Jello wrote:

Who Wants Seed Money?
Aug 03, 08 in Angels, Entrepreneurship, Startups 4 Comments

The comment stream generated by the word "discuss" in my quote of the week Friday is simply amazing. The quotes are not that important. Read the comments. Some really good stuff in there.

Several of the comments pointed out the need for a seed stage investment company like Y Combinator in the Southeast. I was a bit surprised that no one mentioned the previous efforts to create such entities in Atlanta. There are two. Boostphase, which Stephen Fleming, Wayt King, Keith McGreggor, myself, and others attempted to form last fall. And Profounder (that has a slightly different model) which was put together by Merrick Furst this year and in which I am involved.

So the comments got me thinking. Is it time to try and wind up Boostphase again from an angel perspective and do we have enough entrepreneurs in the Southeast, to quote Wei, to take a shotgun approach. So I am interested in knowing how many of you entrepreneurs out there believe you can answer the following questions, pulled straight from the YC application, in a compelling way.

What is your company going to make?

Please tell us about an interesting project, preferably outside of class or work, that two or more of you created together. Include urls if possible.

How long have the founders known one another and how did you meet?

What's new about what you're doing? What are people forced to do now because what you plan to make doesn't exist yet?

What do you understand about your business that other companies in it just don't get?

How will you make money?

How long will it take before you have a prototype? A beta? A version you can charge for?

If we fund you, which of the founders will commit to working exclusively (no school, no other jobs) on this project for the next year?

And if you can answer the questions in a compelling way, would you accept a deal where you got $25K and some expertise on how to get your concept to the angel/VC/buyout stage for 5 - 10% of your company?

I am going to try this one more time.null

Lance Weatherby steps up to the plate and tries to relaunch Boostphase, a YCombinator style fund that failed to launch last year. If you have a startup, step up ATLiens.

RE: Force of Good: a blog by Lance Weatherby

Charles Leadbeater:

We Think explores how the web is changing our world, creating a culture in which more people than ever can participate, share and collaborate, ideas and information.

Ideas take life when they are shared. That is why the web is such a potent platform for creativity and innovation.

It's also at the heart of why the web should be good for : democracy, by giving more people a voice and the ability to organise themselves; freedom, by giving more people the opportunity to be creative and equality, by allowing knowledge to be set free.

But sharing also brings with it dilemmas.

It leaves us more open to abuse and invasions of privacy.

Participation is not always a good thing: it can just create a cacophony.

Collaboration is sustained and reliable only under conditions which allow for self organisation.

Everywhere we turn there will be struggles between people who want to freely share - music, films, ideas, information - and those who want to control this activity, either corporations who want to make money or governments who fear debate and democracy. This conflict between the rising surge of mass collaboration and attempts to retain top down control will be one of the defining battles of our time, from Communist China, to Microsoft's battle with open source and the music industry's desperate rearguard action against the web.

See also:

We-think is about what the rise of these phenomena (not all to do with the internet) means for the way we organise ourselves – not just in digital businesses but in schools and hospitals, cities and mainstream corporations. For the point of the industrial era economy was mass production for mass consumption, the formula created by Henry Ford; but these new forms of mass, creative collaboration announce the arrival of a new kind of society, in which people want to be players, not spectators.

This is a huge cultural shift, for in this new economy people want not services and goods, delivered to them, but tools so they can take part. In We-think Charles Leadbeater analyses not only these changes, but how they will affect us and how we can make the most of them. Just as, in the 1980s, his In Search of Work predicted the rise of more flexible employment, here he outlines a crucial shift that is already affecting all of us.

We-think: The power of mass creativity

Y Combinator is a new kind of venture firm specializing in funding very early stage startups. We help startups through what is for many the hardest step, from idea to company.

We invest mostly in software and Web services. And because we are ourselves technology people, we prefer groups with a lot of technical depth. We care more about how smart you are than how old you are, and more about the quality of your idea than whether you have a formal business plan.

Very cool concept, the deadline for their second batch of funding is past but there's always next time. Basically they provide you all the money you need to survive for a few months during which you do nothing but work on developing a prototype and business plan -- in return they have an investment in your company should it succeed.

Put on your thinking caps

This fellow has created a small, simple DIY synth that you can build (provided you have a little experience with electronics) at home.

DIY Small Synth

This is an additional outrage...

I hope that those people that know technology will step up, and find a way to lobby against this...

The DOJ is trying to get a 'finger' on everyone, so that they can watch your internet habits...As if Carnivore wasn't enough of a intrusion... now we should have "tappable" ISP configurations for the DOJ?

And what's worse, is the DOJ is trying to push the FCC to be the "Bad Guy", by citing a statute designed for telephony networks...

I'm exasperated...

EFF: Breaking News - More attempts to remove your privacy...

Piccolo is a toolkit that supports the development of 2D structured graphics programs, in general, and Zoomable User Interfaces (ZUIs), in particular. A ZUI is a new kind of interface that presents a huge canvas of information on a traditional computer display by letting the user smoothly zoom in, to get more detailed information, and zoom out for an overview.

Kinda cool -- You lose all your basic UI widgets but get a lot of functionality for free. It's subclassed from a JComponent (JAVA) so adding it to an existing app doesn't suck.

Piccolo : ZUI Framework for JAVA & .NET

"Optical camouflage is a kind of active camouflage.

This idea is very simple. If you project background image onto the masked object, you can observe the masked object just as if it were virtually transparent."

Cool stuff

Optical Camouflage