The ’bird of gold’: The rise of India’s consumer market

McKinsey & Company

"MGI's analysis shows that if India continues on its current high-growth path, over the next two decades the Indian market will undergo a major transformation. Income levels will almost triple, and India will climb from its position as the twelfth-largest consumer market today to become the world's fifth-largest consumer market by 2025."

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Facebook: Friends with Money

by Spencer E. Ante

"The social network taps a fresh source of funds for $100 million and will buy more servers to support its growth in users and applications.

It will be used entirely for servers," Facebook Chief Financial Officer Gideon Yu says in an interview. The slug of cash will help Facebook buy approximately 50,000 more servers...

Forrester Research's Gillett estimates that Google, owner of the world's biggest Web search engine, is buying half a million servers each year, while Microsoft's (MSFT) annual consumption is as much as 200,000 servers."

11 Biz Dev 1.0 Tips

Written by Bernard Lunn | ReadWriteWeb

"The Internet is great at automating routine transactions and more software is being sold as a service on a simple "click here" to subscribe basis. But occasionally some contact sport is still required, and you have to resort to what we can now call Biz Dev 1.0 -- what we used to call selling. You will need these skills to raise money and to sell your business, even if you never have to sell to anybody else."

Where do Babies Come From?

Barry Spencer | Lessons from a Garage

"Code Guy" posts about his new venture Zorap, Inc.

5 Great Examples of Guerilla Marketing Gone Wrong: Olympic Belly-Flops to the Boston Bomb Scare

WebUrbanist

Guerilla marketing is often a risky business, skirting the edge of ethical (or even legal) acceptability. Some guerilla marketers who have crossed the line have caused everything from Olympic belly-flops to city-wide bomb scares and have been punished with anything from modest jail time to millions of dollars in fines.

10 less-than-great personality traits of entrepreneurs

Melissa Chang | 16th letter

"Here’s a look at 10 qualities that some entrepreneurs share that may help them be great at starting a company, but not so great at existing in normal society. The quotes below are all taken from Jessica Livingston’s book, Founders at Work."

Why Venture Capitalists Don't Want You to Have a Sex Life

Independent Street | Wall Street Journal
News, trends, tidbits and tools for and about entrepreneurs

Posted by Wendy Bounds

"No social life. At least in the startup phase."

Why do Open Source?

Why do Open Source?
by Matthew Wilson | artima developer

Summary

"A few days ago I was in the office of one of my clients, talking to the dev guys about Pantheios (what else?!), and they were asking why I do open-source. The resulting discussion was quite illuminating, not least to me, so I thought it might be useful to discuss it here and see why other people do it."

So I went to Startup School

Tim Trueman | hello my name is Tim Trueman

"OK, so I know it’s totally uncool by now to write about this year’s Startup School (which I’ll refer to as SUS from here on out). But I’m going to do it anyways. My excuse is I already wrote most of this and I moved the day after SUS. Oh and I was really sick and swamped with work for almost two weeks. Plus I haven’t seen many articles that I liked about what people took away from it. So here goes…"

In the Air: Who says big ideas are rare?

by Malcolm Gladwell for The New Yorker

"The history of science is full of ideas that several people had at the same time."

Recommendation Nation

By Michael Schrage | Technology Review

"The truth is that I now get more good recommendations about more things, more often, from Bayesian algorithms than from my best friends. Perhaps this should make me wistful, but it doesn't. Better tech­nology doesn't mean worse friends."

Listening to Customers is Hard, Hard, Hard | Continuations

Albert a partner at Union Square Ventures.

"In building a business it’s generally considered a good idea to listen to your customers. The idea is that if your product/site/service is a better fit with customers’ needs you will have more of them. As it turns out though, listening to customers is a lot easier said than done."

It pays to get inside your opponents' heads rather than their hearts

From The Economist print edition | Inside a deal | Economist.com

"JUDGED by the number of times that negotiations are said to have ended in a “win-win situation”, striking a successful deal might seem easy. There are, after all, shelves full of books offering advice about how to succeed as a negotiator.

The main tip is to gain bargaining power by understanding the person on the other side of the table. But what exactly does a negotiator need to know about his antagonist? In a series of experiments a team of researchers have come up with some intriguing answers in a report just published in Psychological Science."