All posts by moore - 74. page

LocalGuides presented next. This is such a fantastic idea, I’m envious. You know the little slips of paper that someone puts in every wedding invitation, with information about local hotels, hotspots and wedding location information? Well, LocalGuides lets you do this on the web and share it. You can be as detailed as you’d like (adding images, etc), and you can share it with other folks or not. They monetize it by providing links to businesses in your area.

I created my own localguide to Boulder easy classic rock climbs. The interface is very web 2.0–there’s no save buttons–when you move off input fields, they are saved. The signup was a bit unclear–you have to activate your account via a link sent in an email. That’s standard practice, but I saw no notice of that.

If I were a listing real estate agent, I think that a localguide would be a tremendous complement to a virtual tour.

[tags]cool tech,localism[/tags]

Someone from Share Your Look spoke next. Basically, a YouTube for the fashion industry. You can upload photos of your style and folks can comment. They also aggregate fashion blogs. Development is done in Romania, and images are checked for obscene content in Thailand, so it’s a real distributed company.

When asked about the business model, the speaker replied (I paraphrase): we have a long and complicated business model, and I’d be glad to talk to you afterwards about this. That smelled a bit of The Underpants Gnomes but they already have designers using the site as a lead generation tool, so I am guessing there are a number of possible ways to monetize the site.

[tags]fashion,youtube[/tags]

Andrew Hyde talked next, about Startup Weekend. This was an event in Boulder on July 6-8, where folks came together to build an entire startup. 68 folks attended. They created a full on S-corp, revised ideas from 50 to 10 to 3, and decided upon some kind of survey tool. The product did not quite launch. They had no business plan, but did write an executive summary. Andrew plans to expand this to other cities (London, etc). There will be another one in Boulder in 6 months.

Several folks asked what the benefit was in signing up for this, especially as the product did not launch. Andrew stated that the main goal of Startup Weekend was to meet other folks “that can kick ass” and to grow your network.

I don’t doubt it was a pressure cooker environment that smoked out some quality people, but I’m not quite convinced that a weekend with no firm monetary goals at the end is the best way to find folks who can succeed. I don’t know, I’ll have to keep my eye on it, and perhaps give it a go in December.

[tags]startupweekend,startups[/tags]

Don Dodge spoke first, and gave a short history of his career; he’d been through a number of ‘name’ startups, including Altavista, where they invented multimedia search (searching images, video, etc), Napster, and Groove. He is now in the Emerging Business division at Microsoft, and has two roles. First, he communicates with VCs and lets them know where Microsoft is investing, and, more importantly, not investing. This lets the VCs make wiser choices about their portfolios. Second, he assists startups in dealing with Microsoft, including introductions to technical, marketing and sales resources, depending on where the startup is in the business cycle. He only deals with companies that are $10-15M in revenue, after that they get passed along to account managers. Don also mentioned the Empower program, which lets startups get boatloads of Microsoft software for $375 (Joel has talked about this program too). On a final note, Don mentioned that Microsoft had acquired 35 companies in the last 24 months, and that they preferred to acquire companies in the $30-50M revenue range, doing interesting innovative things.

I thought it was very interesting that Microsoft now makes it clear to VCs where it plans to invest–that helps to lessen the fear that a startup is merely doing market research for Microsoft. Robert Reich, the guy from Me.dium that helps run the Meetup, put in a plug for Microsoft and said that they had been a pleasure to work with.

[tags]microsoft,startups[/tags]