Luckily, it’s now easier than ever to translate your thoughts using advanced tools or web based services.  If you are graphically challenged, you can now get some help.

Balsamiq

I had the pleasure of designing some mockups using Balsamiq as part of START Atlanta’s team.  This software makes it SOOOOO easy to design new pages its not even funny.  It’s basically as good as designing rough wireframes on paper or in Photoshop except you won’t have to scan the paper afterwards or waste hours in photoshop to get everything layered and pixeled correctly.  The tool is also simple enough to use that even an non-graphical idiot CEO can piece together some elements to get the page close to what he envisions.  If you need a tool to jump start you from concept to rough sketch, I’d highly recommend this tool.

99 Designs

99 Designs is a service I just learned about that I haven’t had the chance to use.  However, from the design of the website and the sample work I’ve seen by their community, you definitely have a lot of potential to get some great work for bargin prices.

The site basically allows you to create contests where you specify your design needs and a bounty and designers get to work based on your descriptions and feedback.  The best thing about this service is you get to see your work before you pay for it so ultimately, you win.

As a graphically challenged person, if you combine the wireframe tool and submitting the wireframes to designers at 99 Designs, you should be able to get a great mockup of your new website for under $500.  This is a lot cheaper and faster than paying a professional designer thousands only to get the work after a few weeks. Your mileage may very…

While many entrepreneurs prefer to skip to the beat of their own tunes, the best way to stay on track is to make sure you have a destination and a pre-defined track to get there.

Marathon training is a great example of breaking up a large task into short term, measurable goals and forcing yourself to push forward based on a set schedule.  Since most people don’t have the agility to run 26+ miles without some intense training, breaking the task up into smaller, managable chunks forces you to do what matters and ignore the fluff.

Earlier this year, we decided we needed to get the website out there sooner than later so we set a date for launch and stuck to it. Even days right before the launch, we were still not ready and many items were still broken but when launch day came, we put together what worked and threw it out there.  Our reasoning was once the website is public, we would have to start developing against a public time line whereas if we hid in pre-launch mode, then no one would be pushing us to go forward.  In the end, it worked out really well.  By having the website out there, we were approached by many potential partners and we knew we had done the right thing.

So what’s next?

Now that the website is launched, our next steps are to set measurable growth goals and put it against a time line.  For us, this means setting short term traffic and registration goals for 2009 and 2010 and working from the top down to figure out what we need to do each month to hit those numbers.  Again, we are hoping the goals will help us push out the fluff and help us focus our spending and efforts on what will get us to our milestones.  The alternative would be to sit around and hope that people find us by ???? then PROFIT!

With that said, do you have short term goals for your company for development or traffic - one that’s placed against a time line?  If so, what are some of the things you’re looking to achieve?

Due to increasingly busy schedules and to-do items, we haven’t updated this blog too much over the last few months.  While I would love to say that a lot of crazy things have gone on, the truth is we developed a simple playbook and have been hammering it like annoying telemarketers with a huge list of numbers.

So the pay stinks, the job can be boring, why do this at all?  Why not join a large corporation with a nice salary, huge benefits, and a chance to travel?  Well, at the end of the day, its the love that keeps us going.  We’re not doing this to get on to Mashable or TechCrunch though being recognized would help our ultimate goal.  What keeps us going is the fact that we know we have a better mousetrap and when its complete, we want to make sure the world realizes it too.

It’s funny - of all the people I’ve networked with in the past year who were dedicated to their ideas, many of those startups no longer exist.  Maybe the pay cut is too deep, maybe they learned quick their idea won’t fly or maybe the lack of passion killed it before it ever had a chance.  Whatever it is, it’s amazing to see what a difference a year can make.

Someone once asked me if you found something you loved doing, would you really do it for free? I guess the answer is yes - with some contingencies of course.  But one year later, I’m really glad to see the progress we’ve made and to experience everything we have learned.  Despite the struggles, sleepless nights and developing a habit of talking to my dogs to get their opinions, I probably wouldn’t trade it at all.

It will be interesting to see where we are another year from now.

Since our operations for the most part is still pretty compact, I’ve been pushing the team to focus on trimming the fat in our technology.  When you face a scaling issue with your website, there are a couple of options available to help relieve the issues:

1. You can simply buy more machines to scale up if you can afford the cost.
2. You can tweak your code and squeeze more out of your existing infrastructure.  This one costs money and time as well but the improvements will help you exponentially as you scale up buying more machines.

Of course, both are really valid ways to grow - but if you do 1 without at least attempting 2, then you’re setting yourself up for bloat and wasted expenses.

In the case of EasyAutoSales - our monthly AWS costs for processing and storing images are getting close to  $1,000 a month. For a service that is supposed to the cheaper solution, it either means we’re growing well beyond our initial expectations or that we need to tweak the setup to work faster so we can save some dough.  Luckily for us, our problems are a combination of both growth and some bloat, the latter which we can fix.

In addition to tweaking some processes to make sure everything runs smoother and faster, we also found that Amazon now offers a cheaper mid-sized EC2 where it offers more computing power at half the price.  I guess Amazon realized that many are using EC2 for computing and not necessarily storage for a website and have decided to offer this new service to respond to the usage patterns.  By making code changes and instance changes, we expect to save a significant amount of money, possibly up to 25-30% of our monthly bill with Amazon.

With that said, what have you done with your startup this month to curb expenses?

One of the more important concepts in the article deals with the concept of watching your competitors (for a few laps) to determine what their strengths and weaknesses are. If you go in with your hair on fire trying to make passes without knowing your competitor, you might inadvertently subject yourself to risk that might be avoided by a lap or two of research. Watching, listening and planning is key. Obviously at some point you have to take the leap to make the pass, but learning your opponent’s weaknesses is key to minimizing risk.

Another form of this research comes through race engineers. They work with you before and during the race (over the radio) to tell you what opponent will do or is doing during the race. They are knowledgeable about other races on the track with you. They know who’s fast, who’s a hot-head, which cars are prone to breaking and which cars are going to be the main competition. They are complimentary to an advisory board, people in the industry who have been through the early stages of where you are and have “made it”. They are benevolent souls who aren’t in the “driver’s seat” anymore, but want to help the next generation make their mark and, again, minimize their risk by directing them towards actions that will maximize their goals and minimize their failures.

Though it may seem cliche, running a business is akin to driving a race car. Every week is another race and constantly finishing well will put your business high in the rankings. Making impatient, rash moves may put you ahead one week and behind the next. A few weeks of poor finishes can lead to frustration that snowballs. Planning and thinking ahead is an ongoing and evolving process while racing or in business. You have to constantly reassess yourself to make sure you’re decisions are taking you to your goal. As Randy ends the article, “To continue pounding this into your head, planning means planning to finish. All the crying and blaming and finger-pointing in the world will not unbend that suspension and get you back on track. Planning means using your head, not just your heart, or your hormones.”

After all… We are the change we’re looking for.

If you’re interested in helping to change, grow and foster the Atlanta startup community, you should register for the START Atlanta kickoff event.  More information below…

START Atlanta, a non-profit organization started by local Atlanta entrepreneurs is holding a kickoff event the weekend of September 19-21 to bring together Atlanta-based angel investors, VC’s and Atlanta entrepreneurs to help connect the Atlanta Startup Community.

The vision of START Atlanta is to provide the Atlanta early-stage technology startup community access to knowledge and capital necessary to launch new businesses. START Atlanta focuses on very early-stage companies in Atlanta that are typically below the radar of the angel and VC community. The funding needed for these companies to reach their first milestone is usually between $15k to $50k. START Atlanta plans to help companies network within the Atlanta startup community and to help raise the needed capital to build these companies to a level where they can seek additional rounds from angels or higher.  START Atlanta’s technology platform will also make it easy to allow investors to invest in smaller amounts and help bring transparency to the local technology companies.

For more information, check out the START Atlanta website.

Check out the link below for more information:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=377634011

With all the evidence pointing to high corporate taxation as a huge contributor to a slowing economy, you have to ask where this sentiment comes from? I’ll tell you, people like Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota who have used stastics by Government Accountability Office (GAO) such as the following: 28% of large U.S. corporations paid no income tax in 2005. He says, “It’s time for big corporations to pay their fair share.” Did anyone tell Seator Dorgan that 85% of those companies didn’t make a profit last year? The story even offers this clever quip:

American Airlines and General Motors escaped income tax for 2005 through the clever tax dodge of losing $862 million and $10.5 billion, respectively. How unpatriotic.

Are these idiots really running the show in Washington? Senator Dorgan, and the rest of the polito, need to realize that corporations aren’t a true individual like you and I. Taxing a corporation is just another form of taxing the owners and shareholders of America’s companies. More taxes don’t mean less money for companies. It means less dividends. It means lower stock prices. It means your local fireman, policeman and teacher’s IRA is X% lower because the government had to take their “fair share”.

Simply put, the tax system in the US is becoming less about generating and maximixing government revenues and more about punishing behavior and redirecting people’s labor, and that’s not right. Abolish corporate taxes all together and you’ll have such a surge of new companies, companies moving from overseas and individual startups that the US will see an economic boom such has never been seen before. And with all this extra income people will be getting, the government will get their “fair share”, not to mention we won’t be double taxed any more.

It’s going to take someone with balls to stand up for the big guy and ignore all the anti-corporate rhetoric. Corporations are amoral entities. They aren’t good. They aren’t evil. They are just a vehicle to maximize profits and when they do, EVERYONE benefits. Be it shareholders, employees, charities and other businesses, business is good for America. In a few short months there will be an election and I hope we all look at our local representatives as well as our national to remove these chains which are binding America’s corporations.

So in part one of this series, here are five things you could/should test.

Conversion tags - Before you even do anything related to setting up a paid campaign, you should already have conversion tags telling you how you’re doing.  Setting up something as simple as Goals in Google Analytics will at least tell you how many conversions you are getting a day and where the referrals generating the conversions are coming from.  Use this as a base line in figuring out what kind of goals you want to achieve with the paid campaign.

Keywords - Obviously, keywords are an important part of any pay-per-click campaign that needs extensive testing. However, you’d be surprised at how many people just buy up every single keyword related to their niche.  The thing with keywords is, you want to buy the ones that convert with a positive ROI. Your more generic words may drive the most traffic and may convert the most sales by volume, but if your product cost $39.99 and it takes you $60’s worth of clicks on that term to generate one sale, then you won’t last too long in the PPC game.

Keyword Match Types - If you are getting into pay-per-click, you should know intimately what keyword match types are. If you are unfamiliar with match types, ask around or outsource your campaign setup.  Do NOT setup a campaign without knowledge in this area.  In the tier one PPC engines, the primary match types are broad match, “phrase match” and [exact match].  You can think of broad match as massive fishing nets helping your site catch visitors you want and visitors you don’t.  Phrase match is a more specialized net/cage where you’re more likely to catch the right type of visitors with the right bait.  You end up with less overall volume, but the visitors you attract are more relevant.  Exact match is pretty much like spear fishing.  Very low volume (compared to broad match) but chances you are targeting exactly who you want to catch.

Negative Keywords - Negative keywords are gems that are often not found in amateur campaign setups.  However, these keywords will help you save a TON of money.  One easy way to spot negative keywords: do a search of a top term you want to pay for and see what results show up.  If a lot of unrelated results populate the top ten, start adding their names or related terms into your negative keyword list.  For example, if you only  want to sell “cherry coke” and nothing else, possible negative keywords for you would be pepsi, diet, classic, fanta, sucks, formula, history, merchandise, etc.

Dynamic Insertions - This is a tricky one but I wanted to include it in here cause it’s related to keyword testing in the ad. The idea behind dynamic keyword insertions is that if you show an ad with the exact phrase the user searches on, the likelihood of that user clicking on your ad will be much higher than other ads that have titles that only paraphrase the search.  eBay is a great example of a company that buys up every keyword in the dictionary and use dynamic insertions.  Can you really buy irony from eBay?  Who knows… but it was a term that used to pop an eBay ad.

Before you get into testing dynamic insertions, I would master the other four areas mentioned above.  Dynamic insertions will help you spend money (fo shure) but unless you know what your profitable words and phrases are, it’s hard to test this plus the keywords without some type of control.  Narrowing your profitable words THEN testing different ad copies will ensure you don’t pollute your results.  The next time we continue discussing PPC, I’ll go into some other areas of testing.

Note: It seems these posts tend to step on peoples’ toes so my disclaimer is that EasyAutoSales is not looking for investment money today but may do so in the next few months. These discussions were sparked by the frustrations felt in the Atlanta early stage startups so please, don’t kill the messenger.

If you haven’t read Paul’s post, go ahead and check it out.  To put it simply, it is a great analogy, it makes perfect sense and I agree with his views completely.

On the flip side, the attraction to Hollywood today isn’t so much on the number of talented producers in the area, but more so that the movie studios (VC investors) make an active investment in the community.

As one of the Go5 members pointed out, while movie and TV studios swing for the fences and aim for two to three blockbusters a year, they also put out tons of crappy movies in the field and help produce hundreds of TV pilots each year that never see the light of day. (Many of these pilots use significant budgets and film few episodes deep!)

Why are the studios willing to make these altruistic investments into ideas that may have little chance of making it big?  My guess is they want to keep the community going, attract new talent into the area and make sure it’s not hard for existing producers and actors to get together and create something. After all, if studios only funded blockbusters like Gone with the Wind, Titanic and The Dark Knight, there’d be extremely long pauses between movie releases and generation gaps where some may not even know what a movie is. (Not to mention everyone who currently works for the studios as prop specialists, camera crew, etc. would be working full time at In-N-Out Burger and would be expense to recruit for movie projects.)

On the consumer front, if people aren’t used to going to the movies as one of their routine weekend options, would these three movies even be as successful as they were?  Most likely not.

The other benefit of the Hollywood Community Model can be seen mimicked in Silicon Valley as well.  The studios invest in the community to help not only the producers (entrepreneurs) see what will be sticky, but they also help the studios (angel or VC community) dip their toes into new types of films and learn what makes certain shows or movies stick.  The reason why Hollywood is successful and why others want to mimic it is because they fail fast and hard and get right back to work after failing and learning.  Every movie or TV pilot that gets pushed out, no matter how great or bad, becomes an educational tool and networking tool for the community. If the idea itself didn’t work, maybe an actor did something great and can be used for a different role. It’s because of these repeated investments that we now know we don’t necessarily like Rob Schnider in a leading role (The Animal), but we love him for secondary roles or one-liners in comedic films. (Someone please ask Adam Sandler how much he spent to figure THAT out.)

Our point is, if every micro investment in the Atlanta area fails in the next 24 months, that’s not to say everything is lost with nothing gained.  If micro investments do exist and are heavily publicized for the Atlanta area, there’s no reason why the early stage startup scene won’t be significantly more mature and more populated in 2 years time. (Along with greater chances of successes.)

Another key feature of the Hollywood community is its ability to spin off of partial wrecks, complete failures and remake what was once successful.  The Ang Lee version of the Hulk sucked.  However, the fact that it was made allowed a new team to come and tweak that franchise and helped boost the comic book movie industry as a whole.  The old King Kong flicks while great for its time, is probably a bit out of date for today’s audiences.  However, the fact it existed allowed for the Peter Jackson remake which I thought was amazing. (My startup EasyAutoSales is essentially retooling something that used to work but is now perceived broken by many of today’s dealers.)

One closing thought for the entrepreneurs… whether your ideas get funded, if your idea or startup fail, consider joining another startup in the area for the sake of learning and forming better teams.  We’ve been told time and time again investors invest in people and if we all refuse to get out of our own sandbox to help others, form better teams and learn something new, then no one will really grow as an entrepreneur.  If everyone fail fast, learn and regroup; it’s only a matter of time before an all star cast will form and be able to throw out crap like Ocean’s 12 and still make a ton of money.

However, millions in funding aside, we (the seed stage startups) have decided what we REALLY need to keep talent in Atlanta is to foster our entrepreneurial community.  What this means TODAY is establishing a safe and ideal environment for us to co-work, learn from each other and minimize individual risks by helping each other avoid mistakes we may have already made.

So what does this mean exactly?

Well, as a group, we (the entrepreneurs) are asking someone with the $$$, the vision, and the desire to invest in the Atlanta early stage startup community to step forward, work with us and earn this t-shirt.

While we do expect our joint efforts to flourish and ultimately churn out a few home run businesses, we need investors who can meet our demands and see the value of investing in this community as more than numbers on a spreadsheet.

The questions we don’t expect to answer right now is “How will investing in this community be a profitable business in its first month?” Instead, we want to tackle questions like “What can we do to make Y-Combinator and TechStars jealous of our community and space” or “What would make Appcelerator regret leaving Atlanta?”

I know… those questions seem crazy and wayyyy too idealistic but the truth is it’s too late for Atlanta to play catch up. If we want to act and are willing to act now, we need to compete and try to out-do other established programs to attract talent to Atlanta.  It’s worked for this city before; I’ve seen it in the form of our local aquarium.  Bernie Marcus aimed to have the biggest, baddest, buck aquarium this side of the planet and look what it did for the city?  Now if someone’s willing to do the same for the entrepreneurial community, there’s no reason why we can’t be the Valley of the south east.

Will the real angel please stand up?

After getting a great start on our phase 1 technical development, we are now looking for a new technical lead to take what we have already established to the next level.  The ideal candidate should have previous experience working in a startup, (meaning you know this is high speed and low pay) and would be willing to work for part equity and negotiable pay.

Below are some the requirements for what we’re looking for:

Required:

Deep understanding of LAMP (Linux, apache, mysql, and PHP) development
Deep understanding of Linux server management with enterprise level experience (multiple servers, tightened security, load balancing, etc.)
Deep understanding of HTML, JavaScript, CSS, ajax, XHTML, RSS/XML
Some understanding of Amazon Web Services including EC2 and S3
Some understanding of Sphinx Search, or be able to learn it quickly
Basic understanding of SEO and online marketing stuff

We prefer someone with a genuine interest in working with web 2.0 websites especially one who is interested in all types of web 2.0 services.  Unlike traditional classifieds, we’re looking to do something different so if you play with various web 2.0 services or have worked with Facebook, Twitter or iPhone API’s, we want to hear from you!  We also prefer someone who has managed websites with high volume in the past because we’re looking for someone who understands scaling and design for scalability.  Most importantly, the candidate needs to pick up exactly where we left off.  (If you can only code by starting from scratch using parts of old code you had written for other projects, please do not apply.)

Last but not least, we would like someone with SSL or e-commerce experience and someone who is a self-starter that works well with a team.  Ideally, you can anticipate problems and solve them before they become huge bugs.

As far as hardcore development, we’re only anticipating about 3-4 more months of work before the site is “complete”  After that point, it will basically be maintenance and minor upgrades so if you’re a ninja hacker, and this interests you, please shoot us a message.  Here are our previous messages seeking php programmers: 1st time, 2nd time.  Referrals would also be greatly appreciated!  Thanks.

Sure, Pandora is great because it’ll match up your “musical DNA” with that of others and uses the information to create a database of artists that you’ll like to listen to. In a way, it’s a Google for music. It’s not about advertising and money in order to get airtime. It’s about a conflagration of the musical likes and dislikes of everyone else who listens to Pandora. It’s “SongRank” (my term, not theirs) database is pleasing to my ears as it not only keeps out the stuff I don’t want to listen to, but more importantly, and more to the point, it introduces me to music that others who like the same stuff I do listen to. So, what does this have to do with “the revolution” you say?

Let’s say you’re a small rock band in Ireland, trying to make your way into the big time. You play at local pubs and have a nice weekend gig, but your dream is playing at Madison Square Garden. Even if you do get “big” in the UK, getting into the US market is still a huge undertaking. Unless you have a huge amount of money to tour and promote yourselves, the odds are you’ll just be another indie rock band. However, you and your 4 band mates signed up for Pandora accounts. You each add yourself to your favorite music and then pick out some similar music from U2, Keane, The Rolling Stones and similar rock bands. You’ve now melded yourself into the Musical DNA of Pandora. It’s not a full proof method of becoming the next Springstein, but it’s yet another tool that will move the power away from large corporate labels and into the hands of the bands themselves and it will surely get people listening to your music who may have otherwise never heard of  you.

Now, getting your music onto Pandora will be a task in and of itself. I don’t know where they extract their music from, but the point is that indie bands have a VERY powerful tool in getting their music to people who might not otherwise hear it. I can’t see Pandora shunning small bands as they would, concievably, want as much music on there as possible. By no means is a search engine marketer going to replace a band manager, but unique and trend-setting tools like Pandora, YouTube and MySpace make being a small, emerging band just a little easier these days.

Person 1: I spent $$$$ testing Adwords but I’m not sure if I’m doing it right.  It drove some sales, but it didn’t really pay out so we stopped it after X weeks (or months).

Person 2: I also spent $$$ testing Adwords.  It worked but I think I need to hire someone to do it for me cause I’m sure it could be doing better.

Person 3: (Nodding)  We dropped $$$$$$ into Adwords but it really feels like a full time job monitoring it. I wish we had the resources to do it but we don’t.

As someone who used to manage pay-per-click campaigns for various brands, it makes me cringe a little to hear entrepreneurs dive in head first without checking to see if there’s water in the pool.  However, they really can’t be blamed because sometimes large brands do the same thing - the only difference is they have more budget and therefore, more room for error.

Confession: I’ve even done the same… throwing some money in the pool just to see how things would run without properly setting up all the metrics.

The truth is most business owners test Pay-Per-Click to check one thing - Will this drive me more traffic? The answer to this question is a 100% YES! Just like any other marketing tactic, if you throw any money at it, expect to see a lift in traffic through that medium.  However, if that’s the extent of your test, most of you will feel a little empty inside even after getting the answer you want.  After all, it’s similar to playing the slots - will this machine pay me if I put in some money?  Eventually yes…

So how do you REALLY test PPC marketing and when should you hire external help?

With so many things that can be tested and refined in a PPC campaign, if you are new to SEM and can not optimize your campaign in at least 10 ways (seriously, that’s 10), you should probably outsource your campaign creation and let them run the show for at least 2-3 months until the campaign is somewhat optimized.  At that point, if the contract is in your favor, you can hopefully keep the campaign and the work and continue running it on auto pilot for a few months until it needs to be tweaked again.

The reason I would recommend this technique is because most entrepreneurs take risks and many dive into PPC without being properly trained in it. (Let’s face it, it’s what we do.)  Unfortunately, this means throwing money away at an unoptimized campaign and giving up on the whole thing weeks or months later when the ROI doesn’t work out.

Pay-Per-Click can be great at helping you make money!  In fact, the only reason it’s popular IS because it has helped so many mom and pop shops reach the right audience amongst the masses on the internet.  If you’re still not convinced at hiring a professional is the right thing to do (at least for the setup), my next post will highlight some of the things you should look out for when setting up PPC campaigns.

Twitter - whether you know what it is or not is the one company (next to Yahoo!) that has been in the news in 2008 for its ability to fail.  What started out as the golden child for social media experts and early adapters now face constant struggles to stay alive.  Let’s face it… when your designers need to get cute with multiple ERROR screens because there are several ways to kill the system - that’s a problem!  Sending out a hot vet assistant telling me my dog has cancer does not make the issue any easier to swallow.  The choices are to operate or to put it down. Note: multiple hot assistants wouldn’t help either.

What irks me about the Twitter platform is that it’s being used as a live communication device.  A few of my friends have subconsciously stopped emailing me and have instead turned to direct messaging me on Twitter to get my attention.  That’s fine for recreational purposes or as updates to their status on a microblog but when things are important or when things need my immediate response, Twitter is still failing miserably at this.

In the last week or so, I’ve noticed overall updates have been down.  Whether that’s people abandoning the platform or Twitter’s throttling their usage, I don’t know.

I’ve noticed with the most recent Twhirl upgrade, Twitter has dropped its hourly API quota from 70 down to 20 requests per hour.  First off, just because you managed to keep your system alive (barely) on life support, doesn’t mean it’s still good or useful for the general public.  If email only allowed 3 gets an hour or if cell phones only allowed access to calls and data within some throttled time blocks during the day, would it still be useful for communication?  Would anyone trust it enough to rely on it knowing it’s in a constant state of cripple?  The answer should be “No” to the above 2 questions.

I’m really baffled as to why Twitter think it’s okay to scale it back to this level of service when its indirectly competing with other forms of communication.  It’s like a rat competing to be the messenger in a room full of pigeons.   Let’s be real here… the only time I would personally accept a delay in live communication to the point of crippling the experience would be if we’re doing live chat with someone who lives close to the Sun.  Being that it takes light 8 minutes to travel between Earth and the Sun, I guess I would have to settle for delayed responses even though I’m sure engineers would try to find a way to make that closer to real time than Twitter’s proposed solutions.

Maybe they need to hire some real startup people - you know, the ones who have built extraordinary things without the luxury of doing so in a funded startup.  I fail to see how $15 million (and more) can’t create a stable system… at the same time, maybe they should just shut it down and start over.  Sometimes it just makes more sense to buy a new car than trying to fix a lemon.

In most cases, technology is not the issue.  A viral video is all about the content and in exchange for great content, the viewers are willing to sacrifice quality and post production touchups.  So why is it that a 13 yr old girl can capture a random event on their cell phone and have it be more viral than a professional commercial that cost $25k to produce?  What is it that teens and social media experts get that traditional brands don’t?

The missing element is… the danger zone.

Viral videos for the most part crosses the safety line and bring in to light something that shouldn’t be seen.  Now, when I say “shouldn’t,” it doesn’t necessarily mean a sex tape even though those are pretty viral.

Shouldn’t includes a number of things such as:
- the likelihood of witnessing that in our lifetime is close to nil
- something created that was meant for private viewing
- something so amazing you just had to pass it on so you can discuss how awesome it was
- a new idea or process that invites imagination and wonder
- a train wreck or something so dangerous that you simply can’t look away
- something so stupid you just have to pass on because it made you feel smart
- something witty caught on video that made you smile after you watched it

Unfortunately, the above is where most brand marketers get stuck because they aren’t allowed to cross the safety line into the danger zone.  In fear of offending anyone at all, most brands have chose to stick around in the safe zone when producing videos or worse, they try to take it half a step further by faking the funny or faking the dangerous situation by staging the act, which usually bombs miserably.

Most people can tell a genuine smile from the fake one you do when posing for a camera and that 6th sense is heightened 10 times more when watching it in video form.  So if you’re looking to do a viral (promotional) video of your product, make sure you ask yourself if your video crosses any of the lines mentioned above.  If it doesn’t, you’re probably going to waste a lot of money and time to learn the hard lesson.

Here’s one that was trying to cross into the danger zone.  They were close… but just not quite there.

So what do you do when you want to move at the speed of business but business is crawling like a snail? Change things up!

When I worked in the corporate world, summer was the time when all the co-workers wanted to duck out early, go out for lunch, and stay at home on Fridays. Not a lot has changed. If you’re feeling the cabin fever, schedule some networking meetings over coffee or lunch outside and join the rest of the people in the afternoon Sun.

On the subject of scheduling meetings and making deals - avoid Mondays and Fridays. People are busy catching up on stuff from the extended weekends on Mondays and they’re either physically out of the office or mentally out on Fridays. Either way, if you want to be heard, try the middle of the week.

Do you really want to hurry up and wait? Sometimes it’s good (and healthy) to go with the flow and take a break from time to time. Now that we spend our days doing SEO and waiting for responses from various business people, I find on some days I’m busy manning the computer when not a lot is going on. On some of these afternoons, I really feel like going to the pool and just hang out for a bit; and maybe I should.

Burning yourself out when everything is slow is just… bad.

With all that said, what was shown was absolutely mind blowing. The developers who demoed their products simply blew me out of the water. I recall developing games in Microsoft’s MFC development environment in high school and simply being stonewalled at the obscurity and limiting nature of a development environment. I then look at a combination of what’s in the SDK (I downloaded it shortly after watching the Keynote video) and what was shown and I’m almost ready to delve into trying to create an iPhone app TODAY. The 3D game shown was nothing short of astonishing. The music app, Band, sold me when they got to the “Blues Music Keyboard” and seeing all the Modality Apps made me want to become a doctor. It may sound dumb to you, but this device is more than Apple’s next big money making scheme, this device really can enable the dreams of others (to quote Randy Pausch) by allowing greater flexibility in their day to day life. From presenting information never available to the public in such a rich manner (again, Modality apps) to keeping track of all your information in a centralized location with no fear of losing the data (MobileMe) to sharing your life  and everyday adventures with the easy of taking pictures and blogging through the iPhone 3G, I’m floored and almost ready to be one of the idiots in line on day one for these phones.

This phone is right now for the bleeding edge customer. The power user. We know what we’re doing and we use all features of the iPhone on a daily basis. However, the average user like my Mom, my Dad, my Fiancee and my Brother are simply going to be overwhelmed by a phone with many more features than it has. Apple is slowly allowing people to test and try the iPhone and get used to a PDA that works for the average person. Society as a whole is still getting used to the mobile enabled citizen and if they’re going to release a product that lives up to what we expect from Apple (ie. Perfection), they’re going to need more time to ensure that both the product works flawlessly and people are able to use this in such a way that their cited 90% satisfaction rate isn’t tarnished.

But that’s just my take on it, and though I always want more, I also want time to learn some of these features from a developer’s perspective before some more of these great jumps in mobile awesomeness.

1. Camera upgrade/Front facing camera. A number of people have mentioned that other phones in the industry carry a 5 mega pixel camera as the standard for their phones. If the iPhone 3G is supposed to the be the new standard, and if Reuters is adding an app that lets you submit news directly to them - then why are we still stuck with a toy camera? Maybe the pre-event hype got to me, but having two cameras on the phone, one for pics and the other for video chat should be the new standard. Having two cameras is not even something that’s really new, but allowing people to video chat over their phone would be a huge WOW factor. Also, most cameras have a mini mirror for people who like to take self portraits. Can we at least get the convexed Apple logo put on or something?

2. More storage! If various iPods are already hitting the 80+ gig mark and if the iPod Touch already has one at 32 gigs, why are we still stuck with a 16gig model as the top end model? If this truly is supposed to be a phone that will last us between now and the end of the Apple Care warranty, wouldn’t you want to offer a larger option especially if we’re now supposed to be installing apps, GPS stuff, possibly record video through apps, etc? Why make the mistake that Microsoft did with the Xbox 360 by only putting out 20gig harddrives to start? It just doesn’t make any sense.

3. Gimme some more for the $10 data plan hike! Okay, so it has been whispered that despite the cheaper purchase price for the iPhone 3G, people will end up paying for it through other means, like the mandatory 3G data plan which costs $30/month instead of $20/month. Seriously, yikes! First off, now that I think about it, I’m not even sure why I’m paying $20 for the existing data plan. EDGE is painfully slow which means I probably transmit all of less than 2mb a month on the at&t network. The majority of my browsing has been under the wifi umbrella which I already pay for through other means. So now that we may actually tramsmit data through the at&t network, we have to pay another $10 a month? If you want your users to pay for the network upgrades you’ve been working on, at least throw in unlimited texting into the plan or something to wow us. While we’re all fans of Apple, a lot of people are still holding out because the phone is tied to at&t. Maybe this change of heart will turn some people around - I know it’ll make me feel better about signing another 2 year contract.

4. More colors? Alright, I know this item is pretty weak. In all honesty, the iPhone 3G is pretty great and if certain features are missing, I’m sure a lot of it can be made up through software updates and applications. However, instead of treating the iPhone 3G as a computer and limiting it to the Mac black and white, why not treat it like the rest of the iPod’s and give users choices in colors? Again, not a huge change, but just enough to wow.

Even if we don’t get any of the upgrades mentioned above for another year or more, I’m hoping someone who has a lot of clout will at least push for a petition to get unlimited texting in the new data plan. While I am certainly not one close to hitting the texting limit, I just don’t like to feel like I’m being taxed every time I use it.

Well, Startup Weekend is now looking to hop to more cities and they are allowing you to cast your vote to show your interest.  If you’d like to get the same awesome experience in your current location, go and vote!

Entrepreneurs in Atlanta, make sure you cast your vote for Startup Weekend 2!