Dot: 360º video capture for the iPhone 4 by Jeff Glasse Hey Kickstarter-onians, Thanks for checking out our project! We call it Dot. It’s a stylish, durable and downright pocketable 360º (panoramic) lens attachment and app for the iPhone 4. What does it do? Dot lets your iPhone capture immersive, fully navigable, panoramic video in real-time - and share with friends on your phone, as well as on Facebook and Twitter, or streamed online using our awesome panoramic video web platform and player. Cool, right? We're excited too. But seriously, our secret beta testers have already had a lot of fun taking it to concerts, the park, on moped rides in Italy, and showing cramped apartments to mothers halfway around the world. So? We haven’t slept much. We’ve spent the past few months researching, designing, prototyping and coding. Let's do it! We’re excited to bring our cutting-edge (read: magical) panoramic technology to a much wider audience – and even more excited to see what you guys will do with it. Thanks for your support. Kogeto team www.kogeto.com
How to negotiate better than 99% of people In college, I had the opportunity to teach a “Student-Initiated Course,” or basically a course on whatever I wanted. So I got together with two of my friends and we put together a course on religious studies. Now, Stanford gave us incredible flexibility to teach essentially whatever we wanted…but the student instructors never got letter grades — it was always Pass/No Pass (everybody always passed), issued by the sponsoring professor. Until we came along. You see, I was never the smartest person in any school I attended. But I got pretty street smart over the years. We would basically write our own ticket! One of my co-instructors was amazed that I convinced the sponsoring professor to agree. But my other co-instructor hesitated. To give you some context, this guy was a PhD student in Computer Science at Stanford and had previously attended IIT, one of the most competitive technical universities in the world. “Dude,” I said, “what’s your problem? “What the hell?” I just stared at him. 1. 2.
Starting a Business: Advice from the Trenches If you’re like thousands of other designers, programmers and other creative professionals out there, at one point in time you’ve considered starting your own business. Unlike most, you’ve gone against common sense and decided to open shop for yourself. And not just freelance full-time, mind you, but file for the company name, get some stationery, and wade through the legal mumbo-jumbo. Maybe even get a real office with a water cooler. This article offers real-world advice from the trenches of a small start-up, and is applicable to designers, web developers, copywriters, usability experts and all manner of service providers. Freelancers take heed: there are several items that are just as pertinent to your profession. Write a Business Plan#section1 The most important thing you can do to prepare for starting and operating your own business. A few years ago, new age business rhetoric said forget the business plan and just run with it. File for a Fictitious Name#section2 Funding#section3 Good:
Financing Options For Startups I got a bunch of great suggestions in my kickoff post on this topic last week. Based on that feedback, the series is going to look like this: 1) Friends and Family 2) Contests/Prizes/Accelerator Programs 3) Government Grants 4) Customer Financing 5) Vendor Financing 6) Convertible Debt 7) Preferred Stock 8) Venture Debt 9) Capital Equipment Loans & Leases 10) Bridge Loans 11) Working Capital Financing This list is roughly in chronological order of how a small company might avail itself of the various financing options, but there are always exceptions. I want to do each financing option as its own dedicated post so I'm not going to start today. If you are looking for some meaty MBA Monday reading this week, I point you to Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson's awesome venture capital term sheet series, which is required reading for anyone seeking to raise venture capital.
Web development tips: Ten (or a few more) files every Web site needs Introduction There are a few standard files that every Web site should really have, but that most neglect. Most of these are matters of convention, not of technical requirement, but you are doing your site wrong not to provide them. Let users who make a wild guess about what they want to find usually succeed when they guess URLs. Exactly how a given resource is provided depends on the Web server and Web application layers you use. 404.html When users use your Web site, they will inevitably seek resources that do not exist. A warning when you create a custom 404.html (or whatever mechanism your Web server uses to deliver a custom "not found" message): Far too many Web sites are misconfigured to deliver "soft 404" messages. about.html So why did you create your Web site, anyway? A good about.html page provides a quick overview of what your site does, maybe why you created it, why users might care, and probably has a few links to navigate back to the core functions of your site. contact.html
5 Unconventional Sales Ideas to Help You Land (Many) More Customers. We all want more customers. It doesn’t matter who you are — baker, butcher, or anonymous computer hacker. Getting more consumers is an all-consuming part of everything that you do. And that’s pretty logical. Without customers you find yourself out of work gasping for air. So it’s only natural that you perk up when the topic of winning friends comes around. Heck, you can always learn something from the experts, right? Which is even more troubling because most of what is currently being shelled out as advice is really a pitch to buy a “7 step” CD series on social media advertising. Too late you wake up way too busy, a smidge poorer, and wondering how all the tweeting and Facebook posting is getting you anything more than arthritis in your fingers. So let’s be frank. You can have more customers than you ever imagined. You can be madly successful without selling your soul. And here are a few ways to do that: 1. That’s right. That stuff just doesn’t work any more. Be busy helping people for free. 2.
Top 10 Traits Of Highly Successful People | Yorick Reintjens - StumbleUpon Rating: 8.2/10 (185 votes cast) We have all read about people who are successful briefly. They win a gold medal, make a fortune, or star in one great movie and then disappear.…These examples do not inspire me! My focus and fascination is with people who seem to do well in many areas of life, and do it over and over through a lifetime. These are the people who inspire me! 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. These traits work together in combination, giving repeatedly successful people a huge advantage. This article was originally written by Philip Humbert and can be found here
Just Sell®... it's all about sales® | the web's resource for sales leaders™ ....HOW ADVERTISING SPOILED ME.... 30+ Search Engine Optimization Techniques You Cannot Miss You completed a web site for your business about three months ago, but you are still not seeing very many people visiting your web site. You do a little research and find that your web site is buried about ten pages deep on all of the major search engines. It seems that you have created a very nice web site, but it is not optimized for search engines, so your page rank is very low. Search engine optimization has become a very large field for many different consultants all over the internet. However the techniques needed to optimize your web site for search engines are not very hard to implement on your web site all by yourself. 1. Many people do a good job putting a good description and group of keywords in their meta tags, but they do not use these same keywords throughout the rest of their web site. 2. Many search engines will try to index your site’s pages by following links to all of the different pages. 3. Flash is a very neat technology and it has its place on the web. 4. 5. 7.