Geoloqi, CivicApps, and TriMet API/SDKs
I’m heading off on yet another coding adventure this coming weekend. I can never get enough hackathons, startup weekends, and such. The energy, creativity, and learning is unbeatable at these types of events. This adventure will be mashing up a plethora of APIs (SDKs) and other capabilities to build something cool against. What it may [...]
Google Says Google+ Is Not Ready For Brands
Ever since Google+ was launched, I am playing around with it both for personal use as well as for professional use. I see Google+ eventually replacing Facebook for me (provided I convince my family and friends to start using Google+ and their throttling of invites is not helping my cause) on the personal side. Already, [...]
8 Questions to Help Decide if You Should be Raising Money Now
A year ago I blogged about one of my most common mantras that applies to sales, biz dev & fund raising alike: “Time is the Enemy of all Deals.” When times are really good for fund raising many teams delay to maximize their valuation. Sometimes this pays off, other times it doesn’t. So how should [...]
Why is Quora Censoring our Questions and Answers?
Answer: They are too smart for their own good and not smart enough for everyone else’s. Molly Ivins once quipped, “The strongest human emotion is neither love nor hate. It is one person’s desire to f#ck with another person’s copy” Well we’re not talking Farenheit 451, more like a quarter of that temperature but complaints [...]
Cloud Computing Through the Eyes of 10-year-olds
Oh, the typewriter. Is it: A business machine? A museum artifact? If you are my generation, there was a time when you called it a business machine. You typed letters (OK, perhaps your assistant did), folded them, stuck them in envelopes, mailed them and waited a few weeks for the response. Yes, it was possible [...]
An Entrepreneur’s Growth Equity Conundrum: Should I sell stock or sell growth?
Two times in the past year, I’ve been close to making an investment in two separate micro-cap growth equity opportunities only to have the opportunity go sideways deep into the process. The two businesses share a lot in common; they are similar in size, profitability, and growth prospects. Both are capital-intensive; the first being asset [...]
This Week’s Keynote Presentations
I have often complained how much I hate sitting on panels. The reason is that conferences usually pack them up with speakers to maximize the number of high profile guests in attendance to sell more general admission tickets. So with a panel of 5-6 people and 30-45 minutes it’s hard to have a real conversation. [...]
Turn about is not fair play on the broken hiring process
We have all heard about the problems with finding the right employee for the jobs you are trying to fill. Usually from my vantage point as a hiring manager my biggest problems have been about resumes that did not make sense for the position being filled. It is very hard to go from an AA [...]
Best meeting ever with a banker and it was still no sale
Sometimes you decide that you really do want to continue to grow your company beyond cash flow so you decide you want to go talk to a banker and see what all they would be interested in loaning money and providing deeper banking services than you have now. I did not want a traditional bank [...]
Observations on my own Startup
Starting a company is a hard thing to do, you will make mistakes, you will have wins, and you will have your good days and your bad days. Over the last year I have been working on my startup to take it to the next level, crossing the 40,000 a year gross line might seem [...]
Amazon rolls out new Web Store for Sellers
My first and only experience with Web Store by Amazon was a disaster from my viewpoint. Where I expected tightly coupled information between my Amazon catalog and the Amazon Web Store there was none. Realistically to use the site correctly we were looking at going back and touching every single item in our 12,000 plus [...]
Amazon sees renewed pressure to collect State Sales Tax
Amazon and other online retailers like EBay might not be able to dodge the tax collection business for much longer as States try increasingly to find new areas of revenue. Over the last couple of weeks, both Colorado and California have started passing legislation in one form or another that will mean that Amazon will [...]
Startup Weekend Hits SXSW 2010
Startup Weekend and Piryx are working on the 2nd Annual Piryxtopia Charity Bash – this is your chance to donate 20 bucks and get tickets to meet up with Startup Weekend and Pyrix. This also ties into the idea of doing startup support in Haiti via We Hear Your Voice. You need to go here [...]
Startup Weekend in Haiti
This is one of the best ideas I have seen all month, taking startup weekend directly to Haiti to help and provide support for budding programmers and entrepreneurs in the earthquake stricken country. If anything will add a bit of hope to that country, startup weekend is one of our best American assets we could [...]
This is where I get to disagree with Louis Gray about leadership
It is not often that I get to disagree with Louis Gray, who is one of the best people to know for any reason. So it is surprising when he writes an article and misses bits and pieces of what makes some companies succeed brilliantly, while other companies settle, settle for anything with a prayer [...]
