October, 2013

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Framework Benchmarks Round 7

TechEmpower

'Happy Halloween fans of web development frameworks! After a several-month hiatus, Round 7 of our project measuring the performance of web application frameworks and platforms is available! Round 7 includes many new framework test implementations contributed by the community. They are Falcore, Grizzly, HttpListener, PHPixie, Plain, Racket-WS, Start, Stream, and Treefrog.

Framework 507
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How to Avoid a Common Product Mistake Many Teams Make

Both Sides of the Table

'I’ve been involved with technology product design in one form or another for nearly 25 years and seen one mistake consistently repeated. The single biggest mistake most product teams make is building technology for what they believe the user would want rather than what the actual end-user needs. From the experience in my earliest days of designing products for Windows and OS2 machines in the early 1990′s I developed a product philosophy, “Design for the novice, configure for t

Product 408
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More Features Kill More Startups Than Lack of Money

Startup Professionals Musings

'“Scope creep” (or feature creep) is an insidious disease that kills more good startups than any other, especially high-tech ones, and yet most founders (who may be the cause) never even see it happening. This term refers to the penchant to add just one more feature to the product or service before first delivery, just because you can. The instigators are all well-intentioned – executives talk to potential customers who “must have” a few more things; or the technical team edicts some “technicall

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[Infographic] What Does It Cost To Run A Startup?

YoungUpstarts

'Planning to start your own technology startup? That’s great, but do you know how much it will cost to hire the talent that would make take your idea from concept all the way to a market-ready product? And even if you do, did you know that where you’re based also matters when it comes to doing up the numbers? It’s true – it’s cheaper to start a company in some countries compared to others.

Cost 248
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Building Healthy Innovation Ecosystems for Your Projects

Speaker: Nick Noreña, Innovation Coach and Advisor, Kromatic

Every startup and innovation project exists within an ecosystem that either helps or hurts that project. As innovation managers, we need to keep a pulse of that ecosystem and make sure we're helping those innovation projects we're managing every step of the way. In this webinar, Nick Noreña will walk through an Innovation Ecosystem Model that he and his team at Kromatic have developed to help investors, heads of product, teachers, and executives understand how they can best support innovation in

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A programmer commiserates with journalists

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

'I feel for the journalist, because I see in them the same geekery that inhabits my fellow software developers. They’re different in detail but identical in kind. They work in packs, but the individual has something to prove. They labor in parallel, joining together just before release. They enjoy the artful skill of their fellow producers, and genuinely want success for the person sitting to their left, but secretly want to demonstrate their own superiority, and find more fulfillment in t

Salary 234
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Lean Startup at Scale

Startup Lessons Learned

'Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference. As Lean Startup methods have been used now for a number of years, we’ve become increasingly interested in how companies use them to sustain growth. That is, once you’re no longer a small company and you have some success, how do you execute and continue to grow through innovation? Next Tuesday, October 22 at 10a PT, we’ll take a look at this advanced entrepreneurship question.

Lean 167

More Trending

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Putting an End to the Dark Ages of Local Businesses

Both Sides of the Table

'It’s stunning to me how quickly we take for granted certain conveniences in our lives that go from Eureka to minimum expectation. Take OpenTable. In the old days we used to call a restaurant to book. The hostess worked from 4-10pm so you had to call during these hours. Between 7-10 she was busy seating guests so had to put your on hold. After hours there was the answering machine.

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7 Myths About Ethics Which Will Hurt Your Business

Startup Professionals Musings

'New entrepreneurs tend to focus only on getting the product right, and assume that the right culture and ethics will come later simply by hiring good people. In fact, they need an early focus on developing their moral compass, as well as setting the right ethical tone. Building an ethical business is more than just compliance and meeting legal requirements, and it has big paybacks.

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Freelancing is the new normal: oDesk and the future of the workforce marketplace

The Next Web

'In conversations about freelancing and online marketplaces for remote contract workers of the tech industry, the name of oDesk floats up pretty often. Founded in 2005, the company has since delivered more than $1 billion from employers to freelancers. According to the last stats provided by oDesk itself, the company has 4.5 million registered freelancers who have worked 35 million hours in total, as well as 900,000 clients who have posted 1.5 million jobs. oDesk claims that it dominates the m

Russia 151
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Why I don’t like the LTV metric

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

'This is the fifth article in a series on novel ideas for SaaS metrics, which started with The unprofitable SaaS business model trap , COC: a new metric for cancellations , The mistake of 1/c in LTV , and SSEBITDA: Steady-state profit metric. Metrics summarize tons of processes, causes, and effects into a single number. It’s a two-edged sword.

Metrics 244
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The Entrepreneurial Enterprise

Startup Lessons Learned

'Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference. How can established companies benefit from implementing Lean Startup? To answer that question, we hosted a webcast conversation earlier this week with Eric Ries, Brant Cooper, and Patrick Vlaskovits. We’d like to share a few highlights and invite you to join the ongoing conversation by posing questions for Eric, Patrick, and Brant in the comments to this post.

Lean 167
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Accelerating Technology Change and Continuous Learning

Feld Thoughts

'At dinner last week, my long time friend Dave Jilk (we just celebrated our 30th friendship anniversary) tossed a hypothesis at me that as people age, they resist adopting new technologies. This was intended as a personal observation, not an ageist statement, and we devolved into a conversation about brain plasticity. Eventually we popped back up the stack to dealing with changing tech and at some point I challenged Dave to write an essay on this. .

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How Netskope is changing the way enterprises adopt the cloud

Lightspeed Venture Partners

'The past few years have been an incredibly exciting time to be an enterprise investor. We have seen the rise of the cloud, the shift away from PCs to new mobile computing platforms, and the emergence of Big Data and Analytics as a core enabler of business agility. With these trends as a backdrop, we are in the early innings of a massive redirection of enterprise IT budgets towards new technologies and architectures.

Cloud 162
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10 Ways Self-Promotion Drives Entrepreneur Success

Startup Professionals Musings

'Too many entrepreneurs I know still believe that that their great idea will carry the startup, and they may even minimize their own value, especially if they have introvert tendencies. Yet most investors agree that the “idea” is worth nothing alone, and it’s the entrepreneur execution that counts. That means that selling yourself is more important than selling your idea.

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How many cofounders should your startup have?

The Next Web

'Backblaze CEO Gleb Budman embodies the entrepreneurial spirit. He started his first business at age 15 and ran it until he went off to college at UC Berkeley. When Gleb was in business school at Berkeley he founded NetRelevance – his professors liked his business plan so much that they used it in the Haas School of Business as a teaching tool. Two more entrepreneurial ventures later, Gleb cofounded online backup provider Backblaze to help consumers affordably, automatically, and safely back up

Cofounder 143
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Search: Not Provided: What Remains, Keyword Data Options, the Future

Occam's Razor

'In late 2011, Google announced an effort to make search behavior more secure. Logged-in users were switched to using httpS from http. This encrypted their search queries from any prying eyes, and kept from being passed on to websites the users visits after seeing search results. This led to the problem we, Marketers, SEOs, Analysts, fondly refer to as not provided.

Search 156
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Speaker Lineup for the 2013 Lean Startup Conference

Startup Lessons Learned

'Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference. Between webcasts and interviews, we’ve been gradually introducing some of the speakers who are appearing at this year’s Lean Startup Conference. Now we’re ready to announce the full lineup , along with a special deal, explained below. There are some speakers on this year’s roster whom you''ve heard of before and who who deliver great talks every time out—people like Marc Andreessen , Steve Blank , Reid Hoffman, Chris Dixon and Ke

Lean 152
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No More MBOs

Feld Thoughts

'I am so very tired of MBO-based bonuses in startups. I knew the concept of MBOs pre-dated my time in business school, but I couldn’t remember where they came from. Wikipedia reminded me – it’s another Peter Drucker creation from The Practice of Management. I’ve only worked in what could be considered a “big” company for 18 months (1993 – 1995) and that was the company (AmeriData) that bought my first company (Feld Technologies).

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Twitter Link Roundup #198 – Small Business, Startups, Innovation, Social Media, Design, Marketing and More

crowdSPRING Blog

'Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account , I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about logo design , web design , startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!

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How Do You Know If Your Copy Is Any Good? (My 4 Step Process For Copy Testing)

ConversionXL

'For the sake of argument, let’s say you know the basics of copywriting. Blah blah, write a compelling headline , know your audience , be persuasive , find your unique selling proposition , keep copy clean, blah blah blah. At one point, this advice was great. But from where you’re sitting, “write compelling headlines” isn’t helpful anymore, is it?

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How to grow your company from the first few fans to making $10k a month

The Next Web

'Anthony Bosschem is the founder and head of Darwin Analytics. You can contact Anthony on Twitter, where he is @AnthonyBosschem. Relationships are key to succeeding in business. Before our company even had a product, we acquired our first customers just by selling our ideas alone. But what happens after you gain your first few followers? If you don’t act fast, your believers will go away, so we wanted to get to $10,000 monthly recurring revenue as fast as possible.

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Solar power heading towards cost parity with fossil fuels

The Equity Kicker

'The declining cost of solar power is one of the biggest reasons that the folks at Singularity University are optimistic about the future. You can see from the chart above that the cost of generating 1W has fallen below a dollar for the first time and is now or will soon be at grid parity (grid parity is the average cost of all inputs to the grid). Having reached grid parity the use of solar should soar and cost should fall further as more money is invested in the technology.

Cost 136
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Best Of Both Worlds: Mixing HTML5 And Native Code

mobile.smashingmagazine.com

'Smashing Magazine. Menu Search. × Search. × Smashing Pages: Smashing Books. Smashing Library. Smashing Events. Job Board. Categories: Coding. Design. Mobile. Graphics. UX Design. WordPress. Books. Library. Workshops. Job Board. RSS. Facebook. Twitter. Newsletter. Search. Coding. CSS. HTML. JavaScript. Techniques. Design. Web Design. Typography.

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mHealth in the Era of Obamacare

VC Cafe

'mobile health is taking off in Israel. Guest post by Levi Shapiro* The Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) represents the most systemic, transformative change in over 40 years to America’s largest economic sector: healthcare. This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for mobile and digital startups to disrupt an inefficient industry. Even the government (CMMI- Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) predict health expenditures will continue to outpace economic growth, jumping 7.4% in 2014 to

Azure 133
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Selecting Your Investors

OnlyOnce

'Selecting Your Investors. Fred Wilson has been a venture investor and director in Return Path since 2000, first with Flatiron Partners and then with Union Square Ventures. We’ve been through a lot of wars together. In a couple of weeks, he and I are team-teaching a class in Entrepreneurship at Princeton, and the professor gave us the assignment of writing two pairs of blog posts to tee up discussion with the class.

Valuation 133
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Three Weeks to Money: How long a seed investment should really take

This is going to be BIG.

'Some financing rounds seem to go really fast. Others drag on for months and months. The problem with dragging it on is twofold--. a) The entrepreneur is distracted from doing what they need to do--i.e. running the business. b) There really isn''t any more actual information to pour over--it''s just a lot of thinking and talking about the same things over and over again.

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What to expect before accepting the offer to become Engineer #1 at a startup

The Next Web

'“It kinda sucks to be engineer #1.”. That’s what a couple of my friends – engineers at Google and Bloomberg who have been following the rise of startup culture with intrigue – told me recently. They were referring to non-founder engineers, most commonly the first hire for technology businesses. Often difficult to get, the first engineer sets the tone for the rest of the development team.

Engineer 129
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5 UX Hacks That Can Immediately Increase Revenue

ConversionXL

'Managing shopper experience for medium-sized eCommerce businesses presents a lot of opportunities for conversion testing, and the ability to see real and immediate revenue results when tests are successful. My favorite conversion tests are those that can be abstracted from the specific website audience and applied to larger populations of online shoppers.

Revenue 124
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10 Predictions About the Future of Ecommerce

mashable.com

'Mashable. Mashable. Sign in. Like. Follow @mashable. see more > Search. Social Media. Tech. Business. Entertainment. US & World. Lifestyle. Watercooler. Jobs. More. Channels. Social Media. Tech. Business. Entertainment. US & World. Lifestyle. Watercooler. Jobs. Company About Us Licensing & Reprints Archive. Contact Contact Us Submit News Submit a Bug.

eCommerce 108
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Building a High-Tech Startup Team

Business Plan Blog

'Aligning the Startup Team Strategy with the Capitalization Strategy. The single most important factor to raising capital for any tech startup is the management team. This is true for early stage funding as well as venture capital funding. A bonafide team is the assurance that the idea can be executed and that the business can scale when the time is right.

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The 5 Questions That Determine Your Business' Value

Growthink Blog

'The biggest aspiration of most entrepreneurs and business owners today is to grow and then sell their businesses. And why shouldn''t it be? Selling your business creates more multi-millionaires than any other endeavor. The key issue however is this: are you growing your business the right way, and are you focusing on the right things? You see, when it comes time for buyers to appraise the value of your business, they might find different things to be important than you do.

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5 SEO Action Steps You Can Take Today

Duct Tape Marketing

'5 SEO Action Steps You Can Take Today written by John Jantsch read more at Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing In a recent blog post I wrote about the new realities of SEO. For the most part that post revealed how the shifting form of search into a less content and more context driven world requires site owners and SEO professionals to think differently about how they approach search engine optimization.

SEO 77
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Startup spaces: How to design your startup office for a productive workforce

The Next Web

'If you look at some of the latest startup offices, there seems to be a competition to who can have the coolest ping pong tables, kitchen, and big TVs displaying real time data. But are they essential to office productivity and culture? We spoke to some of the hottest startups to hear their experiences and tips for building a space that welcomes productivity, creativity, and keeps employees happy.

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Conversion: The Most Important Internet Metric of All (Revisited)

abovethecrowd.com

'Over 13 years ago, in March of 2000, I wrote a blog post titled “ The Most Powerful Internet Metric of All. ” The key thesis was this: if an Internet company could obsess about only one metric, it should be conversion. No other metric so holistically captures as many critical aspects of a web site – user design, usability, performance, convenience, ad effectiveness, net promoter score, customer satisfaction – all in a single measurement.

Metrics 93
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Deal Selection in Venture Capital

Rob Go

'Source, Select, Win. Those are the three activities that all VC’s do. Ask 10 VC’s which of the three is most important, and I think at least 9/10 would say “Source” If you don’t see the best opportunities, there is no way selection and winning (both winning the deal and helping the company win) will produce the best returns.

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Creating And Pitching A Product At Startup Weekend, Investing In Startups Via Angel List, And How To Gain Exposure For A New Project

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak

'Subscribe to this Podcast in iTunes. In this week’s podcast episode on the Walter and Yaro show (still yet to be named!) we review Walter’s hectic weekend putting in long hours at a startup event. He was part of a team that came third in a competition to create a new product, pitch it and even find customers for it, … Read the rest of this entry » The post Creating And Pitching A Product At Startup Weekend, Investing In Startups Via Angel List, And How To Gain Exposure Fo