What's more, each country is vying to outdo the others. For example, Britain is aiming to win the race online by becoming the first nation in the world where everyone is able to access and use the Web.

Good for Europe, you may be saying - but what has it got to do with businesses in the US? Well, the answer is a heck of a lot. Interxion has put together a visualization of the data surrounding this digital race and unearthed some startling figures that represent fantastic opportunities for businesses worldwide.

Here is what we discovered:

Perhaps the most relevant piece of information is that while 45% of British businesses are purchasing goods and services online, only 15% of British businesses are providing them. This means that UK-based companies are not meeting the demand, and this is where international businesses can swoop in and cater to this need.

However, the Digital Agenda's main purpose was to stimulate domestic business opportunities in order to decrease the EU's reliance on the financial industry. In an effort to boost local economies, the Agenda could potentially force proprietary systems (think Apple's iPhone) to open up to competitors.

Nevertheless, recent events are making the EU attractive for international business owners - particularly in e-commerce. With more and more European users online looking to purchase goods, international companies have a historic chance to grab some of that business.

- Robert Nicholson

To make sure that doesn't happen - and help startups avoid costly lawsuits (another instance where the only people who get rich are the lawyers) I asked Anton Rosandic, a California-based attorney and an entrepreneur himself, for some free advice. The solution isn't all that complicated, Rosandic says, "A successful investor/business owner relationship is all about managing expectations" and making sure all the terms are clear to everyone involved.

The first step is to pay attention to Rosandic's key do's and don'ts:

• Don't do a handshake deal; everything (and he means everything) needs to be in writing.
• Even if the investor is a friend or relative, don't assume you can skip the formalities. You can't. If something goes wrong, you want to make sure your relationship is "protected."

Just as important, don't play lawyer and try to write the agreement yourself. Instead...

• Get a lawyer - and make sure he or she is experienced in drafting investment agreements.

Then, before you sign any agreement, have the lawyers create a simplified description of the deal terms in plain English, so all parties understand the expectations, the deliverables and the consequences. For example:

• How much money is involved, and when can you expect to actually receive it?
• Is this an equity deal, and what percentage of the business does the investor get? Or is the investor loaning you money, which means you're taking on debt?
• If it this is a debt deal, what are the repayment terms?
• Is the loan secured by someone's house or similar collateral?
• When does the investor expect to see a return on their investment?

Next, clarify what say the investor has in the business operations. "For instance," says Rosandic, "will you have to get the investor's permission before making major decisions, like selling an asset or buying equipment?" Make sure your expectations match the investors'.

Of course, that's not all you need to worry about. Once you've covered the basic issues, Rosandic says there are still a lot of questions that need to be answered and clarifying that needs to be done.

• Clarify everyone's roles. Will the investor actively participate in the business as a manager or director? If so, what is expected of the investor as a participant? Will the investor be entitled to any salary or distribution?
• It's crucial to understand your investors' specific expectations for your startup. For example, are they looking for an increase in sales or in net revenue?
• Create a budget for the next 12 to 16 months so that everyone is clear on how you plan to spend the money you raise. "Even if it changes, and it very likely will, [a budget] gives you a starting point," explains Rosandic.
• What's your exit strategy? How do the investors expect to get a return on their investments, and are you onboard with that? Will you be selling the business, merging with another entity, or do you plan to go public?
• Do your investors have their own exit strategies? Can they sell their interest at any time? If so, do you have a right of first refusal to buy back their interest? Are there time constraints on a buyback? Do the investors have a right to force you to buy back their investments?

The sooner you know the answers to all these questions and the more everyone understands everyone else's expectations, the better you'll be able to manage not only your business, but your investor relationships.

Best-case scenario? "If your startup is successful," Rosandic notes, "most of these issues will be nonissues."

In addition to understanding the many real concerns that today's parents have with video games, it's also worth considering the benefits and positive aspects that contemporary interactive entertainment choices provide.

"Games can definitely be good for the family," says the ESRB's Patricia Vance. "There's plenty of selection. Oftentimes I think parents feel that they're not because video games in the media are portrayed as violent, and hardcore games tend to get the lion's share of publicity. But parents also need to be comforted knowing that E for Everyone is by far largest category [of software]. Nearly 60% of the almost 1700 ratings we assigned last year were E for Everyone, which means there's a huge selection of games available that are appropriate for all ages."

In fact, most video games do have quite a few redeeming qualities - even those with violent content. All games can and do have benefits for players, and in a number of different and sometimes surprising ways.

Educational Benefits for Students

A recent study from the Education Development Center and the U.S. Congress-supported Ready To Learn (RTL) Initiative found that a curriculum that involved digital media such as video games could improve early literacy skills when coupled with strong parental and teacher involvement. Interestingly, the study focused on young children, and 4- and 5-year-olds who participated showed increases in letter recognition, sounds association with letters, and understanding basic concepts about stories and print.

The key for this study was having high-quality educational titles, along with parents and teachers who were equally invested in the subject matter. That way kids could discuss and examine the concepts that they were exposed to in the games. Also interesting is the value that video games are proven to have even for very young players. A study by the Education Department Center further found that low-income children are "better prepared for success in kindergarten when their preschool teachers incorporate educational video and games from the Ready to Learn Initiative."

Games that are designed to help teach are having an impact on college-age pupils as well. Following a recent 3D virtual simulation of a US/Canadian border crossing, wherein students assumed the role of guards, Loyalist College in Ontario reported that the number of successful test scores increased from 56% to 95%.

Career Benefits

Future career choices for today's tots will no doubt be influenced by technology in a way that is difficult for many parents to imagine too. Skills learned and honed playing home console and video games, as well as mobile gaming apps, will undoubtedly be very valuable to students in the workforce of 2025.

As mentioned earlier, the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) has proclaimed that kids need more, not less, video game play. They argue that video games hold the potential to help address one of America's most pressing problems - preparing students for an increasingly competitive global market.

"The success of complex video games demonstrates that games can teach higher-order thinking skills such as strategic thinking, interpretative analysis, problem solving, plan formulation and execution, and adaptation to rapid change," the Federation announced in a 2010 report. "These are the skills U.S. employers increasingly seek in workers and new workforce entrants."

Games are increasingly being used to educate and instruct workers around the globe by governments, trade bodies and the world's largest corporations as well. From Cisco Systems' The Cisco Mind Share Game, which facilitates network certification, to the US Department of Justice's Incident Commander, in which emergency responders practice coordinating disaster relief efforts, the number of practical examples continues to grow. In fact, a recent study by the Entertainment Software Association found that 70% of major domestic employers have utilized interactive software and games for training purposes, and nearly eight out of 10 plan on doing so by 2013.

Going forward, in addition to polishing your resume and interview skills, who knows? You may even want to brush up on your button-mashing abilities.

Promoting Exercise

All parents know that kids need a healthy combination of physical and mental exercise. Happily, today's motion-controlled games for Microsoft's Xbox 360 Kinect, Nintendo's Wii and Wii U, and Sony's PlayStation Move help kids get both kinds of workouts at the same time.

Organizations supporting individuals of all ages and interests are additionally using active games to help get people up and moving. Nursing homes, cruise ships and even after-school programs all now employ active video games in some form to help stimulate both the mind and body.

The good news: People seem to be enjoying active play more than ever. Healthy diversions such as Wii Fit and Zumba Fitness continue to be some of the most popular and best-selling games year in and out.

Group & Social Play

Video games can also have some very important effects on family relationships, and deserve to be thought of as something that can - and should - be played together.

Families that embrace playing video games as part of their everyday life are likely to find themselves enjoying a greater sense of cohesion and communication than families who still view video games as an idle, meaningless and solitary pursuit. As a result, it's small wonder that so many in this day and age are putting away the cards and dice and turning to high-tech alternatives for modern family game nights.

Moving, thinking, cooperating, helping, learning, empathizing, growing, seeing the world from other perspectives... video games can help kids and families do all these things and more. So talk to your friends, do the research and seek out games that your family likes to play and that you as parents are comfortable with, then consider making play a part of your regular routine. Chances are, you won't just have a great time - you'll also make lasting memories and connections with your kids while doing so.

I got a call from Satish, one of my ex-students last week. He got my attention when he said, "following your customer development stuff is making my company fail." The rest of the conversation sounded too confusing for me to figure out over the phone, so I invited him out to the ranch to chat.

But in this case, I suggested we take a hike out to Potato Patch pond.

Potato Patch Pond

We took the trail behind the house down the hill, through the forest, and emerged into the bright sun in the lower valley. (Like many parts of the ranch this valley has its own micro-climate and today was one of those days when it was ten degrees warmer than up at the house.)

As we walked up the valley Satish kept up a running dialog catching me up on six years of family, classmates and how he started his consumer web company. It had recently rained and about every 50 feet we'd see another 3-inch salamander ambling across the trail. When the valley dead-ended in the canyon, we climbed 30-foot up a set of stairs and emerged looking at the water. A "hanging pond" is always a surprise to visitors. All of a sudden Satish's stream of words slowed to a trickle and just stopped. He stood at the end of the small dock for a while taking it all in. I dragged him away and we followed the trail through the woods, around the pond, through the shadows of the trees.

As we circled the pond I tried to both keep my eyes on the dirt trail while glancing sideways for pond turtles and red-legged frogs. When I'm out here alone it's quiet enough to hear the wind through the trees, and after awhile the sound of your own heartbeat. We sat on the bench staring across the water, with the only noise coming from ducks tracing patterns on the flat water. Sitting there Satish described his experience.

We Did Everything Customers Asked For

"We did every thing you said, we got out of the building and talked to potential customers. We surveyed a ton of them online, ran A/B tests, brought a segment of those who used the product in-house for face-to-face meetings. " Yep, sound good.

"Next, we built a minimum viable product." OK, still sounds good.

"And then we built everything our prospective customers asked for." That took me aback.

"Well everyone uses the product for awhile, but no one is upgrading to our paid product. We spent all this time building what customers asked for. And now most of the early users have stopped coming back."

I looked at hard at Satish trying to remember where he had sat in my class. Then I asked, "Satish, what's your business model?

What's Your Business Model?

"Business model? I guess I was just trying to get as many people to my site as I could and make them happy. Then I thought I could charge them for something later and sell advertising based on the users I had."

I pushed a bit harder.

"Your strategy counted on a freemium-to-paid upgrade path. What experiments did you run that convinced you that this was the right pricing tactic? Your attrition numbers mean users weren't engaged with the product. What did you do about it?

"Did you think you were trying to get large networks of engaged users that can disrupt big markets? 'Large' is usually measured in millions of users. What experiments did you run that convinced you could get to that scale?"

The wind was picking up over the pond so I suggested we start walking.

We stopped at the overlook a top of the waterfall, after the recent rain I had to shout over the noise of the rushing water. I offered that it sounded like he had done a great job listening to customers. And better, he had translated what he had heard into experiments and tests to acquire more users and get a higher percentage of those to activate.

But he was missing the bigger picture. The idea of the tests he ran wasn't just to get data - it was to get insight. All of those activities - talking to customers, A/B testing, etc. needed to fit into his business model - how his company will find a repeatable and scalable business model and ultimately make money. And this is the step he had missed.

Customer Development = The Pursuit of Customer Understanding

Part of customer development is understanding which customers make sense for your business. The goal of listening to customers is not please every one of them. It's to figure out which customer segment served his needs - both short and long term. And giving your product away, as he was discovering, is often a going out of business strategy.

The work he had done acquiring and activating customers were just one part of the entire business model.

As we started the long climb up the driveway, I suggested his fix might be simpler than he thought. He needed to start thinking about what a repeatable and scalable business model looked like.

He really needed to think through his revenue model (the strategy his company uses to generate cash from each customer segment). And how was he going to use pricing, (the tactics of what he charged in each customer segment) to achieve that revenue model. Freemium was just one of many tactics. Single or multi-sided market? And which customers did he want to help him get there?

My guess was that he was going to end up firing a bunch of his customers - and that was OK.

As we sat back in the living room, I gave him a copy of The Startup Owner's Manual and we watched a bobcat catch a gopher.

Lessons Learned

• Getting out of the building is a great first step
• Listening to potential customers is even better
• Getting users to visit your site and try your product feels great
• Your job is not to make every possible customer happy
• Pick the customer segments and pricing tactics that drive your business model

TravelTriangle.com

First, Sanchit Gurg from Noida, India, pitched TravelTriangle.com, a marketplace for travel agencies offering personalized tour packages for travelers seeking such help. The company already has engaged about 75 travel agencies and some 900 customers. They have started transacting, generating multiple bids for each RFP and taking a commission off closed deals. Reviews, ratings and other core marketplace functions are part of the offering. Sanchit and his team of six have validated the concept already.

I like the idea a lot, especially because traveling in India and South Asia and South East Asia is still quite complicated. Local knowledge and contacts are key, and the logistics of travel can be very complex. Having personalized, reliable service from a travel agent, along with local guides, etc., are attractive value propositions.

The market size, however, is relatively small: 5% of $500M or $25M is the estimated Total Available Market for the foreseeable future. Frankly, that doesn't bother me, since I tend to like small, niche businesses with good, solid execution, which Sanchit's company is demonstrating. Clearly, a multi-million dollar, profitable business can be built here, and I plan to be a user of the service. In fact, I'd like to design a trip to visit Bandhavgarh National Forest in Madhya Pradesh to see tigers, as well as visit the Khajuraho Temple, ideally during the famous dance festival that is held there. Maybe one of the travel agents on TravelTriangle can help put this together for me.

For the time being, the company is seeing maximum interest from travelers who want to visit Rajasthan, Kerala and Sri Lanka.

BabbleTAB

Next, Andrew Jaffa from Jacksonville, Florida, pitched BabbleTAB, a social media marketing service that generates relevant content for the Facebook pages of small businesses like car dealerships, restaurants, retail, etc.

Andrew wants to offer a tablet-based console on location that would capture video and images of customers and post them to the businesses' Facebook pages. The business model is a subscription service with a small fee per loaded image.

We brainstormed today about the adoption barriers and whether consumers would take the trouble to be photographed or recorded. Andrew's preliminary research says that they would if offered the right incentive. In a car dealership, for example, he thinks a $250 discount would be a substantial enough incentive. I am listening to the use cases but would like to see a statistically significant validation exercise done on the idea.

We also discussed Andrew's proposed tiered pricing model, which I felt was too complicated. A simple flat pricing would be more appropriate. Andrew agreed and is planning to change the model.

You can listen to the recording of today's roundtable here. As always, I would very much like to hear about your business, so let me invite you to come and pitch at one of our free 1M/1M public roundtables. We will be holding future roundtables on the following dates starting at 8:00 a.m. PST:
Thursday, February 16, Register Here.
Thursday, February 23, Register Here.
Thursday, March 1, Register Here.
Thursday, March 8, Register Here.
Thursday, March 15, Register Here.

If you want a deeper relationship with me, you are very welcome to join the 1M/1M premium program. If you have any questions about the program, please, first study the website, especially What to expect from the 1M/1M premium program and the FAQs. If you have additional questions, please email me, and I would be very happy to respond. Please note that I work exclusively with 1M/1M entrepreneurs.

I also invite you to join the 1M/1M mailing list for the ease and convenience of getting updates. This way we can stay in touch, and it will help you to decide if 1M/1M is a program for you.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock

Given that there is only one week left until Valentine's Day, we wanted to make shopping for the special developer in your life a little easier. Here is a list of gift ideas for the developer love (or "like") in your life, crowdsourced from our community team.

Nomad Brush: This handy brush makes digital painting on the iPad and other tablets possible.

Star Wars: Episode 1 movie tickets: Who wouldn't want to watch a classic - The Phantom Menace - in 3D!

Magic Wand programmable TV remote: This gadget is as entertaining as it is useful and learns from your existing remote control.

Steve Jobs book: If you have an urge to give a "real" book, this is the one.

Chrome cufflinks: These Chrome logo cufflinks are for the guys in your life, but don't shy away from grabbing an Android T-shirt.

JayBird Bluetooth Earbuds: Bluetooth Stereo Headphones make working and commuting even more enjoyable.

Hard Candy Stylus and Pen: If your valentine isn't a painter, opt for the pen that makes writing on an iPad (and paper) possible.

Jawbone JAMBOX: This buletooth speaker boasting hi-fi audio definitely says "love."

Das Keyboard Model S Ultimate Silent Keyboard: Give the gift of incognito typing. It's silent and doesn't have numbers or letters visible (so you can still work while on the phone with your loved one).

Dave Messinger, chief architect and evangelist for CloudSpokes at Appirio.

Robot photo courtesy of Shutterstock.

In fact, one of the best ways we can delineate this phenomenon is by contrasting 1M/1M with YCombinator. (Video after the jump.)

This short video explains how the two programs differ:

Bottomline: YC, superb incubator, is a program that applies to less than .01% of entrepreneurs, whereas 1M/1M is an inclusive, global program. The businesses we will discuss today will put this distinction in perspective.

Hooduku

First, Sudhendra Seshachala from Houston, Texas pitched Hooduku, a professional services business that already has significant revenue from cloud integration work. Hooduku is a 1M/1M premium member and is interested in moving away from pure services toward a product+services model.

Sudhi presented the idea of a platform that bridges between Microsoft Azure customers who are also using RackSpace and other Infrastructure-as-a-Service providers for their content management and delivery. He uses a classic and highly successful mode of building products, that of being deeply immersed in customer situations through services projects and using that domain knowledge and relationship to identify opportunities for building products. A major example of such a company is Appirio, which went on to get funded by Sequoia Capital and has since built a strong product-services company in the cloud integration domain.

My advice to Sudhi is to not position his company as a 'platform' but rather pitch the value proposition as an 'integration framework'. These subtle wordings make a huge difference in how a company is viewed.

Buy Or Boycott

Next Doug Lowenthal from Jacksonville, Florida presented Buy Or Boycott, which he came up with at the recent Startup Weekend program. Buy Or Boycott wants to offer consumers an easy way to avoid buying products that have major issues, be it political or environmental. However, the user experience that Doug described to deliver this was not convincing. He proposes to offer a mobile app with which to scan every product in your grocery store shopping cart. I don't believe consumers would do this. When we stand on grocery store lines after a long day or week, the last thing we want to do is scan a bunch of products with our mobile phones.

NXI Group

Then Kaushik Mitra from New Delhi, India, pitched the NXI Group of Companies, a custom hardware vendor that presented itself as a laptop and tablet company. It took me a bit of time to parse through the details and figure out that NXI is NOT a laptop or tablet vendor competing with HP, Dell and Acer. Rather, it is developing custom hardware for consumers with specific needs. For example, they are in the midst of developing RFID-enabled tablets for the universal ID effort by the Indian government.

Kaushik's company already has $400,000 in revenue, and while the business is not a typical venture-fundable one, I see no reason why the company cannot continue to grow in its niche.

Koolaring

Last, Edoe Cohen from Tel Aviv, Israel pitched Koolaring, a SaaS solution for building private alumni networks a la LinkedIn. I have seen numerous startups with this general idea. It makes perfect sense for universities to have their own private alumni networks, and it is only a matter of time before they do. Whether Koolaring will be the winner in that space or not will depend on execution.

So you see, I just shared with you four businesses, none of which would suit YCombinator for a variety of reasons outlined in the video. However, 1M/1M is delighted to help any and all of them.

You can listen to the recording of today's roundtable here. As always, I would very much like to hear about your business, so let me invite you to come and pitch at one of our free 1M/1M public roundtables. We will be holding future roundtables on the following dates starting at 8:00 a.m. PST:
Thursday, February 9, Register Here.
Thursday, February 16, Register Here.
Thursday, February 23, Register Here.

If you want a deeper relationship with me, you are very welcome to join the 1M/1M premium program. If you have any questions about the program, please, first study the website, especially What to expect from the 1M/1M premium program and the FAQs. If you have additional questions, please email me, and I would be very happy to respond. Please note that I work exclusively with 1M/1M entrepreneurs.

I also invite you to join the 1M/1M mailing list for the ease and convenience of getting updates. This way we can stay in touch, and it will help you to decide if 1M/1M is a program for you.

I am an Information Technologist for the Department of Statistics and Probability at Michigan State University. The Department is home to award-winning faculty with a wide variety of expertise in fundamental and interdisciplinary research, and over 100 graduate students from all over the world. Keeping the faculty and students ahead of their research is a constantly evolving challenge for my team and I.

Evolution of Statistical Software

Lesson #1: The Shortcomings of Open Source

As more people began to use R and the analysis became increasingly complex, researchers began to face a large problem: time. Research was taking several months to complete in terms of processing jobs. Often, there is a need to run the calculations several times to ensure accuracy; waiting three months for one to complete was simply not feasible. It was taking R this long to process the jobs because the iterations were computed in serial, one right after another, using only one processor core at a time.

Bo Cowgill from Google once said "The best thing about R is that it was developed by statisticians. The worst thing about R ...is that it was developed by statisticians." Even though R was--and still is--constantly evolving, the department needed a solution that could keep up with hardware technology and compute calculations in an efficient, scalable manner.

Lesson #2: Find Commercial Enhancements for Open Source

Our search for a more effective version of R ultimately brought us to a product called Revolution R Enterprise by Revolution Analytics, which provides commercial support and software for open source R. It takes advantage of multiple processor cores by using optimized assembly code and efficient multi-threaded algorithms that use all of the processor cores simultaneously. Although this addressed a lot of the issues of open source R, professors were only using Revolution R on their desktops. The next question was, how we could combine the power of our servers to dramatically decrease our computation times?

Lesson #3: Expanding to Infinity and Beyond

Open Source R is a memory-bound language. This means that all of the data, matrices, lists etc. need to be stored in memory. Issues quickly arose when data sets became several gigabytes large and were too big to fit into memory. This required implementing parallel external memory algorithms and data structures to handle the data. These challenges were tackled by Revolution Analytics as they developed the R language for a High Performance Computing (HPC) environment.

Once the department could schedule R jobs in an HPC environment, the demand began to drastically increase. The HPC cluster is now scheduling more than four times the amount of jobs that were scheduled in previous semesters, from 200 jobs over a year ago to over 800 jobs this past semester. Jobs that were taking over three months to complete on open source R were completed in less than a few days with Revolution R. Computational jobs are now run multiple times with significantly higher levels of accuracy than ever before.

Conclusion

There are often great pieces of software created through open source, but they generally lack key features needed for an enterprise environment. Combined with commercial backing and expertise, these projects can be further developed and expanded to meet the needs of large-scale enterprise environments. IT departments can provide enhanced solutions to their users that adapt to the expanding world of cloud and High Performance Computing environments--all while minimizing the impact on a shrinking budget.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.

The media, when pitched a startup story, is interested in who funded the venture. They seldom ask how much revenue the company has or if it is profitable.

And entrepreneurs? They seem to have confused the definition of entrepreneurship altogether. Entrepreneurship, they mistakenly believe, equals financing!

This is wrong.

There are numerous stories of successful businesses that have been built without a penny of outside financing. I want to share with you some wisdom from the heroes of the other 99%. They live in a world of entrepreneurs who enjoy their freedom and are not looking to sell their businesses or take them public. You could say these businesses are built-to-enjoy, as opposed to built-to-flip. Needless to say, outside financing, by definition, requires an "exit," and for most businesses, that means a sale to a larger company.

But the entrepreneurs I will introduce you to today are not interested in selling their companies. They just want to continue doing what they are doing: building value.

Meet Girish Navani, CEO of eClinicalWorks, a super-successful healthcare IT company based in Boston. He has never taken any funding but has built a $100 million-plus business by delivering value to customers.

Girish says, "I don't foresee leaving the company for at least 10 years. I would like to leave it a private company with no external investors and absolutely no thoughts whatsoever about Wall Street. I am having fun and take great pride in my freedom. There is no reason I would give that up. We are a cash flow positive company. We have recurring revenues and no debt. We have a large customer base that is growing exponentially." [You can read Girish's full story here.]

Meet Andrew Fox, CEO of ClubPlanet, a $30 million-plus nightclub ticketing services company that is also 100% founder-owned. Andrew loves nightlife and says, "The business is very successful and has a lot of room for growth. I think that we have a lot of suitors out there who mention really ridiculous numbers at times. This is such a great lifestyle business that I don't know if I could ever sell it. All of my previous businesses I built to sell, but this time around you might find me right here in thirty years. I hope by then it is $300 million a year.

Based on our growth trajectory, we are seeing really good signs of improvement. [You can read more of Andrew's story here.]

Each of these entrepreneurs could raise money in a nanosecond given how much success they've had. The fact that they don't gives you an idea about the advantages of the self-financed, organic growth model. No matter how much Wall Street gyrates, these entrepreneurs experience and demonstrate a level of stability and steadiness that is exemplary.

Imagine if the American economy had many more such steady private companies that are far removed from the movements of the speculative markets, how much more robust things would be? It really is time that the media starts celebrating more of these kinds of heroes: the other 99%.

And for young entrepreneurs, as you evaluate role models to emulate, perhaps it is not a bad idea to also consider some of these lesser-known heroes. They can give you a picture of the realities of an alternate, deeply satisfying universe.

In conclusion, I want to leave you with a 1:49 minute video message. Please listen to it, and stop for a moment to think about your path forward. Is a single-minded focus on fund-raising your only option?

Conference photo by Dell

Although I believe this year will be a pivotal point in the history of mobile technology, we've got a long way to go. Currently the mobile Web is like a gangly eight year old who, when you gaze upon you sense feelings of annoyance, intrigue and hope for a better future. We've all been there and it ain't pretty.

Web is immature and not growing up. To be clear, I am referring to the mobile Web browsing experience, the Web that will make its natural evolution from being viewed on large desktop screens to one viewed primarily on smaller mobile devices.

When browsing the mobile Web you will find the experience is quite unpleasant since most sites are not optimized for the small screen. If we are going to soon experience a mobile utopia full of simplicity and elegance, things need to drastically change. My hope is just as the immature young person seems to shoot to adulthood quicker than you blink your eye, our mobile experience will transform significantly this year.

The Mobile Web Is Annoying

Mobile computing through smartphones and tablets is growing four times faster than the PC and Internet evolutions of the 1980's and 90's. Even more interesting, people are now using mobile apps more than the "mobile Web" with users spending 94 minutes a day with their mobile apps versus 72 minutes on the Web. Unfortunately, the gap continues to widen each year.

Why is this? I thought browsing the mobile Web was cool?

Through much debate it has been determined the app world offers a better internet experience. According to Forrester Research CEO George Colony:

"The Web is not the internet; it's just a software architecture we decided to put on the internet. Like its software predecessors, the Web will eventually be replaced and we think App Internet is the best direction for the next step. It's faster, simpler and offers a better internet experience."

Here's a video of the entire talk and it's worth a view.

Quite simply, the reasons for using a mobile device are fundamentally different than the reasons why we use a PC. When using a mobile device, consumers are action-oriented and aiming to complete quick tasks such as transactions, communications or searches for information rather than long form reading or document creating such as on a desktop.

Yet, the majority of sites found on the Web today are not optimized for mobile access so the general user experience is terrible. We have to pinch and zoom to read text and to find the appropriate link (which takes two hands by the way... try zooming in and out while carrying something in your other hand), some images don't load well and sites can be too text heavy. And unfortunately, anyone with big thumbs end up hitting the wrong links and take three times longer to complete what should be a quick and easy task.

The terrible mobile browsing experience is precisely why native apps are receiving more and more of our attention. Native apps are designed around and within the small screen, allowing the user a more pleasant experience. I am so not sure the massive growth of the app world is such a good thing and now is not the time to diverge into the native app vs mobile Web debate, but if the mobile Web is to mature there needs to be better standards that put mobile experiences in line with current use cases and patterns. Until then we are left to annoyance and the walled garden of the app world will continue to dominate.

The Mobile Web Is Intriguing

Yet, for all the annoyance there is an intriguing nature to the mobile Web. Strong glimmers of innovative new ideas involving shopping, creating, reading, searching, discovering, communicating, posting, transacting and many other activities are popping up right at our finger tips. It is truly an exciting time as many trends are converging to make 2012 the year the mobile Web finally turns the corner. Here's just a few courtesy of Trendwatching.

One intriguing movement is instant visual information gratification, or bringing information about objects that consumers encounter in the real world through "point and know" actions from their mobile device. The race is on to add a (useful) real world element using textual and visual search, and by "real world" I mean the world of objects and people.

According to trendwatching.com:

"Created by Carnegie Mellon University, PittPatt is a facial recognition tool that enables users to find individuals from photographs or videos. The face detection software can locate human faces and match them up with photographs from Facebook and Google Images, identifying individuals in under 60 seconds."

Another intriguing element of the mobile Web is the cashless society phenomenon. Sure, the cashless consumer concept has been around since the mid-2000's and we've already seen some interesting virtual payment offerings, but nothing major has been driven through the mobile device. Trendwatching.com predicts:

"This year is going to be the year we see major players like Google, MasterCard and others actively roll out their cashless initiatives around the world. For consumers, the initial lure will be convenience, but eventually mobile payments will create an entirely new data-driven eco-system of rewards, purchase history, deals and so on."

Expect to see a lot of innovation on the mobile payments and commerce space going forward.

As you have probably noticed in your own life, screens are taking over our world. We are starting to see ubiquitous, mobile, cheap, always interactive, intuitive touch-screens interface with anything and everything that lies beyond the screen. The emerging screen culture is less of a trend in itself and more of a movement towards a new digital life. In fact, the future for most devices will be a world where consumers will care less about being mobile and more about the screen, or rather what's being accessed through it.

These new uses, although promising, still seem to be force fed into our mobile experiences using traditional desktop Web-user experiences. If no new standards are created, intriguing new uses for the mobile Web just might not make it.

The Mobile Web Is Full of Possibility

The fullest possibility of the mobile Web will only come true when a common language and a better user experience become standard. Web pages must be optimized for the mobile Web or they become worthless in our increasing mobile society. The promise of HTML5 is to replace the majority of native applications over the next few years, but it is not ready for prime time just yet. Here are some of the reasons HTML5 seems poised to take over the mobile Web, according to Business Insider.

• HTML5 will allow online software and content - not just games - to be much more interactive and richer.
• HTML5 apps are cheaper to make because they're cross-platform. With HTML5, you can develop an app once and be up and running on every platform.
• Engineers are more comfortable with developing HTML5 apps, according to Romain Goyet, CTO of app development company Applidium
• The proliferation of HTML5 apps will reduce the power of app gatekeepers like Apple and shift the balance of power back toward content providers instead of app distributors.

Why is HTML so important to the future of the mobile Web? Commerce, of course. According to eMarketer, mobile commerce is continuing to see strong growth and will boost mobile sales to $31 billion in 2015, a compound annual rate of 55% from 2010 to 2015. More smartphone users, greater consumer comfort with mobile shopping and an increasing number of retailers launching mobile sites and apps will all play a part in propelling m-commerce sales.

Gigaom recently reported design store Fab.com, had seen a huge surge in mobile use since launching mobile apps in October, with 30% of traffic now coming in via mobile. But more impressive than that is the fact that mobile visitors are twice as likely to buy compared to visitors to Fab's desktop website.

The Local Merchant and the Small Proprietor

Here's the main point: The promise of the mobile Web is not to radically transform large corporations, who already have access to capital required to invest in tomorrow's mobile technologies. The potential of the mobile Web, just as it was with the original Web, is how much it can positively affect the local merchant and the small proprietor, helping them cost effectively and more efficiently reach their customers. Their hope is the mobile Web brings more transactions and quicker communications at a cheaper price.

And merchants should waste little time catching up to their mobile customers. According to IBM, consumer online spending was up 7.5% over 2010 and 14.6% of all online sessions on retail sites were initiated from a mobile device, more than double the rate of 5.6% over this same period in 2010. Sales from mobile devices doubled, reaching 11% versus 5.5% in December 2010.

Therein lies the challenge for merchants. As more consumers get accustomed to searching and purchasing on their mobile device it becomes increasingly important for merchants to have a mobile optimized presence or the customer is gone. Consumers need to be able to quickly find information and take action. In fact, if customers can't accomplish their desired action within a few seconds, they are quickly on to the next thing and the merchant has just lost a sale. Most local merchants and millions of SMBs lack sufficient resources to invest in customized native apps developed for a specific platform like Android or iOS, so they must be able to fall back on the common mobile Web every user has access to through their mobile browser.

It's true, immature and annoying eight year olds can be real pains sometimes. The great thing is with time they grow up into mature, strong and productive adults. Let's hope this is the year the mobile Web hits it much needed growth spurt.

Photo by Ed Yourdon

This past weekend, the Jacksonville entrepreneurship community hosted their own version of this exciting program. 150 people came together, and 17 businesses were formed. An additional 50 were on the wait-list, an evidence of the energy and enthusiasm that is bubbling in Florida right now. MJ Charmani, founder of iStart Jax, a business accelerator, and one of the key organizers of the event, introduced today's session with additional reports on last weekend's event.

Armex Zero Suit

First, Eric Keeler with Armex Industries, Inc. pitched the Armex Zero Suit, a new kind of durable, special-purpose suit with significantly higher heat and cold resistance targeted towards racecar drivers, firefighters, and military personnel. Eric has done some technology scouting, and believes he can deliver on the specs of the product.

The problem, however, is that he is assuming that an investor would fund the product development. Investors rarely fund concepts. Even seed investors generally fund businesses that are already rolling. So, Eric will need to create a method with which to get to paying customers before any investor would invest. In addition, there is significant work to do on market sizing and go-to-market strategy. Direct selling simply is not the right solution for bringing this product to market. The price-point is too low for that to be sustainable.

pay2pitch.com

Next Perry Kaye presented pay2pitch.com, a network where entrepreneurs will come and pitch investors and mentors and pay, say, $1,000 for a twenty-minute interaction. The money, however, will be donated to the investor or mentor's favorite charity.

Perry rightly points out that a miniscule percentage of entrepreneurs get funded. We agree on the observation, and many of you have already seen our The Other 99% video. However, Perry's observation that entrepreneurs don't get funded because they can't get meetings is not entirely accurate. Most entrepreneurs don't get funded because they are simply not fundable. For a variety of different reasons that have to do with the fundamentals of their businesses, entrepreneurs, even if they CAN get meetings, don't get funded. So paying $1,000 to get a 20-minute meeting, in my opinion, is a total wastage of money. Of course, if the assumption is that this is for charity, that is different.

The second problem with the assumption here is that mentoring networks typically do not scale. You can see my video on the subject to get more color on why.

Bottomline, we get this question very often: Can 1M/1M help me get funded? So yes, tons of entrepreneurs are looking for funding, whether or not they should. Most of them are not fundable. So getting them to pay $1,000 for a 20-minute meeting that will most likely result in a rejection seems deceptive to me.

Ziffor

Then Tim LeMaster pitched Ziffor, a service for table restaurants that would like to offer promotions for non-peak times. This is a compelling idea, because many restaurants that have experimented with Groupon-like services have often been overwhelmed with unprofitable customers showing up during peak hours. Tim's idea offers a good solution to this problem.
However, there are some serious operational complexities involved to make a solution like this work at scale. Getting access to restaurant booking data won't be easy. Also, selling to restaurants is expensive, as we have seen in the massive operational expenditure and lack of profitability in the Groupon model.

I reviewed Tim's financial assumptions, and advised him to redo them with the assumption that the team would have to bootstrap the business locally, get enough validation, etc., before any investor would even consider investing.

SustanAbin

Next Rushabh Shah pitched SustainAbin, a concept that anchors on the assumption that 83 million people are searching for how to practice a green lifestyle. Rushabh wants to create a portal that harnesses this traffic, and give them meaningful content, based on which he would be able to generate high value leads for local businesses in the sustainability area such as solar, organic farming, etc.

Rushabh needs to do a lot of studying of how lead-arbitrage businesses work. To make a case of the business he proposes, he would have to, somehow, channel the search traffic from Google to his site. This is the domain of PPC and SEO, and the market is very competitive, buying extremely expensive.

On the business model side, also, some of the assumptions of monetizing with advertising are misplaced. I keep repeating this: there is way too much unmonetized ad inventory out there, driving CPMs down. Dramatically. Rushabh's analysis of the business needs to be significantly more thorough and comprehensive to even assess viability.

Bthere

Vincent Laganella then pitched Bthere, an excellent concept of analyzing 911 data feeds to extract leads for glass repair, door and window repair, and other crime-related contexts that immediately trigger needs in consumers. For example, a consumer has just had a burglar break in to the house through a glass window. The 911 call would generate a lead for a local glass repair shop instantly. And small businesses would be more than happy to pay good money for such immediately actionable leads. Very strong idea, and excellent analysis of the business fundamentals.

Overall, today's roundtable was a window into Jacksonville's efforts at drumming up additional entrepreneurship for regional economic development. The Startup Weekend programs around the world are doing this in different cities, and the organization is supported by the Kauffman Foundation. We look forward to supporting more such efforts through the 1M/1M initiative.

The Roundtable

You can listen to the recording of today's roundtable here. As always, I would very much like to hear about your business, so let me invite you to come and pitch at one of our free 1M/1M public roundtables. We will be holding future roundtables on the following dates starting at 8:00 a.m. PST:

Thursday, February 2, Register Here.
Thursday, February 9, Register Here.
Thursday, February 16, Register Here.
Thursday, February 23, Register Here.

If you want a deeper relationship with me, you are very welcome to join the 1M/1M premium program. If you have any questions about the program, please, first study the website, especially What to expect from the 1M/1M premium program and the FAQs. If you have additional questions, please email me, and I would be very happy to respond. Please note that I work exclusively with 1M/1M entrepreneurs.

I also invite you to join the 1M/1M mailing list for the ease and convenience of getting updates. This way we can stay in touch, and it will help you to decide if 1M/1M is a program for you.

Empower Lounge

Misty Gibbs from Austin, Texas, presented Empower Lounge, a concept for a website that focuses on offering inspirational content along four major vectors: work, health, play and giving. In addition, the site will offer some level of professional networking. Misty is folding in a national site, Inspiration Lounge, and a local site, AustinWomen, to bring together her current 10,000-strong subscriber base under the Empower Lounge umbrella.

I probed quite hard about the specific positioning for the site and brainstormed with her on examples of other sites/organizations with related agendas: Women 2.0, ASTIA, Ladies Who Launch, etc. The first two are non-profits, and Ladies Who Launch is still a fairly small-traffic destination, far from a venture-style, high-growth business. The company that has successfully monetized in the women vertical is Glam Media, but their model is of a Vertical Ad Network.

I also pointed out that there is way too much unmonetized ad inventory online, a challenge that is putting digital publishers through serious heartburns. I have shared my thoughts on this topic over and again on my blog, as well as elsewhere on the Web. We've had substantive discussions on the topic with entrepreneurs such as John Ramey, CEO of iSocket, Kenny Rosenblatt, CEO of Arkadium, and Jay Samit, CEO of SocialVibe, who all attest to the downward pressure on CPM rates and the challenges of low fill-through.

In addition, ad networks taking large cuts of ad revenues put further pressure on the publishers. Vikrant Mathur, CEO of iFood.tv discusses that at length in the blog post here. Vikrant is running a bootstrapped publishing company, and is a 1M/1M premium member. In 1M/1M, we happen to have a great deal of experience dealing with such companies and their challenges.

I don't think I got through to Misty, though. She is 'confident' that she can raise $500,000 for this website right away. Well, good luck, Misty! I hope you are right.

However, for other entrepreneurs who may be listening a bit more seriously to the challenges facing the industry, I would also like you to invest some time and energy in assessing the 'fundability' of your project before making assumptions like this. You can use the 1M/1M Self-Assessment for that purpose. Also, here is a short video on the issue of fundability, addressing some questions that we hear often from entrepreneurs.

In conclusion, I would like to highlight the fact that entrepreneurs really should STOP focusing so much on funding and start worrying more about how to build a sustainable business. Less than 1% of entrepreneurs actually ever get funded. The other 99% who go out to look for financing get rejected. But there is no reason to believe that you cannot succeed even without funding. So, my advice to Misty is to focus on the business fundamentals of how to get to revenues and profits within a realistic time frame. Here is my video message to all entrepreneurs who are focused on raising money and are facing difficulty: The Other 99% (Entrepreneurs).

Themeefy

Also, Titash Neogi from Pune, India, pitched Themeefy, a publishing platform for self-publishers that helps users create, curate and publish books, magazines, etc. I happen to know a great deal about this business because of my own long involvement in publishing. So, we dialoged about the product marketing issues of what constitutes a complete product in this space. For instance, HTML books are simply not enough and all the traditional formats of e-books need to be supported. Similarly, self-publishing platforms like Amazon's CreateSpace need to be supported; iPad apps need to be supported.

In general, when you come to the market with a solution, it needs to meet the needs of the contemporary customers. The proposed solution is an inadequate one for serious book authors to want to use. It is, however, being used for free by about 5,000 educators, travel book authors, etc., which is a good start. But people using your product for free is one thing, getting them to actually pay is quite another. And that's where Themeefy will need to develop a product roadmap and business strategy that takes this minimum viable product and builds a sustainable business out of it. I will be happy to help him accomplish that.

You can listen to the recording of today's roundtable here. As always, I would very much like to hear about your business, so let me invite you to come and pitch at one of our free 1M/1M public roundtables. We will be holding future roundtables on the following dates starting at 8:00 a.m. PST:
Thursday, January 26, Register Here.
Thursday, February 2, Register Here.
Thursday, February 9, Register Here.
Thursday, February 16, Register Here.
Thursday, February 23, Register Here.
Please note, next week's roundtable will be co-hosted with Jacksonville Startup Weekend and a couple of hundred entrepreneurs are participating in this weekend's event in Florida. On January 26, the top five will be presenting at the 1M/1M roundtable.

If you want a deeper relationship with me, you are very welcome to join the 1M/1M premium program. If you have any questions about the program, please, first study the website, especially What to expect from the 1M/1M premium program and the FAQs. If you have additional questions, please email me, and I would be very happy to respond. Please note that I work exclusively with 1M/1M entrepreneurs.

I also invite you to join the 1M/1M mailing list for the ease and convenience of getting updates. This way we can stay in touch, and it will help you to decide if 1M/1M is a program for you.

Now information continually bursts through our Google Readers, our cell phones, our tablets, display screens in elevators and grocery stores. Do we really need to read all 88,731 articles on the Bernie Madoff trial? Probably not. And that's the dilemma for news organizations.

In the old metaphor, column-inches was the constraint. In the new metaphor, reader attention span becomes the constraint.

Taming the Beast

The dilemma is that relevant is in the mind of the beholder. Emerging application - news readers such as Flipboard, Pulse and Feedly - are struggling to deliver relevancy. One proxy is to use a reader's social graph to curate stories. Another is user profiles and preferences.

These current approaches are doomed. With respect to social graph curation, people have different roles at during different times. On the weekend, a reader might be interested in arts, entertainment and sports news based on a friends and family. During the week, this same person may be interested in business news based on recommendations from trading partners in the capital markets. How do readers seamlessly reconcile this?

I am not able to predict when viable applications will emerge, but I do believe the industry will struggle for several years. The fate of these first generation news readers may be similar to first generation social networks. Remember Friendster and Orkut?

However, there is some clarity on key underlying technologies that will provide the scaffolding for next generation news consumption. Here are some of them.

Tagging and Semantic Extraction

Tagging or semantic extraction engines, process news articles and return structured metadata, to provide insight into the underlying text. A trivial application that uses tags is the tag cloud, where users click tags displayed on a web page to uncover underlying content. Tag clouds miss the point.

Disambiguation

Disambiguation is a technique to uniquely identify named entities: people, cities, and subjects. Disambiguation can identify that one article is about George Herbert Walker Bush, the 41st President of the US, and another article is about George Walker Bush, number 43. Similarly, the technology can distinguish between Lincoln Continental, the car, and Lincoln, Nebraska, the town. As part of the metadata, many tagging engines that disambiguate return unique identifiers called Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI). A URI is a pointer into a database.

If tagging creates machine readable assets, disambiguation is the connective tissue between these assets. Leveraging tagging and disambiguation technologies, applications can now connect content with very disparate origins. Today's article on George W. Bush can be automatically linked to an article he wrote when he owned the Texas Ranger's baseball team. Similarly the online bio of Bill Gates can be automatically tied to his online New Mexico arrest record in April 1975.

Linked Data Structures

Typically, a URI entry holds some content related to the entity. URIs are linked to form a database called a Linked Data Structure. For instance, a URI on Barack Obama may contain a reference to his current position, former jobs, marital status, spouse's name, children, education and schools.

The URI Michelle Obama may similarly contain information on her spouse, children, college, graduate school, etc. The URI on Michele Obama's law school will contain information about the school, such as current and past deans.

For instance, one could build an application to retrieve articles on the Supreme Court and determine if the article mentions any justices who previously headed a law school attended by the wife of any U.S. President. This application would identify all articles mentioning Justice Elena Kagan, previously Dean of Harvard Law School, from which Michelle Obama graduated.

That example, per se, may be nonsensical, but the power of the technology is immense. For instance are there any CEOs of government contractors who spouses happen to sit on philanthropic boards along with lawmakers on the House Ways and Means committee?

Linked Data Cloud

The metaphor becomes even more powerful with the federation of Linked Data Structures into the Linked Data Cloud. This level of abstraction allows different owners (such as dbPedia, IMDb, the New York Times) to link their data to create a powerful ecosystem. The power here is the power of the network effect.

Utilizing these underlying technologies emerging applications will drive a completely news-reading metaphor.

Conclusion

Semantic infrastructure technologies will propel next generation news consumption. The fluidity and deluge of online news overwhelms us, but smart readers will tame this flow and enable new consumption models and insights.

Newspaper box photo by George Kelly

I have visited IIT KGP many times over the years, and each time I see a marked improvement in the energy and momentum at the campus on entrepreneurship. My 1997 recruitment visit met with tepid response, with the student body largely interested in multinational placements at the time. But a subsequent visit in January 2009 saw a massive change: the students were excited about entrepreneurship.

Today's roundtable was yet another step forward: the students have started producing interesting, viable business ideas, and some are even validating them successfully. It gives me great satisfaction to observe this evolution, and play a small role in shepherding these young entrepreneurs along.

Before I start discussing the businesses, I'd like to highlight the role the National Entrepreneurship Network (NEN) has played in developing the e-cells at 470 different schools and colleges in India. NEN is part of the Wadhwani Foundation's efforts at entrepreneurship development, and it is great to see how pervasive their success has been. I spoke to Ajay Kela, the CEO of Wadhwani Foundation recently, and got a feel for the breadth of their investment.

The challenge ahead for NEN and the academic institutions in India is to now take the massive interest and enthusiasm that has been generated, and harness it to produce a large number of successful companies.

Today, at IIT KGP, we caught a glimpse of some of the budding heroes of 21^st century India.

mobHUB

First, Piyush Bagaria from IIT KGP pitched mobHUB, a learning management solution with extensive simulation and visualization capability that he proposes to sell to science and technology educational institutions to empower faculty to produce rich media content. Piyush has got some early encouragement from a couple of schools in Calcutta, and while he needs to expand the scope of his validation process, there are some interesting nuggets in his core idea.

Optimum Mobility Services

Next Lakshman Pasala from IIT KGP presented Optimum Mobility Services, a fleet routing and optimization solution for cab companies, their current validation segment, followed by logistics companies operating trucks, etc. Two cab companies have already validated the idea, and OMS is on their way to signing up more cab companies in India as beta customers. Clearly, the solution offers some concrete value, and conceivably, OMS can look at the global market later on in their evolution. The notion of Indian companies bringing software technology to the Western market at dramatically lower price-points is one that I have highlighted on many prior occasions.

BUYHatke

Then Gaurav Dahake from IIT KGP pitched BUYHatke, a penny auction site that is considering three primary segments with a consumer-to-consumer e-commerce business model: net-savvy housewives, IT and BPO professionals, and college students with Internet access. My feedback was that the company needs to enter the market in a business-to-consumer mode because the logistics infrastructure in India is not at a point where a c-to-c business can thrive. A B-to-C business, on the other hand, can use Flipkart's logistics infrastructure, and have a better shot at success. My other feedback was to focus on one of the three segments, because everything else - from customer acquisition, to merchandising, to PR, to SEO would work better if the segmentation is tighter.

Univect Education Solutions

Next Parth Pachoir and Udayan Pandey from IIT KGP presented Univect Education Solutions, a social network for parents, teachers, and students in second and third tier Indian cities, to support online expert networks, mentoring programs, knowledge sharing, etc. The team is short of Computer Science expertise, and is looking for a co-founder to add to their pack. I like their focus on second and third tier Indian cities, and they have already started pilots in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh.

TransTag

Then Nishant Koul from IIT KGP pitched TransTag, a RFID solution to help check car-theft in India. Well, Nishant's idea, to achieve success, would need the cities to install RFID readers at every street-corner. This is impossible to consider as realistic in the near term. Nishant would turn grey by his mid twenties if he hangs his hat on this idea, so I discouraged him to pursue it. Instead, he should turn his talents elsewhere.

I very much enjoyed getting a peek into IIT KGP's entrepreneurship action tonight, and look forward to working with other campuses - both in India, as well as in the US, Europe, Asia, and Latin America - on similar programs.

You can listen to the recording of today's roundtable here. As always, I would very much like to hear about your business, so let me invite you to come and pitch at one of our free 1M/1M public roundtables.

We will be holding future roundtables on the following dates:
Thursday, January 19, 8:00 a.m. PST, Register Here.
Thursday, January 26, 8:00 a.m. PST, Register Here.

If you want a deeper relationship with me, you are very welcome to join the 1M/1M premium program. If you have any questions about the program, please, first study the website, especially What to expect from the 1M/1M premium program and the FAQs. If you have additional questions, please email me, and I would be very happy to respond. Please note that I work exclusively with 1M/1M entrepreneurs.

I also invite you to join the 1M/1M mailing list for the ease and convenience of getting updates. This way we can stay in touch, and it will help you to decide if 1M/1M is a program for you.

IIT photo by zimble thimble

To test a package, for example, we would contract with a field service that had a mall facility and recruit shoppers to compare the package designs and tell us about their preferences. Generally it would take two to three weeks to get the artwork and approvals from the client, two weeks to actually conduct the interviewing, a week to have the questionnaires coded and tabulated, then another week to prepare the final report and present it to the client.

Back in the early 90's this project would cost $10,000 to $25,000; depending on whether you used an independent consultant or a large, well known marketing research company.

I recently had the opportunity to conduct a frozen food package design study. The client approved the study Tuesday morning, emailed the final artwork on Tuesday afternoon, and the study launched (via the internet) on Tuesday evening. The interviewing was completed Wednesday evening and the coding, tabulating, and reporting were done on Thursday. At 4:30 Thursday afternoon I emailed the final report to the client. Three days start to finish! And what did it cost? About 15% of what it would have cost in 1990.

I bring this up because in every mentoring relationship that I do, sooner or later one of the mentors will ask the entrepreneur: "Where's the research?" Usually the response goes something like: "I have talked to many of my friends about this and they all say it's a great idea and that they will buy..." That's not good enough.

The point is that the Internet provides us with opportunities previously unavailable. The most important opportunity is the ability to get answers, insights, opinions, attitudes, and demographic information about constituents, customers, audiences, and markets. And we can get those answers quickly and inexpensively. In almost every case, an investment in market research by a start-up company will generate a significant return on that investment. It is something to keep in mind.

Rural ERP

Surjith Singh from Chennai, India, pitched Rural ERP, a business that intends to focus on supplying rural Indian small and micro businesses with local language ERP systems. While there are 30 million small and micro businesses in rural India, according to Surjith, and only 5% of those know English, there are substantial barriers to selling technology to these companies, including the fact that computer knowledge and Internet connections are both quite low in this segment. Hence, building a local language (Tamil, Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Marathi, Gujrati) ERP SaaS business will be an uphill task.

The company, however, has a small ERP product plus customization services business which currently generates $36k a year, on track to do $50k this year. The 20 customers for this business are urban businesses in Tamil Nadu, and one of them had some local language needs coupled with the regular English ERP functions.

The strategy for scaling this business needs to be completely rethought. Building a rural ERP company is going to be an uphill task, and I am not convinced that Surjith should follow that route.

SmartERP

Next Sudhendra Seshachala from Houston, Texas and Bangalore, India, presented SmartERP, catering to the domain-specific needs of textile companies in India. Sudhi also has a professional services business that generates $200-250k a year, and is currently financing his forays into ERP. The textile ERP business is in validation stage with a couple of paying beta customers, and Sudhi needs a strategy to scale both.

My assessment is that the textile industry in India is also extremely backward, so the business model that would work for that sector is more a managed services kind of solution as opposed to a regular software or SaaS model.

Patient-Help

Then Adarsh Patil, also from Bangalore, India, pitched Patient-Help which is toying with two different, albeit related ideas: (a) a doctor-patient marketplace for India (and potentially other markets where the insurance industry is less mature than the U.S. or Europe), and (b) a marketplace for medical tourism. The latter is what he has started implementing, and it has a business model of generating leads via PPC advertising, followed by selling those leads to hospitals and medical service providers.

Adarsh has a crucial decision ahead of him: which of the two businesses is he going to pursue?

You can listen to the recording of today's roundtable here. As always, I would very much like to hear about your business, so let me invite you to come and pitch at one of our free 1M/1M public roundtables. We will be holding future roundtables on the following dates:
Thursday, January 12, 7:30 p.m. PST, Register Here.
Thursday, January 19, 8:00 a.m. PST, Register Here.
Thursday, January 26, 8:00 a.m. PST, Register Here.
If you want a deeper relationship with me, you are very welcome to join the 1M/1M premium program. If you have any questions about the program, please, first study the website, especially What to expect from the 1M/1M premium program and the FAQs. If you have additional questions, please email me, and I would be very happy to respond. Please note that I work exclusively with 1M/1M entrepreneurs.

I also invite you to join the 1M/1M mailing list for the ease and convenience of getting updates. This way we can stay in touch, and it will help you to decide if 1M/1M is a program for you.

Cane field photo from RDPixelShop

It's almost a decade ago now that the 2002 film Minority Report showed the moral majority what the future will look like in 2054 when mobility, geo-location and targeted content technologies merge. While the movie looks at various elements of the digital future, the biggest 'ah ha' moment for both privacy advocates and marketers alike happens when John Anderton (Tom Cruise) has his retinas scanned as he exists the train and a digital billboard displays "John Anderton, you could use a Guinness right now."

So how long until you walk past a store and it offers the "other people like/bought" experience outside of the confines of a website? Services like AT&T's Shop Alerts show promise by linking customers proximity to stores and offers. But these aren't the "other people like you" recommendations based on behavior that go beyond the proximity to a store you already like (and have already subscribed to).

Another service that brings us closer to beverage recommendations is the goHow application developed by Denver airport. Described as "blending real-time travel information with precisely targeted marketing messages," it targets travelers with relevant offers based on their locations such as departure gates, as well as their likely needs based on events. Your flight is delayed? You could use a Guinness right now. There is a bar around the corner and a restaurant near gate four.

However, as innovative as both of these technologies are, they rely on voluntary subscriptions and locations. What if you haven't subscribed to your carrier's service, or aren't at Denver Airport? Well, your friendly social platform is already building out the data that could soon understand when you'd like a Guinness.

Adrian Lewis from on the community weblog MetaFilter said that "if you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold," referring of course to the value of the data that folks like Facebook are amassing. Facebook doesn't just know what sort of trivia my old school friends and I like to play - it knows the brands I like and often where I am.

Looking at my own Facebook and Twitter pages, if Smith & Wollensky in New York had a party of six just cancel their reservation, and knew that five of my colleagues and I were at an industry event around the corner, the combination of these data points (my location, my likes, what I'm doing and at what time of day) could allow them to create an offer that brings them a customer immediately.

One consideration is the time of day - a crucial element in the real world, unlike in the online world where it's essentially irrelevant. My recommendations on Amazon are the same while I'm at the office at 1:00pm as they are at 3:00am while I'm in my pajamas. Smith & Wollensky however, is closed at 3:00am. They have an empty table at 9:00pm and a very narrow window to get revenue from it. If they want to be relevant to the mobile consumer, the time of day a potential customer walks past their restaurant is imperative.

While most of today's technology relies on the consumer explicitly stating their likes and locations, micropayments are becoming more prevalent, and they're eliminating the need for the consumer to identify themselves. Make a payment with your phone and it knows that you like Starbucks, when you like to drink coffee and the specific location you frequent.

What if the consumer doesn't make a purchase? CNN Money recently reported that malls are already implementing technology that anonymously tracks shoppers' cell phones to determine the path they take between stores. As the article points out, this technology applies techniques of the online world to gain insight into people that don't make traceable transactions.

There is of course, a social element to data gathering and it can be seen in two ways. Firstly, the data is sometimes used as only a conversation starter so you can be sold a product by a human. I used to have the pay-per-view soccer channel in the UK, and I would often get a call from "a fellow Chelsea fan" who would talk about my team and tell me that I should sign up for Chelsea TV. There are other times when social media and the "gamification" of services that basically harvest data for marketing applications are so influential that we volunteer all the information in exchange for a virtual badge or to be crowned mayor of our favorite restaurant.

While privacy advocates may be concerned about large-scale information gather, the general public doesn't seem to mind. We are all surrendering privacy in exchange for convenience, credibility, badges or to be social. Who doesn't dream about an assistant who knows your coffee preference, a barman who recalls your favorite beer, or a Maître D who knows your favorite table?

One could argue that the launch of Apple's Siri isn't just about talking to your iPhone and establishing a verbal relationship with your mobile device. It may be that your phone will soon be making suggestions such as enjoying a pint of Guinness after a run from the authorities. Perhaps it will be more subtle than that. Maybe we won't have billboards using our names and favorite brands as we walk past as envisaged by Minority Report. Perhaps our little pocket assistant will whisper wirelessly as we walk into a strange town bar and the barman will say, "you could use a Guinness right now."

BootstrapToday

Anand Agarwal from Pune, India, pitched BootStrapToday, an Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) SaaS solution from his company Sensible Softwares. Anand already has 100 beta customers and fifteen of them are paying Rs. 1000-2000 (~$20-$40) per month to access advanced workflow logistics and intelligence in the area of software testing and productivity improvement.

Anand is asking an important question as part of his work with BootStrapToday: The annual cost of software bugs is about $59.5 billion. Can we reduce time spent on fixing bugs and maintain quality? If you are running a software engineering team, I am sure you can relate to this question rather well.

To answer the question, Anand and his team are leveraging social network-based machine learning and intelligence built into application lifecycle management, thereby reducing the knowledge gap and ramp up time via effective collaboration. Social network analysis of developer contributions to predict software quality, dependency structure and fault proneness of individual software components are just some of the pieces of the immensely complex puzzle. If you wish to experiment with the product, please sign up at BootStrapToday.

Anand also announced a newly drawn up partnership with AppDirect, which is a network of marketplaces for Web-based software and distribution to more than 500,000 businesses. Through the AppDirect Network, BootStrapToday is currently available for free trial and purchase through ISP's including Bell Canada, which is Canada's leading ISP (Internet Service Provider). BootStrapToday has now been listed both on AppDirect and Bell Business App Store.

Anand is a premium member of the 1M/1M program, and we will be working with him to further validate his product, crystallize his go-to-market strategy and, of course, help him get to the upcoming 1M/1M Hall Of Fame.

Inphodrive

Next Mark Heifets from Netanya, Israel, presented Inphodrive, a technology for helping drivers use the Internet in a completely speech enabled mode. Mark is looking for an appropriate segment to position this market in, and I advised him against a pure consumer solution if his assumption is that the business model would be an ad-supported mobile app.

You may ask why, and this is a very important point that I would like all entrepreneurs to be aware of. Currently, there is far too much unmonetized ad inventory online and on the mobile eco-system, and this is dramatically driving down CPM rates making it very difficult for businesses to survive on ad revenue. Those who read my columns regularly know that I have highlighted this problem as one of 2012's biggest open problems that needs to be addressed. Meanwhile, though, I cannot advise nascent businesses to launch with a free, ad-supported business model. You have to go to a subscription or a transaction business model, and if you are doing Freemium, then please, also be aware that only 1%-2% of free users convert to premium. It may or may not be sufficient to build your business, especially if you are working with a low ARPU scenario. Do not stumble into an unworkable situation without thinking through these highly complex business model, pricing model, and sustainability issues.

evly

Then, Eric Edelstein from Cape Town, South Africa, pitched evly, a Facebook app for crowdsourcing ideas that he foresees brands using to engage their audiences. Eric is working with a good number of brands and ad agencies in South Africa and has already succeeded in getting them to pay $700/month for the solution. However, there are some significant issues around pricing and sales model alignment here that need to be dealt with to arrive at a repeatable sales process for the international market, which is Eric's eventual goal. In the U.S. or Europe, for example, selling an $8,400/year subscription via direct field sales is just not justifiable. It will render the profitability of the business unworkable. What I like very much in Eric's situation is that real customers are involved, and from them he can derive good feedback. My guidance, however, is that there is a complex pricing model and sales channel strategy to figure out here, one that I have seen many startups get burnt by. Eric needs to be aware of the pitfalls.

BlitzLocal

Then Dennis Yu from Portland, Oregon, presented BlitzLocal, which is an analytics engine gauging the effectiveness of online campaigns for various brands like Rosetta Stone. Dennis has a robust enterprise business that is yielding strong revenue traction, and he is now trying to figure out how to make a self-service version of the 'report card' tool available to small businesses. There is, once again, a significant brand and pricing challenge here. If he gives a somewhat similar (adequate) product to small businesses for free or for a very small price, his enterprise customers would refuse to pay the kind of premium they are paying today.
I asked Dennis why he doesn't just focus on the enterprise business, which seems to be scaling nicely. If I heard him correctly, he said that some days, the business scored $100,000 a day. If that is indeed true, I simply don't see a business case for diverting attention away from the enterprise business.

A.I.type

Last, Udi Yehezkel from Hadera, Israel, pitched A.I.type, a very interesting predictive writing technology for mobile keyboards. Today, when fat fingers dance on tiny keyboards, often the results are awkward. Mistakes happen. Autocorrect features on iOS or Blackberry are simply not of the accuracy level that Udi's technology can get to.

Currently, Udi has an Android App out there, which has 250,000 free users, of which 5,000 are paying. Clearly, there is a very easy Android App business to be built here. But conceivably more, in partnering with the OS vendors as well, like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Palm and RIM. Very interesting business!

You can listen to the recording of today's roundtable here. As always, I would very much like to hear about your business, so let me invite you to come and pitch at one of our free 1M/1M public roundtables. We will be holding future roundtables at 8:00 a.m. PST on the following dates:
Thursday, January 5, Register Here.
Thursday, January 12, Register Here.
Thursday, January 19, Register Here.
Thursday, January 26, Register Here.

If you want a deeper relationship with me, you are very welcome to join the 1M/1M premium program. If you have any questions about the program, please, first study the website, especially What to expect from the 1M/1M premium program and the FAQs. If you have additional questions, please email me, and I would be very happy to respond. Please note that I work exclusively with 1M/1M entrepreneurs.

I also invite you to join the 1M/1M mailing list for the ease and convenience of getting updates. This way we can stay in touch, and it will help you to decide if 1M/1M is a program for you.

Led by social media leaders like Chris Hughes of Facebook, Obama managed to run circles around the Republican nominee, Arizona Senator John McCain. Whereas the Internet was only a secondary concern for McCain, Obama made the web a central part of his campaign. As such, it wasn't much of a surprise that Obama had more than 20 times as many Twitter followers than McCain at the time of the election. This helps to at least partially explain the $150 million fundraising advantage that Obama had during the 2008 presidential election.

Twitter has become one of the tools most embraced by the candidates this primary season. Indeed, several of the Republican candidates participated in a debate held on Twitter in July. Through Twitter, candidates have been able to quickly communicate their message to interested parties and rally their base of supporters.

Newt Gingrich

In particular, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich has been very active in cultivating a Twitter following. He even argued at one point earlier this year, when his poll numbers were still in the single digits, that he deserved more attention by the media on account of his numerous Twitter followers. With more than 1.3 million Twitter followers, he had far more followers than the rest of the Republican candidates combined. However, it was later revealed that most of those followers were created with fake accounts. It still showed the importance the Gingrich campaign was placing on social media, even if it meant buying followers for "social proof".

In addition, all of the candidates have been turning to YouTube as an alternative means of advertising their message during the campaign. Many of the campaign videos will see more views on YouTube than on traditional television, and the candidates have looked at YouTube as a low-cost way to spread their message visually, even if it means targeting a younger audience.

Ron Paul

Rick Perry

Of course, the social media blitz can hurt you just as much as it can help you. Texas Governor Rick Perry recently put out a much-pilloried video on YouTube that attempted to appeal to his political base on the religious right, attacking "Obama's war on religion." Although clearly targeted towards a specific audience in Iowa, the first state in the Republican presidential nomination race, the power of YouTube as a means of dissemination meant that the video received more than four million hits, not to mention continual replays on several news channels. However, the dislikes outnumbered the likes 30-to-1.

Mitt Romney

If there has been anyone who has been reluctant to embrace the digital revolution, it has been former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, who has been a consistent top tier candidate. His strategy was recently described in Forbes as having a "quaint, pre-social media, pre-2000 feel to it." Romney has been a front-runner for most of 2011 and this may have led his campaign to believe he didn't need to actively engage with his opponents. Interestingly enough, this strategy has worked out relatively well for him up to this point. Every candidate that has challenged him has quickly faltered. First, it was Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann after her first debate performance. Then, it was Rick Perry when he decided to enter the race. After that, businessman Herman Cain received all the attention.

Social Media Savvy

The use of social media in politics is still in its infancy, but its power is becoming more apparent by the day. Even Sean Parker, the former president of Facebook, declared recently that the 2012 presidential election would be won or lost on the Web. He may be a bit biased, but there should be enough truth there to motivate all Republican campaigns to pay more attention to their social media strategy. And, yes, that means you, too, Mitt Romney.

Gingrich photo by Gage Skidmore ]]> http://readwrite.com/2011/12/19/will_social_media_dictate_a_tight_republican_race http://readwrite.com/2011/12/19/will_social_media_dictate_a_tight_republican_race Guest Mon, 19 Dec 2011 02:00:00 -0800 Jeremy Page At today's roundtable, we had a 30-minute segment on Web 3.0 and Social Dancing. We basically took the Web 3.0 framework - Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS) - and did a blue sky exercise on how to create a comprehensive user experience for social dancers. We also explored business models that not only can span advertising, subscription, and e-commerce, but also hybrid virtual-physical concepts that could even draw upon a Starbucks of Salsa, Tango or Swing!

It's a fun segment, so please take a look at the recording here. I hope some of you reading this post ARE social dancers. I am. I would love to see a much better leverage of web technologies to facilitate the formulation of dance related experiences. For more, you can also follow the discussion on my blog titled: Web 3.0 and the Argentine Tango. Complete with videos and definitive use cases, it would give an interested reader some great ideas on how to design such a Web 3.0 system.

Then we moved to another exciting segment for which I need to give you some context. As you may recall from previous roundtable posts, that 1M/1M works closely with many incubators around the world. We simply offer our services as an extension of the incubators' existing programming. Today, Timisoara Software Business Incubator, led by Executive Director Radu Ticiu, brought on an entrepreneur to pitch, giving us a window into the Romanian startup scene.

123ContactForm

Florin Cornianu from Timisoara, Romania, pitched 123ContactForm, a company that competes in the same space as YCombinator's WuFoo that exited earlier this year for a $35M price, and was acquired by SurveyMonkey. In other words, 123ContactForm offers web forms of all kinds that are used by web developers, small businesses, etc., for various purposes, from surveys to lead collection.

Florin has already built a nice, profitable business with $100,000 a year in revenue. Of course, the significantly lower cost-structure in Romania helps a lot. He is looking at additional expansion opportunities, especially in Europe (through the introduction of multi-language forms) and Asia (through channel partners).

The space is crowded, and requires steady navigation. However, it is wonderful to see steadfast execution from a software startup, and the evolution of a sustainable business in Romania. We hope to see many more in 2012.

You can listen to the recording of today's roundtable here. As always, I would very much like to hear about your business, so let me invite you to come and pitch at one of our free 1M/1M public roundtables. We will be holding future roundtables at 8:00 a.m. PST on the following dates:

Thursday, December 22, Register Here.
Thursday, January 5, Register Here.
Thursday, January 19, Register Here.
Thursday, January 26, Register Here.

If you want a deeper relationship with me, you are very welcome to join the 1M/1M premium program. If you have any questions about the program, please, first study the website, especially What to expect from the 1M/1M premium program and the FAQs. If you have additional questions, please email me, and I would be very happy to respond. Please note that I work exclusively with 1M/1M entrepreneurs.

I also invite you to join the 1M/1M mailing list for the ease and convenience of getting updates. This way we can stay in touch and it will help you to decide if 1M/1M is a program for you.

Dance photo by Gabriel