Posted by Tom Blue on June 22, 2009 under Technology | 
Loud, opinionated, egotistical. These are common characteristics of successful bloggers and typical descriptors of the Top 5 Most Hated Bloggers…
#5 Jason Calacanis
Jason Calacanis is primarily known for his company, Weblogs Inc which was sold to AOL for $25M. He is extremely outspoken and people really seem to dislike him even if they can’t figure out why. Maybe it is his “conference spam” blowup he had with Dave Winer at the TechCrunch20. Or maybe it was his sensational “retirement” from blogging yet he still continues to blog. Whatever it is people seem to have a strong opinion about him.
#4 Mark Cuban
It is easy to hate a multi-billionare that owns a nba team, isn’t it? Before calling out refs in defense of his Dallas Mavericks, Mark sold his profitless Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7B in Yahoo stock. What frustrates most Cuban haters is that they feel he got lucky while he gives the impression he is a business guru. On top of that, he is an outspoken owner of a professional sports team. My personal opinion is that he is hated because most people want to be him.
#3. Arianna Huffington
Even if you agree with her politics, you probably still find Arianna Huffington’s voice slightly annoying. Speaking against any side politically is a sure fire way to collect detractors. Arianna is a Greek born writer who was previously married to Michael Huffington, an oil millionaire and Republican politician. She was a staunch “right winger” while married to Michael, but has recently switched to the left. Switching teams will definitely anger a few.
#2. Michael Arrington
The more power you have the more likely people are going to hate you. Michael Arrington is the Founder of TechCrunch, the most popular tech news blog. Every startup is dying to get a mention from his blog, but with only 20-25 posts a day a lot of founders are going to be unhappy. Apparently this craze has hit unprecedented levels over the past 2 years. Not only did he get spit on at a conference in Europe, but received death threats for he and his family. Success definitely has its drawbacks.
#1 Perez Hilton
Is it surprising that the most hated blogger is a hater himself. Celebrity bashing and gossip has entered new levels in the past 10 years and Mario Armando Lavandeira (aka Perez Hilton) has put his face on the movement. Not only does he tear people apart, he wears outlandish clothes and his hair is usually pink. That doesn’t sit well with mainstream America. What also doesn’t sit well are discussions and disagreements about gay marriage… especially during a Miss America pageant. And Perez Hilton was in the middle of all of that.
Posted by Tom Blue on June 15, 2009 under Companies, Funding, Investing |
I have gone to a lot of conferences and seminars over the years that were focused on startups, business plans, venture capital, etc. Not only that, but I graduated from USC with a degree in Entrepreneurship. Every single day we would have an entrepreneur or a venture capitalist present to the class.
Many times these speakers talked about how an entrepreneur is a unique breed, self reliant risk taker that goes through an enormous struggle when starting a company. This message almost always seemed to come from a VC and/or a so called chronic entrepreneur that received venture funding. I find this sort of ironic considering I believe the real entrepreneurs are the bootstrappers.
An entrepreneur is someone that assumes the risk of a company and owns all aspects of a business. First of all, almost all founders of vc funded companies get a 6 figure salary. You call yourself a risk taker? When I started my company I had nothing. If I didn’t make a profit that month I was seriously hurting. In my late twenties I was couch surfing to save money and when I did have enough for an apartment it was a literally a box with no kitchen. My car got repossessed! I am not trying to say my life has been tough(it hasn’t), but I am bit tired of the violin playing CEO of a company that got $5M in funding…
Second, once you get financing you are not in control of a company regardless of what you might think. Bootstrappers completely control their destiny… Even if you try to blame your failure on an employee you have to look at yourself. You are the one that hired them. If you fail it is because of you. You make the final decisions.
No offense to anyone that has received venture capital… I am sure I will raise money for other ventures in the future. I am just asking if we could make the struggle a little less sensational…
Posted by Tom Blue on June 10, 2009 under Uncategorized |
Craig Rosenberg of Funnelholic did an interview with me last week and it was just posted on their blog. Thanks! I like their site because it gives insight in to what people are thinking about the future of sales, marketing, and lead generation. I also noticed the company Craig works for, Tippit, has a number of bloggers that focus on different subjects in and around marketing. I think this is a solid strategy as it gives the Tippit brand name more reach.
Posted by Tom Blue on June 9, 2009 under Companies, Executives, Technology |
TechEndeavor provides Enterprise Mobile Consulting. They are headquartered in Austin and one of their co-founders is Rahul Aggarwal. Below is an interview with him…
We are a specialist Mobility firm. We assist in mobile product engineering right from visualization of a mobile idea around a product concept to actual product development and launch. We have offices in Austin , Tx, Bangalore India, London UK and have been involved with both mobile product engineering and strategic consulting over the last 7 years. In terms of verticals we have deep expertise in Banking, Health care, Insurance, Manufacturing, Not for profit Organizations, Consumer Mobile Applications, Mobile Data Security.
2. Who are your competitors?
Some of our key competitors include companies like Sybase, DeviceDriven, Dexterra, etc
3. What makes you different than your competitors?
As I mentioned above we provide not only product engineering services like most of our competitors do but we also provide Strategic Consulting to our customers who are in initial stages of conceptualising their ideas. So in that sense we are a one stop shop for any customer who has just thought about Mobility. We work with enterprises to define their Mobility Roadmap, we provide consultation on selecting appropriate hardware and design, build, test and roll out industry strength mobile-hand-held solutions, important values before them, ROI, etc and then subsequently also help them execute this roadmap.
4. What are your or your ceo’s biggest challenges?
Some of our biggest challenges in today’s market are:
A. The most important challenge we face is to make the enterprises comfortable with the thought of using mobility. There is still lack in knowledge about what are the right set of solutions needed, which would be helpful even in future. With the ever-changing mobile landscape, enterprises are wondering as to what are the best practices that need to be followed. They are apprehensive with questions like where, when and how to start. This is where the biggest challenge lie.
B. Since every year there are a set of new devices and platforms which get added to the already existing mobile landscape. The challenge we face is to keep upgrading the skills of our team in order to be able to offer a complete solution to our customers our are looking to get the applications developed for the mass market.
6. How long have you been in business?
We have been in business since January 2002.
7. How many employees do you have?
Our current strength is 140.
8. What are your revenue estimates for 2009?
We expect to do in excess of $5Mln in the current financial year
Yes. We have been profitable since inception
Posted by Tom Blue on June 3, 2009 under Uncategorized |
Pari Annamalai is an American that is now living in Singapore. His company, Planvisage, provides supply chain solutions… Here is our interview below.
1. What do you do?
Planvisage is a Supply Chain Solutions Company. We provide both software and services to companies including outsourced planning services for small and medium sized (SMEs) businesses all over the world.
2. Who are your competitors?
Not to sound funny but our biggest competitors are Microsoft Excel or manual processes. We compete with other companies that do Production Planning, Production Scheduling, Demand Planning and Replenishment Planning for SMEs. This market is highly fragmented with no real global player. There are big players like SAP with APO, Oracle with APS, i2 and JDA Manugistics but they focus on larger manufacturing companies so we really do not consider them our competition.
3. What makes you different than your competitors?
Our product is very graphical things like our BOM Diagram and our Gnatt Based Planning board are all very unique to our solution. We also offer functionality that is important to SMEs that are only found in the larger systems but the cost of these systems can be many times higher. Our total cost of ownership is very low because of the following reasons:
a. Our products are based on a proprietary heuristic algorithm rather than optimization algorithms which increases the need for hardware.
b. The products are build on standard proven MS .net framework and standard databases like SQL, DB2 and Oracle. This insures availability of long term support and reduced costs.
c. Implementation times are 25% of the time of larger systems which insures up front investments are low. Typically we can implement our modules in less than one month.
d. No special administrators or support staff required to maintain the system. The users are able to maintain the system and make the needed changes as required.
4. What are your or your ceo’s biggest challenges?
Our biggest challenge is the overall economy has affected most of our customers worldwide but the companies that have used this time to invest in such solutions have seen paybacks of as little as one quarter on their investment. They have seen tremendous cash savings from inventory reductions, utilization of capacity more efficiently, better alignment of supply and demand which has meant lower obsolescence and inventory carrying costs and overall reduction in planning and production cycle times. In one of customers they saw a payback at one of their four factories of less than six weeks. Planvisage has also received in the past year four awards from customers and independent institutions. So getting the word out that this is truly an investment has been one of our biggest challenges.
5. How long have you been in business?
We have been in business since Jan 2004.
6. How many employees do you have?
We have about 21 employees and three partners. Our employees are equally disbursed in development and consulting. We also have a half dozen distribution partners throughout the world. We are also Microsoft, IBM and Intel ISV partners.
7. What are your revenue estimates for 2009?
We expect this year to be similar revenues to last year which is about $1,000,000.
8. Are you profitable?
We expect in 2009 to be breakeven but we have been profitable from 2004 to 2007 and have substantial cash reserves from these years. These cash reserves are in excess of one years working capital requirements.
