Archive for October, 2008
TechEntreprise launches!
October 27th, 2008
Heri’s been working hard with TechEnterprise, a new social-ish site devoted to connecting people together, listing jobs, events and a lot more. User participation is more than welcome and I urge you to take a look today!
Posted in Montreal, Startups | Comments (1)
Daily Dollar Deal featured on CNET’s Cheapskate
October 22nd, 2008
I had quite a (good) surprise when I noticed a huge spike on my Google Analytics account today. It’s just that CNET mentionned about DailyDollarDeal on their "Cheapskate" site .
Needless to say that I was quite happy to receive such an unexpected flow of visitors and I was even happier that the site stayed up all the time.
If you haven’t visited Daily Dollar Deal, I invite you to do so ! 
Posted in Startups, eBay | Comments (0)
Silicon Valley is doomed
October 22nd, 2008
While trying to catch-up with my pile of magazines (yes I do offline reading too!) I came across a very interesting article in the september edition of eWeek.
There is an article entitled “A rusty future for Silicon Valley?” where Judy Estrin, the former Cisco CTO, says that if the valley doesn’t innovate more, it will be doomed just like Flint, Michigan.
For those of you who don’t know Flint, let’s just say that it was hit so badly by the american car industry spiraling down that you can actually buy a house for 2000$.
Yes, that’s not a typo - 2 grands.
You could probably tear it down and make a profit but that’s not the point.
The point is that in the 1980’s the american car makers started to feel the pressure from foreign makers.
They found their saviour - the SUV. The SUV was not an innovation at all but it was nice and served the american market very well. Most importantly, this was something not offered by the foreign car makers (at least back then). Throw in some government help (tax break for large vehicules and relaxed fuel consumption standards) and the auto industry should live a bit longer.
However, as we all know it, the story changed. SUV’s are now produced by any car maker and fuel consumption eventually caught up. As a result, it sucks to be an american auto maker CEO today.
- There is no vision/product
- Their market is crashing
- They have no plan
What was the problem? The SUV was not an innovation at all. It was basically a familly oriented truck. What is innovation? Toyota has been working on hybrid cars since 1994 and sold their first model in 1997. That’s more than 10 years ago. Compare this to Ford who released its hybrid SUV in 2004 (7 years ago). I think that even in the car industry, 7 years is too long.
That’s exactly what’s going on in the high tech area. Every quarter, big companies like Dell and IBM tell analysts not to worry - what is not sold in the US will be sold in emerging countries (Brazil, China, Russia, etc.)
That’s not innovation!
There is, however, innovation in the Valley. Apple and Google are quite good at it. Intel knows that shrinking the chips is just like selling SUV (smaller chips don’t sell more). They are putting software control in the hardware and driving revolutionary PC designs.
So next time you work on a product, tell yourself: Am I creating something new or just moving my actual market to another product and not gaining anything in the end?
Posted in Innovation, Startups | Comments (2)
CEIM receives government money
October 15th, 2008
Here’s some news that literally went under the radar for most people. CEIM (Centre d’entreprise et d’innovation de Montreal) received 800,000$ from the Quebec government.
Funny enough, the CEIM which helps startups in very specific domains by provinding an incubator-style environment, is complaining about the lack of startup financing. I knew about CEIM but what I didn’t know is that it’s been around since 1996. I find it a little sad that they do not promote their services actively by attending social events. Then again, maybe they do and I just never had the chance to talk to anyone working there.
Posted in Funding, Incubator | Comments (0)
Think Small - Or when small works fine for you
October 1st, 2008
People in startups want to change the world. They usually like to help out and produce something new and innovative.
People often have this grandiose idea that startups will either make it big or crash. After all, we’re always bombarded by multi-millions acquisitions and big funding rounds. Google buys this, Microsoft buys that, Yahoo! too.
But wait, there’s another world out there. And this is what I’ve slowly came to realize.
What really matters is your return on investment. What if you work 20h a week on a side project only to see it fail miserably? That’s a lot of wasted time.
Wouldn’t it be better if you could work less than 10 hours, just one time, and make just a little bit of money of recurring money every month? Of course earning a few hundred dollars per month isn’t as sexy as having a lot of stock options but then again, it’s real money. It’s profit that most startups won’t even see!
That’s exactly what happened with my latest mini project (DailyDollarDeal.com). It took me initially less than 4 hours to build this site from scratch.
- I read the eBay API.
- I found a free template.
- I wrote a few lines of PHP (just 2 API calls actually!)
Just a few hours later, boom, I had a site up and running. I was actually surprised at how easy eBay’s API was.
Total investment: 10 dollars for my domain name. Of course I’m cheating a little bit as I’m using my blog’s hosting service to host the service but even if I had to get another hosting company, it would’ve been profitable. It’s not lightning fast but it works fine. In fact, the delay comes from the API calls so there’s not much I can do other that implement a caching service but I don’t even want to mess with this for a simple reason: it works “good enough”!
Can this get any easier? I don’t think so. Can it get better? Of course. But in terms of return on investment, I’d do another project like this anytime. The goal actually is to parallelize them in order to bring decent income. In theory, it’s easy. If you earn 100 dollars per month then make 10 other sites and you will earn 1000 dollars per month. In reality however, things don’t work the same way…
I experimented by adding an Amazon section where people can look for clearance items (up to 90% off). It took me less than one hour to setup everything. Although it allows you to find great deals on Amazon, people prefer the one dollar auctions on eBay. If I had only done the Amazon site, I guess I would’ve called it a failure…
The moral of the story is not matter how small your idea is, take it to the street and let people play with it. Who knows what will come out of it? Many successes started very small. In my case, I know for sure that Venture Capitalists or Google won’t be knocking at my door to give me buckets of cash (although they are welcomed to do so!) but I know that I can make some extra money even while I sleep.
Although my idea is not geek or sexy, that’s a good feeling!
Posted in Startups, ideas | Comments (0)
