Sat.May 28, 2011 - Fri.Jun 03, 2011

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Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out – The Startup Genome Project

Steve Blank

In April 2010 I received an email that said, “I’m an incoming Stanford student in the fall and working on a project that a number of people suggested I get in touch with you about.&#. Ok, I get a lot of these. Is this some grad student or post doc who wanted to do some independent study? The email continued, &# The problem I’m working on is that many founders are either making uninformed decisions or inefficiently learning the new skills they need.

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Be a Benevolent Dictator (And Eight More Lessons For Getting Your Stalled Start-up Off The Ground)

YoungUpstarts

by Michael Feuer, author of “ The Benevolent Dictator “ Be your own boss. It’s a version of the American Dream that most people have fantasized about. Unfortunately, to many would-be entrepreneurs, getting past the dreaming phase and into the doing phase seems insurmountable — especially in a shaky economy where quitting your day job seems foolhardy and funding seems scarcer than, well, pay raises and affordable health insurance.

Cofounder 154
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Twitter Link Roundup #88 – Small Business, Social Media, Design, Copywriting, 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!

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Serial CEO Judy Estrin On Startups and Innovation

ReadWriteStart

Judy Estrin is a serial entrepreneur, having started seven tech companies since 1981. She was the former CTO of Cisco Systems from 1998-2000, and is on the boards of Disney and Packet Design and was a board member at Sun and FedEx for many years. She wrote Closing the Innovation Gap: Reigniting the Spark of Creativity in a Global Economy back in 2008 and now runs her own firm JLabs speaking and advising businesses on innovation, leadership and entrepreneurship.

CTO Hire 118
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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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The Harder I Work, The Luckier I Get

Both Sides of the Table

Overnight success. It’s one of the biggest myths in the tech industry. It’s a ongoing struggle to overcome this bias. I say “struggle to overcome&# because I care about young people entering our industry with a set of realistic expectations about what “normal&# is. If you take a snapshot during an extraordinary surge in valuations, M&A activity, IPOs and thus wealth creation you’d echo John Doerr’s famous quote from 1999 that, “The Internet is the gr

IPO 391
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14 Interesting Findings From The Startup Genome Project

YoungUpstarts

Silicon Valley technology startup accelerator blackbox earlier this year launched the Startup Genome Project , which seeks to type startups, identify their developmental stage and the metrics that matter, and build a system to integrate the methodologies of many of the Valley’s leading thinkers such as Steve Blank , Eric Ries , Sean Ellis and Dave McClure.

More Trending

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Website review to improve website ranking and conversion

Aymeric Gaurat-Apelli

Today I would like to show you how to quickly review a website and find low hanging fruits in terms of SEO, marketing and other technicalities. The website I will review the website of Blue Tea that offers kitchen designs in Sydney. Google Webmaster Tools. Did you register your website to Google Webmaster Tools ? If no, do it now. Done? Now, please set up your preferred domain name inside Google Webmaster Tools.

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Reinventing the Board Meeting – Part 1 of 2

Steve Blank

There are none so blind as those who will not see. Jonathan Swift. What’s Wrong With Today’s Board Meetings. As customer and agile development reinvent the Startup, it’s time to ask why startup board governance has not kept up with the pace of innovation. Board meetings that guide startups haven’t changed since the early 1900’s. It’s time. Reinventing the board meeting may offer venture-backed startups a more efficient, productive way to direct and measure their search for a profitable business

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Managing Social Media With Fetch Plus

YoungUpstarts

One of the companies that will feature at the upcoming web and mobile technology startup conference Echelon 2011 is Fetch Plus , a social media and mobile application development company. As we know, this space is a very competitive one; Fetch Plus differentiates itself from the rest by targeting companies with holdings, focusing on developing tools necessary for these companies’ holdings to efficiently and effectively build and scale their social media footprint through different networks

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Role Splitting – Non-CEO Founder and Board Member

ithacaVC

Interesting conflicts can arise when a non-CEO founder is on the board of directors of a startup. Assume that Jim is the tech guru founder of Company X. Jim founded Company X with Al, a self proclaimed entrepreneur. Company X raises some venture capital, and after about a year Jim goes to his non-management board members and basically says “Al has to go” See my earlier post Tech Founder Wins at Early Stage.

Founder 53
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Ten Quotes Never Spoken By a Happy Entrepreneur

Startup Professionals Musings

Some people are not cut out to be entrepreneurs. This is a good thing, or the business world would be chaos, with everyone trying to do their own thing. So what about you? How do you know if you should be running your own company, or concentrating on that queue of work that someone else has built for you? I’ve hit this before, but I still hear from too many unhappy entrepreneurs.

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Reinventing the Board Meeting – Part 2 of 2 – Virtual Valley Ventures

Steve Blank

There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come. Victor Hugo. When The Boardroom is Bits. A revolution has taken hold as customer development and agile engineering reinvent the Startup process. It’s time to ask why startup board governance has failed to keep pace with innovation. Board meetings that guide startups haven’t changed since the early 1900’s.

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$4 Per Gallon Gas = Energy Innovation

YoungUpstarts

by Robert Brands, author of “ Robert’s Rules of Innovation &#. Why Expensive Gas Will Be The Fuel That Drives Innovations in Alternative Energy. History has proven that innovation in the energy industry has almost always been driven by high consumer prices. When we had cheap and abundant oil – and low gas prices – during the 1980s, energy exploration and innovation slowed to a halt.

.Net 157
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Groupons Global Rocket

deal architect

I was impressed at SuiteWorld to hear Groupon had implemented NetSuite in 26 countries in under 3 months. But I did wonder why such a young company needed that much functionality in so many markets. Turns out Groupon has been.

Global 250
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Every Entrepreneur Needs These Relationship Skills

Startup Professionals Musings

Starting and building a company is all about leadership – formulating an idea, building a unique plan based on vision and experience, and forging a path over and through all obstacles. Yet the image of leadership in business is at an all-time low, according to national leadership experts, considering the political debacles, record business bankruptcies, and executive fraud cases.

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Why Board Meetings Suck – Part 1 of 2

Steve Blank

There are none so blind as those who will not see. Jonathan Swift. What’s Wrong With Today’s Board Meetings. As customer and agile development reinvent the Startup, it’s time to ask why startup board governance has not kept up with the pace of innovation. Board meetings that guide startups haven’t changed since the early 1900’s. It’s time. Reinventing the board meeting may offer venture-backed startups a more efficient, productive way to direct and measure their search for a profitable business

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[Competition] SingTel “The Tablet Enterprise” i.Challenge 2011

YoungUpstarts

Leading regional telecommunications provider SingTel today kickstarted i.Challenge 2011 , an annual competition for app developers. The theme this year is “The Tablet Enterprise&# , and will focus on applications that are tablet-friendly – iPads, Blackberry Playbooks, or Android-based devices – and helps address issues for enterprise customers.

Developer 154
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Outsourcing: Gullivers Travels

deal architect

I was struck by two lists I saw this past week. One was in an advertising section in the back of the Fortune 500 issue from the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals (IAOP) with its list of 100 outsourcing leaders.

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Every Entrepreneur Needs to Outwit the Devil

Startup Professionals Musings

“The devil in the details” is a quote that we have all heard, and clearly applies to startups, where success in the long run is all about execution. But for you as an entrepreneur trying to get started, the devil is really in your mind, where you must prevent drifting, and maintain that confidence, commitment, and passion, to achieve your business dream.

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What Can You Do For Me?

Rembrandt Communications

I don’t know about you, but I’ve talked to many small business owners who are really watching their budgets closely and saving as much money as possible. With this in mind, it can be more difficult to get to customers to use your products and services. Yes, competition may be tough, but if you know [.].

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[Infographic] Net Worth: Tech’s Wealthiest Founders

YoungUpstarts

We all know that the founders of those successful tech companies are worth quite a bit of money, but how much are they really worth? Our friends at RetailMeNot.com ranked the top ten hot technology startups, including Facebook and Twitter, in order of estimated value and come up with an infographic to show us how much: Infographic by RetailMeNot.com.

.Net 185
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Imagine if Google and Apple were into consulting

deal architect

Last week in Zurich at a data center event, Google “spent the day laying out the best practices that any IT manager can do on a reasonable budget, such as maintaining hot and cool aisles, managing airflow, measuring the energy.

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Entrepreneurs Confuse Product and Business Plans

Startup Professionals Musings

Why is it that most of the business plans I see are really product plans? I define a product plan as a detailed description of your product or service, with a bit of business thrown in at the end. A business plan is a detailed description of your business, with a bit of product description thrown in near the front. Don’t get me wrong. It’s definitely positive to have a product plan.

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How Not To Start A Relationship

Feld Thoughts

In the last month I’ve had the chance to make about 50 new friends. I’ve suddenly become very popular with investment bankers and have been on the receiving end of over 50 emails that look something like the following: “We met once a long time ago when I was with firm X. I’m now at firm Y. We are the blah blah blah best at blah blah most successful blah blah tied into blah blah working with blah blah blah connected with blah blah blah.

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The Start-up Scene In India

YoungUpstarts

by Willis Wee, Penn-Olson.com. Vijay Anand is an entrepreneurially-minded professional with more than 13 years of hands-on experience as an entrepreneur , an advisor, and a columnist at Entrepreneur magazine. He recently founded The Startup Centre , an India-based accelerator for early stage start-ups, and also a hub for initiatives related to tech, design and entrepreneurship.

India 168
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More Innovation

deal architect

On the New Florence blog 3D Printing and Crowdsourced Product Design Zynga’s hybrid and highly elastic cloud Innovation in European postal services How tech is changing the military.

Cloud 199
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Six Keys to Managing Your Reputation on the Web

Startup Professionals Musings

Every startup fears that one angry and unfair customer who can jeopardize the business by a SCREAMING post on Ripoff Report , Yelp , or one of the hundreds of other consumer complaint and review sites on the Internet. Most entrepreneurs don’t even know how to keep track of what people are saying about them on the web, much less how to respond or remove it.

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Backing Up Your Google Apps Data

Feld Thoughts

I find it endlessly entertaining that people say things like “I don’t need to back up my data anymore because it’s in the cloud.&# These people have never experienced a cloud failure, accidentally deleted a specific contact record, or authenticated an app that messed up their account. They will. And it will be painful. I became a believer in backing up my data when I was 17 years old and had my first data calamity.

Cloud 131
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Main Steps To Starting A Business

YoungUpstarts

by James Kim, writer at Choosewhat.com. You’ve got a business idea. Unfortunately, you don’t know anything about business solutions or what you have to do to actually get your company off the ground. Don’t worry: here’s a quick walk-through. First you’re going to have to plan. Even though you have a decent idea already that doesn’t mean that you’re ready to move onto the next step.

Incubator 164
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Mobile: The mother of all wars?

deal architect

PayPal’s lawsuit against Google is bringing into focus the massive stakes in mobile markets. More on that in a minute. I was thinking about all kinds of scenarios from Blackberry World last month. There were Adobe and Facebook executives showing.

Mobile 199
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10 Reasons Why Capital Shouldn't Make Or Break Your Startup

Startup Professionals Musings

By John Williams Fast Company magazine recently reported that PayPal founder Paul Thiel is giving away $100,000 to twenty-four young men and women to finance startup businesses. The caveat is that these young entrepreneurs have to drop out of college to do it. This move is indicative of the possibility that the traditional ways of going about making a living through a college education, an entry-level position at a firm, and steady promotion through the ranks is a dead model.

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Thinking About 2015

Feld Thoughts

Once a quarter my partners ( Seth , Ryan , Jason ) and I spend 48 hours together. Unlike a typical offsite that ten zillion organizations have, we tend to spend less time on formalities and more time on wider ranging, forward looking discussions about what we are doing, both professionally and personally. Last night, over an amazing meal, we ended up talking about what we’ve been investing in over the past four years.

Syndicate 129
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Innovation In Technicolor At TechCrunch Disrupt NYC 2011

YoungUpstarts

GE was a sponsor of TechCrunch Disrupt NYC 2011 last week, and Chief Marketing Officer Beth Comstock spoke and served as a judge of the impressive field of tech start-ups vying for top honors, which included a US$50,000 prize. Check out the stunning panels GE created as real-time illustrations of several of the inspiring talks given at Disrupt: These images were first published on GE Reports and are republished here with permission.

New York 157
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More New Renaissance

deal architect

on the innovation blog NYC’s digital future A century of Indy 500 Travel & leisure’s Coolest new Travel Adventures NetSuite’s SuiteWorld in 3 minutes.

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Startup Founders Walk a Thin Line on Delegation

Startup Professionals Musings

For a few, delegating comes easily, maybe too easy. For others who are perfectionists, letting go of even the most trivial task is almost impossible. If you are in this second category, you probably don’t like the references behind your back that you are a “control freak” or a “micro-manager.” Business school professor John Hunt notes that only 30 percent of managers think they can delegate well, and of those, only one in three is considered a good delegator by his or her subordinates.

Founder 228
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5 Interesting Observations on the Groupon Model from Academic Research

ReadWriteStart

The number of daily deal sites is growing at an amazing rate. Recent data from daily deal aggregator Yipit , shows there are now over 480. The number has grown by almost a factor of 10 over the last year (chart below). Entrepreneurs definitely have become interested in this model. The largest, Groupon, is actually being studied by some leading academic researchers.