Viacom’s content distribution partner Joost, founded by the creators of Skype, has inked a number of ad deals with very prominent brands.

Salesforce launched an incubator for startups.  It is a similar proposition to the Socialtext Coworking space, but has a cost for the startup and is structured as a partnership program.  A BusinessWeek article interviewed me about it.

Startup Meme and Chris Pirillo report that quite a few people have made login credentials of theirs public via Google Calendar event descriptions, which can now be found by searching for public events for e.g. “username password”.

If you are a startup entrepreneur, at some point, you will need to make a decision regarding your business model.  Many software startups have a strategy to build early market traction by giving away their offering for free with some plan to monetize at a later date.  I’m not going to make a strong argument against this.  So, for purposes of this article, lets assume for a moment that as a software startup, you actually *want* to charge money for your software someday. 

Before we get too deep into this, let me clarify two things.  When I say without a “plan”, I mean without a formally written business plan – not that you should be clueless about what you want to do.  And, when I say startup funding, I’m talking more about early stage seed funding via angels (though most of these tips should apply to VCs as well).

I’ve been in the startup business for a pretty long time now.  One of the things that I’ve found hardest to do is find and recruit exceptionally talented individuals.  This is not particularly surprising, I think all businesses (big and small, young and old) have this challenge.  However, I think this challenge is particularly acute for startups.