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Jonah Lehrer on How to Be Creative. The Arts Collective 3rd Ward Thrives in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Free Private Group Chat, Video Chat, File Sharing - War Room | Hall.com. NeighborGoods. Spinlister | Find a bike to ride. After a Year, Startup America Has a Start. Courtesy Startup America.Scott Case (hands raised) and Steve Case celebrate Startup America. Start The adventure of new ventures. It’s been a year since business leaders gathered at the White House to kick off the Startup America Partnership, a national nonprofit initiative intended to spur the growth of new companies, with the end goal of creating jobs.

What has happened in 12 months? Did Startup America become a well-meaning but soft entrepreneurial pep rally, as skeptics feared? Or are entrepreneurs getting a measurable, tangible boost from its efforts? The answer, so far, is a bit of both. But its chairman, Steve Case, a co-founder of AOL, and its chief executive, Scott Case, a co-founder of Priceline who is not related to Steve Case, have been promoting the importance of entrepreneurs while building their program’s infrastructure.

. • Startup America has joined with big companies like Dell, Facebook, Ernst & Young, Google and Microsoft. So far, 3,800 start-ups have signed on. Q. A. Q. Hiring Contractors Without Getting Into Trouble. Why Every Entrepreneur Should Self-Publish a Book. I’ve published eight books in the past seven years, five with traditional publishers (Wiley, Penguin, HarperCollins), one comic book, and the last two I’ve self-published.

In this post I give the specific details of all of my sales numbers and advances with the traditional publishers. Although the jury is still out on my self-published books, “How to be the Luckiest Man Alive” and “I Was Blind But Now I See” I can tell you these two have already sold more than my five books with traditional publishers, combined. If you, the entrepreneur, self-publish a book you will stand out, you will make more money, you will kick your competitors right in the XX, and you will look amazingly cool at cocktail parties. I know this because I am seldom cool but at cocktail parties, with my very own comic book, I can basically have sex with anyone in the room.

But don’t believe me, it costs you nothing and almost no time to try it yourself. A) Advances are going to zero. B) Lag time. C) Marketing. Now, 1. Beekeeping 101: Online Classes Help Pay the Bills. Megan Paska photo by Neil Despres The tech industry has brought about many recent innovations in business, but perhaps one of the most important for those in food+tech is the trend toward monetizing knowledge. No longer are entrepreneurs solely hoping low paying ads and internet product sales will pay the rent. Technology like webinars, ebooks and apps are helping innovative food companies spread the word, and their wisdom, for profit.

Meet Megan Paska, a Brooklyn homesteader who runs a honey CSA and teaches urban farming workshops, including beekeeping. Starting Sunday, January 22, 2011, Paska will begin leveraging the web to extend the reach of her classes with the launch of her 3-session, online intensive Urban Beekeeping 101 workshop. Only time will tell how profitable these courses will be, but one has only to look to courses taught in other industries, like web development and writing, to see that the model has great potential. DG: What is involved with teaching the course online? 4 Tips for Artisan Food Startups - Food Media. So you still want to start a food business, despite the obstacles? Here are four things to consider: 1. Amateurish packaging won't cut it. This is where many artisan food makers fall down. You spend so much time getting your bacon-caramel sea salt truffles to taste great that you barely consider what it'll look like on a store shelf. "If you make the best chocolate bar ever, but you're packaging it in a little bag that falls over on the shelf and breaks every day, there is no way we'll put that in the store," says Alli Ball, assistant grocery buyer at Bi-Rite Market in San Francisco.

"Packaging and labeling has to be attractive and interesting. " Emily Olson, cofounder of the specialty food subscription service Foodzie, agrees that "unprofessional" packaging is the downfall of many. "The packaging helps you trust what you purchased," continues Olson. 2. It's easier to sell a unique product than one that's similar to many others. 3. Of course, you'll have to account for scale. 4. Going Legit, Part 4: Selling Your Food at Farmers' Markets.

​Part four of a series in which SFoodie asks the question: With the Underground Market now shut down, what would it take for San Francisco's aspiring food microventures to go legit? Up until the Underground Market and its imitators appeared, Bay Area farmers' markets were one of the best incubators for new food businesses, offering beginning vendors a way to introduce themselves to the public and build personal relationships with customers. With small, neighborhood farmers' markets continuing to proliferate around San Francisco, they're still a viable launchpad, though the waiting lists for top markets are ridiculously long. SFoodie called up the Pacific Coast Farmers' Market Association, which runs 68 farmers' markets in San Francisco and six other counties, working with more than 900 farmers and prepared-food vendors.

We asked them: "What does it take for a vendor to appear at one of your markets? " Not bad, really. "The permits are very expensive," Jordan said. 3 Reasons Not to Start a Food Biz - Food Media. You see shiny jars of organic cherry marmalade on the shelves of some upscale food shop and you think, "I love making jam, I could do that. " Chances are you can't. Not now, anyway.

This is a particularly terrible time to enter the artisan food market. Here's why: 1. The market is already too crowded. Alli Ball is the assistant grocery buyer at Bi-Rite, the market at the forefront of San Francisco's buy-local movement. "The bar is so much higher than it was a few years ago because there are so many producers out there," she says. Indeed, Bi-Rite's shelves are so crowded that the store is constantly trying to figure out how to slot in more product—the store now "single-faces," stocking a single rather than a double row of products, and hangs bagged items from clips.

But if there are so many new products, shouldn't the overflow be spilling into bigger chains, like Whole Foods? 2. For a small food maker, the holy grail is getting into the big chains: Safeway, Walmart, Kroger. 3. New Restaurants Turn to the Public for Cash. Bank loans were out of reach. “We didn’t have the kind of collateral they wanted,” said Mr. Lefkove, a 31-year-old punk rocker and publisher’s copywriter, nostalgic for family visits to Bigelow’s New England Fried Clams in Rockville Centre, N.Y. “I liquidated my and my I.R.A. as well,” Mr. Lefkove said. “I even sold my guitars.” It wasn’t enough. So to help get his restaurant, Littleneck, over the finish line, the next stop was Kickstarter.com — a Web site that solicits donations to finance art, technology and business projects. The Internet campaign helped Littleneck financially, but Mr.

Spurned by tapped-out investors and tightwad bankers in challenging times, restaurateur-wannabes are turning to their neighborhoods, and the wider community of the Internet, to finance their dreams. For restaurateurs it provides the added benefit of eliminating interfering investors who second-guess them and demand higher prices for higher returns. Mr. “This could be my Cheers bar,” he said. Dwolla. Ben Milne founded Dwolla There's a tiny 12-person startup churning out of Des Moines, Iowa. Dwolla was founded by 28-year-old Ben Milne; it's an innovative online payment system that sidesteps credit cards completely.

Milne has no finance background, yet his little operation is moving between $30 and $50 million per month; it's on track to move more than $350 million in the next year. Unlike PayPal, Dwolla doesn't take a percentage of the transaction. We interviewed Milne about how he is building a credit card killer and Square rival from the middle of the nation where VCs and press are scarce. BI: We hear you're making credit card companies angry. Ben Milne: Ultimately we're trying to build the next Visa, not the next PayPal. Dwolla started out of my old company. So I thought, 'how do I get paid through a website without paying credit card fees? ' That was three years ago, so we've been working on the project for a really long time. How many transactions are you doing? What's your story? Dwolla.