Launch Port &#8211; The Open Door Business Blog

http://www.forbes.com/pictures/fgdi45ehikj/5-must-read-tips-for-building-a-brand-3/

Gift Connect Wants To Replace Regular Ads With Gifts From Brands

Interesting business concept. Let’s see how it actually develops and functions.

The Top Private Cloud Companies

Startup Web Guide

I recently came across this cool chart put together by the team at VC firm Bessemer Venture Partners. They plot what they consider the top private cloud companies grouped by functional area (marketing, sales, finance, HR, etc.).

The team at BVP also has an interesting Cloud Computing Index they keep up to date which tracks over 40 publicly traded cloud companies.

Check out the chart and the index at http://www.bvp.com/cloud or, click on the image below.

BVP Cloudscape

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Be an intrapreneur: How to bring the entrepreneurial spirit inside a corporation

There’s No ‘I’ In Entrepeneur

There is an I in the genesis of your Venture, none worth mentioning as it matures and progresses.

David Schwendiman

I had the chance recently to listen to a number of successful entrepreneurs and venture capitalists share how they started in business. Of everything they said there was one theme which, frankly, surprised me. All of them said that they never, NEVER enter a new venture without a partner.

: Don’t build it alone

In fact, when Brad Gleeson of Sol Republic headphones was asked what is the first step he takes when starting a new business, his answer; find a partner.

In the past when I have launched a new venture it was always a solo operation, and a solo failure. This time around I have sought out a team before launching for the same 3 reasons these other successful entrepreneurs did.

1. Expertise

Many entrepreneurs are experts in their field. As leaders in what they do, they recognize the opportunity in the marketplace for innovation that will better…

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Yes! You can Land your Dream Career!

It’s not just about print vs. digital media — it’s about culture

Because of the obvious differences between traditional print publishing and the digital kind — the lack of a physical product, the fact that one can link and the other can’t, differences in the speed of publishing, etc. — it’s easy to come to the conclusion that print is the problem. But in many ways, as Frederic Filloux argues in a post at The Monday Note, the biggest problem is the cultural differences between the two.

In his post, Filloux notes that more than fifteen years after the consumer web started to become mainstream and the disruption of media began in earnest, many traditional publishers are still struggling to grapple with the issues that disruption raises. Even the New York Times, with its massive resources, filled an entire “innovation report” with the things that it still needs to do.

[blockquote person=”” attribution=””]”About fifteen years into the digital wave, tectonic plates…

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Don’t overstate investor power at Uber

LE GUIN’S GOOD ADVICE

Not only is this good writing advice, it is, for the most part, excellent business and career advice.

Wyrdwend

By the way I’ve said for years that “Show, don’t tell”may just be the single most juvenile and straight-jacketing piece of writing advice I’ve ever heard in my life. Show, don’t tell is an appropriate device for certain genres and in certain situations, it is the kiss of death for great literature and poetry.

10 Writing Tips from Ursula Le Guin

byJoe Bunting | 17 Comments

At the National Book Awards a few nights ago, Ursula Le Guin was honored with the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, a fancy sounding award that basically means she’s the bomb (she really is).

Ursula Le Guin writing quote

I’ve been reading Ursula Le Guin for a long time, since I first discovered The Earthsea Cycle, which re-invigorated my love for fantasy.

She’s also famous for her science-fiction, especially The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, and was one of the first to show the…

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The Future is Really the Past

RU Creatively Inspired?

The YouTube video, “The Mother of All Demos,” by Engelbart truly opened my eyes. What a wonderful lesson for us that we have not come as far as we like to think and that these technology ideas were in the air long before anyone starting charging for licenses and taking credit for features. Email, telepresence, collaborative editing, hyperlinks, guided search, keyword search, mouse driven cursors are all shown in a user context clear as day. The video makes me think that technology is being stalled. By now we should have superior software development technology, more advanced hardware, cure for many diseases, better energy sources, etc.

It’s pretty amazing that this “mother of invention” idea is so similar to the internet and what we use everyday in 2014. Little did people who were watching this at the time know that it really was the future. The mouse, graphic user interfaces, the web, wikipedia…

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CEO Start-up Session: What Makes a Good Business Idea?

The Written Description Requirement: When Narrow Teachings Meet Too Much Specificity (Part Two of Three)

Finding IP Value

This is part two of a three-part series on written description requirements and the developing case law under the America Invents Act (AIA).

The previous post in this series introduced the potential litigation hurdle – or, opportunity, depending on one’s perspective – involving the requirement that a “parent” patent application must satisfy the written description requirement with respect to claims of a later-filed “child” application. While this requirement is well established under U.S. patent law, the interaction between the written description requirement and the AIA is a new wrinkle. iStock_000019576650Large

An AIA “transitional application” is one filed after March 16, 2013, which claims the effective filing date of an application filed on or before March 16, 2013. If such a priority claim is justifiable, then

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A Beginner’s Guide to Kickstarter

Trivae

Sometimes new concepts can be hard to grasp. Especially really new concepts. It took running a Kickstarter campaign and not quite reaching our goal to realize that maybe explaining ourselves would be a good idea. It’s a revolutionary idea, we know.

Most people aren’t familiar with Kickstarter. What is this foreign concept? Well, we’re going to tell you in our next couple of blog posts. Trust us, you’ll almost be experts by the end of this course. Wait, should we be charging for this?

To get started, the first thing you need to know is that Kickstarter is an online platform that allows people to kick start their creative projects. We would say no pun intended, but that was definitely intended.

To keep learning, check out the infographic below and stay tuned for our next lessons on Kickstarter.

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In the Age of Abundance, Software is Free for Creative People

scott thorp

In the Age of Abundance, it’s amazing what’s free for creative people. All you have to do is look for it. As I’ve mentioned before, there are great classes offered online for free. The Y Combinator startup class in my last post is just one example. But in addition to education, the tools are free too. For 3D rendering, look to Autodesk. There are nine of these Autodesk 123D online apps that offer and incredible array of 3D rendering capabilities.

Catch: Create 3D scans of virtually any object.

Circuits: Design, compile, and simulate your electronic projects online.

Creature: Have a perfect character idea in your head? Bring it to life with this free app for iPad!

Design: 123D Design is a free, powerful yet simple 3D creation and editing tool which supports many new 3D printers.

Make: Turn your amazing 3D models into even more amazing…

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A Beginner’s Guide to Kickstarter II

Trivae

In our first installment of Kickstarter education we covered the burning question – what is that…thing? In this installment, we’ll discuss why people choose to fund their dreams with crowdfunding. As you’ll soon see, it’s not just because it’s a fun way to do so; it’s because of all the ancillary benefits. But, it’s still a lot of fun.

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Thinkers, Tinkerers, and Inventors

Being an inventor myself I understand his postulate. And his classifications.

ideaworth

I have been an inventor for 12 years and have been full-time self-employed as an inventor for the last 5 years. I have found there are three kinds of people when it comes to invention.

Thinkers

When I relate the story of my first invention to someone, they often smile knowingly and say to me:

Oh, I could be an inventor, I have ideas all the time!

The amazing thing to me is they are completely serious. The same person would never suggest he could be an NFL football player because he plays football with his buddies.

For inventors coming up with ideas is the easiest part of the process and also the least important. Culling ideas, developing the good ones, creating prototypes, testing, marketing and partnering with trustworthy partners – that is the difficult part.

The problem with thinkers as described above is that they never do anything.

Tinkerers

Tinkerers love to fix things or…

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THE ABILITY HOARD – AN INTRODUCTORY ESSAY ON PERSONAL AND CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT

This is an introductory essay I wrote for my gaming blog but it has far wider applications, especially in the realms of Business, Career, Self-Development, and Work.

Tome and Tomb

THE ABILITY HOARD – AN INTRODUCTORY ESSAY ON PERSONAL AND CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT

When it comes to my own characters (be they fictional or gaming) and even the players and characters I DM I think of Skills, Capabilities, Abilities, Attributes, (innate personal and individual features) and so forth as much more important character elements and possessions than magic items, spells, money, and other types of what is normally thought of as “standard treasures.”

To me the single greatest types of treasures a character (or a real person) can possess are what they can actually do for themselves (and for others) in the world, devoid of all outside help, material/materiel, and extraneous accoutrements. So I’m going to call this idea and post the Ability-Hoard, or the Treasure of Personal Capacity. I think that this is where the true emphasis of “characterization” should be evident, and most brightly shine.

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Why people are giving Ind.ie money to think past the web

Last time I checked in with user experience designer and privacy advocate Aral Balkan, he and his Brighton, U.K.-based Ind.ie team were preparing to unveil details of a handset called the Indie Phone, which they hope will provide a less centralized, more privacy-respecting alternative to phones from Apple and Google.

The concept for that device has now been unveiled (see picture above) and it’s still on the team’s “Project Stratosphere” roadmap for a 2016 debut, but first they want to build the underlying open-source technology. To that end, Ind.ie. is running a crowdfunding campaign to fund the development of the three key elements:

A peer-to-peer distributed file synchronization system called Pulse, which as a starting point lets people synchronize stuff between their devices without having to share it with a third party, as happens with something like [company]Dropbox[/company]. Pulse is a fork of another project called Syncthing, and…

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The European Parliament wants Google to be broken up

Apple $450 million e-book settlement gets final court approval

4 new ways movie theaters are filling seats and upselling patrons

Net neutrality looks doomed in Europe before it even gets started

Here come more leaks, and more reasons to suspect that the European Union is not going to get the hard-won net neutrality law it seemed likely to get just months ago.

After last week’s letter from new European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker to his commissioners, suggesting that former digital agenda commissioner Neelie Kroes’s “Telecom Package” will be pulled and started again as a “Digital Single Market Package”, digital rights group EDRi has published documents that appear to show the neutering of that legislative package’s net neutrality provisions.

A quick recap on how this all works: Commissioner Kroes came up with the Telecom Package, which also proposed the abolition of intra-EU roaming fees and the harmonization of radio spectrum across the union. The package then went to the European Parliament, which strengthened the net neutrality provisions by giving strong definitions to both the term “net neutrality” and the kinds of…

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ZenPayroll CEO: Fundraising is a lot like recruiting. We care about shared values and vision

The next generation of LTE chips are all about the upload

This week Qualcomm unveiled its next generation LTE modem, which boasts another big theoretical boost in download speeds up to 450 Mbps. But in this announcement Qualcomm made special note of a feature that has long been ignored in 4G: upload speeds.

[company]Qualcomm[/company]’s new Gobi 9×45 modem actually doubles the possible uplink bandwidth between a device to 100 Mbps. Ever since the first LTE networks came online six years ago, uplink speeds have never crossed the 50-Mbps threshold (and in reality, most networks see much slower real world speeds).

Why? In an interview earlier this year, [company]Intel[/company] chief wireless technologist Ken Stewart explained that the upstream component of the network was never the biggest priority when LTE standards because the use cases the industry envisioned were things like video and app downloads. But as we move toward cloud services, video chat and many more applications that require symmetric bandwidth…

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With the help of Ben Horowitz, rapper Ryan Leslie wants to reinvent the record label for the new music economy

Being a songwriter and having an interest in the music and recording industry I found this article gave me some ideas…

Leaked document suggests Uber wanted to “weaponize” taxi research

The latest development in UberGate comes, once again, from BuzzFeed, which got hold of an internal Uber document that outlines an investigative plan. In this case, however, the target is not journalists but the taxi industry.

The strongly worded sheet, which is part of a job application process for a “Director of Research and Rapid Response,” tells the reader to dig up facts on the taxi industry that can be “weaponized.” The applicant’s task is to develop a six-month research plan on Uber itself and on the opposition. Once hired, the candidate will work with the communications team to “disseminate” the information.

An Uber spokesperson told BuzzFeed that its definition of “weaponize” meant “distilling sometimes dense or lengthy information (e.g. 75-page research reports, political contribution reports) into factual, bulleted points.” That’s the first time I’ve heard the word weaponized used in that way, and it gives the entire document a tone of attack. Merriam-Webster’s…

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HAVING THE PERFECT LIFE DOES NOT = HAVING A SUCCESSFUL LIFE

Based upon my own experiences I think it is quite possible to have it all, though not necessarily all at the same time. As a matter of fact that is extremely unlikely.

One must prioritize differently at different points in time and life. The trick is knowing when to pivot and in what direction and why.

itsalwaysevening

We are never told by the media, tradition, or society that it is impossible to have “it all”

Recently I had a final where I had to define what it means to be a successful woman in today’s day and age. This proved a challenge, as when I started a discussion with a group of random women, from different stages and walks of life, every single one of them had a different definition of what it means to have success and be successful.

Growing up, we are expected to spend most most of our time and effort into trying to have the perfect life and to have “it all”. You need to have a memorable life where: you are a busy working, yet you can’t be the boss, you can’t get paid equally, and you have to be able to drop everything for your kids at a moments notice.

You…

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Horrible Job Interview Advice People Love To Give

Vision statement VS Mission statement

There is a difference.

3 HR Practices that Kill High Performance Teams

janaaxline

It’s all about the money. While the number one reason people leave companies is not money, a lot of dissatisfaction stems from money and the performance review process. It’s not about the dollar amount though. It’s about not getting equitable rewards for equitable work. I’m not sure about your experiences, but my experience during annual review time was never pleasant. A general tension permeates the office as people wonder where they will fall in the performance rankings. Rumors about force-ranking employees and how the bonuses will be distributed prevail. And then once the reviews are delivered, commence walking on eggshells as people dance around the subject of whether they felt their ratings were fair. The impact of this is highest on top performers and high performing teams. Here are some human resource practices that contribute to disengagement of high performers:

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Finding innovative ideas in unexpected places

Cisco opens up about its struggle to diversify its workforce

If you want to make a well-designed product, give it some love

At the center of any good product design is a whole lot of heart. Mladen Barbaric, the founder and CEO of Pearl Studios, explained at Gigaom’s Roadmap conference Wednesday why design is a “deeply human and profoundly emotional” process, and design projects created with love have a better chance to resonate with the general populace.

“I think that creating brands and products is something that requires us to reach deep inside and it’s a very emotional endeavor,” said Barbaric.

During his session, Barbaric interwove tales from his childhood with examples about how the specific lessons he learned over the years could be seen in some of the companies his design firm works with.

As a kid, Barbaric’s love for art drove him to draw all over the place–including the walls and ceilings of his house, much to his father’s chagrin. When Barbaric’s mom showed she was impressed with how he…

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Startups should adapt to the developing world, not ignore it