Angel Investing, Entrepreneurship & Learning

One of the things that has been on my mind since I attended the Gnomedex 8.0 conference was how social media can positively and negatively affect the FundingUniverse brand.  Now, I realize that “social media” is a very popular buzz word these days — everyone (& their dog) is talking about social media and I’m trying to decide if the buzz is justified or if this is a fad similar to podcasts and other new media.

Some of you might be asking… what is Social Media?  I’m no social media expert, but I’m referring to the following platforms:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Company Blog
• iPhone & Facebook Applications

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I’m up in Seattle today getting ready for tomorrow’s Northwest LivePitch event.  Carolynn has been working her tail off up here to host the event and things are coming together quite nicely.  As of earlier today, we had around 100 people that had RSVP’d for the event.  We also have 15 companies that have been selected to pitch with a Rockstar panel of judges that include:

• Nathan Kaiser, nPost.com
• Todd Dean, NorthWest Keiretsu Forum
• Tom Ryan, Atlas Recruiting
• Jim Roberts, UW Technology Transfer
• Rebecca Lovell, Alliance of Angels
• Buzz Bruggeman, ActiveWords
• John Kauffman, Stoel Rives

In addition to the event, we are excited to announce that Chris Pirillo, the well-known technologist, will be broadcasting the event live!  For those that want to check things out, go to http://live.pirillo.com at 2 pm PST (3 pm MST) and check things out!

FYI… spent the evening with Chris & his wife, Ponzi.  They are amazing individuals and have built an incredible business together.  I’ll have to write the details of the trip when I get back.  See you tomorrow!

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My brother Dave (the one that works at Omniture) let me know about the Omniture-Sponsored website www.SiliconSlopes.com. If you are an entrepreneur/business professional in Utah (or someone that spends time in Utah), I highly recommend checking out the site. Omniture has done a great job of compiling a ton of information about the Utah business community and creating in interactive community. Here are some of the things that you’ll find on the site:

• Deal flow reports
• Blogs
• HUGE list of Utah companies with stats on each one
• Events

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Thanks to Phil Windley, I found out about the very-easy-to-use web app TripIt. TripIt is a new tool that will manage your travel plans and itinerary for you (i.e. flight schedule, hotel reservations, directions from airport to hotel, weather suggestions, etc.). The best part about the tool is that all you have to do is email your itinerary to plans@tripit.com and it will do the rest. In fact, you don’t even have to register the first time that you use it… just send the email and it will reply with a confirmation and allow you to register the next time that you visit the site.

As you can tell, I am very impressed. It made my travel arrangements last weekend very convenient because I didn’t have to the spend the time figuring out directions, maps, etc. TripIt also has a tool that allows me to share my itinerary with others (those traveling or others that need the information).

Highly recommended.

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Wow… it’s been a nice and relaxing holiday break.  Plenty of family, food, and fun.

While the break was relatively uneventful in the business world, I did find out that the Entrepreneur’s Story has finally been released!  The story is the brain-child of entrepreneur super-woman Carolynn Duncan.  She spent most of 2007 gathering stories from over 70 entrepreneurs from around the world and compiled them all into one book.

I have had the chance to read some of the book and I am completely impressed.  If you are an entrepreneur, or an aspiring entrepreneur, or are just suffering from “entrepreneur’s anonymous”… you should read this book.

Thanks Carolynn!

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First off, I’ve been fairly impressed with Google lately.  While most of the world (including me until recently) doesn’t ever interface with any human at Google (which is why they have such a great business model), FundingUniverse has shown up on Google’s “radar screen” in the last few months because we have such a large adwords strategy.

I guess that if your monthly adwords account grows to a certain level, they assign an account manager/team to your account to help you optimize and grow your adwords strategy.  They also provide a Google Line of Credit so that you can change the billing from your credit card to a monthly invoice.

Anyway… that’s a whole other story.  Back to Christmas…

Recently, we received a gift in the mail from Google (something else that must happen once you reach a certain level of adwords).  Besides a very cool 2 GB USB storage device (that is the size of a credit card), they also included a $100 “gift certificate” to the website DonorsChoose.org.  I hadn’t heard of DonorsChoose before, but it is a pretty cool website that allows you to donate to a school/service project of your choice.

So instead of Google just making huge donations to a small handful of charities, they give us the freedom to choose a project by giving us a $100 DonorsChoose gift card.

Google:  I like it.

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