Who is Colin Needham?
Colin Needham, from Stoke Gifford, began the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) in 1990 as a hobby, and now the website is the 42nd most popular on the planet, attracting some 57million unique users every month. ASuch is the power and influence it wields, IMDb - which has information on over 3.2million actors and industry professionals and a database of more than 1.5million films - has the ability to launch and crush Hollywood careers.Avia
Khan Academy : Raising Startup Money

Posted: January 1st, 2011
at 9:12pm by Koookiecrumbles
Categories: entrepreneurship
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Abandoning Free Software
The idea behind the freemium model is great: let everyone use the service or app for free, hope it goes viral, and consequently spend far less on marketing, instead putting it into building a fantastic product. And for a few businesses, this works. The entire free software movement, in my opinion, stems from just a few successful companies who utilized the freemium model: Evernote, Dropbox, Pandora, Automattic, Zynga, and Skype. Perhaps even Facebook and Twitter. The idea of behind the all too frequently heard line: 'we'll get millions of users first, and then worry about revenue' stems from these businesses. The problem is, just about every startup is following this mantra, Aand that's exactly the reason why a lot of them fail.
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Posted: January 1st, 2011
at 9:07pm by Koookiecrumbles
Categories: development,open source
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A big advantage of baking corporate philanthropy into the core of a startup from day one is that all employees and investors know what they’re getting into up front. Is this likely to put off some investors? Possibly. But as long as appropriate safeguards are in place (regarding rules on profitability), it may even attract investors that are better aligned with your own goals.

Are new ideas and new inventions inevitable? Are they driven by us or by a larger force of nature? In this conversation recorded as part of the New York Public Library series LIVE from the NYPL, Steven Johnson (author of Where Good Ideas Come From) and Kevin Kelly (author of What Technology Wants) try to convince Robert that the things we makeafrom spoons to microwaves to computersaare an extension of the same evolutionary processes that made us. And we may need to adapt to the idea that our technology could someday truly have a mind of its own.

A recent EU survey confirmed Ireland has a bigger entrepreneurial spirit than any of European neighbours a a fact spurred on by the recession. "Taking the plunge and starting a business can be risky and the survey shows that across Europe, Irish people are among the most willing to throw caution to the wind," says Avine McNally of the Small Firms Association.
DIY: How to Win a Nobel Prize
I went on to work out equations of wobbles. Then I thought about how electron orbits start to move in relativity. Then there's the Dirac Equation in electrodynamics. And then quantum electrodynamics. And before I knew it (it was a very short time) I was "playing" a working, really a with the same old problem that I loved so much, that I had stopped working on when I went to Los Alamos: my thesis-type problems; all those old-fashioned, wonderful things.
It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. It was like uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly. I almost tried to resist it! There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams andAthe whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.
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Posted: January 1st, 2011
at 2:19pm by Koookiecrumbles
Categories: 9th dan,science,diy,competitions
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