**Update: Check out Mashable’s screenshots of the upcoming Foursquare app update for next week. Could possibly alter your vote.
MG Siegler posited last week that location apps are going to be the big bang at SXSW this year, achieving Twitter-like buzz level. This seems a pretty safe bet; as [...]
Continue Reading →Over the past month, we’ve been rolling out the G/Score framework with partners, training G/Score assessors, and introducing entrepreneurs to the concept of a standardized, objective, transparent assessment methodology. The feedback from literally hundreds of conversations has been gratifying and tremendously helpful as we work to make the G/Score a useful and prescriptive tool for [...]
Continue Reading →Guidewire Group is looking for early-stage companies that have what it takes to be named one of the world’s most promising startups. Our Innovate!2010 global competition will consist of Pitch Slams around the world, kicking off March 1st in Barcelona.
The top 100 companies chosen from these Pitch Slams [...]
Continue Reading →Founded originally to develop project management software, New Zealand-based Aptimize discovered the need for Web page delivery acceleration when its own product was painfully unresponsive. The Aptimize optimization scheme turns “chatty pages into chunky pages” by concatenating images and JavaScript, recompiling and compressing them on the fly. In one example with its own product, Aptimize [...]
Continue Reading →Originally published on Austin Startup
Since I moved to Austin in October, Foursquare’s game of location-based tag has held my interest, allowing me to familiarize myself with the town a bit better and connect quicker with people in the tech scene. I hadn’t yet experienced the a-ha with it [...]
Continue Reading →In October, I spoke at Startup Camp Montreal5 about the 10 Stupid Things Entrepreneurs Do to Mess Up Their Businesses, and alluded to that talk again recently at the Forum for Entrepreneurs and Executives conference on entrepreneurship. It came up in conversation again on Friday so [...]
Continue Reading →I admit I’m a bit behind in my reading amidst end of year planning and all this holiday hoopla, so I’m just getting around to reading Sunday’s Wall Street Journal post asking “Should Start-Up Founders Forget About Business Plans?”
The post quotes HubSpot founder and CEO Brian Halligan saying that [...]
Continue Reading →In a post written a couple days ago, I took a poke at “free” business models and cited the success of WatchDox launching its secure file-sharing service with a premium price tag.
In that post, I wrote:
At best, free is a marketing strategy, although typically not a well understood one.
Having said [...]
Continue Reading →I started my day at SAP Labs in Palo Alto moderating a panel discussion about “Enabling Innovation: How does it happen? What’s the secret sauce?” The room was filled with the managing directors of SAP Labs worldwide and their invited guests, the vast majority of them representing multi-billion dollar global [...]
Continue Reading →If you’ve pitched to me over the last 6 months or so and talked about a free business model, you’ve no doubt heard my rant that “free isn’t a business model.” Most proponents of “free” plan to make their money in advertising, even while failing to understand much at all about the dynamics or economics [...]
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