Startups

I've gotten bitten by the Drupal bug. I can't help it, but ever since I started working at Acquia, I've become obsessed. The open source software is straightup awesome and even compelled me to switch this blog over from WordPress to Drupal. With that said, I'm pretty excited to be attending my first Drupal meetup in Boston tonight. I've heard great things about the events and recommend going if you're a Drupal user, interested in open source, or looking for a new CMS for your website. If you're a startup, you may consider building your venture off open source to get it up and going fast while saving costs as an "Ultra Light Startup."

Drupal users will be able to present their websites and anyone can give a brief presentation on a topic of their choice, if they choose. We'll go over questions, module demonstrations, share marketing ideas for Drupal, and anything else that you may be interested in. After, the group will continue conversation over dinner. Myself, and a couple other members from Acquia, will be there as well, and will be happy to answer any questions about our services or what we're up to.

The meeting will be hosted by John Eckman, from Optaros (one of Acquia's partners), at 6:30 tonight on the 11th floor at 10 Milk St in Boston, MA.

Fun Fact: Dries Buytaert started Drupal while at school 7 years ago.

If Skoobit is the "Netflix for Textbooks," then WePay is the "PayPal for Groups." Their pitch is simple: "People frequently pool money and share expenses, which is not always so easy. WePay makes it easier, faster, safer and cheaper." Although the startup out of Boston College hasn't launched yet, its one that i'm watching closesly and you should too.

We've all been through the hassle of pooling money with a group of friends to pay for that ski trip, booze for the party, utilities, or rent for the house you're renting off campus for school. Thankfully, the concept doesn't just apply to college students, but anyone who is looking to collect cash from a group of friends. If they are able to alleviate this pain, then the model becomes very appealing due to the ability to easily generate revenue by taking a small percentage of each transaction. (The same concept that made PayPal so lucrative and valuable selling to eBay for $1.5 billion)

Marketing the service could prove to be fairly straight forward and simple, too. By partnering with real estate agencies, vacation planners, and similar businesses they can create multiple channels for viral distribution. Even by itself, the service is viral since one friend likely has multiple groups of friends that he or she hangs out with. Thus, word of the application could spread exponentially, similar to how Facebook took off. It would also be easy to create social network applications and host their own API. Startup Blog Cont. »

Below is a list of blogs that I read and what I consider to be "must reads" if you're an entrepreneur, looking to start a company, working in the tech industry, or looking to become a part of the startup world. While you can learn a lot from other people's mistakes and experiences, its likewise important to stay on top of emerging trends, technologies, and the latest companies that are springing up. Blogs are great for learning new cost saving tricks, finding resources, and keeping yourself inspired, too. I'm a blog addict and have put together this list that I've hand selected of some of the better blogs that I would recommend for startups and entrepreneurs. Enjoy! Startup Blog Cont. »

What do you do when you're pissed off? Just about everyone at somepoint or another has complained about something. I think people by nature love to complain and to talk when given the chance, whether its explicit or not, or to a willing or unwilling ear. For the most part, rants are great ways to blow off steam, and sometimes its hard to control that urge to tell your boss, professor, friend, or random irritating passerby how you really feel. Thankfully, the Internet brought about true anonymity. With the advent of blogs and websites, people can rant to a seemingly infinite audience with few or no repercussions. For instance, popular YouTuber Phillip Defranco is a great example of how someone used the internet to unleash frustrations. YouTube is one medium, and now you have another - FlameUp.com, started by John Xie from Babson, provides you with an anonymous arena to run your mouth dirty. As their motto goes, "Have an Attitude." Startup Blog Cont. »

The same way Hollywood breeds superstars and celebrities, the internet has quickly become a medium for people to gain their own fame, power, influence, and stardom. Just take Michael Arrington from TechCrunch, the rise of his popular blog landed him on Time’s 100 Most Influential People in the World list. Anyone can gain instant “stardom” or popularity over night if they post a hit video on YouTube. Then there are the founders and visionaries who build billion dollar companies while dozens of conferences, events, and tech parties have sprung to glamorize even the dumbest of startups. Virtual worlds, such as SecondLife, have even popped up giving rise to new microcosms and social environments that utilize the internet, computer screen, and 3-D representations of real life to facilitate communication and interaction between people around the world. No matter how you look at it, the internet has helped form a new ecosystem.

Sarah Austin, a student and entrepreneur at Parson, seeks to cover this new micro fame on her blog Pop17.com where she calls herself an online lifecaster and video journalist. She describes Pop17 as a two-to-three minute daily exploration to track, analyze and understand the new cultural phenomenon of online micro-celebrity. Her site has video interviews, news, and personal musings on how these trends/success stories came to be while profiling who these new influentials are. The site and concept is similar to how we cover college startups and entrepreneurs. Startup Blog Cont. »

If you're obsessed with Facebook, then you should check out AllFacebook.com. Its a blog entirely dedicated to Facebook news. I have been finding myself perusing through the site more often these days. It's pretty addicting. You can find some interesting news and information there. For instance, they just reported that MTV has made their entire music video collection available through their new MTV Facebook application. You can find 16,000+ of their videos there. Startup Blog Cont. »

The following post is written by Derek Johnson, the 23 year old CEO and Founder of Tatango. We recently profiled their ad supported, group text messaging service that has sent over 35 million SMS messages since they launched in 2007. Derek is a dropout of the University of Houston entrepreneurial program and has raised half a million dollars in investments for the company from private investors and the Bellingham Angel Group. Moving forward, we'll be starting to syndicate select posts from college entrepreneurs' blogs to share their experiences, insight, and updates about their companies.

The employees at Tatango are motivated, hard working and extremely dedicated. As the CEO of Tatango, a company where all our employees are under the age of 24, the question I get asked the most is, “How do you motivate your college age employees so well?” My answer isn’t rocket science and doesn’t require a whole lot of capital for a company to implement. I have made a quick list of the top 7 things we do at Tatango to keep our young employees motivated to give 110% and put in the type of hours required in an internet startup. Startup Blog Cont. »

Marketing is sometimes the toughest part of starting a company. It won't matter if you have a great idea, product, service, or blog in my case, if you can't reach your target audience and make it as easy as possible for people to find you. One of the quickest ways of building traffic to your site is via blogging. It is also a perfect way to start building an audience before you even launch by writing about the industry you seek to enter, providing valuable information, or just simply writing about your experience starting your company. Blogging has exploded and even seeping into the corporate world. Did you know GE just launched their corporate blog ? In many ways blogging is starting to mold a new era where transparency, free information, and daily communication between companies and public are critical to build brands and companies that people are attracted to.

Blogging, in other words, is a great marketing tool. Although, I'm not using this blog to market something else, I am using it to build a brand, culture, and motivating force to inspire other young entrepreneurs to venture into the world of startups. I suppose to some degree I am marketing myself, but I mostly blog because I enjoy it, love startups, and know that there are tons of interestings startups by college entrepreneurs who don't receive enough press coverage. They need a home. Anyway, I'm a fanatic about technology, the web, startups, entrepreneurship, innovation, web trends, and anything that challenges something in the world to do something better. Startup Blog Cont. »

Tatango is a dead simple, free group texting messaging service that grew out of Derek Johnson's basement to a company that now serves over 300,000 users across the nation. The startup helps groups, organizations, sports teams, college cheerleaders, and similar type groups blast messages to their members via SMS or voice message. Although simple, it helps solve a variety of problems such as effectively reminding peers of group meetings last minute or staying in the loop about what's happening on campus by subscribing all of your favorite groups. The model is attractive because it can be applied to any organization or business on or off campus and has a viral component that helps propel user adoption. You can send messages from your browser or conveniently from your phone - perfect for when you're on the go.

How do they make money? That's simple too, just attach a brief 30 character advertisement at the end of each message. This model is not only appealing to investors since it builds on the rapidly expanding mobile marketing industry, but likewise to marketers themselves as it allows them to send highly targeted messages to their target markets right on their cell phones. The isolation of the ads helps to increase brand awareness while their actionable nature bolsters their overall value, thus producing high CPM rates. 4info, a startup that utilizes the same model, has been able to charge marketers $0.05 per impression (a $50 CPM rate).

Startup Blog Cont. »

EyeView Digital, a company out of Harvard Business School, announced today that they launched their new website and landed their first round of funding from the Gemini Israel Fund, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Gigi Levi, previous division president at Amdocs, and current CEO of 888 Holdings Plc. The investment will help them build on success the've already experienced while enabling them to grow their platform that transforms and increase online conversion rates through the use of rich-media content. Their service and technology offers an end-to-end solution that combines the creation, serving, testing, and optimizing of media to increase user engagement and to turn more visitors into real revenue for websites and their companies. The new website looks awesome and their services are positioned to take advantage of some of the biggest trends and needs on the web.

Websites are not only important to display information, they are becoming an increasingly important asset that companies use to communicate messages and compel users to action. Now-a-days, web properties are strongly tied and integrated with marketing initiatives and brand awareness. Therefore, there are two primary goals that are critical to hit in order to successful achieve those business strategies; 1. to increase in traffic and 2. to convert visitors into valuable leads to increase sales. Rich-media, such as video, audio, and interactive flash applications, have proven to be the most effective medium to catalyze this process. Even though companies utilize rich-media, there has never been a platform to capture its power for online conversion. Startup Blog Cont. »