artificial ignorance

After a small hiatus, the popular event StartupSF is now back! I’m pleased to announce that BizSpark is now a proud sponsor of this event series. We’re all about supporting the startup ecosystem in the Silicon Valley, and through this event entrepreneurs will have a great opportunity to connect with and learn from other entrepreneurs.

StartupSF

StartupSF will debut at its new location in Microsoft SF on June 4, 2009 from 6-9pm. And our guest speaker for this opening event is Loic Le Meur, Founder and CEO of Seesmic. Loic’s presentation is titled “How to Launch a Product with your Community” – learn first hand how to use various community building techniques to build your product, service or brand from the ground up.

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A couple of months ago, I met Dan Merritts from RSWP, Inc. at a coffee shop in South Park, San Francisco. It was a short meeting, but as soon as Dan described the idea that RSWP had been working on, I got really excited. Eduify is a web application that lets students edit and store documents, capture and discover research, find writing tutorials and safeguard against plagiarism. I remember spending countless hours in school looking for quotes and finding the right way to cite them.

Anthony Ha, from VentureBeat, has a good way of describing a student’s typical paper-writing process: Continue reading

I’m off to Palm Springs this evening to attend DEMO09. The BizSpark team will be there, so feel free to come by our booth if you want an invite code, or if you want to play with Live Mesh or some of our other technologies.

Which one of these  companies do you think will win DEMOgod status (list borrowed from Brian Solis):

7 Billion People, Inc.; Austin, TX
Always Innovating, Inc.; Mountain View, CA
AppZero Corp.; Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Asurion Mobile Applications, Inc.; San Mateo, CA
Avaak, Inc.; San Diego, CA
BitGravity, Inc.; Burlingame, CA
bluBuzz, LLC; Holland, MI
Cc:Betty, Inc.; Palo Alto, CA
Citrix Online, Goleta, CA
Coveroo, Inc.; San Francisco, CA
deskNET, Lausanne, CH
Document Depository Corp., LLC; Wayne, PA
eFormic, Ltd.; Stuttgart, DE
Ensembli, Ltd.; Sheffield, Great Britain
Evri, Inc.; Seattle, WA
Gazaro, Inc.; Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
HAM-IT, Inc.; North Andover, MA
Home-Account, Inc.; San Francisco, CA
HowSimple, LLC; Huntington Beach, CA
Jadoos, Inc.; Sunnyvale, CA
Kutano Corp.; Burnaby, BC, Canada
Liquid Media, LLC; Arvada, CO
Ontier, Inc.; Portland, OR
Primal Fusion, Inc.; Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
Promptu Systems Corp.; Menlo Park, CA
Purewire, Inc.; Atlanta, GA
Qualcomm MEMS Technologies, Inc. San Diego, CA
Qubes, Inc.; Taipei, Taiwan
Silverstone Solutions, Inc. San Francisco, CA
Skout, Inc.; San Francisco, CA
SmartyCard; San Mateo, CA
Symantec Corp.; Mountain View, CA
Technicopia, LLC; Carmel Valley, CA
Transformyx, Inc.; Baton Rouge, LA
Vokle, Inc.; Santa Monica, CA
Xandros, Inc.; Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
XMARKS; San Francisco, CA
Zipadi Technologies, LLC; Bluffdale, UT
Zuora, Inc.; Redwood City, CA Continue reading

First, I must preface my post by telling you that I’m a fan of Cuban’s. I was shamelessly giddy when I got the chance to sit down with him a few months back at TechCrunch50. The man is a visionary.

Cuban just wrote about “Open Source Funding” (I wish he hadn’t called it “the Mark Cuban Stimulus plan”, for obvious reasons). Jokes aside, essentially Cuban wants to fund a few ideas that will be self-sustaining and profitable soon (in 90 days). And the best part is, he wants the ideas to be public.

Now there’s a (good) chance your idea will not get funded by him, probably because of the sheer volume of submissions that he will see and the finite time the man has. But even the worst case scenario isn’t a bad one – let’s say Cuban doesn’t fund your idea after you post it publicly, your idea could still be discovered by someone else – possibly another investor, or a co-founder (or a plagiarist, sure). Continue reading

Since the launch of BizSpark in November, we’ve hit the road and spent time in several cities in the US.

We participated at the New York New Tech Meetup in New York City on 11/11/2008, where I got to present to pitch ‘BizSpark’ to 300 entrepreneurs, alongside Steve Barsh of DreamIT Ventures (a BizSpark Network Partner)

I want to send special thanks to Scott Heiferman and Dawn Barber from the New York New Tech Meetup. Continue reading