Can a book project be a start-up?
I’ve been looking for a start-up to get involved with in 2010. I’ve also been working on a book proposal. It dawned on me that the book proposal is my start-up. The proposal is a business plan. The literary agent is a business development person. The publisher is both [...]

Great guest post on Techcrunch today by Vivek Wadhwa about the amount of university research that languishes on shelves in labs:
“In 2007, U.S. universities performed $48.8 billion of research and filed 17,589 U.S. patent applications. In that same year universities received back revenues for licensing and royalties on patents of less than $2 billion. Those [...]

Business success in a recession?
Recessions have the effect of showing up poorly conceived business models. It’s one the reasons that more long term successful businesses are started during downturns. When the economy is giddy and people are spending, businesses that are providing luxury products or services will thrive as will businesses providing incremental improvements to [...]

One of the primary goals of social media marketing is generating motivated and qualified leads. This is accomplished by tracking your keyword phrases and initiating conversations with those who mention your keywords- whether they are in a Tweet, on a blog or anywhere else in social media. To turn these conversations into leads you need [...]

As you might know from my rant about firing your ad agency, I think the agency business model is broken and that social media is the nail in the coffin. In the interest of offering something positive, I’m going to explore a few of the issues and opportunities that social media offers agencies enlightened enough [...]

Knowing the business eco-system, be it hard, soft or a combination, that your company is part of is critical to understanding new patheways to grow.
‘Soft’ business models
I have a background in software marketing. Techrigy, the last company I worked for, and BlueTie, a previous employer, are both software as a service or SaaS companies. In [...]

By background I’m a writer so when I look at business models I tend to orient towards content. However, as Jeff Jarvis points out in his interesting but flawed book, What Would Google Do?, virtually all successful tech companies are platforms, not content producers.
Content does not scale well
Content, whether it’s writing, video, audio (I refuse [...]

There is an assumption that sophistication in social media is inversely related to how old the user is. Youth is generally associated with a far higher awareness of the uses and capabilities of the medium. I’m going to question that assumption.
Young entrepreneurs and social media
Yesterday I spent an hour and a half with a high [...]