This article has some great tips for startups. Take a read and feel free to discuss here.
Archive for December, 2007 Page 3 of 4
I noticed this posting over at GigaOM about additional personnel cuts at EarthLink (there is a side commentary about the fact that NO ONE posted a comment to this story but I digress). I pinged some folks (and have been pinged by some folks) that I know there (disclosure: I consulted for EarthLink for six months in 2006). It does seem as if there are some additional cuts coming at the end of this month. These may be in line with the previously announced cuts but I’m not sure.
With all of these EarthLinkers on the street, you have to wonder where they’ll land. I’d say it’s a perfect time for them to form teams and start some new companies. Unfortunately, I haven’t heard of this happening yet.
For you recently ex-EarthLinkers, maybe you can get back some of those jobs that were outsourced and are now coming back to Atlanta.
P.S. The EarthLink web site still blows. I can’t believe they still list all their press releases (back to 1995) on one freakin’ page (132K of HTML). I complained about that when I was there last year. Glad to see no one did anything about it.
When the folks at iRobot realized that hackers were itching to use the Roomba as a platform for their own robotic projects, they released the iRobot Create. This simple decision has spawned a whole community of individuals that are using the iRobot Create for homebrew projects.
A team of Georgia Tech students in ECE 4180 used the Create for their class project. It’s been written up in Engadget and there is a full description (with photos) on Instructables. The talcum powder “GT” caught my eye as did the pretty good rendering of Buzz from the PrintBot.
So why do I mention all this? Well, this team of four was pretty creative and developed a decent product over a semester (which may have commercial viability). If I were running a hardware based startup that needed to hire some college grads, I’d hunt down the four students whose names appear as output from the PrintBot (assuming they were the only ones involved in the project). I’d say their semester long project should bump them up to a second round interview for any company looking to hire some people. ECE 4180 is a senior level undergrad class and presumably these four will be graduating soon if they haven’t already.
The last few posts have been about why there isn’t coverage of Southeast/East Coast startups. Every time I write or talk about this subject, I think “is this just our perception and it really isn’t true?”. Well apparently not. Tyler Ransburgh over at Startup Hustle thought about it and then discovered he was right. I haven’t looked back but I’m pretty sure no Atlanta or Southeast based startup has been in the running for a TechCrunch award. At least, I’ve never heard of it (as always, make sure you speak up if you know of something that proves me wrong).
This is just additional fuel to the fire that we need to be more vocal about our own community because folks outside of our community aren’t going to do it. So what are you doing to help out the community?
In an effort to cover as much local news as possible, I thought I’d go to every local startup website I could find and subscribe to their newsfeed. As a one person side-project operation, I don’t have the luxury of spending hours a day finding news at this point. And besides, why not let a feed reader gather interesting news for me and let me get to the good stuff as quickly as possible?
Well, I think I might have found one of the reasons that good local news isn’t discussed that widely. After checking every one of ATDC’s companies (which I would expect to be representative of most local startup companies), only one company has a blog (that I could find, let me know if I missed any) and one other has an RSS feed of their news stories (again, tell me if I missed any). Over ATDC’s 42 listed companies, I found 11 without news sections, one with listed stories but no link to them, two “coming soon” type sites, one with a broken news page, one site that was totally broken, and two without dates on their stories. Of the remaining 24 companies that listed press releases, only 12 companies had releases from the last four months (August - December, 2007). One company’s most recent release was in 2001 (announcing their joining of with ATDC).