Sat.Dec 04, 2010 - Fri.Dec 10, 2010

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Social Networking (the Shorter Version) Past, Present, Future

Both Sides of the Table

This blog post originally appeared in serialized form here on TechCrunch. This version is the shorter, ADHD version. If you came here via a direct link you might want to check out the more detailed full version on my blog, which is here. Social Networks: Past, Present & Future. I recently spoke at Caltech at the Caltech / MIT Enterprise Forum on “the future of social networking,&# the 30-minute video is here and the PowerPoint presentation is here on DocStoc ).

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Ten Tips to Make Your Startup Website Memorable

Startup Professionals Musings

Smart people only visit and buy from credible and memorable websites. In the past, if your startup had a website presence, the company was credible by definition. In today’s world, a website is necessary but not sufficient for credibility. Dreamers and gamblers have found out that if the website isn’t validated as credible, it’s probably a scam, and everyone loses.

Startup 230
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Building a company that people want to work for

This is going to be BIG.

I just had the pleasure of sitting in on a SinglePlatform team development session—where everyone in the company (they have about a dozen people at the moment) sat down to work through personal styles of work and communication. They sat around a table talking personality types, how they prefer to interact with others, etc. Everyone was having fun because it was clear that they were all working towards making a better and more successful working environment.

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On Expert Networks, Compliance, the Drunk and the Lamppost

David Teten

Expert networks have been in the news a lot for the past few weeks, due to the SEC’s attempt to look for insider trading amongst hedge funds, following on their Galleon investigation (Raj Rajaratnam of Galleon is in the photo shown). The best source of information on this topic is as usual the Integrity Research blog. I wholeheartedly agree with the thrust of their commentary: expert networks replace social capital with financial capital.

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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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Twitter Link Roundup #64 – 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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Startup Strategy Roundtable: Where Should You Raise Money?

ReadWriteStart

During this week's roundtable we had a group of entrepreneurs from the Pune Open Coffee Club gather at the offices of Persistent Systems to participate in the roundtable together. It is a very good format for entrepreneur groups around the world to get together and network around the roundtable programming which happens every week, religiously. First up today was Jacqueline Floro-Pierre with ShopTranslated from China.

More Trending

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Process Police

SVPG

Readers of my book and articles know how much I value a strong project manager. I’ve written earlier about the positive impact to velocity a great project manager can have (see [link] and [link]. And one of the reasons I advocate for Scrum is that as a process it values this role of project manager as “impediment remover” (known as the Scrum Master role).

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How To Become Unemployable

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak

I am unemployable. I always have been. I always will be. Up until last year employment gave me a morbid fear deep in the pit of my stomach. Even with a successful personal business, living in a house that is paid for, and a dedicated support team in the wings – I still was freaking out about the fact that I don’t think I could hold a job anywhere for anyone.

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SpeedMenu Open to New Customer Base

Austin Startup

SpeedMenu announced today that their mobile menuing, ordering and payment software has entered the beta testing stage with Micros Systems Point of Sale (POS) software. SpeedMenu enables patrons at participating establishments to connect to their tab, order items and pay for their tab – all from their cell phone. Dan Janjigian, CEO of SpeedMenu said “Due to the size of the Micros installed client base, SpeedMenu will begin offering service in every city around the country.

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You Think You Screwed Up? Have I Got a Story for You!

Babbling VC

"An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field." Niels Bohr (1885-1962). According to the above quote from Nils Bohr, it's taken me at least ten years to exhaust many of the opportunities for making mistakes. This doesn't mean I won't make any more mistakes nor does it infer that I am now going to rock as a VC.

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How to Detect a Toxic Customer

Software By Rob

A month ago I received a sales inquiry via email for my invoicing software package. The prospect asked if we could complete the questions he had attached in a spreadsheet: I will need the attached questions answered in order to proceed as I can’t get them all answered off your website. There were nearly 80 questions, at least half of which could be answered from our website.

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OptimizePress Review – The Easy Way To Make Squeeze Pages, Sales Pages & Membership Sites

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak

Two months ago, I decided to launch a training program called the 7 Day Bootcamp. In that program, I teach people how to start an internet business in 7 days. I spent a ton of time putting together the videos, resources, task sheets and I really focused on the quality of the content. Then I launched the site. Initially, I just wanted to get it out there, and I didn’t care too much about how it looked.

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Two Clean Energy Incubators Launched in Texas

Austin Startup

The Austin Technology Incubator (ATI) and the State Energy Conservation Office (SECO) are announcing a program to launch two new clean energy incubators at Texas universities. This program will make two awards of $200,000 each to build clean energy incubation capability. Interested parties should go to the program website, [link] , for more detailed information.

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Insurance is always too expensive until needed.

Berkonomics

This insight seems obvious to most anyone. But it is a fact that business insurance is one of the more poorly managed mitigation of risk in small and some medium sized corporations, often because of failure to assign the responsibility to an individual or department, and sometimes just from the willingness to bet against the event and save cash. Business package policies are inexpensive and rather comprehensive tools that should be contracted by all companies with any assets to measure and prot

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Is it OK to Want to Make Money?

Both Sides of the Table

This past October I was honored to be invited by Steve Blank to speak at Stanford for their Enterprise Thought Leader (ETL) series. The topic I chose to speak about was “lessons on starting a company&# but I created the sub-title in class “a Silicon Valley heresy&# since my goal was to slay many of the myths I believe exist right in the heart of Silicon Valley!

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The Lean LaunchPad – Teaching Entrepreneurship as a Management Science

Steve Blank

I’ve introduced a new class at Stanford to teach engineers, scientists and other professionals how startups really get built. They are going to get out of the building, build a company and get orders in ten weeks. Jon Feiber of Mohr Davidow Ventures and Ann Miura-Ko of Floodgate are co-teaching the class with me (and Alexander Osterwalder is a guest lecturer.

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Why Vineet Nayar should be at Dreamforce this week

deal architect

If you have read his book Employees first, Customers second or heard him present on it, you know the CEO of HCL is an articulate fellow. But like many technology executives who try their hand at becoming industry analysts, the.

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Innovative People Laugh and Have More Fun at Work

Startup Professionals Musings

I’m convinced that people who have fun at work are more innovative, as well as happier. I don’t have any big scientific studies to prove this, but in my considerable business experience, I haven’t seen many successes come out of a group of fearful pessimists or unhappy people. As I was looking through the literature, I did find evidence that many strong business leaders, like John D.

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What the Past Can Tell Us About the Future of Social Networking

Both Sides of the Table

This blog post originally appeared in serialized form here on TechCrunch. This post has a bit more than the serialized version, but if you prefer an even shorter version I created the ADAH version , which is < 50% the length. I recently spoke at Caltech at the Caltech / MIT Enterprise Forum on “the future of social networking,&# the 30-minute video is here and the PowerPoint presentation is here on DocStoc ).

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SaaS Economics – Part 1: The SaaS Cash Flow Trough

For Entrepreneurs

Provides SaaS entrepreneurs with an Excel spreadsheet model and graphs that show the cash flow trough that happens to SaaS or subscription businesses that use a sales organization.

Sales 168
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3 Things You Can Do Right Now to Increase Sales

Rembrandt Communications

If you need to bring in new sales immediately and are overwhelmed with all of the Webinars, books, program, services, and other “opportunities” that come across your desk on a daily basis, stop for a moment and take a breath. Here are three tips to help you simplify the process and actually see an increase [.].

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Be Sure Your Startup Has a Clear Value Proposition

Startup Professionals Musings

By Joe Bockerstette As an angel investor who has considered hundreds of startup opportunities, the concept of a value proposition may be the most misunderstood and taken for granted element that I see in newly formed startups. While entrepreneurs freely throw around the term “value proposition,” they rarely offer a thoughtful explanation for the “value” their business is providing and, more importantly, an understanding of who their real customer is and what valuable benefit their customer perce

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5 Ideas to Spot an Opportunity

Life Beyond Code

Note : A shorter version of this article was published first in my newsletter. Based on the response there, I decided to expand and repost it on the blog. So, here we go: First of all, rarely will someone hand you a “golden&# opportunity simply because if that was the case for everyone, it won’t be called an “golden&# opportunity anymore.

Semantic 151
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SaaS Economics – Part 2: Scaling the Business

For Entrepreneurs

Discusses the cash flow trough that happens to SaaS, or other subscription/recurring revenue businesses when they decide to scale their business by ramping sales and marketing. Provides an Excel spreadsheet model and PowerPoint slide deck that can be used by readers to model their own data.

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Which U.S. States Are the Most Entrepreneurial?

ReadWriteStart

The website FormDs.com has posted a very interesting map with a breakdown of investment dollars over the course of the past year. The map caught the eye of Boulder-based venture capitalist Jason Mendelson - not surprisingly, as the map points to Colorado as one of the most entrepreneurial states. FormDs.com bases its findings on the filings, as the name suggests, Form D, an SEC requirement when startups and other privately-held companies raise venture capital.

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Five Elements of a Credible Startup Marketing Plan

Startup Professionals Musings

It’s not uncommon for me to see a startup business plan “mission” to be the “premier brand” for their product, yet their marketing budget in the financials is trivial. This combination will almost certainly get your plan tossed by potential investors, who understand all too well the need and cost for marketing in today’s environment. When questioned, founders usually mention word-of-mouth, viral marketing, and a top quality product.

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New Amazing Deal – Give The Gift Of Learning

Feld Thoughts

The latest Brad Feld Amazing Deal is online. A few weeks ago I was approached by Sympoz , a company in Boulder that is excited about building online classrooms where anyone can take a courses in categories like Wine, Personal Finance, Cooking, etc. The have a nice looking site, and their classes are self serve, at your own pace, in HD. They have forums where you can interact with fellow classmates and teachers.

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Ten Crowdsourcing Trends for 2011

crowdSPRING Blog

Crowdsourcing is fundamentally changing business, government, non-profits, education, research, and other sectors. Remarkably, we’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg. Here are my picks for the top ten crowdsourcing trends for 2011: 1. Crowdsourcing marketplaces will earn significantly more market share. In 2010, the top two design crowdsourcing marketplaces (crowdSPRING and 99designs) together paid well over $1 million dollars every month to thousands of designers from around the world.

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Big Opportunities for Startups Providing Big Data, Data-as-a-Service

ReadWriteStart

The open database service Factual announced yesterday that it has secured $25 million in financing, led by Andreessen Horowitz and Index Ventures. Factual was founded in 2007 by Gil Elbaz, whose last company Applied Semantics was acquired by Google in 2003, becoming one of the core components of AdSense. Investor Ben Horowitz describes Factual as "a key player in the emerging data-as-a-service market, with the potential to fundamentally impact how people and businesses use data to make decisions

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Investors Don’t Fund Startups Without a Good Plan

Startup Professionals Musings

Too many entrepreneurs still believe the urban myth that you can sketch your idea on a napkin, and investors will throw money at you. Every investor I know is frustrated with the poor quality of the business plans they get. This is sad, since “how to write a business plan” is a frequent topic found in every business journal, and a common title in the business section of every book store.

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The Power of a CEO 360 Review

Feld Thoughts

I recently sat through an annual CEO 360 review at a company that has been very serious about executive development since inception. It reminded me how powerful this is when it’s done correctly. In this particular case, the entire board and management team had an hour-long facilitated discussion without the CEO in the room. The facilitator is not an employee of the company but has worked with the entire management team on executive development as they’ve grown over the past 5+ year

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How to Raise Capital for Your Startup

David Teten

Next Monday, 12/13, I’ll be presenting on “ Best Practices in Raising Capital for Startups “ , as part of the last class in the Founder Institute’s second program in New York. I welcome feedback on the draft slide deck, below. David Blumenstein (The Hatchery) and Adeo Ressi will also be there. How to Raise Capital using Online Networks.

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Pulling Together a Pre-Launch Checklist for Your Startup

ReadWriteStart

As you prepare to launch your product, there are a number of things you can do in order to make sure things go as smoothly as possible. We've written before about the steps you can take, for example, to make sure that your website is ready even if your startup isn't. The blog Bootstrapping Independence recently posted a very thorough list of some additional resources and reminders for building a detailed launch plan.

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Get Credible Market Research Without a Consultant

Startup Professionals Musings

Most startup founders know exactly what they want to design and sell, and they are personally convinced that everyone will buy one. Yet they often fail to realize that their view is likely biased, and will be instantly discounted by potential investors. Business plans with no “industry expert” data on your target opportunity size and growth are routinely rejected.

Marketing 221
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Gist in Gmail for Chrome

Feld Thoughts

Gist just released their Chrome extension for Gist in Gmail. Chrome is my browser of choice for Gmail and I’ve been anxiously awaiting this release. It’s just awesome. It’s tightly integrated with both consumer and enterprise Gmail. It’s fast, light weight, and takes advantage of the huge amount of data discovery that Gist does via the cloud (rather than in-browser).

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3 Things You Can Do Right Now to Increase Sales

Rembrandt Communications

If you need to bring in new sales immediately and are overwhelmed with all of the Webinars, books, program, services, and other “opportunities” that come across your desk on a daily basis, stop for a moment and take a breath. Here are three tips to help you simplify the process and actually see an increase [.].

Sales 100