Thu.Dec 06, 2012

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Who the hell are these guys?

deal architect

I remember a meeting with a systems integrator while at Gartner. He wanted to know who would be the “next SAP” they should build a practice around. So I showed him an ERP magic quadrant. I still remember his face.

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Build Social Media Into the Customer Experience

Startup Professionals Musings

As I visit the websites of many startups, as well as more mature businesses, I still too often see a “contact” page offering nothing but a sterile form for customers to submit, never to be heard from again. Social media connections, if they exist, are buried elsewhere or reserved for monitoring purposes only. Social media is here, and is the preferred mode of communication by a large segment of your customers, so make it a positive differentiator for your business.

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Whither Outsourcing Advisory Services?

deal architect

Phil Fersht has a sarcastic post on the Insight HCL event we both attended on Tuesday. To start with I think he is a bit too tough on HCL. I thought they did a fairly good job with the event.

Offshore 220
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My Smart Phone Is No Longer Working For Me

Feld Thoughts

I spent two weeks without my iPhone. I was completely off the grid for the first week but then spent the second week online, on my MacBook Air and Kindle, but no iPhone. I got home on Sunday and have had my iPhone turned on the past few days. I’ve used it as a phone, but I’ve largely stayed off of the web, email, and twitter with it. Instead, I’m only done this when I’m in front of my computer.

Mobile 187
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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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[Infographic] Why Employees Leave Your Company

YoungUpstarts

Facing high employee turnover and no idea why? There are many reasons why employees leave: too heavy a workload, lack of career advancement or promotion opportunities, or even unrealistic job expectations. In fact, many of the reasons cited by employees when they leave are down to factors you can actually control. Ultimately, 1 in 2 of them leave because they just don’t feel that they are being valued at the job.

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Users Guide to Startup Advisors

Gust

What’s an advisor to a startup deal? Technically, advisor is one of those bucket terms that means anything and everything, depending on context. Those names and faces and backgrounds that turn up in pitches and business plans might be deep and important relationships, somebody with options or equity who is going to be helping for the long term; or meaningless fluff, somebody who agreed once to have his or her name appear, but really does nothing. .

Startup 165

More Trending

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How much stake (equity) is an idea worth?

Gust

It depends on the quality of the idea. I’m a firm believer in Derek Sivers ‘ calculus, which goes like this: AWFUL IDEA = -$1. WEAK IDEA = $1. SO-SO IDEA = $5. GOOD IDEA = $10. GREAT IDEA = $15. BRILLIANT IDEA = $20. The real value, of course (as other answers here have noted), comes from executing on the idea. And to see how that calculation works, check out Derek’s classic, seminal article on the subject: [link].

Equity 150
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What Do Investors Look for in a Game Developer?

Lightspeed Venture Partners

In the past few years, the opportunities for game developers have exploded. With more places than ever to play — from proliferating smartphones to Facebook — games are the most popular category of applications. I’m often asked what I look for in a game company investment so I recently wrote a blog post for GamaSutra on the topic. Check it out and let me know if you have any questions or thoughts in the comments.

Developer 148
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How to manage your inside sales team

Version One Ventures

For many SaaS companies, the effectiveness of the inside sales team is the key to scaling up. After all, other marketing channels often either hit a ceiling (i.e. inbound marketing, PPC, etc.) or simply aren’t efficient enough (i.e. all offline marketing activities). However, managing an inside sales team is tough and you need a well-oiled machine in order to get customer acquisition costs inline with other marketing channels.

Sales 142
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5 Ways to Improve Sales Without Selling

Growthink Blog

There is a big difference between marketing and sales. The act of selling generates revenue when a product is sold. Marketing, on the other hand, is the act of attracting attention, branding a product or person, and creating a buzz that will eventually result in sales. Peter Drucker once said, "The point of marketing is to make selling superfluous." In layman's terms, this means that if you do a great job of positioning your business in your ads and build a strong reputation, you won't have to d

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Qunb wins the LeWeb 12 startup competition, helps users find and visualize numerical data

The Next Web

Le Web Paris 2012 has come to an end. So has the startup competition, an important part of the annual conference for Europe’s finest in tech. And the winner is … Qunb , a Paris, France-based startup that wants to help users – both individuals and corporations – find, share, visualize and download numerical data. Similar to Belgian startup Wondergraphs , the idea is to help make sense of structured data – primarily in a professional context – by visualizing it

SMS 119
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Robotic Balls Dancing In Union Square

Feld Thoughts

28 Spheros + 1 Boombox. + 4 Android phones = Mind Blown. Wow – have you bought a Sphero for Christmas yet?

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Samsung is a powerhouse

The Equity Kicker

The FT’s Lex column has a piece on Samsung today which spells out how powerful the company has become. Anyone with an interest in consumer electronics will have noticed their success in the TV and smartphone markets in recent years. Taking a sample of one, over the last twelve months I have bought two Samsung phones and a Samsung laptop. And on top of that they sponsor my beloved Chelsea.

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Are You Providing Answers to Magic Questions?

ConversionXL

The best kind of visitor is the one looking to buy. She knows what she wants and has a credit card in her hand. Now it’s your job to seal the deal. If you’re dealing with a motivated customer, you just need to make taking action easy and present a competitive and compelling offer – and answer the magic questions. What are magic questions?

Metrics 98
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Words of Wisdom from Steve Blank

Scott Edward Walker

To Our Clients & Friends: Welcome to our weekly series “ Helping Entrepreneurs Succeed.” Each week, we post a short video clip of a successful entrepreneur, investor or business leader on a variety of topics. This week, we again present startup guru Steve Blank , a highly-successful serial entrepreneur, Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship at Stanford University, and author of Four Steps to the Epiphany and co-author of The Startup Owners Manual.

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Winning big

Start Up Blog

The big win is rarely an event or an agreement reached. It’s more often the accumulation of the many little yeses we gather on the journey. Not just because it takes the iterations to win, but also because the having is in the doing.

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Quality, Quantity, and Values – Rating Your Associates.

Berkonomics

How often do you take the time to rate your employee-associates? Is it really worth the time and effort when measured from the perspective of the company and of the employee? First, like any important process, the metrics used to measure effectiveness and progress are so important to a successful outcome, that a good manager will spend time reviewing those metrics used by others and create an appropriate set of measurements for your company that reflect the most important attributes of the empl

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Winning big

Start Up Blog

The big win is rarely an event or an agreement reached. It’s more often the accumulation of the many little yeses we gather on the journey. Not just because it takes the iterations to win, but also because the having is in the doing.

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Introducing Lean Planning: How to plan less and grow faster

Up and Running

Today, I want to introduce you to a new concept for starting and growing successful companies: Lean Planning™. Lean Planning is a set of tools for discovering a business model that works, building an action plan to test your assumptions, creating financial models and a plan for a viable business, and tracking your performance so you can adjust your plan on the fly, quickly and easily.

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Tech Wildcatters Spring 2013 Applications Are Open

The Startup Lawyer

Tech Wildcatters , a Forbes Top 10 seed accelerator, is now accepting applications for the fifth cycle of their 12-week accelerator program which begins Spring 2013. The deadline for submissions is January 21, 2013. Comprised of 15 startups, the fifth cycle is set up to be the largest group of companies to go through the Tech Wildcatters program to date.

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Business Resolutions for 2013

Early Growth Financial Services

As we hurtle towards the end of another year, I find myself taking stock of how much Early Growth Financial Services has accomplished this year—and what I’d like to accomplish in 2013. All thoughtful entrepreneurs should approach the end of the year with plans to move their business forward for the upcoming year. While I’m in the business of supporting entrepreneurs by providing a full suite of financial services, I also happen to be an entrepreneur myself, looking to build and maintain my

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Seven Reasons Why Today’s Boomerang Kids Can’t Hack It In Business

YoungUpstarts

by Michael Houlihan, coauthor of “ The Barefoot Spirit: How Hardship, Hustle, and Heart Built a Bestseller “ The holidays are here, and too many parents are wondering if they need to buy Santa gifts for the kids who are helping them deck the halls, swill the eggnog, and carve the Christmas goose. Okay, “kids” is a bit of a stretch. But what are the rules when “Little Johnny” is twenty-eight and back in his old room, jobless, his expensive grad school diploma about as useful as a trun

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Why VC’s Don’t “Crossover” Invest

Agile VC

A little more inside baseball from the VC biz… why VC’s rarely make “crossover” investments, with capital from multiple funds the VC firm manages invested in a single startup (see note 1). I was talking with an entrepreneur recently about this phenomenon. This person is an experienced CEO and a veteran of several startups, yet appreciating this nuance of how VC’s operate their business was relatively unfamiliar to him.

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10 Tested Tips to Improve Ecommerce Conversions Without Going Broke

Duct Tape Marketing

Thursday is guest post day here at Duct Tape Marketing and today’s guest is from Alexia McCormick – Enjoy! There are a couple ways for an ecommerce company to increase performance. One is to increase the number amount of traffic that arrives on the website through marketing, Pay Per Click advertising, and other forms of outreach. The other method is to develop the visitors you’ve already got and improve your conversion rate.