Five lessons experienced entrepreneurs have learned There’s certainly no shortage of successful young entrepreneurs in business today. We hear daily of fast growing startups from New York City to Silicon Valley, headed by CEOs such as Mark Zuckerberg, Andrew Mason and Tim O’Shaughnessy. These creative minds have demonstrated the power of youthful tenacity and innovation, combined with a sharp eye for business. Yet, in 2010, entrepreneurs aged 35 to 54 were responsible for over 50 percent of total new entrepreneurship activity in the U.S, according to the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity. Individuals aged 55 to 64 also made their mark, representing 22.9 percent of new entrepreneurs in 2010, compared to 14.5 percent in 1996. With their irreplaceable advantage of experience, perhaps those who are older and wiser have learned a few valuable lessons during the course of their careers. Follow-through is essential Build an enthusiastic and passionate team Balance is critical It pays to think like an investor Listen and learn
Citeulike: A Researcher's Social Bookmarking Service This article describes Citeulike, a fusion of Web-based social bookmarking services and traditional bibliographic management tools. It discusses how Citeulike turns the linear 'gather, collect, share' process inherent in academic research into a circular 'gather, collect, share and network' process, enabling the sharing and discovery of academic literature and research papers. What is Citeulike? Citeulike is a Web-based tool to help scientists, researchers and academics store, organise, share and discover links to academic research papers. It has been available as a free Web service since November 2004 and like many successful software tools, it was written to solve a problem the authors were experiencing themselves: 'Collecting material for a bibliography is something which appeared to require an amazing amount of drudgery....So, the obvious idea was that if I use a web browser to read articles, the most convenient way of storing them is by using a web browser too. Figure 1. Figure 2.
Armstrong’s Internal Memo To AOLers About The HuffPo Deal At midnight, AOL announced that it will buy the Huffington Post for $315 million. Below is the internal memo AOL CEO Tim Armstrong sent to all AOL employees (except us, they don’t trust us with anything) about the transaction. In between the corporate speak, he points out that a combined AOL and Huffington Post will have 117 million unduplicated unique visitors per month in the U.S., and outlines the new organizational structure with Arianna Huffington as Editor In Chief of all of AOL’s media properties, including TechCrunch. ——————– AOLers, We are taking another major step in the comeback of AOL. Co-founded six years ago by Arianna Huffington and Ken Lerer, The Huffington Post has grown to become an industry leader—one of the Web’s most popular and innovative sources of online news, commentary, and information. The Huffington Post is a strong influencer brand and it attracts a valuable audience, including a great focus on women’s content.
Plurk versus Twitter: They're Not the Same, and Here's Why Earlier this month, Plurk was discovered and has had social media addicts abuzz with the “new Twitter clone,” especially as a result of Twitter downtime. After using both closely, the comparison to Twitter shouldn’t even be the case. Plurk and Twitter are two entirely different beasts. Personally, I don’t even see the need to compare the two at all. The only similarity is a 140 character limit for posts — so Plurk is essentially a microblogging platform. Plurk: Real Nested Conversations Brought to the Microblogging Platform A few days ago, I noticed via Twitter search tool Summize that Aaron Brazell had been talking about me on his Twitter stream. This is where Plurk would have totally rocked the house. Do Plurk and Twitter really need to be compared? When it comes to a basis of comparison, nested conversations are probably the only aspect of Plurk that has brought it much success (save for the lack of downtime, though it does suffer some quirks here and there).
As Rummble’s CEO is ousted, the story of a European startup unravels Rummble, one the UK’s oldest location-based reviews and social network which actually pre-dated Foursquare, has had its CEO removed by the board and now faces a radical shift away from it’s consumer-facing service of four years towards a Business-to-Business future. What we know on the ground right now is that CEO Andrew Scott has departed the company; the existing staff remain in place and Rummble, while maintaining its web site and smartphone apps, is set to move forward towards a B2B strategy which is not white-label, but based on leveraging its core technology. Over the past week TechCrunch Europe has been delving into the story of why Rummble ended up in this situation, and where it goes from here. I have been covering Rummble for over 5 years. I had them pitch at startups events even before I joined TechCrunch and I’ve written about 45 posts mentioning them in the last three years. So I guess I feel I know the company quite well. So – to be blunt – what the hell happened?
Exclusive: Ad Tech Startups Banding Together To Take On Google And Microsoft As the online ad technology industry consolidates, it is becoming tougher for startups to stand out among the giants. The 500-pound gorillas like Google and Microsoft keep integrating in new technologies and selling themselves as a one-stop shop to ad agencies, publishers, and brand marketers. But a group of ad tech startups is in the process of creating a counterweight to all the consolidation by establishing a consortium for sharing data and agreeing on standard ways to interoperate. Details are still spare on the yet-to-be announced group, but here is what I’ve been able to find out from industry sources. It will be called the Consortium for Accountable Advertising. The four founding members are Cross Commerce Media (Stephen and Heidi Messer’s ad startup) , Clickable, MediaMath, and TARGUSinfo. Companies that join agree to allow their customers to share data. Image by txkimmers
Twitter: Make that almost San Francisco Twitter, the popular messaging site, may be growing out of its startup phase with a possible headquarters move to Brisbane, California, according to brokerage sources in the San Francisco Business Times. The company appears to have more than 175 million users, has sent over 25 billion tweets, and 100 million accounts added in 2010, according to statistics from Royal Pingdom. What do these numbers have to do with moving headquarters? Twitter is growing and with more than 300 employees it may be looking for more room. Twitter moved to its current location at 795 Folsom St., Suite 600 in San Francisco a little over a year ago and, according to the New York Times, it expanded from the sixth floor to the third floor in May. The article goes on to quote Twitter’s chief executive, Dick Costolo, as he predicted that Twitter will probably outgrow its 62,000 square feet around the spring of 2011 and need to take over new space in the building or move elsewhere.
ShopSocial locks down $1.2M for “commerce as a social service” The most recent project of BuzzLogic co-founder-Todd Parsons, ShopSocial lets users share and recommend products and services with their friends via display ads, commerce sites and fan pages. Founded last year, the nascent site — not to be confused with ShopSocially, which just secured funding in October — says it is building a platform that will merge advertising, commerce and social recommendations into a new take it is calling “commerce as a social service.” Currently operating in beta mode, ShopSocial also uses what it calls “merchandising windows” for brands, which allow secure transactions for things like group-buying or limited-period sales. The new platform will include buttons on display ads and product pages that users click to “share” deals that they particularly like on Facebook and other social services. In return, users will rack up reward points or special payouts like gift cards and future discounts.
The Number One Key to Innovation: Scarcity - Uri Neren - The Conversation How should an enterprise go about inventing something novel and useful? Is there a structured thinking process that reliably produces results? Believe it or not, at least 162 different answers have been proposed to that question. But only a small subset of these processes for inventing are based on hard evidence. So when it happens that these rigorously researched methodologies independently converge on a common factor — something they all find valuable in an innovation process — it’s pretty safe to assume that it really is important. On one level, this may not seem surprising. It’s almost as if the constraints coming from all sides have squeezed the advertising world so hard that incredible new things are starting to pop out of it. This is not merely a logical theory. How interesting, by the way, to note that Altshuller was one of the many intellectuals arrested by Stalin, so that TRIZ’s inventor himself developed much of his breakthrough approach in a Gulag.
Posterous Founder Leaves Startup, Goes to Y Combinator as Design Guru Posterous co-founder Garry Tan has bid adieu to his startup and is heading to Y Combinator, where he will serve as designer-in-residence. The move is something of a shocker for several communities, especially considering Posterous's aggressive marketing throughout 2010 and product roadmap. In a blog post, Tan wrote, "Effective today, I'm ending my day-to-day development with Posterous and moving into an advisory role. "Though my day-to-day may change, my faith in the team and the product is unchanged and unwavering. In his new role at Y Combinator, Tan will be acting as a sort of UI guru to the batches of early-stage startups and projects that come to the incubator. It's a similar position to those being created at a few VC firms in Silicon Valley; similar to EIRs (entrepreneurs- or executives-in-residence), the DIR works closely with portfolio startups, giving them world-class product direction and advice. However, what we're now unsure about is Posterous' future.
Startups Started By Former Yahoo Employees [Graphic] Oh Quora! You’ve done it again. This time with the utterly fascinating “What startups have been started by former Yahoo employees?” Inspired by the sheer scope of Yahoo defector startups (Hunch!