Author: Chris Cameron

We recently told you about 5 Great Blogs For Funding Advice, and now we wanted to remind you about a resource that can get you advice straight from the horse’s mouth: Larry Cheng’s extensive list of 131 top blogs from venture capitalists and firms – a priceless tool for any entrepreneur looking for free advice.

The blogs are ranked by their number of Google Reader subscriptions, though Cheng, himself ranked 33rd, says, “there are many great blogs with fewer subscribers as the number of subscribers doesn’t necessarily correlate to the quality of content.”

Nevertheless, resources like this are a great tool for keeping up with what the VC’s are talking about, but how can one possibly manage a blogroll so large? Thankfully, there are plenty of solutions for managing RSS feeds so you can stay on top of it all.

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Along with his list, Cheng offers Google Reader bundles of various breakouts of the list. If 100 blogs is too much, you can alternatively subscribe to the top 10, 25 or 50 blogs. Or if you only want to read blogs from your neck of the woods, there are location based bundles for California, Massachusetts, New York, Europe, Canada and Israel. If you just can’t get enough VC blogs, there’s also an option to get the whole kit and caboodle – over 130 blogs total.

Whichever bundle or bundles you choose, Google Reader is an excellent way to filter through your feeds. The best solution for managing a large list is a feature Google recently rolled out: sort by magic. The more you use Google Reader, the more it learns about what kinds of stories you read, and it reflects these trends when it sorts a feed by “magic”.

Another tool for sorting through a heavy list of blogs is to use OPML files and filter them through PostRank – a process we described in great detail last January. In short, PostRank takes your list and creates a new feed, sifting through the noise and filtering out only the best and most popular posts. The only drawback is it takes time for PostRank to determine which posts are more popular, periodically dumping out a dozen or so posts at a time.

If you really want to stay on top of the VC game, applications like Snackr can provide a scrolling marquee of your feeds across your screen while you continue to work on other things. Snackr is built using Adobe AIR, so it’s compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems.

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In a blog post from 2006 titled, “The Art of Driving Your Competition Crazy,” Silicon Valley venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki wrote, “you cannot drive your competition crazy unless you understand their strengths and weaknesses.” Kawasaki undoubtedly knows what he’s talking about, and his advice – while almost 4 years old – still rings true today.

If you’ve got a great idea for a startup, knowing as much about your potential competitors is invaluable, and the people behind Competitious know this as well as anyone. That’s why they created their handy application for keeping close tabs on the competition.

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Developed by RivalSoft, the makers of RivalMap, Competitious is a free service that allows users to collaborate on numerous projects for tracking industry competitors. You and your team can gather and collect news clips, build feature comparison matrices and keep an eye on traffic trends with Alexa data.

The comparison matrix feature is very useful and we here at ReadWriteWeb are even putting this feature to use in researching an upcoming report. However, entering in individual features for each company can become a bit tedious.

It would have been nice to see Competitious offer a list of popular companies whose core features could be automatically placed into a matrix. Users would also benefit from suggested competiors for any given company based on what other users are comparing, but perhaps these features are on Competitious’ roadmap for the future.

The traffic graphs can only be seen if your competitors are ranked in the top 100,000 on Alexa, which can be a problem for small business with equally small competition. Competitious does claim, however, that they are working on “a much more robust traffic system” for their post-beta release.

In the meantime, free site analytics services like Compete and Quantcast can provide data for those hard-to-reach sites. Despite its early flaws, with the ability to easily compare any number of companies in a side-by-side fashion, Competitious is a convenient solution for researching that “competitors” slide in your startup’s pitch presentation.

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Today marks the official start to the 2010 Consumer Electronics Showcase in Las Vegas where all of the biggest electronics manufacturers show off their coolest and newest products. While CES is mainly a gadget show, entrepreneurs looking for the next big thing should pay close attention to the innovative ideas being pushed into the consumer market.

The big show is just getting underway, but we are already seeing some trends emerge that could point to new opportunities for startups in 2010.

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Televisions

On everyone’s CES prediction list this year are new TV technologies, including 3D viewing and the apparent rebirth of Web TV. Recently, various set-top boxes have brought web apps into our living rooms, including the Roku player, and BluRay players with Netflix, YouTube and Pandora integration.

As we reported earlier this week, Skype has partnered with LG and Panasonic to integrate their service with new Internet-connected HDTVs. In addition, Internet media aggregator Boxee is marketing their brand new Boxee Box set-top device, and Yahoo! announced plans today to expand its presence in the living room. As more media and applications migrate onto televisions, startups will have the opportunity to find new niches and provided services on these new products.

Automobiles

Another trend is the implementation of new technologies into automobiles, and as we mentioned yesterday, Ford’s new MyFord Touch is leading the way. By placing LCD touch screens in the dashboard and turning the car into a mobile Wi-Fi hotspot, Ford is opening doors for new platforms in the automobile.

Current companies are already taking advantage of the the growing auto-tech industry. Streaming music service Pandora recently announced a partnership with Pioneer to bring Internet radio to your dashboard – albeit for a hefty $1,200 price tag. When the day comes that everyone has a connected car that can sync and share data, startups will be needed for services that organize and make use of these new forms of information.

Augmented Reality

And finally, while we may not see a plethora of new gadgets in this space at CES, augmented reality looks to make a huge splash in the consumer electronics market in 2010. Right now, most AR experiences are on cell phones or desktop computers, but fans of augmented reality expect to see some Head Mounted Displays (HMDs) or new transparent LCD screens in the near future.

The potential for augmented reality has been flying under the radar for years, and only in recent days have improvements in technology allowed for it to begin to flourish. AR is a quickly expanding field with many opportunities for innovation, and is a field in which startups could quickly find a foothold.

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It’s too often that we read about a startup with an intriguing idea only to be completely turned off by the bland-looking design of their website. Granted, we don’t all have the Jedi-like abilities it takes to create a snazzy logo or website, so when we need something designed, we outsource it to a graphic designer – and there are tons to choose from.

In most cases, the company in need will look over a selection of designers, review portfolios, and pick one to come up with a design. But why only choose to employ the abilities of one designer when you can crowdsource the project and pick from an unlimited number of submissions from a vast community of designers?

The controversial but still successful crowdSPRING does just that.

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Founded in 2008, the Chicago-based company is an online marketplace for creative services that connects small business in need of graphic design with freelance designers. The business creates a project, outlines the details and requirements of the design, sets a deadline and places a cash reward for the potential winner. Then designers submit their entries and once the deadline is reached, the company picks a winning design.

CrowdSPRING has recently been at the center of heated debates in the design community as some denounce the site for promoting “spec work” – a term used to describe work done without any guarantee of compensation. Sites like Spec Watch and NO!SPEC are attempting to raise awareness about spec work, pinpointing sites like crowdSPRING as unethical businesses.

“There is a certain irony in spec work,” writes Elisabetta Bruno on NO!SPEC. “A prospect requesting it is ultimately saying, ‘My project isn’t important enough to hire a professional who will take the time to understand my situation and goals and invest the time needed to create a suitable solution’.”

For providing their platform, crowdSPRING takes a 15% cut on all deals made through the site, but offers a money-back guarantee if a project receives less than 25 entires. If your project passes this number, you better be satisfied with the designs because you’re then “promising to pick a winner,” the site says.

Regardless of these criticisms, crowdSPRING has continued to grow, claiming that over 47,000 designers use the site in over 150 countries, and that more than 6,000 contests have been completed.

The company has even attracted large brands like Italian pasta company Barilla, which has created a contest calling for a unique new pasta shape with three $1,000 payouts.

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In a world where emails, phone calls, texts, and Tweets constantly bombard us, it is getting harder and harder to manage the firehose of data and information being thrust our way. For young companies to succeed this environment, it is imparitive they become organized and efficient lest they fall behind and quickly become overwhelmed.

While there is no shortage of online solutions, it can be hard to know which one is the right tool for the job, so here’s a list of five web applications to help kick-start your company and keep it organized without breaking the bank.

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Google Apps – Google’s collection of web apps includes solutions for corporate email accounts, calendars or contacts, but its best use for a new startup is with document sharing. Using Google Docs to collaborate on text documents, spreadsheets or even presentations is far more efficient than sending a file in an email attachment.

In recent years, Zoho has become an increasingly competitive enterprise alternative to Google, even adding integration with Google Apps. Zoho has also introduced more features that help it stand out against Google Apps, including their own CRM solution that aims to compete with Salesforce.com.

Basecamp – We here at ReadWriteWeb use Basecamp on a daily basis for managing ongoing projects and reviewing edits of our stories. Developed by 37signals, Basecamp offers a great interface with an easily read dashboard of the latest activity, as well as to-do lists, milestones and email alerts.

For the on-the-go entrepreneur, there are a handful of mobile Basecamp apps ranging in features and price. Personally, I recommend using Insight for iPhone, which was rebranded from Encamp and recently recommended by 37signals.

Dropbox – Whether it’s large financial spreadsheets, or Photoshop mockups of your website-to-be, you are going to need somewhere to store all your files. Dropbox makes all of these easy and relatively inexpensive, offering up to 100 GB for $20 a month. But it’s not just storage.

Dropbox can automatically sync with folders on your desktop, creating an offsite backup of your vital startup files in the cloud, which any member of your staff can access. An alternative solution would be to use Box.net, however their pricing plans are higher than Dropbox’s and are aimed at larger corporations.

Dimdim – The next time you find yourself struggling to explain an intricate concept to your coworkers through a text document or presentation, check out Dimdim and use the power of screen-sharing to make your point crystal clear. One of Dimdim’s best features is that their product works entirely from within your web browser without the need to download or install any extra software.

Screen-sharing services like Dimdim can save a young company hundreds if not thousands of dollars in travel expenses by providing a much more efficient way to meet and share information. Also a notable service in this space is Citrix’s GoToMeeting. However, like Box.net to Dropbox, its pricing is much higher than Dimdim’s.

MindMeister – Between the last two semesters of graduate school, I worked on a collaborative ten-week reporting project, and used online mind-mapping app MindMeister extensively to stay organized. The application is a great way to keep those more abstract ideas organized in an easy-to-understand way.

Countless startups have mapped out their product ideas and business plans on giant whiteboards, and now the whiteboard has gone digital. MindMeister makes it easy to create and share mind maps and flow charts, and best of all, its free to get started.

Photo by Flickr user simax.

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So you’ve got a fabulous idea for a startup? That’s great, but before you get wide-eyed and start thinking about wireframes, venture capital and moving to San Francisco, get your feet wet first by beginning to build your community.

Having a strong and loyal community behind you is an important step in the startup process. After all, it will be much easier to convince a potential investor of the viability of your product if there is a thriving community eager to get their hands on it.

Kevin Hale, co-founder of Wufoo, an online form builder, knows this better than anyone.

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Before they even knew what business they wanted to enter, Hale and his fellow co-founders, Chris Campbell and Ryan Campbell, began building a community by starting a Web development blog. The inspiration came from hearing Jason Fried speak at SXSW, Hale said yesterday in a video interview with Mixergy‘s Andrew Warner.

“We were like, ‘Let’s do what they do. We’ll start building an audience, and from that audience something will be born.’ So we started a blog called Particletree,” Hale says. Quickly, the blog garnered a captive audience of over 20,000 RSS subscribers and over 100,000 monthly visitors – all eagerly anticipating the eventual launch of Wufoo in the summer of 2006.

The audience built from the Particletree blog aided the trio in attaining their first round of funding from startup incubator Y Combinator by showing the investors that a thriving community already existed for their product. The audience also helped reduce blowback when Wufoo’s servers crashed the day of its launch by reassuring new users that this was not a common problem.

“Thankfully, our users who had known us immediately said, ‘We know these guy from Particletree. They know what they’re doing. They’re going to overcome this.’ And it immediately turned the tide for us,” Hale says. “That’s not something we did. That was our own audience.”

More than two years later, Wufoo has evolved into a prosperous business based on the freemium model. As the community continues to grow, the company realizes that keeping the users happy is a continuing step in community development. It has a seven-person support team on call from 9 a.m. to midnight, seven days a week.

Disclosure: Kevin Hale redesigned ReadWriteWeb’s homepage in the summer of 2006.

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While 2009 continued a downward trend as one of the worst recessions in U.S. history, the decline for venture-backed mergers and acquisitions has not been as severe as the dot-com bust in 2001 and 2002.

New figures from the National Venture Capital Association show that in the last quarter of 2009, M&A hit $7.8 billion, up from the previous year’s mark of just over $2 billion. Overall, 2009’s total of $12.6 billion could not match 2008’s $13.6 billion total.

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Mergers and acquisitions totaled over $68 billion in 2000, only to fall below $8 billion by 2002 following the bursting of the dot-com bubble. In contrast, 2007’s M&A total of $29 billion has declined to just over $12 billion in 2009 – a much more smooth rate of decay which has begun to flatten out.

Mark Heesen, president of the NVCA, says they expect to see continued improvement throughout 2010. “Clearly, we have a long way to go towards a full recovery but we are encouraged by the increasing acquisition values and the number of companies that have filed a registration with the SEC to go public,” he says.

A late boost in the fourth quarter of 2009 has helped startups from reliving the experiences from earlier in the decade, the largest of which came from Amazon‘s July purchase of Internet shoe seller Zappos for $930 million. This acquisition helped internet specific purchases climb to $2.2 billion in Q4 2009 – a near seven-fold increase from 2008’s final quarter.

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It may soon be easier for foreign startup entrepreneurs to set up shop in the United States thanks to immigration reform which would create a specialized startup visa program.

The proposed program would make more visas available to entrepreneurs who have at least $250,000 in funding from a U.S.-based venture capital firm, or $100,000 in angel funding. The startup must also have plans to either create five new jobs every two years, raise at least $1 million every two years, or generate at least $1 million in revenue.

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The current system grants 10,000 visas each year primarily to investors that have financed over $1 million with plans to create at least 10 full-time positions. It also allows lower benchmarks for investors in less wealthy countries.

However, the new requirements – which are part of a bill proposed by Colorado Congressman Jared Polis (above) – would fall far beneath the current benchmarks, making it easier for smaller companies and those from underprivileged countries to create jobs in America.

The idea is the brainchild of programmer, essayist and Y Combinator partner Paul Graham who first wrote of what he called “the founder visa” in April of 2009.

In some cases, inspired entrepreneurs enter the U.S., but after their ideas flourish and their visas run out they are in danger of being forced to go home to start their businesses. Investor, entrepreneur and co-founder of Foundry Group, Brad Feld experienced this first-hand at the TechStars program in Boulder, Colorado this summer as two of the ten groups had foreign founders.

“Over the summer we struggled to figure out ways to get them Visas – all of the proposed approaches were expensive, risky, and tiresome,” Feld says. “Both companies are still trying, but each are now seriously considering returning to their home countries to build their businesses.”

Along with other entrepreneurs, start-up advisors and venture capital investors, Feld has co-founded StartupVisa.com, a homepage Feld says has been a resource for the movement inspired by Paul Graham’s vision. “In the next few months, we’ll be expanding it aggressively to incorporate grass roots support and feedback,” he told ReadWriteWeb.

One of StartupVisa’s contributors, Manu Kumar, helps spread the word about visa reform by recounting his own struggles. “There were multiple points at which I came very close to having to leave the United States because of the visa issues,” says Kumar.

As the country attempts to pull itself out of one of the largest recessions in history, it only seems logical to make it as easy as possible for foreign entrepreneurs to enter the country and create jobs for Americans.

“I think this would have such a visible effect on the economy that it would make the legislator who introduced the bill famous,” says Graham. “The only way to know for sure would be to try it, and that would cost practically nothing.

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We have profiled Twitter-based file sharing services in the past, but in some cases the shared files were read-only and the UI design left much to be desired, or the service merely redirected the user to a third-party file sharing service.

Spain-based Ideateca has conquered these drawbacks with FileSocial, a sleek multi-platform file sharing service for Twitter. After authenticating their Twitter account, users can upload any filetype up to 50MB, add a message of 110 characters or less, and FileSocial will post the tweet on Twitter with a link to the file.

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The web interface shows users a stream of their files, which any user can download or comment on. Comments automatically get posted to Twitter as @ replies to the user who uploaded the file.

Aside from using the FileSocial web interface, Windows, Mac or Linux users can download a desktop application, built on Adobe AIR with drag-and-drop functionality, to upload files. Android users can also download the official FileSocial Android app, and while there is no official iPhone app, the third-party app tweet media allows uploading through FileSocial’s API.

The one major drawback of FileSocial is the inability to post files privately for confidential sharing. All files uploaded to the service show up in a public timeline of files, regardless of whether you choose to post the file to Twitter or not. The option to mark files as private or send the link as a direct message is a key feature that is lacking from FileSocial.

Don’t forget to come make friends with us at ReadWriteWeb on Twitter!

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Digg and Revision3 co-founders Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson have provided crowdsourcing startup 3Crowd Technologies and its founder Barrett Lyon with an early Christmas present of funding.

Lyon says the angel investors join Storm Ventures and Greenwich Technology Associates to “give 3Crowd the shot in the arm it needs to take off,” likely sometime early next year.

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This marks the second time Rose and Adelson have crossed paths with Lyon, who co-founded BitGravity, the streaming video service that Internet television studio Revision3 utilizes.

San Mateo, California-based 3Crowd has yet to reveal how they plan to transform crowdsourcing (or how much funding they have secured), but Lyon’s history and apparent entrepreneurial fervor to change the web has clearly excited 3Crowd’s investors.

“This concept is yet another disrupting, dis-intermediating idea from Barrett. These are the technologies that change the game,” Adelson says.

Lyon, who is also the subject of the forthcoming book Fatal System Error by Joseph Menn, says that while the Internet has provided the platform for much success, it is still imperfect and needs to change.

“At this point, my goal is to make change – to take the Internet in its current form (resembling digital duct tape) and transform it into something stronger and more scalable,” Lyon says.

Before co-founding BitGravity, Lyon created the Opte Project: “software that traced all the routes of the Internet,” he says. Images from Opte Project have been used in movies, books and are permanently on display in museums of art and science in both New York and Boston.

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With the rapid growth of services like Foursquare, Gowalla and Brightkite, location-based mobile social networks seem to be a dime a dozen these days, but they’re only fun and useful if your friends are using it, too.

Each time that I’ve tried one of these services, I find myself trying to convince my friends to use it so that I can have meaningful contacts to keep track of. Some of them don’t have the right phone, or are worried about blasting out their GPS coordinates to the world.

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Stalqer, available as a free iPhone app since earlier this month, has solved this problem by connecting to your Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare accounts and providing a map of your friends based on information it gathers from those services, even if they don’t use Stalqer.

If your friend uses a geo-tagged Tweet, or if they check in on Foursquare, Stalqer knows where they are. Stalqer can even pull your friends’ location from their Facebook profiles if they publicly display that information, but in most cases this is limited to the city level.

You can also view your friends’ locations in a list, or even in an augmented reality view by turning the phone on its side while in the map view, but Stalqer’s killer feature is its workaround of a pesky iPhone limitation.

Since iPhones lack the ability to run applications in the background, Stalqer piggybacks their service on one of the phone’s core services with periodic updates. By cleverly monitoring the data exchange on your iPhone when the Mail app checks for new messages, Stalqer can update your location as often as your phone checks for email.

After running Stalqer’s custom mail settings configuration tool, I took the app on a test drive, and sure enough, there I was moving along the map with each check of my email.

Not only is this an innovative iPhone workaround, it’s an interesting way to increase check ins without games, badges or rewards like those found in Foursquare.

The San Francisco-based company appears to understand that forcing users to create yet another online account would limit the app’s potential, so instead, you log in immediately through Facebook Connect. In this sense, Stalqer isn’t trying to become another popular social network – it wants to be the aggregator of your friends’ locations.

The app provides push notifications for nearby friends, and you can even move your friends around on the map for them if you know their whereabouts. This is another great feature that Stalqer hopes will keep people coming back to the app, or that will encourage new users to sign up.

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