launch lounge

The BarCamp is comming back to Palo Alto or more precisely back to the birth place. This time it will not only be hosted by Socialtext but will be held on the whole block including neighbors like IDEO, Edgeio and so on.

And here some impressions from Michael Arrington on the first BarCamp Party held in Palo Alto.

Add yourself to the participant list and start with the pre-networking social network on Crowdvine.

BarCampBlock details:
When: August 18-19th, 2007, 10:00 AM - 4:00 PM.
Where: 655 High Street (and surrounding blocks), Palo Alto, California (37° 26′ 34 N, 122° 9′ 40 W)

One of the first steps probably way befor going life will be the branding of your startup. Especially in the Web2.0 world branding is a major point in getting a voice in the market. You can’t just sit there and wait till some one drops in your shop, unless your name is google this will likely not happen (else tell me how you did it :).

When thinking of branding one of the first steps will be the name game. You may find a very good Post of Paul Graham about naming your startup and I think he is right, finding an excellent name in the world where many names are taken by domain squatters is not an easy task and the name will clearly show how creative you are. If you had enough brain to find a sexy name your imagination will probably lead you to build a meaningful startup.

Startup Names

Another part of branding is how you can distinguish yourself from the competition. How can you spread the word beyond your family and friends. Branding and PR are methods to generate traffic on your web site. I can recommend this blog post on the aviva directory which shows you 99 cheap branding tips for your startup. Use them and especially use them frequently!

Little Known Ways to Brand on the Cheap: 99 Tips for Poor Web Startups

Branding and PR are one of the top things to keep in mind when starting. This is how you distribute your service!

If you would like to see a very good presentation about the Art of the Start, I can suggest the following Video. Guy Kawasaki Managing Director of Garage Technology Ventures has a very humoristic way to tell some rules when starting a company:

Guy Kawasaki “The Art of the Start” @ TiECon 2006

The Art of the Start a short overview of the ten rules:

1. Make meening
2. Make mantra
3. Get going
4. Define a Business Model
5. Weave a MAT (milestones, assumptions, tasks)
6. Niche thyself
7. Follow the 10/20/30 rule
8. Hire infected people
9. Lower the barrier to adoption
10. Seed the clouds

For more details and examples on each rule watch the video.

Just got the confirmation mail for the Netvibes Universe Launch Party! This is a great opportunity for me to do some networking and find out more about new startups in the valley.

 Also make sure to check out Netvibes. This is an idea of the old days redone with the new possebilities of web 2.0. I was never a fan of portal pages with the role or user based information. I always thought that this is just another way to save links and this possebility is available since the existence of an internet browser. But I agree Netvibes did a really good job and setting up pages is a snap. The functionality available is just great!

This time I wasn’t under the shower when I thought about a great web application that enabled me to send those tid bits I found on the Internet easily to my mates. Like most of us I love to share my findings on the internet. Web Sites, Videos, Blogs or just news found of a particular topic. Most of the time I send that to a couple of people who are for sure interested in this topic.

Til now I always had to open my mail client and was only able to copy and past the link to the desired resource. Wouldn’t it be a great idea to enable a kind of instant messaging application where you can post parts of a website directly by one or two clicks? Yes, I see this definitly as a smart approach.

After some googeling and brainstorming on how I could build such an application, I found the perfect answer:

http://www.clipmarks.com/

They did exactly what I was brainstorming about and it’s very well done. I use clipmarks a lot and it enables me even more to share my findings on the net!

So take a look at it and let me know what you think about. Review will follow soon!