START UPS  Peter F. Drucker famously stated that "management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things." Great leaders possess dazzling social intelligence, a zest for change, and above all, vision that allows them to set their sights on the "things" that truly merit attention. The unfortunate this is this is all wrong and leadership is way over rated.
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START UPS  Steve Baty who will be speaking at Xmedia Lab Sydney 8-10 June, gives us some ideas on the when, the why and the how to start a business. Steve is a Principal at Meld Studios, a Sydney-based design studio and President at IxDA, a global network dedicated to professional practice of interaction design.
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START UPS  We are joined by London Tech Stars Natalie and Simon from Lanyrd to talk about building a startup on your honeymoon, the experience of going through Y Combinator, and raising $1.4 million of venture money.
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START UPS  Justin Boswer from cloud based CRM and Marketing company HTK Horizon, recently crowned "Britain's Brightest Business", joins the boys for chat. They cover how to build a company organically, and the future of customer relationship management. Hear more from Justin in the accompanying Podcast, including the challenges of running a business from a small town.
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START UPS  Last week I had the pleasure of being asked to sit on the judging panel for MUSIC Tech Pitch 4.5 held at EMI's London office. This was the second music focused pitching event organised by 2Pears.
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START UPS  Welcome to the entrepreneurs profile. This week we have a profile of a company I came across in my UK travels called twiDAQ. As the name suggest its where Twitter meets NASDAQ. I was very impressed with the idea both as a fun game but also as a means where companies can literally track the perceived consumer value of their brands in real time. Below is an interview with Jim Morrison its founder.
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START UPS  Welcome to the first entrepreneurs profile where we will look at those who have the gumption to get out there and create a digital marketing start-up. We will ask them what drives them as an entrepreneurs, how they keep motivated, handle stress and rejection and their plans for the future. First company is iPledge a crowd funding platform based in Oz started by Bryan Vadas & Andy Tompkins.
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START UPS  I first met the vtalk guys at CeBIT and their little blue box piqued my interest. The simplicity of setup and the stylish design were enough for me to want to try it out. We had just moved office and had dumped a very expensive and complex NEC PBX system and were now using Skype which was much cheaper but proving unacceptable in a business context.
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START UPS  I have been really interested in NFC as a marketing channel and there has been a lot of interesting comments over at our Linkedin group and in conversations I have been having with people in the industry. Tapit came to my attention recently and it looks like an interesting company to keep an eye on.
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START UPS  Just got this yesterday and the fact that its been around since before September 2010 is a bit worrying, as you only get the above notification if you have had a positive rating i.e. you have been chosen positively over one other. Intrigued, i clicked through and it becomes evident that the site simply builds a pyramid of preferences based on you comparing 25 people (at a time) in your linkedIn group. It then ranks them in categories like creativity, leadership, work ethic, dedication, teamwork and bizarrely Doctor. It must recognise that i have a doctor in my network and you can rank them over other doctors?
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START UPS  PILO is a Swedish mobile start-up in research and prototyping phase created by three interaction designers. It differs from popular location-based services such as Foursquare by tracking user movements over time and looking for patterns, thereby addressing issues of relevance and data filtering.
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START UPS  Ten years ago, I was working for an industry-dominating technology giant when this happened to us: we tried to buy our way into a smokin' hot new web startup category way too late, only to be roughed-up and shown the door by a team of young punks a couple of years out of college. Why did this deal fail, and what could it mean for Google? It could mean the beginning of the decline.
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START UPS  How much money did your business earn last week? How much did it spend? What's your bank balance? How long can you go on with that pattern of earning and spending? Critical questions for any business, particularly so when you're a small startup with $25,000 and a lot to get done in a short time. But when you're all busy coding or designing or cutting deals, who's got time to track every dollar?
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START UPS  If you could have invented or come up with any one single development or innovation in the digital sector in the past ten years, what would it have been? Thanks to John Butterworth, Dominic Caros...
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START UPS  eCater launched today, a hot new digital startup based in Sydney, Australia. They provide a specialist niche service to both Cafes & Businesses in CBD's around Australia. Traditionally cafes take all their corporate catering and office catering orders over the phone a week or more before its delivered (or the opposite, at the very last second), write it down on a random piece of paper, stick it up on a wall (or in a book if they are lucky!) and hope it doesn't go missing, let alone remembering to fill that order correctly and deliver it at the right time.
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START UPS  This week we ask "What are the most promising or exciting areas of development right now? If you had money to invest in start-ups or development, where would you put it, what would you bet on right now?"
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START UPS  After a chat over a few beers a little over 6 months ago, a few Sydney based Entrepreneurs figured that one of the biggest differences between our own Aussie startup scene and that in places like the Bay Area was the lack of community interaction and ties. Starting out as a Google Group and Mailing List, the community is starting to really take shape, with three startup camps, dozens of meetups, drinks, dinners and social nights, and most of all, a lot of people getting to know other entrepreneurs around them, many of whom have incredible expertise, advice and insight that they're prepared to share with relative strangers, for free. More than a discussion forum, the SiliconBeach group is really becoming a community. If you're in the tech business, this is a group you should be aware of, if not involved in.
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START UPS  "Who cares how the platform works"? This is the subtext to a lot of web startup business plans I see. At this point, you've lost me.
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START UPS  This financial downturn is apparently the end of the world for SME's in the Tech sector, I disagree. With all the news around at the moment, indications are that they sky is falling and Tech Startups have little or no chance of surviving through the ever-widening financial quagmire that is the current world economy. I thought on this, felt sorry for myself and my own startup for 5 minutes, then decided to dig deeper into the effect economic downturns have had on small tech companies. The results may encourage you.
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START UPS  For the past eight months, my colleagues and I have been working feverishly on our very first start-up, it has been a major undertaking for our small team; finding investment capital in a turbulent market, developers during a skills shortage and clients in a still immature digital marketing environment.
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