We have a holiday gift for you. One of the original visions of this site was to truly “aggregate” business news from around the world. Today we reached one step closer. AsItChanges is approaching the problem of delivering business news and education from two diametrically opposing perspectives of the hyper-local and the global. The original content on the website is hyper-local, mostly to Georgetown and the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. We hope to expand this model to other places after we perfect the formula for small communities and cities. Last week, when we compiled the first global perspective of the “The Worthy Web,” we reviewed the sites that people shared with us, that we received in email newsletters, and sites that we heard about. This week’s “The Worthy Web” was compiled using a little help with some amazing aggregating technology. Read more about it after the links, under “Technology.” Happy Holidays!
Inspire
Irene Lane, CEO Mom, Cancer Survivor
A stay-at-home mom waited until her son entered kindergarten to start an eco-tourism company. Read about how she used her experience from academia and her profession to create a business to help the world.
Startup Blogs to Make you a Better Entrepreneur
A listing of excellent start-up blogs to help you learn how others started their companies. We’ll aggregate them shortly, pick out the good posts and suggest them to you on this site.
Entrepreneurs: You Do Know You’re Unemployable, Right?
This may not necessarily inspire you to be an entrepreneur, but it will show you the stark reality. Once you become an entrepreneur, it’s hard to get a “real job,” not that you’d want to. I completely identify with the writer. I keep getting calls from recruiters and my response is “If you can’t pay my company’s rate, please remove me from your calling list. Thanks, bye.”
Five Lessons From Harvard’s Commercializing Science Program
I like this article because it gets at the heart of the innovator’s dilemma. What do you do when your invention or idea does more than what people see currently?
Google Earth for the body | KurzweilAI
Google continues to inspire me to make good things for people. Google Body will change the way that people learn about the human body in schools and universities for years to come.
Confessions of a Serial Entrepreneur
Considered the “Israeli David Copperfield,” David Moyal works 25 hours a day by going to sleep at 1AM and waking up at 5:30AM. He owns several businesses, three in New York City. Stays up on 4-5 Starbucks Ventis a day. Enough said.
Google Takes Another Big Step to Retain Employees: Autonomous Business Units
When a company gets big enough, it becomes bloated and bureaucratic. To stay lean and hungry, Google is going to be creating “autonomous units” within the company. Funny, that’s always how I’ve envisioned our company: We want our employees to be CEOs one day. Let this be a lesson to you to create companies that are as good to work at and as creative as if they were started yesterday.
Grown-Up Startups
You don’t have to be a teenager or twenty-something to create a start-up. This article says that older people make better entrepreneurs than young ones.
How I Made it: Sean O’Toole – latimes.com
Learn how Sean O’Toole combined his knowledge of real-estate and technology to start ForeclosureRadar which tracks foreclosure auctions in California, Nevada, Oregon and Washington.
Educate
The Silicon Alley 100: New York’s Coolest Tech People In 2010
Silicon Valley is no longer the only place for technology. In the past, hardware development was the big catalyst in the technology industry. Today it’s software.
Startup Professionals’ Musings: Ten Tips to Kick-Start Your Startup With Twitter
Although these actions should be obvious, I’ve not seen a better digest of the ways you can start making money with Twitter.
How Your Parents Helped Make You an Entrepreneur
Decent article which talks about how parents can guide the development of an entrepreneur. I know how my parents helped me: They told me to be the best at whatever I wanted to be the best at, and to never give up.
Creating the Entrepreneurial University
Interesting report on the University of Hertfordshire in Britain and how it’s coping with shrinking government support by becoming business-oriented.
Where do VCs get their money from?
I’ve wondered the same thing. I don’t necessarily like VCs, but I can see how they might have trouble raising money.
To Encourage Small Business, Learn from Europe | Business Week
Europeans are more likely to say that entrepreneurship is the major engine of wealth growth. That’s probably because taxes are lower there. “After Japan, the U.S. has the next highest corporate tax rate,” this article reads. Oh boy. I thought I got into business to stay out of politics.
University of Utah: No. 1 for Startups
Apparently the University of Utah sped past MIT this year to become the best place to create a start-up using university technology.
Top 20 Most Useful Twitter Blog Posts of 2010
Useful list of blogs to help you use Twitter for different purposes in business.
Implementing a Social Media Strategy Step-By-Step [DIAGRAM]
We have something similar for AsItChanges, Appleseed and Anant, but not as complicated. I learned something here and will need to refer to this again on the next strategic social media iteration.
Empower
Pair give incubator concept a different twist | Dallas Business News
A tech magnate and a real-estate tycoon pair up to let start-ups lease space for equity in Dallas. Good idea? Bad idea? You be the judge.
How to Raise Money on Crowdfunding Sites : Money :: American Express OPEN Forum
Great article for those who didn’t think it was easy to raise money. I’ve spoken with Brian Meece, Founder of RocketHub and will be interviewing him at some point for the site. His Crowdfunding Manifesto is the best.
How to Turn Your Tech Dreams Into Business Reality
Learn how the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) and Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) programs can help you get started in the technology industry. Wait, I should look into this!
Technology
Managing News is an open source solution which was created by Development Seed as part of a project funded by the Knight Foundation. We have an instance of Managing News at AsItChanges which powers the “World of Business” which shows the latest news as a listing and on a world map. We are polling more than 30 feeds every five minutes, and we have a backlog of about 30-50 more that we are reviewing. The challenge will be to curate all this so that you get the most valuable news to help you with your next action in business. We will eventually moderate each feed and tag articles into channels which represent the major areas of “Inspire,” “Educate” and “Empower.” Since we just started playing around with this technology, we’re still getting used to it. Next week we’ll be a little better at it.