The fourth of July came and gone as quickly as the fireworks show. Unfortunately, San Francisco was too foggy to see anything. Speaking of visibility, I put together a short list of recommended reads to kick off the week on the right foot:
Entrepreneurship 101:
- One-person companies are earning upward of $1 million in revenue annually. How do they do it? With high-speed Internet connectivity, mobile apps, automation, and a little help from their customers. (Information week)
- How not to get a VCs attention. Hint: don’t pose a 7 hour ultimatum for a term sheet. (post money value)
- You are about to present to a VC and you need a financials slide. What should you include?
Danny Cohen from Gemini has a few good pointers for entrepreneurs. On one foot: keep the excel at home, don’t show graphs, round numbers and make sure your business model makes sense. (Israel Venture Capital 2.0) - Mike Cassidy on the importance of building companies FAST. He knows what he’s talking about… Mike founded Stylus Innovation (sold 2 years after launch for $13M), Direct Hit (sold 500 days after launch for $500M), and Xfire (sold 2 years after launch for $110M). Catch the slideshow below (VentureHacks)
Useful Tools:
- Spending a lot of time in front of search engines made me appreciate departures from the traditional ten blue links. Addict-o-matic does a good job in creating a modular search results page. Also check out what people are searching for in the NewsFix page (right now Nadal’s Wimbeldon triumph is hot).
Miscellaneous:
- Shalmor-Avnon-Amichay, an Israeli advertising agency takes first place at “Advertising Oscar”. The agency won the Golden Lion Award at the Cannes Lions international advertising festival” after leading an awareness campaign for kidnapped Israeli soldiers. (Ynetnews)
- The five most addictive Facebook Apps are mostly games (SAI)
- Venture Capital, Angel or bootstrap? (Found|Read)
- How much are social networks really worth? Om asks if the hype is justyfied (Giga Om)
Israeli startup news and products:
- To worry or not to worry? 96% of Israeli VCs predict a wave of layoffs in Israeli high-tech due to the world economic crisis. Based on the Second quarter Israel VC Indicator Survey by Deloitte Brightman Almagor Zohar.
- Other Gems from this report include:
“The Economic Slowdown is here”, “IPO Market Closed, Mezzanine funding needed”, “Cleantech is over-hyped” and many interesting stats.
- Other Gems from this report include:
- Kaltura, the Israeli open source video platform, released MediaWiki, a new extension that enables users to easily embed and edit video, images and audio into Wiki pages. (TechCrunch)
- Israeli VOIP provider Fring launched fringAdd-ons, a free set of add ons that are meant to enrich Mobile IM chats. Among the new tools available: VTap, a video search and streaming service and Google Gmail notifier which will alert you of incoming Gmail messages. The company is also trying to lure developers with its new shiny Fring API. (Mashable)
- After months of preparation, Wix went live with its open beta. Create flash pages on the fly and free of charge. (Wix Blog) previous coverage of Wix on VC Cafe here and here.
- In the midst of the Euro Cup earlier this month, Footbo.com was born. The Israeli website combines social networking with the world of soccer, in the spirit of UK based Ole-Ole. Worth checking out.
- Will they really Modu? Om Malik interviews Guy Horowitz Director of startegy of Modu. The ambitious Israeli startup is close to completing its $100 million funding goal and was recently awarded for inventing the world’s smallest mobile handset. (GigaOm)
- Make any computer into a Wii with CamSpace, a new technology developed in Israell. Using CamSpace, all you need is a webcam, and you got yourself an interactive gaming experience. Yaron Tanne, founder & CEO of CamTrax Technologies, the company behind CamSpace, has been developing the technology practically single-handedly for three years in his apartment in Tel-Aviv. A video is worth a 1000 words:(Roi Carthy)
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