Sat.Dec 08, 2012 - Fri.Dec 14, 2012

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Technical Advisors: Every Web/Mobile Startup Must Have One

SoCal CTO

I did a presentation recently for a graduate class from The Founder Institute around getting online/mobile products out the door. I LOVED it because, the presenting part was over quickly and we got into specific issues that the founders had in terms of getting things built. It was like having a bunch of mini- Free Startup CTO Consulting Sessions all in one room.

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[Review] Startup Communities

YoungUpstarts

“We need to be like Silicon Valley,” we hear many a startup community organizer around the world intone. After all, Silicon Valley been held up as a shining example as a hotbed for startups and many clamor to copy its success in positioning themselves as a similar scene for innovation and technological entrepreneurship. But early-stage investor and entrepreneur Bred Feld, the co-founder of VC firms Mobius and Foundry, as well as startup accelerator TechStars , thinks trying to be Sil

Community 152
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Be the Startup I Want to Fund

This is going to be BIG.

The other day, I'm in a meeting where someone told me an industry magazine that would be relevent to one of my companies. I texted the founder and got the following response: " Yeah. We were in their last issue.". Oh, umm. yeah. well, carry on. A lot of times, I take meetings with companies that feel a lot more like they're on the outside looking in than they should.

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How important is a video pitch to investors for an early stage start-up?

Gust

There is no one thing (aside from integrity) that is an absolute, and what you need to have when fundraising for a startup will depend to some extent on how you are managing your funding process. A good list of just about everything you could possibly want to have in your arsenal is listed in the answer to What materials or software should I use to pitch a VC?

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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 #158 – 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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The Nike+ Accelerator, powered by TechStars

David Cohen

Today, Nike announced their first Nike+ Accelerator program, powered by TechStars. Ten companies will participate in a three-month, mentorship-driven program. The technology focus will be about leveraging the success of the Nike+ FuelBand, Nike+ Running and NikeFuel to support digital innovation. Anyone that knows me will tell you I’m a quantified self geek and enjoy data.

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More Trending

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Three Hard Truths About A/B Testing

ConversionXL

Sometimes A/B testing is made to seem like some magical tool that will fix all problems at once. Conversions low? Well run a test and increase your conversions by 12433%! It’s easy! Setting up and running tests is indeed easy (if you’re using the right tools), but doing it right requires thought and care. 1. Most A/B tests won’t produce huge gains (and that’s okay).

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Small Business Spotlight of the Week: miiCard

crowdSPRING Blog

Let’s talk about passwords for a second. Or rather, how outdated and insecure passwords are nowadays. With sites like Dropbox, LinkedIn, and Yahoo! all experiencing major password breaches– and learning that most frequently used password is actually “password”– it’s clear the current system of rote memorization and hacking is not working.

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Some Quick Sage Advice for Young Employees Early in Their Careers

Both Sides of the Table

My wife & I have a close friend who recently entered the workforce for his first-ever job. On his first day of work my wife was kind enough to write down words of wisdom from her years on the job. I don’t write about Tania very often – mostly at her request. Otherwise I’d shout from the mountain tops how smart & capable she is.

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My disappointing Android upgrade

The Equity Kicker

About a month ago I dropped my old Samsung Galaxy Nexus on the floor at the Gare du Nord train station in Paris and when I picked it up the screen was quite badly cracked. I was of course annoyed at myself for dropping the phone but a little part of me was quite pleased, because the new Google Nexus 4 was due for release a couple of days later and now I could get one with a clean conscience.

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10 Entrepreneur Qualities That Tag You as Fabulous

Startup Professionals Musings

To be successful as an entrepreneur, you don’t have to be a fabulous person, but it helps. Some people, and some entrepreneurs, have that something extra, like Simon Cowell is searching for on the X-Factor , that you can’t quite put your finger on. But the entrepreneurs that have “it” seem to be able to effortlessly get team members, investors, and customers to follow them anywhere.

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Zombie customers, Bad Profits and the "Technology Depression"

deal architect

I was reading Tim Cook of Apple: “It’s interesting to me—and I think this is a privilege for Apple—just like we’re sitting down at this table today, I get e-mails all day long, hundreds, thousands per day from customers who.

Customer 255
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Customer Development in a Diagram

Steve Blank

Thanks to: Alexis Finch, Sketchnotes / UX Research Consultant @agentfin. Filed under: Customer Development.

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Lean startup intro (with no buzzwords)

The Startup Toolkit

Slides from “ Lean startup intro (with no buzzwords) ” by robfitz. Lean gets bogged down in tactics & tools. This presentation is about what are, in my opinion, the big principles behind lean startup. Things are nowhere near as bad as they were in the dotcom days. The typical startup spends little money, focuses on product, and tries to build traction.

Lean 54
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10 Keys to Successful Entrepreneur Relationships

Startup Professionals Musings

Just because you are an entrepreneur, or work in a startup, you can’t ignore the rules of building and maintaining relationships. Many despise these experiences in corporate environments, and leave for a startup, only to find that they have to be able to navigate a similar minefield there of workplace and business relationships to be successful. Jan Yager, Ph.D., an author and speaker on this and related subjects, outlines in her recent book “ Productive Relationships: 57 Strategies for Building

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The History of the Office and the Future of Work

deal architect

Excerpts from my guest column for Unevenly Distributed, a publication from Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work. “Through the last couple of decades, the TV show “The Office” (the US and the predecessor British show) has been surreal. You.

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Version 2.0 and why Series Seed Documents are better than capped convertible notes

www.seriesseed.com

SeriesSeed.com. Series Seed Financing Documents Blog. Home. Documents. Blog Archives. Subscribe. « Step 2 (as opposed to version 1.1) | Main. 09/02/2010. Version 2.0 and why Series Seed Documents are better than capped convertible notes. “First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.” Mahatma Gandhi. I hesitate to use a quote from one of the greatest people ever to grace planet earth, and certainly the question of how to structure early stage investment

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Essential Development Questions for Startups: The Questions Founders Need to Answer for Product Development, Web Strategy, Marketing, and More

Early Growth Financial Services

by Tony Karrer Originally published on SoCal CTO Almost every day I’m talking to early stage startup founders (see Free Startup CTO Consulting Sessions) about what they plan to do. I tend to ask a lot of questions, challenge aspects, make suggestions. But I’ve often been very surprised by one aspect of these conversations. Many of these founders have talked with several developers or development firms about their plans.

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Business Innovation Requires Successful Execution

Startup Professionals Musings

Most people think innovation is all about ideas, when in fact it is more about delivery, people, and process. Entrepreneurs looking to innovate need to understand the execution challenge if they expect their startup to carve out a profitable niche in the marketplace, and keep innovating to build and maintain a sustainable competitive advantage. Everyone thinks they know how to make innovation happen, but I can’t find much real research on the subject.

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More New Florence

deal architect

On the innovation bog The gamification of IT Security The conflict in the “Social East” Mars technology and oil rigs Can commercial planes fly inverted? The Furby Rebooted The animated life of Pi Re-imaging the humble umbrella Census report on.

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Series Seed Financing Documents

www.seriesseed.com

SeriesSeed.com. Series Seed Financing Documents Blog. Home. Documents. Blog Archives. Subscribe. « About the Series Seed Documents | Main. | Step 2 (as opposed to version 1.1) » 02/25/2010. Series Seed Financing Documents. Please note, these are the latest versions of the Series Seed Documents.  Series Seed COI (v 2.0). Series Seed IRA (v 2.0).

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The Search For Product Market Fit

Seeing Both Sides

I continue to be fascinated with the changing art of product management. This week, I taught a class at Intelligent.ly on the topic. Intelligent.ly is a new start-up led by Sarah Hodges , who used to be an executive at Run Keeper and Carbonite (full disclosure: Sarah recently joined Flybridge Capital as a part-time advisor). The company is part of a new wave of companies, such as Skillshare, Boston StartUp School and others, to provide "over the top" professional education to help chip away

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Founders Must Keep Their Startup Culture Positive

Startup Professionals Musings

Startup work environments are always chaos, but they can still be great environments to work in, or they can be terrible. Whether yours is terrible or great, that same tone flows out to your customers, and regulates your productivity inside. You as the founder are the starting point and definer, so you need to get it right. What does it take to create a positive workplace culture?

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More Innovation

deal architect

On the New Florence blog Nice touches at Descartes Evolution Dropbox – a feature for 100 million users Who are you? My heroes have always been operational folks Meet the new hacker dude: Bond’s Q Israel’s “Iron Dome” Smart LIFX.

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Eight Year-End “Must-Dos” For Entrepreneurs And Small Business Owners

YoungUpstarts

by Bill McBean, author of “ The Facts of Business Life: What Every Successful Business Owner Knows that You Don’t “ All year long you’ve been in frantic motion. You’ve put out fires. Solved employee snafus and issues. Juggled conflicting priorities. Fielded exhausting back-to-back meetings, telephone calls, and endless emails. Motivated yourself and others.

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Why SEO Content is King

Rembrandt Communications

Are you providing value through words? You’ve probably heard the statement a lot these days that “content is king.” Well, you may not know exactly what this means. Basically, your customers want valuable content. They want to know what you have to offer them. At the same time, the search engines realize this and look [.].

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5 Suggestions to Escape Linear Startup Thinking

Startup Professionals Musings

It’s time for more entrepreneurs to reset their focus, and shift their thinking to completely different ways of doing things. Everyone talks about innovation, but the majority of business plans I see still reflect linear thinking – one more social network with improved usability, one more wind-farm energy generator with a few more blades, or one more dating site with a new dimension of compatibility.

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Talent Sourcing fool me twice, shame on me

deal architect

McKinsey says we are already critically short of “data scientists” even as the hype about Big Data takes off.

Offshore 297
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What does it feel like to be the CEO of a start-up? 3 FULL TIME JOBS.

Scalable Startup

Being the CEO of a startup is crazy, fun, very hard work, inclusive, humbling and of course can be quite rewarding. Weekends are meaningless. There is a continuous decision stream where each decision informs the next. Your mind is thinking 24 hours a day, even when you sleep. When you’re the CEO of a startup, a real startup with product and some cash in the bank and/or revenue, there are 3 FULL TIME JOBS. 1.

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[Review] Going Social

YoungUpstarts

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from reading books on social media, it’s that there’s already a very significant shift in the mindsets of businesses towards the acceptance of using social media as a tool to engaging consumers. Indeed, tomes on social media marketing used to devote massive chapters trying to convince companies large and small to adopt the then-new marketing platforms.

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10 Perspective Checks on Your Startup Aspirations

Startup Professionals Musings

Every entrepreneur needs to be honest about their strengths and weaknesses, and realistic about their reasons for choosing the startup route. For any entrepreneur, even the best business opportunities, if entered for the wrong reasons, will likely fail. Some of these reasons seem obvious, so forgive me for restating, but I still hear them too often.

Startup 234
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Building a Startup is Navigating an Obstacle Course

Gust

Image via Facebook. It would be no fun if starting a business was simply plotting a straight line between your idea and success, with no challenges along the way. Zigging and zagging amongst the obstacles is the fun part of being an entrepreneur, and it’s what sets you apart from the average worker who knows exactly what he or she has to do every day to get paid.

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Shark Tank 2012 Holiday Episode Breakdown

Lightspeed Venture Partners

Although Sharktank has been running reruns on Fridays the last few weeks, the show ran a Sharktank 2012 Holiday special on Tuesday night. The most interesting company to present was The Coop , a modern, design-focused, indoor-outdoor children’s playspace in Los Angeles. The two founders, Lucinda Lent and Juliet Bodystun wanted to raise $150,000 in return for 15% of the company in order to franchise their concept nationwide.

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[Singapore] What You Googled This Year: Top Google Searches Of 2012

YoungUpstarts

National Basketball Association (NBA) rising superstar Jeremy Lin emerged as the top name Singaporeans googled this year, beating out even its founding father Lee Kuan Yew (the infamous Amy Cheong of this saga also made the list), while the Olympics 2012 came out as the top trending search. In its newly released Zeitgeist , Google revealed the top search trends this year in Singapore after analyzing over one trillion search queries it received this year.

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Software Patents Have Become a Startup Nightmare

Startup Professionals Musings

I always advise software startups to file patents to protect their “secret sauce” from competitors, and to increase their valuation. The good news is that a patent can scare off or at least delay competitors, and as a “rule of thumb” patents can add up to $1M to your startup valuation for investors, or for M&A exits (merger and acquisition). The bad news is that patent trolls (non-practicing companies that make their money from licensing patents) can squeeze the lifeblood out of unsuspecting

Software 233
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Google Announces the Launch of Campus Tel Aviv

VC Cafe

I'm thrilled to share the news that today, 9 months after the launch of our beloved Campus London, Google announced the launch of Campus Tel Aviv, a floor in the new Google Tel Aviv office, dedicated. [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]].