Both Sides of the Table
DECEMBER 16, 2010
I sit through a lot of presentations. It’s usually people wanting to raise money and/or persuade me of something. Many of these are not as effective as they could be. 1. Understand Personality Types – One of the benefits of working for a big company (Accenture) was that we had lots of speakers come in and train us in topics like leadership, creativity, presentations, strategy, etc.
socalTECH
DECEMBER 16, 2010
Shop.com , an online comparison shopping website with operations in Pasadena, has been acquired. Market America , an Internet marketing firm based in Greensboro, N.C., announced the acquisition Wednesday, but did not reveal any financial terms. According to Market America, it will continue to maintain Shop.com's Pasadena offices, along with Shop.com's Monterey headquarters.
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InfoChachkie
DECEMBER 29, 2010
A friend once told me about a soccer game in which the opposing team deployed a frustratingly effective strategy. Every time they scored, their Captain ran around the field yelling, “tied score, tied score!” He continued to do this, despite the fact that they were beating my friend’s team by several goals. The Captain’s message was clear, “Ignore the score and play as if we are tied.
SoCal CTO
DECEMBER 1, 2010
I continue to collect great content that is the intersection of startups, products, online and technology. It turns out that I missed October but here are some previous posts in this series: Top 30 Startup Technology and Product Posts for September 2010 Top 40 Startup Posts for August 2010 Top 30 Startup Posts for July 2010 Top 30 Startup Posts in June 2010 Top 29 Startup Posts May 2010 Startup CTO Top 30 Posts for April 16 Great Startup Posts from March This month there are some amazing posts.
Advertiser: Aggregage
Office leases are one of companies’ largest expenses, and if your whole team is working from home with no clear end in sight, you may be wondering what to do about your lease.
Berkonomics
DECEMBER 6, 2010
Use stock options and warrants to pay for service only rarely. Earlier, I stated that stock options are the currency of early stage business. This truth is obvious when a start-up has no cash. For this insight, we will assume a business is perhaps well beyond start-up and growing, but that cash is tight, used for growth and for working capital as earned.
SoCal Tech Calendar
DECEMBER 10, 2010
Thursday, December 16, 2010 -- SoCalBio Holiday Dinner. Come to enjoy an evening of networking and good food in a relaxed environment; and learn about new bioscience industry developments in Southern California.
Southern California Tech Central brings together the best content for technical professionals in Southern California from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
socalTECH
DECEMBER 6, 2010
Think your company is popular on Facebook? Think again. Burbank-based Walt Disney reported Sunday that it has just surpassed one hundred million fans across its network of Facebook pages. According to Disney, those fans are spread across more than 200 official Disney brands, property, and character pages, which the firm has been creating on Facebook since August of 2009.
InfoChachkie
DECEMBER 9, 2010
Community Organizer Saul Alinsky categorized people into three classes; (i) the Haves, (ii) the Have A Little, Want Mores and, the (iii) Have Nots. He wrote Rules For Radicals to instruct, “…the Have Nots on how to take it away” from the Haves. Mr. Alinsky preached that wealth was relatively static. In Alinskyland, if you were a Have Not, your only alternative to attain wealth was to take it away from a Have, preferably with the assistance of Government-sanctioned coercion.
Tech Zulu Event
DECEMBER 18, 2010
So nice we had to do it twice! We are pleased to announce that Chris Van Dusen will be joining the TZ writing crew. With a knack for helping others understand what/how to use all things in the digital realm, and get down to how it can best fit you or your company, Chris is here to give you information on what you need know. Visit TechZulu for full story.
Berkonomics
DECEMBER 9, 2010
This insight seems obvious to most anyone. But it is a fact that business insurance is one of the more poorly managed mitigation of risk in small and some medium sized corporations, often because of failure to assign the responsibility to an individual or department, and sometimes just from the willingness to bet against the event and save cash. Business package policies are inexpensive and rather comprehensive tools that should be contracted by all companies with any assets to measure and prot
SoCal Tech Calendar
DECEMBER 8, 2010
Tuesday, December 14, 2010 -- Venture Funding in Green Technologies. LAVA. LAVA special event focused on Green Tech companies and Green Tech investing. There will be an extra session from 9am -10am for attendees that will focus on green start-ups and the introduction of the Green LAVA special interest group, following the traditional panel session. Moderated by John Babcock, Partner, Rustic Canyon Partners.
Both Sides of the Table
DECEMBER 20, 2010
It surprises me how many really smart people I meet still doubt the power of Twitter. It seems the urge to be a naysayer of Twitter is really strong for some. I think some of this stems from the early days of Twitter when it was presumed that it was a technology to tell people what you ate for lunch. Twitter never seemed to really take the offense in PR and marketing.
socalTECH
DECEMBER 15, 2010
Among one of the fastest growing industries--despite what has been a stagnant economy--is Internet advertising, which has continued to grow strongly over the past two years. One of the firms poised to take advantage of that growth is Pasadena-based OpenX (www.openx.org), which develops one of the most widely used ad serving solutions available. For today's interview, we spoke with Tim Cadogan , CEO of OpenX, to hear more about the firm's growth on the strength of Internet advertising, and what t
InfoChachkie
DECEMBER 29, 2010
A friend once told me about a soccer game in which the opposing team deployed a frustratingly effective strategy. Every time they scored, their Captain ran around the field yelling, “tied score, tied score!” He continued to do this, despite the fact that they were beating my friend’s team by several goals. The Captain’s message was clear, “Ignore the score and play as if we are tied.
Startup Professionals Musings
DECEMBER 4, 2010
I’m convinced that people who have fun at work are more innovative, as well as happier. I don’t have any big scientific studies to prove this, but in my considerable business experience, I haven’t seen many successes come out of a group of fearful pessimists or unhappy people. As I was looking through the literature, I did find evidence that many strong business leaders, like John D.
Berkonomics
DECEMBER 17, 2010
This is one that early stage CEO’s are almost universally unaware of. Most every state requires that any company with employees be covered by a policy of insurance against claims by workers for injury on the job, or worker compensation insurance. Many states has privately owned but state-overseen state insurance funds for this purpose, and of course a number of private companies offer such insurance alone or along with business package policies.
SoCal Tech Calendar
DECEMBER 10, 2010
Thursday, December 16, 2010 -- CommNexus Presents:Managing a Crisis in the Age of Social Media. The way people find out about breaking news has changed significantly in the past several years. From real time Twitter updates, to eyewitness news to iReports, how media outlets source and broadcast stories has changed as well. First-hand accounts from everyday people involved in an incident are not just relayed through the media, they are posted directly to the world through social media outlets suc
Both Sides of the Table
DECEMBER 27, 2010
Yesterday I wrote about how to talk to investors about your competitors. In short, acknowledge they exist, be transparent about strengths & weaknesses and use your differences to talk about how you want to position yourself in the market. But forget talking about them, how should you actually treat your competitors? Conventional wisdom in most companies is that “the competition is the enemy&# – it’s the rallying cry to dig deeper, get more features out the door, issue pres
socalTECH
DECEMBER 30, 2010
All this week, we are sharing the opinions of some of the top influencers in Southern California's high tech community. We asked the same five questions of a variety of top technology entrepreneurs, investors, and others, to hear what they're thinking about, and are sharing it here over the next two weeks. We last shared the thoughts of John Babcock at Rustic Canyon Partners.
InfoChachkie
DECEMBER 9, 2010
Community Organizer Saul Alinsky categorized people into three classes; (i) the Haves, (ii) the Have A Little, Want Mores and, the (iii) Have Nots. He wrote Rules For Radicals to instruct, “…the Have Nots on how to take it away” from the Haves. Mr. Alinsky preached that wealth was relatively static. In Alinskyland, if you were a Have Not, your only alternative to attain wealth was to take it away from a Have, preferably with the assistance of Government-sanctioned coercion.
Both Sides of the Table
DECEMBER 5, 2010
This blog post originally appeared in serialized form here on TechCrunch. This post has a bit more than the serialized version, but if you prefer an even shorter version I created the ADAH version , which is < 50% the length. I recently spoke at Caltech at the Caltech / MIT Enterprise Forum on “the future of social networking,&# the 30-minute video is here and the PowerPoint presentation is here on DocStoc ).
Both Sides of the Table
DECEMBER 26, 2010
Competition. Unless you’re Microsoft selling an OS for a PC you probably have some. And even then Microsoft has substitute products as anyone who has taken Econ 101 will tell you. So if you’re raising money – from angels or VCs – you’re going to have to address the question of whom you’re competing against. And the reality is that if you have no competition it will likely be perceived as a negative, not positive.
Both Sides of the Table
DECEMBER 6, 2010
This past October I was honored to be invited by Steve Blank to speak at Stanford for their Enterprise Thought Leader (ETL) series. The topic I chose to speak about was “lessons on starting a company&# but I created the sub-title in class “a Silicon Valley heresy&# since my goal was to slay many of the myths I believe exist right in the heart of Silicon Valley!
Both Sides of the Table
DECEMBER 13, 2010
One of the wisest people I worked with in my career was Ameet Shah. Ameet always had the quietly reflective view of “why things were&# that always came from a unique angle that I hadn’t considered. He taught me, amongst other things, the benefit of “ top down thinking &# that changed the way I analyzed markets, companies and people.
Both Sides of the Table
DECEMBER 14, 2010
I was recently speaking with some founders about their fund raising process. They had received a term sheet from a VC and were wondering whether to work with this firm. I personally had three separate data points from entrepreneurs who took money from the firm that said “never again.&# I really try to stay out of the middle of these things so I softly said to the team, “maybe you should contact these companies and see how their experience went?
Both Sides of the Table
DECEMBER 5, 2010
This blog post originally appeared in serialized form here on TechCrunch. This version is the shorter, ADHD version. If you came here via a direct link you might want to check out the more detailed full version on my blog, which is here. Social Networks: Past, Present & Future. I recently spoke at Caltech at the Caltech / MIT Enterprise Forum on “the future of social networking,&# the 30-minute video is here and the PowerPoint presentation is here on DocStoc ).
Both Sides of the Table
DECEMBER 24, 2010
Like many of you, for me this was the year of the unsolicited eCards from random people I barely knew. Let’s be honest, much of this has become spam. I’m not the Grinch. I’m not anti holiday spirit. But if you ARE going to get into it then you ought to do it right. Make it count. Like the team at First Round Capital always does.
socalTECH
DECEMBER 16, 2010
Santa Monica-based Campus Explorer , which provides an online resource on universities, colleges, student loans, housing, and more to students, has raised $5M in a Series C funding round, according to a source near the firm. The funding came from Vicente Capital Partners, OCA Venture Partners, and Origin Ventures. Klaus Koch led the investment for Vicente Capital.
socalTECH
DECEMBER 9, 2010
Altadena-based Melanoma Diagnostics , a developer of technology for the diagnosis and prognosis of malignant melanoma using genetic markers, is in a deal to sell its technology to Myriad Genetics , a publicly traded provider of molecular diagnostics products. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.Myriad said it will gain the right to commercialize all tests derived from Melanoma Diagnostics' technology, in exchange for both upfront fees and contingent payments.
socalTECH
DECEMBER 16, 2010
Woodland Hills-based ReachLocal , the provider of online marketing services for small and medium sized businesses, said today that it has launched a new product called ReachCast. According to the firm, the new product provides Web presence management to its customers, helping customers to drive their online search discovery, manage their reputation, and also manage social media marketing.
socalTECH
DECEMBER 8, 2010
Pasadena-based Cramster , the online homework help site started by Aaron Hawkey, Robert Angarita and Kaveh Golabi, has been acquired by Chegg , Chegg announced today. Financial terms of the buy were not disclosed. Chegg said the acquisition will add to Chegg's textbook rental and course planning services. Cramster is an online community of users interested in discussing homework; getting homework help; and practicing for tests.
socalTECH
DECEMBER 17, 2010
El Segundo-based Internet Brands said Friday that the acquisition of the firm by private equity firm Hellman & Friedman has closed. The acquisition, which had originally been announced in September, was worth $640M. Internet Brands said that the firm will cease trading on the NASDAQ Global Select Market at close of the market today. JMI Equity also invested in Internet Brands as part of the sale.
socalTECH
DECEMBER 16, 2010
Not satisfied with the firm's plans to provide suborbital space tourism flights, Mojave-based Virgin Galactic said Thursday that it is now supporting work by Sierra Nevada Space Systems and Orbital Sciences, on commercial space vehicles to support orbital flights. Virgin Galactic said it is hoping to allow fare-paying passengers to experience safe, orbital space flight.
socalTECH
DECEMBER 17, 2010
Thousand Oaks-based Amgen , via its nonprofit foundation, the Amgen Foundation, said Friday that it is giving $1.8M to the Teach For America effort. According to the two, the funding will go towards increasing the number of math and science graduates who are joining Teach For America's teaching corps by 2013. Teach For America helps advance math and science in America's underserved public schools.
socalTECH
DECEMBER 16, 2010
Santa Monica-based GotCast , the online casting site headed by Alec Shankman, said today that it has launched a new social media campaign with Mercedes-Benz. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Mercedes-Benz posted the campaign today, saying it is looking for four teams of "Twitter-savvy" auto enthusiasts, who will race from New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Tampa to the Super Bowl in Dallas, to win a Mercedez Benz 2012 C-Class Coupe.
socalTECH
DECEMBER 10, 2010
Santa Monica-based GoodReads , the online book discussion community run by Otis Chandler, is seeing a nice uptick in its traffic after the launch of Google's eBook store Monday. GoodReads is prominently featured on all of Google's eBook pages, with reviews from GoodReads users showing up under the various titles available under Google's bookstore. Google launched its eBook store Monday, offering up titles for electronic book readers, the iPhone and iPad, the Nook and Sony readers, as well as And
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