Companies Hiring Entrepreneurs for Innovation!

Innovation is a term which comes naturally to Entrepreneurs. Needless to mention, today there is a rapid growth in start-ups and small companies. Leading organizations and big corporations though, are at a loss of innovating new products and services on a comparative note. A long time ago, entrepreneurs were taken so lightly and entrepreneurship was [...]

Companies Hiring Entrepreneurs for Innovation!

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Comment on Training for Next-Generation Tech Entrepreneurs by Jason

don't forget raise money at the Open Angel Forum! :-)

Comment on Training for Next-Generation Tech Entrepreneurs by Jason

Backlink: http://gigaom.com/2010/12/05/tech-entrepreneur-training-programs/#comment-538363

Mark Zuckerberg And An Army Of Insurgent Entrepreneurs Just Declared War On The TV, Music, News, And Movie Industries

At the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave a six minute speech about how, starting sometime in the next five years, he expects his company to make billions and billions of dollars turning the TV, news, film, and music industries upside down.

The speech was nuanced and obviously pre-planned. It contained big revelations. But because it came in the middle of a wide-ranging, hour-long interview, hardly anybody noticed.

The gist: As has already happened in the gaming industry – where Zynga now has a larger market cap than Electronic Arts – Facebook expects insurgent entrepreneurs to "reform" the film, TV, news, e-commerce and music industries with the help of Facebook. Some of these companies will be incumbents. Some will unseat incumbents.  Facebook will then – perhaps through credits or advertising, but also perhaps some other way – tax these companies in exchange for the value it has added.

Here's how Zuckergberg put it:

"Anything that involves content or specific expertise in an area – games, music, movies, TV, news, anything in media, anything e-commerce, any of this stuff.

Over the next five years, those verticals are going to be completely re-thought. There are going to be some really good businesses built.

Our view is that we should play a role in helping to re-form and re-think all those industries, and we'll get value proportional to what we put in. In gaming, we get some percentage of the value of those companies through ads and credits. But that's all because we're helping them.

If we're helpful to other industries in building out what would be a good solution then there will be some way we get value from that. "

In the next few days, we're going to publish a speculative story on how Facebook can "reform" those industries the way it has been able to funnel hundreds of millions of users into social gaming. We'll be talking about some of these issues at our Ignition conference next week too. We'd love to hear your thoughts, too. Comment below or email us at Nicholas@businessinsider.com.

In the meantime, we've embedded Zuckerberg's speech here:

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See Also:

• What I, Eduardo Saverin, Learned From Watching “The Social Network”
• Here's Some Real Damage Mark Zuckerberg Did To The Winklevoss Brothers That Wasn't In "The Social Network"
• Peter Thiel Rips Early Facebook Employee Eduardo Saverin And The Social Network Movie

Mark Zuckerberg And An Army Of Insurgent Entrepreneurs Just Declared War On The TV, Music, News, And Movie Industries

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IT Geeks: Entrepreneurs or Drones?

For those who think they do not have the resources available to them then consider Fritz Ekwoge, a Cameroon born and based programmer and develop who created iYam.mobi, a mobile phone based directory. Or, look at 15 year old Lachy Groom from Australia who is on her 4th tech startup with her newest project dubbed the iPad Case Finder.

Failure is the first prerequisite of successful entrepreneurs

Every entrepreneur is preoccupied with success. But to succeed, we must first understand failure.

Storm Clouds On The Horizon For Web Entrepreneurs

We have enjoyed an amazing run in the web startup and investing space over the past five or six years. In this sector of startupland, company creation is up, investment is up, there are plenty of success stories, and not all of them are based on quick flips and takeouts. There is real revenue flowing through web companies and many web startups formed in the last five or six years are operating profitably. It has been good to be a web entrepreneur and a web VC, and I think it will continue to be for quite some time.

However, there are a few storm coulds out there that we need to be watching. In particular, I think the competition for "hot" deals is making people crazy and I am seeing many more unnatural acts from investors happening. If it were just valuations rising quickly, I'd be a bit less concerned. But we are also seeing large deals ($5mm to $15mm) getting done in a few days with little or no due diligence. Investors are showing up at the first meeting with term sheets. I have never seen phases like this end nicely.

We are also seeing a massive talent war for software engineers going on in Silicon Valley and it is spilling over into other regions. The story by Mike Arrington this morning about a Google engineer is just one example. There are many more examples of poaching by companies driving up salaries, equity packages, and stay and join bonuses.

You might say, "this is good for entrepreneurs and software engineers, they are finally being valued what they are worth." Maybe. But I think both of these situations are unsustainable. And anything that is unsustainable will eventually stop happening. And when it stops happening, there will be a dislocation event that will cause people to change their behavior.

Of course if you are a VC or a HR person in a web company, you don't know when that event will happen and you have to operate your business until then. So we will see this behavior and other troubling things continue to happen for some time to come. When will it stop? Who knows? But be prepared for it to end. And when it does, things will be different. And we should all be prepared for that time.

This article originally appeared at A VC and is republished here with permission.

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How China’s Entrepreneurs Are Helping It Win

Bob Compton and I finally have something to agree about. The Washington, D.C.–based venture capitalist produced a provocative documentary, 2 Million Minutes, which tracked six students—two each in the U.S., India, and China—during their senior year of high school. It showed the Indian and Chinese students slogging to learn mathematics and science, and the Americans partying and playing video games. Bob concluded that the Indians and Chinese will eat our children’s lunch since they are better educated. I was featured in the documentary and agreed that Indian and Chinese children do indeed work much harder than American children; that they are brought up to believe that education is everything and will make the difference between success and starvation; and that most of their childhood is spent memorizing books on advanced subjects. I argued, however, that things aren't nearly as dire for U.S. competitiveness as they might appear to be in the documentary. My team’s research into global engineering education showed that more than 95% of Indians and Chinese do not receive a good education, and even those that do receive one take much longer to develop crucial real-world skills than do Americans. Yes, U.S. teens work part-time, socialize, and party. But the independence and social skills they develop give them a big advantage when they join the workforce. They learn to experiment, challenge norms, and take risks. They innovate from the get-go.

Post originale: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/7iM9aA8tbIE/

Our Government Can’t Prevent A Digital 9-11: Entrepreneurs Need To Step In

At the Security Innovation Network (SINET) Showcase at The National Press Club in Washington, D.C., this week, Michael Chertoff, former Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, presented a dire assessment of the cyber-security threat facing our nation. He discussed how rogue governments and hackers are quietly infiltrating our computer systems and the disasters that can be perpetuated—like those you see on the TV show “24”. Chertoff worries that these risks haven’t yet gripped the public imagination; that it may take a “digital 9-11” to get businesses, consumers, and governments to fortify their defenses. The most troublesome thing I learned by talking with a who’s who of our nation’s security community was that our government doesn’t believe it has the ability to defend us from the rapidly evolving threats. Yes, the National Security Agency and some branches of government have brilliant computer scientists working for them and can defend their own systems; but the rest of us are our own. The Government simply can’t innovate fast enough to keep pace with the pervasive threats and dynamics of the internet or Silicon Valley’s rapidly changing technologies. Indeed, as George Hoyem, a partner at the CIA-backed venture fund In-Q-Tel, noted, there has been a 571 percent growth in malware since 2006; today, 60 percent of all websites are infected.

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