Grandaisy Bakery has announced the availability of a delicious cake made from an old family recipe.

Call them at 212.334.9435 and demand they send you one. You won’t regret it.

Rockies Venture Club announced today that it had secured free and discounted PositiveWare subscriptions for paid up RVC members as an additional member benefit.

PositiveWare is a web application that is used to track time, manage projects, and create budgets and bills. The PositiveWare user base falls into the exact same category as RVC members: management teams and small professional services firms.

“PositiveWare provides the increased collaboration, alignment and accountability that every small business needs to be successful, and we are thrilled to be part of the RVC success story,” said Charles Von Thun, President, PositiveWare.

Under the terms of the agreement PositiveWare will offer RVC members five free users and a discounted rate on additional users. Because the majority of RVC members are startups and small professional service firms, RVC expects most members to be able to take advantage of this benefit at no cost.

“RVC helps create Colorado success stories. This important new benefit for our members is part of our ongoing commitment to make the latest information and technology available to our members to make sure they are successful,” said Maita Lester, Executive Director, RVC.

About Rockies Venture Club
Rockies Venture Club (RVC) was one of the first non-profit organizations in the country to help entrepreneurs launch and manage high-growth potential companies. Founded in 1985, RVC is the Rocky Mountain Region’s premier networking organization that connects entrepreneurs, service professionals, investors, venture capitalists and other funding sources. More information is available at www.rockiesventureclub.org

About PositiveWare
Founded in 2003, PositiveWare Gives Work Meaning™ by providing a single environment for workers to know what they are working on, why it is important, and how they are doing. Functionally this includes collaboration, time tracking, project management, billing, and budgeting. In addition to the web application that is a hybrid of performance management and project management, the company provides professional services including executive coaching, management consulting and IT development. More information is available at www.positiveware.com.

For More Information Contact

Maita Lester, Executive Director, RVC
(303) 831-4174

Charles Von Thun, President, PositiveWare LLC
(303) 293-2200

A weekend article in the Denver Post/Wall Street Journal Sunday by Kelly Spors offered some great advice for finding a mentor. The advice in nutshell is figure out what you are looking for and then use on these tools to find it.

• MicroMentor
• IdeaCrossing.org
• iMantri.com
• Count Me In (for women)

There are also numerous resources available at a cost, including:

• EO (The Entrepreneur’s Organization)
• Vistage
• Axcelus

Why mention this? A key part of mentoring is performance management, and that is what PositiveWare does really well. As mentioned in the article,

“A good mentor is someone who is expecting the mentee to show up prepared and with their homework, so you waste no one’s time”

Coacing mentors and their mentee clients use PositiveWare as part of regular meetings to stay on track.

So I sent out a bunch of Twitter invitations and got no takers. Which makes putting out 140 fairly pointless. Must be an age thing. Nonetheless I think there is a business application there.

Check out our YouTube channel. Kelly did a great job customizing it with colors and graphics.

In August I wrote the following:
Things I wish the iPhone could do…

1. Send/Receive photos via SMS like the Treo
2. Update calendar automagically
3. Support Flash on the Safari browser
4. Work elegantly with PositiveWare for time tracking and project management

So at MacWorld how did I do?
1. No.
2. No.
3. No.
4. See 3.

The focus seems to have been on configurability. Maybe next time. We are really struggling with iCal and Address Book in the enterprise environment.

One of my New Year’s resolutions was to make sure that for every flame I left on the internet I would write five nice things. It is easy to express one’s disgust and vindictiveness - it takes a little more effort to go back and say something nice about a business after a great or even just good experience.

Watch for a Vonage update.

Last Tuesday saw a great Rockies Venture Club dinner meeting at the Marriott. Three great pieces to the meeting:

• 5 minute overview by Hydra car builder
• Presentation by Dan Murray of Ravenwood Marketing
• Presentation by Dave Taylor of askdavetaylor.com

Since Hydra doesn’t have a web site I can’t really comment further, other than the guy wants to build 100 cars selling for $250,000 each based on GM parts.

Both presentations (by Dan and Dave) made me sick with just how successful you can be if you are clever and focused and have one good insight.
Dan Murray figured out in mid 2002 that if you can buy an AdWord for x and get an affiliate to pay you 1.5X or better to get someone to click on the AdWord, than if you can repeat that enough you stand to make some serious bling. In 6 years of doing this he claims they have grown to over 8 figures of revenue, and some serious cash flow headaches as they fund the growth with banks that can’t fathom the business model. The big takeaway: Good AdWords are valuable, and affiliate marketing is good for the affiliates.

As for Dave Taylor, his presentation was more thought provoking. It helped that he is also a great speaker - the audience was rapt. Dave talked about how he began to develop content for his site based on questions he received from fans of his books. His content gave rise to substantial discussion between readers, and many thriving communities sprung from these discussions. He mentioned posts with over 600 comments. This in turn gave rise to serious AdSense revenue as his content generated more and more visits.
But Taylor’s most important point was that in the Web 2.0 era, a company no longer controls its brand. Its brand is the sum of all the discussions and items about the company that exist on the web. As an example he gave the downward slide of Dell, who did not pay attention to a rising web-based chorus of discontent from consumer customers. Eventually Dell’s popularity fell, as did their stock, as did their CEO.
For the RVC crowd, his advice was straightforward - if no one is talking about you online then you don’t warrant an investment.
What shapes the online brand is not just ‘conventional’ web tactics like SEO, SEM, but also the social networking applications that serve to segment users and provide numerous opportunities for users to talk back to the companies in whatever form they desire. Some examples mentioned were facebook, linkedin, myspace, twitter, youtube, plaxo, and many others.

I was captivated by the presentation, not least because of the impact on conventional marketing firms. Someone out there today pitching a conventional integrated marketing approach with collateral, direct mail, print, and so on is doing their clients a disservice. The prospects are on the web, and you need to get them talking about you.
It made me think all my marketing efforts were stupid, and that I really didn’t get it.

Here’s hoping that I start to get it in 2008. Baby needs new shoes. I can feel a twitter already.

A great list about startups from the facebook group Web 2.0

1. Your idea isn’t new. Pick an idea; at least 50 other people have thought of it. Get over your stunning brilliance and realize that execution matters more.
2. Stealth startups suck. You’re not working on the Manhattan Project, Einstein. Get something out as quickly as possible and promote the hell out of it.
3. If you don’t have scaling problems, you’re not growing fast enough.
4. If you’re successful, people will try to take advantage of you. Hope that you’re in that position, and hope that you’re smart enough to not fall for it.
5. People will tell you they know more than you do. If that’s really the case, you shouldn’t be doing your startup.
6. Your competition will inflate their numbers. Take any startup traffic number and slash it in half. At least.
7. Perfection is the enemy of good enough. Leonardo could paint the Mona Lisa only once. You, Bob Ross, can push a bug release every 5 minutes because you were at least smart enough to do a web app.
8. The size of your startup is not a reflection of your manhood. More employees does not make you more of a man (or woman as the case may be).
9. You don’t need business development people. If you’re successful, companies will come to you. The deals will still be distractions and not worth doing, but at least you’re not spending any effort trying to get them.
10. You have to be wrong in the head to start a company. But we have all the fun.
11. Starting a company will teach you what it’s like to be a manic depressive. They, at least, can take medication.\
12. Your startup isn’t succeeding? You have two options: go home with your tail between your legs or do something about it. What’s it going to be?
13. If you don’t pay attention to your competition, they will turn out to be geniuses and will crush you. If you do pay attention to them, they will turn out to be idiots and you will have wasted your time. Which would you prefer?
14. Startups are not a democracy. Want a democracy? Go run for class president, Bueller.
15. You’re doing a web app, right? This isn’t the 1980s. Your crummy, half-assed web app will still be more successful than your competitor’s most polished software application.