entrepreneur

MIAMI--It's not fancy, nobody talks about "monetization," and there are no "breakout sessions" on the schedule.

Despite, or perhaps because of this, dozens of young Web developers swear by the annual Future of Web Apps conference in Miami, an annual winter event put on by tech events firm Carsonified. They came from up and down the East Coast, from local tech start-ups in Florida and even from Europe--for the most part, hailing from locales well outside Silicon Valley, hoping to soak up a bit of that insider knowledge.

Many in the developer community say that … Read more

Steve Jobs is a hit with teens--even bigger than Oprah or the Olsen twins.

The Apple co-founder and CEO is the most admired entrepreneur among teenagers, according to the results of a survey released Tuesday by Junior Achievement, an organization that educates students on matters related to future employment.

Of 1,000 teens queried, Jobs garnered 35 percent of the vote, beating out a list of celebrities that included Oprah Winfrey (25 percent), skateboarder Tony Hawk (16 percent), and Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg (10 percent). Rounding out the list were Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen with 7 percent and … Read more

If the first quarter was the apocalypse, then the second quarter offers a glimmer of hope for VC community. New data from Chubby Brain shows that with the "numbers tallied, Q2 2009 saw 61% more money flowing from venture capital investors to entrepreneurs over the prior quarter." Good news for all.

I'm part of the camp that believes a downturn is a great time to start a company and I suspect we'll see many more fundings in the second half of the year--especially as too many VCs chase too few deals.

Second quarter highlights:

I had a great time talking to a group of Stanford kids yesterday as part of a VC quick-start program where teams compete for spaces in a summer program that gives them office space and a bit of guidance toward building a company that they can then pitch to VCs at the end of the summer. Sort of like an entrepreneurial boot camp.

Let me state that these kids (and man did I feel old) are smart. Book smart, socially affable and well aware of how you become an entrepreneur in the Valley. They also are smart enough to recognize … Read more

I spent a little of Easter weekend preparing for Under the Radar, in which I will be one of several industry veterans judging some of the latest start-ups pitching their cloud-related businesses. (If you are interested, there are still VIP tickets available.) The conference organizers have told me that both the start-up and venture capitalist interest has been very high, and that registrations are actually higher this year than they were last year. Cloud computing remains an excellent draw, it seems.

In reviewing the companies I will be judging this year, it feels like the term "cloud" covers way too much ground to be useful in a venture pitch. In fact, a few weeks back I wrote a post that built on a conversation I had with venture capitalist Lars Leckie of Hummer-Winblad Venture Partners, in which I asked whether "cloud computing" has lost its VC luster.

It's possible I'm being a little too harsh on the term, however. Soon after writing that post, I exchanged e-mails with good friend and sometimes mentor Gamiel Gran, vice president of business development at Sierra Ventures. I asked Gamiel what he thought of the term "cloud computing" as it is applied to start-up pitches.

His response, frankly, surprised me. Far from being a confirmation that the use of the term has gotten out of control, Gamiel embraces "cloud" for all it's worth (and it's worth multiple trillions of dollars in Sierra's estimation). He is excited about the opportunities that cloud computing presents for new businesses, and wants to see more of it--lots more of it.… Read more

Y Combinator on Monday announced that it has raised a $2 million venture fund with the aid of Sequoia Capital and angel investors.

In making the announcement, Y Combinator noted that it plans to increase the number of start-ups it funds to 60 a year, up from 40.

For Web services and software start-ups, that may bode well. Y Combinator focuses its investments on those two sectors and funds companies that are in their early stages.

As it notes, one unusual twist to this venture firm is its reliance on the strength of entrepreneurs' ideas, rather than on their business … Read more

I've had a few discussions with venture capitalists of late regarding the assignment of the "cloud" label to start-ups pitching everything from hardware to--believe it or not--downloadable software clients.

It seems that just about every pitch these days is for "cloud computing," and the folks with the money are getting a little weary of it.

Before a Strategy Series dinner on cloud computing I participated in a couple of weeks ago, Lars Leckie of early stage venture firm Hummer Winblad made a point about this. He noted that just about everyone was trying to relate their product or service to cloud computing, and that the label had begun to lose any meaning on its own.

A big part of the problem is the now almost unresolvable definition of cloud computing. How do you define the term? My own definition has shifted over the years, to where I use the term quite ambiguously. It's kind of like that famous old quote about pornography obscenity from the late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart. The judge wisely noted: "I know it when I see it."

(Lorie MacVittie of F5 wrote a fabulous post about focusing on the "who and how" rather than "what and where" in "cloud-computing" definitions. I absolutely agree, though I have failed to find words that meet that objective to my satisfaction.)

If forced to give a written definition, I borrow a Cisco Systems' definition that bounds the problem, rather than defines it:

Cloud computing is IT resources and services that are abstracted from the underlying infrastructure and provided "on-demand" and "at scale" in a multi-tenant environment.

With this definition, I can at least say that content sites are almost never cloud computing. It is debatable whether or not something like World of Warcraft is an IT service, but your traditional enterprise and consumer-oriented SaaS applications, your PaaS offerings, and certainly your server and/or storage resources all very much count as cloud computing in this case.

At the very least, this definition is hard for anyone to find too specific.

What this definition fails to do, however, is give guidance to those trying to get at the heart of how a given "cloud" makes money. This is why it has become important to be specific about what kind of cloud service you are offering. Are you pitching Infrastructure as a service? Software as a Service? Cloud infrastructure management? … Read more

So, about two dozen high-profile and quasi-high-profile young business leaders were invited to Washington, D.C., to meet with senior Obama administration officials Friday to discuss the future of the ravaged U.S. economy. And I've got to respect the fact that the administration wants to hear from young, outside-the-box entrepreneurs. But, of course, the dial on the snark machine has been turned up to 11.

I don't have a complete list of attendees, but we've learned through various channels that the roster includes Kluster founder Ben Kaufman, Zappos founder Tony Hsieh, Toms Shoes founder Blake Mycoskie, … Read more

I've been invited by Sonicbids CEO Panos Panay to speak on a panel at SXSW later this month entitled "Artist as Entrepreneur," and as I've been thinking about the subject, my attention was drawn to this recent post on CD Baby's bulletin boards (it was first posted elsewhere). Katie Taylor, the artistic director of Opera Theater Oregon, is worried about the rising perception that art--particularly music--should be available for a very low price or free.

To change this perception, she argues, artists need to convince the general public that there's a fundamental difference between … Read more