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Showing posts from April, 2011

Managing Your Online Persona, Part I

by Brandon Giles (republished from his personal blog ) Why Care? It is becoming more important than ever to actively manage your persona on the internet, particularly if you operate in the fields of entrepreneurship, venture capital or marketing. In general, persona management is more crucial in industries where your value and success depends on personal human capital and others perception of that value. However, digital footprints have a material impact on everyone. Beginning back in 2007, an ExecuNet survey  found that 83% of recruiters already used internet searches to evaluate job candidates, with 43% of recruiters eliminating candidates because of what they found. “How-to” Guide As an aspiring entrepreneur I sought to learn more about the tools, platforms and best practices before busting out onto the Blogging scene. I heard from nearly every guest in my Launching Tech Ventures entrepreneurship course at the Harvard Business School (#hbsltv) that blogging was critical to establish

The 5 hour start-up: BrownBagBrain

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by Humberto Ayres Pereira (republished from his personal blog ) This is the first of (I hope) many contradictions in my opinions in regard to entrepreneurial matters. A few posts back I talked with some  disdain about the Lean Start-Up movement . Essentially my argument was that while it may be easier than ever to build a service/company nowadays, and people can and are starting such companies, the result is a massive and hard to navigate world of start-ups and apps, many of which reach success status because of the extensive guidance and care of VCs and their networks. There is, I argue, a false perception of the start-up world as being easy. But while people see it as a gold rush, I'd warn that it is a very creative but also numbers-driven environment. It may seem as if this or that company is having a grace period where the founders can just be creative and eat pizza and blow thousands of VC-backed dollars while not delivering numbers, both bottom-line and in terms of user grow

The Narrow World of Platforms and APIs

by Humberto Ayres Peirera (republished from his personal blog ) In our upcoming venture, we at the team of Centroid.it have had the hard task of choosing a "partner platform". Or service relies heavily on venue search, or POI (Point of Interest Search), and naturally we don't think its feasible that we'll build one ourselves. Also, at this point in time where major POI platforms have emerged, asking users of yet another online tool to built the database themselves, the phenomena known as crowd-sourcing, also won't do it. So we set out to find the best one available that would suit our needs. We looked into: Yelp Foursquare Google Hotpot  (a social layer on top of Google Places, these guys are a mess really) Facebook Places Gowalla  and others.. At the start of our search, december 2010, the main choices were Yelp and Foursquare. Google Hotpot/ Places had a semi-functional API with loads of restrictions and usage limits. Facebook Places didn't really have those