Wed.Feb 20, 2013

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It's Not About the Tools

Babbling VC

I'll be the first to admit that I often invest a disproportionate amount of time analyzing hardware and software. I've recently caught myself dicking around with Android for a couple days. Seriously, a couple days.hours spent trying to see if I "like" an OS. I've been the first to jump on bandwagons of apps too and spent time analyzing which email or calendar or messaging app is best.

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Entrepreneurs Need to Sell Themselves as the Brand

Startup Professionals Musings

The days are gone when a techie or a genius could build things in his garage and customers would find and buy the product, based purely on the “wow factor” of the technology. New technologies are everywhere today. People have seen so much that they are blasé, or actually fear pure technology. They want a personable brand, before they will consider the product.

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The Oracle Forrester Cloud spat

deal architect

I have watched with interest the Oracle/Forrester back and forth around Fusion apps Two observations Comparing Fusion to other pure play SaaS products is myopic. Oracle offers its customers the full SIP (Software, Infrastructure, Platform) as a service. Fusion will.

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[Infographic] Small Businesses Continue To Lack Disaster Preparedness

YoungUpstarts

Despite the slew of natural disasters that’s hit continental United States in recent months such as Hurricane Sandy and the winter storm Nemo, small businesses continue to lack a business preparedness or recovery plan in case they’re affected. According to the recent 2013 Small Business Disaster Survey carried out by Alibaba, Vendio and Auctiva in December 2012, 74-percent of small business owners don’t have a disaster recovery plan for their business.

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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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TechStars London Calling

Feld Thoughts

Jon Bradford and I have known one another since before the development of the Mentor Manifesto. Today we’re bringing Jon and his team at Springboard in London into the TechStars family as they re-brand to become TechStars London , our first international program. We have every confidence in them as a high-quality extension of the strong ecosystem we have already built here in the US.

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6 Tips For Smarter Networking

YoungUpstarts

You know networking is essential for building your business, but you’ve hit a wall. You’ve done your share of keeping up-to-date with former colleagues and providing LinkedIn updates, but you’re not seeing results. You need to smarten up your networking habits. Here are six ways to do it: 1. Have a strategy first. The key to acting smarter for anything related to your business – whether it’s launching a new product, marketing through Facebook, or networking for connections – is to start with a p

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Introducing TechStars London

David Cohen

Today is a big day for TechStars. With the announcement of TechStars London , we are taking a first step outside of the United States. We’ve always been cautious with our growth, always prioritizing quality over quantity. We have great programs in the US that are well respected, and have built an incredible network of hands-on mentors and alumni.

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Taboola is Growing Internationally, Here’s a London-based Intern Experience

VC Cafe

Israeli startup Taboola is growing from strength to strength. The recent news of a D Round of $15 million round led by Pitango and joined by previous backers Evergreen Venture Partners, WGI Group and Marker. Taboola’s flagship product, EngageRank, suggests related videos users may click on, and helps publishers [.]. [[ This is a content summary only.

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6 Smart Ways to Capture Emails

ConversionXL

Email lists are key assets for any company. any 4-year old knows. The bigger your list and the better your relationship with the list, the more money you make. . Growing your email list starts with a great lead magnet – without it no tactic mentioned here will work. You should also have a kickass email capture form – here’s how to design a good one.

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Israeli Startup AfterDownload Sells to IronSource for $28M

VC Cafe

Israeli startups are now aquiring each other. In 2010, I wrote about Israeli startup Afterdownload on VC Cafe, and was really impressed with what I saw. Today, Carmel Ventures shared the news that AfterDownload was sold to IronForge, its Israeli partner, for $28 million. [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more!

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Is a Down Economy a Good or Bad Time to Start a Business?

Up and Running

Graphic by: Global Economic Intersection. Times of economic woe don’t mean you have to tuck-in your entrepreneurial spirit and settle for whatever job you can get. In fact, economic slowdowns can be prime opportunities to get your startup off the ground. Don’t believe it? Ask General Electric, IBM, Microsoft, Facebook, Disney, Burger King or Apple — all of these powerhouses started during recessions, depressions or bear markets.

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There's a Special Place in Hell for Panel Prep Calls

This is going to be BIG.

Let me first say that I am absolutely honored to get asked to speak anywhere. I love it. I don't really care how large the event is--if you put me in front of a curious audience and give me a topic I'm passionate about, I'll do my best to share what I've learned and try to inspire. That being said, one of my least favorite things in the entire world is a panel prep call.

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PernixData Heralds a New Era in Software Defined Data Center

Lightspeed Venture Partners

PernixData introduces a software-defined “Flash Virtualization Platform” that aggregates and virtualizes flash storage distributed across servers into a scale-out data tier for enterprise data centers to provide low cost, deterministic high performance to any out-of-box application. The enterprise storage market is experiencing a tectonic shift led primarily by virtualization and storage media disruptions.

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Interview with Sunil Kanderi on launching Mokriya’s Craigslist App

Life Beyond Code

I have been watching my friend Sunil Kanderi and his team innovate, imagine, ideate, iterate and implement the Craigslist app for months and finally, today it’s getting released. Here is a quick Q&A with Sunil on the app and more. About Mokriya: Mokriya is a design-focused mobile app strategy and solutions company based in Silicon Valley. It has become a go-to mobile app developer for high-tech, consumer-facing companies like Path, Hipster, Sidecar etc and for world-class brands like S

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How Passion Leads To Success

Mike Michalowicz

A guest post by Rodrigo Laddaga of Estrategia45. Passion is a topic that is covered by many authors and gurus in these past decades, but I still see that many people “don’t get it” yet. When we talk about entrepreneurship and small business success or any kind of success we find that in each instance passion is the key element. Steve Jobs explained it in a very practical way in his famous interview with Bill Gates, when he said “you have to love what you do or you are goi

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Why Following In The Footsteps Of Other Bloggers Can Be A Treacherous Path

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak

Tweet A few weeks ago on one of my Yaro.TV daily videos I talked about solving problems by learning how other people have solved the same problem before you. You can study other people’s solutions and then copy them to solve your problem. Easy.

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Icon Creates a “Wicked Smart” Digital Business Card

SiliconHills

BY LAURA LOREK Founder of Silicon Hills News Just in time for South by Southwest, there is a new way to network with a digital business card called Icon. Icon is the brainchild of Kent Savage and Matt Hovis, technology startup veterans in Austin, who grew tired of having wads of crumpled business cards at [.] The post Icon Creates a “Wicked Smart” Digital Business Card appeared first on SiliconHills.

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Book Short: Plain Talk

OnlyOnce

Book Short: Plain Talk. An HR rock star I met with recently told me that “You can say anything you want to your people, as long as it’s true,” which of course is great advice. Plain Talk: Lessons from a Business Maverick ( book , kindle ), by Ken Iverson, the long-time CEO of Nucor, pretty much embodies that. If you’re not familiar with Nucor, it’s a steel company – right, steel – and the most successful one of the last 50-75 years, at that.

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Icon Delivers A Business Card That’s As Digital As You Are

Austin Startup

Personal brands have been around forever. It’s just that we used to call them something else. Like famous people, or celebrities. But in the era of Tweets, Likes and LinkedIn requests, the idea that everyone can build a brand has caught on. While some of the consumer-facing activity in the internet sector has lost some [.].

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6 Ways To Make Freemium Work For B2B Products

ReadWriteStart

Guest author Anthony Smith is CEO of Insightly. You may have read a lot of articles last year about why the so-called “freemium” model doesn’t work for most consumer-oriented companies. And it’s true that offering a base-level product for free to gain visibility and marketshare and then converting a subset of users to a paid, premium version is not a viable strategy for every business.

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Five Lessons On Teamwork The Business World Can Learn From “His Airness”

YoungUpstarts

by Bruce Piasecki, author of “ Doing More with Teams: The New Way to Winning ”. It’s hard to believe, but the great Michael Jordan turned 50 this past weekend. When you recall him soaring (and scoring) again and again — as effortlessly as breathing — it’s not hard to see why millions of fans revere him as the greatest basketball player of all time. While Bruce Piasecki is a big fan, he tends to view Jordan a bit differently from most.

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A 2 way revolution

Start Up Blog

Industrial and bricks and mortar businesses are overcome by their need to ‘get on line’ Guess what? Digital and startup businesses need to ‘get off line’ It turns out that this revolution is a two way street. The new eco system is wide, and we ignore either side at our peril.

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5 steps to putting your career on the right track

Jeff Hilimire

5 steps. Presumably leading to success ;). I’ve been talking to a lot of young(er) people over the past month about their career aspirations and if they are on the right path toward success at this point. It’s a great exercise for people to go through at any point in their career. You gotta love what you do , or what’s the point? Here are my 5 steps to putting your career on the right track: #1 – Find a mentor.

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Trademarks, Copyrights, and Patents

Business Plan Blog

'When starting a business, one thing to think about is security. Not just the security of your business in general, but security of your ideas and what you have created. This is where things such as trademarks , copyrights , and patents come in to play. These are ways to assure that your business is safe from plagiarism and knockoffs. Trademarks are used to protect things such as business logos, names or anything that is put on your product to distinguish it from other products.

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Apptive Announces Release of EasyApp 2.0

Austin Startup

Apptive, the Austin area company that enables any small business to create a native mobile app, is excited to announce the release of a brand new, totally redesigned version of their EasyApp service.

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Into The Mystic

aweissman.com

Yesterday I was on the subway, listening to music or something. We came to a stop and a gentlemen walked by me to exit the car. As he did, a button on his jacket caught my headphone cord, which pulled my phone out of my pocket, flipped it up in the air, spun it around, and then we both watched it fall into the crack between the subway car and the platform.

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Tesla Lost the Minute Musk Tweeted

Venture Chronicles

I have been watching with curiosity the battle of words between Tesla CEO Elon Musk and the NYTimes. On balance I think Musk miscalculated and has come out on the losing side of the bigger issue he is confronting… complexity. As I drive around I see a surprising number of the Tesla Model S sedans and with each sighting I find myself saying “I should get one of those” I am at heart a gear head, I love cars and motorcycles, and for me factors like fuel mileage and cost of ownersh

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5 Reasons Why You Need To Own a Marketing Routine

Duct Tape Marketing

This guest post features Duct Tape Marketing Consultant Kelly Weppler. The key to producing marketing results has a lot to do with consistency. If you’re guilty of ‘one and done’ marketing, it’s unlikely that you’ll see any kind of success. Routine and consistency help to build momentum for your business and that’s why I talk about the value of having a marketing routine.

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Best Social Media Tools For Your Small Business

crowdSPRING Blog

Do you want to know how you can best leverage social media to help your small business succeed and increase revenues? In a moment, we’ll look at some of the best social media management tools that will help you do more with less. Let’s first take a minute to help you understand why you should take the time now to decide whether you should invest some of your marketing and advertising efforts in social media.

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Why Playing It Safe May Be the Riskiest Path of All

Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing podcast with Randy Gage. Back when I started my own business, some twenty-five years ago, I was a bit of rebel. I was taking a leap and doing something that many considered terribly risky. photo credit: jjay69 via photopin cc. Well, the game has changed dramatically since then and now not starting a business, not figuring out how to be paid well to do something you truly love or not taking a leap of faith is perhaps the only risky thing left in the world of work.

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The Stupid ‘Entrepreneurs are Made Not Taught’ Debate

Up and Running

No such thing as a dumb question? How do you explain this one: Are entrepreneurs born that way, or can they be taught? . The only thing this question is good for is generating trumped-up traffic with a catchy headline. Because this isn’t an either-or question. It’s both, and all of the above, case by case, and obviously entirely in gray, not black or white.

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The Democratization of Entrepreneurship

VC Adventure

One of the great trends we’ve been witnessing over the past decade, and in particular the past 5 years, has been what you might call the “democratization” of entrepreneurship”. It’s a powerful trend and one that I think will have a huge impact not just on the US economy and workforce, but perhaps even more intensely on other areas of the world – particularly developing economies.

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The Democratization of Entrepreneurship

VC Adventure

One of the great trends we’ve been witnessing over the past decade, and in particular the past 5 years, has been what you might call the “democratization” of entrepreneurship”. It’s a powerful trend and one that I think will have a huge impact not just on the US economy and workforce, but perhaps even more intensely on other areas of the world – particularly developing economies.