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Tuesday, October 21st, 2008
Yesterday Dealmaker Media put on the Startonomics conference and it was a tremendous success!
The speakers gave outstanding presentations that the audience found to be quite thought-provoking. It was one of the only conferences I have ever been to where the halls were pretty much empty during the sessions because everyone was actually listening attentively to the speakers and not out in the halls networking.
Check out the slides, video and blog posts from yesterday at www.startonomics.com/blog
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on Oct 3, 2008, 6:24PM
Startonomics - Watch it live today
Tuesday, October 21st, 2008Startonomics is happening today at the Mission Bay conference center and has been awesome so far, you can watch it live right now at www.startonomics.com
See our full session schedule and list of awesome speakers.
Follow Startonomics real-time conference updates at Twitter.com/STNX
Use these conference tags for your blog posts, tweets, photos & videos:
General: Startonomics Startonomics08
Twitter: #STNX
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on Oct 2, 2008, 6:18PM
2 Sentences CEO..Tell Us What You Do
Tuesday, October 21st, 2008
Elevator pitch annoying a VC to the 18th floor? Get off in three, and make a lasting impact.
1. REALIZE THE AUDIENCE ISN’T YOU
Step out of the brush, and realize the person you are speaking to probably doesn’t share your passion. Have an everyman pitch, something everyman can understand and repeat.
2. HAVE A ZERO TOLERANCE ON MARKETING JARGON POLICY
Cut the crap, normal people don’t say words like (world leader, best in class, cutting edge, impactful, innovative, patented, highly viral, next level). Leave marketing speak in the office.
Keep a two sentence pitch constantly on your companies breath, by spending time with your people so that your whole company knows what it is you do “exactly.” Then they can repeat it confidently, and they will because everyone asks everyone about what they do.
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from Under the Radar Blog
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on Oct 1, 2008, 1:46AM
Secure Phone - Yet Another Cool App From Riffware
Tuesday, October 21st, 2008
Riffware produces some truly great applications for your phone. In fact its hard to decide which of the Riffware products is coolest â Miles To Go lets you monitor your gas consumption and Guitar Tuner is an actual high-quality tuner right on your phone.
As much as I like both of those products, what I am really excited about is Riffwareâs Secure Phone which is expected to be released in early 2009.
Secure Phone allows you to control your phone remotely so you can find it and secure it when its lost.
Riffware CEO Rob Witman summed it up very well in a recent email to me: âSecurePhone allows an owner to REMOTELY, via the web or another phone; override the default ringer volume, remove sensitive data and locate the phone with GPS.â
All of the apps from Riffware are cool but I have a high personal interest in Secure Phone because I am one of those people who is always misplacing and often losing her phone. Why didnât someone make a product like this before? You can be sure that I will have Secure Phone within days of its release.
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from Under the Radar Blog
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on Oct 1, 2008, 12:09AM
Virtual Goods Summit: A Deal for Dealmakers
Tuesday, October 21st, 2008 
Many have been blown away by the emergence of the virtual goods economy. A virtual good or service can actually be bought and sold with money from the real world?
Mind boggling… and incredibly cool.
What are the forces behind this movement? What are the latest trends in online gaming, social networks and virtual economies? Our good friend Charles Hudson is one of the forces behind The Virtual Goods Summit - coming up on Oct 10.
Wanna go? Register with the code DEALMAKER and receive 10% off 
cha-ching (virtually).
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on Sep 30, 2008, 6:58PM
Vuclip Makes Mobile Video Fun And Easy For Users
Tuesday, October 21st, 2008Vuclip is a video search and delivery product for mobile devices. Watching videos on a phone - I like the idea but until now I have found the experience mildly frustrating mostly because I couldnât find what I was looking for. Unless someone sent me a link to a video, it was a hassle to find the video I wanted on my blackberry. If it was an usual video instead of a super popular video I had a very hard time finding it and/or getting it to play. But now things are very different thanks to Vuclip.
A query made through Vuclip will return an obscure video just as well as it returns the most popular YouTube videos. Plus the video will play correctly on your phone.
How do they do this? Itâs a magic called on-the-fly transcoding.
Most companies providing video to mobile devices do pre-encoding. They encoding the video for a mobile device and then store the encoded version until the next time someone with the same device requests that video. As you can imagine, this requires tremendous storage capacity and it isnât feasible for the company to store every single video on the internet encoded for every single type of phone. So they only pre-encode and store the most popular videos for the most popular phones .
Recently I spoke with Ashwin Puri of Vuclip and he offered the following analogy: âWhat if Google only searched the most popular 20% of the internet instead of the entire internet?â.
Of course no one would put up with a web browser that only searched 20% of the internet but limitations in video transcoding technology gave us no other option when it came to mobile video search.
Vuclipâs technology represents significant progress in transcoding. Next time you want to show someone a clip from last nightâs Daily Show instead of just tell them about it, go to www.vuclip.com Once you check it out I have a feeling you will quickly become a regular user.
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on Sep 30, 2008, 1:24AM
What’s most influential in making or breaking your startup?
Tuesday, October 21st, 2008The following is a guest blog post from Rajesh Ramchandani, Sr. Market Development manager for Startups and Emerging markets at Sun Microsystems, Inc. He is focused on helping startups with technology, architectural and consultancy services on Sun’s Open source platform and providing access to funding through partners and VC network.
…
A few weeks ago, I was at DEMOfall 08 and happened to meet an entrepreneur who questioned how bloggers affect the success or even launch of the web 2.0 startups. It was an interesting conversation (or argument) where, from his point of view, the success of a Web 2.0 startup company was not about how unique your startup product or idea is, but about how many bloggers (or which bloggers) actually profile your company. To a certain extent he was successful in convincing me that bloggers do have influence (some more than others, of course), not only when starting out or launching, but at any stage of the company. They can accelerate or decelerate the growth or cause it to collapse, too. I think it really depends on how much power and credibility you want to give to bloggers and in my mind there are several other important factors which can determine the fate of the startups.
If you already tried to answer the question, you probably guessed things like how unique your idea is, innovative technology, engineering and management teams, execution plan, time-to-market, market positioning and adoption, competition and last, but not least, funding. I bet most of you did not guess the two important things - scalable infrastructure and bloggers!. If you did, you are more prepared for success than most startups and entrepreneurs. Let’s talk about infrastructure because I think it can have more impact on a company’s growth than anything else.
By infrastructure here I mean, hardware, software, developer tools, web hosting solutions and the data center to host the deployment environment. Engineers usually pick the developer tools and software that they are most comfortable with, which is ideal since there is no learning curve. When it comes to deployment, that’s where things tend to be shaky - most people assume that choosing a few white- label boxes to run their application or hosting it at the cheapest hosting provider would do the job, or, some tend to pick the Cloud Computing route to start small and grow as needed. There isn’t much thought as to the architecture, design and optimization at the initial deployment stage, and that, in my mind, is a recipe for failure, or for putting yourself in a situation where you either have to re-think your architecture and fix performance issues at a stage in your business where you would rather focus on your growth. I have seen and you too have probably heard about popular web 2.0 sites going down repeatedly, causing them to lose users and subscribers which directly translates into loss of revenue because their business model depends on the advertising revenues. A “We’ll get it right later” attitude is way more costly than getting and building the infrastructure right the first time.
Keeping a few things in mind will help you make sound decisions about your company’s infrastructure:
How strong is your engineering and development team? If you have technical folks on your team (ideally one of the founders), then you are probably in good hands already. He or she will make the right infrastructure choice based on the experience and / or knowledge gained learning from developer communities and the web. But if your product development is outsourced, then you are at the mercy of someone who may not be able to make decisions that may be right for your particular business. Take a look at the architecture and design, and get a second opinion to make sure that the product would scale and is designed and built to do just that. A lot of developers that I meet seem to pick a language to code in because it’s “hot” and they want to build their skills there rather than in robust and proven technology.
Is Cloud right for you? Most probably it is. Some Cloud solutions are much more flexible than others, in the sense that you don’t get locked into a certain Cloud and can migrate your code to other solutions or even bring it in-house if need be. Cloud at times can be difficult since you need to design your application in a way that you can scale any of your stack tiers, such as Web tier, business tier or back-end database with little effort on the Cloud. You want to avoid situations where you end up paying twice the amount of managing your Cloud application than the cost of the Cloud Computing itself. Also consider Cloud security, portability, network bandwidth cost, storage cost and manageability. There seems to be threshold point beyond which hosting your infrastructure at a co-lo data center may be much cheaper (and more convenient) than using Clouds or dedicated hosting solutions.
Technology partners - Mostly startups tend to depend on the open source and developer communities to get help on any issues with the open source product or with any piece of code. While this approach works most of the time, there are certain technology vendors who are willing to help (for free) to not only develop the product but to also make the right choices of infrastructure and growth plans. Find a partner who has programs to help Startups and I am sure you’ll be in better hands.
And finally, I will leave it to you to decide how influencial bloggers and their feedback are to the success of your business.
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on Sep 29, 2008, 11:50PM
Insulate Your Startup Against a Nuclear Winter
Tuesday, October 21st, 2008
Many of us seem stressed and transfixed on the impeding financial situation gushing toward the Valley with Tsunami like power. Some folks seem to think we could see a 90% failure of Early Stage Startups. Some bloggers seem to think it will mean 50-80% Startups will not receive any funding to get off the ground. At times like these it is easy to focus on the future…and lose track of the present. It’s time to shore up your Startup for a possible winter season, and you can come out on top. Here are a few no-nonsense ideas to help you survive a Nuclear Winter…
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on Sep 29, 2008, 8:54PM
Mob4Hire - A Crowdsourcing Company With An Excellent Business Plan
Tuesday, October 21st, 2008Mob4Hire is a Canadian company that provides crowdsourced testing for mobile applications.
Before Mob4Hire there were two primary methods for a mobile application to be tested â developers could either hire a firm like DeviceAnywhere to run the tests or they could purchase devices and do the testing themselves. The first option provides convenience but the âvirtualizationâ of large number of devices in a rack and tested by software stimulations does not provide all the information of true field test in the hands of actual users. The second option is not only expensive, it is a major logistical headache.
The problems get even worse if you want to test in a variety of countries. DeviceAnywhere currently only offers simulations in six countries and it is a substantial undertaking to set up your own employees with your own devices in multiple countries.
Mob4Hire was formed by serial entrepreneurs Paul and Allen Poutanen who have been in the mobile space a long time and knew firsthand what a hassle testing can be. Inspired by the Canadian crowdsourcing company Cambrian House, they realized that crowdsourcing would be the perfect way to get mobile applications field tested by real users all over the world (currently offering testing in 64 countries). The Mob4Hire crowdsourcing solution provides location dependent information that can only be gathered by real users going about their daily lives with their devices. Not only does Mob4Hire provide a better test, they are able to offer a lower price than traditional testing.
There is a good chance that many of Mob4Hireâs testers have no really understanding of what crowdsourcing is â but they do understand that they can be paid to play with the latest new mobile applications. All they have to do is use the applications and report back. There is no complex interaction or team activities . And they are paid. So, unlike other crowdsource companies they have people lining up to participate.
If you are a developer with an application or if you are just a user who would like to get paid for trying the very latest in mobile applications you should check out Mob4Hire.
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from Under the Radar Blog
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on Sep 26, 2008, 11:48PM
Are Your Usage Stats Cheddar or Swiss Cheesy?
Tuesday, October 21st, 2008
Okay I have to be cheesy here. All week we have been hearing lots of numbers about mobile social network users. One Startup has millions, another has tens of thousand in just a week! Even a few tout that they are the most popular social network in the world -even more popular than Facebook!- That’s just silly…so here is my silly response…nursery rhyme style.
My Friday Ditty
Seriously folks would you show me the cheddar… or even better. Lets commit to define “YOU—SERS” to the letter.
Is a user someone that whizzed by your site in July? Or is it someone who logs on as each hour goes bye?
I get wary of numbers not equaling money….am I a dummy? Can’t we define this on something less funny?
It seems you VCs would be the ones who would care. So much crap out right now in our blogosphere.
Now lets please get incremental and pointed….not all disjointed. I know no one christen’d and anointed
me…
To be the bearer of definitions to our community…
But someone please holler and blogger complain!
Otherwise no truth’s in our writing and our blogs are all lame
Please respond in a more better rhyme.
Help me define the word user…it just is the time.
I will leave one right back, c’mon you know what to say.
And give me a break, It ain’t easy being cheezy on this Happy Friday.
Happy Friday Everyone!
Originally
from Under the Radar Blog
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on Sep 26, 2008, 10:38PM