Sat.Jun 19, 2010 - Fri.Jun 25, 2010

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Ten Internet Rip-offs Any Fool Should Recognize

Startup Professionals Musings

Why are people so gullible to Internet rip-offs? One would think that with all the sad stories and warnings that have been published over the past twenty years on common ones, this problem would be largely in our past. But based on the number of victims still looking for technology or laws to protect them, we may be attacking symptoms rather than the real problem.

Internet 222
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Oblong is Hiring

Feld Thoughts

Jason and I were at an Oblong board meeting last week and spent the entire day at the company. It’s grown a lot over the past few months and it was fun to spend time with a number of folks we hadn’t met before. The first Oblong baby was born while we were all eating lunch which resulted in lots of good cheer, karma, and the revelation from another member of the Oblong team that his wife recently found out that she was pregnant.

Hiring 110
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“Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer's Guide to Launching a.

Software By Rob

Software by Rob Passionate about Startups and MicroISVs Lessons Learned by a Serial Entrepreneur home about press micropreneurs archives ← Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It) Excellent Showing at 59 Days of Code Startup Competition → “Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer’s Guide to Launching a Startup&# is Now Available in Paperback and PDF About this Blog , Micropreneurship , Startups If youre trying grow your startup youve come to the right

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An invigorating day with Talent Management executives

deal architect

Readers know I like small, specialized services firms like appirio and Corefino. I have also been a fan of Knowledge Infusion and its work around talent management for a while, and yesterday that respect jumped multiple fold. Oh, they gave. Tags: Industry Commentary.

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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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Out of the cesspool and into the sewer: A/B testing trap

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Your A/B tests are trapped in a cesspool when they should be in the sewer.? Do you really care why A/B testing is analogous to unwanted liquids? Not yet, so I'd better get right to the point. On the rare occasion that it rains in Austin we get these deep puddles in the backyard. Of course it would be better if the water would flow out into the street and into the sewer, but that's not how gravity works.

Metrics 233
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How To Beat the Odds and Succeed Like Google

Startup Professionals Musings

I tell entrepreneurs that Google was an “exception” to all the investment and startup rules, but I’ve always wondered what it takes to be an exception. Since every business is built by unique individuals, I’m totally convinced that exceptional people are the key to an exceptional company. To check out the Google founders, and because I still see so many business plans that are modeled after Google (more search engines, and more billion dollar growth models), I had to take a look at the recent bo

More Trending

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Of Hollywood and ERP

deal architect

I enjoy going to Judith Rothrock’s annual Grape Escape. She showcases 4 vendors and a customer each and tightly controls their communication to 8 to 10 minutes each. The rest of the time is a good chance to mingle with.

Restful 186
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What is a startup?

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, June 21, 2010 What is a startup? I think most people have a fairly specific image that gets conjured up when they hear the word startup. Maybe it’s the “two guys in a garage&# made famous by HP, or the idea of Jobs and Wozniack walking barefoot and shaggy through the Homebrew Computer Club. Maybe it’s the more recent wunderkinds like Zuckerberg or Brin and Page.

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Entrepreneurs Have to Make Decisions, Quickly

Startup Professionals Musings

Every so often a promising entrepreneur seems to freeze in the oncoming headlights and gets run over by his competition. Why is it that his idea which seemed so fundable only months ago fails to dazzle investors today? The team is the same. The company's market is the same. The only difference might be that the economy is down, resulting in a lower valuation for Internet ventures, and that makes all the difference.

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Rethinking The Laptop

Feld Thoughts

This morning, as I was waiting for my laptop to grind through its startup process I started wondering why I had a laptop. I travel a lot and had it with me in San Francisco and Los Angeles this week, but hardly used it. And, when I did, I was frustrated with how long I had to wait for it to “get started&#. Today, while I was waiting for my laptop to sync email (Outlook 2010) I grabbed my iPad, opened mail, and read/reply/deleted all of the email that came in over night.

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Transcript And MP3 Of My $180,000 Website Flipping Presentation

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak

The response to the video I shared of my presentation – How I Made $180,000 Profit Buying And Selling Websites Part Time – was awesome, and as I promised, here is the text transcript for you. I’ll also include the MP3 download if you just want the audio without the video. I’d appreciate it if you shared this with as many people as you think would benefit from the information.

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5 Ways to Create Newsworthy News

Rembrandt Communications

As a new business owner, it’s easy to rush through publicity efforts in order to concentrate or core business activities and priorities. But before you contact the media or post a press release, ask yourself if the information you’re about to send is really newsworthy. Will a reporter really care about what you have to [.].

Media 100
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How Much Stock to Ask For When Joining a Startup

Startup Professionals Musings

Wouldn’t you like to be one of the lucky people who joined Google and Microsoft when these were startups, and now be a multi-millionaire? So people ask me “How many shares should I ask for when I join a startup today?” In reality, the number of shares doesn’t mean anything – it’s your percent of the total that you need to negotiate. For example, 200,000 shares may sound like a lot, but if the startup has issued 20 million (a common starting point), that’s just 1% of the company.

Stock 144
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eBay Acquires RedLaser

Feld Thoughts

Another TechStars company has been acquired. Well – part of it has been acquired. Today it was announced that eBay has acquired the RedLaser product from Occipital. The Occipital guys tell the story in their post titled Arrival at the Launchpad. Occipital’s founders – Jeff and Vikas – are the epitome of bootstrap entrepreneurs.

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10 Tips for Startups and Small Businesses on Naming Your Company

crowdSPRING Blog

Naming your company can be challenging and time consuming. If you need help or simply don’t have the time (it took us nearly 50 hours to name “crowdSPRING&# ), you can leverage crowdSPRING’s community of more than 64,000 designers and writers to come up with your company name or a product name. Whether you leverage crowdSPRING’s community to help name your startup or small business or find a name on your own, you might find the following 10 tips useful: 1.

Naming 120
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Perfecto Mobile Gets Perfect Backer in Vodafone Ventures for App Testing in the Cloud

VC Cafe

V odafone’s venture capital arm made a strategic minority investment in Israeli startup Perfecto Mobile , joining previous backers Carmel Ventures and Vertex Venture Capital who invested $7 million ten months ago. The sum of the round was undisclosed, but sources in the Israeli media estimate it at $4-5 million. Perfecto Mobile, previously known as Nexperience, provides companies testing services for their mobile apps over the Internet and on a large range of handset models.

Cloud 107
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Startups Must Grow or Die, Despite the Chaos

Startup Professionals Musings

Every startup founder I know talks about the chaos of his business, which he usually attributes to that burst of growth that is required to get to positive cashflow. He envisions a stable environment after that point, and may have convinced himself that he will be safer and happier with a livable income, maintaining a loyal but flat customer base. Sadly, this false perception often leads to the death of his business, or at least the end of his tenure as CEO.

Startup 144
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Startupbootcamp – TechStars Global Affiliate in Compenhagen

Feld Thoughts

Recently, TechStars began expanding outside the United States through its new TechStars Global Affiliate program. From experience, we know that investing internationally from the United States is difficult. However, the demand from entrepreneurs throughout the world for a TechStars-like program has been substantial. So, TechStars opted for an affiliate model which gives the local partner the benefits of working with TechStars such as process know-know and access to the TechStars network.

Affiliate 129
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Crowdsourcing, the Gulf Oil Spill and the Arrogance of BP

crowdSPRING Blog

BP has spent $2.35 billion dollars to date to clean-up, contain and pay claims for the largest oil spill in U.S. history. They’ve established a $20 billion dollar reserve to deal with ongoing obligations and liabilities from the oil spill. Despite BP’s efforts to stop the oil from continuing to pollute the environment, 35,000 to 60,000 barrels of oil continue to spill from the well.

Offshore 109
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Five people that I wish I had something more interesting to say to

This is going to be BIG.

One of the things I pride myself on is knowing a little about a lot of things. I can generally strike up at least a brief conversation with anyone—which helps a lot when your job is basically to talk to strangers. I do, however, have a huge amount of respect for anyone who has deep expertise in an area—who has found something they want to focus on and done the deep dive.

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Negativity Has No Place in Your Startup

Startup Professionals Musings

Throughout my career in small companies and large, I’ve always been appalled by the number of people who seem to complain all of the time. These people don’t seem to realize that they are hurting themselves, as well as other people’s productivity, and the company they are working for. I’ve always thought that I might be overly sensitive, but recently I saw an old survey done by badbossoloy.com , which claims that a majority of employees spend 10 hours or more a month complaining or listening to

Startup 124
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A Month of Mac

Feld Thoughts

My post yesterday titled Rethinking The Laptop resulted in three very specific pieces of feedback followed by me taking one specific action. The feedback was: Dump Outlook. Get a solid state drive. Get a Mac. After mulling things around for 24 hours, I decided to once again try my annual switch to the Mac. Fortunately, I have a very nice Mac from last year’s effort (a MacBook Pro 2.4 GHz with 2 GB) so I fired it up, configured Mail and iCal to work with my Exchange server, downloaded Chro

Alaska 120
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How Fran Kerr Turned Her Acne Prone Skin Into A Profitable Blogging Empire

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak

Press play to begin streaming the audio or right click the text link and choose save as or save link. Download the MP3 [ 55 Minutes - 76 MB ]. This interview is one of the most exciting successful blog case studies I have ever shared with you. This is the story of Fran Kerr , who created HighOnHealth.org , a blog about acne treatment, skin care and alternative health.

France 102
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Startup School… tweetstream

Start Up Blog

You may be aware that I recently ran my annual Startup School in Melbourne. During the event we ran a tweet stream of the ideas and soundbites coming from the forum. A lot of people followed the hashtag #melsus and said they got some great stuff from it. One person in particular Josh Moore , took it to the next level and pulled together a great PDF of the event via what appeared on line from it.

Startup 80
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The Convertible Note Discount Price Cap

The Startup Lawyer

If you follow this blog, you know that I think convertible debt is a good structure for a startup’s angel round. The main feature of the convertible note is that the debt investment made by the angel investor will typically later convert into equity. For this article, let’s assume this equity is the Series A Preferred Stock purchased by a venture capital fund.

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The Magic of Email Conversations

Feld Thoughts

In the mid 1990’s I used an email client that did a pretty good job of “threading conversations.&# The UI was kind of crummy, but it did some interesting things. It was called Lotus Notes. I also invested in a company called NetGenesis that made the first threaded web discussion software based on a construct that had been deeply implemented in BBS’s and Notes; in fact, we referred to it as “bringing Lotus Notes like threaded discussion functionality to the web.&# Tha

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How can you cut your marketing budget?

Life Beyond Code

Short answer: Do insanely awesome work. That kind of work markets itself and you. The short answer is obvious I am sure but let me take an example which is simply four screenshots from Twitter this afternoon. #1. Ben Eubanks tweets about how impressed he is with a PR pitch? ( Think about it: when was the last time you heard a praise for a PR pitch). #2 I tweet back requesting more information. #3 Ben tweets back with more details. ( Shows that the PR person “walked the extra mile&#. #4 Cor

PR 70
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Spreadsy Partners with Do512 and Plans Dallas Launch

Austin Startup

Rapidly growing social commerce startup Spreadsy today announced the success of its official launch in Austin, TX and partnership with the most popular local website in Austin, Do512. Like other websites in the quickly expanding “group buying&# space, Spreadsy offers consumers significantly discounted daily deals from popular local businesses such as restaurants, spas, and fitness clubs.

Dallas 75
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How hard you worked is irrelevant

Start Up Blog

It’s what we create for the people who care. The truth is we never know how hard it was to deliver the right product, at the right place at the right time. We only care that it was. What we (the entrepreneurs, producers, marketers) had to go through is not part of the consideration set. It isn’t charity, it’s about them. So if we nail it and deliver the project quickly, we needn’t feel guilty or less deserving.

Web 75
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Discovering At Least One Awesome Thing A Day On My Mac

Feld Thoughts

I’m a week into using a Mac as my primary computer and loving it. Every day I discover at least one little thing that makes me go “why the fuck didn’t my PC ever do that.&#. Today’s was the time zone thing. For two decades I’ve been bedeviled by time zones whenever I travel. For a long time I had to manually set the time.

Widget 114
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The rise of RTB and our investment in Triggit

VC Adventure

Clearly a hot topic in online ad-tech right now is the rise of exchange-based buying and the advent of real-time bidding platforms (RTB) that allow advertisers and publishers to transact on an impression by impression basis. Given all the focus on RTB I sometimes have to remind myself that true real-time trading is less than a year into its existence.

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Sparefoot Raises $2M Series B

Austin Startup

Disclaimer: I am an investor in Sparefoot, and they were in the 2009 Capital Factory program where I am a Managing Director. In early 2009, the founders of Sparefoot (then called Homstie.com) had a vision of allowing people with extra storage space in their homes to make a match with people who wanted to store things. It was a way to bypass the traditional self-storage providers, and create a mutually beneficial relationship between people who otherwise would never have met.

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For Good Info on Franchise Business

Up and Running

If you’re at all interested in buying into a franchise business I’d think you’d definitely want to become familiar with Joel Libava , his Franchise King blog , and his new ebook called How to Carefully Select a Franchise to Buy. I just read a good review by TJ McCue, founder of SalesRescueTeam.com, someone I’ve come to know and like from a relationship that started on Twitter.

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Fun and Games with BigDoor

Feld Thoughts

We recently invested in a Seattle company called BigDoor Media. The founder/CEO Keith Smith wrote a wonderful love story about the deal which was picked up by the WSJ VC Dispatch in a post titled A Summer Romance Between Founder And Venture Capitalist ? Yes, I’ve fallen in love (in a very non-sexual way) with Keith, his co-founder Jeff Malek, and BigDoor.

Seattle 109
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Big Smiles = Big Entrepreneurship Lesson

Growthink Blog

Look at this picture: Those are pretty big smiles don't ya think? Well, those are my kids. And the reason they are smiling so much is that today is their last day of school. Do you remember how you used to feel on the last day of school. I do. I clearly remember how good it felt. Knowing that I was done with whatever grade I was in. And that I had the long, fun summer to look forward to.

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How to pitch

Start Up Blog

There is more good than bad in these hilarious Ali G pitches to Venture Capitalists. What to look for: His tone of voice and pausing when speaking. His reliance on talking. There is no powerpoint. Taking them on a journey. Story telling. Simple visuals. Having samples / props. Supreme confidence. I’d seriously recommend this video on how to pitch versus most other examples we see on the web so long as we understand the context.