Email Marketing and Newsletters, Part I

Whether you have a good-sized customer base and email list or you’ve got a nice blog following going, at some point you’re going to want to blast out an email campaign to everyone. It’s not as easy as writing out a nicely formatted email in Outlook and sending out a big BCC to…

Read more

My Journey from BlackBerry to Android

Not too long ago, I wrote a lengthy post called “I’m Your BlackBerry” where I explained how great my BlackBerry is for getting business done. I was at that point shopping for a new BlackBerry to replace my aging one. Then a little over a week ago a buddy of mine was showing me…

Read more

Payment Models

When you set out to build your startup, coming up with a business model is one of the qualifiers, and hand-in-hand with that decision is what payment model to use. If making money solely using ads is your revenue model, you may skip this article. Today I’ll touch on how customers will pay…

Read more

Startup Spotlight: Interview with Medizzle

Today we introduce Medizzle, a medically-focused social network that connects doctors and patients, and matches up users using a whiz-bang algorithm so that they can find each other more easily and share experiences and questions about their medical conditions. I interview Dr. C. Layne Fontenot,…

Read more

One Browser is Not Enough

When you’re working on a website design or testing a layout, testing it in the one browser you normally use is a recipe for surprises down the road. Your layout could be broken in Internet Explorer 7, or the JavaScript function you’re using breaks in Opera 9. Checking your website in…

Read more

A Business Lesson from Dune

He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing. – Paul Atreides And if that thing is valuable, you become the monopoly. Providing a reference tool is a good business idea. I’ve been in organizations where having a large-size data repository and searching capabilities keep people coming…

Read more

Why Aren't You the Leader?

Before the web, everyone had a Rand-McNally map in their car. Once the web was prevalent, MapQuest was the destination for getting maps online. Then around 2005, Google began to pull market share from MapQuest and is finally now surpassing MapQuest. If you go to Rand-McNally nowadays, it looks like…

Read more

Advertising your Startup, Part II

In the last article on advertising, I introduced you to the complexity of Adwords and the promise of Trada. In this article I’ll go over a few more services to help get your startup marketed, this time covering display ads. Facebook Ads Facebook has recently joined the advertising game with…

Read more

Startup Spotlight: PicClick

Today I feature an interview with the founder of PicClick, Ryan Sit. PicClick is a site that helps you shop on eBay and Etsy by displaying the images from listings and minimal text. It’s a much more efficient way to find items than standard search. I first heard of PicClick when it was…

Read more

Advertising your Startup, Part I: Adwords

Google Adwords is a force to be reckoned with in the online advertising space. According to IAB Internet Advertising Report conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers for the year 2009, search advertising is 47% of all online advertising efforts, and of this Google has the lion’s share. So when it…

Read more