Category Archives: entrepreneurship

Instagr.am Critic (And the Like)

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I hate to be critical of running startups, because I\’ve never raise $500 of capital, much less $500k of capital like InstaGram, but, I\’m going to because somebody asked on Quora about Flickr failing to get into the mobile single post image game.

The IDEA of mobile picture sharing is to share with friends. This means to me, that a service that does solely images (like InstaGram) will never be as great as something like Facebook. And, as a twitter user, I use TwitPic, mostly because it is very well integrated into every twitter client and has a pretty easy to use comment system. My incentive to download a different app is severely limited when I have two that do what I need.

Capital Intensive; Where is the money? Hosting images is the next most costly thing to hosting video, and I suppose that with maximum ad revenue, you might be able to make money. But let\’s face it: If you have images online, who actually looks at the ads next to the picture where the attention focuses : Viewers have a specific scope. Ads in the app – which I\’m still not convinced actually make much money – might be the source.

Cohosting Atlanta BarCamp 4

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This Friday will be the 4th annual Atlanta BarCamp , hosted at the Atdc and hosted by myself and Sam @samsm.

I challenge anybody reading my blog to come with some new ideas to teach me more, and most of all show up. We have almost 60 registrations so far and expect many more Friday night.

Challenge one : setting a date was difficult, the things to avoid were home gt football games and big Atlanta events like taste of Atlanta.

2. Sponsorship seemed a little difficult to gather this year, and while the Atdc can help ponsor the location, air conditioning and other fees apply. Luckily, I\’m a perfect business case for.Microsoft as I started a company with their Azure incubation week after hearing about it from the sponsors last year. Then we got in contact with Core Commerce which has products some attendees might use for  payment processing. We\’re still looking for more sponsorship though to pay for more food and drink.

3. Letting go. If we don\’t have a final sponsor, I\’ve got to realize that this is an un conference with creative idea people. They won\’t kill me if something doesn\’t quite go right.

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I\’m going to attend bar camp too though. Which means I need to prepare some talks.

1. I really want to talk about my experience auto racing with the sports car club of America and how it provides a good way for everybody to learn how to handle during loss of traction. How could we institute it as privatized required education?

2. Cloud. Anybody with a web app has some issues with scalabilty and the ideal cloud structure is to use only what you need.

3. Believing ideas are worth $1 to $15 and your time to try. How to start that simple idea or business. Not saying i\’ll make you any money, but at least the idea is out there.

I also plan on taking my sleeping bag so that I can hang out with all of the attendees Friday night.

Not Every Company Needs a One Liner

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Last night I went to a tweetup at the Glenn Hotel, and somebody asked me for the one liner pitch of both Pardot and TAG, but

  • I\’m not on a sales or business development team
  • I\’m not looking for angel or VC funding.

While I appreciate that sales people or most CEOs need to be able to pitch their product if they are looking for investment, there is very much a category of \’boot strapping\’ and company development where, frankly, advertising isn\’t needed (with the right strategy). Of course, maybe my dreams are too limited, because my TAG projects will likely never bring in a multi million dollar buyer, and that\’s not really the growth strategy.