Brian Roy’s Blog

Phoenix Startup Weekend

Tuesday, September 30th, 2008 | AZ Small Business, AZ Tech, Experimentation, Innovation | Comments

UPDATE: 10/17/08 - I’ve set up a FriendFeed room enable everyone to live blog the event - see this post for details.

The whole reason I’m going on vacation tomorrow (back next Tuesday) is to rest up for Phoenix Startup Weekend… well not really…

If you have not checked it out - you should. If you aren’t already signed up… you should.

See you there:

Marketers, Web designers, legal experts and others will convene in PhoenixOct. 17-19 to pull off what sounds like an impossible task: develop a product in one weekend from scratch.

The event is called Startup Weekend. It’s the brainchild of technology entrepreneurs Andrew Hyde and Michael Gruen, who operate Startup Weekend LLC. The company organizes the collaborative events in cities across the U.S.

Startup Weekend has a Web site set up for details of the Phoenix event, but it’s currently down.

details of the Phoenix event [From Want to build a product in one weekend?]

Tags: AZ, AZ Tech, development, phoenix startup weekend

Turns out Angel Investors do not make much on investments…

Monday, September 29th, 2008 | Regulation, The Future | Comments

From AZCentral’s Innovator’s Circle blog by Andrew Johnson:

Fledgling companies often turn to “angel” investors when they’re trying to fund start-up costs.

The term refers to individuals who invest small amounts of money - typically under $2 million - in early-stage firms. They hope to get a return on their investments once the firms start generating a profit.

Although such investors are more willing to funnel money to companies that are dealing with unproven technology or have a significant customer base, many still require companies to have a management team and potential for commercial success before they provide funding.

Thus, many early-stage entrepreneurs complain that they can’t get these early-stage investors to provide capital.

A study released Thursday by the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy may provide a reason why some angels are apprehensive to take a risk on these firms.

The study, “The Importance of Angel Investing in Financing the Growth of Entrepreneurial Ventures,” says the majority of such investors do not experience positive returns after placing their money in the firms.

The reason, according to researchers, is that the most profitable investments typically come from companies that go public. However, “only a small portion of angel-backed companies go public,” the study says.

The study noted the difficulty in pinpointing exact returns for angels because of challenges in defining a truly representative sample of such investors.

However, the study cited other research conducted in 2007 in which 539 angel investors from 86 associations were surveyed.

Combined, the 86 groups had made 3,097 investments, from which they experienced 1,137 “exits.” An exit refers to when a company is bought by or merged with another firm or goes public. Typically such an events are when investors see the biggest return.

The average investment made by the sample in that study turned a profit of $295,000 on an investment of $191,000 in 3.52 years.

However, the median investment for this group was $50,000, and “that returned $40,000 or 80 cents on the dollar,” the study said.

The study included other information that differs from common perceptions researchers and start-up companies have about angel investing.

The market for such investments is considerably “smaller than is generally believed,” the study said. “Few companies are appropriate for angel financing, a fact that limits demand for this source of financing.”

Also, a big portion of angel investors fund their investments with debt or equity, contrary to the belief that they not as interested in taking an ownership stake in the firms they provide funding to.

[From Few 'angel' investors get positive returns, study says]

Given the state of the economy and markets - this is not good press for those of us trying to raise seed funding.

As it turns out the recovery from every financial downturn has been led by small businesses. With micro businesses currently representing 95% of all U.S. firms we need to be aware that cutting off capital to “high risk” startups will deepen the current crisis… not improve it. The economy can only recover when we start developing high pay, high value jobs in the U.S. - more jobs at WalMart will not do it.

Why is this so important. Home prices are an issue because the cost of housing has increased while wages have not. Only when those numbers are brought back into balance can any real recovery take place. There are two ways to do that:

1. Reduce the cost of housing
2. Increase wages

The problem with the first option is that is requires tens of thousands of (more) foreclosures to bring things back into balance. Investing in small businesses is the best path to creating high wage/high value jobs which will support home prices at (something reasonably near) current values.

If all the capital evaporates from the SMB sector - specifically if individual investors (i.e., Angels) close their wallets the SMB sector will crash.

Net/net - watch the small business sector - if we start to see that sector crash we know this will be a long protracted downturn.

Tags: Angel Investors, capital

JQuery adopted by Microsoft and Nokia

Monday, September 29th, 2008 | Web 2.0 | Comments

I posted earlier this month about JQuery - and how it can help you write less JavaScript code and get more done. The JQuery team today announced via their blog that both Microsoft and Nokia have adopted JQuery as part of their application development platform:

We have two pieces of fantastic, albeit serendipitous, news today: Both Microsoft and Nokia are taking the major step of adopting jQuery as part of their official application development platform. Not only will they be using it for their corporate development but they will be providing it as a core piece of their platform for developers to build with.

Microsoft is looking to make jQuery part of their official development platform. Their JavaScript offering today includes the ASP.NET Ajax Framework and they’re looking to expand it with the use of jQuery. This means that jQuery will be distributed with Visual Studio (which will include jQuery intellisense, snippets, examples, and documentation).

Additionally Microsoft will be developing additional controls, or widgets, to run on top of jQuery that will be easily deployable within your .NET applications. jQuery helpers will also be included in the server-side portion of .NET development (in addition to the existing helpers) providing complementary functions to existing ASP.NET AJAX capabilities.

Nokia is looking to use jQuery to develop applications for their WebKit-based Web Run-Time. The run-time is a stripped-down browser rendering engine that allows for easy, but powerful, application development. This means that jQuery will be distributed on all Nokia phones that include the web run-time.

You can find the full post here.

This is both great news for JQuery and for developers - and here is why. This will enable significant growth of the JQuery ecosystem - particularly where mobile browsers are concerned. Safari - on the iPhone - already cleanly supports JQuery - and this move indicates that Pocket IE and the Symbian browser will also cleanly support JQuery. This will make JQuery the dominant JavaScript framework for mobile devices.

If you haven’t tried JQuery - you should.

Tags: JQuery, Microsoft, Mobile, Nokia

Skype begins un-walling the Walled Garden

Friday, September 26th, 2008 | Vendors, VoIP, cosinity | Comments

I’ve said it before - and I’ll say it again. Walled gardens are great for developing a market - but the outcome is inevitable (barring anti-competitive regulation). The walls fall.

Skype announced yesterday that they are introducing a Skype interface (know as a channel driver) for Asterisk. This is great news - it enables Skype to work within the larger VoIP environment.

I’ve applied to have cosinity beta test this solution - it will allow us to use a Skype account as a business “phone number” for page2call. Hopefully Skype won’t attempt to defend their network in the Terms or EULA.

Tags: Skype, walled garden

PodCampAZ 2008 - Have you signed up yet?

Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008 | AZ Tech | Comments

November 1st and 2nd I’ll be at PodCampAZ. Will you?

Sign up here

Tags: AZ, AZ Tech, PodCampAZ 2008