A little while I ago, I wrote an article on this blog titled

I have no idea, but he’s on the speaker lineup at the EconSM (economics of social media) conference put on by Paidcontent.org, being held on April 27th in Beverly Hills.

This article is a continuation of my series of articles on software startups in India (a topic I know very little about, but am hopeful that I can spark interesting conversation in the comments).

Before we go too much further, let me explain a bit further what I mean when I say “competing with customers”.

Don Dodge wrote a couple of great articles recently titled “Why Startups Innovate While Big Companies Incrementally Improve” and “What do the PC, Mac and Xbox All Have In Common“.

I want to start out by saying that this is one of the more troubling articles that I’ve written for this blog.

So, do cheapskates make the best early customers for a startup. In a word: No.

Business people often need encouragement in their startup business phase. Getting that fledgling company ready to fly on its journey to success is a challenging and often lonely journey.

After a weekend to reflect, I’ve come up with the Top 10 Things I Learned at the Web 2.0 Summit that was put on by O’Reilly and hosted by John Battelle.

Are the names and faces of your nocturnal exploits beginning to fade into a maybe-I-should-get-tested blur, there stud? Liar, they are not. But if your fantasy world is rich enough, and if you’re worried your mom’s going to find your little black book (she’s not here, is she?), then maybe you should move that top-secret information online.

Ebay-owned Skype acquired San Francisco-based Sonorit Holding AS and its US subsidiary Camino Networks, Inc. for about $27 million, or 700,000 shares of eBay stock.

In the last week I’ve had the chance to play with a few new services that have begun to appear:

Click on the image to see the slightly larger (and better in-focus) original on Flickr.

Silicon Valley venture capitalists vie with Google and Yahoo to shower money on the latest, greatest idea; this is a brief summary of two approaches to building one’s presence.

A guy has a great idea for a product or service that companies would very likely buy, certainly enough that the idea has money-making potential.

The last dot-com boom was all about getting wired. The next boom will get everyone unwired. And that’s a good thing.

Insights into the world of start-ups from Michael Moritz, a partner at Sequioa Capital, one of the most successful venture capital firms in the world.

Venture capitalists invest in new and rapidly growing companies that have very significant growth potential. Part of their role includes assisting companies in the development and commercialization of new products. To make a startup firm profitable, it is critical that the VC help the firm develop products that have significant profit margins. While business plans always show significant profit margins, the product cost estimates in the business plans can rarely be met using the first designs. In these cases Design for Manufacturability (DFM) can help close the gap between the actual cost and the target cost found in the business plan.