I’ve been working on a new service lately, called ReceiptFarm. The idea of it is to take the pain out of doing expenses. It works like this: You send us your expense receipts once a month. We scan and input them. You get a report about your spending and a digital archive of your receipts. [...]
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I’ve been researching some new business ideas lately and it struck me how rarely people seem to discuss quick and cheap ways of testing the critical assumptions upon which business models are based. Often we’re keen to play with Excel, but less keen to check that the numbers we’re typing in are grounded in reality. [...]
Making Stuff Happen in 48 Hours The last couple of days I was involved in another “build a website in 48 hours” event. This time, it was Launch48, organised by a couple of friends of mine, Ian Broom and Adil Mohammed. Thanks to lots of great work from Ian and Adil, some generous sponsors who [...]
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John Buckman, founder and CEO of Magnatune.com (and founder of BookMooch), gave a really interesting talk on how to be successful as an Internet entrepreneur at Loic Le Meur’s recent LeWeb08 conference in Paris. He had a lot of good, practical tips about what he sees as the ‘right’ approach to entrepreneurship. His presentation is [...]
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Can Sales of Desktop Apps Predict Successful Web Apps? Attending FOWA a couple of weeks ago got me thinking about web apps in general. With the move from desktop to web-hosted software, I’m wondering if what’s selling now in desktop versions will be a good predictor for what people will pay for in web app [...]
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I just came across these guys: http://www.brownbook.net/ They’re a sort of open yellow pages where anyone can add, edit or review businesses. This is very similar to what sites like WeLoveLocal and Yelp are already doing, but in a world where many small business owners have yet to really get to grips with online marketing, [...]
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photo credit: Tony the Misfit TechCrunch ran an interesting post-mortem article yesterday by the founder of Meetro, a location-aware instant messaging platform, that recently closed its doors. Meetro’s idea was to let users download an application onto their wifi-enabled mobile phones that would then allow them to find other Meetro users nearby to chat with. [...]
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photo credit: sowri Here’s a neat idea… these guys are selling words from a dictionary.
photo credit: Robert Scoble So you’ve got a great idea for a killer Web startup but you’re not a techie yourself? You’re looking for a technical business partner or CTO; someone who understands business but can pull the technical side of things together and make your ideas real? This kind of person can be hard [...]