New Florence. New Renaissance.

The new IT consultants – Venture Capitalists

When Equinix (EQIX) Chief Information Officer Brian Lillie wants new business tools, he seeks advice from a venture capitalist, bypassing sources like IT consultants or the biggest names in enterprise software.

He takes that unusual route because many of the latest innovations in cloud computing and software-as-a-service are coming from startups, not enterprise mainstays like Oracle or International Business Machines. Venture backers who get early looks at emerging companies as they consider cash infusions can be the best guides to the most promising new technology.

Bloomberg BusinessWeek

BTW, I had the pleasure to work with Lillee when he was one of the main coordinators of the Innovative CIO program at Stanford in March where I was one of the guest presenters

Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth, er network

He has had an amazing week – an IPO and a wedding - but this BusinessWeek graph shows his really impressive asset: his network.

Fortune’s Greatest Entrepreneurs of our time

A Fortune gallery of 12 entrepreneurs – Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Fred Smith (Fedex), Jeff Bezos, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Howard Schultz (Starbucks), Mark Zuckerberg, John Mackey (Whole Foods), Herb Kelleher (Southwest), Narayana Murthy (Infosys), Sam Walton (Walmart), Muhammad Yunus (Grameen Bank)

The TechStars accelerator

Companies accepted into TechStars New York get free office space, $18,000 in cash, $100,000 in convertible debt, and access to 150 mentors—the list includes Fog Creek Software founder Joel Spolsky, venture capitalist Fred Wilson, and Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley. At the conclusion of the program, graduates take the stage at New York City's Webster Hall to pitch their companies to hundreds of reporters and investors. In exchange, the program takes a 6 percent stake in each company.

For most entrepreneurs, that's a small price to pay. Of the 126 companies that have completed a TechStars program, only 8 percent have failed. By comparison, the failure rate for most technology start-ups is thought to be as high as 90 percent. The average TechStars company raises $1.1 million from venture capitalists, and some raise much more. "If you take a really talented group of people and give them intense mentoring, you sharply increase the chances that their company will be successful," says Hochberg. "I tell my M.B.A. students to apply for these programs. The model works."

Inc

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A Financial Services App Store

Wall Street lives and dies by its ability to quickly and smartly manipulate data to come up with the latest financial product, high-speed stock trading strategy, or algorithm for hedging risky derivatives. But just as the technology edge becomes more important, Wall Street is facing a big slump in its profits and reputation. That makes it harder to recruit promising technologists.

Now, some Wall Street giants—including American Express, JP Morgan Chase, Capital One, State Street, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America— have backed the FinTech Innovation Lab, an attempt to create an ecosystem of financial technology startups in the New York area. The baby "fintech" companies could provide important innovation to the larger firms while making connections with potential customers and gaining insight from them.

MIT Technology Review

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The low-risk MVP - Minimum Value Product

“Coca-Cola (KO) has established a Venturing & Emerging Brands unit that made early-stage investments in Honest Tea and Zico Coconut Water, which have become two of the beverage industry’s hottest new soft drinks. If the traditional Coke organization had tried to develop and launch these products from scratch, they might still be in the R&D lab.

Not all of these projects work out. In fact, for every PowerBar, there are nine failures. But the beauty of the MVP model is you can experience hundreds of failures and walk away worry-free, knowing you just saved millions in R&D, marketing, and manufacturing costs.”

Bloomberg BusinessWeek

The Crunchies awards

I watched some of last night's TechCrunch sponsored annual celebration in San Francisco of startups and VCs. Plenty of innovative companies from Dropbox to Nest to LinkedIn profiled previously on this blog were honored.

You can watch the whole event here

 

The Startup Genome Compass

“Earlier this year, Blackbox released the Startup Genome Report, a 67-page analysis of more than 650 startups, created in collaboration with researchers from Stanford and Berkeley, that seeks to determine which startups succeed and fail, and why. Since then, they've expanded the report to include roughly 3,200 high-growth Internet startups, and based in part on that data, today launched the Startup Genome Compass (SGC), a benchmarking tool designed to help entrepreneurs keep track of their startups's progress and know what to do next.

Rather than make decisions based on an arbitrary whim or advice from others, SGC bases its recommendations on hard data. Every month, entrepreneurs can benchmark their startups. After filling out a questionnaire, SGC will automatically classify your startup by type and stage, compare it to other similar startups, and generate a personalized Genome Report across 25 key performance indicators, including metrics on your customer, product, and team value, as well as metrics related to your business model and finances.”

FastCompany

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The $ 32,000 startup

From BusinessWeek

"But Park and Bahn did. How? To start with, they crowdsourced the design. Instead of hiring a bunch of marketing people, as tech companies usually do, they asked their user community for volunteers to help conceive a new site. Then they selected a handful of the most eager users and trained them on the basics of Silicon Valley-style product management. Next, Park and Bahn needed to find a designer. They used 99designs.com, which hosts design competitions, for a two-week contest that attracted hundreds of designers, yielding a design they used as the theme for the new site. The contest, prize, and designer's time cost $9,200.

They broke up Web development into two tasks: front-end engineering (turning design artwork into code) and back-end engineering (making the code actually function). They built their technology on top of WordPress, phpBB, and Drupal—which are free, open-source platforms. Front-end engineering usually requires sophisticated coding done by contractors who earn as much as $100 an hour. Instead, the Beat The GMAT team turned to a service called PSD2HTML.com—which converts Photoshop design files into HTML and CSS code. This service costs $160 to $220 per Web page, totaling $4,500. For back-end engineering, they hired four developers from Hungary and Ukraine on the outsourcing website oDesk. They paid $15 to $20 per hour. The entire back-end engineering cost $18,000."

2009 Young Innovators Under 35

MIT Technology Review's annual list of young innovators in medicine, computing, communications, electronics, nanotechnology, and more.