Web Movie - Honda

Check out this web movie by Honda

Global Entrepreneurship Monitor Report for 2005

The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor Report for 2005 has just been released by Babson University, and it has some interesting findings:

- Entrepreneurs in middle income countries are beginning to catch-up to their counterparts in richer economies by tapping into technologies unavailable to them just a year ago

- Entrepreneurs with 'innovative' businesses drive higher growth rates of GDP per capita

- Middle income countries tend to start more businesses than high income countries

Source: 1

Predictions for 2006 from an Indian perspective

The Web 2.0 bubble will burst
Yahoo will continue upswing
Outsourcing: A shortage of good tech workers
The blogosphere expands and consolidates
Resurgence of newspapers
Consumer storage will be hot
Major breakthrough in the attention problem
Content will become more valuable
U.S. real-estate slowdown will have global consequences
Uncertainty in China will cause investors to hedge bets

Source Venture Woods

CES Update

Excerpts from "Who has time for This"

HOME AUTOMATION

Home automation includes the remote control, synchronization and monitoring of electronic products through wall switches, remote controls, phones, PDAs, PCs and web browsers. I observed this year at CES that home automation products have finally matured to the point where consumers can stitch together broad, integrated functionality in existing homes without having to pay $50,000+ for professional installation and programming.

(Yes, the X10 protocol has been around for 20+ years to cheaply control household elements over powerlines, but I and many others know from experience that X10 does not work reliably, especially in large homes or alongside increasingly common electronics that draw current even when turned off.)

The first step is to decide which electronics you wish to control--lights, media, climate control, sprinklers, shades, window cranks, thermostats, door locks, alarms, garage doors, etc. (For some of those elements, you will need to replace existing products with controllable ones.) Then select a control protocol that supports those devices through in-house powerlines or wireless -- such as Z-Wave, Zigbee or Insteon. (Since Z-Wave is furthest along, my firm Bessemer invested in Zensys, the Z-Wave chip vendor, as did Cisco.) Finally, buy and install products that control those elements using your selected protocol, such as wall switches, touch panels, remote controls, TV interfaces, key fobs, and PC application or widget.

Patent Process

Excerpts from Scott Maxwells Blog

My takeaways (filtering out all of the patent law issues and all of the traps and opportunities that good patent lawyers can tell you about):

David recommended two basic patent strategy points:

Develop a strategy for pursuing patent protection. What are the core technologies that you wish to protect and why? Revisit this strategy periodically.
Develop a strategy for pursuing foreign patent protection. There are a lot of countries (read more costs!). Where are your major competitors and where is your customer base. Revisit this strategy periodically.
I particularly liked several of David’s very practical steps for managing the day-to-day patent process:

Give incentives for each member of the development staff to submit short “invention disclosures” that describe the problem, the solution, and why the solution is novel. David suggested $25 or a dinner out for each disclosure. (I have also heard of larger companies having a quota for disclosures as well as patents…not sure which is best.)
Set up an IP group to review the invention disclosures periodically and decide which to move forward with. David pointed out that it will probably be budget that sets the bar for the number of disclosures to move forward with (assuming innovation in the company and an incentive to create the invention disclosures).
Do not bother reviewing third party patents (it will take too much resource and you won’t necessarily get to a meaningful answer).
Contact a good patent attorney to prosecute the patent application (Wong Cabello comes highly recommended).
A basic patent will cost about $8-10k if done regularly and if you build a relationship with the right firm.

Nice note...

There's an old saying in consulting which basically goes like this: there are three factors you can impact in a project: scope, time and resources, choose any two. As a client, you get to define any two of the three factors, and the third one will be basically dictated to you.

Nice one, Applies to most types of projects.

Source

Zen of management. You can tell others about your pain, you can express your needs in eloquent language, you can scream about how important your pain is. None of that really works all that well. What does work is to set expectations, goals and compensation of the people who work for you in line with what's important to you.

Types of VCs

Excerpts on type of VCs
. Some key parameters as you look to choose a VC:

1. Stage — Angels, Series A VCs and Series B VCs are different breeds. While the first one will invest (maybe under a crore in India) for an innovative team and idea, the series A VC wants to see a more broad based team, lead paying customers and clear differentiation — this kind of VC funds the path to profitability. Gaps in team are acceptable but to be clearly recognized. Investment size will very with plan, but typically under $5m. Series B VC will typically take a profitable (or close to it) company, with the management pretty much in place, and basically fund expansion (depends on the business, but typically over $5m).

2. Expertise of the VC — Especially at early stage, it is hard to understand and fund businesses where none of the VC partners have expertise.

3. Portfolio — See if the firm you are looking at ha

The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint - Guy Kawasaki

the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint. It’s quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.

The ten topics that a venture capitalist cares about are:

Problem
Your solution
Business model
Underlying magic/technology
Marketing and sales
Competition
Team
Projections and milestones
Status and timeline
Summary and call to action

You should give your ten slides in twenty minutes.

Good ....New Year Resolutions

AVC
This is going to be big

More on New Year Resolutions

One thing about setting goals for the future - make sure they are RAM. Realistic, achieveable and measurable. For instance, I can establish my yearly goal of losing some weight, or I can establish a goal to lose 10 pounds by March 1. This is a clear goal that is realistic, achieveable and measurable. For some goals it may make sense to identify milestones along the way. If my goal is to build a new building in 2006 which will take eight months, I may want to include some significant milestones along the way - foundation in place by February, framing in place by April, etc.

Source: Thinking Faster

2 Questions for the New Year

What's the most important thing you've done in the last year?

What's the most important thing you'll do in the next year?

By John O'Leary of Tom Peters Blog

Start up Life Graph

JobsAhead Life Graph - Is an attempt to encapsulate the life of a startup in one picture by Alok Mittal at the VentureWoods Blog. Check it out here.

The two obvious secrets of every service business every one...

1. Take responsibility
2. Pay attention to detail

The thing that's so surprising is how little attention is paid to these two, how often we run into people (business to business or b2c) who are totally clueless about them.

Source: Seth Godin