July, 2013

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Frameworks Round 6

TechEmpower

'July marks the fourth month of our ongoing project measuring the performance of web application frameworks and platforms. We''ve just posted Round 6, which includes several more developer community-provided framework test implementations: Beego, Dart, Hapi, Jester, Luminus, Nancy, Yaf, Plack, Play-Slick, and Undertow. The results web site has been improved with test-type and hardware-type navigation, allowing you to share links to a specific results chart, such as Round 6, Fortunes on EC2.

Framework 521
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Startup Grind Turns the Tables on Mark Suster

Both Sides of the Table

'One of my favorite events last year was attending Startup Grind where I got to interview Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma. Not just because meeting Clayton was influential in shaping my thinking about markets but also because Derek Andersen (who founded Startup Grind) is such an awesome host and runs a very informative events.

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Internet Entrepreneurs Think Beyond Get Rich Quick

Startup Professionals Musings

'Many aspiring entrepreneurs are looking to the Internet as an opportunity to get rich quick, instead of a place where you can start a business you love, for very little capital and minimal technical expertise. The reality is that if you build a business you love, you may in fact make big money, but if you start a business to get rich, you will probably fail.

Internet 263
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Why Every Company Needs A DevOps Team Now

Feld Thoughts

'An increasing number of companies we are investors in are focused on DevOps. A year or so ago I read an early draft of a new book titled The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win. I really enjoyed it and asked Gene Kim, one of the authors to write a guest post on DevOps. He wrote it a while ago and it has sat in my draft queue waiting for the perfect moment to emerge.

Phoenix 175
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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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Why it is hard for VCs to say ‘no’ and why that ‘no’ could be good news for an entrepreneur

The Next Web

'Editor’s note: Andrej Kiska is an associate at Prague-based Credo Ventures. Prior to Credo, Andrej worked at an early growth fund Benson Oak, the first backer of AVG Technologies . “VCs are arrogant. VCs are cowards. They speak about how they love to help entrepreneurs build successful companies, yet when I ask them to give me feedback on my business plan or idea, they usually don’t even bother writing me back.

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Twitter Link Roundup #187 – Small Business, Startups, Innovation, Social Media, Design, 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!

More Trending

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How to Know When to Sell vs. When to Market to Customers

Both Sides of the Table

'This is final part of a series that describes a sales methodology for technology companies or frankly many other types of companies, too. We developed this at our first company and called it PUCCKA – the overall methodology is described here. Pain. Unique Selling Proposition. Compelling Event. Champion. Key Players such as enemies, sages and blockers.

Customer 324
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8 Reality Checks That Every Startup Founder Dreads

Startup Professionals Musings

'Starting a business is a lot like starting a marriage. At first, all parties are in dreamland, with a vision of changing the world, having lots of fun, and raking in the profits. But all too soon, reality sets in. Product development is stuck at that 90% mark, a key person leaves, and customers are talking but not buying. In his book Reality Check , Guy Kawasaki summarizes some of the key issues.

Founder 250
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Welcome to The Frontier – An Ode To Startups

Feld Thoughts

'Following is a guest post by Zack Rosen , co-founder and CEO of Pantheon. Pantheon is building “A big badass platform that will run 30% of the Internet.” They are making it easy for professionals to build, launch, and run websites. Pantheon is one of the Silent Killers in our portfolio – and I’m immensely proud of the progress they are making and excited about their future.

Vermont 165
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Here’s how London’s other ‘Tech City’ in Croydon has fared in its first 6 months

The Next Web

'If you think about the UK tech startup scene, London’s Tech City in the east of town will probably jump to mind. But look a little closer and you’d realize that while most focus goes on the Silicon Roundabout area of the city, there are other parts of the capital, and country, with a burgeoning startup scene. One of these hubs of new activity is Croydon, just on the southern outskirts of Greater London, which saw the official launch of Croydon Tech City (CTC) six months ago.

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5 Situations That Kill Businesses and How to Avoid Them

Growthink Blog

'Every successful business requires a lot of planning. From market research to internal corporate structure, the planning stages of starting and growing a business can be quite extensive. While this preparation is a key factor in the success of any company, there are a few things which far too many business owners neglect. Planning for success and growth is important, but smart businesses are also prepared for the worst case scenario.

Revenue 115
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Startup CEO (OnlyOnce- the book!), Part III – Pre-Order Now

OnlyOnce

'Startup CEO (OnlyOnce – the book!), Part III – Pre-Order Now. My book, Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business , is now available for pre-order on Amazon in multiple formats ( Print , Kindle ), which is an exciting milestone in this project! The book is due out right after Labor Day, but Brad Feld tells me that the more pre-orders I have, the better.

Startup 95
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Summer Business Books: What to Read Now

crowdSPRING Blog

'I love to read. Books, newspapers, magazine, blogs, comment threads. Put the written word in front of me, whether on a sheet of paper bound into a book or magazine, or as pixels on a glowing screen and I will consume it. But like most small business owners, I have very little time available for reading and what time there is tends to be pretty well consumed by the other parts of my life; you know – family, the couple of friends I still have, household chores and (this week at least) the a

Viral 93
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10 Guidelines for Angel Funding Presentations

Startup Professionals Musings

'The average length of a funding pitch to Angel investors is ten minutes. Even if you have booked an hour with a VC, you should plan to talk only for the first fifteen minutes. The biggest complaint I hear from investors is that startup founders often talk way too long, and neglect to cover the most relevant points. Or they get sidetracked by a technical glitch due to poor preparation.

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Startup Communities Are Up To The Entrepreneurs

Feld Thoughts

'As I continue to talk about Startup Communities , I say over and over and over again that the leaders have to be entrepreneurs. Everyone else – who I call the “feeders” (government, university, non-profits, big companies, VCs, angel investors) – have an important role, but the leaders must be entrepreneurs. Now – members of feeder organizations can play a leadership role, but in the absence of a critical mass of entrepreneurs, the startup community won’t ever

Community 163
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9 insider tips for promoting your app

The Next Web

'Editor’s note: Jonathan Saragossi is the founder of IM Creator , a free website builder, and AppSite , an editor and website collection for promoting mobile applications. Jonathan is also a UX and marketing consultant for major startups including Any.Do and Playscape. You can contact him by email or on Twitter. So you’ve developed your dream app and uploaded it to the market, eagerly waiting for a flood of downloads to propel your product to stardom.

PR 157
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How to Create a Perfect Customer Experience

Duct Tape Marketing

'Thursday is guest post day here at Duct Tape Marketing and today’s guest is Peter Sandeen – Enjoy! photo credit: OutofChicago. If you’re not getting the customer referrals or repeat business you hoped for, something’s wrong. Maybe your product doesn’t deliver the benefits customers expect. Maybe your service doesn’t meet the standards they expect.

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Why You Need to Ring the Freaking Cash Register

Both Sides of the Table

'I work with a lot of startups. I start to notice when bad behavior creeps into the system as a whole. I have seen much of that behavior over the past 2 years get worse. Nobody seems to want to make money any more. I remember just a decade ago in 2003 when we all laughed at how dumb people in the 90′s were talking about the race to “capture as many eyeballs as possible” before your competition.

Burn Rate 412
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EIs look ahead to 2018

deal architect

'Gartner has been talking for a while about the ‘Nexus of four forces – Social, Mobile, Cloud and Information” Forrester warns “”Today’s Hottest Technologies Will Be Ho-Hum By 2015” Many of the customers I have interviewed this summer for the.

Cloud 326
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Startup Due Diligence Success Requires Advance Work

Startup Professionals Musings

'If your startup is great enough to get a term sheet from angel investors or a venture capitalist, the next step for the investor is to complete the dreaded due diligence process. This is the last step of the process, where surprises in the evaluation of the management team, documentation, and personnel problems can derail the investment. Some startups do nothing to prepare for the due diligence process, assuming the people and business plan documents will speak for themselves.

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An MVP is not a Cheaper Product, It’s about Smart Learning

Steve Blank

'A minimum viable product (MVP) is not always a smaller/cheaper version of your final product. Defining the goal for a MVP can save you tons of time, money and grief. Drones over the Heartland. I ran into a small startup at Stanford who wants to fly Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (drones) with a Hyper-spectral camera over farm fields to collect hyper-spectral images.

Product 335
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9 pieces of data e-commerce entrepreneurs should collect

The Next Web

'There’s no question that the future of e-commerce is in personalization. But you can’t improve your customers’ online shopping experience (or retain existing customers) without understanding what it is they want in the first place — which means you need to be understanding, and then acting, on whatever data you’re collecting. Figuring out where to start is daunting, so I asked 9 successful founders the following question: What is one piece of data that most novice e-commerce entrepreneurs would

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The unprofitable SaaS business model trap

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

'Marketo filed for IPO with impressive 80% year-over-year growth in 2012, with almost $60m in revenue. Except, they lost $35m. WTF? It’s not impressive when you spend $1.60 for every $1.00 of revenue, force-feeding sales pipelines with an unprofitable product. Don’t tell me this is normal for growing enterprise SaaS companies. I know the argument: The pay-back period on sales, marketing, and up-start costs is long, but there’s a profitable result at the end of the tunnel.

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If You Don’t Define Your Personal Brand the Market Will

Both Sides of the Table

'I have long advised startup companies that if you don’t control your messaging somebody else will and your potential customers will form impressions of you shaped by somebody else or by nobody at all. It’s why it’s important to establish a brand, know what your key messages are and communicate them often and simply. I have published many of these PR Tips before.

Marketing 385
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3 Website Trends That Customers (and Business Owners) Will Love

Duct Tape Marketing

'3 Website Trends That Customers (and Business Owners) Will Love written by Guest Post read more at Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing Thursday is guest post day here at Duct Tape Marketing and today’s guest is Andy Hayes – Enjoy! I know what you’re probably thinking: oh, great, another trends post. Personally, I think trend-watching is interesting because it can give you new ideas for your business.

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IFRS, as in SAP

deal architect

'I think Jim Snabe, co CEO of SAP is creating his own new terminology for reporting numbers when he says about 1H13 numbers "First of all, we don''t like to be in the category of traditional software players. We''re now.

Cloud 308
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Your Computer May Already be Hacked – NSA Inside?

Steve Blank

'In a time of universal deceit – telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell. In Russia, President Putin’s office just stopped using PC’s and switched to typewriters. What do they know what we don’t? Perhaps it’s Intel NSA inside. ——— For those of you who haven’t kept up, the National Security Agency (NSA’s) Prism program has been in the news.

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8 ways to cultivate more inventiveness at work

The Next Web

'When people think of the word “work,” a creative space perfect for cultivating ideas isn’t exactly what comes to mind. But really great startups tend to do one thing well, and that’s innovate. I wanted to know how successful founders make sure creative juices are always flowing (even if their office or local coffee shop isn’t necessarily the next Googleplex).

Jordan 131
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Scaling Sales: From Craft to Machine

Seeing Both Sides

'I''ve been thinking a lot lately about scaling sales. . In every start-up, finding initial product-market fit is a magical moment. Before this occurs, the sales process is a craft or an art - custom-made by the founder or evangelist sales VP. You dive deep into a customer development process, working closely with a few customers who feed you requirements and are willing to trial an imperfect product that is evolving quickly.

Sales 50
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Why Focusing on Only One Buyer Will Lose You Sales

Both Sides of the Table

'This is part of a series that describes a sales methodology for technology companies or frankly many other types of companies, too. We developed this at our first company and called it PUCCKA – the overall methodology is described here. Pain. Unique Selling Proposition. Champion. Compelling Event. This post talks about the “K” or Key Players involved in a buying decision.

Sales 321
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How to Find Your Personal Value Proposition

Duct Tape Marketing

'Marketing podcast with Sally Hogshead. Value propositions are a sales and marketing staple. It’s very difficult to get a purchasing conversation started unless the potential buyer understands some way in which a product or service they are considering adds value in a way that is somewhat unique from other offering. Lacking a strong value proposition lands one in the commodity pile.

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10 Reality Checks to Verify Your Entrepreneur Fit

Startup Professionals Musings

'Making the decision to become an entrepreneur is a major commitment, with huge implications for skills and lifestyle. Yet there is no standardized testing or certification required or available anywhere to help you decide if you are a good fit for entrepreneurship, or entrepreneurship is right for you. An MBA or other academic credentials just don’t do it.

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Don’t Give Away Your Board Seats

Steve Blank

'I had a group of ex-students out to the ranch who were puzzling over a dilemma – they’ve been working hard on their startup, were close at finding product/market fit and had been approached by Oren, a potential angel investor. Oren had been investing since he left Google four years ago and was insisting on not only a board seat, but he wanted to be chairman of the board.

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Zesty: the dental startup with ‘denture capital’ and an eye firmly on UK healthcare

The Next Web

'“We had bookings at midnight, one AM last night and six ‘o’ clock this morning. I had a couple of calls, two people had booked and were in pain. ‘I’ve booked in Tower Bridge’ ‘I’ve Booked in Soho’. So I said, ‘great, did you read the email, everything’s fine.’”. This is currently the life of Lloyd Price, ex- Badoo man and founder of Zesty , a service that will find you a dentist in London at the click of a button. “’Yeah but I just need to know is the appointment booked?’.

Cloud 121
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4 Necessary Small Business Resources And The Creative Approach To Get Them

YoungUpstarts

'by Natalie Gonzalez, co-founder and head of marketing and social media at Chatalog. Small businesses are the economic engine that drives the U.S. economy, with more than 27 million small firms providing 60 to 80 percent of the new jobs in our country. New survey data from Constant Contact® , Inc. found that 59 percent of small businesses believe it’s harder to run a business today than five years ago.

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(First Annual?) List of Go-To Early-Stage Service Providers in the NextView Ventures Boston Portfolio

Genuine VC

'Recently, we surveyed our Boston-based NextView portfolio Founder/CEOs asking them about which service provider firms they’ve been using. The goal was to assemble data in order to share it back to our portfolio companies (especially the newer ones) so that they didn’t have to recreate the wheel in determining a short-list of firms to talk to when evaluating new options.