Sat.Dec 03, 2011 - Fri.Dec 09, 2011

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The Rise Of Cloud Computing

YoungUpstarts

by Yi Ning Lim, marketing specialist at GMO GlobalSign. Cloud computing has become a buzzword in the recent years, with numerous companies providing the technology to enable organizations to access applications over a network to remote computing sites. It delivers on-demand, self-servicing capacity so as to allow users to run applications through a simple administrative console.

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The Funding Gap

Gust

The resources required to start a company vary significantly , depending on the type of company and growth rate anticipated by the entrepreneur. An experienced software engineer, for example, can develop a new mobile app with his or her own resources and market the product on the web with very little capital. A medical device company, on the other hand, may need cash resources to pay for FDA testing, designing the prototype, manufacturing the product, establishing an inventory of the devices and

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Twitter Link Roundup #113 – 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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Pound Around the World – My Thoughts from Random Hacks of Kindness

VC Cafe

This weekend, I took part in Random hacks of Kindness, a social enterprise hackathon taking place all around the world (Google is one of the sponsors). I usually attend these things as a mentor, but this time I decided to roll up my sleeves, pitch an idea and get a project done in one weekend (48 hours). Time flew by and it didn’t feel like ‘work’ Since the organizer in London was a charity call Mybnk (teaching youth financial literacy), the problem we focused on was financial

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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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6 Landmines To Avoid In Web Development Contracts

YoungUpstarts

by Ilene B. Stern , partner at Kurzman Eisenberg Corbin & Lever, LLP. Congratulations! You’ve graduated from doing business with a handshake to a generic written contract downloaded from the Internet. But don’t pat yourself too hard on the back. Web site development contracts can be legal minefields, as many web site developers learn the hard way.

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6 Ways Any Business Can Engage Customers and Increase Sales During the Holidays!

Up and Running

Tis the season for businesses across the world to see the bottom line of the P&L report go from red to black! It’s the time of year that can make or break a business. So what are you doing to make sure you stay in touch, stay top of mind, and stay on top of sales this holiday season? Here are 6 ways any business can stay in touch and increase sales this holiday season!

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Why I Canceled All My Memberships Except One: Mixergy Premium Review

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak

I’ve been involved in internet Marketing since January 18th, 2011. Since I started, I’ve had the privilege of taking part in a number of online courses that have given me a solid Internet Marketing Education.

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Storably.com – Peer-to-Peer Marketplace For Renting Storage Or Carpark Space

YoungUpstarts

Storably.com ( www.storably.com ) is an online peer-to-peer marketplace for parking and storage. Say you own an apartment that comes with a carpark lot in the middle of a city where parking is limited and expensive – but you don’t drive or own a car. With Storably , you can rent the space out to others who can put that space to better use – so now you can look at unused space as waste… or potentially an opportunity for additional income.

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I Want Someone to “Amazon” Health Insurance

Andrew Payne

We pay about $1600/month for family health insurance. It’s a pretty good HMO plan from Blue Cross/Blue Shield of MA (BCBSMA), and we’ve been generally happy with their benefits. However, we miss ten years ago, when it was $600/month, with better benefits. Of course, rising health costs is a national debate topic, and BCBSMA prides itself in paying out relatively a high percentage (90%) of premiums for member medical services.

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Why I’d Rather Err on the Side of Direct Feedback Than Pleasantries

Both Sides of the Table

A few weeks ago I was reading a blog post by MG Siegler that really struck a chord. The title was “The Jerk,” which is a reference to both the Steve Martin film but more precisely to Robert Scoble’s interpretation of Steve Jobs having just read his biography. The gist of MG’s argument is that he’d rather work with people who are openly critical of his ideas if it helps him to perform better than to have a bunch of “yes men” around who just say what a gre

Founder 337
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Small Business Spotlight of the Week: ThriftyWrench.com

crowdSPRING Blog

There are lot of benefits to owning your own car. Like not having to haul groceries a mile and then drag them up the stairs to your third floor walk up. Or not having to limp around town on a sprained ankle. And having the independence to go where you want to go, when you want to go there, not arrive to work 40 minutes late because the train was delayed.

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The unimportance of product names

37signals.com

This is Signal vs. Noise , a weblog by 37signals about design, business, experience, simplicity, the web, culture, and more. Established 1999 in Chicago. Follow us on Twitter for more information on our products. Jobs: See more on our Job Board. The unimportance of product names. Matt. Apr 27 2010. 43 comments Latest by Johan Strandell. Don’t waste too much time on picking a perfect name for your product.

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Easy to criticize, hard to create

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

(Powered by LaunchBit ). I can rip any business idea to shreds. Take NetFlix: The costs of inventory logistics, millions of non-technical customers, the Postal Service, and loss from wear and delivery will make profit impossible with a reasonable retail price. Movie-watchers are accustomed to the immediate gratification of browsing and selecting. People will copy movies, pissing off suppliers.

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A brave new world of services

deal architect

I recently saw an SAP announcement around its Next-Gen services and got excited. Turns out it is services around its newer products (SAP HANA platform and business analytics, mobility and on-demand). That’s certainly one definition of Next-Gen. I was hoping.

Analytics 265
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Most Great Entrepreneurs Don’t Drop Out of Harvard

Startup Professionals Musings

Many believe that entrepreneurs are born, not made. While I agree that successful company builders usually have a natural inclination to be entrepreneurs, a good education helps polish that apple. There are people who are natural musicians, but that doesn't mean we don't try to teach them music. Of course, there's no law saying you have to go to college to start a business.

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6 Tips to Choosing a Great Company/Product Name

www.startupnextdoor.com

Startup Next Door. Venture without Capital. home. coming soon. about. contact. « Don’t Let Them Know You’re Alone. The Self-Serve Startup » 6 Tips to Choosing a Great Company/Product Name. 2010. February. 25. Jump to. Comments. When naming your company you’re naming your baby. So give your baby a name that will still be a good name when she’s all grown up.

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Are Brilliant People Secretly (or Publicly) Miserable?

entrepreMusings

I’ve seen a couple of movies recently that were really good and one of them got me thinking about how some brilliant people are very insecure and miserable. The movie that made me think about this was My Week With Marilyn which is about Marilyn Monroe, Colin Clark, and Laurence Olivier. Michelle Williams is a fabulous actress and seemed to really capture what was going on with Marilyn Monroe.

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Revolutionary, Legendary, Incredible

deal architect

Congratulations to Lars Dalgaard and his team at SuccessFactors as SAP makes a bid at a significant premium for $ 3.4 billion. His excitement is palpable as he uses plenty of big words in the press release. Let’s do a.

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7 Keys to Startup Survival in Today’s Now Economy

Startup Professionals Musings

Since the days of Henry Ford, mass production has been the Holy Grail of business, rather than build-to-order. Too many businesses haven’t noticed that we have come full-circle, where mass customization is required now to win. Customers have come to expect immediate and tailor-made responses to their needs, and the businesses that fail to deliver quickly fall behind.

Startup 262
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Turning Your Anxiety Into Creativity

YoungUpstarts

by Gini Graham Scott of Changemakers Publishing. I just read this article about how the anxiety everyone experiences from time to time can be good for you as well as destructive. As Alice Park describes in “The Two Faces of Anxiety” in the December 5th issue of Time, not all anxiety should be battled. Instead, sometimes you should embrace or even celebrate it, because “the hormones that drive anxiety can be powerful stimulants, arousing the senses to the fullest.

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Investors Fund Solutions Rather Than Technology

Gust

Too many entrepreneurs develop a new product without regard for market demand , then build an entire strategy based on creating a need, rather than acting on an existing market need. Investors characterize this approach as a “solution looking for a problem.” These don’t get funded. The best startups find a way to drive the market with their technology, rather than push their new technology-driven ‘solution’ on the marketplace.

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Crossover Candidates

deal architect

In my next book, I have several examples of what I call crossover executives who moved from tech vendors to user organizations or vice versa. The book has guest columns from Tony Scott, now CIO of Microsoft who got there.

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Nerf Guns Hold the Line Between Startups and Corporatocracy

ReadWriteStart

Growing up on the coast Maine we would do all sorts of things to pass the time. In back of our house was a small stream with steep banks surrounded by a forest that ran from the tidal sections of the Royal River to the Cousins River. We called it The Creak. By the time we were about 10 years old or so, The Creak had become an epic battle ground for the neighborhood kids, would-be commandos yielding sophisticated weapons chasing each other through the mud and sticks.

Startup 161
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Top Five Ways To Recognize And Appreciate Millennial Workers

YoungUpstarts

by Mike Byam, managing partner at Terryberry. We’ve seen this pattern repeat itself time and time again in our work with employee recognition for businesses large and small – the college kids of today become the business leaders of tomorrow. With “Millennials” – taking by storm the digital world of texting, iPads, laptops, e-commuting, YouTube, Wii (I do love Just Dance!

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A short-term, long-term, and bad approach to starting up without programmers

The Startup Toolkit

It’s pretty common to have a great project idea and no resources to build the thing — whether you’re strapped for time, cash, or coding talent. The worst plan is to do nothing and let the idea become irrelevant. Instead, you should find a way to either benefit from giving it away or create enough non-product momentum that an excited team materialises around you.

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Substitute S for Z?

deal architect

TechCrunch brazenly had a URL of zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz about the SAP announcement of its SuccessFactors acquisition. I must admit I had an Animal House moment: “They cannot make fun of our enterprise vendors, only we can!” Then I saw Peter Goldmacher.

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Kauffman Sketchbook: Where Do Entrepreneurs Get Their Money?

Feld Thoughts

My friend Paul Kedrosky – who spends some of his time as a Senior Fellow at the Kauffman Foundation – has a thoughtful short video (as part of the Kauffman Sketchbook series) on where entrepreneurs get their money. While it’s easy to get confused and think that VCs are the center of the financing universe, Paul reminds us that most entrepreneurial companies are funded by the entrepreneur’s savings, cash flow, credit cards, friends, and family.

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The Micro-Manager And The Delegator

YoungUpstarts

by Maren Kate, founder of personal concierge service Zirtual. There once were two young people who dropped out of college to chase down their dream of entrepreneurship. Both had good ideas, both worked hard, yet one spent thousands more hours working on their business than the other. Now which of these two young, bright entrepreneurs do you think ultimately succeeded?

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Do It Right The First Time, Part II: Visit the Doctor or House Call?

Gust

In Part I , I gave a quick summary of the who, when and why of forming and documenting a new startup company. This week we’ll delve into what , exactly, is necessary or desirable to lay a solid legal foundation for a startup to build upon. I’m reluctant to give legalistic disclaimers, but in this instance, I do need to emphasize that the material in this article is legal information , not legal advice.

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More New Florence

deal architect

on the innovation blog Popular Science Best of 2011 The magic of diasporas Martin Scorsese on creativity The fascinating history of Zero

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Startup Summer In Boulder

Feld Thoughts

If your company is interested in joining Startup Summer, please email me and I’ll get you plugged in. Startup Summer, a new program from Startup Colorado , will bring hard working, passionate college-age entrepreneurs to Boulder to work as summer interns for startup companies. We are looking for a total of 30 Boulder-based early-stage companies to participate as we are going to try to accomodate 30 students from around Colorado in the first year.

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Know What You’re Good At

YoungUpstarts

by Kelly Austin, Higher Salary. Follow your bliss. Do what you love and the money will follow. How often do we hear these expressions? This article will give you a game plan for actually turning your passions into a lucrative career. Everyone wants to be successful in his or her chosen career. For some, this means wealth, and for others it might mean serving others.

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Pivot = Don’t Give Up

VC Cafe

I’m a big fan of the Lean Startup movement. At the heart of Lean Startup methodology is the concept of “Pivoting”, essentially changing the product, the target market, the business model, etc when the startup can’t prove its original hypothesis. In a talk with a veteran entrepreneur this week, he said something that caught my attention: “Not a lot changed in the last 20 years, you call it Pivot, and I call it never giving up.

Lean 133
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Check Your Tech – How to Avoid Unnecessary SEO Surprises

Rembrandt Communications

It’s been months since you did extensive, search engine optimization (SEO) keyword research and added the appropriate tags to your site. Lately, you’ve been focusing on other things like landing pages, newsletters, case studies, and more. But as you scan the Web one day, you notice that your site is not showing up in the [.].

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Signing Credit Card Slips

Feld Thoughts

Let’s put this in the category of “pet peeves” around things that are obsolete. One of my goals as a VC is to help create companies that cause obsolescence of existing products, companies, and industries. As a result I think about what’s becoming obsolete all the time. I don’t just think about this in the specific areas that we invest in, but in all aspects of my life.

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[Singapore] SingTel Innovation Exchange Introduces myBusiness Techblog

YoungUpstarts

SingTel Innovation Exchange (Six) – the partner development program of Singapore-headquartered Asia telecommunications provider SingTel – has launched myBusiness techblog , an online information resource on business, innovation and technology, targeted at small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Many SMEs tend to find it difficult to identify useful technology solutions that are relevant and applicable to their businesses, and SingTel Innovation Exchange (Six) hopes to plug that gap wit

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