Y Combinator’s Startup School Event
March 26, 2007 | 2 Comments
Wish I hadn’t missed this event.
Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) says to only hire young employees:
“Young people just have simpler lives. We may not own a car. We may not have family.” In the absence of those distractions, he says, you can focus on big ideologies. He added, “I only own a mattress.” Later: “Simplicity in life allows you to focus on what’s important.”
Paul Buchheit (Google employee #23 and Gmail creator) says to “seek out risk-taking opportunities where they can learn”. (That makes me think of any young entrepreneurs out there that have the ability to code — and have the ability to spend the summer in Boulder. If you can get accepted into TechStars, I think you’ll find the experience priceless.)
… and more tips from others. Read the article by VentureBeat for sure.
My Favorite Ideas for Ringside Startup to Use
March 26, 2007 | 9 Comments
These are some hand-picked ideas from my Techquila Shots vault that I think are the best and most practical (given the anticipated budget) for Ringside Startup.
Please contribute to Ringside Startup if you’d like to see the journey of one of these ideas turn into an actual business — and hear the guidance of seasoned start-up experts during the journey.
LikeLoveOrHate.com
Simply put, this idea revolves around connecting people online via similar interests. Right now, if you go to a user’s MySpace page or blog, you may see a list of music, movies, books that they like — but that doesn’t tell you much (plus it’s time consuming).
I’m proposing a simple website that asks you questions to gauge what you like/love/hate — in an easy interface where you just click to answer questions, while we compile all of that data into a back-end database. Then, users place a widget on their blog/MySpace/etc and when another user (that has a profile with us) visits that user’s webpage, the widget instantly compares the visitor with the user being viewed, and tells the visitor what shared interests they have and whether they have a high compatibility (similar to Last.fm — see image provided).- “Vyous” (views, you — “your views”)
Last I knew, YouTube was getting 40k video uploads a day — and millions of people watching. Right now, YouTube is a big cluster — there’s a handful of categories. Personally, I don’t publish videos, because I don’t even know what to create a video on. My idea is that the next step in UGC videos (user-generated content videos) is giving users a reason to create a video.Everyone has opinions — my favorite pizza shop in Buffalo NY is going to be different than other Buffalonians. Just as my opinion on the new movie “Borat” will be different than others — or the parts that I loved the most will differ from others. Give people a reason to create video and I believe you could double those uploads per day. Goal: To become the largest source of original “opinionated” video, photographic, and contextual content on the web (globally). - Event Media Aggregation (Concerts, Sporting Events, etc)
People are taking tons of videos and photos with their cell phones and digital cameras these days at concerts, sporting events, weddings, etc. Right now though, there isn’t a single central source to find all of the media from a concert or sports game.This idea would create that central source — and allow people to specify if they’re attending an upcoming event, or attended a past event. They can submit URLs to Flickr photos, YouTube videos, etc — and they can also meet people that are going to an upcoming event, or find that person that they met at a previous event (but didn’t get their contact info). - Your Syndicated Chronological Life
A website that allows you to input all of your online user accounts and creates a public/private timeline of your life — thus, it will displays your latest Twitter updates, Last.fm songs played, blog posts, blog comments, Yelp reviews, etc. - Classifieds by Cell
Ability to easily record a video, or take photos, via your cell phone of items you have for sale. Typically, it takes too long to list an item on eBay or input it on Craigs List. This idea would allow you to pull out your cell phone, record a video, send it via your cell to us, and we’d call the user back using automated VXML technology to ask the user how much they want for the item, further detailed description, and a simple category selection.The whole process could take anywhere from 1-3 minutes per item. I expect there are tons of items in people’s homes that just aren’t worth it to them currently to post on eBay or Craigs List — and I believe for the millions of items listed on eBay, there are at least that many equivalent (if not more) that would be posted online if only it were simpler and took less time.
Please contribute to Ringside Startup if you’d like to see the journey of one of these ideas turn into an actual business — and hear the guidance of seasoned start-up experts during the journey.
Which one of these ideas do you feel has the most potential for “success”?
Ringside Startup Launches! 60 days to raise $20,000
March 25, 2007 | 24 Comments
I’m excited to announce the launch of Ringside Startup! The gist of the website is that I’m raising $20,000 from readers/sponsors — to enlighten everyone’s entrepreneurship education. With the contributions, I’m going to launch a web start-up (one of the Techquila Shots ideas) and blog the entire journey.
I have a bunch of advisors on-board (and adding more) who will be commenting on my posts to help educate during the process. Thus, you (readers) will get to see the entire process of launching a web start-up — from idea selection (readers will be polled to select which idea I develop) to programming development to launch to marketing, etc.
Contributor participation entitles you to vote on some actual business decisions — the first of which will be which idea that I’ve exposed via Techquila Shots will be the web start-up I build from the ground up. I will blog about this entire journey as openly as I can — taking you through the entire start-up process (beginning with incorporation — whether to be LLC or S-Corp Inc; in Delaware or NY) and providing feedback from VCs to Entrepreneurs along the way. My hope is that we’ll all learn quite a lot about the start-up process from this experience.
The goal is for entrepreneurs to learn from all the processes and obstacles I go through — and gaining insight along the way from seasoned professionals.
I have commitments for advisor participation from:
- Brad Feld (VC)
- Jeremy Liew (VC at Lightspeed Venture Partners)
- Susan Wu (VC at Charles River Ventures)
- Simeon Simeonov (VC at Polaris Venture Partners)
- Andrew Chen (Entrepreneur-in-Residence at MDV)
- Jay Parkhill (lawyer and co-author at Startup Review)
- Ryan Carson (seasoned entrepreneur, founder of DropSend)
- Fred Wilson (he’ll comment when he can, but is unable to commit that he’ll comment at all)
Of course at any point, any of them can remove themselves from this project.
More details are available at the FAQ. Feel free to read up on the advisor profiles and make your own contribution to help this project move forward.
I have posted my favorite ideas for Ringside Startup to use.
More Advisors Sought: I’d really like to add some more seasoned entrepreneurs. If you’re a seasoned entrepreneur, VC, or Angel that has been down the road with many start-ups — and you’re interested in helping to educate other entrepreneurs on the start-up process, please drop me an email.
I’m looking for 15+ seasoned “advisors / educators” for this project — not seeking any money from you, just hoping you’ll comment on various topics through-out this openly blogged start-up process when you feel you may have good input. My hope is for 2-3 comments (short or long) from you per week — but one per week would be better than none. You can drop-off at any point — your participation as an advisor/educator/expert is that your comments will be highlighted / featured in my posts.
10 Twitter Hack Start-Up Ideas
March 23, 2007 | 13 Comments
10 Twitter application ideas — with or without their API are below.
Be sure to throw some Google AdSense around any of these ideas to get a little monetization out of your project.
- digg interface — allow people to vote up their favorite twitters (which sometimes are favorite quotes or breaking news items).
- Mash ebay’s API (and ebay username) with twitter username — post new items a twitterer is selling as a twitter by that user.
- Techmeme of twitterers — tinyurl.com must be seeing tons of traffic increase, because every twitterer is using tinyurl.com URLs. Techmeme keeps track of what the tech blogosphere is blogging about — do the same for Twitter. Grab all the tinyurl.com URLs, convert them to their actual URLs, and see what websites everyone is truly twittering about.
- Timeline for each city — start storing the public timeline xml feed and allowing a user to input a specific city to see what’s been said lately by people that live there.
- RSS feeds of keyword specific queries — A Twitter search engine already exists (you could do the same by pulling all twitters from public timeline xml feed), but it should also be an RSS feed, so you can see who’s talking about something you care about (music bands, product, movie, sports team, city, etc).
- Twitter Tag Cloud — similar to above; start indexing the public timeline xml feed and see what everyone is talking about — overall, past 24 hours, past 1 hour, etc. User could input a Twitter username and see a specific user; or specific user and their friends; or just the friends of a specific username.
- Twitter users specify a blog / MySpace URL — start indexing those and tying people together based on their friends and followers. Input a username and you’ll see “spheres of influence” — or 6 degrees of separation. Maybe display where these people all exist on a map.
- My followers live where? I’d love to see a Google Map of all my followers — so if I’m going to San Fran for the weekend, I could hit someone up and say hi! (note: I’ll likely know where my friends are, but this day in age that might not be the case — so display them too).
- Categorization: Mash twitters up with some sort of directory of categories with content from those categories, and start an auto-categorization of twitters. Thus, if someone twitters about ’springsteen’ or ‘ratm’ or ‘bloc party’, then those are music-related.
- MyBlogLog copycat — a widget that people put in their webpage, which displays recent twitter visitors to their page. Also allows those people to quickly post a twitter about the webpage they just visited. List all twitter comments for that URL in the widget as well.
Twitter API Ideas - digg, categorization, MyBlogLog
March 23, 2007 | 3 Comments
As of now, Twitter is mostly used by the techies. But once this thing hits the MySpace crowd, I think it’s going to explode even bigger. People like to quickly notify the world what they’re doing — that’s what Twitter enables you to do.
News is breaking via Twitter, faster than news blogs. But how do you find this news — other than being a friend of some of the top news outfits?
Somehow these twitters need to start being digg’d (”ranked”) and categorized. Well, at least, that’d be nice. I’d love to see a techmeme of twitters.
Also, I could swear there was a search box on Twitter, but I can’t find it now. It’d be nice to setup an RSS feed on a keyword.
Also, categorizing by language.
Also, dating and friending — who’s in my hometown twittering away that shares common interests with me?
Would be nice to reply to these twitter users — a lot of twitterers tell you what they’re researching, or looking to buy, etc. Would be nice to reach-out to them someway.
You know MyBlogLog (one of my favs) — what about Twitter like MyBlogLog, where the avatars appear on your website if that Twitter user was on your website.. and allow them to twitter a brief message about the website (or specific URL — blog post).
What other mashup ideas do you have? My favorite thus far is TwitterVision — talk about mindless addiction.
START-UP SCARS: 10 Times I’ve Fallen On My Face
March 23, 2007 | 12 Comments
As a child, you learn that if you touch the hot burner, you’ll get burned — and definitely mentally scarred, if not also physically scarred. The same is true in starting a business — most times, if you do something and you get burned, you’re scarred for life and won’t ever repeat that mistake. Sometimes though, we have to touch the burner a couple times until it finally registers 
So here are some of my scars — and some overall background on my start-up experiences. Some were just business plans that were written, while others were full fledged businesses: Read more
Blogging a Web Start-Up with Expert Insight
March 22, 2007 | 2 Comments
Ringside Startup has officially launched.
Here are the basics on this endeavor:
I’m raising $20,000 in reader/sponsor contributions to launch a web start-up. Contributor participation entitles you to vote on actual business decisions — the first of which will be which idea that I’ve exposed via Techquila Shots will be the web start-up I build from the ground up. I will blog about this entire journey as openly as I can — taking you through the entire start-up process (beginning with incorporation — whether to be LLC or S-Corp Inc; in Delaware or NY) and providing feedback from VCs to Entrepreneurs along the way. My hope is that we’ll all learn quite a lot about the start-up process from this experience.
The goal is for entrepreneurs to learn from all the processes and obstacles I go through — and gaining insight along the way from seasoned professionals.
I have commitments for advisor participation from:
- Brad Feld (VC)
- Jeremy Liew (VC at Lightspeed Venture Partners)
- Susan Wu (VC at Charles River Ventures)
- Simeon Simeonov (VC at Polaris Venture Partners)
- Andrew Chen (Entrepreneur-in-Residence at MDV)
- Jay Parkhill (lawyer and co-author at Startup Review)
- Ryan Carson (seasoned entrepreneur, founder of DropSend)
- Fred Wilson (he’ll comment when he can, but is unable to commit that he’ll comment at all)
Of course at any point, any of them can remove themselves from this project.
More details are available at the FAQ. Feel free to read up on the advisor profiles and make your own contribution to help this project move forward.
More Advisors Sought: I’d really like to add some more seasoned entrepreneurs. If you’re a seasoned entrepreneur, VC, or Angel that has been down the road with many start-ups — and you’re interested in helping to educate other entrepreneurs on the start-up process, please drop me an email.
I’m looking for 15+ seasoned “advisors / educators” for this project — not seeking any money from you, just hoping you’ll comment on various topics through-out this openly blogged start-up process when you feel you may have good input. My hope is for 2-3 comments (short or long) from you per week — but one per week would be better than none. You can drop-off at any point — your participation as an advisor/educator/expert is that your comments will be highlighted / featured in my posts.
IM Bots: (Almost) Real-Time Blog Chat via IM
March 22, 2007 | 6 Comments
This post got me thinking about how you could integrate IM into blogs. Currently, if people communicate about a topic/post, they post a comment. Almost in real-time, others can be alerted of the new comments if they have the RSS Comments feed for the blog — or if they are using CoComment, or my blog is using ShareThis, which is a Wordpress plug-in that allows commenters to subscribe to the post and are emailed whenever someone posts a new comment.
IM on websites is tough. As a reader, I enjoy reading the discussions that take place via comments on blog posts. If IM (or live chat) started to really take-off within websites, I think some great discussion could be lost. However, if it’s used to Read more
IDEA #48A - Printed Volumes Of Your Online Reading
March 21, 2007 | 18 Comments
Avid Techquila Shots reader (and commenter! hint, hint) Colin Dowling had an idea that spurred from my Personalized Printed Magazines and Catalogs idea.
(FYI - This is what I always hope for when I make these idea posts — that it spurs thought in you as a reader and you get some other new idea. Feel free to email them to me and if I like them, I’ll post them with full credit back to you. Note: Your idea may then spur another idea by someone — and the chain keeps going, spurring new thoughts and ideas by all.)
His idea:
What about a printed book/volume that was published regularly for a subscriber (monthly, quarterly, annually, etc.) that was a compilation of all the text and image web content they had consumed. What if you could install software or a widget or a browser plug-in that tracked the pages you visited and extracted the text and images and saved them. Then, at the appropriate time, it printed them like a book complete with table of contents and index and mailed it to the user.
The user could even filter which sites he/she wanted tracked. So, I could choose to track Techquila Shots, TechCrunch, and Mashable and at the end of the year, get a big phone-book sized book with all the stories I’d read online printed in it, complete with pictures/images. While bookmarking and tagging solves this online, it doesn’t do much for accessing material offline without committing hard drive space to it. Furthermore, some files get purged from servers as time passes so more and more bookmarked links would become broken or the content would disappear all together. Having a printed archive would allow someone to say, “Honey, go grab the ‘web archive’ from 2007…I need to see what Steve said about rating videos because I know it was good but I can’t remember…”
I’ve been Read more
IDEA #48 - Personalized Printed Magazines and Catalogs
March 20, 2007 | 10 Comments
There is one main idea here, which I take in two different directions: magazines and catalogs. People still like having a printed material to read or browse through — and I don’t see this going away for quite some time.
The catalog idea relies around peer-to-peer (P2P) product recommendations. I’ve thought for years during the holidays, about how great it would be to look through a catalog of products that my friends recommend (with quotes by them as to why they recommend the products!), as well as recommendations from the people I admire. And/or a specific catalog of my friends’ wishlists, so that I knew what to buy for them.
I could either download the catalog as a PDF and print it myself, or I could click a button, spend a couple dollars, and have it physically mailed to me. In fact, I could setup having one physically mailed to me every couple weeks, or every month — with all new recommendations from my friends. Who doesn’t love getting something in the mail?
The next idea is Read more
