Category: Entrepreneurs

IT Outsourcing Sprouts Up in Rural America

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Julia King:

Aelera Corp. CEO Dustin Crane traveled to China, India and Armenia in a quest to buy or start up an offshore IT services company. After six months of searching, he returned to the U.S. and set up operations in the coastal city of Savannah and the smaller town of Fitzgerald, Ga., population 8,758.
McKesson Corp. CIO Cheryl T. Smith estimates that the $8 billion pharmaceutical distributor is saving $10 million annually in salary costs?a percentage of which is reinvested in IT innovation?after relocating its primary data center and about 75 IT jobs from San Francisco to Dubuque, Iowa.

Two fantastic examples of what’s possible. Unfortunatetly, it seems Wisconsin’s political leaders aren’t interested in laying the groundwork for the true high speed networks necessary for these type of opportunities to land here…..

Orion Energy Systems

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Thomas Content:

Lights made by Orion generate less heat and consume 50% less power than standard industrial lighting. Even more significant: Orion lights require fewer fixtures, and while factories and warehouses that use them are brighter, they use less electricity. That’s a big deal for manufacturers always looking to cut costs to stay competitive.

Venture Capital & How to Start a Startup

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Paul Graham offers up two very useful articles:

  • How to Start a Startup:
    You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible. Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these. A startup that does all three will probably succeed.
  • A Unified Theory of VC Suckage:
    But lately I’ve been learning more about how the VC world works, and a few days ago it hit me that there’s a reason VCs are the way they are. It’s not so much that the business attracts jerks, or even that the power they wield corrupts them. The real problem is the way they’re paid.

    The problem with VC funds is that they’re funds. Like the managers of mutual funds or hedge funds, VCs get paid a percentage of the money they manage. Usually about 2% a year. So they want the fund to be huge: hundreds of millions of dollars, if possible. But that means each partner ends up being responsible for investing a lot of money. And since one person can only manage so many deals, each deal has to be for multiple millions of dollars.

Tim Draper on Skype, Telco’s and the VC Business

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Draper is acknowledged as the inspiration behind the term “viral marketing” via his hotmail investment. Interesting interview.

We often list all the problems in society, and the politicians would make you believe that they’re going to solve all those problems.

Generally, I’d say it goes the other way. Businesses solve a lot of the world’s problems. The next big energy breakthrough will happen through a business.

The next big environmental breakthrough similarly could happen through a business. Medicine has been advanced through business. It turns out that it’s the businesspeople that tend to be the ones who solve all this stuff.

Strategic Failure: HP & AT&T

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tingilinde:

It is interesting to note that groups of technologists within AT&T were accurately forecasting the future. A few groups formed to deal with new developments and even attempted to influence the decision makers. Probably the most interesting was ODD *- I wasn’t directly associated with it, but know most of its former members.


A friend who happens to be one of the ODDsters, Amy Muller, co-authored a brief history on the group and AT&T’s strategic failure. (pdf) read it

Interesting Reading… Via Lessig