Sat.Nov 12, 2011 - Fri.Nov 18, 2011

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How cold calling (properly) works better than AdWords

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

(Powered by LaunchBit ). Tweet. --> This is a guest post from Robert Graham — a solo bootstrapper who blogs about the experience. Robert has been working in software since 2005. He is a Ph.D. dropout who spent time working for Google. Someday he’d like to work for himself. When I started marketing my first webapp almost two years ago, I started the way I imagine most people do: online.

Campaign 272
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5 Easy Steps to Your Own E-Commerce Startup for $100

Startup Professionals Musings

If you have a unique creation or invention, and you are not selling it around the world on the Internet, now is the time to start. The cost of entry has never been lower. Anyone can be an entrepreneur today, without a huge investment, bank loans, venture capitalists, or Angels. In the early days (20 years ago), most new e-commerce sites cost a million dollars to set up.

Hosting 248
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[Review] Startup Weekend

YoungUpstarts

Founding a startup company can be very difficult, especially when you have to go at it alone. But it doesn’t have to be that way, as the co-directors of Startup Weekend – Marc Nager, Clint Nelsen and Franck Nouyrigat – can attest. Startup Weekend is the non-profit organization behind the 54-hour events where developers, designers, marketers, and startup enthusiasts come together to share ideas, form teams, build products, and create startups, which have spawned some of the more

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Startup Due Diligence Is Not a Mysterious Black Art

Gust

After you have successfully attracted angels or venture capital with your business case, your million dollar product idea, and you have a signed term sheet, there is still one more hurdle to overcome before investors write the check. This is the dreaded “due diligence” process. For no good reason, this process seems shrouded in mystery, when in fact it is nothing more than a final integrity check on all aspects of your business model, team, product, customers, and plan.

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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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Foursquare: The Second Inning

This is going to be BIG.

Over two years ago, I suggested to Yelp that they should pay attention to Foursquare. While that post resulted in term sheets for Dennis and Naveen from VCs, the original intention was actually to get Yelp to invest in the company. The Foursquare founders had been to nearly every VC we could think of and no one, save for Bryce Roberts OATV who was willing to do half the deal if he could find an east coast partner, was willing to jump in.

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10 Clues That It’s Time to Start Your Own Business

Startup Professionals Musings

Many budding entrepreneurs struggle mightily with that first step – out of their comfort zone and into the unknown. They keep asking people like me whether the time is right, and the truth is that there’s never an ideal time to start your own business. It’s like starting a personal relationship, if you wait for exactly the right time, you’ll never do it.

More Trending

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Do Angel Investors Care About University Degrees?

Gust

There is a stream in entrepreneurship lore that the entrepreneur doesn’t need or want education, a fire fed by legendary dropouts Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, etc. Why waste your time studying? Just do it; or so it goes. So how do angel investors fall on this question? Does the degree add credibility? Is it worth it? My bias, as an angel investor: other things being equal, yes.

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Human evolution and technology

Start Up Blog

I’ve been wondering a lot lately about the speed of human evolution. Do humans evolve at a constant speed, or does our pace of evolution change dependent on our environment? What has the impact of technology been on human evolution? Especially given that this technology is created by us, for us. With the rate of technological change and power increasing exponentially, will it eventually leave humans behind or be the bastion of human dominance and longevity?

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‘Capital Efficiency’ doesn’t exist

K9 Ventures

When I started K9 Ventures, I did so based on a specific investment thesis which had a clear set of investment criteria. One of those criteria was ‘Capital Efficiency.’ We hear that term lobbied around often these days. It comes up most commonly in cases when investors talk about how “it’s gotten cheaper to start a company these days” (particularly in the Web space), and therefore these companies don’t require a lot of capital.

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5 Ways to Improve Local Search Results for Business

Duct Tape Marketing

5 Ways to Improve Local Search Results for Business This content from: Duct Tape Marketing. “This article originally appeared on the OPEN App Center. Visit www.theopenappcenter.com for more information and resources for streamlining and growing your business.” Increasingly, when folks turn to a search engine, they aren’t looking for something around the world, they’re looking for something around the block.

Search 69
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Valuations 101: The Risk Factor Summation Method

Gust

The Risk Factor Summation Method the fifth methodology for estimating the pre-money valuation of pre-revenue companies we have described in recent posts. Readers may have noted that both the Scorecard Method and the Dave Berkus Method considered a narrow set of important criteria for investment in arriving at a pre-money valuation. The Risk Factor Summation Method, described by the Ohio TechAngels, considers a much broader set of factors in determining the pre-money valuation of pre-revenue co

Valuation 102
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HCL Unstructure an eclectic event

deal architect

You know you are not in Kansas anymore when the morning keynote begins with Malcolm Gladwell and the state of oncology circa 1955, and the evening keynote by President Bill Clinton makes you ponder what astrophysics will teach circa 2055.

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‘Capital Efficiency’ doesn’t exist

K9 Ventures

When I started K9 Ventures, I did so based on a specific investment thesis which had a clear set of investment criteria. One of those criteria was ‘Capital Efficiency.’ We hear that term lobbied around often these days. It comes up most commonly in cases when investors talk about how “it’s gotten cheaper to start a company these days” (particularly in the Web space), and therefore these companies don’t require a lot of capital.

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Are You Ready for the Post-Flash World?

Altgate

Repost from [link]. Flash for mobile is dead. Can Flash for desktops be far behind? That is the big question facing hundreds of thousands of websites after Adobe, maker of the most popular technology for web video and other interactive multimedia features, said earlier this month it would no longer support Flash on mobile browsers, ceding to the newer, feature-rich HTML5 technology that works – and performs better – on most mobile devices.

Flash 38
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Scientists Unleashed

Steve Blank

Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not. George Bernard Shaw. We’re in the middle of our National Science Foundation Innovation Corps class – taking the most promising research projects in American university laboratories and teaching these scientists the basics of entrepreneurship. Our goal is to accelerate the commercialization of their inventions.

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We could use more story tellers

deal architect

It was 1997 if memory serves me right. Doug Burgum, then CEO of Great Plains (now part of Microsoft) used his entire keynote at the annual Stampede user event to talk about the story of an English clockmaker, John Harrison.

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[Infographic] Millenials: An Entrepreneurial Generation

YoungUpstarts

This just in: many young adults aged between 18 and 34 – better known as Gen Y or the Millenial Generation – are definitely aspiring entrepreneurs. The Young Invincibles , in conjunction with Lake Research Partners and Bellwether Research and funded by the Kauffman Foundation , released the results of a new poll that showed the Millennial Generation’s sentiments on the economy and entrepreneurship, and the signs are encouraging.

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Lytro - Sr Web Developer - K9 Jobs - Posterous

K9 Ventures

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American Censorship Day Is Tomorrow (11/16/11)

Feld Thoughts

There are two very disturbing bills making their way through Congress: Protect IP Act (PIPA - S.968 ) and Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA – H.R.3261 ). These bills are coated in rhetoric that I find disgusting since at their core they are online censorship bills. It’s incredible to me that Congress would take seriously anything that censors the Internet and the American public but in the last few weeks PIPA and SOPA have burst forth with incredibly momentum, largely being underwritten

Egypt 175
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Salesforce.com and Model Metrics

deal architect

One distinctive feature of Salesforce.com from other application vendors (on-premise and SaaS) has been it has smartly encouraged for years now a group of smaller, cloud savvy systems integrators – as different from large outsourcers, Indian firms or resellers. That.

Metrics 240
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Business Owners: Are You A Mover Or A Head Shaker?

YoungUpstarts

by Brad Farris, principal advisor at Anchor Advisors. Anchor Advisors, a Chicago-based small business advisory firm , conducted a study on over a 130 business owners to find out what owners of growing companies and those of struggling companies were doing differently. The respondents consisted of mostly founder-led small businesses with sales from less than $1M to over $10M.

Chicago 173
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When Selling is the Worst Way to Win Customers

For Entrepreneurs

Customers hate being sold to. They don’t mind getting expert help when they want to buy something. But much of the time they are not ready to buy, and one of the most irritating things is to have a salesperson try to get them to buy when they aren’t ready. Unfortunately too many people in [.].

Customer 168
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Why MANY smart people are not social?

Life Beyond Code

You and I both have met enough smart people who are not social. And while social has many meanings, what I am referring to is social at the fundamental level – to invest ongoing time and energy in conversations with people that fall under a broad spectrum of relationships (from strangers to close friends.) Social media simply happens to be a more efficient (may not be more effective all the time) medium for those conversations.

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Industry events Depth versus Diversity

deal architect

Before he went to TechEd Madrid last week, I asked Dennis Howlett how many SAP in-person events/briefings he had been to this year. 7-8 he seemed to recall. He is a lot deeper man than I am. I am more.

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The 10 Best Brick-And-Mortar Store Experiences

YoungUpstarts

Economists and business experts have long been predicting the demise of the brick-and-mortar store, as online businesses have begun to dominate sales in many areas of retail. While there have been a few fatalities (Borders, Circuit City) in the battle between online and traditional retailers, it’s become increasingly clear that the brick-and-mortar shopping experience isn’t going anywhere.

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Making decisions

The Startup Toolkit

You have a profitable bootstrapped business with good, linear growth. You’re on track to take over your niche and should be able to hold it, but it’s hard to imagine how you’ll make the leap into the mainstream on your current trajectory. On a bit of a whim, you talked to a major bank and they want to license a white-labelled copy of your whole system.

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That old-time startup religion

Startup Lessons Learned

Warning: the video below may be offensive to some readers. It contains irreverent use of religious language. Viewer discretion is advised. So there I was, on stage in front of a large crowd, when Jason says "Has anyone seen the movie Apostle ?" That's when I knew things were about to get interesting. I was in Los Angeles on book tour a few weeks ago.

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Doing an enterprise Dyson

deal architect

On the New Florence blog I have posted about the “serial disruptor” James Dyson. You have likely seen him on commercials with his vacuum cleaners. “Dyson's modus operandi is to reinvent everyday products whose design has calcified into a.

Design 186
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[India] [Event] Click Asia Summit 2012

YoungUpstarts

Click Asia Summit 2012 is positioned as Asia’s largest digital and mobile marketing conference, expo, workshop that provides a platform for mobile and online marketers, entrepreneurs, brand owners, content developers, agency executives, SEO architects and digital media experts to come together and explore the possibilities of mobile and digital marketing in this region.

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The Real Cost of Patent Trolls

Feld Thoughts

James Bessen, Jennifer Ford, and Michael Meurer of BU School of Law have written a phenomenal paper titled The Private and Social Costs of Patent Trolls. Rather than be politically correct and refer to NPE’s simply as “non-practicing entities”, they cut through all the noise, define what a patent troll is, and go through a detailed and rigorous analysis of the private and social costs of patent trolls.

Cost 156
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Valuing Startup Employee Options

David Teten

This is the third of three blog posts on financial modeling for startups. The first was on best practices in building financial models , and the second was a template financial model for a startup. I’ve often found it helpful to have on hand a simple model showing the impact of each financing stages on all team members, suitable for sharing with everyone in the company.

Employee 155
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More New Renaissance

deal architect

on the innovation blog Feed world and sustain planet? The BMW electric i3 The Assault on Science Consumer Report’s Top Products.

Product 186
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Power Up For Yourself And Everyone Wins

YoungUpstarts

by Roshini Rajkumar, founder of The Roshini Performance Group and author of “ Communicate That! “ It’s almost the end of 2011. What have you accomplished this year that could make your 2012 bigger, brighter, more empowered? The entire picture begins with you and grows with your ability to communicate with intention and clarity. Six areas for you to check: 1.

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Our Investment in CustomMade: Riding the Next Wave of E-Commerce in High-Consideration Shopping

Genuine VC

Over the past fifteen years on the internet we’ve seen a few waves of e-commerce innovation. From the initial humble beginnings of simply selling books online, to shopping/pricing comparison engines for electronic and other feature-laden items, to this current wave of “ social commerce ” which includes local merchants’ deals propagated by friends’ recommendation-driven purchases.

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DNAnexus: Front End Software Engineer - K9 Jobs - Posterous

K9 Ventures

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More Innovation

deal architect

On the New Florence blog The triumph of HTML5 Walmart’s iPhone App Data is Power A morning with Malcolm Gladwell.