Podcasts from Innovators

This is GeekWeek for Guy Kawasaki. The iinnovate blog has some great podcasts on corporate innovation from Ideo and Veritas. For context, check out the podcasts at the Capital Formation Institute, for innovation in economic development strategies.

The Charlottesville Podcasting Network has on-demand local radio, including this piece on Web 2.0 from the folks at The Curry School.

For an altogether different podcast, hear about Shakespeare from our Shenandoah Valley partner, the American Shakespeare Center. Bill Gordon presents this week at the Blackfriars Theater at their delightful new Podcast Central blog.

Technorati Tags: Shakespeare podcasts, economic development innovation, geekweek

Chumby

Interested in Chumby? O'Reilly Radar has a summary announcement, and pointers to more information about Chumby, which was announced last week.

O'Reilly goes on to say that

it [the Chumby license] confirms my thesis these many years about the open source paradigm shift -- people will give away hardware, will give away software, with the most open license possible, but will then seek to monetize something new, now web services.

Technorati Tags: foocamp, craft, open source,

Best Cities for Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneur.com recently released their 2006 list of the Top Ten Hot Cities for Entrepreneurs. The Washington DC area and the Norfolk-Virginia Beach area were the Virginia locations on the list. Richmond-Petersburg came in at 25 in the metro area rankings.

This list is based on analysis done by the National Policy Research Council.

Technorati Tags: entrepreneur, Virginia

SEBIO Announces Conference Presenters

Southeast BIO (SEBIO) recently announced the 31 companies selected to participate in its Southeastern BIO Investor Forum on November 8-10, 2006 in Atlanta. Two Virginia Companies, DiaKine Therapeutics of Charlottesville and OcuCure of Roanoke, are among them.

The Forum, now in its eighth year, is expected to attract more than 150 investors. Early-bird registration ends September 8th.

Technorati Tags: life sciences, venture capital, entrepreneur

Virginia's Best

Forbes Magazine recently declared Virginia the best business climate in the country, saying that

The commonwealth of Virginia takes the crown in our first-ever ranking of Top States for Business.

Add up a smart labor force, low costs, good regulatory environment and a great quality of life, and you get Virginia, the runaway winner in our listing of the Top States for Business.

Fortunately, Virginia also ranked number one in Quality of Life and Growth Prospects.

Technorati Tags: Virginia, state business climate

The BGN Entrepreneur's Minute August 25, 2006

(About two and a half minutes. We are testing a new audio service, please let us know how you like Evoca)

Summer Wrap-up links

In May, VCU PocketDoc Team wins national Microsoft Challenge, and places well in the international event in August.
Southern Growth Policy Board, Innovation with a Southern Accent
Virginia Partnership for Nanotechnology
Wireless at Virginia Tech
Institute for Advanced Learning and Research
OpenSource Conection at OSCON
Coulter Translational Research at UVA BME


Conferences, Competitions

ExecutiveBiz's September 20 conference, the New, New Internet for anyone interested in the general Web 2.0 phenomenon.
The Innovation Challenge at Darden
Virginia Business Magazine's Virginia Small Business Success Story of the Year
Wikimedia Foundation's online election

The BGN Entrepreneur's Minute is made possible by the Robins School of Business.

Technorati Tags: entrepreneur, New New Internet, business competitions

New College Institute of Virginia

Welcome to the New College Institute (NCI), an exciting new collaboration in Southside, incorporating education and economic development.

Formed earlier this year through a cooperative effort of Longwood University, Radford University, Ferrum College, Averett University and the University of Virginia, the Institute received funding from the Virginia General Assembly in June.

The Institute named the first Executive Director this summer, Dr. Barry Dorsey, formerly of University of Rio Grande/Rio Grande Community College of Ohio.

NCI will work closely with the other cooperative educational ventures in the area. The Institute for Advanced Learning and Research (IALR) in Danville is focusing on creating an environment conducive to world-class research. The Southern Virginia Higher Education Center in South Boston offers degree programs in partnership with eight Virginia colleges and universities.


Technorati Tags: educational collaboration, southside Virginia

Messaging at CVG

Suzanne Jackson Henry, President of Four Leaf Public Relations, brings her message to CVG on September 19.

"Who are You? No, Really ... Messaging for Marketing Power"
This event is sponsored by Bridgewater Innovations

Information and registration at CVG.


Technorati Tags: messaging

My Way, the Network for Entrepreneurs

Tom Evslin created a new feed, My Way, the Network for Entrepreneurs, with the following entrepreneurship blog partners:

Adventures in Capitalism by Chris Yeh
Brian Berliner’s Brain by Brian Berliner
Fractals of Change by Tom Evslin
Junto Boys by Bernard Moon
Loic Le Meur Blog by Loic Le Meur
OnlyOnce by Matt Blumberg
OnStartups by Dharmesh Shah
Peter's Thoughts by Peter Cranstone
Start-up CEO by Eli Portnoy
terrygold.com by Terry Gold
Web X.0 by Yaron Galai
2-Speed by William Herman
52 Reviews by Eric Allam


In case you wondered, here's Tom Evslin's post "Are you an Entrepreneur?", with links to his sage advice on starting out, hiring, negotiating and sales. Eric Allam at 52 Reviews recently described accidental and habitual entrepreneurs.



Technorati Tags: entrepreneur

OneWebDay on September 22

Lawrence Lessig announces OneWebDay, September 22.



Get the OneWebDay Button for your site here.


Web 2.0 tech as magic:
Mike Kuniavsky has created a fascinating bibliography


Technorati Tags: onewebday

Venture Capital Emerges

Peter Rip has decided that Venture 2.0 has arrived.

Technorati Tags: venture capital 2.0

Rising Tides

In Peter Cranston's piece on rising tides, he says

I’ve lived through irrational markets and IPO’s – the old phrase was “all the fools are dancing while the bigger fools were watching”… Well we’re now in a rational market place.
It’s good to be an entrepreneur right now, the tide is coming in.

GaryLemberg's March 2006 piece on startups from a VC point of view is worth reading in this context.

Technorati Tags: entrepreners, vc funding

Kawasaki on Resumes, Gadgets and Education

For his HR week, a recruiter evaluates Guy Kawasaki's resume and email letter of inquiry, which is posted here.

This week, he has moved on to Gadget Week, and good advice on what to learn at school this year (complete with a short quiz).

Technorati Tags: resumes, communication

Creative Changes at C3

The upbeat and energetic folks at the Creative Change Center in Richmond have announced a restructuring of the organization.

Helping hands welcome:

C3 is moving our library, sofas, computers and boxes to the Model Room at the Turning Basin Building and we need your help! Come to C3 at 5p on Tuesday August 29th to help us move down the street. With lots of hands, we'll be done in a flash.

A huge thanks to the Virginia Performing Arts Foundation for allowing C3 to use that space for our board and committee meetings, assets and programs.

Please email Michele Stuchell at michele@c3va.org to let us know that you can come or if you have any questions. See you then!

Technorati Tags: social entrepreneurship, Richmond

Business Plan Competiton - Working for Good™

John Mackey (Whole Foods Market) also co-founded the FLOW project.
FLOW has recently announced a new kind of Business Plan Competition, Making the World a Better Place Through Entrepreneurial Initiative™

Submissions are due November 30 for December awards.


Technorati Tags: social entrepreneurship, business plan competition

Genericide

Business Review Online blogger Jason Stamper observes that Google is concerned about genericide since "google" is now included in the Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary.

Wikipedia defines genericide as "The process by which trademark rights are diminished or lost as a result of common use in the marketplace."

The recent Washington Post article notes the "the eye-popping fact that Google's trademark complaint [to the Washington Post] arrived via a hand-addressed letter in the actual mail."


Technorati Tags: genericide

An Entrepreneur in Charlottesville

In the July 17 article in theDaily Progress on Crutchfield , McGregor McCance says:

The story of Crutchfield Corp. is a classic tale of American enterprise. An entrepreneur spots an untapped market, risks personal fortune to pursue the chance, learns from his mistakes and takes a business from his basement to a national success. Bill Crutchfield’s story is well known in the industry and in Charlottesville.

Technorati Tags: entrepreneur, Central Virginia

High-maintenance Interaction

Thank you to The Business Punfit, who sums up this research by saying "don't hire drama queens or other high social maintenance individuals".

High-maintenance Interaction.

Confirming what many of us have suspected anecdotally, new research from Northwestern University shows that high-maintenance or difficult interactions indeed drain us. Most importantly, the study demonstrates how those draining social dynamics, in which an individual is trying so hard to regulate his or her behavior, can impair success on subsequent unrelated tasks.

To be published in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the "High-Maintenance Interaction" paper offers a significant contribution to sparse research on how draining social interactions affect self-regulation (the ability to make sound decisions, initiate action and, in general, exert self-control) on later tasks.

Technorati Tags: office politics

Southeastern Bio Investor Forum

The Eighth Annual Southeastern Bio Investor Forum, the premiere life sciences venture capital conference in the Southeast, is set for November 8-10, 2006, at the InterContinental Buckhead Hotel in Atlanta, GA. Come learn about the best life sciences venture opportunities in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia, and network with industry leaders.

Full program and registration at SEBIO.


Technorati Tags: life sciences investors

Emerging Technology Conference

The next O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference will be held in March.

Program chair Rael Dornfest was inspired by Arthur C. Clarke’s wonderful quotation, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” as the theme for ETech 2007.

Are you making complex things simple or makes the impossible possible? Cleverly routing around a problem, subtly integrating technologies, or streamlining user interfaces? If the technology you’re working on–be it bionics, swarming, nanotechnology, energy, gaming, accessiblity–could be mistaken for magic, we want to hear from you.

October 9 is the deadline for submitting proposals.

Technorati Tags: emerging technology

The BGN Entrepreneur's Minute August 17, 2006

(About 4 minutes)

Jason Hull and Eric Pugh of OpenSource Connections discuss their presentation at OSCON last week, leading technology work in the Charlottesville area, and Gartner's Emerging Technology Hype Cycle.

Check out their blog for more on this.

The BGN Entrepreneur's Minute is made possible by the Robins School of Business.

Technorati Tags web 2.0, AJAX, OSCON, social tagging, Charlottesville

Small Companies and SOX

According to Jaclyne Badal and Phred Dvorak,

... auditors say an increasing number of closely held companies are complying with parts of the corporate-reform law -- even though they don't have to. Some of these private-sector companies have investors who hope the company will one day go public, or will be acquired.

Ryan LaFond, an assistant professor at MIT Sloan School of Management in Cambridge, Mass., says there may be a financial incentive for private companies to comply with the law -- internal controls can help them raise money at lower cost.

Snippets from the WSJ Startup Journal August 17, 2006.

Technorati Tags: SOX, entrepreneurs

Wiki Foundation

The 2006 Wikimania Award finalists are available now. One finalist is the Wikipedia entry for Saffron, another is the history of Miami.

The Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation is holding an online election of new board members. Nominations are being accepted until Monday, August 28.

The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is an international non-profit organization dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge. The Wikimedia Foundation operates some of the largest collaboratively-edited reference projects in the world, including Wikipedia, one of the 20 most visited websites.

Technorati Tags: wiki, awards, online election

Robins School Update

The University of Richmond Robins School of Business launched Update this week.


Dr. Jorge Haddock, Dean of the Robins School.



Features include graduate and undergraduate news, faculty accomplishments and alumni spotlight. This issue highlights alumni Rich Johnson, professor Joe Ben Hoyle, and undergraduate Marybe Assouan. The Robins School MBA includes an International Residency program, taking students to Brazil or France.

Technorati Tags: MBA programs, international residency, Richmond

Advice for Working with VCs

Yet another list of tips for pleasing VCs at BusinessWeekOnline, this one from Vivek Wadhwa, currently an Executive-in-Residence at Duke University.

He balances this with "Before You Accept VC Funding".

These articles follow up on his July piece, "Venture Capital: The Good, Bad and Ugly" in which he says

Bottom line: There are no easy choices here. Venture capitalists can be the best thing that happened to your company or your worst nightmare. Your choice is to finance your startup yourself and stay small, or take the risk and raise venture capital. Just be aware that in this marriage, there is no divorce.

Technorati Tags: entrepreneurs

Automotive X Prize

The Automotive X Prize is coming soon.

The goals:

to stimulate automotive technology, manufacturing and marketing breakthroughs that:
Radically reduce oil consumption and harmful emissions
Result in a new generation of super-efficient and desirable mainstream vehicles that people want to buy.

Technorati Tags: energy efficiency, entrepreneurs

Emerging Technology Hype Cycle

Gartner released its 2006 Emerging Technology Hype Cycle, focused on Web 2.0, Real World Web and Applications Architecture.


Dion Hinchcliffe at ZDNet comments on the strategic implications of the Web 2.0 elements of this.

Peter Rip, the the Early State VC provides a nice Meme Check on this discussion.


Technorati Tags: emerging technologies, entrepreneurs, collective intelligence

Entrepreneurs Network - My Way

Tom Evslin has established an online Entrepreneurs Network, a feed called My Way . As he puts it,

Cats are notoriously easy to herd compared to entrepreneurs. Put two entrepreneurs in a room and three businesses and plans for four more will emerge. One definition of an entrepreneur is someone who always wants to do it “my way”. I plead guilty to fitting the definition.

Technorati Tags: entrepreneur

BGN Supports COVITS 2006

As the Commonwealth of Virginia puts into action one of the most sweeping reforms of information technology in the nation, COVITS 2006 will gather thought leaders who share the goal of “Advancing the Public’s Agenda” through innovative technology solutions. This year’s program will shape the future of COVITS, starting with its new name: the Commonwealth of Virginia Innovative Technology Symposium.

Breakout sessions will focus on innovative technologies in:
• Healthcare
• Transportation
• Education

For program updates and registration information visit COVITS 2006 or call (703) 481-5242.

Technorati Tags: technology innovation, Virginia

Mid-Atlantic investment Survey Report

MAVA reports that Mid-Atlantic VCs report an active investment quarter. Time spent evaluating new deals drops as valuations and term sheet competition rise.

"This quarter we see VCs returning to sustained levels of investing even as potential portfolio company liquidity events and fundraising activities garnish an equal amount of investors' attention," said Julia Spicer, Executive Director of MAVA. "As more capital is deployed by investors from both inside and outside the region, entrepreneurs will benefit, often by increases in valuations and term sheet competition."

Technorati Tags: MAVA, entrepreneur

University of CA joins Google Inc. project

From the Pilot Online, comes this report by Michael Liedtke

The University of California is joining Google Inc.'s book-scanning project, throwing the weight of another 100 academic libraries behind an ambitious venture that's under legal attack for alleged copyright infringement. August 9, 2006

Technorati Tags: Google Inc project

Economists Blogging

The New Economist has a post on The Economist's piece on economists' blogs.

A fine companion to Malcolm Gladwell's recent post, The Derivitive Myth on the relationship between blogging and the mainstream media, in which he notes that

Blogs—like this one, incidentally—are necessarily and properly derivative.

Fortunately, all the posts include intriguing comments and useful links to interesting blogs.

Technorati Tags: blogging

Godin's "Small is the New Big"

Guy Kawasaki interviews Seth Godin, who says that "Books are the new T-Shirts" here.

Godin goes on to say

I argue that competence is the enemy. People who are competent are afraid to fail, afraid to experiment. I’ve worked hard all my life to become incompetent but motivated at just about everything. Sure, there are plenty of areas where I’m completely afraid to change the routine—protecting my left shoulder, for example, or taking up drinking—but in general, if there’s a chance to get worse at something, I’m willing to give it a shot.

Technorati Tags: Godin, Kawasaki

Bioscience Conferences

The 2nd annual Mid-Atlantic Bio Conference is now accepting applications from prospective exhibitors, sponsors and biotech companies wishing to present. the Conference will be held October 10 -11 in Washington DC.

The 8th annual SE Bio Investor Forum is also accepting applications for their November 8 - 10 conference to be held in Atlanta. They have already completed applications for company presentations, but they still have a few sponsor openings.

Technorati Tags: life sciences, bioscience, venture capital

Angel Day coming up

Paul Graham has a new piece on presenting to investors. This advice is related to the Angel Day coming up in August, but useful for entrepreneurs seeking financial support elsewhere.

The Next Funding Round application is due in October for January - March review.

Technorati Tags: startup, angel investors

Berkman Center Talks

The Berkman Center for Law and Society at Harvard Law School holds informal luncheon talks on Tuesday at 12:30 PM ET.

Today's speaker is Tom Evslin, who is discussing "Net Neutrality at Home: Distributed Citizen Journalism against Net Discrimination". After today, these presentations resume in September.

These talks are available as Quicktime streams, HTTP streams, and as archived podcasts. (Quicktime trouble shooting here) The archived podcasts are an extraordinary collection of recent research on emerging businesses, the web, and global internet issues.


Technorati Tags: net neutrality, Berkman Center, Evslin

The BGN Entrepreneur's Minute, August 7, 2006

(about one minute)

Commonwealth of Virginia Innovative Technology Symposium COVITS
September 10 - 12, 2006 in Roanoke, Virginia

Nomination information for the 2006 Governor's Technology Awards.

The BGN's Entrepreneur's Minute is made possible by the generous support of the Robins School of Business.

Venturing Out

The Venture Forum of Richmond will hold the next Venture Out event at the Bull and Bear Club on August 10, 2006.

For registration and additional information, contact The Venture Forum.


Technorati Tags: networking, Richmond

Trademarking Tidbits

Vitamin has an excellent post by Stephen Nipper on trademarks.

Although focused on trademarks for web apps, it is full of useful tidbits for any entrepreneur considering trademarking a product.

The US Patent Office site is a good place to start. Patently Silly is a good place to take a break.

Technorati Tags: trademark, entrepreneur

Entrepreneur Seeks Cure for ALS

The Harvard Business School's Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship has an extraordinary piece on a young man who is bringing his entrepreneurship skills to bear on research on ALS, with exceptional results.

For as long as he can remember, Avichai ("Avi") Kremer (HBS '07) wanted to be an entrepreneur. "I thought I only needed a good idea," Kremer recalls, "but I came to realize that it involves so much more."
Avi Kremer became an entrepreneur: to try to save lives, including his own.

Technorati Tags: social entrepreneur, ALS

Business Rules and Regs Compared

Doing Business , a part of the World Bank's Private Sector Resources, maintains comparisons of regions of the world, countries and major cities in terms of the ease of doing business. Guy Kawasaki points to several conclusions from the 2006 report, inlcuding:

In Guatemala it takes 1,459 days to resolve simple disputes in court.

You may be pleased to know that the World Bank now blogs on their "market sector approach to development thinking", where they are following Negraponte's $100 laptop project.


Technorati Tags: business regulation, global business conditions