At 2pm I couldn’t wait any longer and drove to the Apple store at the Valley Fair shopping center in San Jose. The line was going around the mall and they where even standing outside! While walking around I realized that I passed an At&t store while driving to the mall that didn’t have any line any more.
Quick decision and I drove back to the At&t store… All people gone, what’s wrong here? Hmm, after a quick chat with the store manager I got the information that all At&t stores in the Bay Area are sold out! Great!

So I drove back to the Apple store and put my self in the line. Apple store employees handed out water and where really helpful in regards to provide information about the plans and all other details (They must have been sick after 2 hours of telling everyone the same story!)

After some time and some people watching (see below), I then finally ended in the last turn and was heading in the direction of the Apple store entrance. My friend then joined me as well and after 2 hours and 30 minutes we where able to finally buy the phone. I was even able to transfer the phone number from T-Mobile without a problem.

A white 16GB 3g iPhone! wuuuhaaa…

Currently I am updateing iTunes and downloading the new SDK …

Stay tuned for more

The picture below was taken at the Apple Store in Palo Alto on July 10th …

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)

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!

Trevor Blackwell
Watch people who have money to spend, see what they’re wasting their time on, cook up a solution, and try selling it to them. It’s surprising how small a problem can be and still provide a profitable market for a solution.

Paul Graham on 37signals: Programming At Warp Speed
The Lesson: Create a simple product as fast as you can, then get feedback from customers and make it better.

Paul Graham: Handling Investors

by  Matt Jaynes of http://blog.nanobeepers.com

Very humoristic presentation of Paul Graham of YCombinator why to not not start a startup (Posted by Larry Kubin).
Startup School Presentation by Paul Graham of YCombinator

A post by Matt Mullenweg founding developer of Wordpress.
Kapor vs Zuckerberg

Some very good notes from Kent Bye.
2007 Startup School Notes

Venture Beat review.
Start-up advice for entrepreneurs, from Y Combinator Startup School

Some review by Olexandr Prokhorenko.
The Startup School review

And here some Video’s of the 2006 Startup School.

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.

The format is simple, <<12 selected companies will have the opportunity to deliver 5-minute onstage product presentations / demonstrations>>. This has multiple interesting aspects. Fist of all it is a very good plattform to present, so if you are interested in launching soon or need some additional public facing (Who does not?) and have ‘the’ mindblowing startup you may apply here. But deadline for submission will be 27 of April, so move now.

Another very important aspect is how to do a good pitch presentation. This is a plattform where 12 starups invested there very best to create a 5 minutes presentation/demonstration. These are 12 perfectly shaped speeches which enable you to learn how to prepare your own presentation.

If you can’t attend in person you may still be able to get some footage of the confernence via the twitter channel.

So enjoy and let me know if you will head out to San Francisco.

(To get registration discount for the supernova conference go to the end of this TechCrunch post and use the posted priority code to get 200$ off the registration fee)

 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!

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!