Thursday, November 5, 2009

TECHIE TALK....HAUTREPRENEURSHIP...170 MILLLION IN 2 YEARS! WOW OR WTF? HOW'D THEY DO IT?


First Person: Google Talk

Smart ROI Consulting's Kevin Hill on the benefits of Google Talk for business.


My business partner and I use Google Apps for pretty much everything we do at our website consulting company. One of our favorite features is Google Talk, the VoIP service that lets us talk over the Internet for free. We are rarely in the same office -- my partner, Elijah Litscher, often works from his home office, and we attend sales calls and client meetings separately each week. But we stay in contact with the service, which we can use to "text chat" on our BlackBerrys or, preferably, "voice chat" from PC to PC.
It may seem old fashioned, but we've discovered that holding quick conversations is faster and easier than typing out e-mails, text messages, or even instant messages. I simply hit the Call button on my Googledashboard, and I'm talking to Eli in three seconds. If he's unavailable, I can leave him a voice-mail message, and he'll receive a notification in his Gmail inbox. If I'm online but don't want to be interrupted, the service lets me switch to "invisible mode."
Google Talk's sound quality isn't always great -- sometimes the calls are a bit noisy. Still, we prefer it toSkype, since it's on the same dashboard as our other Google Apps. I can see us continuing to use the service to chat with each other and our employees as our start-up business grows



The Way I Work: Jason Fried of 37Signals




Jason Fried hates lame meetings, tech companies that don't generate revenue, and companies that treat their employees like children. A peek inside his typical workday




I don't use an alarm clock. Lately, I've been naturally waking up at 6:38 every morning. I used to wake up at 7:31 every morning, which is actually when I was born. So that was kind of creepy. I try not to grab my phone and check e-mails first thing. I used to do that, and it's just not good for you. Instead, I'll go and brew some tea and try and relax a little bit. But the computer's always kind of pulling me toward it, so I end up looking at e-mail sooner than I'd like to. I love tea. I drink green tea and white tea mostly. I play with different varieties depending on my mood. These days, I'm really into matcha, which is a powdered tea. You add hot water and use a bamboo whisk to make a frothy liquid. You actually consume the tea leaves. I get it online, because there's better selection, and I'm lazy. For breakfast, I usually eat a couple of maple-infused Van's waffles and a handful of pistachios. Unless it's really cold -- then I have oatmeal. Three mornings a week, I go to the gym for an hour. I've been going to a trainer for two years. Otherwise, I think I'd blow it off. Then sometimes I head in to the office. I might work from home for a week and then get bored of that, so I will spend the next week at the office. I live about two miles from my office. I drive there most of the time. I should bike more, but I saw someone on a bike get hit two years ago, and it really freaked me out. I figure I'm better off driving.

(To read the entire story visit: inc.com )


Side Spark: He and I have alot in common. I decided that I'd take some time off from my daily obsessive regimes. Meditation needs to be on the top of the list. -Kash 


                           WOW OR WTF? 


170 MILLION IN  2 YEARS: HOW'D HE DO IT? 




Aaron Patzer of Mint.com
Aaron Patzer launched Mint.com as a user-friendly alternative to Quicken and other personal-finance software out there. Little did he know that just two years later, Intuit, which makes Quicken, would fork over $170 million for his website. So how'd he do it? FOR MORE ON THIS STORY:  (SEE INC.COM) TIPS FROM PATZ: 


Step 1: Create a product that makes a difficult, tedious task easy and fun

"What set us apart from 95 percent of other start-ups is that we served a real need," Patzer says. "Personal finance is so complex and too difficult for most people. I was frustrated with the existing tools and found out that others were frustrated as well."
Step 2: Choose a market that's really, really big."There are 250 million people worldwide who already use online banking," Patzer says. "With our 1.5 million users, we've barely scratched the surface. Intuit made a billion dollars on its tax business alone and that's a once-a-year thing. People do online banking every day."
Step 3: Develop a business model that actually allows you to, well, make money.
"Our product is free, but we make our money by helping people save money," Patzer says. "We understand where people spend their money so we can say, 'You should refinance' or 'You should change your auto insurance.' The only ads people see on Mint.com are ones that will save them at least $50. Financial institutions then pay us for new customers."
Step 4: Don't pay to acquire customers. Ever.
All of our customer acquisition has been free -- through social media, blogs, and the press," Patzer says. "We don't pay a dime for advertising. We also use business partnerships with Motley Fool and the credit-report companies. And Apple has given us a lot of free advertising as a featured application."


Step 5: Be a compete stickler about who you hire.

"In the last start-up I worked for, hiring was done haphazardly," Patzer says. "We have a very rigorous hiring process. For tech people, we might screen 50 people and hire one. For all managers, we use a technique called top grading which reveals patterns in behavior. In the history of Mint, I've only fired two people and only one has left voluntarily."


How to Draw 22 Million Visitors to Your Website


Step One: Be Human
In a world of impersonal web services, Pandora prides itself on its human ingenuity. From the very beginning, Westergren insisted on having real live human beings inform each recommendation the site makes. Analysts rate a user's likelihood of enjoying a song based on a 10-point scale that takes into account as many as 400 attributes such as lyrical content, harmony, and rhythm. "It's profoundly unscalable," Westergren told Inc. in 2007. "Our method is really absurd in that regard."



Step Two: Be Willing to Evolve
It's not as easy as it sounds. Since launching Pandora in 2005, Westergen has revised his business plan several times. He has variously toyed with the idea of charging listeners a subscription fee, with making money through licensing arrangements, and with the idea of placing Pandora's technology in store kiosks. Along the way, Westergren was rejected by venture capitalists no less than 350 times. Still, the entrepreneur kept at it until he found a business model that worked. Westergren eventually settled on a strategy that relies on a hybrid of ad revenue, subscriptions, and revenue sharing deals with web giants like iTunes and Amazon. Today, the Pandora does about $25 million in revenue annually

Step Three: Listen to Your Customers

Westergren routinely seeks input from his users. On a typical day, he has a backlog of about 1,200 emails from customers that he or his staff will answer personally within a week. And 15 times a year, the CEO organizes Town Hall meetings with Pandora users across the country. At these events, which draw up to 300 attendees, Westergren speaks freely about everything from his company's finances to the legal minutiae of Internet copyright law. Think of it as a customer pep rally.



Step Four: Don't Be Afraid to Ask for Help

In 2007, a government ruling more than doubled royalty payments for Web radio stations, placing Pandora's ongoing viability in jeopardy. "Our investors wanted to shut us down," Westergren told Inc. in late 2008. "We were just hemorrhaging money." So Westergren e-mailed each of his customers asking them to contact their Congressional representatives to demand that the ruling be reviewed. He also pleaded for help on Pandora's blog. Over the next year and a half, no fewer than 1.7 million Pandora fanatics called, faxed, or wrote to Congress to plead Westergren's case. As a result, Pandora is now wrapping up negotiations that are expected resolve the royalty issue. "It was an absolute Hail Mary," Westergren said. "If that didn't work, we were finished."

When Is the Right Time to Start a Business? Now.




My favorite answer to a question VCs get every time they sit on panels was from Gordon Moore. "When is it a good time to start a company?" someone asked. Moore shook his head incredulously and answered, "When you have a good idea!"
getting funded badgeIf you look at the history of successful companies, they start up in good times and bad. Those started in poor economic times includeMicrosoft in 1975 and Lotus in 1982 and contemporaries such asLinkedIn in 2003 and Facebook in 2004. But you can just as easily find great companies that were started in good economic times. I can tell you that now definitely appears to be a great time to start a company. And the current economy is a big part of that reason.
Eighteen months ago I was seeing new companies at a pace I had never experienced. AtFirst Round Capital we added 2,400 new companies to our database, companies we had an actual investment conversation with over the course of 2008. We found some great ones, but the hit rate was low. There were too many derivative ideas, FNACs ("feature, not a company"), and just plain bad ones. Usually these companies were founded by folks who were not ready to be entrepreneurs but thought starting a company was the cool thing to do. Our shorthand for these folks is now "employee #327 at Google," meaning that their first job was one where they had made money, had great success in their operating role, and figured, hey, if Larry and Sergey could do it why couldn't I?
Then Lehman happened, and the economy came crashing down. The effect on the community was astonishing. All the people that were starting companies because they saw their friends doing it decided that job at Google wasn't such a bad place to ride out the storm. And they disappeared from the market. The only ones left were the wild-eyed, optimistic nutballs who had amazing ideas and were crazy enough to make them work. Not surprisingly, many of these ideas involved attacking inefficiencies in businesses--they were very ROI-focused.
For us, that meant we invested in 18 new companies in 2008, an historic low. We are on pace to do much more business in 2009, though we're still actually meeting fewer companies than we did last year.
This is important, because it means less competition for employees, customers, user attention, and everything else you might need to get your company off the ground. Additionally, while the venture capital spigot is not as open as it was last year, the investment dollars out there are flowing disproportionately to the obviously great companies. Last year, a good company may have seen 1-2 term sheets and a company on the bubble would have seen one. Today the good companies are seeing 2-3 term sheets and the ones on the bubble aren't getting funded. For entrepreneurs, that's great news.
So if you have that burning urge to quit your stable job in this environment and start a company to build on that great idea, I can't think of why you wouldn't get started. Now.
(Visit fastcompany.com)
I'm so not ready for this: WOW or WTF? 

Youthmobile 2030: 6 Crazy Cars for the Next Generation

What will the gadget-obsessed youth of tomorrow want in a vehicle? The design studios at Audi, GM, Honda, Mazda, Nissan, and Toyota set out to find the answer for the YouthMobile 2030 Design Challenge, which challenged Southern California-based auto designers to come up with cars that teenagers of the future will covet. The winner will be announced on December 3 at the L.A. Auto Show. Check out some of the wild ideas below.


The Car Hero
GM's entry into the competition is both a vehicle and a game, challenging drivers to outdrive the car's autonomous system. If the driver succeeds in proving their skills, a new level of outrageous driving scenarios is unlocked. It's an interesting concept, but it sounds like a way to ensure that teenage drivers get in even more accidents.


These vehicles use some sort of "next-generation vehicle control logic" to sync the body movements and gestures of the driver with the car's movement. In other words, the driver's body is a like a human joystick.


Honda Helix
Honda's concept incorporates human DNA with adaptive polymers that can supposedly shift shape, color, and material properties based on the owner's needs and wants. Over time, the vehicle forms a creepy-sounding "singular bond between both human and machine DNA"


Nissan V2G
Nissan wistfully imagines that the V2G will be the best-selling EV of all time thanks to its affordable range of cell phone-like access plans. In Nissan's vision, solar skins cover all major urban structures and provide power directly to the grid, allowing for cheap and easy access to EV juice.

19 Blogs You Should Bookmark Right Now

According to Inc.com, there are millions of blogs out there. And most of them aren't worth your time. So we scoured the Web and came up with a list of the smartest bloggers, who just might help you run a better business.


There are more than 130 million blogs on the World Wide Web today, and 1.5 million more are created each week, according to the blog tracking service Technorati. It is unknown how many of these are tainted by shameless self-promotion, mindless ranting, and other nonsense -- but you can bet the figure is extremely high. So Inc.scoured the Internet, tabbed through Twitter, and asked the smartest people we know to help us come up with a list of bloggers who, if you pay attention, can help reshape your perspective. Here's what we found.

Oh word! 

Commerce Search: Google Attempts to Boost Online Stores With Boringness


Google's tentacles extend everywhere online, including e-commerce--thanks to Google Checkout, for one. But now it's got a new system, Commerce Search, which companies can use to inject smart search skills into their online stores. Just in time for the holiday season.

In its introduction to the new system, Google explains exactly why it's getting into this business: E-shopping continues to boom, but many sites haven't optimized their e-shopping experience yet. And with an 8-second limit on the average visitor deciding to stay or shop elsewhere, there's lots of potential customers being missed.
Which is where, of course, Google enters the fray. Its main goal is to add some of Google's goodness to commercial sites, enabling faster product location, smart searching, product filtering, and so on. Its technology, borrowed and enhanced from the search site and other Google systems, would seem ideal for small- to medium-sized e-businesses who don't want the difficulty and expense of designing their own e-shops to be that sophisticated. Check out the Google promo clip below.
WOW or WTF? 
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