http://www.startable.com Healy Jones & Prasad Thammineni on venture capital and startups Tue, 07 Sep 2010 14:57:35 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I recently did a post on DIY Marketers, a site dedicated to helping CEOs with limited budgets get the most out of their marketing, called "5 Tips For A More Professional Website." We learned a lot at OfficeDrop when we remodeled our website, and these are 5 things I think many ... http://www.startable.com/2010/09/07/5-tips-from-me-healy-jones-on-making-your-website-more-professional/ Cloud computing is evolving as quickly as you'd imagine it would - a technology with only one place to update, upgrade, re-engineer (vs. standard installed software that needs to be updated on desktops/servers throughout the land...) I'm getting to live this first hand at OfficeDrop. We have changed our strategies and ... http://www.startable.com/2010/09/03/my-thoughts-on-the-evolving-cloud/ Along the lines of my recent series on what makes a good platform (part one, part two) Shaival Shah has a post on how Hunch uses its API to drive growth. http://www.startable.com/2010/08/31/thoughts-on-growing-with-an-api/ This is my second post on what makes a good technology platform company, from the point of view of the companies that integrate into the platform. (I'm calling these companies "platformees.") Here is a link to the first post, "So you want to be a platform? part one." Again, this ... http://www.startable.com/2010/08/30/so-you-want-to-be-a-platform-part-two/ There was a good piece by Scott Austin, the WSJ's venture writer, on how the three venture investors in 3Par have held onto their shares since the company's 2007 IPO. While the company was buffeted by the difficult stock market over the past few years it was unclear what their ... http://www.startable.com/2010/08/23/wsj-on-vc-dealing-well-with-the-difficult-stock-market/ One of OfficeDrop's growth engines is our integrations with other SaaS services, like 1) Google Apps or Evernote, 2) with more traditional software offerings like Intuit, etc or 3) that work on particular hardware -i.e. Apple's iPad. These players are positioning themselves as "platforms." With open APIs and dedicated means ... http://www.startable.com/2010/08/20/so-you-want-to-be-a-platform-part-1/ I've had great luck at OfficeDrop using the "crowd" to help us with important decisions. We very actively survey our customers on new features, pricing changes, etc. Our most important use of the crowd was when we changed our name from Pixily to OfficeDrop. This name change was an important ... http://www.startable.com/2010/08/19/officedrop-on-crowdsourcing/ Quick link to some interesting recent stats on technology M&A as the "new" exit paradigm on gigaOM. http://www.startable.com/2010/08/19/some-recent-stats-on-tech-ma-exits/ Dan Primack, the face behind peHUB - the must read gossip/news/it blog for the VC/PE industry - has just announced he is moving from Reuters to Fortune. He's been with Reuters for five years (well, he was with the same employer, but Reuters made some acquisitions that brought him into ... http://www.startable.com/2010/08/17/good-luck-to-dan-primack-vcpe-blogger-extraordinaire/ peHUB has an interesting interview with Aydin Senkut, a West Coast angel investor who is at the forefront of angel investing. There has been a ton of chatter about the "angel investing bubble" and the idea that "angel investing is where venture capital was 20 years ago." Aydin's new angel fund, ... http://www.startable.com/2010/08/17/aydin-senkut-the-new-age-of-seed-investing/