THE DREAM IN ACTION

As of December 1, the Federal Trade Commission is going to require bloggers, and prominent tweeters and Facebook types to disclose any paid endorsements to their followers, online friends and readers. These new rules have the potential to change everyone’s online habits. A trend, al biet not a common one, among bloggers is to take [...]

In my short time in Chicago, I’ve realized that there are more folks into tech startups than many people realize, however our smaller but still passion startup community doesn’t quite have the “presence” and sense of availability of other startup hubs (ie. Bay Area & NYC). Hubs have events that pull these communities together and [...]

Some people don’t understand how young technology companies work. Some people make it sound like you should be able to charge right away and bootstrap every startup. Well sometimes, in the social web world, you need to have adoption of your product before it proves it’s value. It’s difficult to prove value without adoption and [...]

I have a widget on my site that hasn’t been working properly. It’s called Blogrollr and it’s supposed to be a dynamic blog roll, which is an awesome idea, when it works. I realized that over the past month or so my blog reading has changed quite a bit. I’m doing less Google reader and [...]

There is a new trend on the web and both startups and investors are taking note. Fred Wilson has called this trend, “taking the web offline”. Others call it the challenge of “local”. Companies like Loopt and Foursquare are taking this problem head on. As the only web nerd amongst my group of friends I [...]

image via briansolis I’m in a GE management training program full of over achievers. These individuals are smart and know how to play the corp ladder climbing game very well. One thing I here all the time is, “I need to build my network”. I’ve always questioned this sentiment because I question the value of [...]

[This is the second portion of a series on raising seed funding for a web startup. You can find the first post here, where we discussed referrals, short pitches, accountability, and tracking opportunities. Note: I’ve never raised any seed money for a startup. I write these observations to share what I’ve been learning and to [...]