: Groupon, the online service best known for daily deals that offer reduced prices for retailers from resta

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[Interview] Pekka Viljakainen, Author of “No Fear: Business Leadership for the Digital Age” (Part II)

YoungUpstarts

Leading business information architect and IT entrepreneur Pekka A. Viljakainen’s was recently in town to give a talk and promote his book “ No Fear: Business Leadership for the Digital Age “, and we were fortunate enough to catch him for a short interview to talk about how business leadership in the new digital era. In this interview, Viljakainen also shares some thoughts about entrepreneurship and globalization.

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Twitter Link Roundup #101 – Small Business, Social Media, Design, Copywriting, Marketing And More

crowdSPRING Blog

Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account , I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about logo design , web design , startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!

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Nairobi Weekend: New Startups in East Africa

ReadWriteStart

Driving from Nairobi Airport into Kenya's capital of Nairobi the evening of my arrival left me with this image: A four-lane highway that ends in a big pile of metal, street vendors and thousands of people sharing the street with all the other traffic, dented Disco Matatus, predominantly Asian sedans and pickups for the middle classes, construction workers joking around on the loading area of the huge grime-spewing rack-body truck that takes them home from work, and some rare sprinkles of brand n

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