Sat.Jul 21, 2012 - Fri.Jul 27, 2012

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A Startup Advisory Board Dream Team is Priceless

Startup Professionals Musings

Every startup faces a myriad of challenges that are well beyond the scope of any founder, so you need a few guiding lights to illuminate the road ahead. These should be carefully selected, with a proven track record, willing and available to help, and be completely trustworthy. Make sure they are willing to check their egos at the door. Let’s talk specifics.

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Unrequited Love

Steve Blank

If there’s only one passionate party in a relationship it’s unrequited love. Here’s how I learned it the hard way. The Dartmouth Football Team. After Rocket Science I took some time off and consulted for the very VC’s who lost lots of money on the company. The VC’s suggested I should spend a day at Onyx Software, an early pioneer in Sales Automation in Seattle.

Seattle 259
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13 Habits That May Be Sabotaging Your Career

YoungUpstarts

Everyone has bad habits. Smoking, driving too fast, overeating, giving in to stress; no matter what the habit is, we all know that we need to break them, if only we could find the motivation. How’s this for motivation? Some of your bad habits may actually be sabotaging your career. Whether it’s office gossip or playing around on Facebook, it’s time to kick these bad habits to the curb.

Email 177
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Simple innovation & fear

Start Up Blog

I met a really smart person yesterday. It was a stand up conversation after a business breakfast seminar where like minds often gather to share a few ideas before parting ways. In this short time, it must have been less than 10 minutes, she managed to impart upon me two very innovative ideas that I immediately wanted to share on startup blog. They may not be new, but she put a certain spin on them and I’m yet to see them in market.

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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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10 Keys to Making an Entrepreneur Website Credible

Startup Professionals Musings

Smart people only visit and buy from credible and memorable websites. In the past, if your startup had a website presence, the company was credible by definition. In today’s world, a website is necessary but not sufficient for credibility. Dreamers and gamblers have found out that if the website isn’t validated as credible, it’s probably a scam, and everyone loses.

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Ideas Aren’t Innovation

Gregg Fraley, Author of Jack's Notebook

Guerilla Innovation Chapter Six. Ideas Aren’t Innovation. Ideas are not Innovation — and it’s interesting how often “idea people” think that having a good idea is enough. Ideas need development and implementation — get that done and you’ve still got to run the business. If you’re a start-up you’ll need to hire a team of people, raise funds, market your idea, sell it, and somehow profit from it.

More Trending

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SAP more of the same

deal architect

I tend to not pay too much attention to quarterly earnings – whether they are good or bad. But my friend Dennis Howlett says “SAP’s Q2 results are stunning by any standards” and I decided to apply my own “is.

Software 256
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15 Ways Parents Can Promote Entrepreneurship

YoungUpstarts

These days, the traditional path of getting a good education and going to work in the corporate world isn’t always the best way to find success. Although it’s still a great choice, many young people prefer instead to take a path of entrepreneurship, and there’s a lot that parents can do to help them follow that path. Lemonade stands, family learning adventures, and smart financial lessons are just a few of the ways that parents can instill an entrepreneurial attitude of success

Finance 264
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Six Street Smart Startup Survival Secrets

Startup Professionals Musings

Every entrepreneur wants to know how they can improve their odds on the road to success, and why some entrepreneurs seem to be able to squeeze success out of even a marginal business case. Most experts agree that is has lot to do with your level of passion, determination, and innovation, modulated by a strong focus on reality, common sense, and street smarts.

Startup 244
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Overview of the Stages of Non-Profit Incorporation

Business Plan Blog

'Once you have decided to incorporate your non-profit, your next task is to prepare to file with the state government to attain official non-profit corporation status. The first stage of your preparations includes articulating your purpose as an organization and drafting a mission statement. You also need to recruit a board of directors. Whether you have your new board work together on articulating the purpose/mission statement or you recruit your board based on your pre-drafted purpose/missio

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More Innovation

deal architect

on the New Florence blog Adidas Smart Soccer Watergate 40 years on Father’s Day at Home Depot The FBI Sentinel System How the NBA became a global brand Microsoft Surface Cover/Keyboard.

Global 247
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17 Unspoken Rules Of LinkedIn Etiquette

YoungUpstarts

On most social media networks, it seems like anything goes. Things are a little more loose on Facebook and Twitter, but LinkedIn is strictly professional, giving it a different kind of status when it comes to etiquette. You have to be careful about what you put out there, how you make your requests, and remember to be polite. Are you stepping on toes without realizing your mistakes?

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Good Entrepreneur Ethics Increase Business Value

Startup Professionals Musings

Did you ever wonder how a new entrepreneur knows how to “do the right thing” for his business? Most experts believe that the essence of doing the right thing is ethics. Translating that into business value, a study by Wirthlin Worldwide concluded that 80% of customers still base a good portion of their buy decision on their perception of that firm’s ethics.

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How to Have Good SEO Rankings

Rembrandt Communications

The birds are singing. The flowers are blooming, and Google updated its search engine systems yet again. See: [link] Basically, Google is keeping its keyword-search system, but they are incorporating “semantic search.” and looking at the meaning of words… so what does this mean to you? Well, if you haven’t been writing quality content and [.].

SEO 169
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Father Pacioli is rolling in his grave

deal architect

Luca Pacioli, considered the father of double entry bookkeeping with debits and credits, would be fascinated with Facebook’s first ever quarterly earnings report, particularly this footnote with all kinds of interesting metrics and modern day shenanigans: “The numbers of our.

Metrics 239
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25 Books To Sharpen Your Social Skills (And Transform Your Career)

YoungUpstarts

Humans are strange creatures. Luckily, since you are one, you already have all the tools you need for getting along with them. Even though they come so naturally to some people, no one is born with the skills for fitting into society; these skills are learned over time. It’s never too late to improve your ability to meet people, make friends, and communicate.

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A Business Plan is for You First, Then for Investors

Startup Professionals Musings

Too many entrepreneurs still believe the urban myth that you can sketch your idea on a napkin, and investors will throw money at you. Every investor I know is frustrated with the poor quality of the business plans they get. This is sad, since “how to write a business plan” is a frequent topic found in every business journal, and a common title in the business section of every book store.

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VC Paradox: The Best of Times & Worst of Times (Part I)

Genuine VC

In the past few weeks, we’ve seen extremely positive headlines about the surge in VC fundings like “ Venture Capital Hits Highest Level Since Dot-Com Bubble.” It must be the best of times for the industry with $8.1B invested in startups during the second quarter of 2012 (the highest in a decade!) along “… with seed-round venture capital hit[ing] an all-time high ” [According to CB Insights ].

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London Olympics Innovation Special

deal architect

In the run-up to the event in London I have been running a series of posts on New Florence on how the Games have helped innovate the city, the athlete preparation and many other aspects Interactive map of the Olympics.

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Singapore Startup AFTERSHOCK PC Guns For Gaming Laptop Market

YoungUpstarts

The AFTERSHOCK PC showroom, where users can test their gaming laptop builds. Mention gaming and laptops in the same sentence and you’re most likely to associate them to the brands Alienware (by Dell), Voodoo (by HP) and in more recent times, Razer , with its recently-announced Blade. But a new Singapore hardware startup, AFTERSHOCK PC , believes it can compete in this market with its range of custom laptops wholly dedicated for gaming.

Singapore 181
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Entrepreneurs Must Be Adept at Rapid Realignment

Startup Professionals Musings

Every entrepreneur’s first priority should be the alignment of interests across the range of constituents required for success – partners, investors, customers, vendors, and employees. The best are ones quickest and most willing to do the realignment on a continuous basis these days, as the market changes, customer interests change, and you learn from experience.

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You are the Best One to Build Your Startup Brand

Gust

As an entrepreneur, it’s never too early to start selling yourself and your idea. I hear lots of excuses from startup founders, like “I’m too busy,” concern over IP security, can’t afford an agency, and it’s too early. The result is they get no feedback, no credibility, no visibility, and no investors until months later than they expect. I’m definitely not lobbying here for promising things you can’t deliver, or hiring a publicist before your first programmer.

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My No Axxxxxe Rule

deal architect

We all have our filters. Employees we love but who are drama kings/queens and cause more trouble than they are worth. Customers we weed out because they are unprofitable. Suppliers which are habitually late with deliveries or get orders wrong.

Employee 210
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Everconnect.me Unifies Your Social Networking Profiles And Contacts

YoungUpstarts

Feeling overburdened by trying to handle multiple social networking services at the same time? Confused and frustrated by the need to manage all your social contact lists? We empathize. And apparently so do the folks at EverConnect Corporation, who has launched their everconnect.me service to help manage such information overload. everconnect.me ( www.everconnect.me ) is a social communications platform that is aimed at providing a simplified social media aggregation and management tool.

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Trial and Error for Business Social Media Will Fail

Startup Professionals Musings

Most startups, and many big businesses, still don’t have a clue on how to use social media productively for marketing their business. They randomly churn for hours a day on a couple of their favorite social media platforms, with little though given to goals, objectives, or metrics; and ultimately give up and fall back to traditional marketing approaches.

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Girls Who Code: Crashing the “Brogram”

ReadWriteStart

The high-tech industry is largely a guy’s world made up of "brogrammers" and job ads that ask, “Want to bro down and crush code?” Small wonder that women made up just 21% of all programmers in 2010, off from 24% in 2000. Or that less than 10% of venture-backed companies have women founders. An organization called Girls Who Code is trying to reboot the system starting from the beginning.

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More New Florence

deal architect

on the innovation blog Google’s celebration of Alan Turing Innovating the US Postal Service Personalized Weather Another Ultrabook feature – free wi-fi Low-tech SCOTUS in a high-tech world Not your dad’s “Dallas”.

Dallas 207
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98% of Americans Distrust Information On The Internet: Mancx Survey

YoungUpstarts

According to a survey commissioned by online business community Mancx and conducted by Harris Interactive , almost every American adult respondent (98-percent) who looks for information online distrusts the information they find. Which, of course, leaves 2-percent of Americans as too trusting or clueless. And the reasons they distrust what they find online?

Internet 172
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AC/VC, Mamalode, and The Missoula Startup Community

Feld Thoughts

On Friday 7/6 I spent the evening in Missoula with a bunch of entrepreneurs. Amy and I were in Missoula for the marathon on Sunday and I decided to do a Meetup talk about Startup Communities. Normally we are pretty anonymous when we show up in a town for a marathon weekend, but I thought I’d try something new this time. Rob Irizarry and the Montana Programmers Meetup made everything happen – all I had to do was show up and talk.

Community 150
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10 Ways Startups Can Track Trends: And Why It’s So Important

ReadWriteStart

Staying on top of trends is key to any startup’s success. Spotting trends early makes it possible tocome up with smart startup ideas - or modify your startup plans to jump on a new trend just as it takes off. Just as most important, you can avoid the risk of starting a business based on a trend that’s just about to fizzle out. Fortunately, tracking trends isn’t as hard as it used to be.

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Lead Developer to CTO at a Startup

SoCal CTO

I received a great question via LinkedIn: I'm the founding engineer and working hard to launch my startup. I seem to encounter a lot of people who want to attach a CTO label to me as I'm the only programmer on the founding team of three. While I do fill that role at the moment, I'm a little hesitant to refer to myself as a CTO as we still haven't launched a product, acquired a single user, or turned or a penny in profit.

CTO Hire 231
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[Infographic] Facts About The 21st Century Classroom

YoungUpstarts

(Click through for a larger image). If children are our future and education is an enabler, then the classroom is the incubator that plays a critical role in determining how the future is being nurtured. And in this century, the use of technology is changing the face of education. But what’s the current state of the 21st century classroom? What kinds of technology are being employed by teachers to teach the young?

Incubator 158
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Have A Wake For Failed Startups

Feld Thoughts

In my upcoming book, Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City , Mark Solon ( Highway 12 Ventures ) tells the story of a “startup wake” in a section where he gives an outsiders view of the Boulder startup community. “I’ll never forget one of my early visits to Boulder. After a full day of meeting with startups, I was asked by the entrepreneurs I was with if I’d like to join them and some peers for a “special dinner.” “

Startup 146
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7 Essential Apps for Entrepreneurs

ReadWriteStart

These days everyone has their favorite mobile apps, ones that make both their personal and business lives run smoother. But are there any apps that are must haves for entrepreneurs and startup founders? For startup entrepreneurs, it’s crucial to find the apps that actually make a difference to you and your business. Plenty of startup founders are already experts in this area.

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Web Analytics Consulting: A Simple Framework For Smarter Decisions

Occam's Razor

As I've gotten older I've come to appreciate the value of frameworks a lot more. When we are young, the answers to everything are simpler because, of course, we know everything. What metrics should I use? Use BR & CV. What digital marketing works? Definitely Y, do that. How can I improve my business? Simple, do A then B and you're done.

Framework 126
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Don’t Forget The Dull Stuff When Setting Up A Business – Internet Security

YoungUpstarts

by Lorena Benchis. Starting your own business can be exciting and challenging, but you have to have the basics in place to make sure your business can function properly. It may not be much fun but there are certain things that every business needs, including having insurance policies, a good accounting system and security in place. Security may not be the first thing you think about if you do not have any stock or a warehouse or premises.

Security 155