Mon.Apr 11, 2011

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The real entrepreneurs of New York City

Startup Lessons Learned

The Lean Startup Machine looks a lot like reality television for startups. It's intense, the teams go head-to-head, the protagonists live and learn, and it's all very entertaining. But there is something serious at work, too. I have written previously about how powerful the these events are as a teaching tool for Lean Startup principles. While I was in New York, I had another opportunity to witness this firsthand, and I wanted to share the results with you.

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Here are 10 Tips from BuzzFeed to Make Your Content Go Viral

Both Sides of the Table

I recently had the pleasure of spending an hour with Jon Steinberg, president of Buzzfeed , a company who focuses on helping media companies make their content go viral. His words, “we find things on Sunday morning that will be on the Today show on Tuesday morning.&# That’s why people turn up to Buzzfeed. We talked about a lot of great stuff in the video including how to do sales calls and a how a new “culture of writing&# is emerging as a critical skill set in business today.

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Bringing Values into Vision

The Entrepreneurial Mind

Many entrepreneurs talk about integrating their values into the vision for a new business. But some take it one step further and actually build a business model based on their values. Green Truck Moving Co. is a Nashville-based startup that is integrating the founders' commitment to the environment and the community into the mission of their company.

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Attacking your sucky excuses for not blogging

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

You already know that nowadays you’re invisible without some sort of social media presence. You already know the (alleged) benefits of having a personal or business blog. But you still don’t blog, and for good reason, right? Blogging is work, and ten other things are more important. Writing is hard and takes longer than you think it ought.

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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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Follow Seven Rules for a Creative Startup Culture

Startup Professionals Musings

Within the startup realm, there is a big difference between having an innovative product versus an innovative business. Some startups have a new technology, but stick to a tried-and-true business model. Others take an existing product, and give it new life with a creative business model. The most competitive startups do both, all the time and every time.

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Amazing Deal – Entrepreneurship Courses

Feld Thoughts

I’ve got an entrepreneur focused deal on Brad Feld’s Amazing Deals today. The deal is for Udemy.com , a website that has online courses on a variety of interesting topics. When Udemy came to me, they were interested in offering a deal on one of their $99 courses that was pertinent to startups. After some negotiation, we decided to do an offer where you get their five top startup courses, priced at a total of over $400, for only $59.

More Trending

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Introducing BigDoor’s New Cost Per Quest Ad Format

Feld Thoughts

I love watching our portfolio companies iterate on their products, especially when they are in the early days. Initial efforts often provide nothing more than learnings, but turning those learnings into an improved product offering is a huge part of what being an early stage company is all about. BigDoor has been going through that iteration process over this past year and this last week they quietly launched a pilot of a new feature called “Quests&# on UGO.com and a dozen other sites.

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Guide to Creativity & Innovation Conferences (2011)

Gregg Fraley, Author of Jack's Notebook

Spring, Summer and Fall are the seasons for creativity AND innovation conferences. The guide I’m posting here isn’t meant to be comprehensive — but a quick glance at what’s on and why or why not you might want to go. Everybody has different criteria, so, take my thoughts with a grain of salt. And if [.].

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Don’t call it AdTech. It’s “Adhesive”

VC Adventure

For about the past year my partners have been pushing me to write up some thoughts on AdTech investing. “We’re not AdTech investors,&# I’d push back, “we just have a bunch of companies in the portfolio that are working in and around online advertising.&# And for a while that worked pretty well. Most of our AdTech investments would be labeled “glue&# (they were all connecting or intermediary technologies – just applied to online advertising).

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Where Did Your Creative Mojo Go?

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak

Last article I said we would look at the way the final four play personalities engage their creativity but we’re going exploring and excavating instead. We will come back to those final four later. The big question right now is, where did our creative mojo go? If we’re born creative, and we’re highly creative as children, then what happened to this ability?

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Do You Have Your Elevator Pitch Ready?

Up and Running

Tweet Could you describe your company in 60 seconds? They call it the elevator speech, or elevator pitch, and it’s a good exercise. I was there last Thursday to hear these two pitches , two of the best from 16 one-minute pitches at the University of Oregon’s New Venture Championship. These are good examples of classic elevator pitches, limited to 60 seconds.

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Not a Fan of Angel Investment Tax Credits

The Entrepreneurial Mind

Milt Capps who published Venture Nashville Connections contacted me the other day to see what I thought of a bill here in Tennessee that would create tax credits for angel investors. Here is what I told him: Targeted tax credits for angel investments do little to spur new investments or to increase the overall activity level of angel investing over the long term.

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Forecast your cash position and sleep more soundly.

Berkonomics

In the past insight, we created an example to demonstrate that it truly takes money to make money; that growth calls for increases in working capital. The example we crafted proved that companies can easily find themselves strapped for cash during periods of rapid growth as well as in downturns. There are many techniques and time horizons for forecasting cash.

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What Renée Zellweger and Elephants Have in Common

Growthink Blog

Perhaps the biggest challenge for 21st century companies is how fast and well they respond and change in the face of incredibly fast-evolving market and competitive conditions. It is not hyperbole to define a successful organization as one that finds the balance between a) making the right changes at the right time and b) having the discipline to “keep on keeping on” and just do more of what is working.

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Massachusetts Sales Tax “Fairness”

Andrew Payne

In case you missed it, H.1731 and S.1554 are winding their way through the Massachusetts legislature. These bills attempt to make large vendors like Amazon subject to state tax, by arguing that MA-based affiliates create an in-state presence. I’ll concede that the US Constitution has made our in-state/out-of-state sales tax system a bit quirky.

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Don’t call it AdTech. It’s “Adhesive”

VC Adventure

For about the past year my partners have been pushing me to write up some thoughts on AdTech investing. “We’re not AdTech investors,” I’d push back, “we just have a bunch of companies in the portfolio that are working in and around online advertising.” And for a while that worked pretty well. Most of our AdTech investments would be labeled “glue” (they were all connecting or intermediary technologies – just applied to online advertising).

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Interview Questions, Part II

ithacaVC

This week is the Entrepreneurship@Cornell Celebration (April 14th and 15th). See [link] for more information. I am one of the primary planners for this event so my blogging time this week is running on empty. Remember that I asked for your favorite interview questions on the April 6th Interview Questions post. A few responses came in to augment the list.

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Selling My Personalized Rate Card and Amazon’s New Kindle Pricing

Venture Chronicles

Amazon announced a version of the Kindle that can be had for $25 less , providing you are willing to subject yourself to screensavers that are ads and banner ads at the bottom of the home screen. I don’t have a problem with ads but my reaction is still negative. Amazon is saying I am only worth $25. Okay so Amazon has to create the market first but with their volumes they won’t have a problem doing that.

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hot or not?

Jason Ball

Facebook is going to be irrelevant in 10 years time. Google has lost the search war. Microsoft has lost the desktop war. We live in exciting times. Change is in many ways the only constant we have. I started the post with what many would consider heresy- if you don’t believe me, or disagree, you have forgotten the rise and fall of all tech companies.

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Digby Lands AT&T Deal

Austin Startup

AT&T today announced a new service, Digby Mobile Commerce from AT&T, created specifically for retailers to help them design, deploy and manage mobile commerce web sites and rich applications optimized for smartphones. It’s a big deal, and we’ve already seen coverage today on The Statesman , and TechCrunch. AT&T already provides retail industry solutions across mobile channels, including AT&T Mobile Barcode Services , AT&T Global Messaging Suite, AT&T Digital S

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Who are we? And where do we come from? (2011 edition)

crowdSPRING Blog

It is almost 3 years since we opened the doors to crowdSPRING and in that time we have grown dramatically. In May of 2008, we started out with fewer than 600 registered users. By May of 2009 we had grown to just under 30,000, and by May 2010 we were 79,000 strong; today we have nearly 125,000 registered users and are growing by 1,100 per week! And they are active: after one year in business, Creatives had collectively submitted over 275,000 entries to projects; by May 2010 the entry count was ov

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Tyler Durden’s take on mobile marketing #FightClub

Jeff Hilimire

Ok, so maybe its not directly Tyler Durden’s (one of the greatest characters in movie history!) take on mobile marketing, but hey, I get points for including a Fight Club reference in my most recent MediaPost article right?! In the article, which I talk about the idea of mobile as a single-serve medium (in some cases anyway, not in all cases), much the same way in Fight Club Edward Norton’s character talks about single-serve friends.

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Small Business Spotlight of the Week: Watchdog Breathalyzers

crowdSPRING Blog

As children, we’re often told to learn from our mistakes. Some of us take this to heart more than others. After a humbling DUI conviction over ten years ago, G.R. Rush wanted to be proactive and help others help themselves. This is why he started Watchdog Breathalyzers. The company provides personal breathalyzer devices, ranging from $49 – $149 apiece.

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The Marketing Experiment

Growthink Blog

This experiment has been done many times at events. At one end of the table, they place a box of donuts. At the other end of the table, they place a bunch of fruit. The attendees filter out of the room on a break.and see the table. Fifteen minutes later, the attendees go back into the main room. What do you think the table looks like? As you can imagine, the donut box is usually empty and much of the fruit is left on the table.