Dan's Biz Talk posts

Seattle Startup Resources

Rob Eickmann, who is one of the creators of the Six Hour Startup Conference here in Seattle, has created a great list of Seattle startup resources, which I'd like to pass along here.

Seattle Startup Resources, This is the list of organizations that I wish that I had known about when I came out here. It's broken into Frequent events, Infrequent events, Entrepreneur support/educational institutions, Funding sources, and Web Resources.

Startup Minded Events: where in Seattle where you are likely find technical people, hanging out having fun while working on changing the world.

Frequent Events (Every week or month):

Open Coffee at Louisa's Coffee on Tuesday mornings: Early stage entrepreneur and investor networking in Seattle. Occurs Every Tuesday Morning at 8:30Am 2379 Eastlake Ave E Seattle, Washington asack.typepad.com/a_sack_of_seattle/2007/04/seattle_open_co.html

Saturday House: Seattle Saturday House is a weekly gathering of several people who meet and do ... whatever they want! People work on projects, people talk about ideas, people conspire and hatch plans, and people play games with each other. Every Saturday at Giraffe Labs in Pinoeer Square www.saturdayhouse.org

Seattle Lunch 2.0: Learn about cool local Companies and technologies over your lunch hour - Various locations and times seattlelunch20.wetpaint.com/?t=anon

Seattle Startup Drinks: A simple concept: startup culture in cities around the world gathers around a bar to have a pint and discuss what they are working on, what they need help with and what they can do for each other. Occurs the Last Friday of every month at various locations. seattle.startupdrinks.com

Seattle Tech Startups (STS):  A group of entrepreneurs in the Seattle area who give and seek advice on running technology startups. We meet about once or twice a month. This is targeted at founders of, employees of, or those folks interested in joining local technology companies. Be ready to talk shop, get into technical arcana, and discuss the nitty-gritties of running/working at/launching a tech startup. Occurs first or second week of the month at The Douglas Forum at the Executive Education Center, University of Washington www.seattletechstartups.com

Six Hour Startup: A group of hackers/designers/entrepreneurs  meeting to try and build and lunch a startup in less than six hours. Second Weekend of every month at various locations. www.sixhourstartup.com

Venture Breakfasts (NWEN): A monthly breakfast with a featured speaker talking about startup related issues. www.nwen.org/index.php?option=com_events&Itemid=15&cat=Venture+Breakfast

Infrequent Events: (Every few months, it is best to find out about when these events occur from sites like MeetAtThePig meetatthepig.com or Seattle 2.0 http://seattle20.sampasite.com, or Gary's Guide http://seattle.garysguide.org)

Barcamp: An ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. barcamp.org/seattle

Ignite Seattle: Ignite Seattle is a geek event that combines on-site geekery, sharing, and innovation (and drinking) igniteseattle.com/

Mindcamp: Seattle Mind Camp is an unconference that is held annually in Seattle. mindcamp.gearlive.com/

NPost: nPost networking Event for tech startups, Demos and getting to meet members of the local startup community. www.npost.com

Think Tanks (NWEN): Evening Knowledge Exchanges that are recognized as the go to forums for new ideas. www.nwen.org/index.php?option=com_events&Itemid=15&cat=Think+Tanks

Workshops (NWEN): Graduate School level workshops on various topics such as VC Financing, Human Resource, Bootstrapping, IP Protection and more. www.nwen.org/index.php?option=com_events&Itemid=15&cat=Workshops

There are a lot of other events that occur here in Seattle which attract interesting, smart technical people : Bizjam, Startup Weekend, Dorkbot, Powertool drag strip races, Seattle Scrum, Seattle X-Coders, Seattle Ruby Brigade, Python Users group.... Its best to subscribe to a few of the calendars above to find out about those events.

Entrepreneur Support/Educational Institutions:

Biznik: Is a Seattle based social network for entrepreneurs, they have a wealth of events and information on starting up a company. biznik.com/

Score: Small Business Administration, hosts workshops, offers conseling and has a wealth of resources for startup entruperumers. www.seattlescore.org

Freelance Seattle: good for finding freelancers to help with design/code/branding/localization/etc... freelance-seattle.net/

MIT Enterprise Forum: Hosts several different types of events though out the year, Dinner Programs which can be a companies presentation of key issues the company is experiencing or has experienced or an experts panel with a featured topic of interest, Venture Lab workshops which is a lecture series on various topics and Global Broadcasts from Cambridge aimed at different topics. www.mitwa.org/

NorthWest Enrepreneur Network (NWEN): Has Venture breakfasts, workshops, pub nights, and hosts the Early Stage Investment Forum yearly. www.nwen.org

Funding Organizations:

Alliance of Angels: www.allianceofangels.com/

Funding Universe: www.fundinguniverse.com

Ignition Partners: www.ignitionpartners.com/

Keiretsu Forum: www.k4seattle.com

Web Resources: John Cook's Venture Blog: Explores startups, Venture Capital and Life in the Pacific Northwest Technology Community blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/venture/

Meetatthepig: A calendar for geeks, makers and other world changers. meetatthepig.com

Seattle 2.0: Marcelo Calbucci's website with local startup events, and the Seattle Startup List of Seattle Internet startups, includes an extensive list of Seattle Startup Blogs. seattle20.sampasite.com

Seattle Tech Startups: A fairly high traffic email list of various founders and others involved creating new internet companies. seattletechstartups.com/doku.php

We're co-hosting a new music industry networking night at King Cat Theater..

Lara and I have teamed up with Levi Lyon of Seattle indie record label Xil Records to host a music industry networking night.

The first of these monthly events will happen next Thursday at King Cat Theater, a newly renovated space near downtown Seattle with a swanky bar that will hold 200.

If you're a musician, or want to network with musicians, this is the event you've been waiting for you. Musicians need web designers, bookkeepers, massage therapists and attorneys too!

Networking begins at 6 with cocktails, and there'll be an acoustic performance beginning at 8pm. Hope you can join us.

Free RSVP here: Music Industry Networking Night at King Cat

You're invited to the BizJam Soirée...

For those of you who can't make it to the main event on Wednesday and Thursday, we'd like to invite you to the BizJam Soirée on Thursday evening. It's 10 bucks at the door up until 10pm - free after that!

Here's the scoop:

7pm to 8pm Arrival & Networking
Enjoy light artful confections from award-winning chef, Tiberio Simone. Cash bar provided by and benefiting the Space Virgin Light Continuum, a 501c3 Community Arts Organization.

8pm to 10pm Evening Program
Experience the “Story Wave.” Beginning with a brief solo performance by international actor and improviser, Matt Smith, will start the evening program by leading the room in an interactive story-telling adventure.

Biznik co-founders Lara Eve Feltin and Dan McComb will host the Biznik Award show - see which members will be recognized for the significant community contributions. Must be present to win!

Then grab your seats, the evening program will conclude with a rope and silk tissue aerial performance (think Cirque du Soleil!) by the students of Biznik Beverly Sobelman of Versatile Arts.

10pm to 2am Party til the Wee Hours
Wrap up the evening with your new friends, collaborators and associates to music in the form of downtemplo ambient beats provided by DJ b. wonder Jones and DJ Digitroll of Bluesdome.

Full event details here.

New sitewide search makes it easier to find people, articles, events and discussions

We’re happy to announce a significant improvement to the Biznik site today: sitewide search! You can now search from any page of the website. Just enter your search term, and the results are automatically split into four separate categories: members, events, discussions, and articles. If there are more than five results in any category, you can click through to the search results page of the given subject, where you’ll see the rest of the results of your search.

To use the search, just click in the search box, located at the top of every page. The results are grouped by type, with members first.

Next up: we’ve got some big improvements to the quality of the search results right around the corner.

I’d like to say a special thank-you to Biznik’s newly hired web developer, Matt McCormick. This is his first feature release, and we’re delighted to have him on our team. Great job, Matt!

Happy searching, Dan

What business category would you like to be listed under?

One problem with the current Biznik membership directory is that there's no way to browse members by category (for example, you can't browse all the Seattle attorneys). We're about to fix that, and if you've got an opinion about what category you'd like to appear under, please share it with me now. It's kind of important, because we're going to add routes that look like http://biznik.com/members/seattle/pr-consultants. So if, for example, you'd rather appear as "publicist" instead of "pr consultant" let me know now. It's possible that we can dynamically create both, actually. But I want to track members into selecting a smaller, shared set, so that there isn't too much fragmentation around categories.

Biznik selected as an Official Honoree for the Social/Networking category in The 12th Annual Webby Awards

Hey everybody, guess what? I gotta share this email I just received from the Webby Awards (the leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet)...

Dear Dan:

It is my pleasure to inform you that Biznik has been selected as an Official Honoree for the Social/Networking category in The 12th Annual Webby Awards.

The Official Honoree distinction is awarded to work that scores in the top 15% of all work entered into the Webby Awards. With nearly 10,000 entries received from all 50 states and over 60 countries, this is an outstanding accomplishment for you and your team.

Congratulations!

YOUR OFFICIAL HONOREE LISTING: Your listing on the Webby site is located at http://www.webbyawards.com/webbys/current_honorees.php?season=12

MAKING THE MOST OF YOUR NOMINATION: We developed an online toolkit full of PR tips, sample press releases, site bugs and other helpful tips to help you promote your achievement. Please visit http://www.webbyawards.com/resource_center/honoree to access the PR toolkit.

You should receive an official notification letter with more information about your nomination this week. In the meantime, please do not hesitate to contact me (info below) or my colleague Jody Collins, General Manager of The Webby Awards, at jcollins@webbyawards.com or via phone at 212.675.3555 should you have any questions.

Again, congratulations!

David-Michel Davies Executive Director

The Webby Awards | Int'l Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences http://www.webbyawards.com | http://www.iadas.net

Tune in tomorrow morning to hear Biznik's first national media coverage on NPR's Morning Edition

Remember that story that NPR correspondent Wendy Kaufman has been working on about Biznik for the past few months? Well, she's finished her story, and she just informed me it's scheduled to air tomorrow morning (here in Seattle anyway) at 6:50 and 8:50 am on KPLU (88.5) and at 6:50 on KUOW (94.9). So if you were among those interviewed at the McLeod Residence back in December, be sure to tune in!

Biznik welcomes Intuit as our first major sponsor!

I've got a great announcement to make today: Intuit is Biznik’s first major sponsor! We’ve been working closely over the past couple of months with some fantastic people at Intuit, to come up with a form of sponsorship that works for both Intuit and for this community of small business owners.

Check out the Learn section this morning, and you’ll see what we came up with - a new section on the Learn page featuring articles provided by Intuit on topics that we’re confident you’ll find helpful, relevant, and interesting.

After working with Intuit to develop this sponsorship, I totally understand why Fortune magazine this year called Intuit - for the third straight year - “the most admired software company in America.” Intuit really does work hard to understand and support small business, and today’s sponsorship is certainly an indication of that to us.

The sponsorship, which will run for the month of April, will help us develop Biznik more quickly, so that this community can grow faster and do a better job at our core mission: helping you grow your business faster and making it more profitable. From all of us and Biznik and on behalf of the entire business networking community here, thank you Intuit!

To give you a complete picture of why Intuit is sponsoring Biznik, I interviewed Laura Messerschmitt, a product manager at Intuit. You can read the interview here.

New feature: Instant video profiles on Biznik add new dimension to online business networking

Biznik launched an extraordinary new online business networking feature today: video profiles. We teamed up with another Seattle startup, EyeJot.com, to provide you a way to instantly record and post up to 5 minutes of video, all from within your profile on Biznik. No need for editing software. No need to shoot first and upload later. No need to cut and paste the link from Youtube. All you need is a computer with a video camera and we take care of the rest. Well, you still have to have something to say. You’re on your own there!

Heres a two-minute video that outlines how to use the video profiles.

As far as I know, Biznik is the first online business networking community to include recordable video from within profiles. LinkedIn didn’t even give users the ability to upload photos to their profiles until last September, so don’t hold your breath on seeing video there any time soon. If you know of any other business social network that offers this, let me know and I will stop making bold claims! Until then, I’m going to keep bragging, because this is worth bragging about. In fact, why don’t you hop on to your profile, record a profile, and we can all brag together.

All of the current Mac laptops already have video cameras built-in. If you don’t have one of those, you can get an inexpensive USB camera, and mount it externally. The video tool is pretty good at automatically figuring out your settings, and within minutes you should be recording your first video. If you have any problems, we’ve created an extensive video FAQ page that should have you up and running right away.

So, what do you think of video on your profiles? Will you use it? Will you watch video on member profiles?

Huge speed boost for Biznik.com

The fantastic folks at Wowrack have installed two new smokin’ fast servers for Biznik over the past week, and last night John and I brought the new configuration online. The result, those of you on the site this morning I’m sure are noticing, is a stunning improvement in speed: pages on Biznik.com are loading at least twice as fast as before, and in some cases, much, much faster. Overall the site feels snappy and responsive. Posting comments happens almost instantaneously now, whereas before it sometimes took 6, 7, 8 or 9 seconds to complete (i.e, “forever”). This new server configuration is not only fast, but it can handle an extraordinary amount of traffic without breaking a sweat. So invite your friends and bring the traffic - Biznik can handle it!

<p>We have dedicated all of next week to one task: making Biznik.com run even faster still. There are many pages whose performance needs further improvement: viewing members in your network, for example, is still unacceptably slow if you have more than a handful of people in your network. </p>
<p>Enjoy the new speed, and as you&#8217;re surfing around the site today, if you notice any pages that you&#8217;d like to see load even faster than they do now,  let me know by emailing dan at biznik dot com.

Learn section launched for Supporting Members

This afternoon we launched a brand-new section of Biznik called Learn. Initially it is accessible to Supporting Members (and invited beta participants) only, so if you're interested in having first crack at contributing an article or reading what other members are contributing, this is a great time to upgrade your membership. The new section of the site features two things: Articles and Tips.

So, what's an article? It's up to 1,000 words on a business topic that will be helpful to someone who is building and growing a business. It's an opportunity for any member of Biznik to share his or her knowledge about how to do something or how to understand something about business.

All articles and tips can be rated by the community. That's right - you get to vote, on a scale of 1-10, on how "helpful" the article or tip is to you. The highest rated articles and tips will be most visible, and most likely to be read by others. And here's the kicker: Once you've published enough articles, which are rated high enough, you will receive an "expert" badge on your profile.

What articles are NOT: Articles are not an opportunity to sell your services directly, and they are NOT a promotion (we already have provided the promotion tool for that.) Articles are not a place to publish articles that aren't immediately relevant to small business. They are not a place for commercial messages of any kind.

What articles ARE: Articles are concise, well-written pieces that someone running a small business will find instantly helpful. They are an opportunity for the author to gain visibility and status within the community by sharing his or her expertise, and drive traffic to their own website or blog as a result.

So, what can you write an article about? Everyone on Biznik is an expert at something, and if your expertise extends to knowledge that will help a small business grow and be more profitable, please write an article or publish a tip - you'll benefit, and the community will benefit, and that's what Biznik business networking is all about. Finally, we will be exercising rigorous editorial control over the quality of the articles, so don't take it personally if we kick them back to you with requests for improvements. Enjoy!

Has Biznik helped grow your business? NPR may want to interview you at McLeod Residence on Thursday...

NPR correspondent Wendy Kaufman is doing a story about Biznik, and she'll be at the happy hour at McLeod Residence this week on Thursday, Dec. 13. If you've got a story about how Biznik is working to make your business grow faster and be more profitable, please join us - she is planning to interview a few members about their experience in this community.

New forthcoming feature: Business Articles and Tips

We’re in the final stages of readying a new feature for release on Biznik: Articles and Tips. Unlike previous features, this one will be released first in beta form, to Supporting Members and a small group of invited participants. We are releasing this to Supporting Members first and foremost because we love Supporting Members! And we want you to feel the love by having first crack at this awesome new tool. Secondly, we need a whole lot of articles in the pipeline before we can launch this to the rest of the site, so this will be an opportunity for Supporting Members to post as many articles as they like. Here’s how it works:

By the end of this week, Supporting Members will see a new tab to the main navigation, called Learn. (It will be hidden from all other users until some time in December or whenever we receive enough articles to make it launch worthy). Under that tab, you’ll find a list of articles and business tips, that are authored by members, for members. Members will be able to rate the articles and tips on a scale of 1-10, and the most helpful articles and tips will become the most visible. By contributing enough highly ranked articles, you will earn an “expert” badge on your profile, which will help you build your reputation inside the Biznik community.

If you’d like to have first-crack at this new feature and an opportunity to contribute articles of your own, now is a great time to upgrade your account.

Using your real name

We've decided to enforce a policy that requires all Biznik members to use their real name on their profile. The main motivation behind this is simple: if you're going to do business with someone, you are going to want to know their real name. Simple. It's pretty difficult to develop trust for someone who won't even tell you their name. Many other social networks allow usernames and pretty much anything goes. Facebook is a notable exception - they require real names, and as a result the integrity of the network is much higher.

I've already begun asking members who have put things like their business name into their name field to change it, so this is a head's up to everyone to be sure your profile first and last name fields list your real first and last name, and nothing else (no keyword stuffing allowed here - that is a violation of our Code of Conduct). In some cases I will be editing profile names directly to ensure compliance.

Biznik wins silver in w3 awards

Biznik is an award-winning social network! We were recognized by the International Academy of Visual Arts (www.w3award.com), which gave us a silver award in the Social Network category.

Here's the full story: http://blog.biznik.com/2007/11/03/biznik-social-network-recognized-in-2007-w3-awards/.

Post your bug reports here

Please post any bugs you find here. I've locked the old one because it was getting too long.

Forum guidelines

Hey folks, I need to jump in with some observations about this forum. I've recently noticed a lot of "me too" comments that are dragging the quality of the conversation down. Before you comment on a post, pause for a second and ask yourself, "how is what I'm about to post going to contribute to this conversation?" If the post you are making is more social in nature, take it to the Coffee Break forum. Let's keep all posts in this forum on-topic and thoughtful, helpful, or otherwise likely to increase our community business knowledge.

Business networking is not a spectator sport: Biznik’s participation algorithm rewards active participation

We made some big changes to Biznik's participation algorithm today, which I'd like you all to know about. Here's a link to a blog post I just made that outlines the changes: http://blog.biznik.com/2007/10/10/business-networking-is-not-a-spectator-sport-bizniks-participation-algorithm-rewards-active-members/

What do you love about Biznik? (in 20 words or less)

Biznik membership is growing steadily at an average of 15 new members per day. But we'd like to see that rate increasing, so we're launching a campaign to get first-time visitors to Biznik.com to sign up. And, because Biznik is all about collaboration, we're going straight to you to come up with content for this campaign.

Here's how it works: Reply to this post telling us what you love about Biznik in 20 words or less. If your quote is selected, it'll appear in rotation in the right column of selected pages throughout the website, and will include your photo, your name, your business name, and a link to your profile. For ideas, you can see the first four quotes we're using already here.

So, what do you love about Biznik?

Navigation change

We made a change to the navbar this afternoon, that I want to announce. Now, the email icon is persistent next to "Your Profile." This allows you to get into your messages with one click at any time, not just when you have new messages. When there's no new mail, it's just an email graphic. When new messages are waiting, an exclamation mark appears to the right of the email graphic.