Are You Making What You Should? Startup Guarantees a Raise

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: GetRaised

Quick Pitch: GetRaised tells you what you should be making and shows you how to ask for a raise.

Genius Idea: Helping users create a letter that explains why they deserve raises.
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The gap between salaries of women and men with the same jobs is well documented, but the founders of Thrive, a personal finance site that Tree.com purchased in 2009, discovered it on their own.

While the percentage of money that women were saving was higher than what men saved, the actual value of those savings was less. "We could have made those women the best savers in the world, and it wasn't going to close the gap," says co-founder Matt Wallaert, whose background is in social psychology (he studies how people make decisions).

After selling Thrive, Wallaert and Avi Karnani founded a new consultancy called Churnless. In the first of what they call the company's "passion projects," they decided to tackle the pay gap. They consulted academics including the author of Women Don't Ask -and interviewed human resource professionals before putting together what today is GetRaised.

GetRaised, like many sites, gives users an idea of how their salaries compare to those who share their title, experience level, and location. This portion of the service is free and based on a mashup of data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and open job postings in the area. The algorithm also factors in data collected from other users.

More than 10,000 people have logged in to the salary comparison portion of the site since it launched in October (Karnani estimates that about 75% of them are women). But what sets the site apart from others like it is a $20 paid option that actually helps an underpaid person ask for a raise.

After answering a handful of questions about what she has accomplished at work and what her goals are, the site generates a polished letter that lays out the user's case complete with her market value and an explanation of her expanding role. If submitting the letter to a supervisor and reasonably following up doesn't result in a pay raise, Churnless will refund the $20.

The founders both admit they were skeptical that a form letter could actually get the job done, but they have not been giving many refunds. According to Karnani, about 75% of subscribers to the service have succeeded in getting a raise within a month a higher success rate than either founder expected. The average raise is about $6,500.

Not bad for a $20 investment.
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Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark
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The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

More About: bizspark, churnless, getraised, thrive

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The Future of Advertising Will Be Integrated

Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Mark Suster (@msuster) a VC at GRP Partners. He blogs at BothSidesoftheTable.

Banner Ads. They first started in 1994 and are therefore almost as old as the Web itself. They were very effective back then, with the original ad garnering a 78% click-through rate (CTR)!  I guess from there we had nowhere to go but down.

Nowadays banner ads get on average 0.2% CTR meaning for every 1,000 ads that are served up only 2 people click on them. And as Jon Steinberg of Buzzfeed points out, the CTRs for social media banner ads are just 0.08%.

Holy Shiitake!

Despite its creation more than 15 years ago, banner ads have been surprisingly resilient despite their lack of efficacy. In the IAB study that revealed the graph above, brand advertisers indicated that their number one objective in online advertising was "creating awareness" followed by "creating purchase intent" or "likelihood to recommend" the product. Yet these seem to be the least effective attributes of banner advertising.

The fundamental problem with banner ads is a condition called "banner blindness" meaning that our eyes are really quickly trained to look at what is most relevant on the page - the content we want to see. Check out this chart from eye-tracking research conducted by the usability guru Jakob Nielsen published in this piece. It shows that our eyes are trained to focus on the text, not the ads.

I'm sure it probably resonants with how most of you read the web.

So I've spent the last few years checking out companies that are trying to solve for this problem. The global advertising market is estimated at around $475 billion / year with only 12% of this online and measurable. (some data sources have this estimate much higher.) We believe that the structural industry changes will continue to create big opportunities for technology firms that enable the changes in media consumption for television, radio, inbound calls, online & social media. We are investing heavily in these changes.

One company that I previously wrote about trying to change this industry is, Solve Media, (I am not an investor) has created an interesting ad unit designed to drive up brand "engagement" and recall. The idea is that if I can serve you an ad for a function that you already need to perform on the web anyways - a captcha - with a brand message I can drive recall. And market research seems to confirm this.

You'll see a clear problem here. Traditional banner ads only drive 16% brand recall and almost ZERO message recall. So it's hard to argue that brands shouldn't worry about CTR rates when it doesn't seem that banners are very effective for branded advertising or awareness either.

It's no big surprise that the overwhelming majority of online spend has therefore been "direct response" advertisements (trying to elicit an action) rather than branded advertising as pointed out in this good summary by Jeremy Liew.

So people will spend money online to get you to sign up for credit cards or Netflix but not to change your laundry detergent. I decided to look up one branded company in the chocolate segment to get a sense for the magnitude of spend online. Hershey's chocolates spends about $365 million in advertising per year. Just $460,000 of this is spend on online display ads (0.1% for those without a calculator handy).

The reality is that advertising has got to become more integrated with content in order to drive efficacy. I know that any time ads are mentioned it makes the blood boil on any self respecting technologist the same way it did when HotWire ran their first ad in 1994 and the way it made Google's blood boil when Overture launched the sponsored search category.

Ask anybody if they like product placements in movies or TV and they'll resoundingly tell you "no" but marketers know better, which is why the celebrity endorsement industry is a $50 billion industry.

But even for the consumer reality sets in. Firstly, we care more about getting cheap or free high-quality media than we do about whether we see ads. Give people massive price increases on most media and they'll abandon it. So how people behave and what they verbally say they stand for are often at odds.

Integrated Advertising

I believe that "integrated advertising" is one of the more effective types of advertising out there. You have to find a way to get your audience to actually "engage" with the content in the way that Solve Media is doing, in the way that in-game advertising works for video games or the way that celebrity endorsements work.

It's why I still believe passionate in companies like Adly (I'm an investor) who have created ways for celebrities to integrate endorsements "in steam" in a Twitter feed. Yes. Oh, sacred cow. In the steam. Integrated with where our eyes & attention are. I advocated strongly for this 18 months ago and my belief system is as ardent as it was back then. If you're interested here is my case.

But the simple facts are:
Our attention is all in the stream. As evidenced by the eye-tracking studies - they will remain in the stream.
We know that celebrity endorsement works. It has for decades. Celebrities care about their personal brands so will naturally rebuff requests to sponsor inauthentic products.
The beauty of social media is that consumers can vote with their "unfollow button" so it has a natural self-correcting mechanism. If you get economic value out of having followers you don't want to lose them over one ad.
Sure, there needs to be ad disclosure. And naturally we have built in quality controls like: frequency capping, automated measurement so we can pull ads that people respond poorly to, A/B testing tools, data analysis to tell celebrities & brands which products will resonate, etc.

But I can tell you as my firm invested in Overture who created the category of pay-per-search that Google perfected - our company underwent three years of ridicule in Silicon Valley until people looked at the performance data and realized that efficacy matters.

The technology blogs will be aflutter with continued criticisms of in-stream ads while mainstream consumers continue to click on links provided by the celebrities they respect and will buy products accordingly. We already have the data that proves it.

In Image Ads

Another areas that I've been really focused on over the past 2 years is "in-image ads" as another form of integrated media. When you think about the eye-tracking we know that people care about the story and the images. And it is already an accepted fact that in many cases the ads & images are blended as any lady who reads Cosmo or Vogue will tell you. The big splashy image ads is part of their reading experience.

So we put our money where our mouth was an invested in the largest in-image advertiser on the web, GumGum, whose network now reached over 100 million monthly uniques with 3 billion ad-compliant images, delivering an average CTR of 0.4% (2x industry average for banners). The eyes are in the image. We believe this is why Google Ventures invested in Pixazza.

As you can see from this image, the ad is unobtrusive and potentially valuable to the reader. The ad unit is served up based on algorithms that determine what is actually in the image and also for whether an ad placement would impair the image. We could even target ads better based on who the end consumer was.

What else is out there in the field of integrated advertising?

Vibrant Media & Kontera have both built large and fast-growing businesses around text-based advertising and there are new entrants doing it in new ways like SkimLinks. Vibrant has a reach of 250 million uniques, making in the 12th largest ad-focused property online and has 3rd-party verified studies suggesting up to 50% increase in brand lift following their in-text ads (I'm not an investor in any of these companies). Text is shown to deliver higher CTRs than banners. Text is what we're reading. It's integrated.

There is a whole industry being spawned in the Internet video world and especially in the integration of devices (second screen TVs) and the TV experience. Some of the interactive experiences I've seen in recent demos are simply mind boggling and are starting to form new opinions in my head about how we will consume big screen TV in the future (I'll save that for a future post).

The games industry has massively changed over the past several years to more of an integrated advertising / purchasing media with the growth of virtual goods and ads. An obvious example of integrated media would be the new Rio Angry Birds version. It's actually very cool. There are increasingly incentivized offers to get more powerful swords & shields in battle games. This has proved far more effective than small crappy banners at the bottom of each screen.

There will always be a tension between advertising wanting to reach audiences through whatever means they can to capture their attention and help them discover new products and consumers who claim a strong preference for ad-free products. Yet the other tension between ad-free products that cost more versus ad-supported models have a clear winner: ads. On products where I've seen data the "ad free" versions have converted at 4-6% of the user base at maximum.

So the future of helping make the ad industry more measurable (and more online) I believe will be one of helping make ads both authentic & integrated. Trying to relegate ads to the least intrusive real estate of our computers is missing the point. Advertisers pay for efficacy.

If not, we'd be telling advertisers to just leave all of their branded advertising spend on traditional television in the future. And to stick with their old adage, "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The problem is, I don't know which half."

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Jasfilin.com, Aplikasi Akutansi Berbasis Cloud

PT Prosperita Sistem Indonesia hari ini meluncurkan produk aplikasi akutansi yang memakai teknologi cloud-computing.

http://techno.okezone.com/read/2011/04/29/325/451546/jasfilin-com-aplikasi-akutansi-berbasis-cloud

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ChoozOn aggregates the deal aggregators

Having a hard time keep track of your Groupon, Living Social, RetailMeNot, retailer, and manufacturer deals? ChoozOn wraps them all up for you.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-19882_3-20057257-250.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

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Facebook’s New Deals Product Coming to Five Cities Tomorrow

Facebook is finally launching local Deals a feature that will compete with Groupons core product, not Foursquare's in five cities starting Tuesday.

The five communities in question are San Francisco, Austin, Dallas, Atlanta and San Diego. Facebook revealed to The New York Times that the local offers made to Deals users will be delivered via email and will also appear in users' news feeds.

Any Facebook user can sign up for Deals notifications on the feature's landing page now; users in the five test cities will be able to see and use Deals within a few hours of the writing of this post.

Facebook's first local deals product was announced as part of Facebook's overarching locations feature, Places. Mobile check-ins were linked to deals; in this way, Deals served as an incentive for Facebook users to integrate Facebook Places in their daily lives and they were also an incentive for marketers and major brands to put more money into the Facebook platform. Facebook even briefly launched a page to let web users find these checkin-focused deals on the web.

However, the new Deals will be less like a Foursquare coupon awarded to the user after a checkin and more like a Groupon voucher, which means the user will buy a certificate for a certain good or service at a steep discount, typically half off its retail price, then redeem it later.

Examples of the new breed of Facebook Deals from brands include "unlimited bowling with six friends for an evening for $60 (75% off)" and "luxury winery tour and 25% off all wine purchases for $50."

Perhaps most importantly, users will be able to buy Deals using Facebook Credits, paving a smooth path between a virtual currency and real-world goods and services. We suspected Facebook had plans to bring Credits to the real world since around the time of f8, the company's developer conference, when Facebook announced its ambitious Open Graph.

Users will also be able to buy Deals with major credit cards.

Stay tuned for more information, specific deals and screenshots in a few hours.

Image based on a photo from Flickr user nathangibbs.

More About: facebook, Facebook Deals, groupon

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11 Inspirational Quotes That Will Supercharge Your Day

No wonder the smart-phone business is so tough. Every new design seems to simply be yet another take on a 3.5 to 5 inch screen. But what if a smart-phone could expand to replace all four screens (phone, tablet, PC, TV) in your house? Or, what if we simply eliminated the screen entirely with a 3D hologram phone that provides an Xbox Kinect experience in a small puck? (note: if you just want to see the phonescroll down)

We asked the eYeka community of co-creators to imagine not what features the iPhone 5 or next Android phone might have, but what a true, next generation phone might look like. One that will make today's phones looking like yesterday's rotary phones (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotary_dial - for all you youngsters).

The best designs show the creativity of a similar paradigm shift in product design that the iPhone took from the Blackberry-type qwerty designs.
The Round Phone by j-bouille

The crowd favorite is a small round item that fits into your pocket, but projects any number of functions with which you can interact. User j-bouille imagined a round smartphone that contains a camera, a projector and is able to connect to a wide range of objects. Take it into a shower and you will know the temperature of water. Connect it to a fridge and you will know what food you are missing. This is a phone for the future that connects to the internet of things. It adapts with what it touches and becomes simply a part of our everyday life.

The Flexphone by iKev

We also loved the Flexphone by iKev who created a new take on e-paper. Instead of simply creating a rollup phone, it uses flexible OLED technology to easily turn a phone into a gaming device, tablet PC, or full fledged media-player. Flipping photos from one screen to another, shifting form-factors to easily morph into whatever device you need it to be.

Ford was quoted once in saying "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said: 'faster horses' ". And professional designers often say that no disruptive innovation can't come from consumers. Well, j-bouille and iKev may well be proving them wrong.

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About Francois Petavy

Francois Petavy is CEO of eYeka, a company that leverages a community of 150,000 creative consumers to help big companies such as Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and L'Oreal innovate with consumers through co-creation. Learn more at www.eyeka.net.

For the latest tech news, visit SAI: Silicon Alley Insider. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

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Take a look – The Next-Gen Smart-phone Has No Screen

We all need a pick me up from time to time.

And what would be better than some of the most inspirational quotes on this beautiful blue planet of ours?There's something about inspirational and wise quotes that gets your mind churning and thinking about the positive instead of the negative.

I've collected 11 highly inspirational quotes below that will supercharge your day with positivity if you spend some time contemplating each and how each quote relates to your life.

Even though we all live completely unique lives, there still something about quotes that speak to all of us.

With all that said let's dive right in, shall we?

1. Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.  Mark Twain

We will always be afraid of doing new things and having new experiences, but it isn't until we do what we most fear that we truly come alive. Look back into your life when you faced and overcame your fears and did something you were scared of.

It felt amazing, didn't it?

2. "If you hear a voice within you say you canbnot paint, then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.  Vincent van Gogh

Never let yourself or anyone else say that you cannot do something. You alone determine the limitations that you set upon yourself.If you want to do something, just do it. Get rid of negative friends and destroy your inner critic that tells you that you cannot do something. You are a genius, you can do anything you want to do.

3. Fall seven times, stand up eight!  Japanese Proverb

Life is about failing and learning from your mistakes. If you want a truly happy and successful life, you have to be willing to stand up and never give up. Truly successful people are positive and they know that each failure gets them closer to their goals.

Failures are nothing but mere stepping stones to success.

4. To change one's life; Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly. No exceptions.  William James

Never put off what you can do today. If you want a fulfilling and passionate life, start moving toward it, even if it means beginning by writing down what you want.

Most people put off their goals because they can't see how they could reach them. What matters is not how you are going to get there, but that you're moving in the right direction every single day.

5. "Life is either daring adventure or nothing.  Helen Keller

Take life by the horns, conquer your fears and live your life as a daring adventure. If you settle down and think mediocrity is good enough, you will soon regret your decision.

Think about what you want to accomplish and go after it. Make the choice that you will not give up before you have it. You can make your wildest dreams come true, if you'll just have the courage to go after them.

6. Realize that true happiness lies within you.  Lucian

It is not the stuff that we have but what goes on inside that makes us truly happy. If you want to feel happy inside, start working on yourself.

Begin listening to personal development audio courses. Read books. Attend seminars. Do whatever it takes to increase the happiness you feel inside.

You cannot control anything outside of yourself, so you might as well start with what you can control, which are the thoughts you think.

7. We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

You are here for a reason. We all came to this planet to contribute as human beings.Most people forget who they truly are, and end up thinking that this life is all there is to it. Never forget who you are and the amazing things you are capable of.

You have gifts to share. Discover what they are and share them with the world.

8. Your work is to discover your work and then, with all your heart, to give yourself to it.  Buddha

You may not know what your purpose or passion is, but you can find out. It isn't until people become determined to find and go after their passions that they become truly great.

When you've finished reading this article, make sure you find your passion in life and start moving toward it as fast as you possibly can.

One step at a time will get you there if you take consistent action.

9. You can have anything you want if you are willing to give up the belief that you can't have it.  Robert Anthony

Most blame external circumstances when it is they who hold themselves back from success, prosperity, and happiness in life. If you want success, start by eliminating the negative beliefs you have about yourself.

You have the choice between feeling happy or unhappy. What do you choose?

10. There is no man living that can not do more than he thinks he can.  Henry Ford

There's a reason why most of these quotes focus on what we think and believe about ourselves. The thoughts we think shape our reality. Successful and happy people are those that are positive and always thinking about solutions instead of problems.

11. The best way to predict the future is to create it. Dr. Forrest C. Shaklee

It's time to take control of your destiny and think about what you truly want. Are you in a job you love? Is your life heading in the direction you want? Is your body in great shape? Is your health where you want it to be?

Everything you do shapes your future, so make sure you're creating the future you want.

Remember - for those of you that just read something and thought, "AH HA! Awesome point", the key is to do something with it. Even if it's a small, somewhat silly, step forward, something is something.
Written on 4/24/2011 by Henri Junttila. Henri writes at Wake Up Cloud, where he shares his personal tips on how you can live the life you know you deserve. When you feel ready to take action, get his free course: Find Your Passion in 5 Days or Less. And if you liked this article, you will enjoy one of his top articles: 77 Great Quotes That Will Change Your Life. Photo Credit: Dene' (Seattle) Miles

For the latest career news, visit War Room. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story

See Also:
2 Ways To Never Make A Bad First Impression Again
Why I Ditched The Cushy VC World To Start Kohort
How To Keep Up With A Fast-Growing Business

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Five Problem Solutions to Motivate Your Startup

Potential startup founders are always looking for ideas to implement, when they should be looking for problems to solve. Customers pay for solutions, but there is no market for ideas. I'm often approached by people with a "million dollar idea," but I haven't seen anyone pay that for one yet.

Equally often, I see startups who are on the road to implementing an idea, but haven't figured out what problem it solves – the business plan waxes on eloquently for 20 pages about how great this product and technology is, but never gets around to defining the problem (investors call this the "solution looking for a problem" syndrome).

A related "red flag" in a business plan is a missing competitive analysis section, or a short paragraph that essentially says, "this product has no competition." My reaction is, if there is no competition, then there is no market demand for your product, so why are you building it?

Luckily, many startups are smart enough to keep morphing their idea, until it finally fits a real-world problem, and they can move forward in the marketplace. Unfortunately they could have saved themselves much lost time, money, and heartache if they had just focused on identifying the problem before they built a solution.

Smart startups also don't forget that startup ideas are solutions for someone, and companies have to make money. The way to make money is to make something people or companies need (not necessarily what they want). Here are five solutions from an old essay by Paul Graham on "Ideas for Startups" that are even more relevant in these tough economic times:

Automate a labor intensive process. This is the traditional realm of computers. Lotus 1-2-3 applied it to accounting spreadsheets, and Google applied it to information mining on the Internet, but Henry Ford even applied this principle to auto manufacturing. There are still millions of these opportunities for startups out there.

Fix something that's broken. In business, it seems to me that the traditional banking business models are broken or at least no longer fit the purpose. On the other end of the spectrum, Internet dating sites don't seem to work. There are thousands of them, so they must be offering something people want. Yet they work horribly, according to most people who have tried one.

Take a luxury and make it a commodity. People must want something if they pay a lot for it. Yet most products can be made dramatically cheaper as technologies improve. This opens the market opportunity, you sell more, and people start to use it in different ways. For example, once cell phones were so cheap that most people had one, people started using them as cameras and Internet devices.

Make something cheaper and easier to use. Making things cheaper means more volume and more profit. For a long time making things cheaper made them easier, but now even cheap things are too complicated. Computer applications today are cheap, but often still impossible to use.

Take a current solution to the next level. Solve the currently intractable problems that impact all of us. Tackle the global warming problem, predict where earthquakes will occur, find alternative energy sources, cure cancer, and unlock the keys to aging. There is no shortage of opportunity here.

Combine these with the value of a good understanding of promising new technologies, and the value of having associates with complementary skills to extend your thinking. Problem solutions are the ingredients that startups are made of. Start solving a problem today that you can use as the basis for the "idea" for your next startup.

Marty Zwilling

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Entrepreneurs: B2B Rains, B2C Marketing Brings a Facebook, Abercrombie and a Wynn's 1,900 Gaming Machines

Prior to starting a business, the aspiring entrepreneur must decide what kind of entity they wish to begin. Leave VC dreams to the jaded, and months of useless planning up to the coaches. An entrepreneur can cut his or her options right in half by choosing whether to do a B2B or B2C sales/marketing-based organization.

If the entrepreneur wants to make it to owning a beach house, a couple BMWs, and a diversified portfolio, here is what the small business owner needs to know regarding the two business styles:

B2B vs. B2C: What is the Difference Between the Two?

B2B Marketing, by definition, is the marketing or advertising of a product or service from one business to another businesses. More casually and broadly speaking, you can also call "B2B" any sales or marketing geared toward municipalities or government.

Example: Software sales to hedge funds or to the food packaging services industry

B2C Marketing, by definition, is the marketing or advertising of a product or service by a business directly to the consumer.

Example: Retail clothing sales, or a subscription-based website that ranks colleges and sells tips on applying and gaining acceptance to various high-end universities (targeting the website's visitors before the website's advertisers)

What are the Pros and Cons of Each?

B2B Marketing- and Advertising-Based Companies:

Pros:

Businesses tend to have more money. It is also more transparent which company can write the bigger check: General Electric or Anytown USA Hardware Co.

Typically, a single B2B transaction can yield thousands of dollars for the small business owner, where selling a simple B2C product or services amounts to a much smaller profit.

B2B Marketing services can usually be done from a virtual office and the need for storage and distribution can more easily be circumvented then (for instance, gift baskets).

In B2B Marketing companies, many players can remain in the same vertical and still feed off the target market. In B2C, well, when was the last time you logged into MySpace (assuming you aren't in a band)?

You can turn B2B success into B2C success if you're uncommonly gifted, insanely creative, and even more driven by money. A good example would be when I was in Macy's and saw Donald Trump signature ties. Not a bad gig, turning commercial real estate into neckties.

Cons:

B2B Marketing-oriented companies have long sales cycles and can often see extended periods of cash flow shortages.

B2B Marketing-oriented companies often have to compete against industry giants, thus fighting every inch to make a name for themselves in an industry that's already been defined, and redefined again.

B2B Marketing-oriented companies eventually involve some sort of office leasing. I can vouch that it was not fun receiving hate mail from competitors regarding whether our team was interviewing candidates from the kitchen table.

B2C Marketing- and Advertising-Base Companies

Studies have shown that there is no set pattern of behavior governing why the average consumer buys what they do. We know that U.S. consumers are driven by intangibles such as looks, status, etc., but we don't have individual purchasing down to a science and we probably never will.

Pros:

In B2C, you can begin with a better knowledge of who the consumer is than the young entrepreneur just getting into an industry.

For instance, you can relate with the 20-somethings on your dating website. The business owner selling alarm systems to hotels probably cannot relate to the day-to-day job of the hotel's security manager and procurement or purchasing manager.

This detachment can be due to various reasons such as age difference, lack of professional respect on the veteran's part, or the professional dress of the budding entrepreneur.

In B2C, there is less maintenance. Once things are truly up and running, a B2C success story can sit by the pool at the Venetian worrying whether his margarita is going to melt before his sushi arrives, while the B2B success story can sit by his son's cubicle trying to instill enough motivation so he can pass the business on.

Cons:

B2C failure rate is high. With B2C marketing-oriented companies, there are so many players focusing on simultaneously beating away newcomers and growing sustaining current market share that entrance is quite difficult. You're going to have to produce more than a blog about NYC culture -- unless that blog is one-of-a-kind.

In B2C, you're dealing with an unknown beast. Unless the entrepreneur has B2C marketing experience, they will have to battle with the blatant lack of intelligence that is inherent in nearly each and every U.S. consumer.

That may be phrasing it in the extreme, but in a niche B2B field, the business owner is, more often than not, dealing with another business owner who is equally well-informed about the subject at hand. Not so in B2C.

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Cool Websites and Tools [April 22nd]

Check out some of the latest MakeUseOf discoveries. All listed websites are FREE or come with a decent free account option. You can make use of them without spending a dime. If you want to have similar cool websites round-ups delivered to your email daily email subscribe here.

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Breakup Notifier - With 500 million users and hundreds of friends, Facebook is a great place to build romantic relationships. However, the fact that many of the eligible candidates are taken doesn't help. Breakup Notifier is a fun little Facebook app that sends you an email whenever one of your Facebook friends becomes available. Read more: Breakup Notifier: Get Alerts When Your Facebook Friends Break Up

Neevia Document Converter - Here is another quick online converter that you can use. Neevia Document Converter is an upload-and-done tool that converts several file formats to a PDF or an image. Supported formats include Microsoft Office, Microsoft Works, Apple documents, Lotus, Open Office, Adobe documents, and more. It even supports various graphic formats like JPG, PNG, BMP. and a lot more. Read more: Neevia Document Converter: Turn Anything To PDF Or An Image

Remote-Utilities - DControlling a PC remotely can come in handy in a large number of situations ranging from help desk and trouble shooting to centralized software management. Remote Utilities is one of the best software out there that allows you to view or fully control a PC remotely using an Internet connection. Read more: Remote-Utilities: Easily View Control A Remote PC [20 Free Licenses]

iHearNetwork - With millions of users buzzing on Twitter from around the world, one often wonders which ones are in your area and what they are talking about. iHearNetwork is an Android app that identifies tweets being sent in your area and reads them out to you so you don't have to focus on reading them yourself. You can change the location by simply entering any city. Read more: iHearNetwork: Reads Out Tweets In Your Area

DAR - or Digital Audio Recorder is a tool that lets you record radio broadcasts aired over the Internet. To start, simply browse through the list of radio stations to find the one you want. These are all actual radio stations that also stream their content online. Read more: DAR: Record Radio Broadcasts Aired Online

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Stop Dating Strangers: LinkedIn Meets OkCupid [INVITES]

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: Clique

Quick Pitch: Clique is a private dating site.

Genius Idea: Using friends' social networks to filter date prospects.
---------------

When the dating world plugged into the Internet, it largely catered to the classified-style dating that preceded it. Match.com, OkCupid, and eHarmony all facilitate meetings between strangers who might like each other. But the age-old method of meeting dates through friends was largely ignored by online dating sites.

Clique, which launched on Valentine's Day, wants to make that method its niche. On the invite-only site, only you, your friends and people connected to you by fewer than three degrees are visible. When you're browsing profiles, you can see how you're connected to each person, and your friends can make match suggestions for you.

Filtering online dating this way improves the experience, says co-founder and CEO Christy Purington. For one thing, it makes online dating easier.

"People spend hours and hours looking for people with similar interests on dating sites," she says. "Even if your interests are different, if you have a mutual friend, that's a filter already."

It also makes online dating a bit less creepy. After a class action lawsuit was filed against Match.com by a woman who was allegedly sexually assaulted by a man she met on the dating site, that's an advantage many are poised to appreciate.

Another convenient perk from the site's perspective is that users don't graduate when they successfully find relationships. They can set their statuses to "wingman" and continue participating as a matchmaker. Right now there aren't a lot of incentives for doing so other than the pure fun of matchmaking, but eventually, Clique will add rewards for active matchmakers.

Doing so could be one potential revenue stream. Purington says the site might give successfully matched couples the opportunity to buy a thank you gift for the friend who set them up, for instance.

Other potential revenue streams include pairing with a daily deal sites to suggest date-appropriate coupons or selling a "premium" feature that gives users access to their third-degree connections (these contacts are currently visible without charge).

One of the biggest challenges for this bootstrapped startup is creating value for users who don't have a lot of friends already on Clique. The private nature of the site necessitates its invite-only structure, as it ensures that at least one friend's connections are filling out a new user's potential dater section. Uninvited users can scan their Facebook profiles to see if they already have friends using the site who might send an invite.

Obviously, scaling past its current 300 users will be a bit more difficult with this invite-only stipulation. But if Clique can pull it off, it has potential to fill a rather vacant niche.

Mashable readers can sign up for a priority invite at this URL.
---------------

---------------
Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark
---------------

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

More About: Clique, dating, eHarmony, Match.com, okcupid, online dating

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The 7-Stage Evolution of a Socially Responsible Brand

Simon Mainwaring is the author of a new book, We First: How Brands and Consumers Use Social Media to Build a Better World (Palgrave Macmillan). Prior to founding We First, a social branding consultancy, Simon was a Nike creative at Wieden+Kennedy and Worldwide Creative Director for Motorola at Ogilvy. He blogs at simonmainwaring.com and tweets @simonmainwaring

For decades, the decision to be an environmentally and socially responsible company has been based on the bottom line: Would it be profitable? In general, companies have crunched the numbers and chosen shareholder profits over a sufficient commitment to invest in greater social responsibility. In terms of traditional accounting and the legal requirements of corporations, costs always outweighed benefits.

But it now seems that this equation is starting to lean the other way as brands recognize the potential financial and reputational advantages they can gain by engaging with consumers around the shared ambition of building a better world. We can see this already happening among some leading brands such as Pepsi, Google, Nike, Patagonia and Starbucks, who have all earned consumer respect for their involvement in some area of environmental or social responsibility related to their business.

How did this come about? In large part, it is because the payoff for corporate engagement with customers has risen dramatically as a result of social media. The new dynamics between brands and consumers, driven by social media, are proving to be a powerful impetus for change.

It begins with brands recognizing that, in the future, they must position themselves to win customers by offering them a vision of a better world and inviting them to help achieve it by co-creating the brand's story. As the brand's customers become loyal fans, they use their social networks to spread the word about that brand, driving even more new fans to join in. This dynamic may have its initial upfront costs, but it pays off in the end through an extended global audience of buyers and fans.

Transforming a brand into a socially responsible leader doesn't happen overnight by simply writing new marketing and advertising strategies. It takes effort to identify a vision that your customers will find credible and aligned with their values. The company must learn how to engage its consumers with authenticity and transparency, using social media to create a meaningful dialogue. Finally, it must beat back the forces resisting change, including opponents among shareholders and management fighting to preserve short-term rewards for themselves.
---------------

The Seven Stages

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The process of becoming a brand leader in the next decades will be an evolutionary one involving at least seven stages. Each stage is defined by its unique leadership style, brand vision, social media commitment and level of engagement with the brand's customer base:
Unsustainable corporate self-interest: This is where most organizations sit today. They donate to philanthropy or practice some type of cause marketing but they largely define their success in terms of monetary returns for shareholders.
Self-directed engagement: A growing number of organizations are moving up to this stage, recognizing that changing their social responsibility profile can earn benefits. But most of their outreach efforts at this stage are still done for image management in the public eye. They are still motivated mostly by self-interest and the desire to avoid bad publicity.
C-suite reflection: In this stage, the corporate leaders of the brand begin to reflect deeply on their vision for the brand. A few leaders among them will put together a proposal for the company's future based on fulfilling greater social responsibility benchmarks.
Consumer facing self-interest: At this stage, the brand begins moving toward an authentic commitment to socially responsible behavior. However, it still fails to make all of its consumer-facing outreach consistent. As a result, consumers (and employees) often experience a disconnection between what the company says it stands for and its actions, including its supply chain and the products and services it offers.
Self-directed reform: Here, a brand examines the details of its mandate its core values, purpose and consistency of its messaging. It starts making serious changes such as changing suppliers, imposing strict ethical standards and hiring new leadership to reformulate its vision. These changes are mostly unseen by the public.
Brand leader: At this stage, the corporation embraces the need to share stewardship of their brand with their consumers. It recognizes the need to be transparent, accountable, and authentic. The brand endeavors to become a pacesetter for others in its socially responsible behavior. Its employees rank it as a great place to work, watchdog groups give it high marks as a responsible company, and consumers hold it up as a leading purveyor of positive social impact, by talking about the brand in their blog posts, tweets, and across their social networks.
Brand visionary: In this final stage, the brand is well respected for carrying a strong, long-term vision of a better world that it seeks to bring to fruition. It quiets shareholders who clamor only for short-term profits. It conducts a regular dialogue with its consumers, who willingly co-create the brand's story, while being loyal fans of the brand and driving its profits. In achieving this brand visionary status, its customers form a global synaptic network that is always in support not just of its products but also the core values of the brand, which become meaningful in their lives.
---------------

The opportunity for many of today's companies to become true socially responsible brand visionaries is available, but only if they want it, and ask their customers for help. Indeed, if we consider the online reach of companies like Facebook and Twitter, the offline reach of companies like Proctor Gamble, Unilever, Coca-Cola and Walmart, and the fervent consumer loyalty that companies like Apple, Nike and Patagonia inspire, it's easy to imagine how a web- and social-savvy population could coerce these companies and any others who want to follow their example into becoming the leading global brand visionaries of the future.
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Interested in more Social Good resources? Check out Mashable Explore, a new way to discover information on your favorite Mashable topics.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, clu

More About: brand, business, charity, csr, MARKETING, noon-profit, social good, social media, social responsibility

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Does anyone in Silicon Valley care about Windows anymore?

Microsoft is today showing off pieces of the next version of Windows (we're all calling it Windows 8 ) but I'm wondering if anyone cares anymore about Windows in the tech enthusiast space.

Why do I say that?

Well, at nearly every tech industry event lately I've noticed an almost complete shift away from Windows-based computers. Here, take a look at a panoramic photo I shot this morning at the VMWare Cloud Foundry announcement. This room had only two PCs that I could see. The entire rest of the room was on Macs or iPads. Keep in mind that in this one room was a mixture of marketers, developers, executives, press folks, and hard-core geeks.

I noticed this same ratio at TEDx. At Web 2 Expo. At Stanford University events. At Facebook events. And other places.

Now, you could say "well, Silicon Valley is just weird and they all buy Apple stuff." But, note that VMWare is run by many former Microsoft executives (I met Charles Fitzgerald in the hallway, who is one of the smartest strategists I've ever met, and Mark Lucovsky was on stage this morning. He even joked about his former Microsoft role "I developed DLL hell at Microsoft" he said).

But I saw the same shift at LIFT in Geneva, Switzerland and LeWeb in Paris and while the World Economic Forum had more PCs in the audience than at VMWare, there were a TON of iPads.

Something is going on here, but why isn't it showing up in market share numbers?

Is this the new "tech divide?" Those who are passionate about tech are going to get Macs and everyone else is gonna get a PC because their boss probably bought one for them assuming that if you only do email, Excel, and Powerpoint that there's no need for you to have a Mac?

What does this mean for Windows 8?

When Steve Jobs noted that the iPad is ushering in a "post-PC world" I wonder if he knows something we don't: that early adopters, influencers, geeks, developers, and Silicon Valley insiders are going "all Mac, all the time?"

Are you? If you're still excited by Windows, why?

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(Founder Stories) Right Media’s Mike Walrath: “I Was Never Qualified For Any Job I Got In My Life”

Mike Walrath "was supposed to write novels." Instead, he got int digital ad sales, started Right Media, which became an online ad exchange that he sold to Yahoo in 2007 for $850 million. In this Founder Stories video, he answers some rapid fire questions from host Chris Dixon about startup advice, hiring, and investing.

"Don't try to solve a problem that you don't fully understand," he warns would-be entrepreneurs. He speaks from experience, having dabbled in the broken independent film industry after he left Yahoo. Now, the startup world is pulling him back in. He recently became the chairman of Yext, and is involved with some smaller projects as well.

Walrath admits, "I was never qualified for any job I got in my life." But the most important thing is to keep on learning. His No. 1 piece of hiring advice for startup CEOs is to figure put how fast a candidate can learn new things.

We'll post the other parts of this interview throughout the week. Check out previous episodes of Founder Stories or subscribe in iTunes.

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Michael Walrath

Right Media

Chris Dixon

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Ad.ly Versus Facebook: Something Doesn’t Add Up

Earlier this week we heard whispers that Facebook was clamping down on Ad.ly and Crowdrally — two services that let users post sponsored updates to their Facebook Pages. This is important, because the companies are monetizing Facebook Page feeds, which is something that Facebook presumably would prefer to do itself.

Inquiries to speak to both companies went unanswered.

Then, this morning, Ad.ly posted an update to its blog stating that it has "complied with Facebook's request to no longer offer celebrity endorsements on Facebook." A report on MediaMemo expanded on the news, and we've spoken to both Facebook and Ad.ly founder Sean Rad to get to the bottom of what's going on. The only problem: both sides are directly contradicting each other.

In a statement, Facebook says that Ad.ly has repeatedly violated its Terms of Service, and that the company has been "told many times" to stop:

We feel that it is important to take action when we see repeated violations of our Terms and activity that is misleading to our users and partners. Adl.ly was told many times that their activity with personal profiles was not allowed. They nevertheless attempted to circumvent the rules and were caught. We've officially told them to stop, they say they have, and we consider the matter resolved.

But what exactly were Ad.ly's "repeated violations"?

Ad.ly founder Sean Rad admits that the company created a single fake user profile — which is against Facebook's Terms of Service. But the reason why they created it sounds benign. Rad says that the service regularly posts updates to its celebrity clients' Facebook Pages, but that because of the way its system works, it sometimes runs into trouble with Facebook's API, and they're forced to ask their celebrity clients to re-authenticate with the application. Rad says they've spoken with Facebook's engineering team about getting a fix implemented.

In the mean time, Ad.ly came up with a solution. Instead of dealing with the app, celebrities can opt to bless Ad.ly's fake' user profile as one of their Facebook Page's administrators, which means the celebrity doesn't have to worry about it any more. Rad says that the company created this fake account because he didn't want to have personal accounts of employees associated with these celebrity Pages. This fake account isn't actually posting updates to users, it's just managing the client Pages. In theory, Ad.ly could just avoid this violation entirely by simply doing the same thing with a real' user's profile.

And, Rad says, "The fact that [Facebook] say they told us repeatedly about this is completely untrue. The only time they said anything about our personal profile was when they sent us the Cease and Desist. Every comment they've had before the C&D was positive all of our interactions were positive and often supportive."

I asked Facebook repeatedly if they could specify any of Ad.ly's other infringements, but they declined to comment further.

Either Ad.ly is being misleading and actually has committed further offenses, or Facebook has honed in on a minor policy violation and is using it as grounds to boot a service that could compete directly with its own monetization efforts. Unless Facebook comes back with something else I'm inclined to believe it's the latter — especially since we've confirmed that Crowdrally, which offered a similar service as Ad.ly, was also issued a Cease and Desist.

At this point it looks like Facebook is fine with celebrities using their Facebook Pages to post promoted updates. Just don't make a service that helps them do it. That's apparently Facebook's turf.

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Book a Better Hotel Room With Room 77

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: Room 77

Quick Pitch: Room 77 is a hotel room database and search engine that helps travelers find great rooms.

Genius Idea: Room Request Guarantee, a coming-soon feature that will let users secure their preferred room when booking at a partner hotel.
---------------

Years ago, Brad Gerstner, now the founder of hotel-search startup Room 77, would maintain a running list of his favorite hotel rooms on his BlackBerry. Friends got wind of the list and started asking for copies, and Gerstner started thinking about the larger problem, a problem of information asymmetry: Hotel front desks have all the information on rooms, while the consumer has nothing.

It took years and countless hours with Gerstner and friends walking through hotel hallways and gathering floor information for the full Room 77 concept to materialize into a functional hotel room database and search engine. Today, travelers can turn to Room 77 to get the run-down on nearly half a million hotel rooms in 18 different cities.

Why might a traveler want access to this data? For starters, any frequent hotel visitor knows that each stay can vary drastically depending on room size, bed quality, balcony or view. Consumers often demand higher floors or rooms with views to circumvent bad experiences; but most often, guests are slotted into rooms as hotel clerks or computer algorithms see fit.

Room 77 is designed to give would-be hotel guests access to a combination of hotel-sourced and people-sourced room information so that they can book better rooms.

The site and companion iPhone app [iTunes link] return "Room Cards" matched to user preferences things like high or low floors, view importance and elevator distance. When the user selects a hotel, rooms are ranked and the best matching rooms are returned accordingly.

The user can select an individual room to get more details about the room, see where its located in the overall floor plan, take a glipse at the actual view with images sourced from Google and read the Room Card to gain insight into bed type, room square footage and other factoids. At two pilot hotels the Grand Hyatt Seattle and the Hyatt at Olive 8 in Seattle Room 77 users can now also click a beta "Look Inside" button to see photos inside each room.

As it stands, Room 77s greatest shortcoming is it merely solves the information asymmetry piece of the problem; it does little to help the customer book the specific room he wants. Users that find the perfect room can, however, hit the "Request a Room" option for tips on how to book their preferred room number.

The startup recognizes this manual process is far from ideal, it's working on another pilot product it calls "Room Request Guarantee." "It's the equivalent of picking your seat on an airline," vice president of product Kevin Fliess explains.

Room 77 is in talks with hotel partners and is making Room Request Guarantee a priority initiative for the year, says Fliess. There's also a revenue-sharing aspect to the feature, as Fliess believes that users will be open to paying an additional room fee to secure the rooms that they want.

Room 77s greatest asset is its technology platform, Fliess says. The startup uses patent-pending technology to turn raw, unstructured data into digital blueprints for hotels in a matter of hours. The technology piece is crucial to ensuring that the data flooding in from users via the iPhone app, hotel partners and even startup staff members who continue to troll hotel hallways, can be seamlessly transformed into an elegant way for users to consume hotel room data.

San Francisco-based Room 77 raised $3 million in Series A funding in April and now has a 20-person team with four PhDs, several travel industry veterans, a few former Googlers and one ex-Facebook employee on staff.
---------------
Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark
---------------

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

More About: bizspark, crowdsourcing, room 77, spark-of-genius, startup, travel

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A Better Way to Find & Install Windows & Linux Apps

This post is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark as a new part of the Spark of Genius series that focuses on a new and innovative startup each day. Every Thursday, the program focuses on startups within the BizSpark program and what they're doing to grow.

In stark contrast to today's heavily-financed mega-startups such as Facebook, Groupon or Color, consider the unassuming and newly profitable Ninite, maker of a bulk software installation tool for Windows and Linux.

Ninite co-founders Patrick Swieskowski and Sascha Kuzins, the startup's only employees, run a lean operation out of a San Francisco-based office and have no interest in raising flashy amounts of venture capital. Instead, their focus is on being the easiest way for software geeks, regular folks, grandmas and even system administrators to get software.

"The most frequent feedback we get from users is, I love you,'" says Swieskowski.

The primary reason for the user-love is that Ninite gives them the ability to install dozens of applications with just a few clicks it strips out all the tedious navigation and unnecessary dialogs usually involved in the software installation process.

"This is way software downloads should be," Swieskowski says.

Users seem to agree. One and half years post-release, Ninite's site now sees 2 million pageviews each month.
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Second Time's the Charm
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Ninite's origins date back to early 2008, when Swieskowski and Kuzins launched BaseShield, a virtualization project for Windows that would run applications in secure containers.

The original idea and product had enough merit to graduate from Y Combinator and help the co-founders raise a small angel round. But the general public wasn't responding with the same fervor. "It was hard to package that up and sell it to users," Swieskowski explains.

After nearly two years of work on the original product, the co-founders switched to Ninite. The first iteration of the so-simple-it's-stupid software installer was released at just the right time in October, 2009 right before Microsoft released Windows 7.

"We saw a huge uptake from people. Within a week, we were getting posts on random technology blogs; within two weeks, we had 10,000 users in the beta."

And for good reason. The installer automates installs offscreen, always grabs the latest available version of apps, picks the most appropriate version and language edition for the user's PC, and auto-updates installed software upon re-run.
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Accidental App Curators
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As Ninite worked to simply the application installation process and give users a one-stop shop for picking and downloading great apps, its co-founders slowly became curators of the best Windows applications.

The Ninite site features dozens of hand-selected browsers, messaging, media-imaging and file-sharing applications, among other things; and Swieskowski and Kuzins go to great pains to ensure that there are no junk apps or scam installation add-ons.

The pair also solicit tips and requests from users, and Ninite has grown to become a powerful distribution mechanism for software titles.
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Quiet Simplicity
---------------

"We believe in simplicity," reads Ninite's About page. The words epitomize both the product and its creators.

Simple has its perks. Ninite became profitable a few months ago, roughly one year after releasing a for-charge Pro product aimed at IT professionals and super users.

Now Swieskowski and Kuzins are looking to shed the perception that Ninite is merely something nice to use when setting up a machine and hope to turn the startup into a destination that users return to frequently for single-app downloads.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, gbrundin
---------------
Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark
---------------

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

More About: bizspark, Ninite, software, spark-of-genius, Windows

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100 Mahasiswa Binus Bakal Jadi Content Provider

Sebanyak 100 mahasiswa Bina Nusantara telah digandeng Telkomsel untuk dipandu menjadi wirausahawan penyedia konten.

http://techno.okezone.com/read/2011/04/07/54/443662/100-mahasiswa-binus-bakal-jadi-content-provider

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Dukungan Jangka Panjang untuk "Start Up" Lokal

Microsoft Indonesia menyatakan berkomitmen akan melakukan program jangka panjang untuk mengembangkan start up lokal.

http://tekno.kompas.com/read/2011/04/06/2200318/Dukungan.Jangka.Panjang.untuk.Start.Up.Lokal

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Pemerintah Janji Bangun Lebih Banyak Inkubator

Pemerintah berkomitmen terus memberi dukungan terhadap perkembangan start up lokal di Indonesia khususnya di bidang ICT.

http://tekno.kompas.com/read/2011/04/06/22181234/Pemerintah.Janji.Bangun.Lebih.Banyak.Inkubator

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VC's, Stripper Poles and G-Strings

I bet that title got your attention. Now on to the serious stuff. Here's the next question/request which came up in regards to blog topics:

From a purely selfish standpoint, I'd like to hear about your views on bootstrapping vs. VC. I know it goes against your business model :-) but it must tickle you that to some, the sign of success is funding and not a successful business.

This is a good one. I love talking about this. It's kind of funny that the majority of people coming to me are obviously looking to raise venture capital and don't have this discussion with me. Yet, after getting to know people or having had worked with them, we end up having just the conversation mentioned above....usually over a beer. The question is always asked: "So, as a VC, would you go out and raise money from a VC?"

I have no idea whether any other VC would so openly say this but if you can avoid taking venture capital, do so at all costs. No, really, I am a VC and I truly mean this. If you can't avoid it altogether, push it out as long as possible until you absolutely need it. The later you raise money, the better your chances of having a higher valuation, giving up less of the company and keeping the most control. Venture capital screws everything up. It injects a layer of beauracry into your business that only government intervention could match. It also hijacks so much of managements' time which could be so much better spent with customers. Finally, it takes up equity which could be so much better put to use to buy your Ferrari after the exit (or your best employees' Ferraris). Most importantly, running around and telling everyone you're successful because you "raised venture capital" just labels you as an idiot! Success is in no way measured by the size of your financing round. In this game, only the exit and how much of that exit you owned matters!

So let me turn this around a bit before I talk myself out of a job. There are very specific reasons to raise venture capital. I've written about this in-depth before but in summary, here are the reasons you go out and raise money:

1.  You need the money and can't generate it via bootstrapping or sales and are convinced that you will eventually generate cashflows. 

2.  You have no clue how to run a business and have zero network but your product rocks, you're a tech whiz and you trust your lawyer (preferably he's related and already has money of his/her own....mom or dad being best, followed by siblings....caution: even brothers and sisters can be blood-sucking, milk-you-dry lawyers...mom won't do that). 

3.  You've already raised venture capital, built up and successfully sold a business and can "walk the walk and talk the talk" of a venture backed entrepreneur.

4.  Your product is Facebook/Google/Zynga or any of the other high fliers and you could probably get Tier-1 VC's to french kiss one another while pole dancing in g-strings on your conference room table because they want a piece of your pie!

Easy enough, right? All joking aside VC's and their money can turbo-boost your business. Good VC's have extensive networks of both potential customers, partners, employees and exit channels. They can help you get there far quicker if they are supportive, engaged players on your team. Narturally, there is necessary homework which has to be done to pick the right one. Sure there are tons of horrible VC's out there but there are great guys who add so much value that giving up a piece of your pie and losing some upside is truly outweighed by how much bigger they can help to make your exit. There IS a time to raise venture capital but it has to be well planned and make sense on it's own merit. Just raising venture capital because that's the thing to do nowadays makes zero sense.

Further, if you know how to deal with VC's, having either done it before or having the right advisors, makes the option far more interesting. VC's (the good ones) aren't out there to invest in your idea, pull one over on you and then reap all the benefits. I know for one that I as a VC don't want to run your company. I want YOU to run your company. Hence, if I invest in you, I also want to see that I can't easily screw you. Sure, I am trying to get the best deal for me but a fair deal. If you cave when negotiating with me, how good can you really be as the CEO of your company? At the same time, if you have totally unrealistic expectations of me, you better be Facebook or Groupon to expect me to accept crap terms. Otherwise, I'm moving on to the next deal where I see a far better chance of making money.

Like I already said, I am the first to say avoid venture capital. Bootstrapping is always the best way to build a business. Fund it yourself and make it profitable. This is the only guaranteed way that you'll own enough to either do exactly what you want strategically or to own as much of the upside as possible but it's hard. Growing to global scale obviously requires external financing nevertheless and if you have your eyes set on this, go find the right VC. Being successful and regional is great for some. Others want to own the global market. For each option there is a strategy. 

BUT forget the concept of seeing yourself as successful for having raised a round. This is not a measure of success by which anyone should be measured and don't let yourself get swayed by the numbers you see in the press. Those are just headlines like "VC's, Stripper Poles and G-Strings" to grab your attention.

 

 

 

 

 

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Google Yourself to See How Other People See You

The measure of an entrepreneur used to be the number of real friends claimed, but times have changed. Now the measure is how many hits one has on a Google name search, factored by some formula, like the sum of all positive messages minus 100 for every negative message. If you don't define yourself effectively, the Internet will do it for you in ways you never imagined.

That's the reason every good parent should be coaching their child from birth to avoid posting all the naughty things on social networks that can come back to haunt them later. To illustrate the point, here is a true story posted by Seth Godin a while back:

"A friend advertised on Craigslist for a housekeeper.

Three interesting resumes came to the top. She googled each person's name.

The first search turned up a MySpace page. There was a picture of the applicant, drinking beer from a funnel. Under hobbies, the first entry was, "binge drinking."

The second search turned up a personal blog (a good one, actually). The most recent entry said something like, "I am applying for some menial jobs that are below me, and I'm annoyed by it. I'll certainly quit the minute I sell a few paintings."

And the third? There were only six matches, and the sixth was from the local police department, indicating that the applicant had been arrested for shoplifting two years earlier.

Three for three.

Google never forgets.

It doesn't take much imagination to extend this example into your own business world, with potential customers and business associates checking you out. Can you imagine how many positives and how many years it will take to offset the impact of three negative posts entered by the entrepreneur herself in some spirited moments?

In reality, it's not just the Internet that captures everything we do – just look around you at the cameras in public buildings, banks, and everyone's cell phone. Remember the news with the videos of the latest celebrity exploits, or the cell phone photos that are snapped of every public and private activity and printed in magazines.

There's still a bit of the "wild west" left in the Internet, especially as it relates to social networking sites, so keep your wits about you as you explore and act. Don't be tempted into thinking that can safely relieve your tensions or aggressions in the anonymous massive numbers on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

In case you think the number of friends is a meaningful measure, remember that social networking has also totally destroyed the meaning of the word "friend." Teenagers have hundreds of friends on Facebook by the time they are sixteen, most of whom they have never met face-to-face, and other people collect thousands on LinkedIn. Many of the top Facebook users boast proudly of their "whale" status (5,000 friends or more).

I'm not here to argue whether it is right or not. Just recognize that it is what it is. So do your business networking and social networking with your eyes wide open. In fact, if you live your business and personal lives that way, you might actually hope that someone is looking over your shoulder, and catches you in a glowing moment. Be known for your strength. Then you can be happy that Google never forgets.

Marty Zwilling

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Conduit Acquires Web Application Platform Wibiya For $45 Million: Sources

Exclusive - No, Conduit was not acquired for a billion dollars or more by Google or Microsoft yet (although one executive suggested to me in a phone call this week that the company should, in fact, be worth about half of Facebook's valuation on the private market - meaning about $35 billion at present day - because they reach about half of the social network's audience).

We'll see about that.

Either way, what's really happening, according to solid sources close to the company, Conduit is in fact acquiring another Israeli startup in the Web app publishing and distribution space, namely Wibiya, and they added that the deal could close as early as next Monday or Tuesday.

According to those people, who are familiar with the negotiations, the transaction hasn't been signed off yet and the deal could still fall through, although multiple sources I've spoken with are confident the acquisition will close soon.

I hear that the purchase price is roughly $45 million, which means the deal would give a solid return to both Wibiya's founders and investors, who have pumped about $2.6 million into the company. Backers include Primera Capital, Yossi Vardi, Oded Vardi and Jeff Pulver.

If the acquisition closes, all 17 Wibiya employees are expected to join Conduit.

Wibiya essentially enables publishers to add a social layer to their websites, rendering said sites interactive, free of charge, in order to grow their audience organically.

It is similar to what Conduit does, although Conduit is mostly known for its Web toolbars and web application marketplace. Complementarity seems to be the key word, here.

From what I've gathered about the company, Wibiya currently partners with publishers of about 120,000 websites, many of which are small ones, although its customer base also includes the likes of TheStreet.com, Playboy.com and Glam.com. In total, Wibiya is said to reach 200 million unique users, although that is to be taken with a grain of salt in my opinion (even Twitter reportedly boasts less active users than that).

Conduit partners with companies like Zynga, Fox, MLB and Time Warner Cable to reach about 230 million unique users, according to its own count. I should note that the company does seem to do extremely well even though those numbers seem to be inflated: it has raised less than $10 million since its founding in 2005 and boasts about 250 employees today.

CrunchBase Information

Wibiya

Conduit

Information provided by CrunchBase

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/YduiH7YWF6Q/

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Entrepreneur Corner: Succession planning and napkin entrepreneurs

Here's the latest from VentureBeat's Entrepreneur Corner.

Demystifying the VC term sheet: Protective Provisions – Controlling a company is about more than having the most voting power. Attorney Scott Edward Walker breaks down protective provisions, which give investors a chance to veto or block certain corporate actions, regardless of the Board's vote.

Succession planning should extend beyond the C-suite – Sure your company might suffer if the CEO were to leave abruptly, but what about the person who runs your reporting systems? Jeff Diana, Chief People Officer at SuccessFactors, discussed the need to dig a little deeper when mapping out your succession plan.

Today's napkin entrepreneuers take to the Web – In days of yore, many a business was started by people scribbling ideas on the back of a napkin. Today, though, it's just as easy – and a lot more effective – to build a Web prototype, says serial entrepreneur Steve Blank.

3 strategies to achieve web start-up success – Software companies used to be able to rely on shelfware to reap their fortunes, but as the software industry has changed, that model has fallen by the wayside. Infusionsoft CEO Clate Mask gives three tips on how to find the same sort of success in the current environment.

Walking the fine line between goals and ROI – Is the rush to see a return on your investment (or that of an angel or VC) more important than a company's overarching goals? Serial entrepreneur Brent Constantz, founder of Calera and other firms, discusses  this in an Entrepreneur Thought Leader Lecture given at Stanford University.

Tags: entrepreneur corner

http://venturebeat.com/?p=252046

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How To Turn Google Into A Customizable Read-It-Later Service

You find a lot of interesting articles as you browse the web, but you don't always have time to read them right away. Read-it-later services like Instapaper and Read It Later both help solve that problem, but rather than signing up for yet another service, you can actually turn your Google Reader account into a personalized read-it-later archive.

Recently, bookmark-and-read-later services like Instapaper and Read it Later have become really popular. You bookmark articles that look interesting, they save the text and allow you to go back and read the piece at your leisure (and with nice type and formatting) from a variety of devices. I've even been using Instapaper myself, for reading articles later on my iPad. After reader ygolive tipped us off to Reader's save to Reader bookmarklet, though, I realized that a few simple tweaks can turn Google Reader into a really great, cross-platform, super customizable dump for interesting articles.
Why Would I Want to Switch?

If you're already using something like Instapaper or Read it Later, you might wonder why you'd want to switch. You can already save articles you discover, strip them of all their formatting, and even read them when you aren't connected to the internet. While we think services like Instapaper and Read it Later are pretty darn cool, using something like Google Reader has distinct advantages over the other services scattered about the net.

The biggest advantage to using Google Reader is that you don't need to sign up for an account on another service, or download a separate app to your phone, and you can stick with something that's already integrated into your workflow. Chances are, you're probably already discovering a lot of those articles in Google Reader, and doing a good amount of reading in it too--so why send those articles to an external service when you can just leave them in Reader? It already strips them of ads and formatting, and any Google Reader app worth its salt provides offline access for reading on-the-go. With just a bit of tweaking, you can add any article from the internet to your starred items, whether it's in your RSS feeds or not.

It's also worth noting that Google Reader's popularity offers some serious customization options. You have a ton of different apps to choose from on Android or iOS, as well as some nice userscripts and browser extensions that let you tweak it to look however you want. Also, while Read It Later and Instapaper have some nice sharing features, Google Reader has them too--and you probably know more people on Reader than you do on the others. Of course, if you don't like the sharing features, the aforementioned scripts and extensions can help you get rid of them entirely, which is another really nice perk.

Lastly, something I've always found really cool about Reader is its podcast and video integration. If you listen to a lot of podcasts or watch a lot of web video (like Lifehacker's brand new show on Revision3), Google Reader handles them beautifully. Just subscribe to their RSS feed in Reader as normal, and you'll be able to listen or play them right from the Reader interface, turning Reader not only in to a read-it-later service, but a watch- and listen-later service too. It's nice to have all my media in one place to check out when I have some free time.
How to Set it Up

The main idea is that instead of using an external service, you just use your Starred Items list in Google Reader as your list of articles you want to read later. As you're perusing your feeds, starring an article is super easy--just hit the "s" key on your keyboard and keep moving along. Of course, that alone doesn't make Reader the perfect read-it-later tool. With these extra tweaks and tools, though, you can seriously increase Google Reader's read-later potential.
The Bookmarklet

The great part about services like Instapaper is that you can save articles from anywhere around the 'net with a bookmarklet. It's a lesser known fact, however, that Google has a similar bookmarklet available for reader--in the form of the "Note In Reader" bookmarklet. Just head to Reader, go to the Notes section in the sidebar, and drag the bookmarklet to your bookmarks bar.

Now, whenever you find an article you want to save for later, just hit that bookmarklet to save it in Reader (if you want, you can even select specific text on the page and send only that text to Reader). Make sure to uncheck the "add to shared items" box if you don't want to share it, or install this user script to uncheck it by default. Once it's in Reader, just star it as normal and you'll have it in your new "read later" list.
Getting Full RSS Feeds

One of the problems you may run into as you star things from within reader is that some feeds are truncated--that is, they only give you the first paragraph of the article, after which you need to go to their site to read the whole thing. Instead of clicking through to the article and then sending it back to Reader with the bookmarklet, use a service like previously mentioned WizardRSS or previously mentioned Full Text RSS Feed Builder to turn them into full feeds. They'll even turn aggregators like Hacker News into full feeds, which is great.
Customizing Reader's Appearance

Reader may strip your articles of all their annoying ads and formatting, but depending on your tastes, you may not like the font or colors Google Reader uses. One of the great things about its popularity is that there are a ton of ways out there to customize how it looks. Previously mentioned Helvetireader is a great option, though my personal favorite is Minimalist Google Reader for Chrome, which lets you tweak nearly any element of the interface to your liking. Searching Userscripts.org for specific tweaks you want (like a simple font change to make it look more like Instapaper) will produce quite a few results, too.
Mobile Devices

The last thing, of course, is to make sure you can read all your articles on your mobile device. Again, Google Reader's popularity comes in pretty handy here--because it's such a widely used tool, there are tons of different RSS apps out there that will sync with Google Reader, so you can pick the right one for you. Here are a few of my recommendations:

Reeder for iOS: If you're looking for a good-looking, offline-capable, sharing-ready Google Reader client for your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch, you can't go wrong with Reeder. Not only does it sync all your starred items, shared items, and feeds with Google Reader, but it's just really good looking and easy to read. It will also cache all your feeds and their images for offline reading if you plan on going somewhere without an internet connection--which means you're never without your articles. Trust me, it's worth the few bucks it costs.

gReader for Android: There are quite a few quality Google Reader clients for Android, but as far as this setup is concerned, the best is gReader. It gives you easy access to your starred items, caches all your articles for offline reading, and will even let you stream podcasts from any RSS feeds containing audio files, which is especially convenient

Google Reader Mobile for any platform: If you don't like one of the above apps for some reason, or you aren't using Android or iOS, Google's mobile site is actually pretty good. You won't get offline access, but as long as you have internet you can just head to http://reader.google.com and access your starred items from the "Tags" section. It isn't quite as great as some of the above apps, but it will still work pretty darn well if you're on a less flexible platform like the Kindle.

It may not be as quick and easy to set up as something like Instapaper or Read it Later, but you end up with a bit more choice as far as the apps you can use and the customizations you can make. Plus, you have one less service to sign up for and one less password to remember--which is always nice. If you give this method a shot, let us know how you like it in the comments--and be sure to share your favorite Google Reader apps and customizations, too.

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See Also:
Get Android 2.3 Gingerbread On Your Droid X Or Droid 2 Early
How To Turn On Google +1 Now
How To Make Your Blogger Look More Like Tumblr

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