Feld Thoughts - Allen Stern has a great interview up with Jon Fox, the co-founder of Intense Debate.  Jon and Intense Debate were part of the first year's crop of companies from TechStars and are going great guns right now.  They create the comment replacement system that I use on my blog - if you are a blogger and haven't tried it yet, wander on over to Intense Debate and take a look. Jon covers a lot of ground in his interview, but I especially like his answer to Allen's last question: "What tips do you have for aspiring entrepreneurs?" Jon: I would say two things. First, find yourself a mentor, or at least a friend in the business that can help to get you hooked in. If you don't know anybody yet, reach out to a handful. My experience is that these people are generally more than willing to help, and happy to bring someone new into the mix. Second, don't be afraid to just dive in. I realize not everyone can do this, but it's really hard to go half way into the startup li

Feld Thoughts - Fred Wilson has an excellent post up today titled Venture Fund Economics.  It appears to be the first of several posts he's planning to write on this topic. "When I write about venture fund returns, there are always comments and questions that lead me to believe that the economics of a venture fund are not well understood. And since most of the readers and commenters on this blog are people who work in the startup ecosystem, I think its important that the economics are better understood. So I am planning on some posts on this topic in the coming weeks." Everyone that is interested in venture capital in any way should read this post (and presumably the subsequent ones.)  I'll try to remember to point them out when they appear.

Om Malik's Blog - Are you running a mobile startup, or know someone who is, that has (with a nod to Tom Wolfe) “The Right Stuff”? GigaOM is looking for the emerging technologies — and the companies behind them — upon which the new era of the mobile web will be built. So at our upcoming Mobilize conference on [...]

Om Malik's Blog - It has been an exhausting two weeks. First there was the Brainstorm Tech Conference down in Half Moon Bay, then a panel discussion at the MobileBeat conference, followed by a pit stop to the TechCrunch Party (see photo), a visit to the Microsoft Campus up in Redmond on Monday, and quick visits with some startups [...]

Scripting News - Yesterday I wrote a teaser piece masquerading as a vision piece. The vision is not mine, it's Eric Marcoullier's, a very affable and brilliant entrepreneur from San Francisco, who founded MyBlogLog and sold it to Yahoo for big bucks a few years back. As we know Twitter is having scaling problems, and in fact, some of the problems are related to people pounding their API when they should just be getting the data through Gnip, Marcoullier's new startup. But Gnip didn't officially exist until 9AM today, but as of now (9:20AM) there is no excuse. Twitter, what are you waiting for? Call Eric now, and do a deal and let's get on with building a fantastic network of wired-up Internet apps that scale. And if you want to get details, get the full scoop from my amigo Marshall Kirkpatrick over at ReadWriteWeb. Here we go!! Update: Mike Arrington seems to agree. "Notably absent from the list of partners is Twitter, which may be the one service that needs something like Gnip the most."

Genuine VC - After the crash at the end of the last decade, web startups clamped down to focus on their core value proposition and were forced out of necessity for survival to hone their revenue models. However, for the past couple years, the metrics of ?success? with early-stage digital media startups (especially consumer-facing ones) have clearly focused on distribution, as opposed to monetization. The stories of tremendous growth in adoption with the promise of revenue later on has been enough to excite both entrepreneurs alike. Yet, with the current economic climate driven by the looming recession, it?s been interesting to see the pendulum swing the other way in the past couple months. If the notion has reached the popular business press, then it?s indeed a pervasive story. A few weeks ago Businessweek?s article Widget?s Worth talked about ?cracking the monetization code,? wondering how social widget applications are going to make money. The old playbook six years ago was that the

On Startups - The following is a guest post by Jonathan Sapir of Silver Tree Systems.  I've added some editorial commentary (in italics) to help spark the discussion.  Enjoy.  I have had the misfortune of personally making every one of these mistakes during my years as a software entrepreneur.  I am currently reviewing a startup that seems to be trying really, really hard to make all of them in one go.  As a result, I decided to put this list together in the hopes of saving as many startups as possible from crashing in to the rocks of false hope and misguided thinking. 20 Ways To Put A Monkey-Wrench In Your Machinery 1.       You think that your product must be awesome because your buddies are telling you it is the greatest thing since sliced bread.  Unless they are willing to hand over cold cash to use your product, they are just being nice. 2.        You are finding that your pr

Om Malik's Blog - One of the questions that I really wanted to get answered at Structure 08 was what the chances of survival are for the myriad of startups out there building their businesses around Amazon’s Web Services. Companies such as RightScale, Hyperic and Soasta depend on both the success of AWS and its shortcomings — the solutions [...]

Om Malik's Blog - Dropping out of college to launch your own company? Yawn. The real startup action is in the halls of your local high school. Case in point: Daniel Brusilovsky, the 15-year-old founder and CEO (yes, the CEO) of TeensinTech.com. Brusilovsky was easy to spot at our recent Structure 08 conference — he was the only one [...]

Om Malik's Blog - After today’s launch of Microsoft’s server virtualization hypervisor, Citrix, which bought virtualization company XenSource last year, may be asking itself some hard questions. Microsoft’s Hyper-V will compete directly with Citrix’s XenSource products for the data center as well as with products from VMware and startup Virtual Iron. But Citrix and Microsoft have close enough ties that [...]

Ross Mayfield - Markets, Technology & Musings - Diary of a Failed Startup I'm going to frame these as advice, but everyone should remember Buchheit's Law: "Advice = Limited Life Experience + Overgeneralization". The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete Sounds like yet another kind of model to me Social Media at the Podium Media Writing and Media Studies students walk through exhibitions and designated spaces, twitters aggregate the thoughts in a Socialtext wiki where the composite viewpoint helps create a 600-word critical review of the artwork or space. Enterprise 2.0: Take the Plunge! Most Compelling Application?Socialtext?s new wiki-based, collaborative spreadsheet, SocialCalc, developed with Dan Bricklin, co-creator of the blast-from-the-past spreadsheet VisiCalc (http://www.socialtext.com). Wikibility of Innovation oriented Workplaces This is the networked professional?s web 2.0, via Sebastien Sauteur I found Vincenzo Cammaratas master thesis, called ?Wikibility of Innovation Oriented Workplace

Om Malik's Blog - Richard Moross may have started his web-based printing company, Moo, because he was bored with the standard business cards out there, but now his four-year-old startup is about to enter the world of the boring head on. As early as next week, Moo will start selling the standard-sized, Docker-toting-executive business cards — that same product [...]

Om Malik's Blog - Charter Communications this morning backed off plans to deploy an advertising system that had stirred privacy fears about the way user data was intercepted and anger over an inability to truly opt out of the program. The cable provider said back in May that it was working with NebuAd, a startup in Redwood City, Calif., [...]

Ross Mayfield - Markets, Technology & Musings - Location social software company Plazes has been acquired by Nokia. I'm an advisor to the Berlin-based startup and really happy for the team. Nokia is a customer of ours and through many trips to Helsinki have gotten a good feel...

Om Malik's Blog - What’s in a company name? Plenty. It’s your first opportunity to brand yourself. Get it right and you’ll stand out as clever, useful, and memorable to potential users and investors ? even if your product isn?t any good. But get it wrong and you’ll flame out before your product even gets out of beta. So, what [...]

Ross Mayfield - Markets, Technology & Musings - Seesmic Raises Another $6 Million Round Video conversation startup Seesmic raised another $6 million in a series B financing. The round was co-led by Omidyar Network and Wellington Partners. If the CIA can collaborate with Web 2.0 tools, Whatever information they have, no matter how sensitive, it?s definitely not as critical or as classified as the CIA. Tell your boss, ?If the CIA can collaborate with Web 2.0 tools, so can we.? Yahoo!, eBay and Amazon | The three survivors but it ?put them in the curio cabinet? without transforming the company, says Jerry Michalski, a technology consultant. Yahoo! was ?so bent on being the future?, he says, that it ?missed the new?. Study: Social networks may subvert 'digital divide' "Students are developing a positive attitude towards using technology systems, editing and customizing content and thinking about online design and layout," Greenhow continued. "They're also sharing creative original work like poetry and film and p

On Startups - Here are the six simple steps for building a startup (in this case, a software startup). 1.  Figure out what to build.  You can do this by being brilliantly insightful (which you might be), or by just talking to some people.  Ask them questions.  Would you use this?  Does this solve a problem?  Would you pay for this?  Do you know anyone that would pay for this?  Are you going to roll your eyes and laugh out loud once I leave the room?  Are you going to tell you spouse this idea over dinner this evening to demonstrate that you indeed do have a sense of humor? 2.  Build something.  It doesn't have to be the world-changing thing you devised in step 1, but a close enough approximation.  It should do at least one useful thing from the list of game-changing things that's on the feature-list from #1.   Oh, and it should sort of work (even if requiring the assistance of some chanting, prayer and pro

Bnoopy - A while ago (actually, any post I've done is now "a while ago...") I wrote about Sabermetrics for Startups. I wondered if there was data you could collect in an interview process that would allow you to more accurately determine...

Om Malik's Blog - These days, we are deluged with data, and as a result we?re confusing noise with information, and information with useful information. But what many companies fail to realize is that what matters is what you do with that data and as a result, they are missing out on a tremendous opportunity.

Signal Vs Noise - Startup mythology demands that to create something great, you need superhuman sacrifices. You need to work for no pay, you need to put in 120 hours/week, you need to preferably sleep under the desk and live off pizza as a sole form of nutricient. As a result, you need to abandon your family and risk life without insurance. Hogwash! We’ve repeated this story so many times that it’s starting to wear a little thin, but here it goes again: Basecamp was created with 10 hours/week of programming time and as a 3rd or 4th project alongside paying customers for the designers over the course of about 6 months. In other words, we didn’t drop everything we had to create Basecamp, and you don’t have to either. There are plenty of startup ideas that can be done without millions in funding, thousands of man hours, and dramatic risk. But I can excuse people from failing to see them when blinded by press and popular opinion. Everywhere you turn it’s stor