Please follow our journey here:

–> www.UrbanHikers.com <–

Links & Give-aways

Lineup

This event is interesting as it brings in leaders from the tech space, with experts in the journalism space, to share knowledge and bring ideas together.  I’ll be on a panel discussing “How to Build Communities for Brands”

Register soon for the Early-Bird Discount and use this coupon code for 10% off: 10smmsf12

Thursday 8th July, 9:00am – 5:30pm

Hotel Nikko, 222 Mason Street, San Francisco, CA 94102

Speakers include: Ben Parr, Co-Editor of Mashable; Richard Jalichandra, CEO Technorati; Chris Heuer, AdHocnium; David Gelles, Reporter at The Financial Times; Kym McNicholas, Anchor/Reporter at Forbes; Jon Swartz, Technology reporter USA Today; Hiten Shah, Co-founder KISSmetrics; Lawrence Coburn, CEO of DoubleDutch; Murray Newlands; and Marissa Louie.  The event is sponsored by Oracle.

Tonight we’re featuring 3 companies with tools to help you manage your online communication – from email to twitter along with 1 company in town from NYC. If you can’t make it in person, check out the Live Stream @ 7pm:

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/svnewtech

—> APPLY TO DEMO <—
http://demo.newtechmeetup.org

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Lineup:

mongodb.org – Learn about their document-oriented approach to database storage and how their customers include Foursquare, Etsy, and The New York Times. NYC Based. [Roger Bodamer]

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refollow.com – Your own analytics database and dashboard for your Twitter circle. Powerful stuff. [Rob Meadows, Jeremy Miller]

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threadsy.com – Pull together all your email and social accounts into one place, from gmail to twitter & facebook. [Rob Goldman]

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threadbox.com – Create private shared workspaces right from where you normally work, your email inbox! [Michael Cerda]

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Links & Give-aways

• I’m looking for Assistant Organizers for this meetup group. Req’s include enthusiasm, speaking comfortably, social, self-motivated, and genuine: http://bit.ly/svnt-organizer
• Don’t buy Tech Books! Win yours at 101freetechbooks. Thousands of titles to choose from and NO signup fees. Use code ‘CL000162QK’ to get 2 additional opportunities to win in our June 30 Raffle: http://bit.ly/cPxr6t
• Free ticket to Social Developer Summit for those that subscribe to the newsletter from the email.  Everybody else gets % disc for group w/ code ‘SDSSVN’: http://bit.ly/9GYpI0
• Lots of ppl came up to me last month asking about the Balsamiq mockup software that demo’d. They’ve offered a discount code for the group: “svNTmu” http://bit.ly/auWzka

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Shout Outs

• Urgent Content, social content production agency seeks another start-up(s) to share office space with in SF, figure we’re 4 desks. – bg@urgentcontent.com
• Beyond launch-what next? (6/3) @hackerdojo #bluerunventures #jay_jamison being scrappy,creative, fundable http://bit.ly/9YlNyL
• Post a job or find a new gig on http://Dice.com

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Supporters
A special thank you to:

• Dice.com for sponsoring our Job Boards
• DLAPiper.com for hosting us each and every month
• Future-works.com for providing wine & beer at tonight’s event
• [Your Company Here] -> email ‘vincent -dot- lauria -at- gmail -dot- com

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When: Tuesday, June 1, 2010 7:00 PM
Where: DLA Piper, 2000 University Ave, Palo Alto
More: http://meetup.com/svnewtech

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Matt Shapiro, a second year MBA student at the Yale School of Management and part time Associate with LaunchCapital, a seed stage venture capital firm, authored the first Entrepreneur’s Census asking a range of questions to co-founders and ceo’s on why they landed in their city and analyzed the behaviors in each city with a series of questions ranging from fundraising to hiring.

As a NYC to Silicon Valley transplant I was very interested in the results of the census and passed it out to the Silicon Valley New Tech Meetup.

The results that most interested me:

• 40% of startups in Palo Alto reached the financing they sought vs. only 24% in NY (graph above)
• The leading reason for why founders picked a city was due to a prior job, university came in 2nd.
• Software-as-a-Service beat out Advertising as a revenue model 2-to-1
• The peak tiers for number of employees were 4-7 for NY and Boston, and 2 for Palo Alto, which would indicate a larger percentage earlier stage companies in Palo Alto, and a larger percentage of more mature companies in NY.
• 42% of startups in NYC don’t pay for rent, vs. 22% in Palo Alto. With an avg. rent of $733/employee in NYC vs. $475/employee in Palo Alto, I can see why there’s a need for free rent!  Also, as a former NY’r, it’s much hader to create the live/work spaces that you have in Silicon Valley, such as our our Meetro house that crammed 8 guys into one apartment for living and working.
• Angel Access – Silicon Valley has the numbers, with 17% of companies speaking to 20 or more angels in Palo Alto, compared to 7% in NYC.  Though the flip side of this could be our crazy west coast ideas sometimes need to land on more ears then those solid business plans in NYC.

Read the full research report below or head to the 2010 Entrepreneur Census website.

The Entrepreneur’s Census –

We’re about to roll pass 5,000 members today!  Every member of this group has contributed to our growth, thank you!  The 5,000th member to join will get his or her website or service tweeted out, so pass this onto your friends.  Also, there’s a 2010 Entrepreneur Census sponsored by Yale, please fill it out and let the world know why Silicon Valley is the #1 place to launch a startup. http://bit.ly/do7A2F

Awesome mix of companies tonight. If you can’t make it in person, check out the Live Stream @ 7pm:
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/svnewtech

Apply to demo:
http://demo.newtechmeetup.org

When: Tuesday, Apr 6, 2010 7:00 PM
Where: DLA Piper, 2000 University Ave, Palo Alto
More: http://meetup.com/svnewtech

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Lineup:

wepay.com – Helping groups collect and manage money. A great system for that next Tahoe cabin rental with friends. [Bill Clerico]

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helpbubble.com – Your website vistiors are really confused, make it easy for them to find answers to their questions. [Mark Christian & Brian Klug]

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doubledutch.me – White-labeled location-based game for your Community, Brand, or Event. [Lawrence Coburn]

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aws.amazon.com – Amazon is not just for books.  Amazon Web Services is an entire suite of cloud computing resources powering many of the web startups in this group. [Alex McClure]

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Links & Give-aways

• Book Giveaway Tonight! Web 2.0 Fundamentals – 2 copies will be given away by the authors (& active SVNewTech members), Oswald Campesato & Kevin Nilson: http://web2-book.com/ or buy it 40% off: http://bit.ly/b0Yl3d
• Ad Publishers – Can’t make ad:tech SF during the day?  Then come out to the SFAdPub meetup where we’ll be featuring hot Ad Networks w/ free drinks: http://meetup.com/SFAdPub/
• Startup Lessons Learned Conference – Learn from the best on building a successfully *lean* startup.  20% discount code SVNEWTECH: http://bit.ly/bgaTcI
• 5 FREE tickets – Digital Media Law Conference – 1 day forum for legal experts, biz execs, & entrepreneurs to discuss emerging legal issues in the digital media space. http://bit.ly/dglIE2 (5 free tickets given out in newsletter, signup here.  Everybody else 25% off, code SVNewTech25)
• 2010 Entrepreneur’s Census – Tired of the speculative arguments regarding whether it is better to launch a venture in NY vs. Boston vs. Silicon Valley? Fill out this anonymous survey sponsored by Yale: http://bit.ly/do7A2F
• Looking for a new gig? Post on our job boards http://bit.ly/svnt-jobs
• Hiring? Email me for a sponsored listing.

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A special thank you to:

• The New York Times
• DLA Piper for hosting us each and every month
• FutureWorks PR for providing wine & beer at tonight’s event

First, congrats to CoTweet.com who presented on our stage just 4 months ago and was acquired today.

Second, if you’re interested in how this meetup grew from 5 to 5,000 members in 4 years, check out a SF Ignite lightning talk I gave at Google last month.

Really interesting mix of companies tonight, but if you can’t make it in person, check out the Live Stream @ 7pm:
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/svnewtech

Apply to demo:
http://demo.newtechmeetup.org

When: Tuesday, Mar 2, 2009 7:00 PM
Where: DLA Piper, 2000 University Ave, Palo Alto
More: http://meetup.com/svnewtech

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Lineup:

notepal.com – Online market for buying and selling notes from classes, conferences, book summaries, etc. [Duane Nason]

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99designs.com – Leverage a community of designs for ‘on-demand’ designs fast and affordable. [Jason Aiken]

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superfeedr.com – Bring real-time updates and notifications to your app with real-time feed parsing in the cloud [Julien Genestoux]

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envolve.com – Just add Envolve to your site for enabling conversations and building community. [James Tamplin]

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Links & Give-aways
* Can your technology solve the issues surrounding the Cloud? Win $10,000 and mentorship in the Cloud Security Challenge 2010. Entry is free. http://GlobalSecurityChallenge.com

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They’re hiring [Sponsored Section]
* Aftershock is looking for a superstar rails/java devs who wants to work in the exploding iphone games market for a company leading the Top 10 games – jobs@aftershocksf.com
* Lead programmer wanted: Exciting 1 yr old web 2.0 start-up. Facebook meets Ebay. Low pay/Ground Floor. I Founded a current leading web entity. Contact: marketing@stylophane.com

I was invited to give a talk at another SF Ignite, this one hosted by West Coast Community Leadership Summit.

Ignite are 5min lighting presentations, with each slide at 30 seconds.  I put together some material for any event organizers that shares some of the knowledge I’ve gained over the past 4 years with my Silicon Valley NewTech meetup and how we grew from 5 members at a coffee shop to 5,000 (technically, we’re at 4,874).

You can watch me with firery red hair side by side with the slides:

Or watch my straight slides with audio over them:

And be sure to check out the rest of the interesting talks from that night, including Ann Winblad’s talk on “What’s in a Name” and how that applies to startups.

Here are our notes from the last meeting which include some really valuable links you may want to bookmark.  (copied here: http://delicious.com/vlauria/sfadpub )

In March, we’ll have somebody from Google AdSense joining us

A few 3rd party networks for selling space on your site:

• adroll.com
• blogads.com
• google.com/admanager

Using ‘adsense section targeting’ to tell google what text it should consider (or not consider) for displaying an ad.

• http://google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=23168

Some affiliate linking networks:

• skimlinks.com (automatic amazon, dell, kmart, ebay, etc. referrals)
• goldstar.com (local/event based)

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Next Meeting, Tues, March 9 ==> http://meetup.com/sfadpub

I just attended a breakfast hosted by Next Step, The Brenner Group and K&L Gates on how to position your startup for acquisition.  There’s a lot of common sense that goes into it.  I picked two halves of a pb&j because I think that’s what best represents a merger or acquisition – when the additive results tastes great and keeps the customers coming back to buy more.  Here are a few meaningful points I took away:

• Position your self for an acquisition, such as partnerships with potential acquirers.  Think about this in your product strategy.
• Think of your competition from your acquirer’s perspective.  You may not necessarily compete for the same customers, but maybe there’s similar technology/services out there that you would be similar to from an acquirer’s perspective.
• Be mindful of your intrinsic low value customers vs. your high value and strategic customers.  Low value may be online sales customers, ad revenue customers, etc.  High Value and Strategic customers will usually be of the highest interest from a potential buyer
• Accounting / GAAP / Tax compliance – make sure this is all legit.  I repeat, make sure you are fully compliance here. 1, it can really delay due diligence not to have all your paperwork or be out of compliance.  2, it can slow down the due diligence and you may not have the resources to sit through it. 3, it could be used against you during negotiations as the price can lower with increased risk.  4, if a public company is acquiring you, they will have to do a full audit with the SEC w/in 75 days of purchase. Finally, as you are positioning yourself for acquisition, you may want to have your company audited – your company will look stronger for it, and you’ll also avoid any delays during due diligence.
• Make sure all your other ducks are in order, cap table, previous employees, founders that left, board seats, etc.  You (and your acquirer) don’t want any puppies coming out of the closet during or after acquisition.
• Global acquirers?  They’ve seen a lot of global investment, and think the market might be opening up to more global acquisitions with companies looking for a presence here in the valley.

Hey all, just a quick reminder on our meetup tonight, Feb 9th. In March, Google AdSense will be sending a rep or two to answer your questions, so we’ll use some time tonight to prepare some questions I can send them before hand.

Tonight, Feb 9th, 7pm.
Zebulon, 2nd Floor, above the bar (83 Natoma St)

Please make sure you’ve RSVP’d Free appetizers will be provided.

Please forward this email to any friends/colleagues that run a web property and make real revenues from ads. The more people that join the group, the more influence we’ll have at getting ad networks out to answer your questions.

Also note, I may have to limit the RSVP count in March to 30 ppl, priority will be given to people who have attended this meetup at least once.

Look forward to seeing you tonight,
Vinnie
917-612-0051

–
What is SFAdPub?
SFAdPub is a monthly meetup for ad publishers & web startups looking to learn from each other and share advice. Each month we’ll focus on a different topic, such as ad placement optimizations, mobile advertising, affilate networks, alternate ad networks, google analytics, etc. The group has been casually meeting over the past few months and started the monthly meetup in January. Come network with other startups and ad publishers and learn how to make more money from your site. Every other month, we’ll feature representatives from major ad networks to answer your questions: http://meetup.com/SFAdPub/

Tuesday, January 11

The meetup will be an informal gathering for ad publishers to share knowledge of ad optimization and ad networks over beers.  As the group grows, we’ll have small roundtables with small and large ad networks, like google adsense.

The first one is tomorrow night.  Whether you’re interested in joining us tomorrow or in the future, please be sure to join the group to be informed of updates and free tips.

We have 15+ RSVP’s for tomorrow night, that’s great! I’m looking forward to getting 8-10 of us together for our first event.  I’ve spoken to people at Google and they’d love to come out to a future event in February or March – which would allow us to ask them direct questions about Adsense.

What to expect Tuesday night – A very informal gathering of fellow ad publishers sharing tips. I’ve spoken to the manager at Zebulon and she’s gonna give us our own room above the bar. And as an added incentive to join us, I’ll grab a drink for anybody who brings a fellow ad publisher along or gets them to join the group (honor system, i’ll trust you)

Brad Rock, a partner at DLA Piper and gratious host of the Silicon Valley New Tech meetup has shared with us his incredibly valuable Expert Series Talk on what Term Sheets look like in Silicon Valley for web & tech startups.  The presentation was record on ustream and I’m working on getting the audio sync’d with the presentation below.  The slides have a ton of information and I had a number of people come up to me after the talk and say how what they learned about Term Sheets would have cost them hundreds of dollars if they had to sit down with their own lawyers.

Understanding Silicon Valley Term Sheets – Which Terms Don’t Matter & Which Terms Do

A sample Series A Term Sheet provided by Brad Rock, Partner at DLA Piper

Thank you DLA Piper for your many years hosting the Silicon Valley NewTech Meetup.

Happy Birthday to us!

The SVNewTech started in Jan of 2006, and in 4 years we’re now 4,700 members strong!  Take advantage of our community offline on our LinkedIn Group.

Tonight we’ll be featuring 3 hot startups with pretty killer iphone services, some with true business models!!!  We also have another speaker of our Expert Talk Series – Brad Rock who you all know as the gracious host to introduce each night will be giving a talk on putting a Term Sheet together.

Google Wave – We’ll also have a few bloggers testing out the real-time collaboration of google wave, if you’d like to participate, at 7pm enter the following in the Google Wave search box: tag:SVNewTech with:public

And a reminder, isocket and meetup are hiring, info below.

If you can’t make tonight, 7pm Live Stream:

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/svnewtech

Lineup:

apptizr.com – iphone app suggestion service that actually works.  It’s like Netflix for apps on your phone. [David Li]

iformbuilder.com – Data Collection on the iphone, that is super easy to build and use.  Some customers include Hershey Chocolates, Comcast, and a number of Universities.  [Chris Reichart]

thinkcomputer.com – Will be launching a new mobile payments service that really impressed me – I think you will be impressed too. [Aaron G. & Michael Anderson]

Expert Talk Series – Putting a Term Sheet together. [Brad Rock, Partner DLA]

Links & Give-aways

• Are you an Ad Publisher looking to get more money from ads and share tips with other publishers?  Then join the new meetup I’m starting next week.  http://bit.ly/sfadpub
• FREE – IBM Developer Cloud beta: Request base OS servers and load the stack you like, or try out images of IBM software. RESTful API available.  http://ibm.com/cloud/developer
• Watch December’s Expert Series Talk, How To ‘Use’ your Users.  http://bit.ly/use-users
• Want to demo your service at a future meetup? http://demo.newtechmeetup.org

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They’re hiring [Sponsored Section]

• isocket is a hot new ad platform that just landed some top funding and TechCrunch as their first beta tester. They’re adding a few backend web devs to their small and talented team. Apply – http://www.isocket.com/jobs
• Meetup is looking for superstar engineers to move to New York City http://meetup.com/jobs (mention this email)
• Your company here – email vincent -dot- lauria -at- gmail -dot- com

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A special thank you to:

• The New York Times for sponsoring this meetup – nyt.com
• Meetup.com who is looking to hire superstar engineers wanting to move to NYC meetup.com/jobs
• DLA Piper for hosting us each and every month – dlapiper.com
• Future-works.com for providing wine & beer at tonight’s event.
• [Your Company Here] -> Email vincent -dot- lauria -at- gmail -dot- com

Happy Birthday & Happy New Year,

Vinnie

With 2009 ending, we’ll also be wrapping up our 3rd year as a group.  Jan 2010 will be our 4 year birthday!  We have great demos and an Expert Talk tonight, and I’ll leave a little time to field any questions you might have about the meetup for a year-end wrapup.

If you can’t make tonight, 7pm Live Stream: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/svnewtech

Lineup:

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likeminds.com – Share your ratings from different websites like Netflix, Amazon, iTunes and discover new favorites. [Alan ElSheshai]

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breakthrough.com – Counseling & psychiatry over the web. Lower costs than traditional methods, yet offers the same effectiveness and the ability to prescribe medicines. [Mark Goldenson]

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rrripple.com – A cool interface that allows you to organize and share your media with whoever you want, however you want. [Dan Smucker]

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Expert Talk Series: How To ‘Use’ your Users – A tongue-in-cheek approach at getting the most out of the community using your web product. [me]

Year 3 Wrap-up

Links

• Apply to showcase your startup to tech trend-setters and VC’s at SXSW in March.  Deadline is this Friday. If you’re in bootstap mode, email chris@sxsw.com and he may be able to waive the fee. http://bit.ly/8V9Om0/
• Are you an Ad Publisher looking to get more money from ads and share tips with other publishers?  Then join the new meetup I’m starting in January. http://bit.ly/sfadpub

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They’re hiring

• Ning is looking for Community Managers, Engineers, Product Managers, Designers, Oracle (11g) DBA and Database Architects. http://about.ning.com/openings.php
• Meetup is looking for superstar engineers to move to New York City http://meetup.com/jobs (mention this email)
• Tristan Kromer – Looking for a fourth member of my venture startupSQUARE.com in San Fran. Know some engineers? PHP, PERL, HTML, Javascript? Send ‘em my way. http://www.linkedin.com/in/tristankromer

Another great lineup and more free tickets in our monthly newsletter.  Demos featuring: custom TV, recruiting software you’ll need with the economy picking up, people powered car traffic info, and how businesses do twitter.

If you can’t make tonight, 7pm Live Stream: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/svnewtech

Find a ride share -> http://bit.ly/svnt-ride

Demos

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watchuwant.tv – It’s like last.fm for video, create your own channel. [Adam Bossy]

newtonsoftware.com – Simple to use recruiting software to make your life easier when bringing on new hires.  [Joel Passen]

waze.com – Crowd sourced traffic information.  Something I’ve been asking for since 2003.  [Anselm Hook]

coTweet.com – ‘How Business does Twitter.’ From Ford Motors to Starbucks, co-tweet will help your company engage customers using Twitter. [Jesse Engle]

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Links & Free Tickets

* Subscribe to my emailings on the meetup.com website to receive links to free tickets – meetup.com/svnewtech

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They’re hiring:

• Ning is looking for a Site Reliability Engineer, Product Managers, Designers, Oracle (11g) DBA and Database Architect. http://about.ning.com/openings.php Contact priya@ning.com and mention this svnewtech.
• Meetup is looking for superstar engineers to move to New York City http://meetup.com/jobs