Startups & Entrepreneurs

Calling all sports enthusiasts (and people who should know a bit more about sports): there is a new tool on the market worth checking out. DailyTailgate is a refreshingly simple and witty email newsletter that features hot sports topics as well as personalized sports information in your inbox every morning. Each newsletter features a mix of quotes, facts, witty editorial, schedules, results, and analysis giving you the conversation fodder you need to avoid awkward silence during work lunch or appearing clueless in the eyes of your friends.

I had a chance to ask Michael Corcoran, DT's Editor-in-Chief, a couple of questions about the newsletter:

CM: I want to know more about sports. Why should I read subscribe to DailyTailgate?

You should subscribe because it gives you a quick shot of sports right to your inbox every morning. It's free, informative, relevant and fun. And you can customize it to give you scores and news of your favorite teams.

CM: How does DT fit into my daily digest of ESPN.com, Yahoo! Sports, and other sports news websites?

Well, we aren't a website for one, and you don't have to go looking for us, we come to you. We're not trying to deliver a comprehensive epic about the world of sports each day. Instead, we give you a dose, and do it in ways that will make you laugh and give you some unique insights and useful info to talk about with your friends who are into sports.

I'm not a sports fanatic, but I'm definitely a casual fan. What I like about DailyTailgate is that it gives you just enough to stay in the know about what matters. If you're the type of person that scours ESPN every free minute you get at work then this newsletter is probably not for you. But if you'd like to be able to shoot the shit with your friends and coworkers or be able to contribute to the mid-game conversations this football season, then do yourself a favor and take the two seconds necessary to sign-up for DailyTailgate

Facebook just announced that they've acquired FriendFeed. Although, Facebook already has a lot features that FriendFeed has, I suspect that the acquisition has more to do with the technology and live stream feed. Right now you have to manually update the feed on Facebook, which is a huge hassle. FriendFeed's is live and doesn't need to be.

FriendFeed also has a powerhouse team of ex-Googlers who likely know how to scale this type of technology and already have it built out. Sometimes its more cost effective to buy a technology rather than redevelop it yourself. That seems to be the play here.

If Facebook is able to enhance their feed, it'll give Twitter more of run for their money. It'll also help Facebook aggregate user data and activity from other applications from across the web. It begs the question, will Facebook kill Twitter? 33% of people from our previous poll believe that Facebook will kill Twitter. 54% believe that Facebook won't kill Twitter. What do you think?

What other applications can Facebook acquire to enhance the shareability of user activity?

Here is Facebook's Press Release:

PALO ALTO, CALIF.—August 10, 2009—Facebook today announced that it has agreed to acquire FriendFeed, the innovative service for sharing online. As part of the agreement, all FriendFeed employees will join Facebook and FriendFeed’s four founders will hold senior roles on Facebook’s engineering and product teams.

“Facebook and FriendFeed share a common vision of giving people tools to share and connect with their friends,” said Bret Taylor, a FriendFeed co-founder and, previously, the group product manager who launched Google Maps. “We can’t wait to join the team and bring many of the innovations we’ve developed at FriendFeed to Facebook’s 250 million users around the world.”

“As we spent time with Mark and his leadership team, we were impressed by the open, creative culture they’ve built and their desire to have us contribute to it,” said Paul Buchheit, another FriendFeed co-founder. Buchheit, the Google engineer behind Gmail and the originator of Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto, added, “It was immediately obvious to us how passionate Facebook’s engineers are about creating simple, ground-breaking ways for people to share, and we are extremely excited to join such a like-minded group.”

Taylor and Buchheit founded FriendFeed along with Jim Norris and Sanjeev Singh in October 2007 after all four played key roles at Google for products like Gmail and Google Maps. At FriendFeed, they’ve brought together a world-class team of engineers and designers.

“Since I first tried FriendFeed, I’ve admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO. “As this shows, our culture continues to make Facebook a place where the best engineers come to build things quickly that lots of people will use.”

FriendFeed is based in Mountain View, Calif. and has 12 employees. FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being as the teams determine the longer term plans for the product.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not released.

Here are several other articles on the story:

First Interview After Acquisition With FriendFeed And Facebook

Facebook Takes FriendFeed To Take On Twitter

It’s not what you know or who you know, but who knows you. Susan RoAne

Having a strong network is important in the business world. But, it's even more important if you aim to be an entrepreneur. Having a strong network is only the start, though. Entrepreneurs should perpetually be working on growing their network. You never know what new contact can help you take your business to the next level or introduce you to someone in media who can get your business more exposure. The reasons go on, as you can imagine.

An undergraduate at Simmons College recently asked me how I started and gradually began to know a lot of people in the community. I explained to her that its quite simple and networking events are a great way to start. As a college student myself, I've come to realize that this is the perfect time to start, even if you aren't starting a company. 

Here are 7 networking tips to help you get started in Boston: Continue Reading...

We may well discover that the business failure we avoid and the business success we strive for do not lead us to personal success at all. Most of us have inherited notions of ‘success’ from someone else or have arrived at these notions by facing a seemingly endless line of hurdles extending from grade school through college and into our careers. We constantly judge ourselves against criteria that others have set and rank ourselves against others in their game. Randy Komisar

As we profiled before, Babson's Summer Venture Program produced 17 undergrad startups and 6 MBA startups. With the growing trend of college startups and entrepreneurs, it begs the question; why are these students starting companies?Continue Reading...

Here are some interesting articles from around the web worth reading:

Harvard Professor Slows The Speed of Light to 38 MPH!

Lene Hau has already shaken scientists' beliefs about the nature of things. Albert Einstein and just about every other physicist insisted that light travels 186,000 miles a second in free space, and that it can't be speeded-up or slowed down. But in 1998, Hau, for the first time in history, slowed light to 38 miles an hour, about the speed of rush-hour traffic.

Two years later, she brought light to a complete halt in a cloud of ultracold atoms. Next, she restarted the stalled light without changing any of its characteristics, and sent it on its way. These highly successful experiments brought her a tenured professorship at Harvard University and a $500,000 MacArthur Foundation award to spend as she pleased.

[Via: Harvard Gazette]

Eco-Docks Designed to Float in NYC's Nasty Rivers

A professor and student team have designed a network of modular floating docks to harness clean energy for New York City.

The eco-docks would generate the energy by harnessing tidal power from the city’s rivers; they should also help to add much needed green space above the dirty waters.

[Via: CleanTechnica]

Startup Bets That Social Networking Will Spur Carpool Craze

A free Facebook application launched by a pair of entrepreneurs to help college students bum rides at Cornell University has expanded into a viable Silicon Valley startup, counting as clients more than 30 college campuses, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Cigna Corp.

Zimride's business is simple: It connects drivers with riders looking to carpool to class or work. More broadly, it tries to capitalize on a social-networking niche at Palo Alto-based Facebook Inc. to help avoid greenhouse gas emissions and get cars off the road.

[Via: Inernational Herald Tribune]

The Little Secret of Web Startups

Consumer startups are tough. You have two basic choices: A paid offering or a free offering (or freemium). If you charge people a penny, you’ll turn off the bulk of your visitors. If you offer free services, you might grow to be the next YouTube, Wordpress or Facebook. Most entrepreneurs are not risk-averse and the dream of being big is just too appealing and the majority of us take the “free-route”.

Read on for lessons learned as Marcelo Calbucci, founder of Sampa, shuts down its doors.

[Via: TechCrunch]
 

We just posted a competition for the undergrad Babson College entrepreneurs from the Venture Summer Program. Here is a list of the graduate students and their startups. Vote in the poll at the bottom for the startup you think has the most potential. We'll give the winner 3 months of free advertising on College Mogul.

Here are 6 MBA startups from the program:  Continue Reading...

The following are 17 undergrad startups from Babson College's Summer Venture Program who presented on Demo day last Wednesday to venture capitalists, angel investors, and friends. The 10 week program helps undergrad and MBA students develop their companies by providing mentorship, shared resources, and campus housing.

Below are brief summaries of all the companies from the undergrad entrepreneurs. I've set up a poll at the bottom for everyone to vote on what startup they think has the most potential. I'll give the winner (with the most votes) 3 months of free advertising space on College Mogul.

Vote on the following Babson Startups: Continue Reading...

The second meetup of Ultra Light Startups Boston, the "Economics of Cleantech" went very well and we attracted around 100 attendees. The panel included 4 panelists from Resolute Marine Energy, GreatPoint Ventures, SunPoint, and the Northeastern University Centure for Renewable Energy Technology.

Here is some advice they offered for entrepreneurs and the cleantech industry:

Ben Jabbawy
Associate, GreatPoint Ventures

1. "Assemble a gold plated management team who are able to vet the technology and facilitate quick adoption." Commercializing new technologies is difficult, so its important to bring in industry experts, scientists, and engineers to gain feedback and understand how the business model will fit into the larger ecosystem.

2. "Start with a need in the marketplace opposed to finding a technology and then finding a need later." They took this approach with one of their recent portfolio companies, AltaRock. While doing research, the GPV team discovered that drilling oil holes is very expensive. Each one costs about $10 million and takes 4 months to drill. "There's gotta be a better way to do that." Explained, Ben. They discovered a solveable problem first and then went to universities and researchers to see if anyone was working on a new technology that could be applied to reduce costs.

3. "Always choose experience over attitude when building your team." Although, GPV works with young entrepreneurs, too. They primarily strive to build teams of experts that have many years of experience in the field or market that the startup is entering. Young entrepreneurs usually have a positive and strong attitude in terms of persistance and work ethic, but they should always look to bring on team members that have experience to balance the equation.

4. "Find an investor who is really going to help you with your first company." Continue Reading...

Streetcanvas is bringing the concept of crowdsourcing to Japan. The Harvard Business School startup launched a couple of days ago and can best be described as a "Threadless for the Japanese market." Their e-commerce company hosts ongoing t-shirt design competitions that enable the crowd to vote and choose the best design. Winning designers get to see their designs put into production and sold exclusively on the website.

Threadless spread like wildfire in the US because it provided consumers with a new model and experience of designing, choosing, and purchasing clothing that matches their interest and styles. Although, I don't know too much about the Japanese market, I do know that they have a booming art scene. Anime characters, pop prints on luxury labels and eclectiv fashion styles are all popular. However, the co-founders explain that there are still many "captivating, but unreconized artists and art with the aesthetic, culture, and detail peculiar to Japan." One of their goals is to enable these artists with a platform to communicate and gain recognition both in local and international markets.

Crowdsourcing can produce very attractive and effective business models for several reasons. The first being that it enables the consumer to get involved in the actual design of the product, fostering a sense of ownership and pride for the product that would otherwise be lacking in a traditional pre-packaged product. Since the community chooses the desirable product, or design in the this case, the platform is able to match demand and supply more effectively. For example, every one of Threadless' t-shirts have sold out. What other company can boast that type of success with all of their products. (O.K. Apple comes close...but, there's not many.)

Here's our quick interview with one of the co-founders, Oren Mor. Continue Reading...

At the beginning of the decade, 1 billion people didn't have sufficient clean access to clean water. - World Health Organization

Did you know that it cumulatively takes 10 liters of water to produce one sheet of paper? Or, 91 liters of water to produce 1 pound of plastic? Generally speaking it requires 80 liters of water per dollar to produce any industrial product. You would also think that it would take 1 glass of water to produce 1 glass of wine. But, that thought process doesn't include the incremental amounts of water that go into producing the grapes, everything in between production, and the the incremental amounts of water in other processes required to store or ship the wine.

It's a problem I never thought of until I met Warren Anderson at the latest Ultra Light Startups event. He's a Harvard graduate student working on a startup called Hydrolosophy. They're building software that crunches algorithms to compute the total amount of water it takes to manufacture different kinds of products. By tracking, analyzing, and measuring water consumption through production, companies may be able to save big bucks. Their goal is to "reveal the truth about water consumption in America and around the world, by creating disruptively innovative applications aimed at providing cost savings solutions to businesses that rely upon water as an interal part of their product life-cycle."

A growing need for accessible clean water.  Continue Reading...