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Mitch Kapor has been at the forefront of the information technology revolution for a generation as an entrepreneur, investor, social activist, and philanthropist. Most recently, Mr. Kapor founded Foxmarks, an upcoming search engine based on bookmarks and related metadata. He received a B.A. from Yale College in 1971 and studied psychology, linguistics, and computer science as part of a major in Cybernetics. He attended the Sloan School of Management at MIT before leaving for a Silicon Valley startup. Mr. Kapor founded Lotus Development Corp. in 1982 and with Jonathan Sachs created Lotus 1-2-3, which made the PC ubiquitous in business in the 1980's. In 1990, he co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He founded the Mitchell Kapor Foundation in 1997 and the Open Source Applications Foundation in 2001. He became the founding Chair of the Mozilla Foundation in 2003 and is a trustee of the Level Playing Field Institute. From 1994-1996, he served as Adjunct Professor at the MIT Media Lab. From 1999 to 2001, Mr. Kapor was a partner at Accel. In 2006, he became an Adjunct Professor at the School of Information at Berkeley. Mr. Kapor has contributed pieces on information infrastructure policy, intellectual property, and antitrust in the digital era topublications such as Scientific American, The New York Times, and Forbes.
Larry Bawden is a co-founder of Jadoo Power, an innovative supplier of fuel cells, and Q1 Nanosytems, a next-generation photo-voltaics provider. Bawden addresses the new landscape in technology and energy and notes the pivotal role of newer technologies in the global economy. He talks about the four fundamental planetary crises - Global Warming, Peak Oil, Population Peak and Resource Depletion that are driving changes in world. Bawden also acknowledges the rise of third generation technology and the fundamental shifts in business that it has created. He believes that these changes have created a favorable environment to launch new ventures.
Benchmarking your firm's performance against the performance of others is essential to creating and following a strategic plan. The seven steps listed here from a professional competitive intelligence service will smooth the way to an improved ROI.
Effectively tracking the who, what, where, when, and why of board decision-making in a concise, informative way is imperative, especially for a newly funded venture. This brief blog discussion is followed by an easy-to-use template for recording board minutes in a formal, logical fashion.
Profiling twenty-five methods used by consistently successful companies to stay ahead, often way ahead, this article will at the very least give you great ideas you can adapt and at best spark a few of your own. The innovative, highly effective techniques range from extreme tracking of competitors' numbers (Hewlett-Packard) to providing thousands of toys and gadgets to spark creativity (Ideo) to betting on new-product launch dates (Microsoft) to bright red "bad news" file folders (Colgate-Palmolive) that can head off catastrophe.
Facing facts and forgetting fantasies are vital to accurate forecasting for startups seeking outside investment. This highly practical blog entry provides eleven helpful tips for doing forecasts realistically and presenting them in ways that investors understand and appreciate.
Although somewhat out of date, this article provides a useful overview of the purpose and principles of competitive intelligence gathering as well as tips and techniques that still apply.
Complements are products or services that are consumed together or that enhance the consumption of one another, such as movies and popcorn. This in-depth article offers grounding in the theory of complementarity in business; practical examples, such as IBM and Linux; and questions to help you determine what role, if any, this approach can play in the growth of your company.
After leaping into "Lean," Southern Vinyl Manufacturing gained efficiencies in nearly every area of its operations. Specifically, entrepreneur Rod Matthews explains the challenges and rewards of involving employees in finding and eliminating waste using the "Five Why" process. As a result of "getting lean," the company resolves manufacturing problems by digging deeply to identify root causes instead of just treating symptoms.
The Six Sigma manufacturing process drives production to near-perfect levels, seeking less than 3.4 defects per million output units. Here, the basic purpose and process of the Six Sigma methodology, and its connection to "lean" manufacturing, are clearly explained for entrepreneurs. The article also provides tips on getting started and guidelines to successful implementation.
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