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Entrepreneurship in the News

Avalon Granted Patent for Innovative Skew-correcting Apparatus: 9/1/2010 7:00:00 AM; The invention provides a skew (delay) detection and skew correction apparatus for high-speed data communications system with multiple data lanes.
Can you start a new business in ten steps with $2000?: 9/1/2010 8:48:32 AM; While it is absolutely true that many entrepreneurs spend lots of time and money building out products that will never fly, I think most entrepreneurs would be ill-advised to follow Ressi's approach. The reason: you may be able to create the impression that you've got a business, but at some point you actually have to deliver the goods.
Denise Kingsmill: 'On yer bike' all over again: 9/1/2010 3:59:59 AM; Everyone wants to be an entrepreneur. Even the Scouts now have a badge in entrepreneurship. Expect the first bob-a-job franchise any day now. A plethora of TV shows such as Dragons' Den and The Apprentice have helped to create the myth that anyone can start a business. A good idea, some aggressive self-belief combined with a celebrity endorsement, and an entrepreneur is born!
Unfiltered: Jeff Sloan on The Next American Dream: 8/31/2010 8:57:54 AM; Last week, Sloan and other members of NextWave met with potential new entrepreneurs to decide which ideas the incubator should fund. This rapid-fire pitch sessions put NextWave and its participants to the test...stamina, strength and their mental bandwidth was all put to the test...all things they'll need to succeed in this mean city. Here's Mr. Sloan's take on the morning, what he learned about Michigan and what he sees for our future.
TweetPhoto Fills Its Own Hole Before Twitter Can, Rebrands Itself as “Plixi”: 8/31/2010 8:56:26 AM; Earlier this year, the digerati were convinced that Twitter was going to start its own photo-sharing service, or buy one of the existing ones. And that this would spell doom for all the other ones. Hasn’t happened yet, but TweetPhoto isn’t waiting around. The startup, which raised $2.6 million in April, is recasting itself as a Web-wide photo sharing service that happens to work with Twitter, as well as every other big social network.
HubCast, an Amazon.com for Commercial Print Jobs, Takes a Traditional Process ...: 8/31/2010 7:10:19 AM; It’s no surprise that many traditionally brick-and-mortar industries and activities are being improved or even replaced by Internet technologies. Wakefield, MA-based HubCast is looking to do the same thing for commercial printing, which is far more complex than the few clicks required for printing an essay off of a personal computer, say.
How Match.com changed the world of online dating.: 8/31/2010 7:37:51 AM; Despite how much work Kremen put into launching and running Match, he initially reaped neither romantic nor financial rewards. “I was so focused on the business that I was lucky to have time to go to the bathroom,” he says. That changed in 1997 when, in spite of his “strenuous objections,” Match’s investors sold the startup for $8 million to Cendant, a Connecticut consumer-services company. The next year, Cendant sold the company to IAC/InterActiveCorp, then still operating under the name Ticketmaster, for $50 million. All Kremen got out of the transaction was $50,000 from selling his company stock and a lifetime account on the site.
Presto, Tibetan Bowls, & Dr. Seuss: How Michel Kripalani Got His Entrepreneurial ...: 8/31/2010 2:06:00 AM; Some tales of technology innovation have an ethereal quality to them, and such is the case with Oceanhouse Media—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that such is the case with Michel Kripalani, the startup software developer’s founder and president.
US Bank Brings Big Tools to Small Biz: 8/30/2010 8:16:54 AM; Much like personal financial management has changed retail online banking by providing the newly budget-conscious consumer with a portal to fiscal transparency, banks such as U.S. Bank are betting the mix of performance and spend analysis and peer comparisons will prove just as sticky in the small business market
Here's the best way to value your startup: 8/30/2010 8:16:43 AM; In the startup world, discounted cash flow method doesn’t work because there is little or no historical financial data and projected cash flow is thus pure speculation. Accordingly, the valuation of startups is highly subjective and is more art than science. To put it bluntly: your startup is worth whatever the market says it’s worth, which was starkly demonstrated during the dot-com bubble.
Startup TeamBuy uses Chinese bargaining model: 8/30/2010 3:58:06 AM; The Internet concept of collective buying is in part based on the Chinese "tuangou" system where organized mobs go into stores to bargain prices lower. "I went to China with my mom, and discovered tuangou, which literally means team buying in Mandarin," said Edward Yao, co-founder of Toronto-based daily deal site TeamBuy. "It works. I've seen it. We're talking thousands of people going into a single store."
Entrepreneurs Fuel Post-Katrina Business Boom: 8/29/2010 7:23:08 PM; Oil and gas fuel the engines of employment and industry in New Orleans, but one legacy of Katrina may change that -- a surprising surge in entrepreneurs. The latest numbers show that 450 out of every 100,000 New Orleans adults have started a business since the storm....
Online Backup Startup Backblaze Was Almost Bought. Twice. What Went Wrong?: 8/27/2010 8:34:49 AM; Here’s something you will not read every time an acquisition deal collapses at the last minute: an account of what happened, and why it did. Let alone why it happened twice over.
Market Research Startup 'Ask Your Target Market' Gets an Answer: 8/27/2010 8:21:24 AM; Founders Lev Mazin (right) and David Handel (left) gave us a tour of the new features and explained why startup companies especially should give the platform a try.
Don’t Confuse Getting to Market with Building a Company: Charles River Ventures Izhar Armony Busts Some Micro-VC Myths: 8/27/2010 3:58:00 AM; “Micro VC” and “super angel” funds are all the rage these days. These terms refer to the emerging segment of venture capital and angel capital in which a growing number of investors are putting small amounts of seed money into very early-stage startups—mainly in Internet software.
Report: Going green could create thousands of Texas jobs: 8/27/2010 5:24:03 AM; Hamilton claimed that if the state aggressively pursued policies to support the clean energy sector, namely wind, solar and bio fuels, jobs statewide could jump as much as 22,900 per year and the gross state product could increase by $2.7 billion every year.
Is Your Corporate Metabolism Killing You?: 8/27/2010 2:44:38 AM; Things are progressing at a faster pace today than ever before, yet corporations struggle to empower themselves to change with them. An example of why Amazon was able to capture about 25 percent of the e-commerce transactions in the U.S. is how two hours after the death of Michael Jackson, it had reconfigured its MP3 store. That's right; in two hours most companies couldn't even coordinate a conference call, yet Amazon reconfigured the home page of one of its most important businesses.
Stability or startup: Keys to making the choice: 8/26/2010 8:07:57 AM; Nearly four years ago, I decided to leave a director role at eBay to join a small 4-person team called RockYou. At the time, a lot of folks told me I was making the wrong decision. Several questioned whether social media was a fad, if we would ever make money at it, and the value of a service that existed as a ‘feature’ for another site. Four years later, conventional wisdom would argue the opposite. If you’re considering making a leap of faith yourself, here are a couple of basic thresholds I used when jumping into a new opportunity.
AdGrok's Grandiose Proposition: Replacing the “Craptacular” Google AdWords ...: 8/26/2010 8:27:41 AM; dGrok is at an interesting point in its evolution as a startup. Right now, the company is probably better known for a series of controversial blog posts by its CEO, Antonio Garcia-Martinez, than for its actual product. AdGrok has developed a browser-based tool that helps small businesses grapple with the complexities of managing search engine marketing campaigns. In essence, it’s a user-friendly front end for Google’s AdWords platform, the system that the company uses to sell ads on search result pages.
Chip Conley Took the Maslow Pyramid, Made It An Employee Pyramid and Saved His Company: 8/26/2010 8:45:42 AM; Chip Conley has a blind spot: the closer you work to him, the less likely he is to recognize your efforts. So Conley, the founder of Joie de Vivre hotel chain, deliberately designed structures to instill a culture of recognition in his company. Conley is the author of three books, most recently Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow. In this Q&A, Conley talks about how the near-death of his business changed his outlook on leadership, why managers put too much emphasis on money and not enough on meaning, and why it's more important to climb the employee pyramid than the corporate ladder.
Car Data As the Next Platform for Innovation: 8/26/2010 7:14:09 AM; A platform around vehicle data has finally emerged: one that entrepreneurs, automakers and DIY-ers are increasingly tapping into in order to develop innovative applications around transportation. The car data can come from computers embedded in the vehicle, in-vehicle navigation systems and drivers’ cell phones.
Elevator Pitch: An online writing club? What a Quilliant idea!: 8/26/2010 5:31:10 AM; The internet has enabled thousands of would-be writers to publish to the world, giving them access to a potentially global readership. But until the launch of Quilliant this month - say its creators - there has been no independent, UK incarnation of the book club online, somewhere aspiring writers can discuss and share their ongoing projects and improve their work.
Interview with Marc Averitt and Sharon Stevenson, Okapi Ventures: 8/24/2010 7:57:02 AM; It's been a good summer for Laguna Beach-based venture capital firm Okapi Ventures (www.okapivc.com), which recently saw its first portfolio firm exit last month in Carlsbad-based Helixis, which was acquired by Illumina for $105M. In light of the recent success, we sat down with Marc Averitt and Sharon Stevenson to talk about the recent exit, where they are with their fund nowadays, and what advice they have for entrepreneurs.
When should you turn on the marketing faucet?: 8/24/2010 8:06:09 AM; In business, “turning on the faucet” is a metaphor for flooding your market with the full spectrum of marketing and business development. It’s an important step in your company’s maturity. Take it too early and you’ll misrepresent your service. Take it too late, though, and you’ve missed the boat.
Interview: Chris Vinson and David Dufresne, Bandzoogle: 8/24/2010 5:28:15 AM; Recently, I spoke with Chris Vinson and David Dufresne, who are respectively founder/CTO and CEO of Bandzoogle, a company that offers a do-it-yourself website builder and a suite of direct-to-fan marketing tools for artists. At present, they are also working on a yet-to-launch project named Backfed, which they described to me as “a fan-to-artist payment system and a platform to enable and encourage collaborative patronage of artists."
Elevator Pitch: 48ers try to simplify social search: 8/24/2010 5:38:13 AM; "We are the only service out there which delivers up-to-the-second realtime search results from the biggest social networks on the web (Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, Delicious and Digg) and present this back in an easy-to-read way. For the first time, brands and companies can instantly track and react to what people are saying about them online, wherever it is being said."
How customer development failed us: 8/23/2010 9:04:41 AM; So, how did Customer Development fail us? Well, perhaps it’s more accurate to say that we failed customer development. In retrospect, our mistakes fell mainly into one of two categories: (1) Failure to follow the process; (2) Failure to be honest with ourselves.
Ann Arbor's Own Hopes To Get Michigan Coffee Houses Buzzing Again: 8/23/2010 8:03:18 AM; Own’s solution is to replace a restaurant’s cash register with a Web-based system—with Ajax to make it “feel” like software—that is easy to use and accessible. He’s aiming his product at Michigan-based coffee shops and microchains.
FinTech in Atlanta hothouse - the Twitterview Transcript - community blog from Elizabeth Lumley: 8/23/2010 8:13:11 AM; Intrigued to learn more about the 'Payments and core banking centre of the Universe', Finextra and a group of plucky Altanta types spent a hour discussing Atlanta, payments and the precieved lack of tech talent in the US.
Microloan program helps some small businesses survive: 8/23/2010 7:37:00 AM; Targeted toward startup, newly established or growing small businesses, the microloans are short-term loans up to $35,000 each for working capital or inventory and equipment purchases. The intermediary lenders who distribute the loans can choose to lend more than that limit.
Propeller technology speeds local business's growth: 8/20/2010 1:15:58 AM; AccuTech Marine Propeller has provided technology that analyzes and corrects calibrations to maximize a propeller's performance since 2001. Enabling recreational boaters, Coast Guard cutters and commercial fishermen to protect and enhance their property has propelled AccuTech to double-digit growth for eight straight years.
Australian "start-up mafia" sows seed for gen next: 8/19/2010 11:06:47 PM; A who's who of names in Australia's tech startup community have banded together to give eager entrepreneurs a leg up in the international market.
Turn Your Great Idea into the Next Big Thing: 8/19/2010 9:27:06 PM; Those who want to stay ahead of the curve and ride a wave of profit need to learn how to identify, develop, and popularize the trends of tomorrow. But it’s not enough to simply chase after ideas that have already happened.

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Entrepreneurship in the News

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