Sat.Jul 18, 2015 - Fri.Jul 24, 2015

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8 Applications You Should Hunt Down On Your Network

YoungUpstarts

By Leon Adato, Head Geek, SolarWinds. In a study conducted by SolarWinds in Singapore, application performance and availability were found to be critical for 59% of respondents to accomplish their work. For 71% it became more important over the past five years due to an increase in the time spent using applications, coupled with an increase in their workload and more demanding deadlines.

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What Boston’s Top Consumer Tech Leaders Think About Boston’s Consumer Tech Struggles [#BostonB2C Recap]

View from Seed

On Tuesday, July 21, we hosted the first-ever Boston Consumer Tech Summit. The invite-only event was attended by 300 of the area’s best tech leaders, founders, product managers, designers, developers, investors, engineers, salesmen and women, and more, all of whom are hard at work in consumer tech. This is a recap of the more insightful tweets and comments from the event.

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8 Team Member Types Challenge Every Startup Leader

Startup Professionals Musings

The most valuable assets of a new startup are the people on the team, and the most challenging task of the entrepreneur and team leaders is to spend their leadership time and energy productively. Cash isn’t always the scarcest resource startups have to invest – more often it’s the leadership capital of under-experienced and over-stretched entrepreneurs and co-founders.

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How and Where to Obtain Business Licenses and Permits

Up and Running

Everyone has to deal with the nitty-gritty details of starting a business; no matter your industry, getting started safely and legally involves at least a little red tape. You need to make your business an official legal entity, and take an in-depth look at what permits and licenses you need at the local, state, and federal levels to be able to operate your business without fear of being hit with a fine—or worse, having to close down.

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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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5 Tips To Better Communication In Your Small Business

YoungUpstarts

By Scott Schreiman, CEO of Samepage. You’ve got a small crew that wears many hats. That makes each minute precious. Yet every minute, tons of data is generated. It’s a constant battle to maintain focus. You’re constantly absorbing information. Making sense of it. Then communicating the right data to the right people in a timely way. SIS International Research surveyed small businesses to uncover what’s mucking up the works.

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The Loneliness of Success that Nobody Talks About

Both Sides of the Table

Yesterday I saw two biopic films: “ Amy ” about the life of Jazz sensation Amy Winehouse who died of alcohol poisoning at the age of 27 and “ Montage of Heck ” about the life of Kurt Cobain , the grunge-rock generational voice who died of an overdose of heroin and valium at the age of … 27. It was a heavy day, for sure.

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Traction by a Thousand Cuts: How The Muse Scrapped to 4 Million Visitors [Traction Podcast #7]

View from Seed

The NextView podcast Traction shares the incredible stories of the creative and unusual things entrepreneurs did to make initial progress in an important area of their businesses. You can listen on iTunes or SoundCloud. Stories to date include LinkedIn, General Assembly, NatureBox, InsightSquared, and more. It’s always amazing to hear people’s founding stories, but few have struck me as just plain necessary for entrepreneurs to hear today than this one.

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What To Do When Your Trusted Employees Defect To The Competition

YoungUpstarts

By James Pooley, author of “ Secrets: Managing Information Assets in the Age of Cyberespionage “. In today’s competitive global market, managers know that employees (including really valuable ones) are likely to change jobs every few years or so. Like it or not, employee mobility has just become a fact of life. But even worse than the cost of recruiting someone new to fill the vacancy when a key employee leaves, there’s one big, looming worry that’s sure to ratchet your anxiety

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How we changed the way the U.S. government commercializes science: Errol Arkilic — Part 1 of Episode 6 on Sirius XM Channel 111

Steve Blank

My guests on Bay Area Ventures on Wharton Business Radio on Sirius XM Channel 111 were: Errol Arkilic , former program director for the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps (NSF I-Corps), now founder of M34 Capital. Steve Weinstein , CEO of MovieLabs. Venk Shukla , president TiE Silicon Valley and general partner, Monta Vista Capital. In my interview with Errol, we discussed the origins of the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps (I-Corps), how and why it was created, and how it

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8 Keys To Providing Consulting Services To Startups

Startup Professionals Musings

I may be old fashioned, but the term consultant still conjures up an image of a self-proclaimed expert who can make great presentations, generate recommendations and leave you to do the hard work of implementation. This may work for big companies who have specialized staffs, but it doesn’t work for startups and small businesses who are already understaffed and overloaded.

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Bits, Bytes, and the Blockchain: An Overview of Bitcoin

Early Growth Financial Services

Once regarded as part of a libertarian fringe, Bitcoin is increasingly commanding the attention of the world’s major financial institutions, institutional investors, and governmental regulatory bodies. Current estimates put the amount of Bitcoin outstanding at $14.2 million. Though this is tiny relative to other asset classes such as stocks, bonds, and physical currencies, proponents and, increasingly major financial institutions, believe Bitcoin has a major role to play in enabling not only con

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A customer-centric voice at SAP

deal architect

As I go through final edits of SAP Nation 2.0, I am updating it for its Q2 results. I was pleased to see two interviews with Rob Enslin, SAP's President of Global Customer Operations here and here. He provides some.

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Can a human do it?

Sophia Perl of Wisdom

A couple of years ago, a friend and I were debating about how to implement a function on a website, one that we were working on for fun. I came up with an elaborate, thorough way to do editorial reviews of user submitted images. Needless to say, it would have required many more coding hours to implement than not doing editorial review at all. My friend then said, “Why do we need a computer to do this?

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8 Ways That Blogging Will Kickstart Your Startup

Startup Professionals Musings

As the number of sites on the Internet floats around one billion, the challenge with every new startup is to be found and stand out. More important, if someone does find your site, the content better be enticing enough for them to come back. Blogging is one of the best ways to do this and build a brand, even before you have a product or service. In this age of relationships, you, the entrepreneur, are a very important element of your new brand, and it’s never too early to start marketing the val

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How Startups Can Beat Seasonality

YoungUpstarts

by Ted Karkus, CEO of Prophase Labs. I’ve been investing in, buying and restructuring small businesses for over 20 years and it’s a passion of mine to see everyone succeed from employees to shareholders, owners and investors. One of the issues however that appears to hamper growth or even attract investors is the acceptance of some of the lulls that come in the off season.

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The Terrifying Sony Hack

deal architect

Well worth a read this Fortune expose We have devoted 12,000 words in our July 1 issue to an extraordinary story by Peter Elkind on the now infamous cyber­attack against Sony Corp….a chillingly compelling, behind-the-scenes narrative of the events leading.

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Can a human do it?

Sophia Perl of Wisdom

A couple of years ago, a friend and I were debating about how to implement a function for a website, one that we were working on for fun. I came up with an elaborate, thorough way to do editorial reviews of user submitted images. Needless to say, it would have required many more coding hours to implement than not doing editorial review at all. My friend then said, “Why do we need a computer to do this?

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5 Reasons Why Storytelling Works For Your Brands

Brandanew

Well, who does not like a good story ? What we can never remember as dry theory can be easily etched in mind as a story. This is why we all love fiction (and hate text books). Ancient knowledge and traditions have always been stored as folk stories rather than voluminous history books. This is exactly why no one should underestimate the power of storytelling , including marketers.

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We’re Stuck In A Success Crisis And It’s Affecting Our Kids

YoungUpstarts

By Susan Ford Collins, author of “ The Joy of Success: 10 Essential Skills for Getting the Success You Want “ Success and leadership have gears… and we’re not shifting them correctly! We’ve gotten stuck in “the more-better-faster, what-have-you-done-for-me- lately, too-busy-racing-around-to- enjoy-our-lives” gear. We’re over-fed, under-nourished, over-medicated, under-rested, and under-satisfied.

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Don’t Try to Fake The Language

Feld Thoughts

The language of startups has become pervasive. It feels like it started with Eric Ries’ great book The Lean Startup when words like MVP and pivot started showing up in all conversations. Back then it was new, fresh, and focusing. Today, there are hundreds of words that people throw around in the context of their startups. Many, like traction, are completely meaningless.

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A Shockingly Common Way that Sales Misses Plan

For Entrepreneurs

It’s just after the end of a quarter, and for VC’s that means many board meetings to review how portfolio companies have performed. Over the years of doing this, I’ve been shocked and surprised how many times I’ve seen good companies with great product/market fit miss their sales targets for an incredibly avoidable reason: they […].

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5 Digital Storytelling Projects That Inspire Us

Brandanew

Everyone loves a good story. Why are we always seeking captivating plots in series and novels? For that matter, why do we try and connect every song to an instance? Because when things become relatable, they make more sense and that holds true for marketing as well. Digital storytelling projects or just ideas inspire us. Brands today are delving into digital storytelling modes , sharing their own experiences and spending time framing posts to promote their products but seem like they are solvin

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The Bare Necessities Of Digital Marketing

YoungUpstarts

As a small business, digital marketing is perhaps the sharpest tool in your arsenal. It’s an affordable way to reach out to new customers, and ensure the old ones keep coming back. You can do it all from your computer, and manage your digital empire. There are lots of components here, but you’ll find they all work together in harmony. The essence of digital marketing is balancing your various online platforms.

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Do We Need A New Word For Entrepreneur?

Feld Thoughts

Has the word entrepreneur become too trendy as to have lost its meaning? I’m hearing it and the word entrepreneurship being used in so many conversations incorrectly. Here’s a simple example. On a daily basis, I have an email exchange with someone who says they are an entrepreneur. I respond “What company did you start?” They respond, “Oh, I didn’t start a company, I was the fifth employee of Company X.” Another example is the email that I get from someo

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How we determine valuations for marketplaces

Version One Ventures

I often get asked about how to determine the valuation for a marketplace startup that is starting to scale. So I’ll run through some basic math for how we value marketplaces at version one. The main multiple we like to use for marketplace businesses is GMV (Gross Merchandise Volume…the total volume of goods sold on the marketplace). Our rule of thumb is that marketplaces at scale are valued at roughly 1x annualized GMV (typically about 6-8x annual revenue).

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5 Storytelling Experts Who Inspire Us (And What Brands Can Learn From Them)

Brandanew

Storytelling is an art , an art propelled by the condition of life itself. It is inspiring, and a revelation that while we are nothing but tiny matters of dust and particle, we all have a story of our own. They may be similar or dissimilar to someone else’s but yet our very own. Over millennia, storytelling has been developed as an art. From the wandering hermits of yore to the celebrity authors of present, storytelling techniques have gone through numerous changes but their charm remains the

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Push Back At Rejection: 4 Ways To Help You Overcome Setbacks

YoungUpstarts

By Hunter Hoffmann, Head of US Communications at Hiscox Small Business Insurance. Whether it’s asking someone on a date, applying to business school or trying to get new clients, rejection can be tough. There’s no way to avoid it completely, but there are ways to help you get past setbacks quickly and keep moving forward. The key is to be prepared for challenges, embrace risk and have the courage to keep moving forward.

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Sometimes I Ask Myself If The Juice Is Really Worth The Squeeze

Feld Thoughts

One of my all time favorite blog posts is Ben Horowitz’s The Struggle. If you are a founder and you haven’t read it, open it up in another tab for after your finish this post. On Friday, a CEO I know sent me the following message. “Brad – I crafted the entry pasted below this morning for my eyes only (and for my own therapeutic purposes), but in thinking about it today, I realized that you’re probably one of the only people I know who might be able to relate or who has

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Use the Summer for Content Marketing Success

Rembrandt Communications

What’s your BtoB strategy for the months ahead? Is Your Content Marketing Strategy on Fire?! It’s hot out there! For many of you, that means you are spending more time in your office in the nice, cool air conditioning. And while business may be slower as people take vacations and spend time with family and […]. The post Use the Summer for Content Marketing Success appeared first on Boost sales with BtoB Content Strategy and PR here.

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34 Educational Resources for Aspiring Entrepreneurs

Up and Running

When you’re ready to launch a startup, the name of the game is research. You need to tap every resource you can to learn the ins and outs of business. From securing funding to marketing your business, there’s a lot to consider. There are hundreds of resources online, but searching for worthwhile sites is time consuming and sometimes unsuccessful. So, we did the work for you.

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5 Ways To Ensure A Safe Workplace For Your Employees

YoungUpstarts

Employees want to know their workplace is as safe as it can be; after all, it is an area in which they are spending a decent amount of time every week. A safe workplace is also an efficient and productive one, so after you create a plan of action for your business, it is also important that all employees work together to make sure the workplace is as safe as possible.

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1985: Oil Prices Will Go Up Forever

Feld Thoughts

This is not a post about a bubble, real or imagined. It’s a lesson from when I was 20 years old. I showed up at MIT as an eager freshman. I was 17, from Dallas, with a nice pair of cowboy boots and long hair. On my first day, at the freshman picnic, I heard that 50% of us would end up in the bottom half of our class. Fifteen minutes later I was whisked away in a white van to ADP, the fraternity I ended up pledging and living in for four years, next to WILG and across the street from The Ma

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Let’s design the future of capitalism

The Equity Kicker

As regular readers will know I’m optimistic about the future. I think there’s a strong chance that advances in technology will bring us cheap and abundant energy, machines that can do most of our work for us and medicine that delivers longer, happier and healthier lives. But, as I’ve also written before, the path between here and there will most likely be very rocky.

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Why we expanded our startup to South Korea

The Next Web

Regardless of where your startup resides, you should always monitor where else in the world your product is gaining traction. Expanding to a new country can lead to a larger client base, a foothold in another market, more media exposure, and more investors. Additionally, if the expansion goes well, you’ll have also demonstrated the adaptability and versatility of your product on a world stage.

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Turning A Business Idea Into A Successful Business Venture

YoungUpstarts

“From a small seed, a tree will grow!” There are no shortcuts to the top. Every business starts off with an idea. And from that point, it is all about growing the idea from a concept to an operation that provides value to customers and that yields you a profit. Many will think that this process is a good theory. But they cannot see it working in practice.

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Backing someone pre-pitch: The story of how I backed Clubhouse

This is going to be BIG.

I'm excited to be able to finally announce Brooklyn Bridge Ventures ' investment in Clubhouse , a company I agreed to back before I even knew what it was. In 2010, a bunch of techies got together to do the next year's NYC Triathlon. I had already done two and was looking forward to joining people from the tech community. It was also right around that time when I started CTO School--a small five session series on how to go from being a developer to a technical leader, which blossomed into a not o

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