Sat.Feb 25, 2012 - Fri.Mar 02, 2012

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Everybody Wants Their Pound of Flesh (Negotiating with Buyers)

Both Sides of the Table

I recently wrote a post about negotiating with suppliers called “ The End of the Mexican Road.” The post talked about how to find the lowest acceptable price & terms in a deal through testing. In the post I made clear that I believe that all negotiations should seek to find fair deals where both parties can feel good about the outcomes.

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Eight Ways To Retrain Your Brain To Notice The Little Things

YoungUpstarts

by Jason Womack, author of “ Your Best Just Got Better: Work Smarter, Think Bigger, Make More “ For many Americans, the 21st century has gone from being the age of information to feeling more like the age of information overload. Between the e-mails, memos, and other miscellaneous information you have to read at work, your friends’ Facebook updates, your Twitter community recommending articles for you to read, and that book that’s been sitting on your nightstand (unopened) for the pa

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Forgetting what we have forgotten

deal architect

Even though I write mostly about technology and how it helps innovate or work, play and life, I keep an eye out for what Frank Scavo says in his review of my next book Lest one think Vinnie is an.

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Visit to Case Foundation and Startup America

David Teten

On February 16, I visited Washington, DC, where I attended an HBS Club of DC lunch on the Case Foundation and Startup America. Michael Smith, leader of the Social Innovation team at the Case Foundation , introduced the Foundation as a non-profit started in 1997 by Steve Case (AOL co-founder) and his wife, Jean Case. Its mission, to invest in people and ideas that can change the world, is supported by a venture philanthropy model that is funding a dozen “big ideas” in a focused way.

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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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Mobile malware is exploding, especially on Android

The Equity Kicker

Most of the posts I write are optimistic and upbeat. Not this one. I have just come from an excellent breakfast hosted by Qualcomm where we had half a dozen talks about the future for mobile. We heard about the potential for NFC, augmented reality, mobile commerce, and mobile operating systems, but the presentation that really caught my eye was about the growth in mobile malware.

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[Review] The Element

YoungUpstarts

If you’ve never heard of Sir Ken Robinson , you obviously haven’t been following the TED series of inspirational talks. A renowned thinker in the the “development of human potential”, Robinson spoke about the need to reinvent education to better develop the diverse talents, aptitudes and passions of individuals all over the world.

More Trending

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HBS Angels Healthcare Night

David Teten

If you’re a healthcare-focused VC or angel who has made at least 3 investments in the trailing year, please contact me if you’d like to attend our upcoming Harvard Business School Angels pitch night on February 29, co-hosted with the HBS Healthcare Alumni Association. The evening is sponsored by a Fortune 500 medical technology company. This is the first industry-specific HBS Angels pitch night.

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Lies that Losers Tell

Ben's Blog

’Cause right now you’re just a liar. a straight mentirosa. today u tell me something. y manana es otra cosa. —Mellow Man Ace, Mentirosa. When a company starts to lose its major battles, the truth often becomes the first casualty. CEOs and employees work tirelessly to develop creative narratives that help them avoid dealing with the obvious facts.

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[Singapore] Newstead’s Second Digital Style Outlet In Jurong Point – A Sign Of Changing Consumer Behavior?

YoungUpstarts

Singaporeans’ love affair with technology continues unabated, judging by the plethora of electronics stores around the island and the massive crowds swarming the four major electronics fairs every year. But if one trend seems to come across strongly in recent years, it’s not just about selling electronics and devices anymore; it’s about selling a lifestyle.

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Can We Studios Raises $1.5M Angel Round

Austin Startup

Can We Studios, a mobile application development company, today announced that it has secured $1.5 million in funding through private investors. The first application of the matching technology scheduled to come to market this summer is CanWeNetwork, which utilizes proprietary technology that will allow business professionals to meet and network with high-value peers seeking new business opportunities.

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The Inside Story of a Small Startup Acquisition (Part 3)

Software By Rob

Photo by psiaki. This is final installment of a 3-part series covering my acquisition of HitTail. I’d originally planned on a 2 part series, but when parts 1 and 2 went to the top of Hacker News I received so many questions that I decided to add this prologue to answer them. Every question below has been asked via email, comment or Twitter over the past four weeks.

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Find Egg-breakers: People With Influence & Authority and Are Unafraid to Use Them

Both Sides of the Table

My friend and fellow SoCal venture capitalist Peter Lee wrote a post about the different roles within a VC and spent much time on the role of an associate. VC’s keep different titles but the most common that I’ve come across that are investment professionals are (in ascending order of seniority): analyst, associate, principal and partner.

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Thoughts on Startup Org Structures and Titles

Rob Go

I have the benefit of seeing lots of startups pitch their teams and watching many seed-funded companies establish their early org structures. I’ve found that there are certain types of orgs and titles that I have a naturally visceral reaction towards. For example: - Having any more “C’s” than the CEO and CTO. - Seeing a head of product that isn’t a founder. - Seeing VPs (the more I see, the worse I feel).

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Entrepreneurs Need Creative Thinking After the Idea

Startup Professionals Musings

Most aspiring entrepreneurs believe their initial idea and inspiration requires the most important creative thinking. Experienced entrepreneurs will tell you that the initial idea is the easy part, and it’s the later implementation, and the competitive business marketing that are the real creative challenges. There is a tough balance here to achieve, since a large portion of starting and running a business requires analytical, logical thinking.

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Role models for the new IT

deal architect

Michael Arrington and Dennis Howlett are both entertaining and influential (and ok to some, annoying) bloggers. They come at the world from very different POV – Michael sees it from a startup/VC view, Dennis from a enterprise software view. I.

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Strata: Mixing the Social Data Cocktail

www.readwriteweb.com

Everyone knows you can learn a lot by trawling data coming from social media services like Twitter, Facebook and Flickr. But sometimes the data will surprise you. For instance, you'd expect to be able to glean product feedback from Facebook's public feed, but did you know that shoplifters tend to brag about it in social media? Chris Moody, CEO of Gnip talked about exploring social data and the real-world use cases for some of that data at the Strata Conference.

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Fred Wilson Visits With the HBS Start-Up Tribe

Seeing Both Sides

For the second year, Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures was kind enough to come to HBS to meet with the class Professor Tom Eisenmann and I co-teach called Launching Technology Ventures. Similar to last year , it was a terrific session. I started the class off by encouraging the students to live tweet the entire 90 minute session. The Twitter stream (which you can see here , using the hash tag #hbsltv) nicely captured our dialog.

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5 Ways to Bungle the Step from Corporate to Startup

Startup Professionals Musings

Many people, especially those who have spent years struggling up the corporate ladder, dream of jumping ship and becoming an entrepreneur. But every job move is fraught with risk, and the move from employee to entrepreneur is on the high end of the risk curve. This is a big jump, especially in an unstable economy, so do your homework first on this one.

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The monkey on our back

deal architect

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently wrote in Foreign Policy magazine “As the war in Iraq winds down and America begins to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan, the United States stands at a pivot point. Over the last 10.

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How Seven Simple Words Can Save A Business Conversation Gone Wrong

YoungUpstarts

By Andy Sobel, co-author of “ Power Questions: Build Relationships, Win New Business, and Influence Others “ Has this ever happened to you? You’re talking to a client, or perhaps your boss, and you realize the conversation has gotten off on absolutely the wrong foot. You may have learned new and unexpected information from the other person that renders everything you’ve said irrelevant.

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How to Avoid Being Overwhelmed by SEO

Rembrandt Communications

If you are a copywriter or small business owner researching SEO (search engine optimization) keywords for your business, it can be overwhelming. You’ll find tons of words via the search engines, Google Analytics, social media efforts, and more. With this in mind, here are… 3 Questions to Ask to Avoid SEO Keyword Stress! 1. What [.].

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10 Ways for Startups to Expand Their Reach in 2012

Startup Professionals Musings

As entrepreneurs, you always need to be on the lookout for ways to expand your current business, and always on the lookout for your next big thing. The competition never stands still, and new opportunities are evolving, based on culture changes in your customers, new technologies, and new problems in the world which need to be solved. Steven Schussler, in his latest book “ It’s a Jungle In There ” characterized this well in relation to his own success by recommending to all entrepreneurs that yo

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Resolutions still doing good

deal architect

One of my New Year’s resolutions was to post an average of 1.25 innovation posts a day on the New Florence blog. Year to date I have 102 posts, so 1.7 a day! It truly feels like living with Da.

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[Infographic] The Digital Classroom

YoungUpstarts

Technology is changing many aspects of society, and one area that it’s been really making a huge impact is in education. The classroom of my era consisted only of traditional teaching aids such as a chalkboard and pieces of colorful chalkboard, flip charts and, if we’re lucky, an overhead projector with which to project images off ‘transparencies’ Oh, and we used the good ol’ paper textbooks too.

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Why VCs Invest in Startups with Gravity

Genuine VC

Given communication tools and an array of online services which foster and empower remote working, many startups are successfully building and creating product with teams all around the world. Here at NextView, we typically invest in companies headquartered along the U.S. East Coast, but a number of them have a significant number of team members outside the country (e.g.

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Your Entrepreneur World Changes When You Take Money

Startup Professionals Musings

The naïve entrepreneur thinks he can relax, after he finally cashes the check from a professional investor, but in reality that’s when the work and the pressure starts. His first reality reset is that now, maybe for the first time, he really has a boss, or several bosses, and often very demanding ones at that. Angel and venture capital investors rarely just give you the cash, and stand back to wait for you to spend it the way you want.

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Drafting in technology

deal architect

As I watched bits of the Daytona 500 it hit me how adept the drivers are at taking advantage of the aerodynamics of the car ahead of them, while balancing the overheating from breathing the fumes of the car ahead.

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25 Brand Experts You Should Follow On Twitter

YoungUpstarts

Social media is an incredibly important part of any branding strategy , so of course Twitter is a great spot to interact with brand experts in their natural element. We’ve found some of the best minds in personal branding, B2B branding, corporate branding, and even career branding on Twitter, and we hope you’ll check them out. Read on to find 25 incredible people, listed in no particular order, that are full of news, knowledge, and resources that can help you make the most of the brands you repr

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The Stealing Jobs From Foreign Countries Act

Feld Thoughts

Yesterday I was with yet another non-US entrepreneur who is struggling to get the right visa to stay in the US and build his company here. This entrepreneur happens to be from England and his business partner (and best friend since they were kids) is also English, but managed to get into the US because he fell in love with and married and America a while ago.

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2/28 Best Practices Event: Becoming a Successful Entrepreneur

David Teten

UPDATE: CANCELED DUE TO MICHAEL YAVONDITTE BEING UNABLE TO PARTICIPATE. I hope you’ll join us Tuesday, February 28, 2012 (6:30pm) at NYU Stern School of Business, 44 West Fourth Street, Kaufman Management Center, Room #2-60, for another in Joe Chin’s Best Practices series on “ Becoming a Successful Entrepreneur “ Joe will be moderating a discussion between our Venture Partner Michael Yavonditte and me.

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The New Milan

deal architect

This weekend I saw the CNN profile of Yves Behar, whose firm Fuseproject has helped design various Jawbone products, the One Laptop Per Child computer and countless other products. In my upcoming book I have sections on Jonathan Ive, Apple’s.

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Facebook Rearranges Pages For Businesses And Organizations

YoungUpstarts

Late last year social networking giant Facebook introduced Facebook Timeline , changing the way people used Facebook in a more chronological order. It was a sign of things to come; earlier today the company announced a new design for Pages , which closely resembles Timeline. The new Pages are touted by the company to be more personalized, with the new cover photo and timeline letting businesses and organizations better express their identity and story.

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My Gradual Shift From Skype to Google Hangouts

Feld Thoughts

I’ve tried to aggressively shift to video conferencing instead of audio conferencing for anything longer than a 15 minute call. I’m also giving a lot of talks around the world, especially on Startup Communities , so rather than travel and burn a day (or more), I’m doing 30 minute videoconferencing things remotely. And, as anyone who has ever asked me to speak to a class of students knows, I have a huge weakness for always saying yes to this so I’ve been doing this via vid

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What is the right age to found a company?

Lightspeed Venture Partners

'I read a story in this weeks economist that surprised me. It claimed that founding new businesses is not just a young persons game , but rather that the average age of a founder of a tech startup was 39. Research suggests that age may in fact be an advantage for entrepreneurs. Vivek Wadhwa of Singularity University in California studied more than 500 American high-tech and engineering companies with more than $1m in sales.

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More Innovation

deal architect

On the New Florence blog “Third major prosecution wave” on Wall Street Edible Innovations Freestyle Fountain tour Turning a plastic bottle into a bulb.

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Tired Of Your Job? Do Something Different With Escape The City

YoungUpstarts

You’re tired of the same-old, same-old in your job. Sure, you may be making a lot of money on Wall Street as a stockbroker but am feeling strangely unfulfilled. Maybe you’d like to do something different. If so, here’s a website you can check out – Escape the City ( www.escapethecity.org ). Initially launched in London by Dom Jackson and Rob Symington (both 28), Escape the City is a community that connects corporate professionals with information, people, and opportunitie