Interesting Trend: Nightowl Co-Working
Nightowl Co-Working is a new concept and complementary to Bootstrapper Breakfasts that start at 7:30am–hard to imagine common attendees!
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Tools for Startups
Survey of Personalized News Aggregators
Gone are the days when you could read a couple of journals and get a good idea of what is going on in an industry. Today, the number of great sources has exploded. The challenge is to manage all of these sources, fortunately almost all of them now provide a Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed.
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Matt Perez on How Nearsoft Leverages Yammer
Matt Perez on How Nearsoft Leverages Yammer I met Matt Perez in 2003 just as I was starting SKMurphy. It was the tail end of nuclear winter in Silicon Valley and folks were trying to figure out what was next. We kept running into one another at various networking events and as we got to
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Articles, Ideas, and Books That Made Me a Better Entrepreneur
This is a start articulating a set of resources for entrepreneurs that are for the most part not yet widely appreciated as applicable to entrepreneurship but that have had a significant impact on my perspective. I welcome any suggestions or lists from readers for what has influenced you, and opened you to new perspectives on your
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Three Useful Search Tools: Keskese, Surf Canyon, and WhosTalkin
I have been using three tools on a regular basis that I think complement Google: WhosTalkin searches a variety of conversations including twitter and blog feeds. It’s handy, quick and claims “Our search and sorting algorithms combine data taken from over 60 of the Internet’s most popular social media gateways.” SearchCanyon is useful if you
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SKMurphy Featured In Case Study For Central Desktop
SKMurphy was interviewed and selected as one of a dozen case studies on Document Management Solutions for Consulting Groups by Central Desktop. Read about our innovative approach at “Document Management Solution helps SKMurphy Consulting Group Increase Productivity.” We make some strong claims in the case study: Increased productivity – approximately 5 to 10 times more
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Maintaining Perspective on the Entrepreneurial Roller Coaster
We had a great Bootstrapper Breakfast® in Sunnyvale this morning. One of the comments from an entrepreneur who was doing his first venture and making good progress was that he hadn’t anticipated how much of an emotional roller coaster doing a startup was with “higher highs and lower lows” than his earlier jobs.
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20 Ways To Generate Leads
Most entrepreneurs we talk to these days is asking “how can I bring more customers into my business?” There are no quick or easy answers here. Just some encouragement to try a new technique or two. You will need to develop a multi-pronged approach for your business. Sometime it takes thinking of creative ways to
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Public Domain Images for Presentations and Websites
Here’s a couple of sources for free public domain photo, clipart, cartoons and images. They are royalty free, not copy-righted and available for personal and commercial use. These stock photos are high resolution and high enough quality for print and websites. www.publicdomainpictures.net www.public-domain-image.com www.pdphoto.org www.unclesamsphotos.com However, keep in mind: You can not copyright the material
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Spellr.us Is So Good That I Want To Pay For It
Spellr.us Is So Good That I Want To Pay For It I sent Kevin Garber an E-Mail yesterday afternoon “I love the product, I would like to pay for it.” I had spent about twenty hours in the last week cleaning up typo’s on www.skmurphy.com and www.bootstrappersbreakfast.com (first of all who knew that there were
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Fantastic On-Line Workshop on Wikis at CPSquare in January 2009
I attended a workshop put on by CPSquare in 2003 on Communities of Practice that had a profound impact on my worldview. I met folks from around the US who helped to foster communities of practice in corporate, education, government, and non-profit settings and was surprised at how common the both the challenges and methodologies
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2008: Year-End Review of Client Metrics
I am doing end of the year status for clients. I thought it would useful to share the best case numbers as well as the worst case numbers. We had a fun year working in the areas of banking & financial services, cloud computing, consulting, EDA, health care services, medical devices & services, search &
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Three Software Startup News Aggregators: Hacker News, Techmeme, Alltop
Here are three startup feeds that I use at last weekly (I am skmurphy on Hackers News and may check there two or three times a day) that represent three different models to generate a stream of topical links for folks in software startups. Hacker News http://news.ycombinator.com/ Techmeme http://www.techmeme.com/ Alltop http://startups.alltop.com/ What are your favorite
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How I Avoid Sending Email I Regret
I have several rules of thumb I follow to avoid sending and email I regret. I don’t hit send after 8pm, or when I am angry, or when the other person is angry, or when a phone call is called for.
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Four Startups at Office 2.0 Worth a Second Look
We plan to take a closer look at four services that exhibited at Office 2.0 last week. They each have one or more compelling features that may fill gap in our current set of productivity tools. Vyew It’s a zero configuration (100% browser based, provided you have Flash and Java installed) conferencing service that makes
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SKMurphy’s Startup Resource Center at SDWest 2008
If you missed us at SDWest last week, here are pointers to firms and organizations we had in the Startup Resource Center. Brighter Naming name your company, product, or service Fortis General Counsel is a law firm comfortable with bootstrappers Action Patents Pete Tormey registered patent agent (see interview) Boitano Sargent, and Lilly accounting firm
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Jotspot Emerges From The Bowels of Google
Jotspot Emerges From The Bowels of Google Rob Hof notes–hat tip to Ross Mayfield–tonight in “Jotspot Returns as Google Sites: Wiki Style Collaboration” (emphasis added): Ever since Google bought the wiki-based online application startup Jotspot in late 2006, people have been wondering if it had disappeared forever inside the bowels of the search giant. Tonight,
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Three Features For A Webinar Or Conference Call
Three features for a webinar or conference call: let someone raise their hand and speak; break a larger group into small groups and then reconvene; automatically manage the “queue for the microphone” during the Q&A segment.
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Lunch & Learn: Using Wikis for Projects
Pierre Khawand of People-OnTheGo and I were on a panel at GABA in October of last year on “Communication Today: Blogs, E-mail and More” and we had a great conversation on blogs and wikis. He has invited me to speak on “Wiki Use Case: Managing Team Meetings: Agendas, Minutes and Tasks” at today’s Lunch &
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Steve Blank on Customer Development Process for Startups
I was an early fan of Steve Blank’s customer development model. This post was written when “Four Steps to the Epiphany” was only available on Cafe Press and documents the early set of principles he espoused.
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