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Last Wednesday I attended the StartUp Atlanta March event (on the web at StartUpAtlanta.org, @StartupAtlanta on Twitter) where about 60 or so members of the Startup community mixed, mingled, and listened to 5 presentations by new Startups in Atlanta.

The community was quite nice (I saw a number of familiar faces, and met some new people too), and the Georgia Tech was nice enough to loan out the Georgia Tech Research Institute facility auditorium. I had a great time meeting everyone and Mike Schinkel and his volunteers moved things along well. It is impossible to overstate how important it is to keep these events running on time.

And now, the contestants! We listened to the presentations, and voted via twitter for our favorites, here were mine, recorded here for posterity. I judge startups by the following criteria, on a scale of 1-10 (higher is better). I thought I would share it here for the first time.

1. Problem Solving - It can be a cool product, but does it make anyone’s life easier?
2. Actual Customers - I am defining the customer as someone with both problems and money.
3. Simplicity of Pricing – can the fees be described to anyone, do you need more information about the prospect before you can offer a quote?
4. Chicken and Egg Problem – does the product require a lot of Customer A before Customer B becomes interested, and vice versa? This applies a good bit to middleman/broker type companies like E-Bay.
5. Remarkability – that is to say, can someone who heard a quick presentation about it describe it to someone the next day, and have it be understood?

Note, I do not judge the passion of the founders, quality of marketing, execution etc. That’s too hard to judge based off of a short presentation. Read more on Startup Atlanta – March 2010 Edition…

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I just watched an interview with Jason Fried of 37 Signals and he and I share the notion (first said by me in 2001) that people in prison are the most effectively creative people in the world (in their escape attempts), and that constraints are good for creativity.  He says that  bootstrapping forces companies to think about what their product, instead of just running around spending money.

Read more on Jason Fried and I have common ideas…

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While pondering installing Visual Studio 2010, as well as thinking how all software is moving to a subscription basis, I had the thought – why not do two predictable releases a year?  The first release, say in January, would be whatever new features were in place by that date.  The second release, say in July, would be a pure performance and usability release, as the development team would spend half the year optimizing and tweaking the code, as well as fixing all bugs.  Any new “Features” would have at least six months to cook in the minds of the developers and would be implemented on a much stronger code base. Read more on Thoughts on predictable software scheduling…

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After being on hold for about 10 minutes now, I can honestly say that Godaddy.com has the best tech support hold music I’ve ever heard.  It seems to be remakes of 1930’s hot jazz numbers.  I have found the tech support to be clear and usually worth the wait.

Read more on It’s sad when hold music makes you happy…

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Nearly a week has gone by without any sort of posting.  Rest assured that work is still being done – it’s just tedious and not very remarkable.  Our second e-blast went out without incident.

Read more on General updates in February 2010…

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Much to-do has been raised over Joel Spolsky’s announcement that he was going to seek funding for StackOverflow.com.  The 37 Signals guys do a much better diessection of it than I can, so I will just add my conculusion, to wit:   StackOverflow.com has become the default go-to site for any technical problem for coders all over the world – the more I think about it I think the VC push is just an attempt at attention, and the real purpose is to sell it in small pieces to the programming community.  Who wouldn’t want to own a share or ten of the site you visit three times a week, even if the revenue model is shakey.   Atwood and Spolsky would remain in control, but they woudl have enough funds not to worry about day to day expenses.

Read more on What to make of the StackOverflow.com VC funding push?…

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After listening to Jeff Atwood rant about email on the most recent Stack Overflow Podcast I thought I would write a quick guide to creating an effective business email.  I am defining “business email” as email designed to garner information needed to perform some larger, work related task.  Business emails tend to be a constant stream of communication between two parties over an extended period of time.  This quick guide should eliminate 90% of problems related to those emails.  We now resume our regular “How To Fix” formatting:

The Problem: People send email  to occupy time and simulate forward motion, and in some cases convey information, but they seldom use email to elicit information from co-workers.  Attempts to elicit information are likely to transmit anxiety from sender to receiver rather than triggering a useful response from receiver back to sender. Read more on How to write an effective email…

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I wrote up my experiences at StartUp Atlanta, and the good people at Core Motives were kind enough to send me a few corrections to wit (they wrote these in the comments) -

1) Actionable:

a) Sales: detecting the interaction of a prospect who is in a stalled sales opportunity, and pinging the salesperson’s Blackberry, in real time, that they need to call the prospect

b) Marketing: real-time revenue reporting from Google AdWord campaign clicks

* Corporate Purchasing: Pricing starts at $99/m; below the radar of corporate purchasing

* Pricing: simple consumption model with 3 tiers
* Remarkability: “Enables your business to detect, track and target potential customers”

Read more on Follow up post to my Start Up Atlanta post…

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Last night I attended the StartUp Atlanta January event (on the web at StartUpAtlanta.org, @StartupAtlanta on Twitter) where about 60 or so members of the Startup community mixed, mingled, and listened to 5 presentations by new Startups in Atlanta.

The community was quite nice, and the venue, Ignition Alley was cool too.  Ignition Alley is a co-working facility about four miles away from Stronico HQ which is on my short list of places to go when I need an office.   I had a great time meeting everyone and the event was quite well run.

And now, the contestants!  We listened to the presentations, and voted via twitter for our favorites, here were mine, recorded here for posterity.  I judge startups by the following criteria, on a scale of 1-10 (higher is better).  I thought I would share it here for the first time.

1. Problem Solving - It can be a cool product, but does it make anyone’s life easier?
2. Actual Customers - I am defining the customer as someone with both problems and money.
3. Simplicity of Pricing – can the fees be described to anyone, do you need more information about the prospect before you can offer a quote?
4. Chicken and Egg Problem – does the product require a lot of Customer A before Customer B becomes interested,  and vice versa?  This applies a good bit to middleman/broker type companies like E-Bay.
5. Remarkability – that is to say, can someone who heard a quick presentation about it describe it to someone the next day, and have it be understood?

Note, I do not judge the passion of the founders, quality of marketing, execution etc.  That’s too hard to judge based off of a short presentation. Read more on A Successful Evening at StartUp Atlanta…

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I do not know that much about jQuery, or any of it’s offshoots (jQueryUI, etc) but I do have a need for modal popups.  As I am building the website in ASP.net MVC, instead of ASP.net webforms I  have decided to use the jQuery platform instead of the standard Ajax Toolkit.

Read more on What is the best jQuery modal popup method?…

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