Luckily, online tools make it possible to continue sharpening your skills, even from afar. Problem with long podcasts like these, is you can easily waste your time if you aren’t picky with your podcast. If used wisely they are the perfect tools for in-between time (driving, flying, doing laundry, etc).

These are my 3 must-listen to  podcast resources:

• This Week In Tech – For the essential tech news, rockstar Leo Laporte is an incredible host and always brings super intelligent guests.
• This Week In Startups - Jason Calacanus does great job of bringing in incredible entrepreneurs and providing a mix of education/entertainment.
• This Week In Venture Capital -  The venture space is changing every other month. Mark Suster does a great job bringing in the top VCs and Angel investors.

It’s also been a privileged to work with such a great team that’s focused at delivering the best video technology.

The latest hire, Billy Disney, is first full-time hire outside that development/support workflow, and with the Viddler Spotlight series, has begun highlighting the love affair and “privelegedness” we have with our customers:

And with this amazingness, Billy humbly bakes himself as folks to be privileged to work with.

We do put much of this stuff on the blog and on Twitter but she was referring to the more traditional marketing techniques: Sponsoring events, parties, keynote speaking, press releases, email newsletters, etc.

This brought me to defend staying low key. Allow me to share reasons….

Benefits of Staying Low Key:
- Competition doesn’t pay attention (we have features implemented better then our competitors and they still haven’t caught up)
- You wouldn’t believe the amount of people buying into video hosting that don’t attend big shindig conferences or give two cents about press releases.
- Save time and money. What matters and what sells is usually how good your product is and how fast you are innovating. Also if your not spending a wild amount on marketing you can offer your customers with a more affordable product.
- Other companies do operate like this and succeed. For instance, has anyone seen Getclicky? Two guys building one of the best analytics toolset in the business. They are low key, no mainstream marketing strategy, and after investigating have a outrageous # of customers.

This isn’t to say we aren’t looking to improve our marketing strategy. Just a slight argument for staying under the radar.

And I will keep the company name I work for out of this, cause I know I have google alerts setup on our competition. #stayinglowkey

We have had our share of bad relationships that I can look back on and all center around the lack of how “tight nit” that organization is.

The goal of this post isn’t to point out bad instances though, but rather highlight amazing relationships.

Stealing a bit of Gary Vaynerchuks thunder, would say these companies are “crushing it”, with regards to how tight nit they are

Tubemogul

These guys have built an amazing analytics company and someone we work with extensively to power our analytics toolsets. They started out of Cal Berkley and have many incredibly smart people working for them. At around 20+ employees they have been able to rapidly build out the best analytics platform in the online video business.

When working with them, if we have a problem an API here or there, they will work overnight to get us the answer or fix by morning. One evening in particular, we had a problem with our flash player and analytic tracker, with everyone out for the day, and not his responsibility, Jason Lopatecki, Chief Strategy Officer, pulled out flash editor, and put together a fix for us. Who has C level officers that know how to code flash?

Incredibly smart and passionate people that are not afraid to wear multiple hats.

Edgecast

The Content Delivery Network (CDN) business is very competitive right now, and get dozens of vendor emails weekly about new CDN price breaks. Having worked with these guys for over a year now, they listen and deliver. This is extremely important as many larger CDN businesses think they have it figured out, and aren’t invested in innovating and listening to there customer.

We have many business service customers we work with. Each of these customers needs to be tracked individually for bandwidth usage. Edgecast listened to this need and not only delivered reporting functions for us with a UI layer but delivered an API with 20+ functions a few weeks after.

And when someone on the Viddler team may call in because we are having a problem with some reporting tool, or inquiring about new services, the level1 support engineer could be the core architect for all we know because of how well versed he is with the status of features and problems within the company. Transparent organization or talented hire? I would assume all organizations have high level of transparency, just that they find passionate and intelligent people.

To get started over there the man to talk to over there is Duane Sulo.

Google

Due to size of Google don’t want to post anything too confidential here. What I will say is that there account reps and support staff are all on point. When working with individual units of Google, they feel like small startups themselves, proving that you can still be tight nit in one of the largest companies in the world.

Woopra

Just started using this product on this blog. But the fact the CEO, John Pozadzides,  is talking transparently about business model with his users, just rocks and leads by example on how passionate his company is about his users.

In summary it appears that there are a few key factors in running a tight nit organization:

1. Smart/Passionate People
2. Ability to Listen and Deliver
3. Employees not afraid to wear multiple hats.

Please think of these when building a company or working with other companies as it’ll help foster more tight nit companies.

Also, just a small disclaimer, there are a more companies I want to list, but in order for Viddler to attempt to be a tight company, am going to have to cut this off here.

If you know of a tight nit company, let me know what tight nit company you work with, would love to hear your story via comments, blog post, tweet, viddler, or email rob at viddler.

Jim Louderback, CEO of Revision3 has launched his blog, louderback.com. Jim is an old-school internet dude, if Jim started this blog only halfway through his internet career he could have registered jim.com.

Seriously though, Jim is great to Viddler and community. If you haven’t done so already make sure and checkout Revision3Beta. If you are looking for another Gary-Vaynerchuk-like “personality” in the video space, make sure to subscribe to his feed!

Now all I gotta do is convince him to get a Viddler.com account and branded player

It just is too difficult. My cheeks cannot go any higher. Someday, I will learn.

Watch Matthew Bare’s elevator pitch:

They send poo through the mail for people.

What do you think, would you use this service?

This was recently uploaded on Viddler by entr200.

Last year, I posted on Jeff Hawkins as a role-model to all entrepreneurs, when I was learning about Entrepreneurship.

He brings up some great points in this video. It’s all about Passion.

1. Think outside the box – No buying the hoopla around Silicon
   Valley chatter and slip into groupthink. You truly think like an outsider and question UI/functionality/application development. It’s great benchmarking trends and common themes but there is something to be said about being different.
2. Focus On Yourself - Worry about your own goals/objectives instead of staying tuned into rumors and “what if’s” about other companies. This may be my football background stepping in as nothinig proved more valuable then worrying about your own game before others.
3. Big Fish in Little Pond – Viddler.com (our startup) has received funding and support from the Ben Franklin Technology Partners and the State of Pennsylvania.
4. Your forced to live online – everything you do is focused at the core of where you work. Your habits form in online behaviors and save time networking and get straight to the core of problems. Also, you focus on talent and developers and designers that deliver on time.
5. Inexpensive! – They have $5 pies (an entire large pizza) and $1 beer specials at my favorite joint Casa Mia. Boooya!
6. More Talent Available - WHAT!? Why else would Google be building a campus out of Detroit? Silicon Valley resources are tapped. There are many talented engineers out here coming from enterprise corporations. Darron Schall, rockstar actionscripter and author of O’Reilly’s Essential ActionScript 3, is an hour outside of Bethlehem. Robert Hall, award winning flash designer, is frequently available to come on board for projects and once again only an hour away as well!
7. Stay Hungry – I always worked out best in old rusty gyms with just the essentials. In my opinion, the same should goes for a startup. No climate controlled facilities, raised desks and bouncy balls here.

Here’s my toast to Bootstrappin’ Bethlehem…

technorati tags:Entrepeneurship, Bethlehem, Viddler, Lehigh

In football, as in life, cheating should not be condoned. Erik, my brother who plays Nose Tackle for CSU, did win on Saturday against Wyoming 39-31. Erik told me after the game the refs did not make a holding call all game and he was really upset. So what am I getting at?

Football teach’s life lessons. Life is not always fair is one of them. It’s all about overcoming and being the toughest guy on the playing field.

Public Facing Website
- Online Business Card
- Portfolio, About Us, and Objective
- If in doubt use white background
- Be Simple
- Come up with content then categorize
- Time is money. So don’t waste it!
- Content, Content, Content.
- Lehigh has a guide for using 3rd party applications and setting up AFS space

Internal Entrepreneurship/PM Tools
WikiWakka – Add with double click
- Newsfeed Support
phpBB – used before, great way to record if attaching documents
- Supports popular database servers
- Unlimited forums and posts
- Multiple language interface
- Private or public forums
- Powerful search utility
- PrivaSte messaging system
BaseCampHQ – Great for Project Management Outside Group
Other Free Project Management Tools
- PHPProjkt
- dotProject
- Many More

Viral Public Facing Websites
- Informal method of talking to your customer
- Adding Content is easy for all group members.
- WordPress is personal favorite

That’s great, but What do I do?

Based on your skill set and needs here are a few of my suggestions.
No Technology Needed:
Setup HTML site with AFS Space and tutorial.
Buy a domain name at GoDaddy if serious

You know how to upload to FTP
Cheap and Unreliable PHP Hosting = $60 a year = $12 a member for the semester
www.yourgroupname.com
Website & Project Management Software

Technology Startup
Public Hi-end hosting Sevice
Wiki
Public Group Blog
Setup a BaseCampHQ account for external projects

At the End of the Day
It’s about getting it done. Too much management at an early stage can be a bad thing. These are my best practices and have changed at least once a semester. The important thing is to be efficient and to use them as a team.

Other Good Resources:
Entrepreneurs Guide to Software.
LifeHacker.com’s Web Publishing Tips
Paul Graham – How to start a startup – for technical companies
Website Best Practices

Godaddy Website – inexpensive hosting

In recent news, Palm has been under scrutiny for finally reaching their tipping point and licensing with Microsoft. This so-called collapse does not directly relate to his personal success.

My theory is if Jeff had stayed with Palm, and not been distracted with starting Handspring the company would have been in a different position today. JupiterResearch analyst Michael Gartenberg was quoted discussing the Palm company without Jeff, “All those guys wanted to do is enjoy the fruits of their labor [...] It would have helped move things along a lot faster at Palm if they had stayed.” His companies’ fortunes aside, he has been successful in his sequence of innovations. And it was not because he was driven for the fame or fortune.

He has been successful for two reasons:

1. Jeff did what he loved.
Loving your work is absolutely the greatest motivation for choosing a career path. His obsession started before Palm was even a thought and opened up a billion dollar industry. Ever since he read an issue of Scientific American about the brain, Hawkins has been interested in studying how brains work. His goal was to solve the major problems in the study of human intelligence and to achieve a theoretical understanding of how the brain works. No corporate job was able to create a fulfilling career for him. He left Intel and other corporate jobs stating, “they didn’t offer enough responsibility.” While working for Palm he was quoted as saying, “My research into human cognition is a lifelong pursuit. It began before Palm, and it will last beyond Palm. The research and the company go together.”

Jeff was quoted telling his employees, “If you’re not enjoying yourself, you shouldn’t be here. That’s how I run my life. I have never felt burdened by my work.” The people around him latched on to this motto and helped him bring together a great organization.

He still shows the will to do what he loves which he has demonstrated this by founding two new organizations. Numenta is a company developing technology based on his book, On Intelligence. He has also started a non-profit organization called Redwood Neuroscience Institute, which gives neurological theorists a chance to collaborate and neurological students to attend workshops and seminars to enhance their education.

2. Jeff Surrounded Himself with Great People.
The success behind Palm started with Jeff surrounding himself with great people that complemented his talents. One of his first hires was Donna Dubinsky. She was the hands-on powerhouse behind the operations and strategy of the company. Her goal was to put Jeff in the best environment and let him do what he does best: innovate. Even when they were millions of dollars in the hole after their first release of the PDA, their synergy drove them to success, a continuing testament to their teamwork, Jeff and Donna continue to work together in their new company Numenta where they are continuing to expand as a team. Only a dynamic duo like this could get so much done in such a fast paced industry.

How do these relate to a young entrepreneur?
In the digital age there is plenty of opportunity to start something great. Doing what you love and surrounding yourself with great people are two concepts that are simple enough to use as themes when starting a company. Jeff Hawkins has demonstrated this strategy and has had an excellent track record. Go ahead and look behind other successful people, teams and companies! I am willing to bet this theme is continuous.

Listen to Tom via Podcast.

A few key points that he empasized in regards to entrepreneurship:

“Make everyone believe” – If you are starting up a company, it is your job to make everyone believe in the vision. The better you are at this, the better your company will be. Evangelizing happens when asking for money from investors, hiring employees on stock, and keeping people inspired during bad times.

“Surround yourself with a great team” - This is a benefactor of making people believe in your idea. The better founders can make people believe the better talent they will bring on. Tom brought up a point in the companies history when they hired an experienced 55-year old employee from across the country with a family. This employee had not yet relocated, and slept on an aerobed in the office for 2 months before moving his family over. Making people believe and bringing on great people where two of Tom’s most emphasized points.

“Everyone quits” – Whether it is selling out for stock, going to the Bahamas for a week, or quitting on the way on the rollercoaster of a startup. Prepare for this by bringing in the best people possible, makes absorbing this easier to handle.

“Don’t drop out of school” – What do all entrepreneurs that drop out of college always say? Don’t drop out. Although he did admit an ivy league education is overrated, it is good to get an education.

“Being an entrepreneur is like being on drugs” – Life as an entrepreneur is a roller coaster. The highs are great but the lows are real bad. He contrasted a startup physique with working for a safe corporate job like JP Morgan, where there is a consistent high. When start-ups are going through low times: It is important to hold on, rehab, and inspire.

“Business Plans don’t mean anything” – Don’t worry about Business Plan’s. Being savvy presenting with PowerPoint’s and elevator pitch simplification is more important. A good team is also more important. He says, “investors would rather put money into a hotshot team with a poor BP then a poor team with a bulletproof BP.”

“Keep a laser focus on your desired goal” – Tom dropped everything when he started project worm, now known as Terracycle. He dropped out of Princeton, gave up a 20-year old party lifestyle, and focused specifically on his startup team and business to shovel college cafeteria waste to make a proof of concept for his idea.

“Wear your greedy hat” – Not talking about keeping company stock! This is in regards to being efficient with company resources. Point and case is Tom’s decision to have HQ located in Trenton, NJ. There “next to the bloods and crypts” he can receive efficient labor. Also, he believes in never paying for computers or office equipment. He says, “with companies like JP Morgan paying $100 to get rid of year old computers you should never pay for computers.” He hasn’t and has over 15 employees on computers.

“There is more lawyers than demand for lawyers” – His point was to take advantage of this. Should be able to receive this work for free or for very little stock.

“Put all eggs in one basket or you are cutting your idea short” - For a young entrepreneur, it only makes sense to invest all of your time, effort, and energy with a startup.

“If young, mistakes are fine” – Investors expect mistakes from a younger entrepreneur. Compare this to a 45 year old seasoned professional where they would expect a complete act. If you are younger, leverage this by not acting like you know everything. Generally, investors like to assist and expect mistakes from young entrepreneurs.

“Only Patent Fundamental Processes” – By posting patent to the public you lose your proprietary idea. All it takes is someone to look at the patent and change it by the smallest amount to steal your proprietary practice. It’s a better strategy to simply keep these practices secret. Also the very high cost in these makes these inpractical. The only worthwhile patents for Tom are “fundamental patents”. For him the only reason investing in a patent is if it could do something like give Terracycle exclusive rights to recycle Pepsi bottles.

Tom was only 23 and spoke like a seasoned veteran. He will be speaking in a seminar later today to the entire school. Plan on making his speech available via mp3.

Digital Entrepreneurs view the world through one or two 19 flat screen monitors. They conduct all normal processes, from internal management and customer relations to public relations through this screen with the same passion that a traditional entrepreneur does with a business like opening a restaurant. The digital entrepreneur understands the digital revolution, views e-everything as more than a billion dollar a year industry. What does it take to be one of these revolutionaries? First of all, a tremendous understanding of the past and current Information Technology. With the Internet and computers getting into their teens there is a history behind computing and a digital life. Their history books will be 30 years old and understand modern proven techniques in management and workflow. There also needs to be a innovative passion for opening new doors and opportunities. There is no concrete mold for an entrepreneur but there is a set of personality traits that is commonly seen. They fit type A personalities. Type As are typically driven, hard-working, self-confident, busy and impatient. In the digital world these type As can be seen writing tech-articles, speaking at conferences, and continuously devoting time analyzing the digital world. On top of devotion to the technology industry you must be dedicated to starting your company from ground zero. This requires being totally dedicated to their businesses, sometimes at considerable cost to their relationship with their friends and family. Over 22.5% of the CEOs of the Inc. 500 got divorced while growing businesses. This goes to say that they lack sensitivity towards others while growing a business. Many times entrepreneurs are impatient and ruthlessly drive themselves and everyone around them. They don’t have the tolerance or empathy necessary for team building unless it’s their team, and this sometimes affects personal relationships around them. These entrepreneurs know what they are deeply passionate about, what they can be the best at, and knows how to drive their engine. The digital entrepreneur manages this offline and online.

Digital Consumption
It is the digital consumer who is driving technological innovation via the Internet. Flickr.com, a phenomenal Internet 2.0 service that allows sharing of pictures and is experiencing 30% monthly growth in users, was recently acquired by Yahoo! for $35 million. Flickr founder, Stewart Butterfield, describes his 1.2 million members: they live pretty connected lifestyles; for most of the day, they have access to an Internet connection.

Stewart Butterfield and other digital entrepreneurs like himself have developed strategies on the Internet based on this growing digital consumer. IT industries have been growing at more than double the rate of the overall economy a trend that is likely to continue. Investments in IT now represent over 45 percent of all business equipment investment. And with traffic on the Internet doubling every 100 days the iPod carrying, MP3 downloading, video stream watching, blog writing, picture uploading consumer is driving opportunity.

The new digital economy has been described as something that all businesses need to be ready for or, “Businesses that aren’t will be toast,” says Don Tapscott, author of The Digital Economy (McGraw Hill). The convergence of computing, telecommunications, and content is a real revolution, giving access to a networked economy working in real time and without knowing distances. The digital entrepreneurs view this new network economy as the next generation playing field. With Internet 2.0 applications like Flickr and E-commerce applications like Amazon.com there is a new set of rules that are being made. As technologies continue to expand on one another, the only constant is that creative destruction will continue to dismantle old business models with new ones at a Moore’s Law rate.

New Set of Practices, Same Old Rules
In this era, digital entrepreneurship holds to a new set of practices based on an old set of rules. Maintaining old practices like low overhead, high productivity, and minimal ownership of capital assets are all expressed digitally with a new set of tools. Viral communications (company blogs), small business intranets, flight-travel saving collaborative application software, pay-per-use online advertising, and customer relation management software are all best practices fluent to the digital entrepreneur. One of the best seasoned digital entrepreneurs, Jeremy Allaire, founder of ColdFusion and once CTO of Macromedia, recently ventured into monetizing Internet TV with his creation, BrightCove. As well as a top-of-the-line brightcove.com website, he uses a personal and corporate blog where he gets a very efficient and effective PR opportunity for interested customers. On top of that, Jeremy creates a personal blogosphere as he writes for other industry papers like ContentNext and ColdFusion Journal. Jeremy doesn’t hide the research he has done and some people might consider giving up valuable market information a poor business practice. You can even view a rather internal Breezo presentation right from Brightcoves PR page. Hiding innovation is a common misnomer, as ideas are a dime a dozen.

William Bygrave, author for The Portable MBA in Entrepreneurship, tells his would-be entrepreneurs, “Almost any idea that they have will also have occurred to others…developing the idea, implementing it, and building a successful business are the important aspects of entrepreneurship.”

Jeremy Allaire and other entrepreneurs that are successful understand that innovation and best practices is always best to give to their community. Just as a rock or movie stars depends upon their audience, the tech industry leaders rely upon their community for fame and fortune. These tech leaders are growing. People with some post-graduate education and between 24 and 35 years of age are the most likely to start a new business. The post-graduates that are coming out of college today behaviorally rely on a digital environment and are receiving curriculums that are just catching up with technology. Combine this growing supply of entrepreneurs with demand — 75% (or 204 million) Americans with a fixed phone line that have home access to the Internet, up from 66% just a year earlier — and their is going to be a convergance of economic activity. It is important to understand that the educated digital entrepreneur is not the next generation of programmers. Rather its the next generation of programming managers that know how to harness their power. They are aware of the fatal assumption that Michael Gerbers teaches in E-Myth, “If you understand the technical work of a business, you understand a business that does that technical work.” They know it is not efficient to work countless hours programming. Rather they work on growing and managing your business by hiring engineers in the meantime.

Final reason behind the next digital boom in entrepreneurship is that overhead for a small business is lower than ever before. Small digital startups don’t have the market barrier that once existed. Open-source and/or very inexpensive software applications, inexpensive computers, and the extensible Internet marketplace are driving a low-cost startup opportunity.

With a large digital consuming market, an educated class of digital entrepreneurs, and low barrier to market; there is going to be more entrepreneurial economic activity than ever seen before.

Summary
Next generation entrepreneurship is growing. New digital applications will be grown by digital entrepreneurs. These digital entrepreneurs are more educated with an understanding of the online and offline structure behind a great, well-run organization. The next five years are going to witness more mainstream educated digital entrepreneurs than ever before on the Internet 2.0 highway.